Yeah pretty much. We’re 2-3 generations deep into a cultural expectation that “some one else” will deal with all these problems.
The constant threat of this being “the most important election of our lives”, when the party making that argument campaigned as if the outcomes were irrelevant (because from their privileged perspective, the outcomes are irrelevant).
Back during covid a boat got turned a bit sideways in a canal and it seemed like the whole world economy was going to collapse. The system we have is actually incredibly fragile and built largely on trust, both in one another but also in institutions and systems. Not only the US, but western Europe is about to get smacked up-side the head by the 2x4 of failing to maintain a civil society (US at fault within its borders, EU at fault beyond its borders).
So i agree that the second Trump administration is going to suck in most every way possible, like the first one but worse because they’re prepared this time.
BUT
I think people overrate a government’s ability to influence the conditions in a given country. I think a country is made what it is by history, geography, technology, sociology, ideology, economics, and the accumulation of small decisions over centuries.
If the Trump administration wants to end democracy in the US, or if a hypothetical based administration were to attempt a switch to ranked choice voting, both ideals would be impossible to implement because our ideals are limited by practical reality. Both would fail regardless of being good or bad changes, because radical change is really hard when the conditions aren’t met for it, especially when it’s opposed by the rest of the country. If the country just isn’t ready to transition to fascism right now, there’s not much that Trump can do to make it.
We talk a lot about how powerful people changed the world, but i think far more often they’re just the embodiment of a societal trend, and they couldn’t change the world if they weren’t. Change isn’t done by powerful people but deeper movements in humanity, with powerful people riding them like a wave.
As to where the deeper movements in humanity are leading us right now, i refuse to guess, trying to predict the future is the best way to look like an idiot
or if a hypothetical based administration were to attempt a switch to ranked choice voting
There are states that have already passed electoral reform. Voting is controlled at the state level, so waiting for miraculous federal reform is unnecessary.
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It’s unlikely.
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That’s hard to impossible to answer in the moment but easier for historians to determine in retrospect.
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I was as surprised and disappointed as anyone, and I think we WILL take a few more steps backwards over the next few years, but I don’t expect an unstoppable fall into fascism.
Most of the votes for Trump weren’t actually FOR Trump. They were against the current situation they are in. They see him as the revolution. The anti-politician that will bring real change. They think all his court battles are the “Man” trying to hold him down and keep him from disrupting a system that gave up on its people long ago.
Of course that’s all bullshit, but, assuming that all “normal” people can see through his lies and that only evil, woman hating racists would support him, is a big part of why he was elected.
Trump denied Project 2025 because he knew most people wouldn’t want it. (Honestly, I would be surprised if he even knew what was in it) If he lets the Christian nationalists push that whole agenda on day one, he’ll become the oppressive government that is taking away their freedoms. And nothing is more important to Trump than making Trump look good.
I’m way more concerned with Vance. Like you say, Trump does what’s best for Trump. If Vance becomes VP for whatever reason then ideology takes center stage.
Progress isn’t a straight line, and sometimes there are setbacks on the way. I’m disappointed, of course, but I’m optimistic that we’ll manage.
And progress without testing it’s resiliency against malicious actors will not last. As much as we hate Trump being elected and staffing clowns in each position, it will test what has been made so far. Row v. Wade, as we now know, should have been stronger. The Voting Rights Act too. The states that required the law to be fair have pulled back the law and reveal little has changed.
No one likes getting burned but fire is useful for showing us what burns easily and what withstands the heat. We will rebuild stronger and know what works.
We may yet manage as a country, but the millions that die from this election won’t get to see it.
millions who die
how so?
Women. Queer people. Non-white people. Hell, even white straight cis evangelical Christian rich men who die from being sick.
There will be so much death.
It will be unending.
That does not clarify anything.
