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 Constitution assumes the people through the ballot box or through protest would clean up any issues like that
It has impeachment. The list of reasons for impeachment are (quite possibly intentionally) vague. But it has to be done through Congress.
And when the nazi controls Congress you know how far that’ll go.
Yeah, it’s rather obviously flawed in light of the current situation, but that is the mechanism that exists in the constitution.
That is true. I can’t argue that.
You mean for the guy who was already impeached twice… And still voted for to be president?
Well the mechanism for preventing criminals who shit all over the constitution from getting reelected is supposed to be people not voting for him. There’s not really much a constitutional democracy can do about voters being fucking morons. Kind of an inherent flaw in the system.
The problem is he won the election.
The vote is the final check and balance.
49% of Voters are either sympatico or stupid.
And that’s the problem with the US election system. In basically any other developed democracy, there are ways to call a new special election. The four years are often the max between elections, not the minimum.
If a new leader proves unpopular, you toss them out and install a new one.
The problem is also that the Republican party is a fascist party, so the other check, impeachment, is thoroughly useless.
Ironically, these are the times the electoral college was supposed to avoid. Also denounced political parties as corrupting. Still likely to have been coopted by now, but the design was to combat lack of education, lack of information, and/or propaganda.
We really only have the Second Amendment. I am now on a list.
Yeah, with every other cool person.
Only losers use guns.
Yea well last time I tried using my dick instead and now I’m on a list and a burglar needs therapy.
You must have a scary dick when I whip mine out the burglar laughs!
Okay buddy degen account, when the Bureau of Moral Certitude comes for you throw a dildo at them at see how that works out.
Degen is a village in Switzerland and I’ve never been.
Well iirc, most adults have a submachine gun in the closet there.
But the bullets are in a sealed can.
I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile
Ignore the political system and look at the economic system. The US is capitalist and as it turns out- capitalism is not mutually exclusive with fascism.
If a human being lives long enough, he will eventually develop cancer. It’s simply a natural physical consequence of repeated cell division. Eventually there’s some mutation that leads to a chain reaction. The cancer spreads enough and there’s no going back. Capitalism, similarly, will always inevitably embrace fascism.
Marx got it wrong. He believed that the workers, realizing their position as class consciousness increases, would inevitably revolt against the power structure. The reality is more depressing.
Capitalism has cycles of crisis. Sometimes the economy is doing good which leaves the workers content. Sometimes the economy is doing bad. The problem is when the economy is doing bad coincides with some other set of crisis, the combination of events radicalizes the workers. This part Marx predicted. However he was mistaken about human nature.
Really, our problem started back in 2008. The global economy never fully recovered. Interest rates were kept low in a desperate attempt to increase spending to keep the boat from tipping. Then COVID pumped up inflation to historic levels- supply chain shortages wrecked chaos. After that, the Russian invasion of Ukraine pushed up inflation even higher. Prices go up but wages lag behind.
Workers, naturally, become more radicalized- as Marx predicted. The issue is Marx was too optimistic about human nature. Humans as a whole are fearful herd animals. They need a shepherd to point somewhere. And eventually, inevitably, some megalomaniac with a vision will take advantage of a vulnerable system and point somewhere. In the 1930s it was to the Jews and the communists. Today, it’s the illegals and “wokeism”.
All this to say that this shouldn’t be surprising. Left wing voices have been warning about this for a long time.
Hitler didn’t take power democratically. Neither did Mussolini or Franco. They each found cracks in how liberal democracy worked in their respective countries. Those cracks were usually the places where the system was decidedly undemocratic, which in those three cases, was generally something where the old nobles still had some power and they lined up behind fascists to save them from leftists.
America never had nobles, but it does have plenty of cracks in its liberal democracy to be exploited by fascists.
So to answer your question simply, no, there are no instruments to fix this. Congress can potentially either reign Trump in with legislation, or even impeach him, but I don’t expect either one to happen. If the GOP can be swept out of Congress in 2026, then we can maybe start to fix some things without resorting to extralegal methods. Even that is only a starting point.
I do know for sure that we can’t go back to the old trajectory as if Trump was just an outlier.
America’s vaunted “checks and balances” are, in the end, just smoke and mirrors to lie to the population and hide the fact that American institutions give way too much power to the president and there are no institutional controls to make the president behave.
not true. congress could definitely remove the president… they just won’t do it because they’re too fascist themselves….
