America vs USA

[charon]

"No" is my answer.

Indeed it was, but I think we were talking at cross purposes.

I was addressing its possibility, you were addressing whether it was a viable idea, and you didn't think it was.

It may be impractical but don't forget it happened in the Civil War. America was certainly riven in two although it never went as far as separate governments and presidents. Which idea, incidentally, I think borders on science fiction :-)

But nothing is impossible. You never know.

[TheVat]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis

[Serpent]

"No" is my answer.

Indeed it was, but I think we were talking at cross purposes.

I was addressing its possibility, you were addressing whether it was a viable idea, and you didn't think it was.

It's not even a possibility - for all the reasons given.

It may be impractical but don't forget it happened in the Civil War.

What happened in the civil war was entirely different from what's happening now.

There has been plenty written on both subjects. Here is a starting point.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/327864.The_Im
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52098718-why-we-re-polarized?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=fWRsjJww37&rank=1

[Forest_Dump]

My own opinion is that the US is actually quite likely to divide and for the same reasons that many other countries have divided in the past. I would argue that there is little holding the US together beyond very disparate interpretations of an 18th century document and, in fact, quite a bit pulling the US apart. There does appear to be an increasing polarity with both sides viewing the other side as inherently evil, misguided, deluded, under the influence of radical minority fringe elements bent on suppressing the will of the people etc and too few appearing willing to seek a compromise. I think the cracks have been forming and widening for some time and I don't believe the political mechanisms exist to repair them. To me the questions are only when and how bad will it be.

[charon]

Once Biden is established I think it'll all gradually die down. You-know-who without the power and protection of the presidency is a tin god. And that's when the followers turn. They're not angry at the tin god, they're angry at themselves for being so dumb.

Well, let's hope so, anyway.

[edy420]

I would agree charon,

But it's not the authenticity of the election that is important. Its the fact that half of America believes the election was rigged.

There's upset in Trumpers because of the way the media avoids any evidence, and social media removes or bans anything to do with fraud. Now video is being released of the audits being rigged. Again, whether the footage is true or not doesn't matter. What matters is that half of America believes its true. And the other half doesn't get to see it due to censorship.

Trump is against lock downs, and Biden is all for it. To the Trumpers, its like having all the evidence to prove that your boss is innocent, and shouldn't be liquidated and replaced by China. Under Trump, they can continue to work and live. Under China, they own nothing and the American dream dies.

Now Trump has denied a covid relief bill that would give Americans $600. He wants to give them $2000 instead. Its easy if they remove from the bill, the millions sent to Pakistan to teach about gender(no idea why that's in a covid relief bill). Its not just Trump that wants a clean bill, also the Trumpers, and also the a anti-Trumpers. His popularity continues to grow.

Trump is calling for big protests on the 6th of January. On the 20th, is when Biden is officially President. These dates are the biggest fireworks displays in history.

You can't write this stuff. American politics is bigger than Hollywood, netflicks and commercial TV combined. It's no wonder the world is watching.

[Serpent]

But it's not the authenticity of the election that is important. Its the fact that half of America believes the election was rigged.

Where did you get this figure?

There's upset in Trumpers because of the way the media avoids any evidence, and social media removes or bans anything to do with fraud. Now video is being released of the audits being rigged. Again, whether the footage is true or not doesn't matter. What matters is that half of America believes its true. And the other half doesn't get to see it due to censorship.

Did none of the 50 courts where Trumpites brought lawsuits get to see it? If they didn't, why not? If they did, how come they all rejected it?

Trump is against lock downs, and Biden is all for it. To the Trumpers, its like having all the evidence to prove that your boss is innocent, and shouldn't be liquidated and replaced by China. Under Trump, they can continue to work and live. Under China, they own nothing and the American dream dies.

WHAT??
Where do you dredge up this stuff?

Trump is calling for big protests on the 6th of January.

He'd like to stage putsch. But his supporters are an undisciplined mob that won't get inside the doors, and the ass-kissers inside will be outnumbered. That doesn't mean they can't cause disruption and do more damage to the country they have been trying so hard to make small and mean - just that they won't succeed. Probably, they will try again on the 20th, yes. And fail again.

These dates are the biggest fireworks displays in history.

I can think of few, compared to which these will be very small damp squibs.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-electoral-college/

You can't write this stuff.

Someone evidently has, and suckered you into reading it.

[charon]

Edy -

You can't write this stuff. American politics is bigger than Hollywood, netflicks and commercial TV combined. It's no wonder the world is watching.

