All of that is true for pretty much everywhere all the time, I mean that people of a country are not a monolithic block and many disagree - so, yeah sure, though, quite honestly, from experience US Americans themselves are often not very good at differentiating when it comes to the people of other countries.
What makes it more difficult is the often cowardly, mostly just anemic reaction of US society as a whole. I know there are protests here and there, but it really doesn’t feel adequate to meet the moment imo.
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I’m not comparing the current lot to the Bush junior administration, mate. I said that I see the GW Bush election as one of the starting points of the slide leading to Trump and co. Very different.
I agree with you that Trump and co are much more dangerous. The slide happened, and here we are.
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Just to make everything crystal clear.
I am a Social Democrat, I have never ever liked the US political model (I have always actually loathed it, it’s money based pluralism and the Two Party System is an ideological and structural weakness and etc.), nor its economic model (hurrah, Nordic Model 
) and I have also always been against much of its foreign policy.
But…
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Can’t disagree with your post. An argument made far better than I could. My style is often very short and succinct, when considerably more detail may often be required.
I would add that Trump has his backers. There’s those that have quietly funded him in the background, like the Bannon’s etc. but also the Musks, Bezos’ and others who want the subsidies, contracts, market or access etc. to be funnelled their way. The US has always been doing this to some degree e.g. Iran 1953. I see them wanting the same here.
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People tend to flatten out complex situations. The “Trump is just a continuation of the bad things the US was already doing” perspective being aired here isn’t really any different than the “what is the point, they are both the same” perspective you heard everywhere leading up to the election and was such a big factor in getting Trump reelected. I get it is hard to be enthusiastic about a candidate from a party that had at best enabled what was happening in Gaza and didnt have much interest in addressing the influence of money in politics, but there was still a clear difference in the implications between each of them winning. It is not just possible but a requirement to be able to be critical of the ills of America without falling into the nihilism of nothing mattering no matter who runs things.
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Is that what people said, really?
What point are you arguing against? You really dont believe there was a common sentiment that said they were both just as bad as each other?
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The real problem is that the world will be permanently changed for the worst due to Trump’s 2 elections.
America will be permanently changed to the point I ask if it will ever have what one could describe as a decent person as president ever again?
Thatcher started the deregulation shift that caused soo much damage. Here we have someone imposing lawlessness. He even has an upper court that doesn’t even up hold the constitution.
We have never seen such destain from an American administration.
When you look at what happened in the UK after Thatcher a decent man couldn’t remain as PM (Major or Brown the media destroyed them. Kinnock was the last hope and look what happened to him). Blair I respected as a politician and manipulator however he wasn’t a decent man!
This is what the USA and the world are up against. A collapse in decency. A system without principles. Try and get your heads around this. It’s fucking frightening!
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Trump can’t be compared to previous administrations. It’d be similar to comparing Hitler to the failed Weimar Republic. Yes, one could point to the failure of the old system that gave rise to phenomena like Hitler and Trump, but that’s all it is.
Trump is such a radical departure from what was considered as normal that he is in a category of his own. Like Hitler there’s going to be a US before him and a US after him, one far more vulnerable, fractured and dangerous.
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Maybe I’ve missed some posts, but I did not get that ‘common sentiment’.
Entirely possible to view Trump as something that didn’t just fall from the sky and is in some ways a continuation of trends and revealing something problematic at the core of the system while also thinking that Biden and Trump aren’t as bad as each other. To me it seems like you’re accusing others of flattening complex situations by flattening their arguments.
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Understanding what was wrong with society, culture, the system that lead to Hitler was crucial for post-Hitler Germany instead of just moving on as a society - it took post-War Germany quite some time to get to that stage. Forgetting about it is what brings us the AfD. These aren’t just academic exercises.
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Of course, I never implied otherwise. My point is that we can’t view Trump/Hitler as a continuation of previous regimes but as a consequence of their failure.
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Coalitions in democracy are the way forward and I hope indian politics finds its ways back to that.
The American system as it stands is broken. They can’t even call themselves a democracy after the shambles we’ve seen.
A one case where American interventionism has done good ? Korea excepting
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Yugoslavia, Gulf War, Haiti from the top of my mind.
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Haiti?!? Which one? Haiti more or less began its history as a recognized state with an American boot on its throat, demanding that it make payments to France as restitution for the loss of property by French citizens (the American interest was by way of huge exposure to French banks) - with the obscenity being that the property in question was the Haitians themselves.
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I don’t think we should blame those who voted for Trump, and those who didn’t vote. We shouldn’t blame the voters (or general people) at all. Yes, there are a dedicated (read, fascist) voter base but are a fringe.
It’s the alternative, in this case the Democrats, who made Trump electable by blurring the lines through their years of ineptness, corruption, and etc. This is how/why Modi came to power. This is how/why Farage, Le Pen, AfD, etc. are continuously not just consolidating, but expanding.
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Then you can maybe argue that this stability did not last many decades after withdrawal of the UN troops, but that is sort of besides the point. The intervention did not make it worse and most would say it was a success. Certainly nothing to be “ashamed of”.
@RedArmada (clicked on the wrong post to reply to)
I guess the word continuation is the problem, as in more or less exactly the same. But to stay in your analogy, there certainly is some connective tissue between the Kaiserreich and Hitler, if you catch my drift.
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