How about the fact drill baby drill means seeing a 3 degree Celsius increase by 2100. That’s the lifetime of many of the people in this earth. That kind of change will kill many ecosystems and make deserts out of a lot where we live and grow food. We know we can’t stop going past 1.5 degrees now do to our slow changes. Instead we are hitting the gas pedal according to Trump. The oceans, plantlife on land, everything that consumes it is in jeopardy. Estimates are around 60% of animal populations have died off since the 70s. At some point you break the link in the food “chain” if you will, and larger masses die off, until it is unrecoverable.
“We can farm fish”. <- We farm fish in the U.S. ship it to China to package and then ship it back to put it on our shelves. That’s how wasteful we are.
Right.
You don’t believe the animals are dying? Or that the temperature is rising, or that the oil companies research who agree are telling the truth? Exxon has been telling us this since the 1970s.
I’m not about to provide you with masturbation material.
It doesn’t clarify anything because so far I’ve been told
- People are going to die (I asked why)
- Those people are minorities (which doesn’t say why they would die)
I love how you have downvotes for asking for clarification. As if asking for it is an argument deserving of downvotes.
A fellow Lemmit who enjoys split score totals!
I’m not sure I’ll be here for long if it’s just more groupthink similar to reddit. I like how Tildes works though. Everyone seems nicer too.
Tildes?
Soldiers knocking down doors to arrest millions of illegal aliens and everyone who looks like an illegal alien and shoving them into camps, what could go wrong?
Hm. Okay.
I don’t think we will see that, but i do think we will see ice raids on businesses that tend to hire immigrants and fake crackdowns on paperwork that dramatically increases the time and hassle for everything, and weird pushes for all paperwork to be in English.
It is literally what they’re promising.
Yeah, but so was build a wall. I really think/hope that there’s too much infighting and shitslinging for them to follow through on much. They’re good at blocking thanks, but not super great at passing things. Concepts of plans and all…
Their wishes and promises are not the only thing involved here.
I think that the us perspective on politics is surprising self-centered. If millions will die remains to be seen, but an unpredictable us leadership will certainly shift power dynamics on an international scale. The trump administration might randomly decide to side with land grabbing dictators, might embolden Israel, or switch to Doge Coin as the main currency. Those things might not directly cause death, but will disrupt the world stage to a degree which might overpower currently stable institutions. Which in turn might lead to death and suffering as a consequence. I’m not trying to say that everything should remain as is. Things are awful in a lot of places, but one of the biggest and most powerful nations with a “leader” that might throw a world ending tantrum over a Twitter thread is nothing anybody, but the most nihilistic acclerationists want. Also Trump’s plans to withdraw from climate change mitigation will certainly add to the pile of dead bodies which we will inherit in the next 50 year as a consequence of our actions today.
The US has had presidents who were literally more evil than Mr. Burns.
They haven’t been a real democracy (where the will of the majority influences policy) in decades, if ever.Climate change is still the thing that’s most likely to fuck us all, and it’s not like the US were actually helpful in that regard under Democratic leadership.
I think the real answer is that we end up kind of like the UK – going from the worlds ultra-dominant superpower to a sort of slow regression to the mean, as China, India and others take the spotlight.
When you look at what China is doing with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their move to dominate the transportation infrastructure of developing nations – the US isn’t anywhere near equipped to counter that. We’re still in a cold war mentality thinking that we will dominate as the world’s police force.
Meanwhile, all the actual economies will be run by Chinese companies operating with state support.
Did Britain or Rome know the moments when Pax Britannia or Pax Romana had hit their tipping point to decline? I doubt it.
I think the tipping point will only be observable through the lens of history many years from now with a subject heading of: This event was the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.
The exact point will be the advent of the internet.
USA was still very much on the rise at the advent of the internet. If you define the advent of the internet to be Arpanet, then that was 1969, the same year the USA landed on the moon. If you define the advent of the internet to be the first use of the World Wide Web that would be 1989 the same year the Berlin wall came down and 3 years before the Soviet Union collapsed, which was arguably the most powerful the USA has ever been as it was before China’s rise.
Nobody can predict the future. That being said, I am no longer optimistic.
Not really. Not to be dismissive of the harms of a 2nd term trump.
But you have to understand what American history has been.
