MicroWaveThe United States loses its status as a liberal democracy: ‘Trump is aiming for a dictatorship’
AreaKodeThey’re going to let him tear the country apart, and then 25th amendment his ass just after January 20th 2028. That let’s Little Smokey take over, and he’s still eligible for 2 full terms. Mark my words…
I think they’re just gonna kill him. Leaving him alive risks the chance of him sending whatever is left of MAGA after them. It also risks splitting their support base.
samus12345If they were going to do the smart thing and off him, they would have done so long ago.
Why would republicans have done that? It wasn’t in their interest to kill him while he still had enough sway and the populace still had some power. Now though, they know they can take over without risks since they’ve managed to accumulate so much power in the presidency that, so long as they can hold on to the senate, they can do whatever they want with the judicial having abandoned any semblance of control over the executive.
He’s an obese octogenarian. He’s already on borrowed time.
All the signs are there, he’s suffering acute heart failure likely. Just that he’s likely to get Dick Cheney’d a new heart they rip out of some teenager in China.
4gramsYep, they will prop his rotting corpse up as long as they can, the plan is to having him be the wrecking ball, take all the blame, but by then the fixes are all in for the next one in line.
Not sure if they will foist vance on us, I don’t think they believe he can be the front of a cult but by they maybe the power will be consolidated enough that they don’t care since he’s just a puppet.
Let’s be honest, the US was no shining beacon of democracy even before Trump. The system was rotten and everyone knew it. However, those with the power to change it have no incentive to do so. It was basically held up because the poeple in charge had some common decency. At that point it’s just a matter of time before someone came along that didn’t have this basic decency.
I think the people of the UK should take a long, hard look at how the situation has evolved in the US and decide if they want to change their system to avoid having only two parties dominate the political climate. Ironically, being a monarchy means they are probably more resistant to going down the same route, but I suspect the parties are going to get more radical as time goes on and the royals aren’t terribly popular these days.
(Opinion to be taken with a pinch of salt. I am no expert in these things and don’t live in either country; We’ve got our own radicalization and issues with our own democracy.)
I think the people of the UK should take a long, hard look at how the situation has evolved in the US and decide if they want to change their system to avoid having only two parties dominate the political climate.
There are currently 5 parties vying for position here, but your point is still generally true. Hopefully with the rise of smaller parties, we might start to see a move towards a more proportional system, but I’m not holding my breath.
I think the people of the UK should take a long, hard look at how the situation has evolved
LOL… the same people who voted Brexit. Sure.
KneeTittsthe US was no shining beacon of democracy even before Trump
he didnt create that corrupt system, hes just taking advantage of it
WWII changed everything about the USA. Everywhere in the world, manufacturing was bombed, the populace was traumatized.
The US became a hub of manufacturing. We exported our culture, and our products, all over the world. Our currency and our language became the standard in business.
Everything since then has been a slow walk backwards, so that the ultrawealthy could exert more control and line their pockets. You know, a return to the “real” American values of exploitation.
The US became a hub of manufacturing. We exported our culture, and our products, all over the world.
only because the rest of the world was bombed to shit. As soon as they rebuilt, they did everything better.
the poeple in charge had some common decency.
The people in charge were scared of the public a little bit. It was not their decency that was stopping them, it was the danger of losing next elections if they took it too far. Bush attacked Iraq and he didn’t lie about the WMDs out of decency. He lied to cover his ass. Lindsey Graham was the same guy he is now back then. He didn’t lose his decency along the way. He realized he can be himself and people will still vote for him.
I find this hard to believe. What is the reasoning for that?
synae[he/him]gestures broadly
IlixtzeGiven that elections are the defining feature of a democracy, I think it would be prudent to wait until after the mid term elections to start proclaiming the demise of American democracy. Granted, the Republicans are trying their best with mass disenfranchisement, but it remains to be seen how effective they will be.
But there’s already such a long list of laws and rules he just ignores and seemingly gets away with. It’s madness.
Let’s also not forget all the campaign finance election laws that preceded his win. No accountability followed because the winner keeps the spoils
MulligrubsAnd let’s not forget that THE LOSER of the election still gets a BILLION DOLLARS in their coffers (that we know of).
Imagine what the spoils are for the winner; we’ll never know the extent of it.
They ALL get away with breaking a long list of laws and rules, that’s what makes the election of Trump possible!
Back in the 1970s, the FBI would bust reps for accepting cash bribes (Abscam). So, the reps made bribery legal with the help of the supreme court. Now Super PACs are the way. Highest bidder wins.
Giggle. We’ve been playing “wait and see” for a decade now.
Elections don’t solve this. We’ve seen that high-level Democrats are no different than high-level Republicans. Biden refused to investigate the Epstein files, he refused to prosecute Trump, and he refused to target gerrymandering/election interference.
There’s no version of this where the old America magically returns. That’s the same logic trap that ushered in this entire mess. There are plenty of MAGA who truly believe that they are shaking up the system and that just one more election will solve everything.
THIS. IS. THE. FUTURE.
We are living in it. The trajectory is set. We didn’t stop militarization of the police when they stepped on our toes. We didn’t stop data collection when we were warned. We didn’t stop gross financial mismanagement, corporate influence, gerrymandering and all the other things that make a democracy work.
We aren’t living in a fascist takeover. That happened years ago. We are living in its aftermath. We are frogs in a simmering pot, watching the bubbles float past us and wondering how to turn off the heat. It doesn’t matter now, the damage is done. The momentum takes control.
