The Constitution assumes the people through the ballot box or through protest would clean up any issues like that
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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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.
How do you build a system that doesn’t depend on voters not being morons? Everything I can think of, up to and including full-on authoritarianism, has human shittiness as a glaring weak point. The founding fathers assumed that people would, for the most part, act in good faith, and it kept us going for a couple hundred years, but all that is starting to fall apart.
I am not arguing in favor of authoritarianism or against democracy, to be clear. Just saying there is an inherent risk that if you give the common people power, the common people might do something dumb with it. I'm not aware of a system that removes that risk without other considerable downsides. There are other democratic governments that have fewer structural issues than the US, but none of them prevent the whole "sometimes, voters are very dumb" thing.
Well the only vast ocean we have left is space... Time to build some ships and make a new country free from all the bullshit... We can do it better this time!!!
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.
But Trump hasn't proven unpopular; that's why he won reelection. If the ruling party has a majority and the PM has their party's support, nothing would happen in most other systems either.
Didn't say he was. Just saying if he did such crazy things that even the crazies drop out, he could be removed. That's extremely hard in the US. You're basically stuck with the moron for four years.
In theory, if he went so far over the line that he became very unpopular, then Congress members would fear for their reelection chances if they didn't publicly break with him. But with him attacking democracy itself, Congress may be more afraid of him than they are of voters. It's a deeply troubling time.
The problem is also that the Republican party is a fascist party, so the other check, impeachment, is thoroughly useless.
Fifth columnists love FPTP. It minimises their workload.
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!
I used mine and the fucker came back!
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.
So they don't spoil?
So the government can keep track of their property.
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
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"
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