Not really. Not to be dismissive of the harms of a 2nd term trump.
But you have to understand what American history has been.
People were literally enslaved in the early days, then the country was literally at war with itself over slavery. Then Jim Crow and Segregation. Black people were lynched. White mobs would kill black people.
Chinese people were targeted by the Chinese Exclusion Act and banned from entry, some were US Citizens too and they weren’t except either.
The US had a major economic crash in 1929. Got into 2 world wars. American Citizens of Japanese ancestry were literally arrested and held in camps because of their ancestry. Went through cols war, the red scare, mccathyism. People randomly getting accused of being “communists” and arrested. Unions get cracked down. Protests were brutally suppressed, more violently than in modern day. Black people protesting for their rights and took a bus down south got burned. Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. literally got assassinated.
That is the American history.
And here we are, through such a shitty history, democracy survived, and voting rights expanded to so many people. First to Black people, then to Women.
Back then a majority of the population supported segregation, institutionalized racism. But today, a majority of people are okay with interracial marriage.
I have high hopes we can survive another trump term.
It won’t be pleasent, but we’ll survive.
It should be noted that through all this people fought for those rights. So don’t fall asleep, dear America, because organizing even within small communities will make a difference.
If done correctly, massive change can happen. Dream big so that those who fear negotiate back down to the levels you’ll accept.
The Beastie Boys certainly did.
I feel like a lot of people online need to read this comment, go outside, and live their life. This is not defeatist, and it’s not unreal optimism. Thank you for this.
I think the problem here is the concurrent effects of climate change. The US couldn’t have picked a worse time to move from flirting with facism to full-on marrying it.
You can deal with one crisis if you’re coordinated enough but the chaos that’s already occurring with the climate - and is set to become exponentially worse - doesn’t give me much hope for a harmonious conclusion to this. Obviously, I hope I’m wrong and you’re right.
The part about our history you’re forgetting is that we never, through any of that, gleefully elected a guy that has made it abundantly clear he doesn’t give a fuck about democracy and will work to subvert or destroy it if it doesn’t suit him.
This is new territory.
And we’re about to experience the deconstruction of things that will be very difficult to build back.
Your point is that we’ve been around for a few hundred years, so we can bounce back. But history would like to point out that nations that were around much longer than us have ceased to exist many times over.
I wish I had your optimism.
On the other hand, do keep in mind that mighty empires have fallen. We cannot say for sure that things will be fine just because in the past the USA has survived
Dont forget the trail of tears.
The US has been through a lot and will likely recover, but it would be nice to avoid making the same mistakes again. How many more people have to get hurt before humanity learns?
How do you replenish the oceans and maintain life for any ecosystem humanity lives off of? Most of America is set to be desert by 4 degrees c average warmth increase. You won’t grow crops outdoors. We know we are guaranteed to blow past 1.5 now without being able to stop it as are actions are to late. Yet we are saying “drill baby drill”. The topographical map will change drastically.
democracy survived
LMAO!!
Choosing between two candidate picked by lobbyists/corporations, and anyone else not having a slightest chance in hell isn’t a democracy, but hey, you do you.
It’s slightly better than China/Russia having a single candidate and everyone else is just for show.
It is a democracy.
Not a good type, but still a democracy.
Remember, Democracy and Autocracy isnt binary states of its either a Full Totalitarian Regime or a Full Direct Flawless Democracy.
There’s a sliding scale in between.
We don’t just go from Monarchies to a perfect Utopian Flawless Democratic system overnight. Change is incremental.
I do agree with the sentiment that 2 party system isn’t really a good idea, that very much need to be changed.
But its not like the constitution says “The United States shall be a 2-party system”, its an emergent property of First-Past-The-Post electoral systems. But unfortunately, human brains always look for the first thing they think of, I mean “Most Votes Win” sounds simple right. People never thought about the fact that “Most” doesn’t mean majority, but by the time people realize, its too late, people go too used to it.
But its still a democracy, a very very flawed democracy. But if you argue that First-Past-The-Post isn’t a democracy, then most of the world are living in dictatorships.
