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.
What’s your definition of Nazi? I would think Andrew Jackson still a worse president than Trump. And not even the Supreme Court was able to stop him
That mofo made it to the $20 bill. Sick.
Ah fuck you really going to make me infodump I hate you sm fr
Part 1: The Two Parties
In the 1960s Civil Rights movement a deep political polarization began which results in wealthy interests backing the Republican party more and more, President Ronald Reagan in return shifted the party away from unions and towards deregulated and low tax markets and industries, and when Democrats introduced a campaign finance reform to curb the issue in 1995 it failed but was reintroduced and passed in 2002 it furthered that divide yet again, that bill was then sued by Citizens United wealthy interests and the SCOTUS sided with Citizens United as a Partisan 5-4 decision. So now we live in a world where political divide has all of the wealthy interests backing one side whose policies are actually extremely unpopular but people are easily misled into not knowing the stances of people they are voting for, or misled on the repercussions of those actions.
Figure 1: Partisanship of Congressmen
Figure 2: Partisanship of citizens
Part 2: Legislative Requirements of the USA
The USA has steps to pass laws:
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It gets called to vote by majority leader and passes the House of Representatives, which is capped at 435 congressmen allotted very very roughly proportional to the state populations.
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It gets called to vote by majority leader and passes the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes, unless a handful of senators decide to filibuster it to delay the vote indefinitely, in which case the bill gets amended with concessions and sent back to the House for yet another round of voting. Filibuster can be bypassed with 60 votes which is basically impossible due to aforementioned partisanship.
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The president signs it into law.
Now the problem here is that to remove a congressman, the president, or a supreme court judge: you need 60 votes following a successful impeachment inquiry. So it never happens.
Part 3: Foreign Interests
Influential media from the Murdochs, the Kochs, and the CCP are constantly pushing the USA further into the grave they’ve been digging for 50 years. China has always been a source of cheap labor and the relationship soured greatly following the Chinese influences on Korean and Japanese elections during the time those two nations were rebuilding following the World War era and were under the watchful eye of the US Military who were a central figure in the aforementioned conflict. This divide deepened with the 1984 Tienanmen Square Massacre where cities all over China were quelled by military forces being deployed on their own people. But far from being the end of it, the Pacific was still a prime trade route where the USA sought profits, and so Chinese influence continued to spread more as the days went by.
Part 4: Where We Are Now
President Obama was denied a lifelong SCOTUS nomination in an election year, giving the nomination to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump was granted yet another lifelong SCOTUS nomination in an election year. The SCOTUS was thusly deeply conservative.
His court nominations allowed him to run for office despite not qualifying under the insurrection clause, because if the courts choose not to reverse a lower court decision that he wasn’t barred from office then nobody is enforcing the law.
Billionaires bought or operated their own home made social medias in the USA, the CCP deployed TikTok campaigns to elect a fascist.
This isn’t just a thing that happened which we were unprepared for. It’s a thing that has been happening for decades which so many of us have been desperately attempting to stop.
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Impeachment. That’s it.
But you’re also forgetting that in the US states have a significant amount of power. For example the President cannot cancel elections. If a state cancels elections they just don’t get counted.
There’s a lot in that particular area that shields people from federal government stupidity.
Just to be clear, your solution to saving democracy would be for the military to usurp a president who received the majority of the vote less than six months ago?
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.”
If the US military goes Nazi, then the USA is beyond fucked.
Cool, but half the country supports this shit. And no, people who don’t vote don’t matter in this context.
That is by design. If the “majority” of the country wants the US to be Nazis, that is the direction it will go. That is how a representative democracy works. The flaw was the founders assuming retarded puppets would not be elected by even an uneducated public. But, they also didn’t plan for automatic weapons either. Well, they sort of did, they said we should be rewriting the constitution every so many years so it can evolve with the times, but we chose to enshrine and misinterpret it like a civic bible. Oops.
We have the Bill of Rights which limits the government’s authority.
HAHAHAHHAHAAH
you were making a joke, right? Because Trump right now is using the constitution and the bill of rights and everything like it in his personal bathroom as toilet paper.
We’re 2 days in and it’s already a giant shit show world wide and we have 4 more years to go.
You better brace yourself for what’s coming
To be fair, that’s a piece of paper. If the President violates that and isn’t impeached then there’s nothing physical to stop him.
This guy has been impeached twice and convicted of 34 felony charges. So we actually need something physical to stop him.
He knew it from the beginning. People didn’t listen.
Who would have thought a government created in model of a constitutional monarchy would do this?
Oh right, all the people who opposed the US constitution. People forget the Anti Federalists every time.
Except most of the Anti Federalists weren’t arguing against the specifics of the model, they were arguing against a centralized government at all. Which had literally just failed.