Second amendment
Everyone has been bought and paid for https://lemmy.world/comment/13431373
a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players
Your proof of this is… what?
For real. US history is replete with supporting dictators, military coups, and so on.
Upkeeping our own democracy. For a certain value of “Dem”
It’s funny that Germany has safeguards against nazis in power in it’s constitution which was designed
byin cooperation with the USA, France and GB, yet afaik all three don’t have similar mechanics in their own constitutions because they never belived to have to deal with the next hitler themselfs.Germany has a modern constitution created in response to nazis.
USA has extremely outdated constitution created by proto-nazis.
Those same safeguards that banned AfD years ago, thank god they exist!
Lets take out the politics for a moment, and just look at railroads
This is what I call the “Old Railroad Theory”:
The US build the railroad/subways so long ago, that most of it is now in decay and as far as I know, none of the US has any Platform Safety Barriers, and people could just fall on the tracks (see NYC)
In constrast, in China (PRC), because most subways are only recently built, they are much more modern, air-conditioned, and have Platform Safety Barriers, preventing any “fall on tracks” incidents. (I’ve seen first hand the subway in GuangZhou, they look much nicer than NYC, when I first got to NYC, the tracks were terrifying for me, I always have intrusive thoughts about falling in)
Its because once you build a system, its unlikely to get replaced even when better technology comes along. Too much cost to replace, politicians don’t care.
Same thing with Constitutions.
It was written so long ago, now its too late to add new ideas like Defensive Democracy. 3/4 of US legislature means its almost impossible to add it as an amendment.
(Btw, Germany has a AfD problem, that they still haven’t banned yet… 👀)
Edit: typos
PS.: With the current trend we will find out in about the next decade if the safeguards work …
Decade? More like 3 months. He’s already doing wildly unconstitutional things. If the Supreme Court refuses to take on challenges to it or outright approves it, well, they didn’t work.
Ich sage: nieder mit diesen Gesetzen!
Macht Deutschland wieder Groß
You mean that way, approximately?
If you really believe that the USA has “100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players” you are in delusion.
LOL give me a break. This (undemocratic) state was literally founded by slavemasters, the original proto-nazis, so they could violently maintain their racist privilege. Ofc there’s no law against it.
That’s what 2a is supposed to be for
2A is for attacking minorities, maintaining jim crowe, etc. Grow up.
2A is supposed to facilitate millitias in case England attacks again.
… in case England attacks again.
I have been thinking about coming over there with a cricket bat.
And the benefit is most yanks won’t even be able to make a cheeky single if you flat it past the square leg
Guns can have multiple uses.
The American Revolutionary War literally started over the attempted seizure of guns by a government that feared its subjects could use them in an uprising.
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.
This is good information, a few follow up questions:
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what does China gain by influencing the US to elect a fascist? It’s clear what us billionaires gain, less so for China
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where are the breaks on choo choo train to Nazi America, based on this trend?
USA military interventions in Asia have been a constant concern for a long time, and the USA allied Korea and Japan directly oppose Chinese expansion and Chinese allied North Korea. The USA military control of the pacific ocean is seen as a wall to be overcome. The Chinese deeply despise the existence of NATO; the world’s largest mutual defence pact, and the US Government as barriers between them and their expansionist goals.
For examples, the takeover of Hong Kong and Taiwan almost failed due to US support, and their econimic use of Philippine and Australian seas have faced setbacks.
China is openly allied with other USA adversaries such as Iran and Russia.
It also helps that President Trump has repeatedly praised and admired Xi Jinping openly in public. The USA Tariffs will have no effect on Chinese trade profits at all as USA citizens will instead pay the fees. The less average faith a US Citizen has in their country and the more easily radicalized they are to harm their country, the better it is for China. They constantly predict the downfall of America and the rise of China in a single breath.
If you want evidence of all of this then look no further than the quotes of Chinese officials and the ideals of “communist parties” of the USA.
- The brakes would be electing 60 democrats to senate to pass campaign finance reform, public healthcare with no concessions, and tax reform. As they have repeatedly tried to do for many years but always come up short of votes. Bonus points if they expand the court, house, and senate but I dont know if its an achievable goal until after the campaign finance reform.
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