I share your broader view and cautious optimism. In fact I think that some of what we are seeing are death spasms of that white hegemony that used to lynch blacks at will. They lost their “hard” power long ago with the end of Jim Crow. And they have been losing their “soft” power ever since. Demographic trends point to white people in America eventually becoming a minority. Religion is also dying out. So much of what we see is a panic of a dying group that was once dominant. There is no way that’s ever going to be pretty, anywhere, at any time. But look at the trend behind it and it’s an encouraging one, even if the death spasms are incredibly difficult. TBH if the Democrats could just provide some real leadership into this future, America could flip into a totally different country, much like the liberal democracies of Europe (but way stronger) inside of 20 years. This is the reality that the old guard are scared shitless of, and why they are pulling out all the stops to go the other way.
one difference today is that govt/establishment/utra-rich have centralised way more power than anytime in human history.
add that with extreme surveillance & automated weaponry, “govt” can do basically anything they want. 1% can easily crush any opposition to them with no matter how strongly united the rest of us are. dnc just ignored its entire voter base to continue a genocide & support fracking while letting corporate greed run rampant for last 4 years.
with ai+drones it will become way worse. it’s not unimaginable what’s happening to palestinian will happen to the non-white population here in next 10-15 years.
From an outsider’s perspective, I think a lot of people think you guys sailed past the point of no return back in the 80s.
Reagan, he is the starting point of everything: the tax cut from 73% to 28%. USA never got back on track after this.
Nope. Johnson.
No, not that one.
Andrew Johnson.
So many ways it could have been better.
He could have punished the Southern Aristocracy for starting the civil war. He could have ensured that the evil that led us there was exterminated forever.
Failing that, they could have actually removed him via impeachment instead of falling just short. That would have at least established forever that the presidency is not some sacred “unimpeachable” office.
But Raygun did a great break dancing set in the Olympics.
Remember when the entire world was convinced there was absolutely no way Bush, an idiot, fascist, religious bigot, etc could get re-elected?
Nucular. 🤦
You mean the 1780s, right?
Yes.
In my opinion we’ve already passed the point of no return and recent events have just confirmed as much.
This isn’t about having differing political opinions. A profoundly unfit, amoral criminal with a very public history of being an awful person came along and started spewing extremely dangerous rhetoric, some of which is almost verbatim to Hitler’s, and our society ate it up and made him president in 2016. This man, who leads a party who courts racists/sexists for their votes, utterly failed his tenure as president, bombing his response to the greatest American crisis since WW2 and presiding over the highest White House administration turnover rate in U.S. history. Since then he has become a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and illegally attempted to overturn our democratic institutions by various means.
This go around the American people were presented with a choice between that person, who only managed to make himself appear even more unfit during this campaign season, openly stated he is anti-worker rights, and is directly responsible for removing women’s federally protected right to bodily autonomy, or a successful prosecutor with a doctorate in law, backed by a party that, despite misinformation, has a voting history proving they vote in favor of the average American FAR more than the opposing party…and Americans STILL managed to drop the ball and go with the CLEARLY worse choice. And when I say clearly, I’m talking about by every conceivable metric that exists in reality.
At this point it isn’t about Democrat vs Republican or Trump vs Kamala or Biden. It’s about the American people. We are not a society of intelligent voters. We have failed our responsibility as citizens in a democracy by being too lazy to learn and by allowing misinformation to mislead us and emotions to cloud our better judgement. We are not engaged in responsible involvement in our own politics. We gleefully elect people that only offer hate and fear and lies, despite how hard they try to prove how awful they are to us. And THAT is why we have passed the point of no return. If you remove the parties and the politicians out of the equation, you still have a society that fails at responsibly preserving a democracy. That gives in to hateful rhetoric and fear. That wants to get the better of the “others”.
There is no happy ending for a society like that. A society like that can only decline. This was not an election about one political ideology against another. It was an election about morality. And we categorically failed that moral test.
There are excuses. We’ve been through a lot. Lots of people are desperate. Desperate people make bad decisions. But the bottom line is we don’t live in a society with a majority of responsible adults making responsible, fact-based decisions about the most important things.
In the arc of history we may end up reaching a better place, but personally I believe we’re embarking on a decline that will most likely last the rest of our lives. It simply isn’t a problem that can be fixed short term. And we’re about to experience a sort of deconstruction. A deconstruction of norms. A deconstruction of institutions. A deconstruction of education and safety nets. And those things take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to build back, because it’s easier to destroy than it is to create or maintain.
