A more important question is: Is that even necessary? Why would liberals dismantle the facades that keep citizens calm? The powers that be can simply do whatever they want, courtesy of a friendly supreme court and an effectively-nonexistent left opposition.
When Democrats tell you the other guy is the greatest threat to democracy, don’t believe them. The CIA is, and they love the CIA.
Not at all, for at least two reasons:
- There’s zero need for it, considering both branches of the US’s one-party state will carry out all the policies of its ruling class with equal vigour.
- It’s useful to maintain the semblance of professionality and consistency that these constitutional / legislative customs give to the US government.
Trump has violated a lot of norms around the second point
If the Democrats believed their propaganda about Trump they would have done literally anything to turn those norms into laws when they had control of both houses at the start of biden’s presidency. They’re lying to you.
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The electoral system is already vestigial. Would the Heritage freaks dispense with the charade? Maybe, but what would it accomplish? Leaving it in place means you can get Ba’ath party election results (since the courts are compromised to the point that redistricting can only benefit that goal) and get at least another 5 years of libs saying “well, they won fair and square, guess we just have to vote harder” while you govern from the bench unopposed.
Yeah the system is working now, no need to be overt about it, just disguise the disenfranchisement as free and fair elections.
Just to reiterate what everyone else said better than me if the capital class really thought Trump was going to do these things and they didn’t want it to happen then they’d do anything besides promoting him to a position where it was possible he could get it done, so best case they’re lying and worst case they’re lying and planning to end democracy themselves with him as the perp to pin it on
States are just going to continue on the present course of voter disenfranchisement. An auto-coup would be counterproductive.
Personally, I think there’s too much of an industry around the spectacle of the election for it ever to be in danger. While many of the politicians and talking heads are idiots, the monied(sp?) interests know there is a benefit to the illusion and play both sides. Whether or not the think tanks like heritage foundation understand their role, idk, but the Koch brothers funding them did. But, all that being said, it feels like a lot of people have failed upward into positions of power that don’t have a clue. So, who knows? We could continue the slow steady collapse or some jackboot thug wannabe might get put into positions of too much power.🤷
the american government is already effectively dismantled and is still consistently capable of only contract enforcement and sporadic spectacular violence
all trump can do is budge that de facto state toward de jure and to further decrease the USA’s legitimacy in the eyes of its residents
There’s already basically no term limits in most positions of power. Other than some minor differences domestically, what functional difference has their been in the executive branch since Reagan?
I agree with most of the posts here, this has already been accomplished. This is end stage neoliberalism.
Yeah court appointments have no term limits and clearly have more power then our legislature.
It’s kaye fabe pro wrestling drama jinned up to get voters to vote. Propaganda works. Hell, after visiting Reddit I almost thought about Voooting for
!but then I remembered xibe-check We already had Trump for 4 years. None of that happened.Abolishing term limits maybe, but elections? Nah, they’ll just make it harder for minorities and poor people to vote as they’ve been doing for decades.
“If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.”
The capitalist class doesn’t need to destroy liberal democracy to keep everyone in line so nothing should change. We might go to having a right wing strong man with a political party that returns to an older kind of political corruption with party machines that strong arm the populace to vote how they want and stuff the ballot boxes as needed. Basically what the US did to create “democracies” around the world like in Russia.
In like 10-20 years there might be a decline in the treat economy and the crushing weight of neoliberalism might spawn an actual socialist movement. If that happens then there would be the bipartisan dictatorship under the Hunter Biden/Barron Trump copresidency where they share the share the presidency like Roman consuls to crush anything anticapitalist.
After a few years they might let go of the dictatorship and institute a multiparty democracy like the eurocucks have with defanged social democrats as the furthest left option and proclaim progress.
“If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.”
Is this a good rhetoric considering the history of universal suffrage and all, voting was illegal for large parts of the population throughout history? Of course liberal democracy is shit, but I don’t think hard fought concessions necessarily legitimizes the system.
It’s a pretty well known phrase in the US (I don’t know where you’re from). Capitalist countries throw out rights and institute reactionary/fascist dictatorships to rediscipline the working class and the quote was the first thing I thought of to explain my views on what it would take for the US to revoke them. It’s not literally true but it’s spiritually true. Those rights were given out a concessions and are subject to change or being revoked like abortion.
Ultimately, we’re in a very far left internet space and if I was talking to a “normal person” I’d gauge their politics and try to figure out how to talk to them without seeming weird.
