You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.
Is it really that the president is all that decides about the future of democracy itself? Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime? Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?
I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile.
The CIA can always assassinate a president who gets too far out of line,
like what happened to JFK,but they don’t tend to mind the right so much as the left.Law enforcement tends to lean conservative…
Yes, the President can be impeached and removed by Congress. On the opposite side of the coin a President can veto laws passed by Congress, which Congress can override but it’s harder than passing a law. The problem is when Congress also goes nazi at the same time. In that case we’re fucked. In fact I think Article 97 sub-paragraph E13/W even says, “Such conditions and circumstances shall by Law constitute Fuckage.”
He knew it from the beginning. People didn’t listen.
He also didn’t want to be president or have his face on money. They really just ignored the dude.
I guess ignoring Washington’s wishes foreshadowed what the US would eventually become.
I mean, did he propose a solution?
Yeah, don’t have political parties.
Second Amendment.
The odds aren’t in our favor.
He’s just a symptom of the real problem, which is that he exposed himself as a nazi a long time ago and still got reelected.
It’s not illegal to be a nazi in the USA BUT it’s worth noting that Trump is more garden variety fascist than Nazi. He’s not looking to create the ubwrmensch.
Yet
It turns out that a handful of young land-owning white men from the 1700s, born almost 200 years before the advent of game theory, didn’t actually properly anticipate every way in which the political system they were designing could fail.
Lol they fucked up real bad. I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm. So why didn’t he just advocate for that to be… ye know… written into the fucking constitution?
Also, they had a contingent election like just 4 years after his retirement, because checks notes Pres and VP are just 1st and second place? And electors cast 2 votes for the same office? NANI?!? What a bunch of mess. (Imagine if the Federalists just tell their electors to, instead of voting 65 for Adams and 65 for the VP, just vote all 130 for Adams, 0 for the VP candidate. Just win with a Federalist Pres and Democratic-Republican VP. Oh wait checks 1796 election that actually happened. They got a Federalist Pres and Democratic-Republican VP because of shenanigans. Imagine a trump-walz or harris-vance. What a dumb ass idea. It failed so bad, they had to write an entire amendment to fix this shit. 🤣
(When I read about that, my brain just had an aneurism, like WTF is that election system?!?)
The funny thing is that so much of it is based on the idea that everyone involved is going to be on their best behaviour, working for the good of the country, compromising with their opponents, and so-on. And, then it all falls apart as soon as one person realizes that they get an advantage as soon as they simply ignore the norms.
Also, don’t forget that there was less than a century between the revolution and the civil war. If your brand new form of government is so poor that a significant fraction of your population thinks a civil war is preferable to resolving things through that system, your system isn’t very good.
The civil war wasn’t about the form of government.
I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm.
He didn’t, that’s just a whitewashed version we tell ourselves.
He just didn’t want the President to be viewed as a monarch or a lifetime appointment. He turned down a third term because he feared he would die in office and the public would believe that’s the norm.
it’s working as intended
In 1776, people didn’t know what fascism was. Hell there wasnt even consensus on what capitalism was, Wealth of Nations was published that same year. They had never seen a capitalist system degenerate, as would happen in France under Louis Napoleon in the 1850s.
They knew what feudalism was, which was bad and a form of authoritarian autocracy, but this isn’t Fascism. They were afraid that the kings and queens would get restored, as revolutionaries (and capitalism was revolutionary and progressive at that time) they were safeguarding against a counter revolution which would come from monarchists.
There is no way they could conceive of a movement to overthrow capitalism, which they barely understood although being the revolutionary capitalist class, that would come from a greater demand of social reforms, one where the class they were a part of would rule society rather than just administer it as they had for centuries, one where a class that they didn’t even know about, the proletarian working class, would supplant them and bring greater prosperity and equality. This movement developed fully in Russia and Europe after the first world war when the last of the weakened feudal aristocracy destroyed their own continent to fight over scraps of colonial internationalism. A revolution in Russia inspired the global working class, especially where they were highly organized and industrialized such as Italy and Germany, and terrified the ruling capitalist classes of those countries.