Buckle up. Try to find happiness where you can. It’s probably not getting better anytime soon.
I’ve never been more happy to be childless by choice.
And I’m childless, not by choice, and sadly glad too.
I don’t understand this line of thought. As in you are childless by choice BECAUSE of what is going on in the US?
I’m childless by choice because I don’t like children. I’m happy I don’t have kids because they’d be experiencing this shit storm during their formative years and I can’t even imagine how badly that would fuck them up.
Progress isn’t a straight line, and sometimes there are setbacks on the way. I’m disappointed, of course, but I’m optimistic that we’ll manage.
We may yet manage as a country, but the millions that die from this election won’t get to see it.
And progress without testing it’s resiliency against malicious actors will not last. As much as we hate Trump being elected and staffing clowns in each position, it will test what has been made so far. Row v. Wade, as we now know, should have been stronger. The Voting Rights Act too. The states that required the law to be fair have pulled back the law and reveal little has changed.
No one likes getting burned but fire is useful for showing us what burns easily and what withstands the heat. We will rebuild stronger and know what works.
I hope not. But I am fearful that the US electorate has not grasped yet what it threw away.
No. People always want some apocalyptic ending, but there’s always a chance to make adjustments in various ways. It’s just that some solutions, the ones that are less painful and involved less people’s lives getting destroyed and less death, some of those solutions become increasingly distant.
And look, if you go back and check out the history of unions and labor rights in the US, it was a bloody history. I think we might be looking at that repeating itself. And that’s only if we’re lucky.
So what is your solution when we blow past 4 degrees © rise in temperature and most of the land on earth becomes uninhabitable? Shift all the farms up north which will die of freezes annually, or move all agriculture and life indoors permanently? Surely mining all the resources to put all of human life indoors will be a non issue? Or is it just the 5% that get indoors to survive and then the lower 90% of that 5 become the poor disadvantaged driven to be the new poor slowly? Or is your hope that the top 5% after killing most the world’s population once indoors will simply accept a form of socialism then?
We don’t know.
The US came back from a US president hiring private goons to spy on his political opponents.
The US came back from a US president illegally selling weapons to Iran to fund right wing militias in South America.
The US came back from a US cabinet member taking literal bribes from oil companies to give them oil drilling rights on federal land.
The US came back from a US president illegally firing a cabinet member and installing his own lackey.
But it didn’t HAVE to.
I don’t think there’s really such a thing as a ‘point of no return’ for a Democracy. But it is possible to get to a point after which you don’t return.
The next line of defense is 3/4 of state legislatures.
Nah.
That was Reagan. You’re about 40 years late.
If you want to play that game, it was likely Nixon and the southern strategy.
But neither of those were point of no return. They were just foundational groundwork to set up this moment that likely is.
No. Of course not!
Failing to Reject the Reagan Revolution, and mass embrace of the Jack Welsh style “trickle down” economics lie, by BOTH parties was the point of no return, almost half a century ago at this point. This car was already totaled.
Citizens United years later was just a victory lap by the owners pissing on the long dead corpse of the dream of societal equity.
Trump is just another symptom of that intransigent reality we all live in.
I’d say hope for collapse, as painful as it is, to have any hope for a better life for our children, maybe, but oligarch greed made climate change and at this point inevitable ecological collapse in the coming decades means there really isn’t hope for a better society/civilization for generations(if they eventually develop technologies to better cope with the new hellish climate reality) if at all.
It’s going to be a really shit 4 years. There could be a point of no return anytime along that based on a variety of issues, but IMO the most likely point of no return is if/when Trump moves to take a third term in '28. If that happens it’s clearly dead no hope.
Just feels life another goal post moved… He literally worked to overthrow the American government and have his VP killed on live TV and was then clinched of dozens of felonies. . There can’t always be a *“yeah, but if THIS next thing happens…”*I
He failed to overthrow the American government and have his VP killed. And the reason he wanted his VP killed was because he wouldn’t help him overthrow the American government.
It’s undeniable that some very powerful people want US democracy dead, but from that to the actual death of US democracy is a long way
Right now my mind is at, “it very well could be, but time will tell”.
Had Trump had the right people in places to make certain decisions, it could have very well ended in 2020 just as much. Well the world did change in a big way near the end of his term, with COVID, how he botched it and how he gave corporate handout after corporate handout which caused the inflation that Biden is being blamed for.
