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Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?
by andsoitis 11mo ago
Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?
- idle_zealot 11mo agoIt's not so simple a binary. We're definitely much less democratic than a year ago, and the bar was low then.
- sneak 11mo agoI’m still always surprised that there are adults who think it is not. The CIA, for example, is entirely above the law.
- neutronicus 11mo agoThat's different from a dictatorship, though, especially if the CIA is not answerable to a supposed dictator.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> That's different from a dictatorship, Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA, unless the CIA is effectively answerable to some other authority despite not being answerable to the law, and then it is equivalent to a dictatorship by that higher authority.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA No it's not. I can commit all manner of illegal acts in my home unnoticed, that doesn't make me a dictator.
- sneak 11mo agoThe CIA ran torture prisons, got caught, then there was a congressional inquiry, and they hacked into the computers of the congresspeople to delete the evidence of torture. Then they got caught hacking congressional computers to delete evidence. Nothing happened to them. They are above the law. You are not.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> CIA ran torture prisons, got caught, then there was a congressional inquiry, and they hacked into the computers of the congresspeople to delete the evidence of torture One, source? Two, this above reproach. Not above the law. They deleted the evidence, they didn't just blow the scandal off. (Historically, our IC was popular. Right now, it's the deep state. You're seeing political appointees at the FBI and CIA exert control.)
- dragonwriter 11mo agoYes, and if the hypothetical were that the CIA was effectively outside of control of the law for actions committed in private by CIA personnel in their homes, then the conclusion would be different (even though an agency the scale of the CIA would still have different implications than an individual even then), but that wasn't the hypothetical under discussion, which had much fewer—as in zero—qualifications on the CIA’s lack of accountability. Analogies don't work when they aren't analogous.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> if the hypothetical were that the CIA was effectively outside of control of the law for actions committed in private by CIA personnel in their homes My point is their actions are committed outside the law. They've just been able to avoid punishment by covering it up. What they are not is above the law, at least not in the long run. (There are absolutely short bouts where the CIA acts above the law overseas, and rare cases where it has done so domestically. But the fact that they're covering it up betrays that they're crafty bastards, not invincible ones.)
- neutronicus 11mo agoThe CIA can’t rule by edict. Being above the law is necessary but not sufficient to be a dictator. We also don’t know enough about the internal politics of the CIA to assert much about the head of the CIA.
- fuzzfactor 11mo agoFrom what I gather, it's so tight that when a clandestine company has served its purpose and winds down, anybody who managed to become a shareholder gets to cash out. Anything else could blow the cover for next time.
- bdangubic 11mo agowhat is the US exactly currently if not dictatorship? is there a single thing “President” cannot do right now and if so who would be stopping him? so perhaps on paper US is not dictatorship much like Russia and China are not… We spend decades trying to fight these regimes and lost so much that now we are worse than them :)
- chocoboaus3 11mo agoThe supreme court did just stop him for the moment putting the national guard into chicago
- bdangubic 11mo agobookmark this for a few days and then come back to it… the story is “… for now” :-)
- jibal 11mo ago"rare setback"
- bdangubic 11mo agoit is not a setback, they have to play a little game now and again to entertain the masses. scotus as it was before doesn’t exist anymore and won’t for decades, it now just rubberstamps
- jibal 11mo agoI quoted the media. The main point in this context is the "rare" part. I'm well aware of the nature of the GOP operatives on the SCOTUS. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch all voted in Trump's favor. That Beerhead, Ms. IDreamOfGilead, and "Citizens United/I hate the VRA/worst chief justice since Taney" voted to temporarily uphold the stay actually surprised me (Bart O' said he would have given Trump more leeway) but yes, it's theater.
- hattmall 11mo ago
- Loughla 11mo agoI truly believe we're headed that direction. I've lived long enough to have seen a wide variety of presidents, both good and bad. This one is easily the worst one, in terms of bare naked power grabs. I believe Trump will manufacture a crisis before he's out of office in a bid to maintain control. I believe he will have learned from Bush Jr. that a simple war isn't good enough, and it needs to be a genuine emergency. I believe he'll do whatever he can to make that happen. Native born terrorist, or war with a close country, or absolutely over the top financial crash. Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval - he'll just skip the congressional approval part like he already does.