Next you’re gonna tell me a constitutional monarchy isn’t a centralized government.
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.
To some extent, political parties are naturally occuring . The group dynamics of a legislative body will naturally result in groups forming around specific issues and even philosophies. But there is definitely a strong argument to be made that we’ve made them far too official, and far too entrenched.
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.Trump spent his first term selling classified documents to enemies of the state that revealed the identities of CIA operatives and got them killed and so far they have done nothing about it. I think it’s safe to say the CIA is not as scary as hollywood wants us to believe.
The CIA is not great at high profile assassination, their declassified documents are plenty scary though.
They have a long history of infiltrating foreign governments and assassinating world leaders, so what makes you think they’d have trouble doing the same in the US? Surely, during the height of the Cold War, they would’ve had contingencies for America electing a socialist. If they did back then, then who did what when to change that situation? Nobody’s really said no to the CIA since, again, Kennedy fired Dulles and was assassinated shortly afterward.
Because they haven’t? Inaction speaks pretty loudly.
Which of my questions is that supposed to answer, exactly?
They haven’t because nobody’s actually crossed a line. A few leaked documents isn’t going to provoke an assassination, it’s an extreme measure so they’re not going to do it over something so trivial.
Law enforcement tends to lean conservative…
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.
Second Amendment.
The odds aren’t in our favor.
People who wrote the 2nd amendment cant even conceive the concept of what a fat man can do
The nuke is a bad example of the sheer power of the modern American military. It’s also a bit outdated. That legal mechanism was drafted when many other modern weapons and tactics were not even dreamed of. Just a couple days ago the US military announced its strongest armor yet.
But I agree: your assault rifle may save you from others with an assault rifle, but it won’t do shit if the military comes for you.
That’s a non sequitur though, unless you’re suggesting a tyrant would nuke the population he wanted to rule.
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.
The civil war was due to the fact that the disputes over what should and shouldn’t be allowed couldn’t be resolved within the framework the government provided.
It was about State’s rights…
State’s rights suchs as the right to own slaves
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
- with a 100-year* tradition
- throwing down its* key ideology
- Are* 53 out of 100 senate seats
- make the* country fall
You can impeach a president for any reason. You don’t need a crime or such committed, all you need is congress to do it.
Be careful what you wish for though since the other party could do “tit for tat” with the president you support.
not like it changed, he was impeached twice, didn’t mean shit. he’s a felonious racist rapist, doesn’t mean shit.
USA made this bed, now we fucking lie in it.
The house voted on impeachment, but the senate has to remove him, or decide on a punishment.
If it was bad enough (by that, I mean if he starts taking away the ability for the senate to have power) then he would be removed.
And then he instead advocates that senators should be moved into the House of Representatives. The House thinks it’s great. So they never start an impeachment.
would be
more like: might be removed
That gets to the root of the problem. We have “checks and balances” designed around the idea that separate institutions would check the excesses of each other. Even if you don’t accept the “Republicans and Democrats work for the same people” theory, well, now all three branches of government are majority Republican, and not even in a way where there’s significant internal division or strife, so it’s just a bulldozer. The stupidity of not including popular recall votes in the Constitution - or really, just not having a mechanism for popular referendums, vetoes, etc. - is I think its biggest fault. The “representative democracy” model is inherently flawed because you can corrupt representatives, while corrupting an entire population, while not impossible, is a hell of a lot harder.
Check and Balance was intened to stop bad individuals, not an entire political party working in unison to destroy the system.
Honestly, no amount of careful planning and constitutional design will restrain a society where enough people have gone completely insane. Look at “Israel”. Even 100% direct democracy there would still be a genocidal nightmare. Gets to the problem of how culture is the real driver behind the shape of society. And in that case, how religion incinerates real morality.
Be careful what you wish for though
No, I’m calling BS. They’ll impeach anyone they think they can get away with it on. They investigated the shit out of Biden. They’re not being held back by some for of fear of tit for tat decorum. That’s wildly inaccurate.
For it to succeed, it would require congress to agree which they won’t because they’re conspiriting. And if it did get him out, then we get Vance who is also a Nazi. Protest, Resist, put up an fight, and wait in hopes that he’s bad enough that the right and left people can field some half decent candidates and stop being nazi’s
Alternatively, we’re now making/selling a lot of armbands.
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.
Trump is the dancing monkey who will sign whatever they put in front of him. Plenty of people in his sphere are itching to kill.
Yet
Our government leans heavily on decorum and good faith. Trump’s success has been due to his refusal to adhere to decorum and good faith. Our system doesn’t know how to handle that other than shaming and shaking fists so Trump gets free reign to do whatever he wants.
Its not just government its all social systems. Cheating only works if the large majority follow the rules. This is sorta what civil disobedience is about. Its to show that hey, guess what, we could all just start ignoring norms.
