Formerly-fictional totalitarian regime, here we come!

Politics & Elections
1

My posts three years ago in this thread are looking positively prescient now.

I’ve heard people saying, “It’s just four years,” but an awful lot of bad can happen in that amount of time, and there are no guarantees that 1) It will be only 4 years, or 2) That the laws about term limits will still apply to God-Emperor Trump and his legion of pussy-grabbing brownshirts. Don’t expect him to play by the rules after the election any more than he did during the election.

And for those who are taking some comfort in living outside the US, sorry for bursting your bubble, but America really does matter, and this will probably affect your lives. How much things will change depends on where, exactly, you live, but it will have worldwide repercussions. For one example, Taiwan-China relations are going to get a lot more complicated because of stuff that has nothing to do with either country directly.

I’ve lived in Japan for most of my adult life, and during that time it has been steadily drifting to the right. Abe was almost visibly salivating when he talked about the election results on the news earlier today. Trump said repeatedly that he’d pull US bases in Japan and make Japan take up 100% funding of defense.

That means Abe will almost certainly get his constitutional reform, and Japan will return to having an active military presence for the first time since WWII. Look for them to join the nuclear club within 5–10 years after that. That will, in turn, lead to a much higher likelihood of military action between some combination of North Korea, Korea, China, Japan, and possibly other Southeast Asian countries, plus maybe the Philippines, in the next decade to a generation at the most. Trump will be long-gone by the time the ripples of this finish expanding.

The US presence in Japan has been a strategic and logistical advantage for the US military as well as a stabilizing influence in the entire region. The relative peace of the last 50 years is probably going buh-bye in an amazingly short time. Losing the bases means that US presence in the Pacific is going to be substantially more complicated, with much longer supply lines and reduced sphere of influence. How that will affect the US proper is uncertain, but I’d put money on it not being good.

I have a strong feeling that even the people who voted for Trump aren’t going to like the effects of him being President. Everyone here in Japan except the right-wingers are worried as hell, and from the negative indications in various world financial markets, they aren’t alone.

2

As much as I dislike Trump, I seriously doubt that he will change anything significant with respect to the US military presence overseas. Once he gets schooled in why the US has those bases, he will quietly ignore all those campaign promises, just like he is already walking back the Mexico wall.

3

Lots of people said Clinton was going to cancel the election and stay president.
Lots of people said Bush was going to cancel the election and stay president.
Just Monday I read that Obama was going to cancel the election at the last minute and stay president.

Trump is equally likely to try it. Declaring yourself dictator is a good way to get yourself assassinated, so no one really carries it out.

4

I can’t wait until he makes a bunch of children march along the east coast while being followed by a half-track.

5

Did Clinton, Bush or Obama act like Trump? Did they show the disrespect for democratic institutions? Did they call for ‘2nd amendment remedies’ to deal with their political opposition? Did they say they’d refuse to accept election results unless they won? Did they call for voter intimidation to prevent their opposition from voting?

I’m not too worried about Trump, if he does try this I don’t think he’d succeed and I doubt the judiciary, military, police, etc would let him do this. But he is reasonably likely to try it.

6

Trump will look ridiculous in a Major’s uniform.

7

I should have posted this weeks ago, and would have posted it even if Trump had lost:

Trump is almost an aside to the real problem. He’s a symptom, not the cause. What’s worrying is that there was enough support of someone so obviously unsuited to run anything (much less a country) to enter the election in the first place. That shouldn’t have happened. That it did happen is the real cause for concern.

It means that there are tens of millions of Americans who are afraid of, hate, and want to hurt their neighbors. It means that there are tens of millions of Americans who desperately hold on to a worldview of negativity and decline despite the US being better off by any objective standard now than it was the last time one of “their guys” was in office. People who hate, and fear, and willfully disbelieve are incredibly dangerous because they impose their delusions on the world and make them real.

The real danger isn’t Trump, it’s his supporters. They are the ones who will remake the country I thought was getting better into a much more hateful place, one that I’m not sure I want to return to.

For the last several years, I haven’t been living abroad entirely by choice. I had the eventual goal of getting things in order and moving back to the US. Since I had kids, especially, I’ve wanted to be able to expose them to a more racially diverse society, and I wanted them to have real-life exposure to English so they don’t start ignoring it in favor of Japanese.

Now, with mixed-race kids and a wife who might be labeled an unwanted immigrant trying to piggy-back on my citizenship, I don’t know if I want to go back at all. It doesn’t feel like home anymore. It sure as hell doesn’t seem like a place I want to bring my family.

8

Oh, get a grip.

The results were almost 50-50. I live in Arizona, ground zero for anti-immigrant sentiment, and I don’t see any significant difference from my neighbors this time around.

There are lots of Americans with Asian backgrounds out here - my great friend and workout partner is one of them (his parents were from Vietnam). I’ve never heard him say that he has experienced any increased discrimination. I suspect he voted for Trump (although, I’m not going to ask).

9

Lots of countries have a military. There is no reason for Japan not to have one. That is not going to cause a war. The current system of America having military bases in case WW2 heats up again is not sustainable whoever is president. An aging society like the US is going to spend more government money on old people. The only place left to get money is the defense budget, no matter who is president the US military presence around the world is going to have to shrink.

