Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

Revising our electoral system to change the incentives for political parties and politicians would be an approach. Winner-take-all on a state by state basis with single-party primaries produce candidates who are far from the median voter and then campaign to drum up support among their party base. Universal primary systems encourage candidates with broader appeal outside of their party to end up as the party nominee, who then have a much easier time running a general election campaign on appealing to opposition party voters rather than being forced by the positions they took in their primary to campaign only to boost turnout among their existing base.

My Facebook account was recently restricted from 'complex entities interactions' a week before the election until November 28, with no explanation as to why, and an error thrown whenever I click a link to contest the restrictions (for lack of a better term).

Thus far, it seems to mean that I can't follow, comment, post, or dm on/with groups or facebook pages. I cannot create events, pages, or new groups.

I can only post to my timeline, dm my friends, or comment on my friend's posts.

I do not post, or comment on Facebook, though I am a member of a number of politically engaged and activist facebook groups on the fringes for the purposes of having access to on the ground primary sources.

I have a number of friends active on the right who received a similar set of restrictions, ending on the same day. They're used to these kinds of restrictions, comment often, and thought nothing of it. This is typical of facebook to them.

More unexpectedly, and in my opinion a disturbing development in an already unsettling moderation regime, a number of second-order contacts (friends of friends and coworkers) who work as left and progressive organizers/activists (not liberals, progressives and leftists) also received the same levels of restriction.

This was accompanied by the removal of quite a few fringe activist and political pages, the most infamous which comes to my mind being 'God Emperor Trump', a large meme page that had significant reach during the 2016 election.

I don't think this is circumstantially unique. This is a preview. Assuming recounts and court challenges go Biden's way, I believe we're looking at a future where social media uses the tools they've developed over the past four years to enforce a bipartisan moderate consensus over their user-bases, restricting any populist, revolutionary, or potentially dangers speech or users that might produce it.

The activist left has largely been shielded by its circumstantial alliance with the DNC establishment and its allied institutions, given their mutual opposition to the Trump administration.

The populist right has partially been shielded by the implicit threat of Trump's executive authority.

Libertarians (I'm including the Boogaloo movement, and many lockdown protests under this umbrella) have had no such cover, and in my limited experience I've seen entire networks of users and pages been scrubbed off the platform over the past two years with little fanfare, and largely as a product of their affiliations. I believe their experience will be mirrored on the left and the right going forward.

A voting system needs to be accurate but it also needs to inspire confidence. I think the U.S. failed on the latter point. Let me be clear that I don't think this affected the outcome, only the confidence in the outcome.

Mail-in voting has existed for a long time, but it is being done at a larger scale and in new ways and new places. It was a mistake to do it during such a contentious election. Covid is not a good enough reason: it's easy enough to drop the ballot in a county box so the secretary of state has a chain of custody for all valid ballots. I would actually prefer voter ID as well as people standing there to do a brief check. In addition to preventing fraud, it also helps remind voters if they forgot to sign or something.

Also, I think it needs to be said that a lot of people hate Trump. Hate can cause people to do things that they would never imagine doing otherwise, like election fraud. It doesn't need to be a conspiracy... just a lot of individuals doing small stuff (post office employees throwing away likely Trump ballots, etc.).

And it doesn't help that the map looked quite red on the day of the election, and that the poll numbers were WAY off, and that the media was rooting for Biden. It all just erodes confidence.

Do you live in SV? That might have something to do with it. I have plenty of friends on the right and left who don't think in absolutes.

I don't believe that Trump is a racist. I believe that Trump is a Trumpist. I believe that he lacks the capacity to hold any real beliefs outside of his own self-interest, even twisted and depraved ones. He panders to racists, along with other segments like Evangelicals, not because he believes in their cause but because they give him what he wants: praise and power. But to think that Trumpism is about race is deeply, tragically, missing the point.

If we want to understand and get to the root of what just happened for the past 4 years, the left needs to step back and seriously reconsider its assumptions.