I’m not in the US, but it seems to me that the Republicans keep breaking norms and procedures, including politicising impeachment and ignoring illegal, immoral and plain bad conduct.
They also seem to be fine with not applying the same standard across the isle.
On the other hand, either Democrats follow new precedent, with even more devolving, or they keep the old decorum and get their asses kicked by Republican foul play.
What ways out of this spiral are there?
I’m still optimistic. While the severity of the current shitshow is unprecedented, the reality is we tend to bounce left and right. One side gets in power and does (or doesn’t) shit, until people get pissed off and elect the other side.
I am more worried about the death of media and rise of streaming. Just like the rise of TV changed who could be elected and how, new media is also changing that. So far new media helps elect people with dark skills, people farther from anyone you’d want governing. It’s not pretty, it’s not good, and it’s getting worse before it gets better. Truth doesn’t matter, echo chambers matter, outrage matters.
Trump absolutely matters. This isn’t your avg rightward swing of the pendulum. They have gone full mask off and are ripping the copper out of the walls. This country genuinely will not survive this presidency. 0% chance it survives intact as a democracy.
It’s not exactly 0%. Their ineptitude is still fully on display, and that’s always been our greatest hope. But it is pretty bleak, and pinning our future on the hopes that the other side makes a mistake only makes it bleaker.
ripping the copper out of the walls
Damn that’s a good analogy for the current slate of grifters!
Things can get better. Theres a saying; third time’s the charm.
Yes. All modern human civilization will collapse with the coming climate change.
Elite centrists have dominated the Democratic party since Clinton. They love to take a “responsible” center left position and try to grab centrists. Unions, minorities and people on the left have no recourse but to continue to vote for them because the Republicans were soo much worse.
Trump’s super power has always been his ability to say anything it takes to get votes yet deliver very little. Because of this he can say appealing things to unions and minorities who have been disenfranchised which undermines Democrats.
The generation of boomers who have lead the Democratic Party since Clinton is literally dying out. These next few election cycles are going to be interesting as the next generation of Xers and Millennials have a different opinion of government and are much more militant and vocal.
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At this point? Probably not. Not if history is any indication. We’ve blown right past all the checkpoints that would have prevented this snowball effect. Our legislative processes are almost too irreparably damaged for a healthy democracy to exist. We’ve removed too many regulations regarding money in our politics and not placed enough regulations on the focus of power on individuals and entities within our government.
We’re probably going to go through a really dark period where the quality of life is going to decline, rights will be stripped, and a lot of vulnerable people are going to die and then, hopefully, things will get bad enough that a revolution happens. It won’t be like WW2 where more powerful forces come to our rescue. We’ll have to do it ourselves. And I don’t really have that much faith in our populace doing that. Again, it will take a really significant decline in quality of life for damn near everyone before that’s even possible. It looks like that’s where we’re headed though.
The rich coastal states that can bail out should definitely do so. Cascadia now!
Sadly, I think you’re right.
It’s absurd that the wealthiest people in the world are making all the decisions that effect the rest of us, especially when they’re using that control to influence the rest of us through social media.
I think the only solution is a revolution where wealth is redistributed, probably through violence.
Bezos and Musks assets should just be nationalised. Give them pensions of 10m a year or something in return.
Revolution
This is the only way. You don’t defeat fascism peacefully.
Well. You can. But we already passed all the opportunities to do so. Gotta nip it in the bud and we chose not to do so.
you already beat one oppressor, what is one more
Good luck. Feels pretty pointless over here right now.
Don’t get sad - get angry
I’ve been angry since I’ve been politically aware and I’m tired of it. It’s exhausting being angry and having no influence.
I’m too old to be angry all the time.
Don’t get sad - get organised?
That just sounds like angry with extra steps. And people.
Which is how you gain influence and do something about it, no?
Considering how little influence those groups already have I doubt it
In America, influence means money. If you can’t donate to a politician, you don’t have influence. That’s just how America works. You can’t build influence without wealth. As someome who has been involved with them, protests and marches don’t really cause a stir here any more, people just don’t care and it doesn’t really influence anything. You can get influence through violence, but people aren’t ready for that conversation and the right already has a head start on that anyway.
I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.
It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.
I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.
Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.
When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).
I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.
- Obama captured the leftward energy that should have swung us back to the left and held it solidly in the center / center-right. He ran as a progressive firebrand and then governed from the center / center right. The big hop and change we got was nationwide Romneycare, a program devised by the Heritage Foundation which has done nothing but entrench the powers of the insurance industry into law.
- Racism broke a large part of the voting public away from reality.
Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.
So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”
Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”
Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.
It’s more of a ratchet than a pendulum.
But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.
