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This is likely game over for Democrats and democracy in the US. Democracy has already been on the backslide here for some time, so it’s not overly surprising, b

• mattmanser 2y ago
  You don't think the democratic state Governors will step up if there's even a hint of that happening? In the end a lot of the money and power is mostly in blue states.
  • labster 2y ago
    Governors can be killed by executive order. It’s an official action so under the new Supreme Court ruling the President can’t be prosecuted. Anyone who carries out the order can be pardoned. The courts can of course reverse the executive order, but not resurrect a man so the case would be moot. This is a man who has talked about shooting political opponents on the campaign trail, I’d be astonished if he doesn’t follow through if there will be no consequences.
    • testrun 2y ago
      Governors can be killed by executive order This is a bald faced lie. Stop talking rubbish.
      • polotics 2y ago
        The sequence of event presented by the poster you are responding to is indeed a joke in 2024. Can you however not see a future where it becomes a practical possibility?
      • light_hue_1 2y ago
        When the liberals on the Supreme Court say this: > Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation. Kore­matsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214, 246 (1944) (Jackson, J., dissenting). The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to as­sassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in ex­change for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Then the claim that the President can in their official capacity assassinate others with impunity and protection from prosecution is no lie. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf You're living in a pre-Trump world. The Supreme Court changed the rules while you were asleep.
      • bigfudge 2y ago
        Can you explain why? It seems like that is exactly what was implied by the recent SC judgement.
  • startupsfail 2y ago
    That money and power doesn’t seem to be willing to move towards centrists policies. And there is a lot of power in the president, considering how unstable the world is the most likely scenario now is further consolidation of that power. And Russia or Israel are good examples, if anyone wants to see what happens after the power gets consolidated.
  • fireflash38 2y ago
    I think you'll see a huge clawing back of power to the Federal government. Just around the things where they want to stick it to blue states.
    • ttyprintk 2y ago
      Definitely. This will involve a tariff regime explicitly disadvantaging the ports in coastal blue states. Certain bureaucratic centers will be moved, the kinds of things a real estate developer can follow in a short meeting. The side effects of this will both hurt his base, and offer opportunities for smart people. For example, careless tariffs can raise the cost of everything at Walmart by 60% with Amazon not far behind. You know this and I know this. Tariffs also demonstrate to domestic companies that they don’t need to innovate. The material and labor to innovate will be cheaper overseas. You know this and I know this.
• aydyn 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • tessierashpool9 2y ago
    how you know there's not going to be a pandemic
    • aydyn 2y ago
      I meant that the pandemic was something that did change things and wasnt "more or less the same". But that has little to do with Trump.
  • fidrelity 2y ago
    Someone democratically elected can still end democratic processes.
    • aydyn 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • mattgperry 2y ago
        But it isn't wrong, is it? Democracy elected Hitler, Hitler ended democracy in Germany. I'm not saying that is going to happen here, but your flippant comeback to a valid point is not a rebuttal.
        • aydyn 2y ago
          [flagged]
          • eterps 2y ago
            Huh?? But how is he wrong?
• rothron 2y ago
  These are the same noises that were made on the right prior to the election. As long as people are sufficiently mad about the status quo, the other party has a chance to take over.
  • jorts 2y ago
    Keep in mind this site swings heavily right wing.
    • aydyn 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • girvo 2y ago
        It skews techno-libertarian, which is more right than left. Always has done, at least as long as I’ve been here. Makes sense considering the audience.
        • aydyn 2y ago
          There are certainly vocal and well spoken conservatives here, but by and large this site skews massively liberal. I mean just read this threads comments, ffs.
    • matwood 2y ago
      Fiscally conservative, socially liberal (in that order) probably best describes HN.
      • moomin 2y ago
        I feel like that's a story HN and a lot of tech likes to tell itself, but the truth is that when push comes to shove they support candidates who are neither, but _are_ deeply right wing. Concrete actions tell the real story.
        • 2y ago
• boomskats 2y ago
  Didn't the DNC kill democracy in the US all the way back in 2016?
  • ks2048 2y ago
    No, way back in 2000, the Supreme Court prevented a recount of votes in Florida.
• wil421 2y ago
  Highly unlikely. The next Governor of my state is likely that person who stood up to Trumps fraudulent voting claims. We will see if the Democrats can find a decent candidate but I doubt it. They used the same person twice with the same results.
  • _heimdall 2y ago
    If the democrats were interested in winning they would have had a few options this election. The party seems to have other priorities that they always prioritize over winning though, and that hasn't worked out well for them.
