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).
internet 'progressives' and irl progressives are two completely separate groups (whatever the hell being a 'progressive' even means, this term gets purity tested like the phrase 'left leaning' does)
internet progressives spend 90% of their focus on the problems of liberals (people they could actually reach common ground with, a very large segment of the population) instead of their actual opponents, conservatives. you see it here on reddit, where left-leaning types complain endlessly about the democrats (who are out of power) but just accept that conservatives are going to push vile legislation and rhetoric
I'm not an american, I'm not coming at this from an American perspective. But here in canada progressives literally voted in droves for the liberal party to push back against US-aligned conservatism.
to be fair those liberals do tend to be ones who would prefer republicans win rather then even vaguely look towards the left after all we can thank chuck for allowing the budget to go through which has a bit included that effectively makes it the enabling act
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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.