- irishcoffee 11mo agoThis is one of those instances where I with hn had some kind of remindMe feature.
- quesera 11mo ago> Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval There is literally no such obscure rule, and a new Congress will be seated two weeks before the 2029 Presidential Inauguration. Elections, and the compulsory ends of terms, inauguration of new Congresses, etc, happen on schedule without regard to any exceptional cases, including Civil War. If he can get a majority of the Electoral College for a third term, and a majority in both houses of Congress in 2028, then things get much more complicated. But there is no other path. Elections matter, and don't let anyone discourage you from believing that they don't matter enough to vote.
- vkou 11mo agoHow would the roadmap for turning a democracy into a one party dictatorship differ from the trajectory we are on?
- rurban 11mo agoWhich democracy? The USA isn't one for decades already
- vkou 11mo agoI've no doubt that if we plopped you down in the middle of, say, modern-day Russia, you'd be able to observe a few important differences in the political organization of the two countries. Fewer than you would a year or nine ago, certainly, and a lot of people are working very hard on closing the gap. Democracy is a spectrum. There have always been significant flaws with American democracy, but you'd be mad to not observe significant, active regression and effort by the government to replace it with something else.
- rurban 11mo agoUnfortunately this is unrealistic as we cannot travel to both countries easily.
- vunderba 11mo agoI wouldn’t go so far as to call it a dictatorship, but it’s definitely trending toward authoritarianism. Wasn't too hard to put together a quick graph of the past decade for the U.S. using the World Press Freedom Index (relative ranking and score) - an annual ranking of 180 countries published by Reporters Without Borders that measures the level of press freedom. https://imgur.com/a/4liEqqi https://imgur.com/a/4liEqqi
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ourmandave 11mo agoThe pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition. If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
- refurb 11mo agoYou act like Trump’s policies don’t have broad support with a majority of voters.
- ourmandave 11mo agoPolls can be capricious, but Trump's recent numbers with some groups have seen big drops.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- DANmode 11mo agoTell us more about the sane (“common sense”?) gun laws! I love these.
- cyberax 11mo agoI'd love to limit the semi-auto rifles like the infamous AR-15. Useless for hunting, useless for self-defense. In exchange for country-wide reciprocity for concealed carry and firearm transportation.
- pppppiiiiiuuuuu 11mo ago> Useless for hunting, useless for self-defense. I'm not a 1A guy, I think that for instance people with a history of domestic violence shouldn't be armed (that is what I would cite as "common sense"), but this statement really damages your credibility. Of course semiautomatic rifles are useful for both hunting and for self defense. They are effective weapons. That's the problem.
- rootusrootus 11mo agoThe country as a whole, no. But within the regime? Yeah.
- culi 11mo agoA man who tried to overturn an election is in power and is disappearing people on the streets without due process. The other day there was news about some ICE members who blew up the door to a family's home in order to detain a man. The man was a citizen. They knew that. They came to intimidate him because a few days earlier he tried filming their cars on a public street. That's just one example but these cases are only becoming more common. One thing that's clear is that if he tries to overturn an election again, he is way better positioned to succeed this time. ICE is now the 5th most heavily funded military in the world and the whole point of DOGE[0] was to centralize the government and fill only with loyalists. [0] NYT investigation recently proved there were little savings https://archive.ph/y5guv https://archive.ph/y5guv
- andsoitis 11mo ago> disappearing people on the streets without due process. Undocumented immigrants can be detained and deported by the U.S. government but they are still legally entitled to due process. What is happening is aggressive enforcement and detention that can feel like “disappearing,” but it is not the same thing as extrajudicial abduction in the legal sense. When people use the word "disappeared" they usually mean families temporarily can't find someone after detention, detainees are transferred far aways, no lawyer automatically assigned, communication is difficult, deportation happens very quickly. While this is real harm, it is not the same phenomenon as disappearance under international law. The U.S. is aggressively detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants under civil law, sometimes with minimal process and poor transparency — but not through secret, extrajudicial disappearances. Due process is thinner than for citizens, enforcement can be opaque and traumatic, but this is not the same as "vanished" outside the legal system.