What is your line in the sand?
Edit: thank you all for your responses. I think it’s important as an American we take your view points seriously. I think of a North Korean living inside of North Korea. They don’t really know how bad it is because that is all hidden from them and they’ve never had anything else. As things get worse for Americans it’s important to have your voices because we will become more and more isolated.
Even the guy who said, “lol.” Some people need that sort of sobering reaction.
The short answer: yes.
The long answer: it will take a long time to completely dismantle a democracy in a country as big and complex as America. You don’t just do that in three months.
All trump has done so far is move as fast as possible to make as much of a mess as possible in the hopes that some of his nutty ideas goes through once the system catches up to him. And the system will catch up to him and Musk and all the other cunts who are having their little ego fest currently.
I have patience. Kind of. I look forward to seeing the consequences of their actions come to haunt them. I also hope this period in American politics will be the wake up call America needs to hopefully bar politicians and political parties from taking donations from big corps essentially try to buy the government and weaken true democracy from flourishing. The US isn’t the only country with this problem, but it is certainly neck deep in one of the worst outcomes of letting big corporations take ownership of a government.
What makes you so sure of that? Trump is already actively disregarding court orders, and the Supreme Court ruled he cannot be charged with a crime if it is part of an “official duty”.
I’m sure he will do his damnedest to dismantle everything, but I don’t believe he will succeed. He may get away with it for a little while, but this shit isn’t going to last.
I fully believe it will be the wake up call America has desperately needed for a very long time. Countries like Russia and China never really had democracy and they never had freedom as a value so that is why I don’t think trump will be successful in the long term with his little stunt here. It will get worse before it gets better and America is currently in the finding out phase that we learned in Europe in the 40s.
That is how I look at it.
Not for quite some time now. Not since I learned about the electoral college.
Would be nice to know what part of America you mean by that. It is a pretty big continent you know? Argentinians, Mexicans, Brasilians and so on are all part of America.
Buuuut I’m gonna go ahead and assume you are asking about the UNITED STATES country, right?
Yes it is a Democracy. Not perfect, but then again which one is?
On paper, I guess so? In reality, and as is the case with pretty much every developed democracy, money and technology make a mockery of the whole idea. A society in which billionaires can buy their way into the Whitehouse - literally - is no democracy.
No and it hasn’t been for a long time. As long as you can buy influence via lobbying then the playing field is not level.
The difference this time is they are not trying to hide it anymore
Canadian here.
Before Trump? Ehhh, not really. I’ve always viewed the US as a place where you vote for which oligarch-backed monarch you’d want to put in absolute power for 4 years. Every 4/8 years the new incoming overlord just rips up whatever the previous one did and nothing of substance is actually achieved.
After Trump 2.0? No. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Trump is going to surrender all that power he and the GOP have accumulated. And why would he? He doesn’t have to. He literally controls every branch of government that he can and ignores those that he doesn’t. If the US ever has another election it will purely be for show, like China’s elections. The mask is now fully off and the charade of US democracy is over as those who actually wield the power now do so openly on their sleeves.
China’s democracy is among party members.
Oh I love parties! I’ll bring the glowsticks!
lol
Anyone who is eligible to vote, and chooses not to, implicitly throws their support behind whoever wins.
On 2024-11-05, ⅔ of US citizens who were eligible to vote told the rest of the world they don’t want to be taken seriously for at least 2 years.
The US had always been a questionable democracy with the hyperfixation on the president and just two parties setting the agenda, but I’d argue that it’s still a democracy, though it is a rapidly deteriorating one.
still consider
It has only two political parties, and a weird system where all votes are not equal and the actual vote majority doesn’t always win.
It has frequently had multiple people from the same families running for office, and only wealthy people have a shot. Corporations get to lobby for laws in their favour.
It also spies on its own citizens, holds people indefinitely without trial, has a huge prison population, a militarized police with a high homicide rate, and is the only western nation with the death penalty.
Trump and Musk are laying bare how fragile the veneer of “democracy” really is in that country.
To be honest, not even from the start was it a true democracy, the Electoral College is a layer on top of democracy to give different weight to each vote.
Absolutely not. A two party system was barely nominally a form of democracy. Current one quacks like a dictatorship and walks like a dictatorship. They might hold a fake election one day like many of those do, but still no.
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”. Come on, be serious. Words mean things.
Second, America’s two-party system also has internal factions and primaries, many of them completely open (you don’t even need to declare allegiance to the party). The primaries are effectively the first round in a two-round electoral system (of which there are plenty in the world). The whole point is to create a binary choice in the final round. For some reason this always gets missed by otherwise informed observers. “There are only two parties” is just not a valid argument in this debate.
