4 ms·

> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy. This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a de

> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy. This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles. I had to laugh when I read a title on the Washington Post today, "President Trump faced a wall of opposition from Senate G.O.P. lawmakers, in part over his plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to reward his allies", with of all people Susan Collins in the header image. Lol, I'm sure she'll release a statement saying how she's "very concerned" and end up doing nothing anyway.

epistasis 5mo ago
The primary system means that nobody with any principles is left in the Republican Party, unfortunately. But not all is lost. Many are very eager for the reins of power to come back and for laws to be enforced. Sure, the Trump regime may tell itself that it's immune from tax audits ever again, but that's not legal and as soon as the force of law is back there are many eager attorneys with high principles that will be hired back into the DoJ and enforce the law. We saw this after Nixon's lawlessness too. Those who abetted Nixon in breaking the law were disbarred. Prosecutions will come. Trumps's key mistake is thinking that his popularity doesn't matter anymore. It does. It means that people with morals and ethics can legally gain power and legally enforce the law. If Trump was at 60% popularity, I would be singing a different tune. But at 35% popularity and 60% unfavorable, there is appetite left in our democracy to remain a democracy and to go after the crooks. Even if a good 30% of that unfavorable opinion is just about people's own pocketbooks rather than the principles of law and democracy, that's enough for those who care to actually enforce law. Be concerned, but be ready tk supppprt those who will correct the course of our ship.
- dividedbyzero 5mo ago
  I wonder, is there an appetite left to remain a democracy, or more like an appetite for an autocrat who pays a little more attention to the façade and doesn't go out of his way to offend even his most loyal followers?
  - jfengel 5mo ago
    Right now, there is a lot of support for candidates who do go out of their way to offend even their most loyal followers. They like the offense, even if it occasionally hurts their own feelings, because it hurts other people more. Politicians have long understood that it's easier to get elected by being fearful of their opponents than with your own merits. We've just taken the next logical step: actively attacking them, in words and with restrictive actions. It hasn't yet proceeded to violence, for the most part, but that's only because people still haven't gotten bored with this level of harassment.
- jfengel 5mo ago
  I wish I could share your optimism. But just because a voter has an unfavorable opinion, it doesn't mean that they won't vote for them. Many will choose "the lesser of two evils", and the current administration has devoted a lot of effort to convincing supporters that their opponents are even worse. The President is not in fact on the ballot this year, and quite a few will say "I don't like the President, but I like the local Republican candidate more than the local Democratic candidate". Except that the President should be on the ballot: the only serious question facing Congress is whether they will support his policies or take measures to oppose them. That's going to happen exclusively along party lines. Nothing else that either candidate promises actually matters. It's all made worse by efforts to put a thumb on the scale. That, above all else, makes this feel like the last chance we'll have to fix this. I'm going to hold out hope that we'll take it.
jfengel 5mo ago
how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this. We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so. We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.
- amelius 5mo ago
  It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.
  - ipaddr 5mo ago
    Social media is allowing both views and the against is winning. But the mainstream media is under the thumb of fcc and too afraid to challenge so they keep neutral (or like Fox is a cheerleading) and that's where the disinformation is coming from.
    - Pay08 5mo ago
      No? In what world is there a government agency in the USA that prosecutes anti-Trump journalists? That's most of them, ffs. This is just conspiratorial bullshit not at all based in reality.
      - macintux 5mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_attacks_on_journalists_during_the_Trump_presidencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_attacks_on_journali...
      - IX-103 5mo ago
kergonath 5mo ago
> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles. I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this government was voted in, partly because of a toxic and polarised culture that sees compromise and consensus as weaknesses (and gerrymandering, and the electoral college, and disenfranchisement, fair enough), but also partly because a lot of people did not bother showing up. Republicans have had a grassroots strategy for decades, where they seized everything they could get, even very modest positions. That’s how they progressively ended up redrawing maps and steering politics at the state or county level. You need a long term plan and a good strategy to counter this. So don’t give up (I beg you, from the other side of the Atlantic). Even if things are bad now, they can get better tomorrow.
- randcraw 5mo ago
  I think you would most certainly NOT prefer any Constitution, nor especially any Bill of Rights, that was rewritten by today's version of "We the People".
- shevy-java 5mo ago
  I don't think they can get rid of the constitution. It would require a near total control of all judges right now and I don't think they have that. What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.
  - auggierose 5mo ago
    Happened before, for example in Germany. Not sure "fascinating" is the word I'd choose.
    - Pay08 5mo ago
elzbardico 5mo ago
Sometimes you have to die to get back stronger. Ask the chinese.
- idiotsecant 5mo ago
  I'm not sure that works for democracy. Autocracy is basically the default human state. All it takes to build it back up is a sufficiently powerful faction. Democracy is relatively fragile by comparison and requires more specific initial conditions - I would make the argument that democracies are the lower entropy condition.
  - elzbardico 5mo ago
    Ask the Germans what happens when a democracy degenerates.
    - idiotsecant 5mo ago
      That's a good example. The west forced reconstruction of German democracy. If the Nazi state had been less aggressive it might have still been around today as a North Korea style autocratic state.
UncleOxidant 5mo ago
> it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Jimmy Carter's funeral a few days before Trump was inaugurated really felt like the funeral for America. The moral gulf between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump is just so vast. To imagine that the US elected someone with the integrity of Jimmy Carter in 1976... and then elected someone who is as morally bankrupt as Trump is in 2024. > there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles. Indeed. Well said. I doubt we'll ever see the likes of a Carter again in the Whitehouse.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
  But why was Carter elected? Partly it was disgust at Watergate. Could we see someone of integrity elected as a result of a backlash of disgust at Trump? Yes, we could. Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.
  - lazide 5mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidentia... Carter won basically because Ford pardoned Nixon.
- idiotsecant 5mo ago
  Carter was basically the prototypical example of a politician whose good intentions eclipsed their ability to govern. You need to be a little bit of a high functioning sociopath to be an effective leader. The key is properly controlling those high functioning sociopaths by training them that doing good things is in their best interests.
  - epistasis 5mo ago
    Say what you will about Carter, he kept the Strait of Hormuz open through his strength. He governed well. It was inflation that did him in, not his governance. Trump maganed to hand the Stair of Hormuz over to Iran, and instigate massive inflation personally. The US is laughed at or ignored or treated as a problem on the world stage now, rather than being the leader. However, the more sociopathic in society see Trump as strong, for some weird reason, and Carter as weak, for some weird reason. Very strange.
jrmg 5mo ago
And the ‘wall of opposition’ was ‘we won’t vote right now because if we do we might vote to stop this!’. But we need to believe that the USA can come back. The spoils system was eliminated once before. Slavery was eliminated. The USA ‘came back’ from Jim Crow and segregation. From Japanese internment. From the Gilded Age. From the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. From a civil war. Our modern mistake was assuming that anything is ever truly eliminated without constant effort.
- stevenwoo 5mo ago
  I would argue we had a few good years of Reconstruction before President Johnson put an end to it and it took a century for this country to partially rectify this with a few constitutional amendments and Supreme Court decisions(that were cursed by not having time limits) and those changes have been chipped away again so we are close to returning to a pre Civil Rights era federal government similar to Woodrow Wilson except the guys who would be in the KKK are now federal law enforcement in Homeland Security and the Justice Department is trying to equate anti fascism with terrorism. I would agree that democracy requires a constant fight against but my impression is our education system/news media presents government as done deal and “we have democracy and we don’t have to worry about it” and most Americans are too complacent and politically detached - A third of Americans not voting during presidential elections.