For a nation known for being tough guys with guns who will fuck their government, or any government that messes with them, up if necessary, all I’ve actually seen all my life is a bunch of pussies that let the wealthy walk all over us. And I’m not exactly a spring chicken.
Just wait it out for a few more years and things will settle down. This isn’t anything new… the US has gone through a very similar period of political upheaval and realigning of parties every two or three generations since it was founded. This one isn’t even the worst we’ve had.
Just wait it out for a few more years and things will settle down.
That’s not at all how this works.
This isn’t anything new
It is. Yeah, we’ve had a civil war. We have not had creeping fascism, new rules that allow a president to be entirely lawless, a corrupt supreme court, a woefully misinformed populace, Nazis in the White House, and oligarchs buying legislation and creating insane wealth disparity all happening at the same time.
This isn’t a realigning of the parties. It’s fascism taking hold.
All federal employees have been reclassified to political employees instead of nonpartisan civil servants, meaning they are closer to at will employees.
This has never happened before.
All federal employees now serve at the will of the party in power. There will be loyalty tests. There will be entire departments defunded and dismantled.
They are reviewing social media posts as we speak to decide who to keep. That’s right, that includes folks at the CDC, FDA, EPA… every paperwork jockey, no matter how minor their position, is now subject to the whims at the party in power in a way they were not before.
All these firings will be contested. They’ll go to the courts. Say… Who owns the courts right now?
You have no idea what is happening. The purges begin 90 days from now.
I was talking with some kids the other month (Berkeley grads, so “kids”=mid 20s), and they really believed this current shit show is no big deal because they were taught about “checks and balances” in HS. It blows my mind that anyone thinks Fuckhead and the current GOP is just a normal swaying of the political pendulum.
Back in high school, my history teacher was lecturing about political instability in Europe during WWII. She called out a girl next to me for not paying attention. When asked why she wasn’t paying attention, the girl responded, “Oh, that can never happen here.”
We’re in ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ mode.
Invest every dollar you can spare, because that’s the only way to win in any of this. Both ruling parties care far more about your stock portfolio succeeding than they do about you.
No they don’t give a shit about you they care about their stock portfolio. This is true for both parties’ leadership. Consider inside testing in the debate/house with no legitimate oversight.
Fuck you i got mine and all.
Investing is the only way to get ahead on an individual financial basis, but it feeds the machine. They win more from it than you.
Our capital to bargain with is labor and civility. This is why they want to replace us with AI while blocking alternate means to survive. If AI can do it we lose leverage.
Hardly, the leverage was always violence.
I meant to say civility is a bargaining chip we can take away. I can see how that can be misinterpreted
Armed revolution by the workers
Armed being the key word here. Show them what the left actually does with weapons.
The democrats follow newprecedent to a point but not such that it just breaks the law. Like they would not try to define a sentence in the constitution to invalidate the whole paragraph thus making a paragraph that was written by the founding fathers to nullify itself thus calling the founding fathers brain dead dumb fucks. That being said they did sign off on the patriot act and have not acted to nullify citizens united. I live in the US so I sure as fuck hope we can but its been going on since the 80’s with increasing acceleration. One of my biggest concerns is the most recent coming of age generation has no experience with somewhat sane political discourse.
Everyone gets off their stupid asses, pays attention, and votes in an informed way.
So, basically, we’re probably fucked. People have repeatedly proven to be pretty God damned stupid.
What does fucked mean? Is it over? Will everyone on Earth die?
Not everyone, no. But climate change will kill most of whatever’s left
Fucked as in a huge number of people probably just won’t bother and things are probably not going to be getting better unless there is a fundamental shift in American citizens caring about fulfilling their civic duty to be an informed voter in every single election.
Nope, i mean other than direct action.
As long as people believe Democrats are different from Republicans the spiral will continue.
People believing that they’re the same is the kind of mindset that leads to a Trump victory. Apathy rewards extremists.
Democrats refuse to undo what Republicans do. The best they deliver is upholding the current status quo for another four years.
The US will have a “Revolution of Dignity” moment similar to Ukraine.
If pro-constitution side wins, trump (and leading maga leaders) will flee to russia.
But if the maga wins, the US will remain a fascist nation for decades.
It’s not written in cosmic law that this will occur. The circumstance are certainly leaning in that direction though.
They learned from 2020. So must any opposition evolve. But yeah, moving away from fascism is going to take some blood on both sides. Arguably better than sticking with it where only one side’s blood is shed.
A general strike is probably the best place to start. There’s still a lot that needs to happen to get the placated middle to see the need for more aggressive means.
UAW is organizing one for 2028.
2028 might as well be 3028, feels like
Most could not afford to stop working or buying anything for a stretch of time and this is to prepare for that.