In the shadow of the emerging workers movement grew the dialectical opposite and evil twin of German and Italian communism: Fascism. Fascists gleefully fight and kill communists, and desire power above all else, exploiting contradictions in liberal democracy (that’s “liberal” meaning supports private property, not cool liberals that like freedom and justice) to confuse the masses and gain power. The ruling classes, weakened by decades of militant worker struggles, assented to the will of the fascists and in a last ditch effort to preserve their dwindling control, handed power over to them. The rest is history.
The founders couldn’t conceive of the conditions you describe as they either didn’t exist or wouldnt be developed enough to study for 50-70 years. Not all forms of authoritarianism are the same. They thought they were doing away with their version of it. Besides, the “founding fathers” gags violently would have fucking loved Trump
Capitalism is defederating power, otherwise youll end up centralizing power and end up under some form of authoritarianism. We have all these elites because of privaleges granted by the state, not capitalism. We need less state if we want more equality.
The state is the historical apparatus that manages the inherent contradictions between classes. It administrates capitalism for and by the ruling class. Capitalism is maintained by the state, the state sustains capital and private property, through violence.
Capitalism is a form of class domination, various forms of slavery stitched together to exploit the masses for the benefit of the few. Only a democratically organized working class can “fix” capitalism, by eradicating it. The government is the apparatus that temporarily fixes the contradictions of capitalism, but the relations defined by this irrational, inefficient social system (unless you consider monopolies efficient) are what state governments under capitalist rule try and eventually fail to “mitigate”. The contradictions compile until you have an economic crash, which is actually good for monopolistic capitalists who can purchase the productive capital of their competitors at a fraction of the cost, leading to systematic downsizing; while the rest of the population suffers recession, inflation, and mass indignity.
The poor exist because there are rich. The capitalists are in control, as a class, and governments merely mitigate the worst tendencies. This is why reformism isn’t a long term strategy. Capitalism can’t be reformed, it can only be replaced.
And if we, the working class will be able to replace it with a system of greater freedom, equality and democracy, then the aims of socialism will have been reached without the “authoritarian” tendencies becoming reified in any significant way.
You can have your doubts about this, but your libertarian perspective is one of false appearances. If you want to understand the state and the economy, it must be considered as a series of relations brought about by human activity, using the tools laid before us by history and nature. If you think of the world like this, considering the subjective nature of politics and the economy, such as incentives, motives, etc., then your investigation will uncover the true relations that comprise this mass wage slavery to the billionaire class, known as capital.
Please elaborate.
As far as I know a very important side effect of the capitalism is the great concentration of power (aka money) in just some small individuals and how this creates an oligarchy which the only objective of extracting value form the other layers of the society. And of course the self perpetuation.
This have been happening since monopolies were created since centuries ago.
I really want to see how a system that by nature is concentrating power in some individuals really is really a de federated thing.
The voters were supposed to be that check and the Framers were explicit in that it was part of how they designed the Constitution.
Even regarding electing a felon, the Framers didn’t want a case where one state pushed through a a felony conviction quickly to keep someone out of office.
That conviction was nothing like rushed.
That conviction wasn’t rushed. But imagine it was the fall of 2020 and Trump thought there was a decent chance he might lose. Order his attorney general to indict candidate Biden on some random charge, force it through the courts to get a conviction, removing any judges that object or stall. Voila, Biden has a conviction and can’t run against Trump.
The country just elected this guy knowing that this is what he would do. That’s democracy.
Well isn’t that the reason everyone uses on why America needs so many guns. So they can stand up to the government? But seems it ment standing up to a government giving more people rights not one taking them away.
There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
So, giving the public a means of dealing with tyrannical leadership, either through intimidation or something more, is literally and unironically one of the intended use cases for the second amendment. That’s not to say you won’t face prosecution, but there it is.
