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Dear allies of America, please don’t confuse our president with us
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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Fuck The USA
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"Was considered" by who, us? Our think tanks? Or do you mean, people who don't know how our system works?
Look, I'm not interested in defending the American people by any means. But the people being assholes and the system being broken are two separate questions. Both can be true.
There are no channels where people in power listen to us. There's literally been studies like this Princeton study which found that the poor and middle class have effectively zero influence of what policies get enacted.
I could get into the myriad problems that contribute to the system working that way (aka "as designed"), but as you've expressed disinterest, I won't bore you with the details. But if you don't want to learn about it, then don't try to lecture us on how "democratic" our system supposedly is. Assuming every country works like yours and that you know better than the people living there while choosing to remain ignorant about it is frankly a very American thing to do.
Save me the pity party. You guys democratically elected Trump. To act like Americans are just helpless victims in this is pathetic.
Edit: worth noting that you guys elected him twice. You guys knew what you were doing.
So you're completely incapable of looking at things objectively, got it.
Not acting like this, at all.
Lol.
Yes, democratically. He was elected democratically twice. If you deny that Trump was elected democratically then you’re no better than the Trumpies who say Biden stole the 2020 election. And you think shilling for delusional conspiracies like that is going to make you look any better from an outsiders perspective? It doesn’t.
The US system is not democratic. I'm sorry if you think the existence of the electoral college is a "delusional conspiracy."
Also sorry that you fell for US propaganda.
Is that enough for a system to be considered democratic?
It's wild how you can just change objective facts about the world by declaring the person saying them cringe.
It’s democratic enough for the rest of the world to hold Americans responsible for bringing Trump into power.
Stop with the cope and just admit that the American people fucked up. Your unwillingness to do that is what’s cringe.
It literally doesn't matter if I'm cringe. That's what I've been saying the whole time. Me being cringe does not alter the reality of what the US political system is. The fact that you can't seem to comprehend that is why I said you're incapable of viewing things objectively.
Reread my message. I said it was cringe to not admit that the American people messed up. I never said you personally were cringe.
Why is it on me, as a non-Americian, to understand the ins and outs of your political system? This point is moat because I don’t give to shits about your political system. You’re right: I don’t understand it. But I also don’t care to. Don’t make your problems my problems. It is typical American arrogance to assume that a nonAmerician should care about your internal politics.
I care about how your country is impacting the rest of the world. And this was something the American people can and should be held responsible for, because they could have prevented it literally by doing anything other than voting en masse for a pedophile to lead your country.
Because you're making assertions about it. If you try to tell people that things are a certain way and that they're wrong if they claim otherwise, then it's on you to actually be informed about the thing you're talking about.
Stop trying to assert that the US political system is democratic and I'll stop giving you pushback.
"Typical American arrogance" is proudly proclaiming your ignorance while asserting that people with direct experience with a subject are wrong about it. You have such an American mindset.
I have not claimed otherwise.
Again, you're incapable of looking at the things objectively. I have absolutely no interest in defending the American people. I do have an interest in asserting the objective reality that the US political system is undemocratic trash. The problem is that you can't separate those two questions.
My only assertion is a very simple one: Trump wouldn’t have won if the American people didn’t vote for him en masse. Am I wrong about that?
That's not your only assertion. You've asserted repeatedly that the US system is democratic, and yes, you are completely wrong about that.
You are not wrong that Trump would not have won if people didn't vote for him (although "en masse" is doing a lot of work here, you know that you can't say "a majority"). That's an entirely separate question that I have not disputed at all and which has nothing to do with the claim I'm actually contesting.
If you reread my earlier comments, my exact wording was that it is “democratic enough for the test of the world to hold the American people responsible.”
I was never saying that it’s a perfect democracy. And to act like I am “completely” wrong in calling it a democracy is disingenuous; the US may have flaws but it’s not at the same level as Russia or China (both of which are “completely” not democracies).
A majority of people either voted for him or were complicit. Trump voters + nonvoters = a majority. So yes the majority of Americans are morally culpable here.
Sorry, having trouble finding the words "enough" or "flawed" in there.
Completely irrelevant to what I said.
So every time I talk about American democracy I have to explicitly qualify my statement to assert that it’s flawed, or else you assume I’m saying it’s perfect? Yeah okay makes sense
You said this:
You said I can’t say “a majority”, so I said “a majority”. Makes sense to me but I know Americans are notoriously bad at taking criticism so your mileage may vary
Great, now try saying it in the actual context:
Yes, you are wrong about that. That happened twice.