10

Couple of highlights just from last night’s Twitter feed:

Nigger lynching list at Penn State

reports of Trump-inspired bullying at schools

Do a Twitter search for: Trump day 1 and read through what’s happening to Americans who “look different”.

Tell me again how I’m overreacting.

Are you white? Are your friends white? You’ll probably be okay. Rest of America? Not so much.

11

No, what’s going to cause a war is the change in the balance of power in the region, with the US redeploying and Japan rearming amid already increasingly-aggressive stances in the region and explicit inflammatory statements from the president-elect. It’s not just one thing, it’s the cumulative effects of several destabilizing events converging.

12

Well, as my name suggests, I’m not White. Get a grip, dude.

And Japan absolutely should take up their own defense. If they refuse to defend themselves, we shouldn’t be obligated to do so.

13

I’m Hispanic, and not worried about being attacked in post-Trump America.

14

Is that what happened? Japan refused to defend themselves, so the US offered to do it for them?

15

A few idiot racists acting out on Twitter isn’t going to lead to pogroms or Turner Diaries reenactments. The majority of Americans aren’t racists and they aren’t suddenly going to become racists just because the president believes stupid stereotypes about brown people.

16

That’s not what the election results strongly suggest. A majority of the people in a majority of the US states voted for an outspoken racist, and his support rallies have been nodes for Klan and other racist groups to gather. When someone shows you repeatedly through both actions and words what they are, you should believe them.

17

Yeah, that worked out really well during the entire first half of the 20th Century.

MLF Lullaby — Tom Lehrer

Know what the difference between Japan and Germany is? Germany passed laws, made social reforms, and mandated education to prevent nationalistic parties from hijacking the government. They showed through both actions and words that they would change. Lehrer was right to be skeptical and satirical, but 50 years of German behavior post-War since then has proven that they’re probably not going to start shit again anytime soon.

In Japan, denial of war crimes is common, there have been textbooks approved for use that downplay or ignore Japan’s aggression in WWII. Abe — the current prime minister — has openly displayed denialist beliefs and associated with right-wing nationalists.

There are political forces here who would love to throw away the Japanese constitution because they consider it to be a foreign document imposed on them by an occupying force — which it was, by the country they attacked and which had to nuke them not once, but ** twice** in order to finally secure a surrender. They especially find the provisions protecting Western values like free speech and the right to assembly to be troublesome. So yeah, I’m a little fucking worried about Japan being able to field an active military, and the rightists getting justification for constitutional reform and warmongering.

18

The fact that racist groups like Trump does not mean that Trump is a racist or that all Trump voters are racists. The Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and Jeremiah Wright supported Obama - does that make all Obama voters white-hating radicals?

Trump isn’t going to declare open season on minorities. He isn’t going to order the FBI to ignore hate crimes, or invite David Duke to the White House, or start rounding people up in FEMA camps. It’s not going to happen.

19

What makes Trump a racist is a history of racist comments which is well documented over decades. And the racists following him and supporting him. And those committing hate crimes based on policies he’s endorsed and promised to put into place after he enters office. So, pretty much everything about him and the people following him. But other than that, no no racism. :rolleyes:

He doesn’t have to “declare” open season, all he has to do is what he’s done; give tacit approval of the behavior. He’ll benefit from it in two ways: by letting those who hate do what they’ve been aching to do, and then using the violence as an excuse to curtail more freedoms and rights as well as directly attack, implicate, or imprison opponents and critics.

He already started shutting out the media during his campaign, and now he’s started controlling the press’s access to information in just the first couple of days after the election. How long do you think before America’s freedom of the press is mostly theoretical?

He’s not going to start rounding people up? Yes he is, according to his plan for his first 100 days in office. Where do you think the 1.3+ million immigrants he has promised to deport are going to end up? Regular prisons are already overcrowded, and more aren’t going to be built overnight. You don’t have to be the Amazing Karnak to see prison camps in someone’s future.

Again, this is what he has expressly promised to do. Sure, he lies so reflexively that he’ll contradict himself several times in the same speech, but this agenda has been fairly consistent for the last several months prior to the election to now. It’s best to take this as policy rather than empty promises unless disproven by decisive future action to the contrary.

If you think I’m being hysterical, you haven’t read much history, and have lived a very sheltered life. Like I pointed out in the thread about fictional dystopias, I’ve met people who lived under and escaped from brutal regimes. These tactics are very familiar. He came to power as a demagogue and has no reason to change when it is working so well.

20

I know you’re being hysterical. Full stop. You sound exactly like the right-wing paranoids who spent the last eight years ranting about how Obama was going to shift into Dictator Mode any day now. Didn’t happen then, ain’t gonna happen now.

Trump is all style and no substance. He talks a mean game and then backs down when he’s actually called on it. He choked when he went to Mexico. He choked when he met Obama. He choked at the debates. He’s already backed down from pretty much h everything he campaigned on - no wall, no deportation force, no repealing Obamacare, no debt haircut, and so on.