    • tyleo 2y ago
      They were interested in winning and I think they made decent moves. Dumping Biden amounted to huge increases in their win probability. A stronger candidate could have bolstered that further but Harris ran a decent campaign. The broader state of the economy and border put them on the back foot so I think they would have struggled with most candidates. Perhaps an outsider similar to Bernie’s 2016 campaign would have had the best shot.
      • _heimdall 2y ago
        If they really wanted to win they never would have had Biden on the ticket. At a minimum they would have allowed a primary rather then forcing RFK out of the party and keeping any other potentials off the stage. In my opinion Biden was clearly slipping 18-24 months ago. But even if that's wrong, the best way to show the country Biden was fit for another term and energize the party would have been putting him on stage to debate with other democratic leaders.
      • smolder 2y ago
        I don't personally think she ran a decent campaign. It was very standard and bland talk of unity and other hot air -just the stuff you expect politicians to say when trying to get elected, nothing to really build trust in her. She needed to make Trump look dumb, dishonest and inept by comparison. Talking to voters as if they're smarter might have helped, but I don't really know.
• vundercind 2y ago
  Citizens United and the coup attempt neither being treated as five-alarm fires for our Democracy were probably the moments when a major slide toward authoritarianism became far, far more likely. Democrats just sat on their hands. By the time we got to the news that at least two Supreme Court justices and very likely more are being bought, and collectively shrugged rather than making that the issue until they were out, well, that wasn’t so much a landmark on the way down as another ordinary day.
  • neotek 2y ago
    "Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.' "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.... "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way." — Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
• snickerbockers 2y ago
  I'm always amazed by how many people consider it a failure of democracy for the candidate they voted for to lose.
  • Xeamek 2y ago
    You know that Hitler was literally voted into power, right? I am NOT saying Trump is literally Hitler, but the idea that democratic vote can't have un-democratic outcome in the long run is simply false. It can, and history showed us that more then once
    • snickerbockers 2y ago
      That's the problem with this statement: Trump is not Hitler and any hypothetical "undemocratic outcomes" aren't apparent in the extreme short term. He hasn't run on a platform of eliminating democracy and there isn't any indication at this point that he will.
      • dsmithn 2y ago
        “Except for day one”
      • onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
        He ran on a platform that he won the 2020 election, and it was stolen. How is that not anti-democratic?
        • logicchains 2y ago
          If he and his supporters genuinely believe that, it's an extremely democratic position.
          • wyre 2y ago
            Remind me what its called when someone's geniune belief's don't align with reality?
• ekianjo 2y ago
  > game over for Democrats and democracy in the US So voting is the end of democracy? Interesting take
  • tail_exchange 2y ago
    Because no dictators are voted into power? Hitler, Mussolini, Mugabe, Chavez...
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      “Not worried about Trumpism” is a near-100% accurate indicator of extreme ignorance of authoritarian regimes and of the American political system, unfortunately.
      • ekianjo 2y ago
        > near-100% accurate indicator of extreme ignorance of authoritarian regimes extreme ignorance of authoritarian regime is particularly visible among people who think that things happen like in movies with singular figures like Darth Vader showing up and suddenly grabbing power out of some kind of ether.
        • llamaimperative 2y ago
          Which isn’t and wasn’t ever the concern with Trump.
    • ekianjo 2y ago
      SO everytime someone is voted in, the idea is to panic? Especially when the guy was already in the office 4 years ago and was not Hitler?
      • tail_exchange 2y ago
        No, only if they tried a coup, filled his cabinet with yes-men, and have a following full of neo-nazis. Then you should be concerned.
• Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
  I see this claim often but (from my position as an outsider, not American) it doesn't look very plausible: Trump was already president once and that didn't happen, why would it happen now?
  • bojan 2y ago
    It did begin then. The Supreme Court of the US is since then conservative and will now probably remain so for many years to come. Further, he needed the second term then, so he couldn't go all crazy as he needed the people to vote for him once more. Now he doesn't have that limitation any more.
    • fallingknife 2y ago
      The SC being conservative is the result of a democratic process, not a threat to it. If Trump wanted to be dictator, why didn't he just do all that stuff in his first term and not worry about reelection in 2020?
      • wholinator2 2y ago
        Things take time. Erosion of trust and the creation of political apathy in the populace takes time. Also, as has been said, he did try things but was continuously pushed back on by the actual politicians he put in his cabinet. He's also 8 years more elderly and emboldened. His cult of personality has essentially stabilized into an American institution. He's also had an entire administration to place judges and pass legislation that favors his power plays. In general it seems like you're asking, why might it take more than 4 years to topple a democracy, which i think has an obvious answer, democracy doesn't want to be toppled. Again, I'm not arguing he's gonna go full dictator, but i think it's a lot more likely this time around than last time.
