Yes and no.
Without Trump fucking shit up on a government level (the Supreme Court in particular), there would probably be less scary shit happening on that end. Would have slowed things down.
But the radicalisation of the Americans began before 2016. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The disease started spreading as early as 2008. The recession, the damp squib that was the Occupy Wall Street event was the inception of many political movements, both far left AND far right.
That’s the thing people don’t realise. Even if Donald J. Trump didn’t exist, the underlying social tensions mean that inevitably someone would show up to galvanise far right sentiments, and the political estabilishment would have boosted them, whoever they were, because when the common folk are getting angry about their lot, then to the people actually in charge, a fascist dictatorship is preferrable to the alternative.
No, it started with Nixon, and his Southern Strategy. Reagan and the Silent Majority–which was fundamentally about racism and the desire to segregate schools, even though abortion was their cause célèbre–made it worse. And Newt Gingritch and the “Contract With America” really threw gasoline on the fire.
I mean if you wanna dive that deep, it started when some religious extremists got kicked out of England for being too extremist (for the british empire!) and moved to the new world, killing the people who previously lived there.
… But up until 2008 shit more or less held together? Not pretending 'murica was ever good, but it was the 2008 recession that caused its structure, however fucky it had been from first principles, to really break down.
The modern far-right really got it’s first big taste of legitimacy with the Tea Party. Which, yes, would be 2009-ish, and a blood-relative to the election of Obama. (E.g., without Obama as president, the racist fears of the Tea Party would have fizzled out in the harsh light of reality.) But I look at all of this on a continuum; the only two conservatives I see in recent memory that have made an apparently sincere attempt to stop the crazy train have been John McCain (…although he took Palin as a running mate…) and Mitt Romney, and they both got crushed by Dems. Well, maybe Liz Cheney too. Maybe. But she was okay with everything except Trump, so I dunno. Anyway, point is - Nixon, Reagan, and Gingritch were all laying the foundations and drawing up the architectural plans that Trump has used, and is using now, to build his version of a fascist state.
The modern far-right really got it’s first big taste of legitimacy with the Tea Party
Thanks a bunch Koch brother (still quite happy at least one of them is dead.)
That is entirely an astroturfed “caucus” along with the freedumb caucus… Bought and paid for by the ownership class. Ever wonder why those assholes never go away no matter how horrible they are? They’re the Koch’s henchmen…
I think that electing someone as deranged as Trump — who basically would try anything and everything that a sane person wouldn’t risk out of self-preservation, we basically saw a speedrun of finding out all the weaknesses and exploits of our government, combined with proving that impeachment and removal is basically impossible as long as one party is in collusion with the president.
We might have gotten here anyway, but it might have been a decade or two rather than four short years.
And the Supreme Court wouldn’t look like it does and be doing what’s it’s doing, which is also now a speedrun of horror.
I’ll never forgive Americans for 2016.
Yeah. Pushing for nearly immunity of the president might turn out to be very costly when someone actually reckless comes to presidency. And I presume Trump will be a version of that someone, as he is getting old and there won’t be another term for him. Nothing to lose, all to gain. He will make th US a shit show.
Nope. The racist bastards would still be hiding under their rocks and you wouldn’t have an army wearing red dunce caps drooling while driving their ram pickups with flags in the back.
Edit: I have upset 3 Ram driving, flag flying, dunce cap wearing mouthbreathers.
Bernie would have won. But it was her turn.
Doubtful. Clinton wouldn’t have focused on division. Sure, it would have simmered like during Obama’s years. But you can name 99 polarizing things Trump did and I can think of few Clinton would have done. Besides, you know, being a woman and continuing Obama’s legacy.
Hillary is pretty divisive herself, and there was bound to be another Trump like candidate in the next election who would makes waves. Trump is a symptom, not the source
Exactly, without Trump all the bigotry in the US doesn’t just evaporate. It’s still there and there’s still a sizable portion of voters that want that.
Oh, it’s definitely still there but it’d still be considered fringe. Trump normalized hate groups in a manner we haven’t seen before.
