You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.

Is it really that the president is all that decides about the future of democracy itself? Is 53 out of 100 senate seats really enough to make country fall into authoritarian regime? Is the army really not constitutionally obliged to step in and save the day?

I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile.

  • hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Just to be clear, your solution to saving democracy would be for the military to usurp a president who received the majority of the vote less than six months ago?

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    Impeachment. That’s it.

    But you’re also forgetting that in the US states have a significant amount of power. For example the President cannot cancel elections. If a state cancels elections they just don’t get counted.

    There’s a lot in that particular area that shields people from federal government stupidity.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    Yes, the President can be impeached and removed by Congress. On the opposite side of the coin a President can veto laws passed by Congress, which Congress can override but it’s harder than passing a law. The problem is when Congress also goes nazi at the same time. In that case we’re fucked. In fact I think Article 97 sub-paragraph E13/W even says, “Such conditions and circumstances shall by Law constitute Fuckage.”

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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      Cool, but half the country supports this shit. And no, people who don’t vote don’t matter in this context.

      • Freefall@lemmy.world
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        That is by design. If the “majority” of the country wants the US to be Nazis, that is the direction it will go. That is how a representative democracy works. The flaw was the founders assuming removed puppets would not be elected by even an uneducated public. But, they also didn’t plan for automatic weapons either. Well, they sort of did, they said we should be rewriting the constitution every so many years so it can evolve with the times, but we chose to enshrine and misinterpret it like a civic bible. Oops.

    • Ohmmy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      Who would have thought a government created in model of a constitutional monarchy would do this?

      Oh right, all the people who opposed the US constitution. People forget the Anti Federalists every time.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        Except most of the Anti Federalists weren’t arguing against the specifics of the model, they were arguing against a centralized government at all. Which had literally just failed.

        • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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          To some extent, political parties are naturally occuring . The group dynamics of a legislative body will naturally result in groups forming around specific issues and even philosophies. But there is definitely a strong argument to be made that we’ve made them far too official, and far too entrenched.

  • OBJECTION!
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    The CIA can always assassinate a president who gets too far out of line, like what happened to JFK, but they don’t tend to mind the right so much as the left.

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      Trump spent his first term selling classified documents to enemies of the state that revealed the identities of CIA operatives and got them killed and so far they have done nothing about it. I think it’s safe to say the CIA is not as scary as hollywood wants us to believe.

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        The CIA is not great at high profile assassination, their declassified documents are plenty scary though.

      • OBJECTION!
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        They have a long history of infiltrating foreign governments and assassinating world leaders, so what makes you think they’d have trouble doing the same in the US? Surely, during the height of the Cold War, they would’ve had contingencies for America electing a socialist. If they did back then, then who did what when to change that situation? Nobody’s really said no to the CIA since, again, Kennedy fired Dulles and was assassinated shortly afterward.

          • OBJECTION!
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            Which of my questions is that supposed to answer, exactly?

            They haven’t because nobody’s actually crossed a line. A few leaked documents isn’t going to provoke an assassination, it’s an extreme measure so they’re not going to do it over something so trivial.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      HAHAHAHHAHAAH

      you were making a joke, right? Because Trump right now is using the constitution and the bill of rights and everything like it in his personal bathroom as toilet paper.

      We’re 2 days in and it’s already a giant shit show world wide and we have 4 more years to go.

      You better brace yourself for what’s coming

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      To be fair, that’s a piece of paper. If the President violates that and isn’t impeached then there’s nothing physical to stop him.

      • meliaesc@lemmy.world
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        This guy has been impeached twice and convicted of 34 felony charges. So we actually need something physical to stop him.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    He’s just a symptom of the real problem, which is that he exposed himself as a nazi a long time ago and still got reelected.

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        The nuke is a bad example of the sheer power of the modern American military. It’s also a bit outdated. That legal mechanism was drafted when many other modern weapons and tactics were not even dreamed of. Just a couple days ago the US military announced its strongest armor yet.

        But I agree: your assault rifle may save you from others with an assault rifle, but it won’t do shit if the military comes for you.

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        That’s a non sequitur though, unless you’re suggesting a tyrant would nuke the population he wanted to rule.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    9 hours ago

    It turns out that a handful of young land-owning white men from the 1700s, born almost 200 years before the advent of game theory, didn’t actually properly anticipate every way in which the political system they were designing could fail.

    • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      Lol they fucked up real bad. I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm. So why didn’t he just advocate for that to be… ye know… written into the fucking constitution?

