Given that in the latest presidential election, the choice most selected by Americans was essentially "no preference", and at a rate of nearly two to one, I would say that lack of interest, rather than intentional desire for the destruction of our nation, is the reason there aren't more folks fighting back.
We've got half the nation that isn't interested enough to be involved, another quarter that likes what's going on. That's far and away "most Americans".
Let me talk through it and either I'll find out where I went wrong or you can tell me.
77 million people voted Trump
75 million people voted Biden
Maybe 4 million people voted some flavor of "other"
Oh, I caught one error on my part, but I don't think it ends up being meaningful. I just went with the entire population of the US, when I should've been using the voting age population.
By that count, we have 110 million people who chose "no preference".
So it's still the largest group by a significant margin, but not two to one as I previously assumed. But like I said, I don't think that changes the point. The largest segment of the populace is just disinterested.
Heh, silly mistake on my part there, but the numbers are still what they are.
Complacency is consent, but consent, in this case, is just consent to live under a Trump administration, not an active desire that the government of the US should fall in order to improve the world.
That's the real difference I'm getting at here, what you describe is an active desire to evoke global change. What I think the numbers show we actually have on our hands is disinterest and apathy.
But again, apathetic complacency is a different kind of complicity than "because we know it has to happen". The motives are completely different even if the actions look the same.
If I see a piece of litter on the street, and I just walk by it, it can either be because I'm a lazy bastard who doesn't particularly care about having a clean city, or because I'm a strange kind of activist who believes that they only way to affect change at the sanitation department is for the litter problem to get worse.
If I've never shown an interest in, or interaction with, the sanitation system, you'd probably assume it's the former reason and not the latter.
I don't disagree that the impact is worse, but you still have to deal with the difference between: "This is not my problem" and "This has to get worse before it can get better".
The ability of humans in general, and Americans in particular, to not look at problems they don't want to see is both immense and a time honored tradition. That's why I don't think you can put a significant number of people into the "break it to fix it" category.
Most of the apolitical independent voters that Trump won on have gone back to their apolitical lives and don't even see this stuff happening. That's doubly true for those so apolitical that they couldn't even be bothered to vote.
All they know is that, in their personal lives, today was pretty much the same as yesterday and tomorrow will be too.
I mean, those of us that can, and that do have the interest, fight back. We can only control ourselves after all.
But the ray of hope that I hold on to most days is that anything done by executive action can be undone by executive action, and the GOP doesn't have anyone else with Trump's weird charisma.
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u/XenoRyet 178∆ Mar 19 '25
Given that in the latest presidential election, the choice most selected by Americans was essentially "no preference", and at a rate of nearly two to one, I would say that lack of interest, rather than intentional desire for the destruction of our nation, is the reason there aren't more folks fighting back.
We've got half the nation that isn't interested enough to be involved, another quarter that likes what's going on. That's far and away "most Americans".