People were literally enslaved in the early days, then the country was literally at war with itself over slavery. Then Jim Crow and Segregation. Black people were lynched. White mobs would kill black people.
Chinese people were targeted by the Chinese Exclusion Act and banned from entry, some were US Citizens too and they weren’t except either.
The US had a major economic crash in 1929. Got into 2 world wars. American Citizens of Japanese ancestry were literally arrested and held in camps because of their ancestry. Went through cols war, the red scare, mccathyism. People randomly getting accused of being “communists” and arrested. Unions get cracked down. Protests were brutally suppressed, more violently than in modern day. Black people protesting for their rights and took a bus down south got burned. Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. literally got assassinated.
That is the American history.
And here we are, through such a shitty history, democracy survived, and voting rights expanded to so many people. First to Black people, then to Women.
Back then a majority of the population supported segregation, institutionalized racism. But today, a majority of people are okay with interracial marriage.
I have high hopes we can survive another trump term.
It won’t be pleasent, but we’ll survive.
On the other hand, do keep in mind that mighty empires have fallen. We cannot say for sure that things will be fine just because in the past the USA has survived
The part about our history you’re forgetting is that we never, through any of that, gleefully elected a guy that has made it abundantly clear he doesn’t give a fuck about democracy and will work to subvert or destroy it if it doesn’t suit him.
This is new territory.
And we’re about to experience the deconstruction of things that will be very difficult to build back.
Your point is that we’ve been around for a few hundred years, so we can bounce back. But history would like to point out that nations that were around much longer than us have ceased to exist many times over.
I wish I had your optimism.
I share your broader view and cautious optimism. In fact I think that some of what we are seeing are death spasms of that white hegemony that used to lynch blacks at will. They lost their “hard” power long ago with the end of Jim Crow. And they have been losing their “soft” power ever since. Demographic trends point to white people in America eventually becoming a minority. Religion is also dying out. So much of what we see is a panic of a dying group that was once dominant. There is no way that’s ever going to be pretty, anywhere, at any time. But look at the trend behind it and it’s an encouraging one, even if the death spasms are incredibly difficult. TBH if the Democrats could just provide some real leadership into this future, America could flip into a totally different country, much like the liberal democracies of Europe (but way stronger) inside of 20 years. This is the reality that the old guard are scared shitless of, and why they are pulling out all the stops to go the other way.
I think the problem here is the concurrent effects of climate change. The US couldn’t have picked a worse time to move from flirting with facism to full-on marrying it.
You can deal with one crisis if you’re coordinated enough but the chaos that’s already occurring with the climate - and is set to become exponentially worse - doesn’t give me much hope for a harmonious conclusion to this. Obviously, I hope I’m wrong and you’re right.
democracy survived
LMAO!!
Choosing between two candidate picked by lobbyists/corporations, and anyone else not having a slightest chance in hell isn’t a democracy, but hey, you do you.
It’s slightly better than China/Russia having a single candidate and everyone else is just for show.
It is a democracy.
Not a good type, but still a democracy.
Remember, Democracy and Autocracy isnt binary states of its either a Full Totalitarian Regime or a Full Direct Flawless Democracy.
There’s a sliding scale in between.
We don’t just go from Monarchies to a perfect Utopian Flawless Democratic system overnight. Change is incremental.
I do agree with the sentiment that 2 party system isn’t really a good idea, that very much need to be changed.
But its not like the constitution says “The United States shall be a 2-party system”, its an emergent property of First-Past-The-Post electoral systems. But unfortunately, human brains always look for the first thing they think of, I mean “Most Votes Win” sounds simple right. People never thought about the fact that “Most” doesn’t mean majority, but by the time people realize, its too late, people go too used to it.
But its still a democracy, a very very flawed democracy. But if you argue that First-Past-The-Post isn’t a democracy, then most of the world are living in dictatorships.
Dont forget the trail of tears.
The US has been through a lot and will likely recover, but it would be nice to avoid making the same mistakes again. How many more people have to get hurt before humanity learns?