  • arp242 2y ago
    He's significantly more unhinged than he was 4 years ago, and even more obsessed with personal loyalty than he was before. And in general this sort of thing doesn't happen overnight; there's a process to things. It's like the old quip on how someone becomes bankrupt: "very gradually, and then suddenly all at once". I don't know what will happen, but it's a dangerous path to walk. Maybe the next four years will be sort-of okay-ish, but what about the state of things in 10 or 20 years? In large part, democracies work because we all believe it should work, and once that belief goes out the window for a critical mass of people then you're playing with fire. The GOP in general has been engaged in scorched earth politics since Obama: all that matters is a win today and doesn't matter what conventions or institutions get damaged in the process. A healthy democracy would have disqualified Trump from running again in 2020. It would not play highly nihilistic power games with the supreme court. etc. etc. It's absolutely not a healthy state of affairs.
• _heimdall 2y ago
  If this is somehow the end of democracy here, it wasn't Trump's election that killed it. One election alone (or two if you believe both terms were the cause) couldn't likely kill an otherwise healthy democracy. Democracy would have been dead for my of my lifetime if this is the moment it becomes clear that its gone. That said, I very much dislike Trump and would rather have an empty oval office (arguably we have that already), but I think his threat to democracy has been wildly overblown. Unless a rogue president throws out the book entirely, Congress would have to be the ones to actually get rid of most of our democratic processes and systems.
  • Tostino 2y ago
    The second you have a president willing to mobilize the most advanced military in the history of the world against its own populace there's no chance of realistically resisting.
    • _heimdall 2y ago
      I have absolutely no expectation that Trump will actually order the military on the US populace, but even if he tried it matters whether the military would follow such an order. It could always happen, that's part of the reason I wish our federal government was drastically reduced and our standing military disbanded, but I simply can't think so little of our troops that they would actually do it. That said, if somehow that did happen one day I fully expect to die by their gun. At that point that army becomes an invading force and I'd feel like I have no choice but to fight.
      • Tostino 2y ago
        I really hope you are right about that. I worry because I listened to what he said...and he said he wants to use the military against the "enemy from within, and named specific political opponents and mentioned media figures. I tend to believe him when he says that's what he wants to do. But you are right, one would hope the military would refuse such an unconstitutional order.
    • rightbyte 2y ago
• cynicalpeace 2y ago
  Candidate wins in a landslide election against someone who had not won any votes in a presidential campaign on her own merits ever and you call that game over for democracy?
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    That wasn't a landslide. To see what a landslide looks like, look at 1972.
    • cynicalpeace 2y ago
      OK he still won. Unless you will claim, like MSNBC already is, that it was stolen by the Russians.
      • ball_of_lint 2y ago
        Where do you see that? (not that MSNBC is a monolith, but) This article claims exactly the opposite: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-steal-election-2024-win-rcna178974 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-steal-elec... > Trump didn’t need to file frivolous lawsuits before federal courts. The Supreme Court wasn’t given a chance to throw the election his way in a redux of 2000’s Bush v. Gore. The false bomb threats to polling places that have been ascribed to Russian actors don’t appear to have had any measurable effect. There’s been no reporting that indicates that the promised hordes of MAGA-trained poll watchers blocked any Democratic voters from casting their ballots. > He just won.
        • cynicalpeace 2y ago
          Joe Scarborough was talking about it on his show yesterday
    • nobody9999 2y ago
      Or 1984[0]: Reagan was re-elected in the November 6 election in an electoral and popular vote landslide, winning 49 states by the time the ballots were finished counting on election night at 11:34 PM in Iowa. He won a record 525 electoral votes total (of 538 possible), and received 58.8% of the popular vote [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidential_election#Results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidentia...
• iszomer 2y ago
  Are you attributing the US Democrat Party to be the progenitors of democracy?
  • fnordsensei 2y ago
    It's probably not that, but (separately) both the Democratic Party and democracy for the same reason: if Republicans successfully engineer (what's effectively) a one-party state. Regardless if the dems still exist in name or not, both them and democracy are done.
• snarf21 2y ago
  This is all because of Reagan. Removal of the fairness doctrine and lowering of the highest tax rate from 70% to 50% to 28%. Now, we live in an oligarchy full stop. All the "free press" is owned by billionaires who crave tax cuts and election ad money more than "truth". (Look at the LATimes and WaPost refusing to endorse a candidate at the sole direction of their owner.) The oligarchs soon realized that you don't have to buy the country, just 10 people to control 2 of the branches of government. We really need to move the Supreme Court to 13 that are elected by popular vote in the 13 districts. We elect the heads of the other 2 branches of government, why not the judiciary? The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was convincing the middle class that poor people are the cause of all the problems in their life.