You know, DOGE, fascist president and corporations dictating what people can do, institutions being ruined, laws being ignored. Is there any way out of that or is it over? Is the USA done?
A lot of people are discussing the legal or revolutionary frameworks, but there’s a very human story to all of this. The government is run by people, and people are human. They make mistakes, backstab one another, get sick. They compete for different goals & subvert. It’s politics.
Morality is about respecting other moral agents, but it’s also about self-defeating principles. If you constantly lie, then there is no trust. Without trust, there’s room for speculation, rumor, & fear. Everyone on eggshells constantly. That’s partially why these fascist systems aren’t sustainable. However, as the world has become interconnected, so have the global elite. Fascism isn’t just here: it’s in a lot of places. There’s likely secret (and not so secret) actors pulling those strings, not to sound conspiratorial.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction in physics. Like others have said, I’m not sure about my faith in the USA, as it is today: 50 states and some territories holding “together”. The culture and economy of the Northeast is vastly different than the Southeast. The USA absolutely had its hand in much of global politics over the last 100 years. Russia was the USSR in the 80s (~40 years ago); I think this is our “equal and opposite” moment of a world power fracturing. My expectation is the USA splits up, but I’m not sure what comes next. I don’t know if that’s “screwed”, but it’s not as it is today.
Going from decline to fall. To be fair it took Rome 200 years or so I’m sure the US will limp on for a while yet. But it won’t ever be what it was again.
The “limping on” has been the past 40 years already. Ever since Neoliberalism became the dominant economic ideology and fully embraced by both mayor parties.
Capitalism declines into Fascism. The current administration is not the root cause of the US problems. It is a symptom that is accelerating the decline into Fascism. But the ground work was laid many years ago and defended ever since. We see a similar trend in many other countries that adopted the US Neoliberalism to various extends.
The Soviet Union as a credible major adversary meant the US couldn’t drop the ball too much. China is only now becoming a serious rival. Russia is totally changed player that sneaked up on the west. In the decades in between the US could fumble, drop, and lose the ball without much immediate consequence.
I wont give a knee jerk response to it. a country the size, economy, and history of USA doesn’t get done for by one President. While Muskrump will cause plenty of institutional damage and suffering on American and global populace, USA will come out stronger and better nation at the end of this (whenever this ends). Case in point, Germany before WWII and Germany after WWII
Have you read about US History? I recommend looking at presidents Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon.
Nixon was a CIA takeout, same as jfk.
CIA/OSS blue bloods have been running USA since the JP Morgan bailout of the fed.
Unless you get good with a sniper rifle its going to stay screwed for ever. Or if you actually have the gall to try to annex one of your neighbours. Then we’ll take care of your problem for you.
I’d say he’s headed for his billionaire bunker but he likes golf too much to follow the scared dictator playbook.
yes the country is going to cease to exit tomorrow. i know this is “no stupid questions” but damn dude
More and more every day…
Well, it depends on how you define the USA. You mean the Republic of the United States of America? Yeah, no, that’s dead. It is currently dead. It died when the SCOTUS made the president functionally beyond criminal prosecution, and everyone has just kind of been playing weekend at Bernie’s since then (though the Trump administration is dropping the pretense pretty quickly). Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dying for a long time, but that was the exact moment it was declared dead. No matter what happens, the republic as we knew it is dead and is not coming back. Nobody believes in the constitution anymore; among our leadership there are only either those who are in a hurry to destroy it, or those who are unwilling to defend it. I think a lot of the American populace haven’t sincerely believed in the constitution as an effective charter for governance for a while, too. Imo, we’re less than a year from the legislature being dissolved in some fashion of another, unless they just hang on like some ceremonial vestigial organ.
What we get to decide now is what comes next. That’s what nobody’s sure about. Are we going to have a middle-east style theocratic government? Italian fascism? Maybe the military defends the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic and we re-form the republic? German fascism? Neofeudalism? Peaceful balkanization? Hot balkanization? COULD IT BE?! BY GOD, it’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.
’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.
to date, that 400,000,000 pew-pew stick and freedom rod are proving super effective against tyranny. Civil was is becoming more and more likely though.
The problem is who holds them. The majority are the ones that voted for this crap.
On civil war, if we were in the slow boil phase I’d agree with you, but the ghouls like stephen miller coming out the woodwork combined with a lot of people suddenly having a lot of free time (I mean fired), things are much more likely to turn heated.
they didn’t overthrow biden’s “tyranny” either. Instead of the overthrowing tyranny bullshit, guns have a great track record of killing kids and helping depressed men end it all.
4 of the richest men in the world who own 7/10 of the most popular websites on the internet donated to and sat at The Presidents inauguration. They own the information pipeline and can literally control propaganda completely unchecked and unsupervised. Most of those gun toting freedom fighters use those platforms because it’s all they know. Their family is on it, their business is on it, their news comes from it, they get their daily dopamine kicks from it.
There isn’t going to be any Civil War. It’s just going to be a slow rotation into what Russia currently is now. Little by little by little, hardly noticable changes, over a long enough period of time (say 4 years or so), until one day they wake up and say “Well, it was better then but there’s nothing we can do about it now.” and go about their day.
