https://intrastellar.substack.com/p/where-does-tds-come-from
“Maybe it’s a social contagion and Trump has been turned into a Girardian scapegoat.”

But, “What is a Girardian scapegoat,” I hear you cry.
https://www.imitatio.org/brief-intro

It was a very interesting discussion (as usual at CB), and I want to pull out the post you linked to in one of your own comments, which I think captures the real difference in our current political parties, certainly in the US and possibly in more countries, if not world-wide, regardless of labels and campaign hype:
https://intrastellar.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-agency-or-envy

It has been suggested recently that one of the main dividing lines between Democrats and Republicans in this election was their vision of the economy as either a fixed pie (which justifies tax and redistribution) or a growable pie (which justifies investment in entrepreneurship and innovation).

I would argue that there is an even deeper root divergence that explains the two tribes even better.

The deepest philosophical division is now between agency and envy.
…
We made fun of “vibes-based voters” this year, but perhaps what we call vibes is actually a gut-level identification with the essential story-philosophy offered by each campaign. Maybe we should take vibes more seriously, study them more carefully.

Memes were to the campaign vibes what music is to a party: they played a key role in setting the tone: humor, daring, and optimism on the Trump side, fear and dread on the Harris side.

And a lot of what made each campaign powerful was the meta-message of the mood and the vision it painted about the future. Kamala’s final weeks were totally focused on pushing the fear of a future Nazi regime under Trump. And underpinning that, a sense of impending victimhood — very consistent with the politics of envy and disempowerment.

Can the entire election be reduced to vibes over issues? No, of course not. Some people do care about issues; there are still single-issue voters out there, and some people really do vote on the economy. But the economic data can be manipulated depending on who is telling the story, so even there, it comes down to narrative and story.

Storytellers twist, spin, and weaponize the issues to promote a philosophy and a worldview. In this case, one was dystopian and the other was inspiring.

So much flows downstream from a worldview. Policy is the concrete enactment of a vision, which in turn is based on how we understand the past and present.

And both of these are based on how we understand human nature itself.

Do we identify primarily as victims, defined mostly by what we don’t have (and what others owe us)?

Or are we beings with positive agency, the capacity to create new realities and do great things?

It looks like America understood itself as the latter and voted accordingly.

The American Dream is back, baby!

A lot of very interesting stuff is hidden behind the ellipsis, so RTWT.

“In the not-so-very-distant past, Europeans have picked “creatures” far worse than Trump, and presently several European countries are FAR more broken than the US.”

• High praise indeed

It was very easy for them to develop skewed perspectives as a result.

(Hallucinogens?)

for every step forward in 2004 and 2010, there are retreats in 2018 and 2020

they used every trick in the book to steal back power including the blood price of a million dead, the circumstances of same are too suspicious to really ignore,

Many Eurosneers have visited the US. Two weeks in California or New York City are hardly sufficient to get a good grasp of a country with the size and variety of the US. How many Europeans would believe that a two week visit to Europe would give an American a good grasp of Europe?

I will give Mr. Clayton his due: much of what he says can be found in Democrat narratives about US politics. However, ignoring half the US electorate does not give one a good perspective on American politics.

Mr. Clayton’s ignorant foray into US politics reminds me of a Brit attempt to influence the 2004 Presidential vote, albeit not from Mr. Clayton’s “conservative” perspective. Guardian readers tell Clark County Ohio how it should vote.