I’ve been still grasping for ways that the US still can be saved, which there are many, but they hinge on
1A. Trump going back on many of his worst promises and not doing them, because reneging is his thing, or
1B. Trump and his team being too incompetent to enact his agenda, or
1C. The backlash to Trump’s unpopular moves creates disobedience within government, military and writ large, preventing him from enacting his agenda, and
- Democracy not being rigged during his tenure, avoiding where elections become just as meaningful as Russia’s or China’s during the 4 years.
A plurality of Americans gave Trump and Republican facsism basically all the dragon balls of power, so it’s up to him pretty much whether he can use them and the most Americans can do is organize and resist.
The difference between recession and collapse is a bounce back on the other side.
Banking system is already vulnerable to real estate prices. Commercial real estate has been in zombie mode with banks hiding their losses on the sector. The US government has already unsustainable debt levels that can’t afford major adventures or catastrophes. Adventures include mass deportations or wars. The problem with austerity measures for the non-oligarchs is strong degrowth and crime from multiplier effects.
While Trump is likely to be extremely divisive and angering socially, it is economics and geopolitics that will collapse the US. Deregulating banks is letting the fractional reserve system use a riskier lower fraction. Biden was very good at strengthening the subjugation of US colonies, but he pushed away majority of the world. There is major risk that Trump pushes away colonies without making the world more trusting of US. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/11/requiem-for-an-empire.html
What destroys America is the hubris of thinking it is winning, and that it can win over the world. Fighting China instead of getting cheap stuff is a mistake. Investing in dead ender climate terrorist energy is a mistake. Promising reindustrialization is a lie, and tariffs won’t do it. It will bleed Americans dry while letting oligarchs pillage what’s left.
Weaponizing AI to control population, and kill people is the new priority. Putting your hopes in DNC so that they can undo project 2025 is controlling you in a way that doesn’t avert the path to collapse in any way.
The only escape is UBI and peace. Not something a Israel supremacist neocon DNC wants, because UBI is power redistribution instead of wealth redistribution. The binary of AI and automation is either cooperation where abundance and the profits from abundance can be shared, or extermination of useless riff raff that dares to whine about oligarchy and empire.
This is based on nothing but vibes and my observations but I think so. We were cooked the moment we elected the clown the first time, just been a slower slide than I anticipated. In truth though we already had the disease at that point but it was then it became terminal.
I desperately want to be wrong and will do what I can to prove myself a moron. Fingers crossed.
Yeah, I think this could be the end of free and fair elections in the U.S., and there’s no coming back from that without a revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most of us will directly be killed by this change; our lives will just be shittier. It’ll be like living in Russia. Given how utterly incompetent the administration is looking, and the things they say they’re going to do (mass deportation of a significant part of our workforce, blanket tariffs, gutting social safety-nets), we may speed-run an economic and societal collapse. That could sow the seeds for a horrible and bloody revolution.
Or, maybe I’m wrong and the important institutions will somehow hold against a christo-fascist party controlling all branches of the federal government and a president with immunity. If there are still are free and fair elections, then congress could block a lot of things in 2026, and start repairing some of the damage in 2028.
Still, it does not bode well that the U.S. elected these people in the first place, and at best, the U.S. will slowly crumble for decades.
Free and fair elections have never been anything but an ideal in this country. It started with voters were wealthy landowning men, often who owned slaves.
What we’re seeing is years of undermined reforms by the momentarily wealthy after the previous empires in europe tore themselves apart.
Meh, I would’ve given 3/5 stars to U.S. democracy since the Voting Rights Act. Stars taken away for FPTP, gerrymandering, campaign finance, “lobbying,” and the electoral college. I believe we’re going to go to 0/5 stars with completely rigged elections rather than just manufacturing consent and lightly tipping the scales like they’ve been doing.
I think the real answer is that we end up kind of like the UK – going from the worlds ultra-dominant superpower to a sort of slow regression to the mean, as China, India and others take the spotlight.
When you look at what China is doing with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their move to dominate the transportation infrastructure of developing nations – the US isn’t anywhere near equipped to counter that. We’re still in a cold war mentality thinking that we will dominate as the world’s police force.
Meanwhile, all the actual economies will be run by Chinese companies operating with state support.
