• callouscomic@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    46
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    People who think our presidential elections are only recently fucked up are morons. Since basically day 1 the politics and seedyness and bullshit going on behind the scenes has always been insane.

    There’s some kind of narcissistic selfishness that constantly has a need for THIS time, OUR time to be the worst ever.

    I mean, for the majority of the country’s history, huge portions of its population had literally no democracy due to no right to vote. But I guess we’ll ignore that.

    We had portions of our history that were rocky as hell due to shifting balances of power between the federal branches, especially in the first 100 years.

    We literally had a fucking civil war.

    It’s always so interesting to me how people just ignore how bad it’s always been, and how many times the country did not, in fact, literally end, and yet they STILL gin up end of the country fearmongering constantly in every election cycle.

    None of this is truly new.

    • AbsentBird@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      6 months ago

      They said most influential in the past 100 years, the civil war was 160 years ago.

      100 years ago everyone had the right to vote (though Jim Crow laws limited voting access in many states for people of color, something that’s beginning to be reimplemented to an extent).

      I think FDR might have been more influential, but he won in a landslide. Trump got millions fewer votes than his opponent and only won by a couple thousand votes in certain swing states. I think in the past 100 years it was probably the most influential presidential election in the sense that so few votes held so much influence on history.

      • callouscomic@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        6 months ago

        Yes good point. And how many were incorrectly prisoned, or it’s for kind of stupid offenses that don’t warrant such a right being taken away.

    • LifeOfChance@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      I think the biggest factor is we have media covering everything 24/7 and when the smallest little detail comes out about something bad it’s blown way up and made to be a huge deal. It’s easy to get sucked into thinking we are in the worst point of history. No political figure can take a shit without some news outlet telling us that’s where they were plotting to blow up the entire world.

    • refalo@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      6 months ago

      I wouldn’t say they ignore it, it’s just that they’re too stupid to realize it, or they simply never learned/forgot American history from school.

    • Facebones@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      9
      ·
      6 months ago

      The quiet part is out loud now and the dems are acting just as fascist as they yell at us that only they can save us from fascists.