Comment by epolanski
6 days ago
The point of no return was January 6th 2021!
Once Americans pardoned an attempt by the sitting president to overthrow US democracy the game's over.
America desperately needs a huge revision to the powers conceded to individuals and should instead mature to a slower, maybe less effective at times, but stronger democracy that nurtures parliamentary debate and discourse.
It could have been water under the bridge if we simply did not re-elect him. But now we have a second term emboldened by de facto total immunity.
It would have been water under the bridge if him and his cronies all got perpetuity starting jan 7th and we never heard of them ever again. Instead the dems chose a demonstration of weakness, and showed that an attempt on our democracy would be punished by a strong worded reprimand, at best.
It wasn't up to dems but courts imho.
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Disagree. Polarisation existed long before Trump. America was going to face this sooner or later. The culture war was always coming.
> Once Americans pardoned an attempt by the sitting president to overthrow US democracy it's over already
By this logic it was “over already” at the end of the Civil War. Suspending habeus corpus, ignoring the courts and then meeting with public indifference will be the point of no return. Trump’s third term would just be the canary passing out.
> By this logic it was “over already” at the end of the Civil War.
That may be true. The North won the war, but let the ideology that caused it fester.
I think people frequently forget that the North didn't actually have the firepower to stamp out the ideology.
Like any ideology, you can't actually destroy it with force any other way than burning books and, eventually, men.
And whether or not that would have been wise: the war was extremely costly for the North and there was a non-zero chance that if they started dropping every third Southerner from the gallows the federal government would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the survivors on both sides of the Mason-Dixon and that'd be it.