I wouldn't disagree with you about that :-)

[toucana]

John Tyler 10th President USA

On the subject of presidential descendants, It turns out that president John Tyler who left office 175 years ago still has a living grandson !

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/16/2009717/-John-Tyler-the-10th-President-left-office-175-years-ago-He-has-a-living-grandson

“Who he ?” you might ask. Well, you may recall that the 9th US president William Harrison was elected in 1840 but caught pneumonia while attending his own inauguration and died just 31 days later - the shortest presidential administration in history, and the first victim of the so-say ‘Curse of Tippecanoe’.

Harrison’s vice-president was John Tyler and he eventually became the 10th president after a prolonged legal argument about whether Tyler was now the ‘acting president’ or had assumed the powers of the full presidency upon Harrison’s death. Tyler’s ascendancy to the presidency was in fact the case-in-point that established the legal precedent about the presidential succession.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/06/tyler-precedent-1841-1253840

Tyler failed to secure the Whig nomination for the 1844 election and left office in early 1845. His second wife who was much younger than him had a son called Lyon Gardiner Tyler who was born in 1853, and he in turn had a son called Harrison Ruffin Tyler now aged 91 who was born in 1929 when his own father was 75. Harrison now lives in a Virginia nursing home.

Imagine telling people today that your Grandfather was born in 1790 and lived through the Presidency of George Washington!

[toucana]

Politico have published an interesting article about the history and fate of the mid-19th century 'Know Nothing' political party I mentioned earlier in this thread.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/30/heres-what-happens-to-a-conspiracy-driven-party-463944

It makes particularly fascinating reading, especially the lurid and paranoid fantasies they entertained about Roman Catholic priests and nuns murdering children, and holding young women against their will. It shows that the grotesque conspiratorial fantasies promoted by sects such as QAnon and Tea Party that are currently ripping the GOP apart, have much deeper historical roots than many people imagine.

The conspiracy fantasists of today have simply updated their technological perspective, and are now prone to rant about Jewish controlled space lasers starting forest fires in California, or long deceased Venuzuelan dictators practising voodoo on digital voting machines.

[Serpent]

Trump gave a perfect representation of this constituency when he preferred the numbers he had a gut feeling about to the numbers estimated by experts. The whole movement of anti-intellectualism in the US has been about emotion over reason. It started with converting skeptical pioneers to a rough-and-ready bellicose religiosity, as opposed to the schooled theologies of the European churches. Catholicism wasn't their original target, but it became the biggest when coupled with competitors for the lowest-paid work from Mexico in the south, then Ireland and Italy in the north. Are we seeing the pattern?
I think I've linked Hofstadter's book before. This is an interview about the author:https://paw.princeton.edu/article/moment-historian-richard-hofstadter-anti-intellectualism

By the end of the 1950s, Hofstadter had begun to study the irrationalities of American life, one of which was a fundamental strain of anti-intellectualism that runs throughout our history and crosses the political spectrum. Some of it comes out of evangelical Protestantism, which we can certainly see today, but in a sense there is an anti-intellectual quality latent in democracy itself, such as a distrust of elites and people who think they know better than others as well as more than others. Hofstadter believed that intellectual values, including an appreciation of skepticism and nuance, and a rejection of absolutism and dogma, were crucial to a democratic society.

and I know I've cited this article: https://www.salon.com/2020/05/30/anti-intellectualism-is-back--because-it-never-went-away-and-its-killing-americans/

In cultural democracy, the enemy of freedom is not the Wall Street executive hiding his wealth in an offshore tax haven and corrupting the political process through the deployment of large donations and lobbying firms.....
The true villain in a cultural democracy is the intellectual. The intellectual insists on standards of evidence, reason and logic when attempting to reach a conclusion regarding a matter of social import. She undermines the dogma that all nonsense is created equal, which renders her (or indeed him) unfit for participation in the increasingly masochistic rituals of liberty.

The article is very much worth reading in full.
It fails, I think, in ignoring the role of contagious fervor - how hysteria rises as a crowd responds to the loudest and most outrageous rhetoric. That's the escalator Trump used: not so much because he manipulates the crowd as because he gets so high on it: he and the mob feed-back on each other, mutually creating the monster. Watch one of his rallies - it's quite remarkably horrifying.

[charon]

Here we go. One of the most dangerous, looniest people on the planet in a position of power and they let her remain there... you couldn't make it up.

https://news.sky.com/story/marjorie-tay ... s-12208464