The Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves.

Who will listen to the "perception and needs" of the racist, misogynistic common folks who want to impose their religious liberty (by banning abortion) and and elevate their financial situation (by pushing downward brown and black people)? (The GOP, that's who.)

And don't you tell me it's a minority, when less than a week after the Supreme Court made the VRA null in practice, half a dozen states are rushing to eliminate any black representation. The whole GOP in those states (who already found a way to practice slavery through their carceral system - yes, there are black people picking cotton under the guard of armed white people on horses right now, today) is unanimous in erasing any power from black people. It is their first and foremost priority right now, despite everything else going on.

Grad students outnumber coalminers 70:1, if they're roughly half international which another comment claims, that's still a big difference.

There is historical precedent for uprisings. Those are usually messy and do not tend to leave most people doing the uprising better off.

Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.

It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.

The professors, graduate students, and staff (not admins) are all working class. They are not some kind of elite in society.

The median professor makes less than, say, an electrician. I am a professor in a good school, and I could probably triple my pay by going to industry.

This propaganda needs to stop.

> intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk

Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?

We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...

An emperor choosing a bad heir is much easier to explain than the general population of a democracy choosing this.

Interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia [1]:

> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]

> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]

> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula

Or finding out that he was just the tip of a giant iceberg that corrupted every square inch of our government.

There are many ways that America could be more democratic, and simultaneously produce less stupid results:

1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win.

2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want.

3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal.

4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal.

Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.

Our systems need to be MORE democratic!

First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering.

Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps.

The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time.

Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".

Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because of their own policies.

> you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic

I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary.

> opposing points of view should pick better candidates

Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.

I'm just stating an observation.

This is trolling, or a glaring false dichotomy, or choosing not to recognize reality, or all three.

Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy.

Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes.

The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment.

So, I'm not sure what your point was.

Are you trolling?

Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.

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> So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then?

Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?

Highly recommend The Man from the Future biography of John von Neumann. We got The Martians for a steal because Europe was too hostile to minorities and we got the Manhattan Project and computers out of the deal. Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.

There has been a general downtrend in Chinese students studying internationally.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-29/chinese-student-numbe...

Also US international students as percent of overall student population has been in the low end. Its mostly been universities around the world catering to international students because they pay a higher tuition and to makeup for a shortfall in domestic funding. Its much better for universities to educate the local population.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/12/universities-cry-po...

Those were productive researchers already working in the field who simply moved their address.

Whether to educate young Chinese nationals in the US who plan to return to their home nation isn’t a similar situation.

> A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry

For those who aren't aware, A123 made the batteries for the GM EV1, which GM famously killed after killing the CA clean air regulation that gave rise to it.

If you "drain" something the subject of the verb is what is being drained not where it is draining to.

No. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures.

America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.

I am also saying the same thing. They are commenting that the flight of human capital was coming from abroad and is no longer.

However that's not what brain drain means. You would say "Iran had a brain drain in the 70s" not "America was brain draining Iran" makes no sense.