# Formerly-fictional totalitarian regime, here we come! **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [November 10, 2016, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322 "2016-11-10T04:10:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2016, 9:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/41 "2016-11-19T09:32:35Z")
> [@El\_Kabong](#): > > The tripwire for me will be if the Trump regime (don’t worry, I’m not going to use that term regularly) quickly puts in place regulations intended to muzzle the media. And I suppose you think the courts will be hunky-dory with this? ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2016, 9:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/42 "2016-11-19T09:51:45Z")
> [@HurricaneDitka](#): > > They richly deserve every bit of exclusion they get. So you don’t support the First Amendment? You want to shut out the press from being able to report on the President? No more freedom of the press? Well, yeah, if you don’t think one of the cornerstones of our democracy is important to keep, then you probably think everyone’s being hysterical. But, you see, most of us like our freedoms. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2016, 10:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/43 "2016-11-19T10:00:13Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > I’m Hispanic, and not worried about being attacked in post-Trump America. No one said anything about “post-Trump America.” We’re talking about right now, when racists are going out of their way to attack people of different races. Post-Trump America would be when we fix this mess–I pray to God. Plus, frankly, you were a defense attorney. You’re basically loaded. Yeah, you don’t have to worry as much about racism. It’s the working class legal immigrants with thick accents who are going to be attacked. Now, if your kid(s) goes to public school, he may face it. I sure hope not. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2016, 10:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/44 "2016-11-19T10:04:31Z")
> [@HurricaneDitka](#): > > Meh, I think [mass media is well on its way to the ash heap of history](http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx). > > It was swell when we had a legitimate Fourth Estate. It got less cool when they decided to turn themselves into an organ of the DNC. Except the media hasn’t changed at all. What changed was a bunch of CONSERVATIVE media that tells you that the real media is biased. Even now, all the fake news sites that show up were on the Right, not the Left. ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2016, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/45 "2016-11-19T12:45:41Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > And I suppose you think the courts will be hunky-dory with this? Well, the Supreme Court probably will, once it’s packed with right-wingers. Furthermore, [Republicans’ Senate Tactics Leave Trump Wide Sway Over Nation’s Courts](http://www.npr.org/2016/11/09/501476919/gop-strategy-paved-way-for-trump-to-nominate-supreme-court-justice) \ > [@](#): > > If Tuesday’s election determined who would control the two elected branches of government, it also determined who would control the unelected third branch of government — the judiciary. > > First, the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last February will be filled by President Trump’s nominee, not by President Obama’s. Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland died with the election returns, in essence vindicating the unprecedented confirmation policy of obstruction adopted by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. > … > **In the short run, Trump will have more than 100 other judicial nominations to make to the lower federal courts. There are 103 judicial vacancies on the federal trial and appellate courts, or roughly an eighth of the entire federal judiciary.** There are 59 pending Obama nominations to fill a majority of those seats, but Republicans have been artful about slow-walking these Obama lower court appointments, and the Republican Senate has confirmed only 11 judges since the beginning of the year. Now all of those pending appointments will die. > > If history is any guide Republicans will abandon — as they have before — traditional protections for the minority party, meaning that the views of opposition party senators will not be considered in the appointment of judges, even from states where both senators are Democrats. Senate Democrats, even when they controlled the Senate, did honor those GOP views, but Republicans have forsaken that traditional accommodation in recent times. > > In the longer run, the focus could well return quickly to the Supreme Court if there are more vacancies — a distinct possibility. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed by President Clinton, is 83; Justice Anthony Kennedy, a center-right justice appointed by President Reagan, is 80; and Justice Stephen Breyer, a Clinton appointee, is 78. > > For the past half-century, until Justice Scalia’s death, the Supreme Court has had a majority of Republican-nominated justices, with a 5-to-4 conservative majority prevailing for decades in the majority of closely divided cases. A conservative filling the Scalia vacancy would return the court to that narrow, 5-to-4 conservative domination. But with as many as three more vacancies possible in the next four years, that conservative domination could become overwhelming for generations to come. > … ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2016, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/46 "2016-11-19T12:53:53Z")
