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.
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
“100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy”? That’s not even true in a very minimal definition of democracy, let alone if we also mean equal rights for all. Just off the top of my head:
The vote of racial minorities was not protected before 1965.
COINTELPRO was a thing just over 50 years ago, targeting whatever political group was considered undesirable by the FBI. The FBI was found to be using unlawful surveillance targeting protesters for the inexcusable killing of a black man by police as recently as five years ago.
Last election there was an attempt to overturn the election results. It’s not taken as seriously as it should have because it failed, but it was literally an attempt to overthrow democracy. It’s important to note that Trump was allowed to run for president and the case against him was dropped as soon as he got elected. I’m pointing it out because the system was already there to protect him and it’s not something that he caused through his own actions as president.
There are so many unwarranted invasions of other countries, assassinations, and human rights violations that I don’t even know where to link to as a starting point.
Don’t forget the large scale surveillance both within and without the country.
And then there’s all the undemocratic qualities of unregulated free market capitalism. Politicians are lobbied. News outlets belong to wealthy individuals who often have other businesses as well. Social media too. Technically, you get to cast a vote that is equal to everybody else’s. But your decision is based on false data, and your representative is massively incentivized to lie to you and enact policies that server their lobbyists and wealthy friends instead. Do we all really have equal power?
So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense, that the people have some sort of power through their vote, that’s technically still going on. If you mean in it a more general sense, where people have fundamental rights that are always protected regardless of race or other characteristics, and where power is not unfairly distributed between individuals and racial groups, then again not much has changed. Because that was never the case. If you think fascism was universally condemned then you just hadn’t realized how widespread and normalized it always was. Maybe fascism is growing. Maybe it’s becoming more blatant. But it was always there.
So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense[…]
If you mean in it a more general sense[…]
Where would ancient Greek democracy fall in this spectrum?
Lol its called the 2nd amendment we just gotta wait for the new Luigi to drop
Well isn’t that the reason everyone uses on why America needs so many guns. So they can stand up to the government? But seems it ment standing up to a government giving more people rights not one taking them away.
There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
So, giving the public a means of dealing with tyrannical leadership, either through intimidation or something more, is literally and unironically one of the intended use cases for the second amendment. That’s not to say you won’t face prosecution, but there it is.
Whoosh
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.
Efficient propaganda is not democracy
But gullible people voting or not certainly is.
we have systems for putting people like him in jail but we just didn’t want to do it
I’m told three marked bullets work wonders.
We have the second amendment, but I don’t know how bear arms will help.
ARM THE BEARS!
BEAR FLAG REPUBLIC!
Not really.
In some countries, they have this idea of Defensive Democracy which would allow the government (via court ruling) to ban political parties that are deemed to be a threat to democracy.
In post WW2 Germany, the nazi party was banned, and later a “far-left” (aka: Marxist-Leninist) political party was banned during the cold war, because they meet Germany’s definition of being anti-democratic.
Unfortunately, the US constitution does not have this concept of Defensive Democracy.
I mean we do have impeachment… but we all know how that is (doesn’t work at all).
You say “unfortunately” but do you really trust the GOP with this kind of power?
Had the defensive democracy been in place after the civil war, we could have banned Confederate symbolism, the Dixiecrats and the then Democrat party.
A new conservative party would probably have been created.
The problem with any government system is that it’s still operated by humans. It would have become corrupted but hopefully with a system in place to overturn the corruption.
I don’t think so. Reconstruction ended in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as a political compromise to settle the disputed 1876 election. Even if the Democratic Party in name didn’t survive, a new party would have formed, doing the exact same thing and that party would have been given the go ahead to implement Jim Crow at that time.
Had the defensive democracy been in place after the civil war, we could have banned Confederate symbolism, the Dixiecrats and the then Democrat party.
And then accomplished what? I mean many more people should’ve been executed or spent their life in prison, that’s for sure, but after the civil war there wasn’t a threat to democracy to defend against.
There’s been a political theory that the alt right of today is only emboldened due to the south never really being “punished” for seceding from the union. They didn’t have to pay reparation and it took literal gunpoint for them to fully integrate blacks into schools.
(Aside: the north is guilty of segregating blacks from whites but using capital power, not political power but let’s keep to the point)
As an example, many Confederate statues were erected not shortly after the civil war but in the 1950-1960s, right when civil rights were being decided and enforced. Defensive democracy would have stopped these from being erected.
You have to remember that these people only want democracy so long as it aligns with their goals.
If conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
I’d say there definitely was a threat to defend against, because shortly after the end of Reconstruction, the Klan effectively suppressed the vote of black people in the South and they couldn’t vote for a hundred more years.
That seems outside the scope of the conversation. Remember that we were talking about defensive democracy; the Klan thing was straight up terrorism and not an issue of anti-democracy positions being allowed in politics.
PS: I just learned about this today while looking things up for this convo so I might be overlooking something or straight up wrong.
I mean, if implemented properly, it can work.
Do you think Germany should legalize nazi salute and swasticas, because of “potential abuse” of the power that was used to ban those things? (Those things mentioned are currently illegal in Germany btw).
I mean there’s no right answer here, but do note that the same power of the state to ban Nazi symbolism and rhetoric is also used against pro-Palestinian activists, and this is from a perfectly democratic Germany. If people like the AfD come into power expect many more kinds of speech to become illegal.
I don’t think you know what being a Nazi looks like.
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.
we just don’t know the extent of the interference and whether it changed the outcome.
We do.
There was close to zero in the polls. (Democratic and Independent poll watchers would’ve reported that, and I’m not seeing any of such reports)
The real interference was the far-right propaganda funded by unrestricted spendings thanks to Citizens United ruling.
We’ve always had interference, its just that now its getting more and more extreme, especially after Citizens United, exacerbated by modern technology (like social media that people use almost 24/7).
There was also rampant disenfranchisement prior to the election, whatever Trump’s comments about Elon were referring to, and the bomb threats on election day, just to name a few. Maybe it all amounted to literal nothing, maybe it changed the outcome, but I don’t think we’ll ever know. Trump did a fantastic job of priming the country for 8 years to consider claims of election interference to be wild conspiracy theories and made the democratic party unwilling or unable to question anything without sounding like loons, so here we are.
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.
Congress removed a ban on arming and funding Nazis in order to arm Nazis in Ukraine, the last president violated domestic & international law to openly arm a genocide, and NATO has been openly pushing the Nazi agenda since its founding with Hitler’s former commander.
All that is to say, if you think it’s just a Nazi president or this is a recent change, you’re deeply underestimating how entrenched Nazis are in the current system, and you don’t appreciate just how many politicians are at least sympathetic to Nazis.
The system is not going to turn on itself and suddenly start fighting against the people who’ve crafted it to do this for the past 80 years. It can’t be reformed. It must be destroyed.