Whoosh
Lol its called the 2nd amendment we just gotta wait for the new Luigi to drop
The mechanism was the election.
I mean, sure, impeachment and whatnot, but it’s not like people didn’t know who this guy was. I can give other institutions a whole bunch of crap for not getting rid of the guy the first time, but when you’ve given him a Supreme Court supermajority, both chambers of Congress and the presidency AFTER he attempted a coup I’m gonna say that’s on you, guys.
The mechanism was the election.
That’s making the very bold assumption that there was no interference in said election. In fact, we know for a fact that there was, we just don’t know the extent of the interference and whether it changed the outcome. The reason we don’t know is because it wasn’t investigated (or if it was, it wasn’t publicized), so I’m going to take the stance that it’s very possibly on the outgoing administration, actually, for not making a bigger stink about it.
See, you think that doesn’t make it sound like desperate deflection after having handed the country to the nazis, but it does. I was here during the campaign, I saw how that went.
Nah, man, there is no amount of interference that justifies Trump having a fart’s chance in hell of not losing every single state in a country unwilling to hand the keys to these guys 1932-style. Beds were made, sleeping in them is to happen.
It just sucks that the rest of us are under the covers getting dutch ovened as well.
Nah, man, there is no amount of interference that justifies Trump having a fart’s chance in hell of not losing every single state in a country unwilling to hand the keys to these guys 1932-style.
Let’s say, hypothetically, Trump had personally walked into every polling place, took every ballot that was cast and replaced them with copies that included a vote for him, and then waved his hand Jedi Mind Trick style and made everyone who knew it had happened immediately forget. Obviously this amount of interference would cause him to win the election regardless of how voters voted.
This is obviously an absurd example, but the point I’m trying to make is, saying ‘No amount of interference justifies this outcome’ is similarly absurd and simply normalizes and discounts the interference that took place.
There were certainly a surprising and disheartening number of people voting for Trump, but we will likely never know what the outcome would have been if there hadn’t been any fuckery going on.
Yes we do. This election has no more evidence of being stolen at this point than the previous one did when the nazi weirdos were banging that drum. You’re free to do the MAGA rounds, though, but I doubt you’re going to get the same traction. Don’t quite see anybody storming the MAGApitol at the moment.
Not that it changes anything, because you let it happen and now it happened, so the end result is the same, however you want to cope with whatever part of responsibility you personally have on the matter.
however you want to cope with whatever part of responsibility you personally have on the matter.
I voted for the only other candidate with a chance of winning, she won my state handily, and I did what I could to convince others to do the same, so, nope, I take zero personal responsibility for the outcome, and as such I don’t need to cope with that, thanks.
I said whatever part, and that’s certainly a part.
You will have some coping to do in any case, I’m afraid, and best of luck with that going forward. I mean that sincerely.
we just don’t know the extent of the interference and whether it changed the outcome.
We do.
There was close to zero in the polls. (Democratic and Independent poll watchers would’ve reported that, and I’m not seeing any of such reports)
The real interference was the far-right propaganda funded by unrestricted spendings thanks to Citizens United ruling.
We’ve always had interference, its just that now its getting more and more extreme, especially after Citizens United, exacerbated by modern technology (like social media that people use almost 24/7).
There was also rampant disenfranchisement prior to the election, whatever Trump’s comments about Elon were referring to, and the bomb threats on election day, just to name a few. Maybe it all amounted to literal nothing, maybe it changed the outcome, but I don’t think we’ll ever know. Trump did a fantastic job of priming the country for 8 years to consider claims of election interference to be wild conspiracy theories and made the democratic party unwilling or unable to question anything without sounding like loons, so here we are.
interference
If system relies on candidates not using legally allowed methods of advertisement (aka ‘propaganda’) that are deeply ingrained into every field of media and commerce, then probably there’s a problem with the system in the first place. Many popular musicians, games or products gained popularity by the same kind of ‘propaganda’ working by the same mechanics yet people were always okay with that.
we have systems for putting people like him in jail but we just didn’t want to do it
