I'm a lot less well off than a lot of my friends, and among every group of friends, in addition to my family, I'm known as the borderline communist one.
That said, the events of the last week has had some effects that I had't anticipated. The same people who were posting about how great Bidens policies were leading up to the general election now seem pissed off about not just the Syrian airstrike, but the general lack of inaction on the $2000 checks.
Of course, to anyone on here, we expected this from Joe. But in my circle of late 20's friends who still have a ton of debt to pay off; who assured me that "we can push him left," for those who treated me like a madman for even considering not voting for Biden (I didn't).... The facade seems like its starting to crack.
We were just going to college in 2008 and didnt really follow the news. This last year has been our first real crisis. And the Democrats control everything. I wouldn't expect someone making over 100K a year to be changed by this or anything but it seems like this is different.
I dont even know what my main thesis is, but the fact that Biden approved an airstrike that cost god knows how much money before he gave money to struggling americans seems to have hit a nerve.
I'm too young to remember the Obama years. Was it anything like this? Did people react differently to drone strikes?
It feels like things are changing. Socialism isn't as bad a word as it used to be. It may just be wishful thinking.
At first there was a lot of discussion about them, Obama's line was that the drones were far more precise and killed far fewer civilians and that drones in combination with an increase in special ops was the future of Iraq and Afghanistan. The libs loved it in contrast to the Bush policy of building bases and being in the middle east in force, and after the draw down and the transition to what the wars look like now people just stopped talking about them (until Obama decided to go back into Iraq after briefly pulling out of the country completely).
The conservatives, meanwhile, screamed that Obama was intentionally losing the war because he was a secret muslim. Now that Trump has basically been waging the exact same style of war that Obama's admin pioneered, perhaps the timbre of the conversation has changed - but I suspect a lot of libs will be satisfied if someone comes out and explains that the process of launching strikes is run by people with college degrees who carefully consider the risk to civilians before authorizing them.
Leftwing perspectives were very niche (most people thought Michael Moore was far left) and people were generally much less politically engaged, which meant that more people were centrists. So it definitely feels like things are a bit better now.
Bush was also objectively much worse than Trump and Obama had run on the 2008 version of Bernie's campaign, so there was more excitement and hope that Obama would be good. It meant that the disappointment was greater, but also took a bit longer to set in. People genuinely believed in him in a way that I don't think was ever true for Biden. Obama was also the first black president, which really did feel like a huge thing at the time (I mean, it is important, even if it is like being the first black mob boss) and it insulated him from criticism in the mainstream (as it still does).
The lack of leftwing voices also meant that the criticisms of Obama were different. It wasn't stuff that liberals might feel a pang of guilt over and have to go mask off as conservatives to defend (like access to healthcare and perhaps not bombing innocent people in the middle east), but instead brainwormed conspiracies about his not actually being American that could (rightly) be easily dismissed. That kind of shit took up most of the air in the room.
early on, everything was justified by a still post 9/11 and bin laden era and only some communities like chapo behind the scenes and some obscure leftists really were against it. it started to change at the end of his second term. most libs really went "huh....maybe...what?" during Trump.