We don’t have actual “elections”
We have two private organizations (Ds and Rs) who have through law crushed all possible opposition.
So we get two candidates to chose from, both curated by the billionaire “donors” running each party. This is not a conspiracy, see Super PACs for more.
They won’t cancel the “elections”, there’s absolutely no need.
quick_snailHere is a link to the report:
v-dem.net/…/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy_Report_2026…
Here’s a press release from the source org about this:
Worldwide, democracy has regressed to its lowest levels since the mid-1970s
I’ve been saying over and over again here, that it’s generally been going backwards since the 70’s. This goes for democracy, respect for human rights and minorities, and the peace movement.
And many people here simply don’t believe it. (I’m guessing younger ones)
Let’s talk about what this really means, though. Why would that happen?
Could it be anything like:
- Because power is a fickle structure by nature and therefore democracy is an unstable system?
- Because technology advanced so fast that it yields control to whomever sits at its forefront?
- Because society chose not to make theoretical laws for technology that had yet been invented?
- Because (e.g., Russian) state propaganda was allowed to become so powerful that it actually destabilized global democracy?
- Because we were naïvely assuming we had a stable democracy, when in fact we never really did — it just hadn’t been under enough stress to show its flaws?
- Because institutional capitalism with monarch style governance is an economic system that necessarily leads to authoritarianism?
- Because the libertarian value tolerance of debate is an ill founded ideology, and we actually need more intolerance (e.g., limitations on free speech)?
- …
What’s the next big realization here for mankind?
I mean, sure. But shouldn’t something be said about what that means for democracy? Would it be:
“Democracy only works if you don’t try regime changes in foreign states, otherwise it starts to experience a phenomenon where the democracy withers”
…?
I’m doubtful it’s that simple. If it is, then democracy seems rather unstable in its current form. All it takes is one bad leader to trigger a chain reaction toward failure? Again, I’m doubtful.
There’s got to be a bigger story here.
The rich people are in an exclusive club and collude without meeting because what’s good for one is good for the other. They’ve also been a big driving force for change in the world from consumer based economic models to “supplier” based models. IE themselves.
When you put it that way, it sounds like democracy requires a global effort to continuously thwart such collusion, such wealth, maybe such exclusively? Something… It sounds righteous to me, but also like something that can become equally oppressive in perhaps many different ways.
What you describe is something that I understand to have been the case for most of human history, if not all of it. How do you resolve that issue? And, if that’s really the issue, what do you make of modern democracies?
Democracy grew out of too much power to the rich, though since day one they’ve been thwarting it where they can.
I honestly don’t have real answers for this, I just know of the problem.
You seem to miss the fact that we lost control of society with both political parties being captured by the oligarchy, unions being infected with the mob and beset by law enforcement, and all other parts of the long game of the business roundtable of 1971 to seize control.
Everything you mention is after the fact. We were disunited, and rallied around controlled opposition.
Yeah but even don’t really get to the root of things. Did that happen because we had not accounted for its possibility when constructing the democracy? Was that always happening? Is oligarchy a naturally occurring problem and foe to democracy?
Why were they able to seize control at all, if we had a function democracy before then? Surely if it were a “functioning democracy,” then their seizure of contr would have been democratically acquired — right? Obviously wrong, but why?
We need a second hippie revolution. And I don’t mean the half-assed “comebacks” from the late 90s and 2010s, a real movement that actually influences policy.
Hippies were a CIA OP to distract the left from organising and doing drugs instead.
Hippies did fuck all and then ended up voting for Reagan.
It’s not just younger ones. I talk to a large group of boomers and they are all in the same boat of “everything is fine, we’ll just vote the next election. We’ve had presidents like this before.”
We’ve had presidents like this before.”
On that they are seriously mistaken, of course there have been bad presidents like Bush, but Trump is a whole new class of bad.
I hope they are right, and that all this can be solved by a simple election, but I’m not betting on it.
Yeah I really don’t think so. The damage is already done to democracy. I can believe we used to have a shared common decency. But it’s been rotting for a while now.
Plus boomers aren’t known for actually fixing problems. The things I bring up to them, their responses are always like “well we will figure it out sometime” as they continue doing what they want. So uhhh… I don’t have a lot of confidence.
Miles O'Brien… Okay no really, who ever in their right mind considered us a “liberal democracy”?
KairuByteThe pedofile class doesn’t want democracy
That’s a good one
As far as I’m concerned, everyone who is a billionaire has to prove they had nothing to do with Epstein or pedophilia in general.
I feel like that’s reasonable but billionaires should automatically be abolished also
CharlesDarwinLet them try to get by on $999,999,999.99
If they pinch their pennies, show some restraint on…what was it? Avocado toast, Netflix subscriptions, smart phones, and big screen TVs, they just might get by on a mere penny less than one billion…
Nah, that’s still too much money. I know you’re being sarcastic but realistically it’d be way under 100 million.
I dream of a world where anything above 10 million net worth need to be reinvested or donated. Like, you can gift your kids until you and them and worth ten mil each, and their kids and whatnot, but it would limit wealth accumulation even with a hundred family members. Something like that anyway.
That’s more reasonable, they still have a lot of money but cannot just buy politicians left and right.
I mean one problem is that they dont have a lot of cash, its the worth of their companies…theyd just bribe whoever values these companies to make them worth less would be my expectations…
This seems reasonable