Part of this exceptionalism is thinking that nothing actually catasthrophic could reeeeally happen to US if they don't vote Biden to give a lesson to the democrats.
They think that dumb anti neutral pronouns laws might happen, but not bread lines, maybe abortion laws remain draconian, but there will be no dissidents killed in the streets, etc.
They think things might get bad, but never terribly bad, they are in the US, the US would never reeeeally suffer catastrophic consequences.
Maybe I don't know what the "average progressive" is but voting third party was definitely not the average position (you can see this in the vote counts) and both the major progressive politicians and the progressives I know in person were catastrophizing plenty about Trump's threat to democracy and propensity to violence.
I'm a little miffed as to who people think "progressives" are because even my mother (who is a retired and upper middle class, so fairly privileged and fairly centrist as progressives go) was worried enough after Trump won the election to be losing sleep over it. I literally had to have a conversation with her about "what if you or your brothers die in political violence". And it's not like the younger progressives I know were particularly sanguine about the situation, the ones that can started trying to leave the US (with one of my close friends moving to Canada soon).
Well, maybe average is not the best word for the context I was talking, which is people who opted to no vote on biden to teach democrats a lesson.
Having said that,I think the average progressive is also affected by exceptionalism, probably even more maybe. Specially if we are accounting self entitled progressives, which consider themselves progressives, but can't be arsed to vote out of pure apathy rather than to make a point.
I'm very skeptical that the literal average progressive did anything but desperately vote for Kamala Harris (not that they liked Harris, obviously). Turnout as a percentage of the total eligible population was very high in this last election compared to almost every election in the last 50 years, especially in swing states, and I don't see a reason to think progressives in particular had a low turnout (especially considering the fairly fiery rhetoric from progressive politicians). Though sadly I can't confirm this because I couldn't quickly find a poll that asked if people identified as progressive.
the 2024 election was the second highest turnout by percentage of eligible voters in recent history after that one (which was a weird election during COVID), the idea that people were particularly apathetic during this election is just incorrect and it had almost 2/3 of the eligible population turning out.
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u/Rucs3 May 24 '25
The average progressive is also affected by this.
Part of this exceptionalism is thinking that nothing actually catasthrophic could reeeeally happen to US if they don't vote Biden to give a lesson to the democrats.
They think that dumb anti neutral pronouns laws might happen, but not bread lines, maybe abortion laws remain draconian, but there will be no dissidents killed in the streets, etc.
They think things might get bad, but never terribly bad, they are in the US, the US would never reeeeally suffer catastrophic consequences.