The USSR was integrated too, and still broke up.

This situation would be more similar to that than Brexit.

I think so, they were very much for “the will of the people” and if they saw the will of the people of today is that slavery is bad then they wouldn’t see it as a mistake.

They would absolutely see what Trump and MAGA-GOP are doing as a subversion to that will of the people as a problem though and (after catching them up on 200+ years of technological and sociological development) would see the issues in their original implementation

I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.

It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.

I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.

Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.

When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).

I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.

Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.

So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”

Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”

Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.

The US wasn’t run by Nazis in 1939 though. The same (rather popular) guy was President in 1939 was President in 1941.

It’s very possible Germany becomes run by Nazis again.

I would strongly argue that it is more difficult now.

There is mass communication, yes, but 90% of that communication is rolled on over to the government with the exact location, search history, secrets, psychological profile, vices, everything at the tip of their fingers for every single dissident.

In those days if a letter wasn’t signed and resistance posters were put up at odd hours, nobody would be able to track down the leader and who was doing it. Now, the surveillance state is so big, it would take a matter of hours to make a full roster of the resistance and have an “accidental” police raid on their house where they are killed “by mistake” and it is ruled a suicide.

The entire success of revolution movements came out of anonymity and the fact that the government couldn’t snuff out the organization and break it up. Now, with technology, it is quite trivial to break anonymity anywhere on the main internet. Long lasting organization is much much harder.

That isn’t even getting into engineered addictive media to keep people occupied and demotivates just enough to not get organized.

When has there been a revolution without a revolt in all of history?

When has there been a 180° change without a revolution in all of history?

In much of the world, Unions were forged in blood of many revolts.

Nation separation and independence was exclusively revolution.

Even the civil rights (which most people have been whitewashed into thinking was peaceful) had the black panthers. They have been completely villified, but the civil rights movement would not have succeeded without their violence.

Iirc, Reagan was the first to strongarm a party line and establish the strategy of voting for power over anything which has proven very effective, with courts, gerrymandering, and stalled electoral reforms very helpful to form this current opportunity.

But with the current system where it is, I have trouble seeing any such grass roots being able to accomplish much until they gain a majority enough, for long enough to re-establish the checks & balances. Electoral voting and the two party system makes it incredibly hard for a new party to establish, and even then they will get bogged down in the same malintent behaviour exhibited now. At least enough to appear powerless, ineffectual or otherwise not making change enough to keep taking seats, like the Democrats of the last few cycles.

Do you envision some kind of path short of a revolution to throw out the current politicians?