this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Agree with almost everything except the useless or harmful part. It's just a meme meant for a quick laugh, it's not that serious.
If we want to be serious though, the Republican party has been going further and further right in the past couple of years. The meme is kind of expressing this in a way.
The past couple? 2016 was 7 years ago
Yeah, but like... That's a couple years ago for my old ass. 😂
Tell me you only recently started paying attention to politics without telling me you only recently started paying attention to politics
I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've never heard of Strom Thurmond?
Also, I would argue that memes like this are more designed for reddit style, low-effort upvote farming, than anything genuinely productive. This makes Lemmy worse and oversimplifies any conversation about American politics, with all of its complex and disparate, if nominally similar, but still competing ideologies, and how they shape its material composition and practical functioning. This all a fancy way of saying that the underlying sentiment of "Republicans are all Nazis and we don't need to understand them further than that" attempts to trivialize a complex problem and a complex set of ideological beliefs and leverages that oversimplification as banal clickbait. And it makes those that consume it dumber for having done so, potentially.
It's no different in function from any other form of demonising the outgroup. It's slightly less bad than some because your political views can change, but it's still a sign of politics gone wrong.