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It's wild to think I'd ever say this, but the next four years will be the stress test of the strength of US institutions against an authoritarian president. If

It's wild to think I'd ever say this, but the next four years will be the stress test of the strength of US institutions against an authoritarian president. If they survive the next four years, they will likely survive pretty much anything.

kennysoona 2y ago
> but the next four years will be the stress test of the strength of US institutions against an authoritarian president. As well as a stress test against half the voting population that thinks an authoritarian president is peachy and somehow patriotic.
- whatever1 2y ago
  Half of the voting population were so fed up with the economy that they went with the nuclear option. It’s just that most of them have not read history and none of them have lived through war or fascism to understand what they are signing up for. They will all learn their lesson.
  - phinnaeus 2y ago
    I have strong doubts they will learn anything, if they were capable of that you could expect them to have learned it already.
    - whatever1 2y ago
      We have been told that if you fall head down from high altitude you will hit your self badly and probably die, but what if it is different this time around?
      - StefanBatory 2y ago
        "Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good… so far so good… How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!"
    - monksy 2y ago
      Take a look at r/conservative. They're claiming they got wins with the dismantling, the site tear downs, the "folds" in negotiation. They really think they're winning.
  - blurbleblurble 2y ago
    It was one third of the voting population.
  - hnbad 2y ago
    I think the problem is that most people think nothing ever happens, or to put it bluntly "It couldn't happen here". Harris literally offered nothing - when pressed she even said that she wouldn't have done anything different from Biden, which is the last thing you want to hear about a president whose only selling point was not being Trump and giving the country breathing room to come up with something better. Yes, the US recovered faster and stronger from COVID and the recession than the rest of the world but that doesn't change people's lived realities of living paycheck to paycheck with prices only ever going higher. People don't "learn their lesson". Accelerationism always fails. Suffering, fear and looming threats are what enable the rise of authoritarianism and autocracy, not what helps overcome them. Fascism is rarely overthrown by a popular revolt that establishes direct democracy and egalitarianism. It's usually overthrown by a military junta or gradually coalesces into an oligarchy that reintroduces the trappings of liberal democracy to placate the masses. As much as the American right loves to call the Democrats "radical leftists" or "socialists", the Democrats have nothing to offer in response to the people's suffering. The Republicans can at least lie through populism: claiming to be opposed to "the swamp" while installing their own loyalists and family members in positions of government, claiming to fight the "coastal elites" while implementing the whims of billionaires, claiming to defend "freedom of speech" while prohibiting government agencies from using progressive terminology, etc etc. But the Democrats can't even do this because at best they can offer half-measures or compromises. They couldn't even pass the Green New Deal and now the Trump government keeps referring to it as if it had actually been implemented. This isn't a uniquely American problem. The social democrats in Germany have recently come out in opposition to voting on initiating the process to investigate the far-right AfD party (which Elon Musk has been actively supporting btw, which is an unprecedent level of foreign influence) for qualifying for a trial to be banned as unconstitutional (i.e. roughly equivalent to proposing a grand jury with the outcome being a constitutional court trial being launched or not). Why? Because if they would participate in such a vote and support it, "all democratic parties" should support it but there's a good chance the conservative party would vote against or abstain and this would "hurt the democratic parties" by making them no longer unified in their opposition to the AfD - or that if the conservatives were to vote in favor, this might radicalise some of its supporters to vote for the AfD instead. Mind you, the conservative party has already repeatedly cooperated with the AfD and they have supported each others' proposals, although the conservative party is officially ruling out any potential coalition with them while incrementally adopting their rhetoric. The socdems are too concerned with protecting the optics of the system itself and maintaining decorum to directly attack a party that is fundamentally opposed to the principles underlying that system.
  - aredox 2y ago
    So fed up with the economy that they stopped talking about it immediatly after the election, even though no action had been taken. Because: A) It was all based on "vibes" and beliefs, not their own actual reality (the gap between "how well off are you personally" and "how do you think others are well off" was wild) B) Voters lie and the economy was, like in 2016, the fig leaf for the true driver: egoism and cruelty. If Trump's tarriffs destroy their wellbeing, there will be no outcry, because "the cruelty is the point", to the point of self-harm as long as "the others" are harmed even more.
  - woodpanel 2y ago
    Can you point to an exact policy or EO that constitutes fascism?
- greatgib 2y ago
