I think you need to take a step back and really try understand those who disagree with you - your views or maybe just the way you express it is toxic and dividing. If you can't think of one reason why someone might not want to vote your candidate I feel sorry for you.
There are many valid reasons to vote for all candidates and the weighting of the issues is personal and perhaps not everyone agrees with the weighting that you do.
> If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power
And these 47% would say exactly the same thing about the others. That’s the divide GP was pointing out and ironically your response is perpetuating it. Stop dehumanizing people.
But there was only one side that is proven literally trying to kill democracy. There is no both sides in this argument.
The republicans might be crying about it, but they have zero proof. Whereas they've literally given us their plan out loud of how they were going to cheat. And they followed through.
A lot of the right-wing people that I follow also seem to think that they are having democracy taken away from them. They point to their freedom of speech being restricted, biased fact checkers, big tech being against them, and ballot stuffing.
Except there really was one candidate who would have been happy to kill democracy.
I can't speak for the beliefs or rationale of the people who voted for him but its crystal clear what Donald Trump stood for.
I don't think its dehumanizing to talk about the fact that lots people, many or most individually good, chose to vote for a sexist, racist, authoritarian.
And does anybody really doubt at this point that Trump is those things?
Even though it is a difficult, unpleasant, and heated conversation to have.
> What do you think those 47% want with gays, abortion (is murder!!!!) and foreigners?
Trump didn’t run on an anti-gay platform.
You’re right that anti-abortion is still big. Until you can convince people that it’s not murder, it’s pretty hard to get them to back down from that stance. This is honestly the only reason the Republicans trap so much of the religious vote.
“Foreigners” is also not something Republicans are against, it’s illegal immigration that’s the complaint. That’s why they support reforms that still allow significant immigration.
> Our laws and our government’s regulations should recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman and actively promote married family life as the basis of a stable and prosperous society. For that reason, as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states. We oppose government discrimination against businesses or entities which decline to sell items or services to individuals for activities that go against their religious views about such activities.
> Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a “judicial Putsch” — full of “silly extravagances” — that reduced “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Storey to the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court twisted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond recognition. To echo Scalia, we dissent. We, therefore, support the appointment of justices and judges who respect the constitutional limits on their power and respect the authority of the states to decide such fundamental social questions.
This is a very western view, you have war criminals as former presidents. This was not the worst of the US. You have people bombing weddings and you find this to be the worst.
As someone who is no fan of the warmongers, imperialist US policy, or the debt treadmill that fuels them, I would still rather have a conservative president that serves the US power structure, than a president that shirks his job during a domestic crisis and kills a quarter million Americans. Sorry rest of the world, we will get back to trying to stop the war machine after we get our own house in order.
(Also, witnessing the ceding of Hong Kong to China two decades ahead of schedule did make me appreciate the projection of soft power where USG had been keeping order without dropping bombs)
I guess almost nobody wants to 'remove democracy' even in the least democratic places.
A more plausible explanation here would be indifference. Maybe they don't want to remove democracy, but not exactly trying to uphold it over everything else either.
Maybe seeing your cult of personality hero in office, or your religion or your flavour of boogieman (=not losing the country to commies kind of thinking) has ultimately higher priority than keeping the democracy alive.
I'm not saying that's what is happening, I'm just saying I can see how masses can smother democracy without specifically having the intention to kill it.
disclaimer: non-US, my opinion on anything US would be at best inaccurate.
It's more of the half of the 47% who are in the cult of personality. I don't think they were against democracy so much as for Trump (but it does go to show how little some folks care about democracy when they are losing).
I would be surprised if as many as half of those who voted for him believed that they were voting to either kill democracy or rewarding immoral behaviour.
Perhaps I’m overly-cynical, but in my (limited) experience, most people just don’t pay enough attention for such motivations — or even expectations — to be plausible.
Filling vacancies is not what "court packing" means. That's never what it has meant. Court packing is when you create new positions (and thus, vacancies) to fill. Filling a lot of court vacancies is not court packing.
And you know this. And Joe Biden knew this when he made the same claim in one of the debates. It's gaslighting, and it bothers me that absolutely nobody called him out on it. Court packing is a red line that nobody should cross. I feel it's important that we all choose our words carefully so that it continues to stay off the table.
IMHO if you ask Americans bluntly if they’d be willing to end democracy so that their candidate remains in power, you’d get only a small percentage agreeing.
What actually happened was that large numbers of voters are stuck in a filter bubble and their only news sources were telling them the election was being stolen. So by supporting Trump they probably thought they were defending democracy.
Of course, those particular news stories were pure lies. But we should focus on the peddlers of lies more than those who were duped by them.
If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power, often justified by religious beliefs...
And Trump is not gone yet... Who knows what the Republicans will do with the stacked Supreme Court...