@theblackpage@mstdn.social Firstly I feel very urgently a need to emphasize health takes precedent over much of anything, let alone discussions with average civilian people on the internet, I hope all is well. American exceptionalist narratives are woven into the language of the political realm, starting with a constitution in which they attributed to themselves the invention of a whole different way of governing. It's a slippery slope when the context collapses - the insinuation that exceptionalism is somehow inherent to the people doing it, and not to the acts themselves (which were then somewhat exceptional *in EUROPEAN* culture in the 1700s, but reflected things being done in many other civilizations.) I really think there's still an over-sampling of older generations in the assessment of modern exceptionalism. From Gallup, 2025, before the events of the last five months: > 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. 19% of men said the same. Warsan Shire was right in this: "No one leaves home// unless home is the mouth of a shark." This isn't merely a statement that "it's better abroad than in the United States," it's rather "it's so much better I would give up all my advantages and community ties and start over somewhere else, from a nation so far from others that visits would be onerous." It's a very powerful statement that the numbers would ever represent anything but a small minority who would leave - and again, up to 44 years old. It was 20% of all US adults. Not to defend those who could have turned out to vote and failed (a distinct population from those who could not turn out to vote, due to de jure or de facto disenfranchisement) … but the #1 thing I heard from people trying to justify that decision to abstain in 2024 was that it's not just Trump, and not even just Republicans, but that the entire government is essentially captured by billionaire interests at the expense of the public. Speaking for myself I spent a great deal of my time trying to emphasize the enormous and immediate toll of lives that electing Harris would avert, and which has sadly been demonstrated correct in the drawdown of USAID alone, leaving aside direct murders by federal agencies, the social murder of eliminated healthcare domestically, etc. But I think the public is very much aware that it's "not just Trump" that's the problem. That's actually part of why they're so hard to motivate - given the increasing decoupling of the democratic process from outcomes on the ground, they've become skeptical of the entire democratic system and decided (somehow, I cannot comprehend the logic) that not participating will (somehow) result in better options (somehow.) Of those of us who turn out to vote knowing that it will be hard, obfuscatory, illegally restricted, etc., most of us also know we're in for a long ride, but I think that loops back into the fact that fully one in five people here would pull the plug and leave - we know it's bad. What's not clear is how to prioritize steps on the path to actually fixing a system that is increasingly designed to be anti-public. Introducing ranked choice voting sits at the top of my list, personally - if we actually had representation of public sentiment our political outcomes would be quite different (as experiemental data science showed in the converse, by illustrating if first-past-the-post had decided Swiss and German elections, iirc - the results were horrifying.) Likewise in Europe I sincerely hope there's stern action *before* this locking-in process proceeds any further, as we're seeing in the UK crackdowns on open, peaceful speech. The sliding of the Overton window toward reactionary politics, hostility to diversity, hostility to women, etc. (what I would in the US think of as "right wing") is just the opening salvo. Moving away from US-led tech platforms would also be immensely promising and I hope the EU will keep at it - anything that shrinks these giants' stature is good for the whole of the world, in my book.