  Also, you can't rule out the corruption-like part of the situation. When you have billions to communicate, and people like Musk have a full global network to brain wash his ideas, obviously a lot of people might be wrongly convinced that they elected the president that defend freedom and efficiency of the institutions to improve their life. Not realizing that Trump, Musk, are just selfish bastards defending these ideas but only for themselves.
- okthrowman283 2y ago
  [dead]
- blurbleblurble 2y ago
  1/3rd of the voting population
  - kennysoona 2y ago
    I meant voting population as in population of people that voted not population of people eligible and registered to vote.
- juanani 2y ago
  [dead]
kragen 2y ago
I don't think it's anywhere near that simple. Organizations are ongoing processes, constantly in flux, not structures erected in the past. Like a river, you can never step in the same organization twice. Like ghosts and money, they only exist in people's minds; they consist of belief in them, hyperstitiously. The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it. What is left for it to protect? The laws handed down from an older, wiser time? Perhaps the time of Senator McCarthy? Or Jim Crow? What if today's president pardons common criminals and today's Congress legalizes their crimes—will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws? You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy. Except the only thing that what makes them different from organized crime is also the shared belief in laws that form and direct them. > will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws? If they don't, i.e. if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not, the whole thing will unravel. Laws won't mean anything anymore, and then suddenly the president is just a random dude, the FBI is just a bunch of thugs with guns and suits, and USA is just words on a map. You don't want to go there.
  - nyc_data_geek1 2y ago
    >>openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not ah yes, the same way every major police department in the US has been functioning for most of living memory
  - msravi 2y ago
    > if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not They already did that under Biden.
  - kragen 2y ago
    I think you misinterpreted something in my note. Continuing to enforce yesterday's laws after Congress repeals them would not seem to me to be the opposite of "openly picking and choosing which laws are valid"; rather, it would be an even more extreme form of it, because you're no longer even just picking from the laws currently on the books!
gerash 2y ago
US institutions aka. bureaucracy isn't without its own issues. I believe that's why people voted in a rather unusual person like Trump whose main feature is being outside the establishment. It is the US institutions who have happily engaged in endless foreign wars over past several decades. They have also enacted low corporate taxation resulting in high stock prices but even larger wealth gap where few winners take all the profits.
- soco 2y ago
  Can you please explain how is Trump outside the establishment? Or rather, of which establishment is he outside?
bananapub 2y ago
I think you're underestimating the damage he's done and will do. semi-permanent changes: - complete radicalisation of an entire congressional party against functional democracy - complete politicisation of the entire federal government - normalisation of just straight up lying to the Senate in confirmation hearings (RFK on everything, Patel on q anon) - normalisation of just straight up lying during campaigns (no idea what Project 2025 is!) - making it clear to every single ally of the US that the US cannot be trusted to not be a complete cock - normalisation of pardoning thousands of criminals who did crimes on TV in your favour - normalisation of Congress and the top level courts being completely and utterly unwilling to lift a finger to stop autocratic exercise of powers by the president maybe the next president won't be a sociopath, but the above will still be true and maybe the one after will be.
- monkeyfun 2y ago
  The lying is the most incomprehensible to me. I actually had a conversation with a family member about RFK's lies (including lies about Bernie Sanders! Which everyone around seemingly tried to suppress him from defending himself on!). To give an example of what the process felt like with another case I made the mistake of talking about (makes a better story than just the pure lies of the rfk conversation, where said family member just lied constantly and started making things up about bernie sanders): - elon musk probably didn't do a nazi salute multiple times - and if he did it was misinterpreted - no i don't want to see the videos - and i don't care anyway For context btw, this family member literally had their grandparents suffer under nazi occupation in ww2. It's also wild that this family member has already actively been harmed by trump's policies including the forced RTO, and literally just ignores it. They just ignore painful examples when they're brought up, or claim it's all part of trump's plan and the only way it could possible have been done. Yes, as if it was just an inevitable occurrence like a natural disaster and thus not trump's fault.
  - moogly 2y ago
    The real mind-virus.
moogly 2y ago
It's already over. You'll have to rely on Canadians burning down the White House. I'm afraid there's no democratic solution to what you're enduring now.
- kragen 2y ago
  The US didn't have nukes when the Canadians did that. They can't win another war with the US. Even the UK only has US nukes and presumably can't fire them at the US. And Putin or Xi turning Washington into glass wouldn't bring it any closer to being the democracy that was finally lost nine years ago.
user3939382 2y ago
> authoritarian president Basically the analysis of anyone who already hated Trump and didn't vote for him. I see a lot of psuedo intellectual exercises in this thread that basically amount to trying to relitigate the election or sour grapes for having lost.