The next war is going to be a war of ideas and a war of messaging. We can’t rely on online outreach and have to be proactive IRL spreading messages that it really is a class war. There’s no better time than now, no more apparent point in history than today, it’s just pulling those people away from the propaganda for them to realize it. Somehow, We The People, need to convince the Boiling Frogs.
y on online outreach and have to be proactive IRL spreading messages that it really is a class war. There’s no better time than now, no more apparent point in history than today, it’s just pulling those people away from the propaganda for them to realize it. Somehow, We The People, need to convince the Boiling Frogs.
If you look at the stats on what proportion of US population can read beyond 6th grade level you can predict that there’s nearly zero chance pulling these people out of their bubbles.
On civil war, if we were in the slow boil phase I’d agree with you, but the ghouls like stephen miller coming out the woodwork combined with a lot of people suddenly having a lot of free time (I mean fired), things are much more likely to turn heated.
Lol wut. It died a lot longer ago
Okay, I’m not trying to be shitty with you, I’m actually interested. Why don’t you make your case for when you think the US republic died?
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I think citizen’s united. The spirit was dead probably before I was born, but legalizing corruption made the full death inevitable.
I’d say it died when we accepted first past the post.
Citizens United would be a decent candidate. Once it was established that donations were protected political speech, it effectively legalized bribery, and made oligarchy essentially inevitable. Most of the missteps since then have been motivated by folks trying to simultaneously play to populist talking points but also placate billionaire donors. The left needed an actual positive message, like the kind Bernie Sanders was pushing, that would energize folks and unite the overeducated with the working class, but that was never going to be acceptable to the donor class, and so candidates like him always had to be shoved aside for someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs. And someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs was always going to be a really tough sell and not really a solution to the needs of the moment.
That doesn’t really account for the rise of the tech bro fascist accelerationists like Mencius Moldbug and the Dark Enlightenment, which is a big part of the current moment and accounts for how the far right was able to hoodwink some billionaires into voting for a social collapse that seems very likely to hurt them also. But Citizens United still seems like a fair candidate for a point at which some of the last paths away from this outcome were foreclosed.
I mean, the American Constitution is dogshit. The people who wrote it didn’t even mean half of it, and the other half became out of date about when globalisation took off. It’s not surprising nobody wants to defend it, the U.S. Republic has been desperately, desperately overdue for a revision.
maybe we’ll get something entirely new?
The French are on their fifth republic already. A new constitution with better guardrails and different voting system is possible. The USA has a very deeply ingrained idea of freedom and democracy and is unlikely to lose it completely. It might be a good idea to already start thinking about how that new constitution should look like.
Balkanization or a civil war before that happens is certainly in the cards.
Maybe the military
Trump will try and purge all non loyalist officers from the military. That could lead to a fracturing of the military. California for example has big navy, air force, and marines bases, as well as military industry. The states have national guards already and whole units could defect from the federal military to the guard.
If that leads to an internal cold war, balkanization, or a civil war remains to be seen. It will make the US far less able to project force internationally. Queue China taking Taiwan without much US intervention.
Trump will try and purge all non loyalist officers from the military. That could lead to a fracturing of the military.
We should ask what happens when there are a large amount of military trained men that are suddenly let loose and returned to the population, but I can’t think of a single time that’s happened…
I think if there is a new Constitution, it would need to incorporate economic rights. People can’t abandon work to strike or protest, which negates the voice of the poor and working man alike. The wealthy can afford to voice their politics, which is likely the biggest reason why Yarvin’s Cabal succeeded. Ordinary people simply can’t dedicate the time to research nor influence politics.
I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario.
I’m curious why you think it’s most likely. Most optimistic, I agree.
Okay, here we go
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The US is fucking YUGE. Historically speaking, it’s very, very difficult to keep countries that span huge geographic areas together. There seems to be some fundamental limit of size per population that can be tolerated before your cultural and geographic differences start becoming significant enough to start forming separate identities. The US has like 14 such subregions, and each one has a little different idea of what “America” means to them. A strong single national identity is not the default case here, you’ve got to really work at it or have some big unifying cause, which we no longer have.
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We already have pre-fabricated governments in the form of state governments. State governments tend to be pretty strong, in the sense that they tend to have a whole lot of administrative capacity, much stronger imo than what I believe of European provincial governments. The whole original idea was that the states were mostly independent states joined together under a trade federation and its government. Of course, it hasn’t been that for a long time, but that’s the root that we grew up from.
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We have almost no history of state on state violence, and most Americans do share some sense of national identity. Maybe not a strong one anymore, but it’s there. I think most people would be pretty shocked about the idea of going to war with another state.
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This isn’t really an ideological separation, as much as the federal government is just, like, vanishing in a puff of smoke. There’s a lot of states where they’ve depended on the federal government’s administrative capacity to handle stuff, and that’s just going away in a real haphazard, scattershot way. At some point, these states will ask themselves “if we’re handling all this shit ourselves, what the hell are we sending the Fed tax dollars for?”