Changing from "didn't vote for him" to "weren't morally culpable (including non-voters)" is massively shifting the goalposts.
Look at yourself. You are literally crossing out what I said then inserting your own words into your quote of me. Then you announce triumphantly that I’m wrong, due to this fictional quote that you just made up.
Maybe its time to put the phone down bud.
Do you think that when I said "you can't say 'the majority,'" I meant that you couldn't say it in completely unrelated contexts?
No, you can't say "the majority" in the context we were actually discussing. Because if you replaced "en masse" with "the majority of" you would be very objectively wrong. So yes, "en masse" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, as I said.
Right. So you’re talking about the voting habits of Americans, and I’m talking about the voting habits of Americans, yet we are still somehow talking about “completely unrelated” topics. Okie dokie then
Keep carrying that goalpost right over the heads of a third of Americans.
Nice try. But this “goalpost” was introduced by you when you decided to take issue with my use of the term “en masse”. At no point did I ever assert that a literal majority of Americans voted for Trump. The actual goalpost I was forwarding (that Americans bear responsibility for the current state of their leadership) is something that you seem to be trying to divert attention away from, probably because you’ve realized that any argument against that position is going to sound silly
Show me where I disputed that claim, ever.
The only claim that's in dispute is you repeatedly trying to defend the American system as democratic, because you've bought into to American propaganda.
You don't get to decide which of your positions I'm challenging.
Okay, so you agree. Great.
Tell me then: if America is not democratic, then why do Americans bear responsibility for the state of their leadership? Compare: I don’t blame Chinese citizens for Xi Jinping because the Chinese people literally have no control over his tenure in power. So if America is, like China, not a democracy, then why should I not give the American people the same grace?
If a driver doesn't press the brakes because he was on his phone, but also the brake lines had been cut so it would not have mattered if he had, then would you say the driver is completely innocent?
Give Americans an actually democratic system and there's a good chance we'd still fuck it up. The fact that we suck is a separate fact from the fact that our political system is a sham. As I explained to you in my first reply.
To speak in your language, it's kind of like how over 90% of Chinese people say they approve of their government in anonymous polls conducted by Western institutions. I would say that those people do, in fact, carry some culpablity for their government's actions, regardless of whether the government is democratic or not.
Right. So your position is that the American people didn’t vote for Trump (even though there was no mass voter fraud, and they had another candidate they could have voted for) but they still would have voted for Trump even if they could have.
Gotchu.
I have absolutely no idea how you got any of that from what I said.
The majority of voters did vote for Trump in our undemocratic elections, the second time. Nearly half did the first time too.
You seem to be confusing "being able to vote for Trump" with "the system being democratic."
Well, that makes it democratic enough for them to have not voted for Trump and, like I’ve said repeatedly, that’s all that matters in this context
That's all that matters if you're looking at culpability. It's not all that matters if you're looking at whether the system is democratic.
You literally just tried to argue that Americans wouldn't be culpable if the system isn't democratic. You keep trying to equate these two separate questions. I keep trying to tell you that the system is undemocratic and Americans are culpable.
There is such a thing as an undemocratic election. If you vote for a bad person in an undemocratic election, you are morally culpable for their actions. That fact doesn't somehow imply that the undemocratic election is somehow a democratic election.
Like Ive said numerous times before, I don’t care if the system meets your standards of purity. All I care about is if the election was democratic enough to hold the American people responsible. And that doesn’t even seem to be something you are disagreeing with at this point. You’re just getting your panties in a twist because “America” and “democracy” seems to be some sort of tankie trigger word for you
I guess I don't understand what you're doing in a "fuck the USA" comm if criticizing the American political system makes me a "tankie" in your eyes.
No, I just inferred you were a tankie by your lemmy.ml account and your defense of China
All I did is state objective facts about China. Sorry if reality has a tankie bias.
Sure thing bud. Maybe for your next objective reality-based poll you could poll some Uyghurs
Are you suggesting that Harvard University is involved in some secret communist plot?
Oh you’re just fucking exhausting aren’t you
To people who say things that are false, yeah, I am.
What did I say was wrong? Were the Uyghurs included in this poll or not? (Note that not every sampling bias is evidence of a communist plot)
The first thing you said that was false was that the US is democratic. Now you're trying to imply that the poll I mentioned was not objective or based on reality.
The poll does not break things down by ethnicity, as far as I'm aware. But you're once again trying to move the goalposts because I never claimed it did. Uighurs make up less than 1% of their population, so a "sampling bias" that excluded them wouldn't move the needle much, even if it existed.
You’re so literal-minded it hurts