It’s actually a good thought experiment. Giving the franchise to people who have been oppressed for years is a great way of losing control of the system. So, how did they maintain control despite expanding the franchise? They separated voting from land ownership and ensured the power remained with the ownership and not the vote. Voting changed things in and amount the American bourgeoisie before the expansion of the franchise. In preparation for the expansion of the franchise, the American bourgeoisie made voting less and less likely to change anything. This, if voting changed anything, they would make it illegal, and in fact they did, and they made it legal after it wouldn’t change anything.
Enfranchising more people is always risky, yes, but as time bore on its pretty evident that the franchise in America is a very weak form of voting.
This is why I kinda hate the term fascism now, bourgeois democracy has proven itself to be much worse. Old post:
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially "adopting parliamentary democracy”. They haven’t changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Make no mistake about it: parliamentary / bourgeois democracy is not only a more stable form of government, it’s also far more effective at carrying out colonialism, and killing millions of innocent people.
I do sympathize with that views like that somewhat. Especially since fascism and liberalism aren’t opposites but complimentary aspects used within capitalism.
Then theres the fact that fascism can be a hard thing to pin down with a definition. Do we call Germany and Japan classic fascism and then the Pinochet dictatorship early neoliberal fascism? Where does fascism apply and when? Can fascism exist without mass politics? (If everyone in the US is pacified by so many consumerist options can they form the political mass necessary for Trump to create a real fascist movement like Nazi Germany?) Can we call what the US does abroad in colonial wars and interventions fascist? At what point are racial codes fascism? Fascism is not a structured ideology like communism so it’s very slippery.
Some recommended reading I saw in the news mega is below. Had to skim for the highlights again but you might like it.
If he wins, and he gets to the end of his term without reaching Bidenesque levels of senility, I think he’s very likely to make a half-assed attempt to declare himself dictator or go for a third term or something. If that happens, liberals will scream that it’s the end of the world, and chuds will make another poorly planned attempt at storming a government building, but the political system will overcome it by simply ignoring them and continuing on with elections normally.
0% because the US’s political system is a fundamental part of US political theater. Trump will get someone who won’t miss if he messes with that.
this is the correct answer. fascism has no issues dismantling democracy but it also loves loves loves the illusion of democracy which is exactly what we have
The public having an illusion of input into how the country is run is central to keeping it going without popular revolt. A very brief timeline:
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Country starts. You can refer libs to Natopedia on this one, and most of them won’t even dispute anything because that’s settled history from when our country was Not Nice. There were at least two layers of protection for the owning class from the will of the people – states were allowed to determine who could vote, generally agreeing on white male landowners, and the Senate was appointed. There was a choice quote from one of those guys pretty much predicting the popular appeal of dividing up the holdings of large landowners and the necessity of the Senate to ensure against it, but I haven’t been able to dig it up – little help? Thank you, @peeonyou, for finding Madison’s quote!
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Political parties emerge. This was practically inevitable and happened almost right off the bat, meaning that anyone who wanted a country that’s not so shitty had to get the buy-in of powerful people who wanted it to continue to be shitty. By the time the landholding requirement for voting was gone, our current duopoly was solidly entrenched. Still at least two layers.
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The Seventeenth Amendment passes. Direct election of senators seems like a big win for the people, but who was behind it? William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper magnate. It was a statement of confidence in the propaganda instruments; the people were so propagandized that there was no longer concern about them voting in their own self-interest. Still at least two layers.
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Three-letter agencies come into being. If you try to challenge white supremacy, you get killed. The Civil Rights movement allows black people to vote for either wholly-owned party. At least three layers.
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The Information Superhighway revolutionizes everything. The initial internet hype was that anyone’s reach could extend worldwide. Ron Paul. Bernie Sanders. Even if we say that the internet completely supplanted corporate media, there are still two layers.
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The internet turns into bullshit. The internet consolidates down to four sites sharing memes from the other three. All of them work with the three-letter agencies to ensure that nothing ever changes. TikTok allows people to see the carnage in Gaza and is slated to be banned. The DNC argues successfully in court that it doesn’t have to be democratic and doesn’t lose any supporters. Genocide Joe’s handpicked successor could win without ever getting a single vote in an open primary. Corporate media, bourgeois political parties, three-letter agencies and an approaching great firewall give the owning class more insulation from popular sentiment than ever before and virtually nobody cares.
From the above trajectory, it seems the the owning class has the least to worry about as in any time in the history of the country, so why would they allow a new chapter to be written in which their control is revealed to be brute force supported by nearly nobody?
From James Madison:
In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.
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