That goes for DOGE, both the idea of "drowning the government in a bathtub" and the specific cuts they made (eg, wrecking foreign aid), that goes for ICE, even the Iran War, which is widely regarded as the unpopular thing that might actually sink the administration, is something a solid 30% of the base has been salivating over since Reagan and are only upset that he hasn't "finished the job" yet.
If you think it's all purely reactionary you haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years.
They didn't even pretend to reduce the size of government. They just engaged in some petty grudges.
Which is, as you say, exactly what his voters want. They just pretend that it's "small government", but it absolutely is not.
That set also contains elements who will swear that LLMs are conscious, so it does not mean as much as we might want it to.
I suspect this too will change.
We may get to a point where we'll refer to the Great Depression as Great Depression I.
We'll see change then. It happened last time.
Future historians, with the benefit of hindsight, will probably date the beginnings of the collapse[1] to 9/11, with the actual ceasing of the functional economic system somewhere around the 2008 econopalypse. COVID was something like our Chernobyl. I think Trump is, quite honestly, our version of Yeltsin: the buffoon who ends everyone's faith in "the system".
Americans should mentally prepare for an equivalent collapse in, well, everything, from public health to aviation safety. Of course, by the numbers, "you're already soaking in it".
[1] The American side of it, anyway. The larger end of the West, World War 1 is a logical place to draw the line, but honestly it started when Europe ran out of profitable/exploitive space on the map.
However, those levers of power are subtle enough that once the US voted ignorant jackasses into power, they wrongly thought that's just how the world is, they can do what they like, including -- critically! -- dismantling the levers of power.
It's like that image of the idiot sawing off the branch he's sitting on. How else can you explain the US trying to fuck up the UN and NATO?
Hubris is the undoing of all empires. And hubris is basically entropy for humanity.
At least cynically, there is nothing ignorant about it, it is intentional undermining probably for personal gain.
edit: woops, i guess everyone apparently still hates japan and germany and will hate them forever, too. does everyone still hate spain?
Let's not forget that in the early part of the 20th century, Germany was the powerhouse of mathematics and sciences such as physics and chemistry, to the extent that top scientists basically had to learn German (1) and/or study in Germany (2).
How long did it take Germany to recover that preeminent position?
Its a trick question: they did not recover it.
1) https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/162/how-did-german-b...
2) e.g.
> In 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born; Göttingen was one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Early_ca...
That reverberates even toady -- I had a physics professor who who learned German precisely because he wanted to read some original texts written by Boltzmann. Apparently he thought he was missing some nuance in the translations.
They're basically brand-new countries.
my point was that a couple generations is usually enough to heal most animosity, assuming the offending events cease
certainly in a thousand years, ~no one will remember.
i dont think flattening of most major cities is a requirement...
Both of your chosen examples went through exactly that as part of their reputational change.
Wait, bad example.
i thought it was a fairly obvious statement that over the thousands of years of history, many bad things have been done, but after several generations, we are able to heal.
if you think that in the year 2200, the world will still hate the US because of today, i disagree.
the year 2500? i doubt the people of that time, excepting a few ancient historians, will even know it happened.
"forever" is a long time.
No.
What I want and what I get don't always match up.
The US will suffer from this era on the international stage for generations, in a completely self-inflicted blow. Its continued existence as the present-day USA is by no means guaranteed, either.
Present-day Germany isn't Nazi Germany; I certainly hope people will hate Nazi Germany forever.
I don't see a way out of this without a fundamental transformation of the US. At the very least that looks like a Constitutional convention, repeal of FPTP and the electoral college, maybe even changing to a parliamentary system without a powerful executive. At worst it looks like civil war. Nothing on a lesser scale than than that is going to suffice. Expecting to simply return to normal with a vote for blue and pretend this never happened isn't going to work.
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/doge-driven-hud-cuts-will-make-it-...
I cant believe they would lie about this ... i am sure that this is a totally isolated case and they have been straight forward and honest about everything else.
The DOGE refund cheque is due to arrive any day now.
"Oh, those projections were over the life the expected costs,forecast out 10/15/20 years into the future. Everyone knows this is how you calculate such savings..."
Of course it didn't save any money, and it was obvious from the start that the numbers they put out were entirely fictional.
(Europeans: this is sarcasm)