6 ms·

Wake up. Things are different this time in case you haven’t noticed

• nostrademons 7mo ago
  They may be, but if there are no elections, there is no United States. Constitutionally, its government is predicated on having elected representatives. I could see Trump trying this, but I also can see dozens of other people or groups, some richer, more powerful, more competent, and more ruthless than Trump, just waiting in the wings for the guardrails to come off to make a play to rule the territory of the former United States. If he tries and succeeds at this it's open-season. It's not a Trump dictatorship, it's a civil war, akin to the Chinese Civil War after the emperor fell or the Syrian civil war after the Arab Spring.
• margalabargala 7mo ago
  Yes, of course they are different. We're not embroiled in an active Civil War with tens of thousands dead and a third of the country having seceded. Most things are different from that.
• malfist 7mo ago
  Things are absolutely different, but there is no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections.
  • hypeatei 7mo ago
    > no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"
    • isthatafact 7mo ago
      I agree. Stability of a system is not so much about whether there is some mechanism or force that wants to push it away from equilibrium (because there probably is some such perturber outside of a perfectly controlled environment), but stability is more about whether there exists a stabilizing mechanism to bring the system back toward equilibrium after it starts to deviate.