In my opinion, MAGA officially crossed the line from being a fringe political movement and into a genuine cult after 2020. It was pretty bad starting all the way back during his first campaign in 2015 and it got gradually worse over the years. However, during 2020 MAGA turned into an actual national security threat, not once, but twice. First, during the anti-vaxx shit were they literally denying the existence of the virus, or even worse, they were actively mocking the people who died, and then again after they lost the election and attempted the coup.
Any sane conservative who didn’t nope out pretty early on in his term distanced themselves after Jan 6th. The only people who still supported Trump after what he did were the ones that worshipped him. Since Jan 6, 2021 Trump’s MAGA consist of people who will follow him no matter what, will listen to whatever he says no matter how false or dangerous, and will unironically want him as a dictator. I think the cult thing became most apparent when supporters were wearing diapers in a show of support for him… that’s so batshit crazy that it leaves me speechless.
I’d say it’d depend on the specifics of the result.
Taking the wind out of MAGA’s sails would take a blowout victory and Hillary wasn’t gonna get that without doing some serious full court pressing for the entire general campaign, like well beyond even the “she should have campaigned more in the rust belt!” ideas people have about where she fell short.
Yes and no.
You can bet that there would have been 8 years of propaganda against her. And we would have lost even more house/senate seats because people on the left historically decide to not bother to vote in midterms unless there is an active threat on CNN.
And… I am pretty sure we would have lost in 2020 because of COVID. Which would basically put us back to where we were in 2020 in terms of having a deranged fascist who nobody realized was too dumb to accomplish anything (not a problem this time. See Project 2025).
The main difference would be the Supreme Court. Yes, republicans did everythiing they could to protevent Obama from appointing anyone and I would not put it past them to have stretched that out for a full four years. But Scalia (Rest in Piss) would still be dead and so would Ginsburg (fuck her for putting us in this mess). Which would have made the math a lot tighter. 7 justices but the math would have been tight enough that Hilary likely would have gotten to appoint at least one moderate.
I think Hilary would have bought us the better part of a decade because, like her or not, she is an incredibly effective politician… when nobody thinks she is running for POTUS. She is/was even more generally liked by both sides of the aisle than Biden and would never have had to make concessions to sanders and The Squad for the 2020 ticket (Biden is an asshole but his platform is shockingly Left leaning by US standards…)…
And I think trump would have faded into nothing. But there are plenty of other people who were just looking for an excuse to become a magat on the republican side. And people like cruz and romney and even liz cheney would not be complete laughing stocks without trump. So, at best, we were looking at a ticking clock to the next “reagan republican” as it were.
Like, there are a lot of people who consider the day Ginsburg died to be the day the US collapsed. And we are seeing exactly the repercussions of that with shit like today.
Yes. The MAGA group probably wouldn’t be as large, but they would still be there and very angry.
trump is just a symptom of underlying problem in society that manifests itself all over the world.
populist politicians trying to appeal to nostalgy for “good old times”, ability to weaponize social media and craft customized lies to every minor group, russian bot networks spewing out propaganda… it is something that creates problems everywhere and it will not get better.
recent eu parliament elections are shining example.
Absolutely. The Right Wing funded Hate Machine funded by billionaires would have been there, just like now.
Probably. Division is what we are being fed, every day, on every topic with everything.
We would just be in a different shit show, attacking different groups.
A bit less divided.
From my limited view, I think not much would be different… The US was already down this path. I think we have to look back further to the Bush/Gore election. That election initially sowed distrust in the election process with hanging chads and SCOTUS involvement in politics. This laid a blueprint for the success Trump and the Republicans have had.
Yes, but in a less civil warlike posture. The consequences of the shift to venture capital driving the economy in the 1960’s shifted the need to create more massive scale wars, but unchecked consolidation of wealth destroys the necessary egalitarian framework of a real democracy. All the pieces are in place to enslave the nation, i. e. we all carry tracking devices that can not be turned off, all of our financial means can be controlled, we are surrounded by cameras on most homes and vehicles that are connected to a monitoring system of a few entities. We only have the illusion of autonomy. Real democracies are very rare in history. The blood that bought this one is old money that few value with a thorough understanding. I’d say it was inevitable for unchecked venture capital to destroy the USA, but perhaps it was better than the warhawks destroying the world again in the 1980’s.
some republican would have won in 2020, for sure; trump or somebody worse