kennysoona 2y ago

> but the next four years will be the stress test of the strength of US institutions against an authoritarian president. As well as a stress test against half the voting population that thinks an authoritarian president is peachy and somehow patriotic.

whatever1 2y ago
Half of the voting population were so fed up with the economy that they went with the nuclear option. It’s just that most of them have not read history and none of them have lived through war or fascism to understand what they are signing up for. They will all learn their lesson.
- phinnaeus 2y ago
  I have strong doubts they will learn anything, if they were capable of that you could expect them to have learned it already.
  - whatever1 2y ago
    We have been told that if you fall head down from high altitude you will hit your self badly and probably die, but what if it is different this time around?
    - StefanBatory 2y ago
      "Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good… so far so good… How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!"
  - monksy 2y ago
    Take a look at r/conservative. They're claiming they got wins with the dismantling, the site tear downs, the "folds" in negotiation. They really think they're winning.
- blurbleblurble 2y ago
  It was one third of the voting population.
- hnbad 2y ago
  I think the problem is that most people think nothing ever happens, or to put it bluntly "It couldn't happen here". Harris literally offered nothing - when pressed she even said that she wouldn't have done anything different from Biden, which is the last thing you want to hear about a president whose only selling point was not being Trump and giving the country breathing room to come up with something better. Yes, the US recovered faster and stronger from COVID and the recession than the rest of the world but that doesn't change people's lived realities of living paycheck to paycheck with prices only ever going higher. People don't "learn their lesson". Accelerationism always fails. Suffering, fear and looming threats are what enable the rise of authoritarianism and autocracy, not what helps overcome them. Fascism is rarely overthrown by a popular revolt that establishes direct democracy and egalitarianism. It's usually overthrown by a military junta or gradually coalesces into an oligarchy that reintroduces the trappings of liberal democracy to placate the masses. As much as the American right loves to call the Democrats "radical leftists" or "socialists", the Democrats have nothing to offer in response to the people's suffering. The Republicans can at least lie through populism: claiming to be opposed to "the swamp" while installing their own loyalists and family members in positions of government, claiming to fight the "coastal elites" while implementing the whims of billionaires, claiming to defend "freedom of speech" while prohibiting government agencies from using progressive terminology, etc etc. But the Democrats can't even do this because at best they can offer half-measures or compromises. They couldn't even pass the Green New Deal and now the Trump government keeps referring to it as if it had actually been implemented. This isn't a uniquely American problem. The social democrats in Germany have recently come out in opposition to voting on initiating the process to investigate the far-right AfD party (which Elon Musk has been actively supporting btw, which is an unprecedent level of foreign influence) for qualifying for a trial to be banned as unconstitutional (i.e. roughly equivalent to proposing a grand jury with the outcome being a constitutional court trial being launched or not). Why? Because if they would participate in such a vote and support it, "all democratic parties" should support it but there's a good chance the conservative party would vote against or abstain and this would "hurt the democratic parties" by making them no longer unified in their opposition to the AfD - or that if the conservatives were to vote in favor, this might radicalise some of its supporters to vote for the AfD instead. Mind you, the conservative party has already repeatedly cooperated with the AfD and they have supported each others' proposals, although the conservative party is officially ruling out any potential coalition with them while incrementally adopting their rhetoric. The socdems are too concerned with protecting the optics of the system itself and maintaining decorum to directly attack a party that is fundamentally opposed to the principles underlying that system.
- aredox 2y ago
  So fed up with the economy that they stopped talking about it immediatly after the election, even though no action had been taken. Because: A) It was all based on "vibes" and beliefs, not their own actual reality (the gap between "how well off are you personally" and "how do you think others are well off" was wild) B) Voters lie and the economy was, like in 2016, the fig leaf for the true driver: egoism and cruelty. If Trump's tarriffs destroy their wellbeing, there will be no outcry, because "the cruelty is the point", to the point of self-harm as long as "the others" are harmed even more.
- woodpanel 2y ago
  Can you point to an exact policy or EO that constitutes fascism?
greatgib 2y ago
Also, you can't rule out the corruption-like part of the situation. When you have billions to communicate, and people like Musk have a full global network to brain wash his ideas, obviously a lot of people might be wrongly convinced that they elected the president that defend freedom and efficiency of the institutions to improve their life. Not realizing that Trump, Musk, are just selfish bastards defending these ideas but only for themselves.
okthrowman283 2y ago
[dead]
blurbleblurble 2y ago
1/3rd of the voting population
- kennysoona 2y ago
  I meant voting population as in population of people that voted not population of people eligible and registered to vote.
juanani 2y ago
[dead]