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Yes.
History shows us the most likely outcome of this - and IF for some reason we’re able to survive and get the best case scenario (i.e. somehow he pisses off the base enough that McConnell/stock neo-con flavored Rs start jumping ship to re-assert the R party as a non-orange cult… not because of a moral compass mind you… but b/c they become worried that doing nothing to stop him will result in their insane rabid base replacing them during R primaries over the next 2 years) - the amount of lasting damage is going to ripple for a while. Also primaries for Rs who support unpopular figures assumes ballots will be “free and fair” hashtag TM etc…
…And that’s the best-case “realistic” scenario at this point.
Sadly, even a fantastical more cathartic sequence of events involving ropes and upside down would likely result in power vacuums and chaos and would not guarantee that “good” would take the reins of power.
Assuming he decides to follow through with his recent expansions of power unimpeded, there will be no remaining mechanisms to bring about a good outcome over the next few years… and I’m afraid many folks are going to find out that holding up signs with quips and jeers in designated areas is not going to do much to stop those who have no shame in outright dispatching their enemies - in the same way your grandparents didn’t “hold up signs” to stop the top-shelf authoritarians roughly 80 years ago.
somehow he pisses off the base enough
Trump has to placate the billionaire class. If everybody is still making money and gaining power, they’re unlikely to break with him.
No he doesn’t. Apple and Microsoft and Target and every other Fortune 500 company didn’t originally support him. They swore fealty after he won. They are cowards and money follows power… not the other way around.
Same with the neo-cons who called him a liar and a cheat but whom then also bent the knee when they could not beat him.
Yes but we should still make them pay for every inch they take.
It might take a long time to fix, but someday we will recover.
I think the US is over. There will be something else for sure, but i don’t know if the US is salvageable
I think you need some perspective. The situation is bad and seems like foreshadowing of worse things to come. However, we’re a pretty far distance from states pulling away or civil war breaking out.
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There’s more to it than that. I’m talking about a dictatorship, where trump flaunts the law, more than he already has.
Um, not so much. California is going to have a vote on state independence on the next ballot. I can see Texas following suit.
And does anyone actually think those have a chance of passing right now?
There’s always been talk of succession here and there, but we just aren’t at the point of the US actually breaking up.
doubtful, the usa isnt to keen on balkanization.
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Yeah we aren’t anywhere close to the point of states breaking out of the union. Some people will call for it, maybe even a lot. But as soon as they realize what is required that shit will stop immediately. California would quite literally need to go to war with the union to gain that independence regardless of what they voted. So not only would they need to actually vote for it but then they’d have to be willing to go to war and kill and die for that separation and their independence.
As strong as people feel, we aren’t even close to that point. Not to mention it would fail; none of the states currently have any hope of competing against the US military machine. Give us a couple hundred more years to really really deteriorate and siphon all value from the people and land and we may be there.
I mean I don’t think most people are for state independence now, but the idea is gaining legitimacy. There’s just no reason to stick with a federal government that will take your taxes and then give you nothing.
If these things Trump is removing with presidential orders was so important, why the fuck didn’t Congress make them laws while Democrats had a majority in the past twenty fucking years?
This shit is infuriating to me that we only blame one side for these issues.
I agree. Even if the democrats were doomed to fail because of how the Republicans operate. But the democrats didn’t even start the process.
At least be in record that a bill was put up and the Republicans voted it down. To not do anything was stupid. Maybe ya get lucky and get something passed.
Because the Democratic party is, and always has been, a willing collaborator.
They have their petty squabbles, but they’ve always been on the same side in regards to making sure the wealthy and powerful stay that way, at all costs.
why the fuck didn’t Congress make them laws
Why do you think that would make any difference? Are you not seeing the trump administration straight up ignoring laws that are in place blocking a lot of their current behavior?
Fair point. But then if laws are meaningless if you happened to be wealthy or in a position of power, why is everyone in the Democratic Party essentially shrugging and doing literally nothing about this?
No, I don’t think so. Large portions of government like the CDC, USAID, FEMA and the IRS will take 20 years to rebuild, but the dialed in states like the West Coast will probably be largely fine. It’s just such an unnecessary waste of time, resources, and human lives.
Apparently some of us don’t remember our values unless they get their mouth curbstomped every 70 years and remember some serious pain and suffering. Then the majority of people start voting for people that weren’t dropped as babies and we will go back to a democracy again. Fuckin idiots.
In the meantime, enjoy the unencumbered spread of diseases like measles and HIV, preventable economic meltdowns from disassembling shit like the Fed, SEC and IRS and infrastructure stagnation due to gutting tax infrastructure and the firing of educated and experienced public workers that keep out road, bridges and internet working to say nothing of shit like sewers, water, power, rail, aviation, etc.
And just think, all of this rebuilding could have been prevented with one single vote for a normal candidate. We could have had 20 years of relative progress under our belt instead. 😊
Not just them
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what do you mean “done”? the answer is obviously no, but i want to know more specifically what your question is. why was this even posted? where is your house