      Also, they had a contingent election like just 4 years after his retirement, because checks notes Pres and VP are just 1st and second place? And electors cast 2 votes for the same office? NANI?!? What a bunch of mess. (Imagine if the Federalists just tell their electors to, instead of voting 65 for Adams and 65 for the VP, just vote all 130 for Adams, 0 for the VP candidate. Just win with a Federalist Pres and Democratic-Republican VP. Oh wait checks 1796 election that actually happened. They got a Federalist Pres and Democratic-Republican VP because of shenanigans. Imagine a trump-walz or harris-vance. What a dumb ass idea. It failed so bad, they had to write an entire amendment to fix this shit. 🤣

      (When I read about that, my brain just had an aneurism, like WTF is that election system?!?)

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        The funny thing is that so much of it is based on the idea that everyone involved is going to be on their best behaviour, working for the good of the country, compromising with their opponents, and so-on. And, then it all falls apart as soon as one person realizes that they get an advantage as soon as they simply ignore the norms.

        Also, don’t forget that there was less than a century between the revolution and the civil war. If your brand new form of government is so poor that a significant fraction of your population thinks a civil war is preferable to resolving things through that system, your system isn’t very good.

      • droans@midwest.social
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        I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm.

        He didn’t, that’s just a whitewashed version we tell ourselves.

        He just didn’t want the President to be viewed as a monarch or a lifetime appointment. He turned down a third term because he feared he would die in office and the public would believe that’s the norm.

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    You can impeach a president for any reason. You don’t need a crime or such committed, all you need is congress to do it.

    Be careful what you wish for though since the other party could do “tit for tat” with the president you support.

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      not like it changed, he was impeached twice, didn’t mean shit. he’s a felonious racist rapist, doesn’t mean shit.

      USA made this bed, now we fucking lie in it.

      • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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        The house voted on impeachment, but the senate has to remove him, or decide on a punishment.

        If it was bad enough (by that, I mean if he starts taking away the ability for the senate to have power) then he would be removed.

    • dx1@lemmy.world
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      That gets to the root of the problem. We have “checks and balances” designed around the idea that separate institutions would check the excesses of each other. Even if you don’t accept the “Republicans and Democrats work for the same people” theory, well, now all three branches of government are majority Republican, and not even in a way where there’s significant internal division or strife, so it’s just a bulldozer. The stupidity of not including popular recall votes in the Constitution - or really, just not having a mechanism for popular referendums, vetoes, etc. - is I think its biggest fault. The “representative democracy” model is inherently flawed because you can corrupt representatives, while corrupting an entire population, while not impossible, is a hell of a lot harder.

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          Honestly, no amount of careful planning and constitutional design will restrain a society where enough people have gone completely insane. Look at “Israel”. Even 100% direct democracy there would still be a genocidal nightmare. Gets to the problem of how culture is the real driver behind the shape of society. And in that case, how religion incinerates real morality.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      Be careful what you wish for though

      No, I’m calling BS. They’ll impeach anyone they think they can get away with it on. They investigated the shit out of Biden. They’re not being held back by some for of fear of tit for tat decorum. That’s wildly inaccurate.

      For it to succeed, it would require congress to agree which they won’t because they’re conspiriting. And if it did get him out, then we get Vance who is also a Nazi. Protest, Resist, put up an fight, and wait in hopes that he’s bad enough that the right and left people can field some half decent candidates and stop being nazi’s

      Alternatively, we’re now making/selling a lot of armbands.

  • BigBenis@lemmy.world
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    Our government leans heavily on decorum and good faith. Trump’s success has been due to his refusal to adhere to decorum and good faith. Our system doesn’t know how to handle that other than shaming and shaking fists so Trump gets free reign to do whatever he wants.

    • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
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      Its not just government its all social systems. Cheating only works if the large majority follow the rules. This is sorta what civil disobedience is about. Its to show that hey, guess what, we could all just start ignoring norms.

  • Juice@midwest.social
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    In 1776, people didn’t know what fascism was. Hell there wasnt even consensus on what capitalism was, Wealth of Nations was published that same year. They had never seen a capitalist system degenerate, as would happen in France under Louis Napoleon in the 1850s.

    They knew what feudalism was, which was bad and a form of authoritarian autocracy, but this isn’t Fascism. They were afraid that the kings and queens would get restored, as revolutionaries (and capitalism was revolutionary and progressive at that time) they were safeguarding against a counter revolution which would come from monarchists.

    There is no way they could conceive of a movement to overthrow capitalism, which they barely understood although being the revolutionary capitalist class, that would come from a greater demand of social reforms, one where the class they were a part of would rule society rather than just administer it as they had for centuries, one where a class that they didn’t even know about, the proletarian working class, would supplant them and bring greater prosperity and equality. This movement developed fully in Russia and Europe after the first world war when the last of the weakened feudal aristocracy destroyed their own continent to fight over scraps of colonial internationalism. A revolution in Russia inspired the global working class, especially where they were highly organized and industrialized such as Italy and Germany, and terrified the ruling capitalist classes of those countries.

