as a person that came from the 3rd world country and new in fediverse environment, i genuinely would like to know about this.
edit: thanks for the replies! sorry, i literally don’t know the reason since i’m not a western lol. twitter/x is too biased especially when musk openly supports trump so i came here and seeing fediverse is mostly are harris or biden (when he’s still up for the candidate) supporters. don’t know about reddit tho, i only use reddit as a forum for linux and programming stuff.
There are a couple masquerading as Green Party supporters, and you do see blatently pro-Trump posters occasionally, but most of them are lurkers who, if they comment, hide behind criticizing Democrats rather than voicing pro-Trump sentiments.
Look for the people who were smashing Biden for the debate behavior while ignoring Trump’s Alzheimer’s symptoms. The people being nitpicking Harris or Walz, while being silent about the Couch-Fucker and Orange Stalin. Those are the pro-Trump lurkers. There aren’t many, though, because they don’t thrive outside of an echo chamber.
Lemmy’s an echo chamber as well, but you’ll find plenty of people who criticize both parties, and while a lot of people like Kamala, very few claim she’s perfect, or worship her. And there’s plenty of legitimate criticism of the Democratic party, and strong sentiment about a need for change in US politics. This is the sort of discussion and debate which would not be sanctioned in most conservative forums, and could easily get you banned. So I think it’s fair to say Lemmy is far less echo-y than most.
I think that your metrics for picking covert Trumpers based upon that appaling debate is incorrect and simplistic. I watched every second of that shit show and believed that we were doomed for another 4 years of the orange turd.
Trump lied during the debate. Some estimates were that he lied upwards of 250 times in his 45 minutes at the mic. Those numbers seems off, but who knows? I don’t know the true figure, but it was insane. However, it is also not the fucking point. Trump is a serial liar. He lies to his family, he lies to the people, he lies to the courts, he lies non-stop. He would have lied if Biden performed outstandingly in the debate. He would have lied if Biden put in a middling performance. And, he lied when Biden performed badly. Are we supposed to be clutching our pearls in shock that Trump lied?
So, we can’t judge Biden’s terrible performance by the ‘other guy’. We need to judge whether Biden could win in November. And if you had of watched all 90 minutes, like I did, there was zero confidence that he could. The GOP campaign would have portrayed Biden’s lost moments a million times, over and over and over again. And they’d be stupid not to. And yes, Trump lied in the debate. Let’s try and turn the broken bus around on the seemingly new information that a serial liar lied on stage.
The proof of this was the instant jump in the polls once Harris became the candidate and the growing support since. Is the argument that all these covert GOP critics suddenly turned Dems? Or, perhaps, changing to Haris was the sensible thing to do, and perhaps, just might keep the orange turd out of the white house.
Well, yeah, it’s simplistic. I’m generalizing.
I agree. Biden had a bad night (and, it appears in retrospect, had been declining for a while). Trump has been a deranged narcissistic sociopath since day 1; Biden was held to a higher standard than Trump. Biden performs poorly, and the heart sunk out of the Democratic faithful. Trump performs poorly, and that’s just par for the course, because all Trumpers care about is hurting liberals.
However, I admit I don’t know what you’re arguing; I think we agree on most of this. The Harris bump was because (as I said) it gave liberals hope that they could win. The bump came from undecideds who suddenly saw an energized, engaged, and competent viable candidate as an option; or people who before saw only two decrepit old white men (The Patriarchy) feebly flailing for control, and suddenly one of the candidates was strong, under 60, female, and a minority!
We’re answering OP’s question why there aren’t more Trumpers on Lemmy. There are; they’re just hidden, and how they respond to the debate outs them. The debate was just an example:
Democrats are far more critical of their own candidate than Republicans are of their’s, and that’s how you identify the conservative lurkers. They’re there, and they’re not hard to recognize.
This subsequent post of yours is more substantial in explaining your position and I generally agree with all of your points.
My post was with the absurdist position that critiquing the Biden performance around the time of the last debate made you an enemy of progressive politics. Joe had fired his last good shot in 2016. He’s a good man, a heroic fighter for his age but Trump was always going to steamroll him this time. It doesn’t matter that Joe had a cold, or that he sometimes made excellent policy points, the optics were that he was meandering and frail. It wasn’t that the debate done him in by itself - Obama sometimes had a bad debate (particularly his first one) it was that his performance on the night confirmed what was evident for months. By the time Joe started arguing with Trump about who could beat who in golf the jig was up.
Despite Trump’s own senior moments, despite his atrocious behaviour, despite his obvious lies, the feeling was Joe is doomed. And so was the most important election since last time, and that says a lot. The fact that it is not impossible that he still won’t get in again is beyond worrying. But with Harris there is a decent chance.
I hope that clears up my position? It was more a vent against all those who insisted that we ride the Joe bus over the cliff and disbelieve our own eyes while we did it.
Yeah, I think we’re on the same page. The Biden administration did good, but we’d come to a depressingly low point in politics.
I’m encouraged that more conservatives are feeling it’s safe to pop their heads out and criticize Trump, and the radical right who’ve been able to hijack the party thanks largely to party policies started during Ronald Fucking Regan’s administration. But if they do it on Lemmy, they’re assumed to be liberals which may increase the perception of there being few conservatives on Lemmy.
Lemmy is still more generally politically Left than American Left, which is, after all, pretty centrist compared to western Europe. This feeds even more into OP’s question about why there aren’t more conservatives on Lemmy: if you look at Lemmy as a European, the pro- Trumpers are neo-Nazis, not conservatives; the center is so far right, anything more right is essentially legally banned in Germany.
Thats a pretty sophisticated bit of analysis, particularly for Lemmy.
I still find it amazing that the vote will be as close as it undoubtedly will become. I mean, Trump is not only for himself, but he is also plainly destructive. He’s now touting the low-information ‘Joe Rogan vote’. Young white guys who haven’t been following anything.
Oh ffs, it’s non-binary. I can support certain policies while standing 10 down against others. I can look for alternative candidates without being Nazi, shill or troll. I’m fact, that mentality is from the GW Bush playbook, “if you’re not for us, you’re against us!” Which to be fair, I’m against politicians who rake in corporate, PAC and billionaire dollars, mainly because they’re proud corporate and against we regular people.
But isn’t that exactly what they were saying? If you go on X, for example, you can literally be banned for using the word “cisgender”. Musk considers it a slur. Here, you can voice any opinion.
However there’s a different between agreeing with some right-wing policies and being a full-on MAGA fascist. Full-on MAGA fascists shrivel up and die when exposed to any discourse that hasn’t been heavily censored and editorialized in their favor. So naturally they’ll avoid places where different opinions are shared. This alone is enough reason to call this place an echo chamber, because a (sadly) very prevalent set of opinions isn’t represented here.
And I can, for example, get away with referring to MAGA fascists as MAGA fascists knowing full well that not a single one of those Trump-fellating pussies will say anything against me for it, and even if one does, the community will not have their back.
No these people are definitely leftist. Why would we criticize trump when we know there is no chance of altering his policy. Atleast with the democrats we might (and thats a big maybe) push them left by witholding our vote and being vocal about our opposition to genocide