epistasis 5mo ago

The primary system means that nobody with any principles is left in the Republican Party, unfortunately. But not all is lost. Many are very eager for the reins of power to come back and for laws to be enforced. Sure, the Trump regime may tell itself that it's immune from tax audits ever again, but that's not legal and as soon as the force of law is back there are many eager attorneys with high principles that will be hired back into the DoJ and enforce the law. We saw this after Nixon's lawlessness too. Those who abetted Nixon in breaking the law were disbarred. Prosecutions will come. Trumps's key mistake is thinking that his popularity doesn't matter anymore. It does. It means that people with morals and ethics can legally gain power and legally enforce the law. If Trump was at 60% popularity, I would be singing a different tune. But at 35% popularity and 60% unfavorable, there is appetite left in our democracy to remain a democracy and to go after the crooks. Even if a good 30% of that unfavorable opinion is just about people's own pocketbooks rather than the principles of law and democracy, that's enough for those who care to actually enforce law. Be concerned, but be ready tk supppprt those who will correct the course of our ship.

dividedbyzero 5mo ago
I wonder, is there an appetite left to remain a democracy, or more like an appetite for an autocrat who pays a little more attention to the façade and doesn't go out of his way to offend even his most loyal followers?
- jfengel 5mo ago
  Right now, there is a lot of support for candidates who do go out of their way to offend even their most loyal followers. They like the offense, even if it occasionally hurts their own feelings, because it hurts other people more. Politicians have long understood that it's easier to get elected by being fearful of their opponents than with your own merits. We've just taken the next logical step: actively attacking them, in words and with restrictive actions. It hasn't yet proceeded to violence, for the most part, but that's only because people still haven't gotten bored with this level of harassment.
jfengel 5mo ago
I wish I could share your optimism. But just because a voter has an unfavorable opinion, it doesn't mean that they won't vote for them. Many will choose "the lesser of two evils", and the current administration has devoted a lot of effort to convincing supporters that their opponents are even worse. The President is not in fact on the ballot this year, and quite a few will say "I don't like the President, but I like the local Republican candidate more than the local Democratic candidate". Except that the President should be on the ballot: the only serious question facing Congress is whether they will support his policies or take measures to oppose them. That's going to happen exclusively along party lines. Nothing else that either candidate promises actually matters. It's all made worse by efforts to put a thumb on the scale. That, above all else, makes this feel like the last chance we'll have to fix this. I'm going to hold out hope that we'll take it.