kragen 2y ago

I don't think it's anywhere near that simple. Organizations are ongoing processes, constantly in flux, not structures erected in the past. Like a river, you can never step in the same organization twice. Like ghosts and money, they only exist in people's minds; they consist of belief in them, hyperstitiously. The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it. What is left for it to protect? The laws handed down from an older, wiser time? Perhaps the time of Senator McCarthy? Or Jim Crow? What if today's president pardons common criminals and today's Congress legalizes their crimes—will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws? You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy. Except the only thing that what makes them different from organized crime is also the shared belief in laws that form and direct them. > will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws? If they don't, i.e. if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not, the whole thing will unravel. Laws won't mean anything anymore, and then suddenly the president is just a random dude, the FBI is just a bunch of thugs with guns and suits, and USA is just words on a map. You don't want to go there.
- nyc_data_geek1 2y ago
  >>openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not ah yes, the same way every major police department in the US has been functioning for most of living memory
- msravi 2y ago
  > if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not They already did that under Biden.
- kragen 2y ago
  I think you misinterpreted something in my note. Continuing to enforce yesterday's laws after Congress repeals them would not seem to me to be the opposite of "openly picking and choosing which laws are valid"; rather, it would be an even more extreme form of it, because you're no longer even just picking from the laws currently on the books!

gerash 2y ago

US institutions aka. bureaucracy isn't without its own issues. I believe that's why people voted in a rather unusual person like Trump whose main feature is being outside the establishment. It is the US institutions who have happily engaged in endless foreign wars over past several decades. They have also enacted low corporate taxation resulting in high stock prices but even larger wealth gap where few winners take all the profits.

soco 2y ago
Can you please explain how is Trump outside the establishment? Or rather, of which establishment is he outside?

bananapub 2y ago

I think you're underestimating the damage he's done and will do. semi-permanent changes: - complete radicalisation of an entire congressional party against functional democracy - complete politicisation of the entire federal government - normalisation of just straight up lying to the Senate in confirmation hearings (RFK on everything, Patel on q anon) - normalisation of just straight up lying during campaigns (no idea what Project 2025 is!) - making it clear to every single ally of the US that the US cannot be trusted to not be a complete cock - normalisation of pardoning thousands of criminals who did crimes on TV in your favour - normalisation of Congress and the top level courts being completely and utterly unwilling to lift a finger to stop autocratic exercise of powers by the president maybe the next president won't be a sociopath, but the above will still be true and maybe the one after will be.

monkeyfun 2y ago
The lying is the most incomprehensible to me. I actually had a conversation with a family member about RFK's lies (including lies about Bernie Sanders! Which everyone around seemingly tried to suppress him from defending himself on!). To give an example of what the process felt like with another case I made the mistake of talking about (makes a better story than just the pure lies of the rfk conversation, where said family member just lied constantly and started making things up about bernie sanders): - elon musk probably didn't do a nazi salute multiple times - and if he did it was misinterpreted - no i don't want to see the videos - and i don't care anyway For context btw, this family member literally had their grandparents suffer under nazi occupation in ww2. It's also wild that this family member has already actively been harmed by trump's policies including the forced RTO, and literally just ignores it. They just ignore painful examples when they're brought up, or claim it's all part of trump's plan and the only way it could possible have been done. Yes, as if it was just an inevitable occurrence like a natural disaster and thus not trump's fault.
- moogly 2y ago
  The real mind-virus.

moogly 2y ago

It's already over. You'll have to rely on Canadians burning down the White House. I'm afraid there's no democratic solution to what you're enduring now.

kragen 2y ago
The US didn't have nukes when the Canadians did that. They can't win another war with the US. Even the UK only has US nukes and presumably can't fire them at the US. And Putin or Xi turning Washington into glass wouldn't bring it any closer to being the democracy that was finally lost nine years ago.

user3939382 2y ago

> authoritarian president Basically the analysis of anyone who already hated Trump and didn't vote for him. I see a lot of psuedo intellectual exercises in this thread that basically amount to trying to relitigate the election or sour grapes for having lost.