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I think most Americans, if polled, would prefer to be the global hub of scientific research, instead of an isolated silo of research that only follows a politically approved agenda.
They were polled, on election day. Most Americans want this, or didn't care enough to stop it. Potato, potahto.
This idea that the only way a citizen can disagree what their government is doing is by voting on election day needs to die.
It's the same old "vote with your dollar/feet" solecism, applied to politics.
I would guess that if you polled voters on election Day, and asked them why they voted for Trump, science funding wouldn't even come up as a topic. They would probably talk about high prices, or criminal aliens, or how they didn't like Harris.
They voted for a massive grab-bag of obviously bad stuff. They may not have examined every single item in it, but they obviously wanted this style of bad stuff to happen. This action is aligned with their revealed preferences.
That was kind of my point. They actively voted for a lot of bad stuff, but it was framed in a very different way. They voted for things like ending the tyranny of woke liberalism, and believe that end is so essential to achieve that it justifies essentially abandoning the rule of law. What they did not vote for is the long-term consequences of supporting that position.
What?! They most certainly did vote for those consequences! Why infantilize these voters? Nobody robbed them of the agency needed to see that an obvious criminal tyrant was worse than a woman, twice. They just didn't care. It's ugly and depressing to imagine them not caring about things that matter to them intimately, but here we all are.
It's not that Harris was "a woman". It's that she was -- or so the propaganda line went -- a treasonous saboteur who would continue the woke left-liberal-socialist agenda, which is a path to certain destruction, and along the way allow American governance to be co-opted by corrupt plutocrats and criminals, as well as politicizing and weaponizing the executive branch against political enemies to suppress opposition to the agenda.

That of course is all setup for consent: Trump doing all that stuff is just fighting fire with fire, the justified means to the end of not only making America great again but now saving it from certain doom.

People are both more clever than you think, and dumber than you think. Few non-experts would claim to understand skyscraper design. And yet somehow everyone with a social media account and 4th grade literacy skills claims to understand how to govern 300m people and the largest economy in the world.

I don't consider myself a Jeffersonian Republican, but I can see clearly that tens of millions people voted for short-term action to fight against this or that perceived boogeyman, and did so largely from an emotional perspective with little foresight into what the consequences might actually be, beyond "X candidate says he will fix Y bad thing and I think Y is very important". The fact that 3-time Trump voters feel disappointed and betrayed and yet somehow still claim that Harris "would have been worse" points to a serious lack of unemotional big-picture thinking when it comes to the future of the USA. Hell I see people going all the way back to Obama -- "yeah OK so Trump did [100 unimaginably horrible things that will eventually hurt me] but Obama once hit a US citizen with a drone strike so what's the big deal? get lost snowflake god bless my president"

Doesn't change the fact that the US voted for this.
Were they? I thought they also voted for the "No new wars" guys. Oh wait
I mean they might well prefer it, and a lot of other things, but the Republicans have done such an incredible job propagandizing everyone into "guvernment bad" thinking that they refuse to pay for it, because (mostly) Republicans have spent decades running on a platform of how the Government sucks and can't do anything, to get elected, and then set about making their Government suck and not be able to do anything. Then they go home and tell their dumbass constituents about how nothing in the Government works, and they're so propagandized against any reasonable sources of information they believe them, and vote for them, and rinse and repeat.

They've been doing this for like 70 years at this point and it's frankly a testament to how strong our institutions were that they're still kind of functioning, in the same way a 1999 Corolla you haven't gotten an oil change on since the Clinton admin is still kind of functioning.

And no I'm not going to do the song and dance for both sides. Yes, plenty of Democrats suck and I would love to see them ousted, but by and large the party consistently in power when the U.S. is in decline of it's own making is the Right. Something something facts don't care about your feelings.