jfengel 5mo ago

how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this. We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so. We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.

amelius 5mo ago
It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.
- ipaddr 5mo ago
  Social media is allowing both views and the against is winning. But the mainstream media is under the thumb of fcc and too afraid to challenge so they keep neutral (or like Fox is a cheerleading) and that's where the disinformation is coming from.
  - Pay08 5mo ago
    No? In what world is there a government agency in the USA that prosecutes anti-Trump journalists? That's most of them, ffs. This is just conspiratorial bullshit not at all based in reality.
    - macintux 5mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_attacks_on_journalists_during_the_Trump_presidencies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_attacks_on_journali...
    - IX-103 5mo ago

kergonath 5mo ago

> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles. I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this government was voted in, partly because of a toxic and polarised culture that sees compromise and consensus as weaknesses (and gerrymandering, and the electoral college, and disenfranchisement, fair enough), but also partly because a lot of people did not bother showing up. Republicans have had a grassroots strategy for decades, where they seized everything they could get, even very modest positions. That’s how they progressively ended up redrawing maps and steering politics at the state or county level. You need a long term plan and a good strategy to counter this. So don’t give up (I beg you, from the other side of the Atlantic). Even if things are bad now, they can get better tomorrow.

randcraw 5mo ago
I think you would most certainly NOT prefer any Constitution, nor especially any Bill of Rights, that was rewritten by today's version of "We the People".
shevy-java 5mo ago
I don't think they can get rid of the constitution. It would require a near total control of all judges right now and I don't think they have that. What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.
- auggierose 5mo ago
  Happened before, for example in Germany. Not sure "fascinating" is the word I'd choose.
  - Pay08 5mo ago

elzbardico 5mo ago

Sometimes you have to die to get back stronger. Ask the chinese.

idiotsecant 5mo ago
I'm not sure that works for democracy. Autocracy is basically the default human state. All it takes to build it back up is a sufficiently powerful faction. Democracy is relatively fragile by comparison and requires more specific initial conditions - I would make the argument that democracies are the lower entropy condition.
- elzbardico 5mo ago
  Ask the Germans what happens when a democracy degenerates.
  - idiotsecant 5mo ago
    That's a good example. The west forced reconstruction of German democracy. If the Nazi state had been less aggressive it might have still been around today as a North Korea style autocratic state.

UncleOxidant 5mo ago

> it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Jimmy Carter's funeral a few days before Trump was inaugurated really felt like the funeral for America. The moral gulf between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump is just so vast. To imagine that the US elected someone with the integrity of Jimmy Carter in 1976... and then elected someone who is as morally bankrupt as Trump is in 2024. > there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles. Indeed. Well said. I doubt we'll ever see the likes of a Carter again in the Whitehouse.

AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
But why was Carter elected? Partly it was disgust at Watergate. Could we see someone of integrity elected as a result of a backlash of disgust at Trump? Yes, we could. Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.
- lazide 5mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidentia... Carter won basically because Ford pardoned Nixon.
idiotsecant 5mo ago
Carter was basically the prototypical example of a politician whose good intentions eclipsed their ability to govern. You need to be a little bit of a high functioning sociopath to be an effective leader. The key is properly controlling those high functioning sociopaths by training them that doing good things is in their best interests.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  Say what you will about Carter, he kept the Strait of Hormuz open through his strength. He governed well. It was inflation that did him in, not his governance. Trump maganed to hand the Stair of Hormuz over to Iran, and instigate massive inflation personally. The US is laughed at or ignored or treated as a problem on the world stage now, rather than being the leader. However, the more sociopathic in society see Trump as strong, for some weird reason, and Carter as weak, for some weird reason. Very strange.

jrmg 5mo ago

And the ‘wall of opposition’ was ‘we won’t vote right now because if we do we might vote to stop this!’. But we need to believe that the USA can come back. The spoils system was eliminated once before. Slavery was eliminated. The USA ‘came back’ from Jim Crow and segregation. From Japanese internment. From the Gilded Age. From the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. From a civil war. Our modern mistake was assuming that anything is ever truly eliminated without constant effort.

stevenwoo 5mo ago
I would argue we had a few good years of Reconstruction before President Johnson put an end to it and it took a century for this country to partially rectify this with a few constitutional amendments and Supreme Court decisions(that were cursed by not having time limits) and those changes have been chipped away again so we are close to returning to a pre Civil Rights era federal government similar to Woodrow Wilson except the guys who would be in the KKK are now federal law enforcement in Homeland Security and the Justice Department is trying to equate anti fascism with terrorism. I would agree that democracy requires a constant fight against but my impression is our education system/news media presents government as done deal and “we have democracy and we don’t have to worry about it” and most Americans are too complacent and politically detached - A third of Americans not voting during presidential elections.