Mastodawn

Here's the problem: To even turn things back to the way they were 20 years ago would take a President as ruthless and unchallenged as Trump himself. Or a President, House, Senate, SCOTUS and Federal judiciary that would be completely behind that level of reform. Plus a ruthless purging of all the apparatchiks that Trump and his team have ensconced throughout the federal bureaucracy.

Tell me truthfully, do you believe that that will ever happen? Is there any doubt in your mind that if a Democratic Presidential nominee manages to win they will do ANYTHING to roll back the huge surges we've made toward fascism under Presidents from both parties over the last 40 years?

Is there any question that a Democratic president and Congress would just insist that it was time to look forward, not back, and to make sure that we have a nice diverse group of people running ICE, DHS and the border patrol? Maybe a little more diversity among the staff and inmates of the death camps that Trump has built?

If anything, aren't the Democrats likely to pass MORE funding for the military and ICE and DHS? Will they do a single goddamned thing to rein in Israel and it's genocide of Arabs in the Middle East?

If that's all we can expect under the best circumstances from the Democratic Party, why should we settle for that instead of the complete overthrow of the system that the world desperately needs? Under the status quo our extinction due to climate change and the effects of war will just be a little slower. Which hardly seems a kindness.

I await replies.

#Politics #Extinction #Democrats #Fascism

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Lightfighter 5d ago

@Quasit Even if all changes for the last 20 years were rolled back it wouldn't solve the problem. Trump has shown many of the weaknesses of the Constitution and laws of the US. Without significant structural changes, fascism is only an election away.

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Tiota Sram 5d ago

@Lightfighter @Quasit indeed one can pseudo-empirically ask the question "do Democratic institutions protect counties against dictatorship" and look around at countries like Italy, Hungary, Britain, and Israel to see that they do not.

Liberals love to ask anarchists "but how would your society of free association ever prevent a dictator from rising to power? It's an excellent question that every person should be able to try to answer about their favorite political system, but it seems the liberals have forgotten to ask it about theirs. We can see right now in very fine detail exactly how the "checks and balances" can be systematically dismantled, sidestepped, or just ignored. Even if the system eventually reins Trump in, its failure to stop any of his worst impulses before they happened makes it feel like a very hollow sort of success. Alex Pretti doesn't benefit from a (very hypothetical at this point) swing back towards a less corrupt and fascist system.

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Anarchist Trans Ace Pirate 4d ago

@tiotasram @Lightfighter @Quasit

when "checks and balances" are taught no one bothers to ask how that works when all parties involved do nothing

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Lightfighter 4d ago

@coolcalmcollected @tiotasram @Quasit There are no mechanisms to enforce most of the checks and balances. SCOTUS rulings are just opinions written on paper. Congressional subpoenas the same. While the Executive has an army of LEO's and the Army.

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Tiota Sram

@Lightfighter @coolcalmcollected @Quasit also worth noting that the founders made choices like giving suffrage only to wealthy white landowners in order to create a system that helped a wealthy industrialist class take power from the old nobility, but from the start all the talk of "freedom" was just window dressing to get the commoners to go along. They explicitly choose mechanisms like the electoral college to prevent the common people from having too much power, meaning that the entire system of checks and balances was never designed to prevent the concentration of power entirely.

Obviously it was supposed to prevent the exact situation we find ourselves in now, but it didn't work (and no similar system can work in the long run) because power corrupts, and any system that tries to prevent the corruption of laws using laws is doomed to failure.

What the present moment also shows is that power is not as simple to wield as the fascists would like, and that centralized power inevitably crumbles. Minnesota was able to break ICE not through military prowess but through pressure of norms, Iran is able to resist Trump's overwhelming military power through persistence and economic revenge, Assad's regime couldn't endure as popular support finally eroded and international allies were distracted, etc. None of these offers a simple or painless path to defeating fascist power, but they show things aren't as hopeless as the fascists would like us to believe. Masses of people organized autonomously into formations of resistance can absolutely stand up to opponents that seem to have overwhelming forces because those forces also boil down to a lot of individual enforcers and deploying them is contingent on the backing of an even wider public that can be swayed by a lot of things.

The point is that the ultimate defense against corruption and fascism, with or without official checks and balances, is a politically active mass of common people.