    In the shadow of the emerging workers movement grew the dialectical opposite and evil twin of German and Italian communism: Fascism. Fascists gleefully fight and kill communists, and desire power above all else, exploiting contradictions in liberal democracy (that’s “liberal” meaning supports private property, not cool liberals that like freedom and justice) to confuse the masses and gain power. The ruling classes, weakened by decades of militant worker struggles, assented to the will of the fascists and in a last ditch effort to preserve their dwindling control, handed power over to them. The rest is history.

    The founders couldn’t conceive of the conditions you describe as they either didn’t exist or wouldnt be developed enough to study for 50-70 years. Not all forms of authoritarianism are the same. They thought they were doing away with their version of it. Besides, the “founding fathers” gags violently would have fucking loved Trump

    • C126@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      Capitalism is defederating power, otherwise youll end up centralizing power and end up under some form of authoritarianism. We have all these elites because of privaleges granted by the state, not capitalism. We need less state if we want more equality.

      • psivchaz@reddthat.com
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        I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?

        In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it’s pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.

        However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can’t just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
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        I used to land at basically this analysis myself, but there are definitely some assumptions that need to be addressed. We can probably agree that to a significant degree “money is power”, or at least, money can elicit power, especially in terms of directing the actions of the desperate. We witness in our society - which is not pure “free market capitalism” - that inequality is rampant. There are theoretical explanations for this blaming both government intervention and just simply the behavior of individuals within the market that centralize wealth. And, conversely, there are theoretical explanations for how government can decentralize wealth, or how market participants can decentralize wealth (including boycotts, unions, etc.). The biggest challenge with this age-old “communism vs. capitalism” debate is that establishing overall tendencies for state vs. private actors requires exhaustive historical analysis, and is not even inherent to the nature of either actor, i.e., someone as a private actor, or state actor, can act in a way that either centralizes or decentralizes wealth. The only overarching principle you can even safely state is that the actions of a state are distinct from those as a private actor because of the “monopoly on violence” factor, i.e., the ability to enforce unfair demands that people can’t escape in practice (a behavior that leftie types usually accuse capitalism of, inversely, by pointing to corporate monopoly power - which of course, depends on the dictates of a state or equivalent body to enforce).

        The only way I was able to resolve the problems with this whole analytical framework - communism, capitalism, state, private - was to reject this terminology entirely and perform the analysis in terms of individual behavior, actions, inanimate vs. animate, and the ethical properties deriving from those. A “state” is a useful abstraction at times and a confusing complication at other times. “Capitalism” and “communism” as terms have no universally agreed upon definition, resulting in unproductive, endless, circular debates. What we’re really trying to do is design a social system that maximizes outcomes for every criteria we like - equality, prosperity, individual wellbeing, health, lack of environmental externalities, etc.

      • Juice@midwest.social
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        The state is the historical apparatus that manages the inherent contradictions between classes. It administrates capitalism for and by the ruling class. Capitalism is maintained by the state, the state sustains capital and private property, through violence.

        Capitalism is a form of class domination, various forms of slavery stitched together to exploit the masses for the benefit of the few. Only a democratically organized working class can “fix” capitalism, by eradicating it. The government is the apparatus that temporarily fixes the contradictions of capitalism, but the relations defined by this irrational, inefficient social system (unless you consider monopolies efficient) are what state governments under capitalist rule try and eventually fail to “mitigate”. The contradictions compile until you have an economic crash, which is actually good for monopolistic capitalists who can purchase the productive capital of their competitors at a fraction of the cost, leading to systematic downsizing; while the rest of the population suffers recession, inflation, and mass indignity.

        The poor exist because there are rich. The capitalists are in control, as a class, and governments merely mitigate the worst tendencies. This is why reformism isn’t a long term strategy. Capitalism can’t be reformed, it can only be replaced.

        And if we, the working class will be able to replace it with a system of greater freedom, equality and democracy, then the aims of socialism will have been reached without the “authoritarian” tendencies becoming reified in any significant way.

        You can have your doubts about this, but your libertarian perspective is one of false appearances. If you want to understand the state and the economy, it must be considered as a series of relations brought about by human activity, using the tools laid before us by history and nature. If you think of the world like this, considering the subjective nature of politics and the economy, such as incentives, motives, etc., then your investigation will uncover the true relations that comprise this mass wage slavery to the billionaire class, known as capital.

      • thelittleblackbird@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 hours ago

        Please elaborate.

        As far as I know a very important side effect of the capitalism is the great concentration of power (aka money) in just some small individuals and how this creates an oligarchy which the only objective of extracting value form the other layers of the society. And of course the self perpetuation.

        This have been happening since monopolies were created since centuries ago.

        I really want to see how a system that by nature is concentrating power in some individuals really is really a de federated thing.

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    9 hours ago

    Bro we have the oldest still in use codified constitution in the world and haven’t updated it in 40 years, really longer. What exactly made you think this fucked up system was anywhere close to resilient?