Of course, none of these facts will be popular here, since the real point of this thread is to allow participants to performatively dump on the shared hate-object. Classic social media, I get it.
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”. Come on, be serious. Words mean things.
They do. Have you ever heard about elective dictatorship?
Mere presence of elections, especially gerrymandered to hell and especially where minority can easily win, does not make a democracy.
While I don’t consider the system of governance there very good, I’ll have to agree. While I do absolutely worry for the American democracy, it isn’t a dictatorship in its current form. I also agree that the primaries do make the system better and more democratic. I still think that the two part system is abysmal, but the primaries do make the claim to democracy stronger.
That’s a balanced and fair-minded take. Unfortunately it won’t be appreciated here, because what people are looking for in this thread is catharsis and confirmation of their biases.
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”.
You sure about that? Have you read the news lately?
Yeah I have and saying that kinda just makes you seem uninformed.
Like the people who call the US “a 3rd world country in a Gucci belt”. It just makes it super obvious that you don’t understand how high quality of a life the average person has in the US. Especially globally.
I’m not going to list all the red flags, but there is a reason people feel like this. A few major ones, president talking about taking over other countries out of the blue, attacking our allies to the point where Americans are suffering much more than necessary, his sidekick doing Nazi salutes on stage, literal commercials for his $idekick on the white house lawn.
It’s pretty clear there is no rule of law for blatant corruption and no accountability. Replace USA/Trump with Russia/Putin or NK/Un, guess what, same shit, different smell. Either follow orders or get shipped out is the example they’re trying to set, as well as making free speech illegal.
We’re FAR from a functioning democracy.
In practice, however, it is a two-party system.
For the time being, sure. I dint think democracy is a binary. Democracy doesn’t imply a fair system or universal suffrage or a system where power is split.
Like for example the Vatican is a absolute monarchy and also a democracy.
Am Dutch. I have considered the US an incomplete democracy since I learned about voting in school. It’s not one person one vote, which to me is crucial for a democracy. The US right now is still a nation of laws, but democracy is sharply in decline. The voter-roll issues and Gerrymandering come to mind immediately. Not to mention the fact that guaranteed access to polls has been pulled by the courts. Which is insane to me.
$ is votes, who could have seen where that would go.
Also president having so much power was clearly never democratic to begin with as we can see it all play out now.
The power of the president did not start out like this. Congress kept giving their power to the executive for political reasons.
It happened over centuries.
Ignoring court orders, and “fake national emergency declarations” to create war and international extortion and remove rights and citizenships for deportations crossed the line. The voter suppression/rigging that won election for Trump is also clearly anti-democratic, but anti-democratic as usual. Media/oligarchy/Israel influence/disinformation might not make for an ideal democracy, but also “democracy as usual”.
The big problem with the world is the US empire’s manufacturing of hatred/war against “those who are less democratic than us and our colonies” Corruption of democracy in US, who can cheaply manipulate democracy in its colonies, means that you don’t have functional democracy either. US praises the most violently oppressive apartheid ethnostates suspending federal and local elections as great democracies if they support US wars. There is something wrong when the most important issue of your government is to increase divisiveness/threats to the US’s enemies when the US unjustifiably threatens you, and that thrills you as right track.
So, democracy is simply not working at bringing progressiveness and shared prosperity, or even the most basic understanding of humanist/national interests, to those who say they love it so much. This is global collapse level of delusion. Nations doing best economically are those distancing themselves from US colonial control.
The more objective measure of “good government” is control against oligarchist pillaging, while having pluralism/sustainability, and economic constructiveness. US approved democracies are failing hard on these metrics. Warmongering based on “blanket, evidence free, refusal to accept election results when non-CIA candidate wins” is not the democratic/liberal ideal you think it is.
Just going to leave this here.
No. And I haven’t for a while now. Looking at your electoral system (electoral college, gerrymandering etc.), it probably never was but it was never as obvious as it is now.
I grew up in the US and have lived outside it for 10 years now. I would agree with this. Voting and representation have never been total and is definitely less available for many groups. Further things are being stripped away.
This
Yeah. My wake-up call was quite early in life, when SCOTUS handed the election to GWB. If I was born a generation earlier I’d have called it with Watergate. If I was an ancestor currently dead, I would have called it around the time an assassin put the presidency in the hands of the opposite party, and a drunk asshole subsequently decided reconstruction efforts should fail. Or possibly just prior, when we somehow decided not to hang every man Jack of the confederacy for treason.
Edit: an earlier still version of me would have overseen the death of a culture brought on by poxy mad white religious extremists, and laughed ruefully to hear that centuries later the utter bastardy continues unchanged.