> [@Sleel](#): > > 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. Except the recovery has _completely passed by whole States._ Towns are dying. Many of his supporters do not care about the race stuff either way. They feel, with some justification, that **both Parties** either ignore them, or take them for granted. This is an angry demand for government policies designed for Middle Class/Working Class/non-Rich/non-Poor citizens. ---
**Author:** ![El\_Kabong](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/el_kabong/32/496_2.png) [@El\_Kabong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Kabong)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2016, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/47 "2016-11-19T13:37:04Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > And I suppose you think the courts will be hunky-dory with this? I suppose any such initiative by the Trump administration would either have to get around the courts, or have their blessing. I’m talking possibilities here, not certainties. In any event, that was not my point. I’m merely expressing my personal view of where I would begin to consider the incoming administration ‘totalitarian’. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2016, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/48 "2016-11-22T02:10:21Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > And the right has gone bloody racist again. The previous high-water mark for nativism was in 1920, when the second Ku Klux Klan marched openly with exposed faces in the street and the USA closed its borders. Unlike then, this time the white-power faction have the shadow of 9/11 to inspire them, and _they finally have a President on their side._ I have been informed that Trump has said nice things about Hispanics and may even mean them. I am cautiously withdrawing this characterization. He’s still an ass. ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2016, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/49 "2016-11-22T03:12:59Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > I have been informed that Trump has said nice things about Hispanics and may even mean them. I am cautiously withdrawing this characterization. > > He’s still an ass. Well, the man ate a taco. Or was it a taco salad? For him, that’s very sincere. ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2016, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/50 "2016-11-22T03:27:00Z")
> [@Sleel](#): > > My posts three years ago in [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=16453609) 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. Hysterics much? ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2016, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/51 "2016-11-22T05:49:21Z")
What people call Japan “moving to the right” or “militarization” is simply a pacifist-leaning country becoming a normal country with a normal attitude towards a military, an attitude change about 50 years overdue. But yes, denial of WWII atrocities ain’t cool. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2016, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/52 "2016-11-24T23:53:15Z")
I just realized that so far I haven’t directly addressed my politics. I’m non-partisan. I do this novel thing called “thinking” and vote for whoever I think will do the best job for a particular office. I registered Independent after my first election (I registered Republican like my father at first) and have historically voted for members of both parties. I find the idea of political parties to be slightly repugnant. > [@HurricaneDitka](#): > > Meh, I think [mass media is well on its way to the ash heap of history](http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx). > > It was swell when we had a legitimate Fourth Estate. It got less cool when they decided to turn themselves into an organ of the DNC. If anything, the press was culpable for some of this mess because they were _not critical enough_ of Trump. They didn’t give his espoused policies anywhere near the same scrutiny they would a regular candidate. They used the entertainment value of his tweets, rallies, and off-the-cuff pronouncements to juice their view stats in much the same way they’d throw a vapid media icon on their front pages. Trump would have had way less of an audience if the media hadn’t been sucking his propaganda dick in the hope of a reach-around from the public. The only world in which the mainstream media was an organ of the Democratic party is the imaginary one the fact-free right-wing media have created for themselves. > [@El\_Kabong](#): > > People seem to keep forgetting that we’ve had a concentration camp of sorts for extrajudicial detainees going for more than a decade, although admittedly that it’s survived for so long may be down to it being offshore, and being, you know, just a small one; so small it doesn’t really count, or something. > > The tripwire for me will be if the Trump regime (don’t worry, I’m not going to use that term regularly) quickly puts in place regulations intended to muzzle the media. Much harder to get away with all the dire things people are predicting in the daylight, after all. > > Should we start seeing, say, Rachel Maddow forced off the air, all bets are off. Unfortunately, there probably are many folks like **HurricaneDitka** , who actually would prefer to be ignorant of inconvenient facts. Good point about Guantanamo Bay and the other extra-territorial prisons the US is still maintaining. Thanks, Obama. Trump