Comment by hn_throwaway_99
3 hours ago
> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
I had to laugh when I read a title on the Washington Post today, "President Trump faced a wall of opposition from Senate G.O.P. lawmakers, in part over his plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to reward his allies", with of all people Susan Collins in the header image. Lol, I'm sure she'll release a statement saying how she's "very concerned" and end up doing nothing anyway.
how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles
This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this.
We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so.
We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.
It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.
Proper information is readily available, and everyone on social media has been constantly exhorted to avoid scams.
At this point if people are being taken in by the really obvious and bald lies, the problem isn't a lack of information. They're just plain stupid.
Social media is allowing both views and the against is winning. But the mainstream media is under the thumb of fcc and too afraid to challenge so they keep neutral (or like Fox is a cheerleading) and that's where the disinformation is coming from.
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The people are fairly irrelevant these days. We just saw this week how Israel and billionaires can just spam AI slop adverts to replace a popular candidate with a complete no one.
Boomers will see the ai generated video and believe it immediately.
> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this government was voted in, partly because of a toxic and polarised culture that sees compromise and consensus as weaknesses (and gerrymandering, and the electoral college, and disenfranchisement, fair enough), but also partly because a lot of people did not bother showing up. Republicans have had a grassroots strategy for decades, where they seized everything they could get, even very modest positions. That’s how they progressively ended up redrawing maps and steering politics at the state or county level. You need a long term plan and a good strategy to counter this. So don’t give up (I beg you, from the other side of the Atlantic). Even if things are bad now, they can get better tomorrow.
I think you would most certainly NOT prefer any Constitution, nor especially any Bill of Rights, that was rewritten by today's version of "We the People".
I don't think they can get rid of the constitution. It would require a near total control of all judges right now and I don't think they have that.
What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.
Happened before, for example in Germany. Not sure "fascinating" is the word I'd choose.
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And the ‘wall of opposition’ was ‘we won’t vote right now because if we do we might vote to stop this!’.
But we need to believe that the USA can come back. The spoils system was eliminated once before. Slavery was eliminated. The USA ‘came back’ from Jim Crow and segregation. From Japanese internment. From the Gilded Age. From the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. From a civil war. Our modern mistake was assuming that anything is ever truly eliminated without constant effort.
I would argue we had a few good years of Reconstruction before President Johnson put an end to it and it took a century for this country to partially rectify this with a few constitutional amendments and Supreme Court decisions(that were cursed by not having time limits) and those changes have been chipped away again so we are close to returning to a pre Civil Rights era federal government similar to Woodrow Wilson except the guys who would be in the KKK are now federal law enforcement in Homeland Security and the Justice Department is trying to equate anti fascism with terrorism. I would agree that democracy requires a constant fight against but my impression is our education system/news media presents government as done deal and “we have democracy and we don’t have to worry about it” and most Americans are too complacent and politically detached - A third of Americans not voting during presidential elections.
> it really feels like I'm grieving a death.
Jimmy Carter's funeral a few days before Trump was inaugurated really felt like the funeral for America. The moral gulf between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump is just so vast. To imagine that the US elected someone with the integrity of Jimmy Carter in 1976... and then elected someone who is as morally bankrupt as Trump is in 2024.
> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.
Indeed. Well said. I doubt we'll ever see the likes of a Carter again in the Whitehouse.
But why was Carter elected? Partly it was disgust at Watergate. Could we see someone of integrity elected as a result of a backlash of disgust at Trump? Yes, we could.
Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidentia...
Carter won basically because Ford pardoned Nixon.
The primary system means that nobody with any principles is left in the Republican Party, unfortunately.
But not all is lost. Many are very eager for the reins of power to come back and for laws to be enforced. Sure, the Trump regime may tell itself that it's immune from tax audits ever again, but that's not legal and as soon as the force of law is back there are many eager attorneys with high principles that will be hired back into the DoJ and enforce the law.
We saw this after Nixon's lawlessness too. Those who abetted Nixon in breaking the law were disbarred.
Prosecutions will come. Trumps's key mistake is thinking that his popularity doesn't matter anymore. It does. It means that people with morals and ethics can legally gain power and legally enforce the law.
If Trump was at 60% popularity, I would be singing a different tune. But at 35% popularity and 60% unfavorable, there is appetite left in our democracy to remain a democracy and to go after the crooks. Even if a good 30% of that unfavorable opinion is just about people's own pocketbooks rather than the principles of law and democracy, that's enough for those who care to actually enforce law.
Be concerned, but be ready tk supppprt those who will correct the course of our ship.
I wish I could share your optimism. But just because a voter has an unfavorable opinion, it doesn't mean that they won't vote for them. Many will choose "the lesser of two evils", and the current administration has devoted a lot of effort to convincing supporters that their opponents are even worse.
The President is not in fact on the ballot this year, and quite a few will say "I don't like the President, but I like the local Republican candidate more than the local Democratic candidate". Except that the President should be on the ballot: the only serious question facing Congress is whether they will support his policies or take measures to oppose them. That's going to happen exclusively along party lines. Nothing else that either candidate promises actually matters.
It's all made worse by efforts to put a thumb on the scale. That, above all else, makes this feel like the last chance we'll have to fix this. I'm going to hold out hope that we'll take it.
I wonder, is there an appetite left to remain a democracy, or more like an appetite for an autocrat who pays a little more attention to the façade and doesn't go out of his way to offend even his most loyal followers?
Right now, there is a lot of support for candidates who do go out of their way to offend even their most loyal followers. They like the offense, even if it occasionally hurts their own feelings, because it hurts other people more.
Politicians have long understood that it's easier to get elected by being fearful of their opponents than with your own merits. We've just taken the next logical step: actively attacking them, in words and with restrictive actions. It hasn't yet proceeded to violence, for the most part, but that's only because people still haven't gotten bored with this level of harassment.
Sometimes you have to die to get back stronger. Ask the chinese.