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.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    edit-2
    6 hours ago

    Ah fuck you really going to make me infodump I hate you sm fr


    Part 1: The Two Parties

    In the 1960s Civil Rights movement a deep political polarization began which results in wealthy interests backing the Republican party more and more, President Ronald Reagan in return shifted the party away from unions and towards deregulated and low tax markets and industries, and when Democrats introduced a campaign finance reform to curb the issue in 1995 it failed but was reintroduced and passed in 2002 it furthered that divide yet again, that bill was then sued by Citizens United wealthy interests and the SCOTUS sided with Citizens United as a Partisan 5-4 decision. So now we live in a world where political divide has all of the wealthy interests backing one side whose policies are actually extremely unpopular but people are easily misled into not knowing the stances of people they are voting for, or misled on the repercussions of those actions.

    Figure 1: Partisanship of Congressmen

    Figure 2: Partisanship of citizens


    Part 2: Legislative Requirements of the USA

    The USA has steps to pass laws:

    • It gets called to vote by majority leader and passes the House of Representatives, which is capped at 435 congressmen allotted very very roughly proportional to the state populations.

    • It gets called to vote by majority leader and passes the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes, unless a handful of senators decide to filibuster it to delay the vote indefinitely, in which case the bill gets amended with concessions and sent back to the House for yet another round of voting. Filibuster can be bypassed with 60 votes which is basically impossible due to aforementioned partisanship.

    • The president signs it into law.

    Now the problem here is that to remove a congressman, the president, or a supreme court judge: you need 60 votes following a successful impeachment inquiry. So it never happens.


    Part 3: Foreign Interests

    Influential media from the Murdochs, the Kochs, and the CCP are constantly pushing the USA further into the grave they’ve been digging for 50 years. China has always been a source of cheap labor and the relationship soured greatly following the Chinese influences on Korean and Japanese elections during the time those two nations were rebuilding following the World War era and were under the watchful eye of the US Military who were a central figure in the aforementioned conflict. This divide deepened with the 1984 Tienanmen Square Massacre where cities all over China were quelled by military forces being deployed on their own people. But far from being the end of it, the Pacific was still a prime trade route where the USA sought profits, and so Chinese influence continued to spread more as the days went by.


    Part 4: Where We Are Now

    President Obama was denied a lifelong SCOTUS nomination in an election year, giving the nomination to Donald Trump.

    Donald Trump was granted yet another lifelong SCOTUS nomination in an election year. The SCOTUS was thusly deeply conservative.

    His court nominations allowed him to run for office despite not qualifying under the insurrection clause, because if the courts choose not to reverse a lower court decision that he wasn’t barred from office then nobody is enforcing the law.

    Billionaires bought or operated their own home made social medias in the USA, the CCP deployed TikTok campaigns to elect a fascist.

    This isn’t just a thing that happened which we were unprepared for. It’s a thing that has been happening for decades which so many of us have been desperately attempting to stop.

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    6 hours ago

    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.

      • samus12345@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        10 hours ago

        I guess ignoring Washington’s wishes foreshadowed what the US would eventually become.

    • Ohmmy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      8 hours ago

      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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        6 hours ago

        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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          8 hours ago

          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.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    32
    ·
    edit-2
    10 hours ago

    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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      8 hours ago

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

      • Soggy@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        23 minutes ago

        Then maybe they should have their own shithole country and stop taking our tax dollars.

      • Freefall@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        7 hours ago

        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 retarded 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.

  • hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 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?

    • miridius@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      60 minutes ago

      USA hasn’t been a democracy for decades. It’s hard to pin it down to a certain tipping point but I’d hazard it was when you decided that corporations are people and buying politicians is free speech.

    • door_in_the_face@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      3 hours ago

      Sometimes a voting population needs to be protected from the consequences of their vote, right? A good chunk of the German voting population in the 1930 voted the NSDAP and Hitler into power, and we can agree that it would have been for the best if that party and its leadership had been deposed ASAP. Now, the US isn’t quite that far down the slide yet, but they’re certainly slipping, and the worst part is that the checks and balances that are supposed to keep a president in line are also failing. Not to be alarmist, but we’re in for a wild ride.

      • hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 hours ago

        Your first question is pretty philosophical. All I can say, is that most representative governments place a huge emphasis on giving the people the power to write their own collective destiny.

        A military takeover based on the desires of a minority of citizens would violate that principal. I don’t think any reasonable person can call it saving democracy.

  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    48
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    11 hours ago

    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.

    • rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      26
      ·
      7 hours ago

      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.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        7 hours ago

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

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        7 hours ago

        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!@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            6 hours ago

            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.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    10 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.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    43
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    12 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.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 hour ago

      Is it really failure by their standards? How many of them owned slaves? How many of them viewed women as essentially property?

    • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      11 hours ago

      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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        11 hours ago

        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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        11 hours ago

        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.

      • Lemminary@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        7 hours ago

        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.

      • nomy@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        7 hours ago

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

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      6 hours ago

      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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        5 hours ago

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

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      5 hours ago

      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

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    12 hours ago

    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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      27
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      11 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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        11 hours ago

        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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      11 hours ago

      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.

        • dx1@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          edit-2
          10 hours ago

          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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      11 hours ago

      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
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    13 hours ago

    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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      12 hours ago

      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.