How do you replenish the oceans and maintain life for any ecosystem humanity lives off of? Most of America is set to be desert by 4 degrees c average warmth increase. You won’t grow crops outdoors. We know we are guaranteed to blow past 1.5 now without being able to stop it as are actions are to late. Yet we are saying “drill baby drill”. The topographical map will change drastically.
It should be noted that through all this people fought for those rights. So don’t fall asleep, dear America, because organizing even within small communities will make a difference.
If done correctly, massive change can happen. Dream big so that those who fear negotiate back down to the levels you’ll accept.
The Beastie Boys certainly did.
I feel like a lot of people online need to read this comment, go outside, and live their life. This is not defeatist, and it’s not unreal optimism. Thank you for this.
Don’t believe there really is an absolute point of no return without the plot of Genesis of the Daleks happening. The future is long, and we don’t know how the next four to eight years will play out, but dictatorships have risen and fallen before. Spain was a fascist dictatorship for decades, now it isn’t. Also, lots of people died in the meantime and not all vestiges of the dictatorship are gone.
Nah.
That was Reagan. You’re about 40 years late.
If you want to play that game, it was likely Nixon and the southern strategy.
But neither of those were point of no return. They were just foundational groundwork to set up this moment that likely is.
One definition of a collapse is a sudden drastic reduction in the complexity of a thing.
I’m not sure whether we’re going to have a societal collapse or a slow decline, but either way the US is in a downward spiral. I think Trump increases the likelihood of us going into the collapse trajectory.
All that said, on the other side of a collapse, there is some room for hope. The incendiary portion of the collapse will definitely suck to live through (if you’re lucky enough to do so), but our country could probably use some simplification long-term because the people within it largely cannot navigate a country this byzantine. A lot of this country’s systems are too complex for an average person to understand let alone administer.
Most of these complexities were probably birthed via intentional decisions by the system creators, and others were a product of unintended consequences. I think the gap in education between our commoners and “the elite” – to borrow a tired trope – also played a part here.
No matter how we arrived at this point, I don’t think the current population can actually operate these systems anymore and long-term one way or another our people require a drastic reduction in the complexity of our society.
There is another path in which the United States invests more in education and scales up the average intelligence of its citizens so that they can handle the complexity of modern life, understand nuance, do research, and create better policy…but at this point I think we’re frankly too far fucked to ever go down that path.
No. Of course not!
Failing to Reject the Reagan Revolution, and mass embrace of the Jack Welsh style “trickle down” economics lie, by BOTH parties was the point of no return, almost half a century ago at this point. This car was already totaled.
Citizens United years later was just a victory lap by the owners pissing on the long dead corpse of the dream of societal equity.
Trump is just another symptom of that intransigent reality we all live in.
I’d say hope for collapse, as painful as it is, to have any hope for a better life for our children, maybe, but oligarch greed made climate change and at this point inevitable ecological collapse in the coming decades means there really isn’t hope for a better society/civilization for generations(if they eventually develop technologies to better cope with the new hellish climate reality) if at all.
Why would US collapse though?
I am not following.
The current regime showing zero signs of distress, in fact they could extract even more and it seems plebs will accept it.
Half the country is doing OT on bootlicking and regime whore worshipping.
Most people on here too, and fedi is pretty redical by mainstream lol
In the near term, people increasingly not being able to afford basic necessities like housing and food will lead to increased societal violence, but that likely won’t cause collapse.
Climate scientists are increasingly warning of ecological collapse, meaning core climate systems will fail, like the Atlantic Gulfstream which will cause global famine and destruction, and that might be the end of human civilization all together, we won’t know until we do it within the next half century, and see the full extent of our fine work, a climate hostile to agriculture, dependable fresh water, possibly even standing structures not made of steel and concrete.
But man are we speeding towards that cliff for short-term private shareholder profit, wheeeee!
Yeah but even the bleakest estimates would take generations. Owners are getting paid today.
Also, us is the holy land, food and energy sufficient. So us itself can survive the climate change unlike most other countries.
Sure some plebs will die but that’s a small price to pay for success.
Time will tell
Could be, but we have thought that before.