has already said quite a lot about how he’d like to change libel laws to make it easier to sue a critical press. A meeting with the NY Times a couple of days ago was apparently a complete goat-fuck, with Trump berating reporters for his “unfair” treatment in the paper over his (apparently non-existent) charitable contributions and other subjects. In normal reporting, that’s called fact checking and verifying, not hounding and harassing. > [@Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor](#): > > Except the recovery has _completely passed by whole States._ > Towns are dying. > > Many of his supporters do not care about the race stuff either way. > They feel, with some justification, that **both Parties** either ignore them, or take them for granted. > > This is an angry demand for government policies designed for Middle Class/Working Class/non-Rich/non-Poor citizens. I see absolutely nothing in any of his policies and plans so far that would do anything positive for working-class Americans. Most of it will be actively harmful. Erasing the first steps toward universal medical care, for example, is going to be horrible. I know from experience what I’m talking about. I grew up poor. My dad was laid off from GM in the late 70s and didn’t work for over a year. I almost died from pneumonia when I was a kid because my parents couldn’t afford to take me to a doctor until I was really goddamn sick. I remember what government cheese tasted like. I bought “new” school clothes from Goodwill and Salvation Army for years. I didn’t have anything approaching a middle-class life until the dog grooming businesses my mother started to do better when I was in my early teens. That only lasted a couple of years until she got cancer around the time I was 16, forcing my father to liquidate the business. He had to cover bills above the medical insurance he got from the job he took with the county (which he got mostly because he was a veteran) that he hated, but kept working at because it provided good medical coverage for us; his kids and wife. When future valedictorians were studying and doing extra-curriculars and internships, I was helping out on weekends and after school at the shop. When other kids were applying for scholarships, I was watching my mother die and worrying about where my next meal or tank of gas to get to school was coming from. I was the first person on either side of my family to graduate from college, ever. It took me 8 years to work my way through, because I sure as hell didn’t get any help from my family and didn’t qualify for grants with my exceptionally average grades due to shitty circumstances, admittedly compounded by my own ample faults. My background is as working class as it comes. The only way it could be more blue-collar is if I’d grown up in Appalachia with a coal-miner for a father. And guess what? I still think Trump is a con-artist shitbag who is going to fuck the American middle class in the ass until they bleed while playing to every nasty little self-destructive bias and fear in an attempt to distract them. His tax policies alone look sufficient to plunge the government into trillions more debt, while other policies seem to be focused on cutting just about every strand of safety net available. In the meantime, he grifts money from his campaign, uses his political office to influence real-estate deals, and put his family and cronies into positions of power. It’s fucking sick. It pisses me off that people who do legitimately need positive change did the political equivalent of accidentally shooting themselves in the gut, thinking they were going to get sent home from Vietnam with a flesh wound to their pinkie toe. I’ve undoubtedly got some family, especially the branch in the Sierra Nevada foothills — islands of Trump country in the ocean of California blue — who voted for him and will end up the worse for it. > [@Clothahump](#): > > Hysterics much? I dunno, how long until partisan bullshit devolves into purges and factional killing? I mean, worse than it already is. We’ve already got enough problems to start self-organizing social movements like #blacklivesmatter as a reaction to persistent systemic problems. Now we’ve got open racists being appointed to political offices and positions of influence. Gotta tell you, the trend isn’t looking good, especially for the groups which were specifically targeted during the campaign. Just to let you know, like I said in the dystopian fiction thread, I personally know people who escaped from Cambodia. In less than two years, the mother and father of the family went from being respected members of the community as a nurse and a school teacher, to smuggling themselves and their kids out of the country to avoid being liquidated as intellectual enemies of the state. This shit happens in a much shorter time period than you’d think. If you grew up in a stable democracy, with no contact with someone it has happened to, or have not seen first-hand the dissolution of social order, you literally cannot understand how fast things can go wrong; you don’t have the emotional experience to connect to the intellectual concept. I’m a pessimist. I love being wrong. I’d love for this to look hysterical in 4 years instead of prescient. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2016, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322/53 "2016-11-25T00:58:33Z")
**Sleel** – I never said the Trumpist were right about Trump. But they are right about the neglect. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/formerly-fictional-totalitarian-regime-here-we-come/771322.md?page=2)