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.
Impeachment, but that starts with a 218 vote in the House and the House is on his side.
So you actually need majority to PREVENT the collapse of democracy, and if you don’t have it, you’re fucked? How the fuck did this country even manage not to succumb into dictatorship for such a long time?
Worse… The House makes the impeachment charge, that’s a 50% majority vote.
THEN it goes to the Senate for conviction where you need a 2/3rds majority to remove them. 67/100.
That’s the body which can’t do anything because they’re blocked by a 60 vote super majority to over-ride a filibuster.
So you get 218 in the House, goes to the Senate, needs 60 votes to end debate and proceed with charges, then 67 votes to convict and remove.
Trump’s first impeachment got 48 and 47 votes.
His second was 57 votes.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impeachment_trial_of_Donald_Trump
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_Trump
If he had been convicted, he would have been inelligible to run in '24.
The founders probably imagined no self respecting person, oligarch or otherwise, would want to live under authoritarian rule.
Turns out the 21st century bourgeois is full of pussy ass bitches.
They never could have imagined our modern society at all. The amount of power and influence held by just a handful of private citizens couldn’t have been accounted for in the 18th century.
I’m just speaking from a matter of principle. They don’t have to know the conditions to conclude living under a kings rule in any condition is unappealing.
If enough people in a democracy decide that they want a dictatorship instead, then there is no stopping it, because rules don’t matter at this point. The trick is to not let it get this far. Tough shit for the US, though.
I mean imagine if you could impeach the president without a majority. That would be the death of democracy. Just to put things in perspective: The GOP democratically won both houses of Congress and the presidency and because of DNC incompetence also has the Supreme Court. Them being able to do whatever the fuck they want is, in a way, democracy working as intended. It’d be weirder (and much more undemocratic) if there was a way to remove a sitting president without the Supreme Court or Congress.
This only proves that two-party system is just an authoritarianism with rotation. There’s always a ruling majority and the winner takes all.
Things would be different with at least the third party. 2 out of 3 parties would agree that the party no.3 is a fucking malice and rule him out.
Third party would most likely make things better but there’s no guarantee it would help in the situation you’ve set up. If two of the parties are fine with an actual Nazi in the White House and between them they control over half the votes then we’re still in the same situation.
It’d be weirder (and much more undemocratic) if there was a way to remove a sitting president without the Supreme Court or Congress.
Turns out there is, in fact. It just doesn’t involve governmental process at all. You’re quite correct that it’s undemocratic. (See: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy)
The ruling class was able to get along well enough up until the US Civil War, at which point the slavers decided they were willing to tear the country apart to keep on slaving. I include this because the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow and how we did things over here. Fascism started bubbling up in the early 20th century because industrialization and capitalism polluted everything and made people work awful hours and all that, and liberalism and conservatism hadn’t fixed it. There was a serious coup attempt forming in the early 30s called the Business Plot, but they went to a war hero Marine general who told them to fuck off and told the federal government about it.
At least in the US, we’re in this situation now because authoritarians have been working toward it since the 60s (the Powell Memo was written in 1971 I think) and they’ve taken advantage of how terribly the Constitution is written, along with consolidation of wealth and stoking backlash to all the civil rights movements to get people to back them. The worst part is that it’s a feedback loop: since Reagan took power, Republicans campaign on “look how bad the government is!” and make the government worse once they’re in office, which feeds their cause.
tl;dr capitalism makes living conditions terrible, people abandon liberalism and conservatism for socialism/communism/etc and fascism, liberals don’t want much to change, fascism lives or dies based on how much conservatives sell out to/ally with them. The fact that we’re doing this all again shows to me that liberalism is a dead ideology and capitalism is going to kill us if we don’t kill it first.
It has been under corporate dictatorship for over a century.
Well the country didn’t previously have a legion of mouth breathing retards screaming at the top of their lungs about micro-aggressions and declaring that the nation was illegitimate. I’d also question your metrics for deciding now that he’s an openly Nazi dictator, other than parroting what you hear from other
peoplesocial media accounts.Yes it had, and that legion even stormed the fucking capitol.
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We’re ignoring the constitution already.
14th Amendment. Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The man is an adjudicated insurrectionist. Congress just ignored their duty.
So yes, there “are” protections. Said protections are simply being ignored.
Can’t be a very good protection if it can just be ignored. I was under the impression that in the US, the constitution is strictly executed, though it looks like even that is a lie
People who say they follow the Bible are usually lying too. And anything that’s allowed to be left up to interpretation and still be called “law” is bound to be corrupted when convenient and ignored when convenient.
It’s like the ICC and UN. They just make suggestions. Whether they are followed or effectively enforced depends on who’s in the dock.
I bet pardoning the 1/6ers qualifies as giving aid and comfort.
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.
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.
The mechanism was the election.
NSDAP was elected.
Exactly my point.
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.
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 country just elected this guy knowing that this is what he would do. That’s democracy.
And knowing that he’s a convicted felon. And twice impeached. And almost certainly a rapist. And a successful conman.
The mechanism is impeachment. It’s broken because of polarization.
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.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?
Those same safeguards that banned AfD years ago, thank god they exist!
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.
Is it really failure by their standards? How many of them owned slaves? How many of them viewed women as essentially property?
I mean, I think they’d have considered a civil war less than 100 years after the founding of the country to be a pretty good indication of failure.
As for the modern world, they explicitly talk about trying to design a system so that a tyrant doesn’t become president. All the supposed checks and balances that were supposed to prevent that turned out to be as effective as wet tissue paper. The founders also cared a lot about the president not being corrupt, and drafted the emoluments clause(s) to prevent that, and Trump has just completely ignored those clauses. I think they’d have been pretty upset about that, and wondering why the law of the land was just being ignored.
it’s working as intended
The mechanism is the three branches of power providing checks and balances and voting. But when the people elect them to all three branches. It kinda defeats the purpose
Also Benjamin Franklin said that he believed constitution should torn up and redone every 30 years. We shouldn’t even be using it 200 years later.
Are you ready for some tearing up and redoing of constitution now?
No, I’m ready for something else though are you?
I’m flattered, but I’m not in the mood right now. I’ll be in my corner worrying about constitution redoings…
Let’s go crowd sourced, a la Iceland. That truly opened my eyes to the political possibilities in the Internet age… If only big corps didn’t make all the decisions.
Do you really want to do that now knowing who would put an autograph there?
Exactly, that was my point.
Sure, you’d end up with at least two countries because many states would just refuse to join the new republic.
I know about Jefferson and his 20 year automatic sunset phase for laws at all levels, except for Constitutions, charters, and other founding documents that can be amended. Hadn’t heard that Franklin wanted to sunset the Constitution itself as well. Not sure that we would have lasted this long if Franklin had gotten his way there. I do think that Jefferson and Madison were on the right track with the federal, state, and local laws though. Tyranny of the dead and all that.
I believe this is where the second amendment comes into play. Luigi was on to something.
This is something we can all agree on, including Mr. President. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html
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.”
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.
Then maybe they should have their own shithole country and stop taking our tax dollars.
Cool sentiment, but they all vote every time and we don’t so it doesn’t matter. Or you can become a 2nd amendment person.
If the US military goes Nazi, then the USA is beyond fucked.
I think the US is beyond fucked already. The fact that Bonespurs could get elected president not once but twice is a clear sign that America’s collective intelligence has dropped below Idiocracy level. A complex society can withstand a lot of stupidity as long as there are enough people who can keep the opportunists in their place, but that’s not true anymore. I’m not just talking about people who voted for him, I’m including the several million people who voted for Biden in 2020 but refused to vote for Harris in 2024. They were the safety net that decided to fold itself up and go home. We’re done.
If you really believe that the USA has “100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players” you are in delusion.
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.
Yes, being able to elect a criminal is by design. I’m sure all of the founders were designated as criminals by England. It’s the will of the people over the government which was like their whole thing.
Until the people change their mind we are stuck with Trump and or his cronies.
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!!!
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.
I used to land at basically this analysis myself, but there are definitely some assumptions that need to be addressed. We can probably agree that to a significant degree “money is power”, or at least, money can elicit power, especially in terms of directing the actions of the desperate. We witness in our society - which is not pure “free market capitalism” - that inequality is rampant. There are theoretical explanations for this blaming both government intervention and just simply the behavior of individuals within the market that centralize wealth. And, conversely, there are theoretical explanations for how government can decentralize wealth, or how market participants can decentralize wealth (including boycotts, unions, etc.). The biggest challenge with this age-old “communism vs. capitalism” debate is that establishing overall tendencies for state vs. private actors requires exhaustive historical analysis, and is not even inherent to the nature of either actor, i.e., someone as a private actor, or state actor, can act in a way that either centralizes or decentralizes wealth. The only overarching principle you can even safely state is that the actions of a state are distinct from those as a private actor because of the “monopoly on violence” factor, i.e., the ability to enforce unfair demands that people can’t escape in practice (a behavior that leftie types usually accuse capitalism of, inversely, by pointing to corporate monopoly power - which of course, depends on the dictates of a state or equivalent body to enforce).
The only way I was able to resolve the problems with this whole analytical framework - communism, capitalism, state, private - was to reject this terminology entirely and perform the analysis in terms of individual behavior, actions, inanimate vs. animate, and the ethical properties deriving from those. A “state” is a useful abstraction at times and a confusing complication at other times. “Capitalism” and “communism” as terms have no universally agreed upon definition, resulting in unproductive, endless, circular debates. What we’re really trying to do is design a social system that maximizes outcomes for every criteria we like - equality, prosperity, individual wellbeing, health, lack of environmental externalities, etc.
Great read, thanks for thoughtful content
Did you just throw communism under the bus to promote Marxism? Bravo BTW, I’ll probably steal your last paragraph
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I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?
In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it’s pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.
However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can’t just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.
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.
