Watching him bring this up, unprompted, over and over, is almost literally sickening. He’s on the cusp of launching a protection racket against us.
He did. What do you think the tariff threats were?
“Nice economy you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it!”
What is controversial is you saying:
and then when presented with evidence to the contrary; that real people are making (or being forced to make) “major life decisions as if they truly believe that the worst is guaranteed to happen” because those things are actually happening, moving the goalposts to suggest if they aren’t committing suicide or building an underground bunker they must be disingenuous about their concern, a claim you quite specifically called me out on:
People aren’t just losing jobs or concerned about inflation brought on by tariffs; their careers and identities as someone who works in government employment to help others, or to do vital research and train others on government grands and funds not to make big salaries but for the public good are having that identity and opportunities taken from them by a bloviating self-declared dictator and his unelected factorum who is not only the world’s richest person but gives every evidence of using the opportunity to further enrich himself and attack his competitors, notwithstanding actual American citizens being swept up in immigration raids that don’t serve any valid purpose to begin with other than to stoke the fires of xenophobia and embolden bigots. That’s not “throwing babies over balustrade” bad, I suppose, but it’s pretty fucking awful, and pretending as if it isn’t all that bad or ‘the pendulum’ will just swing back if we contact our representatives to express our displeasure and wait it out is beyond absurd, and well into demeaning the quite legitimate fears that people have,
Stranger
If people here are truly making major life decisions assuming that either they’ll be murdered by the government within five years or that the American/global economy will completely collapse in the same time frame, then I wonder what they’re doing. That’s what I’ve been wondering all along, and I thought I’d been very clear about that. Apparently, I was wrong.
You know all those apocalyptic cults that predicted the end of the world on a specific date? I think those are pretty solid evidence of the obvious (or so I thought) notion that people who have given up the future act very differently than those who haven’t.
Even if you disagree with my posts, I have absolutely no idea how you came to the conclusion that I believe anything of the kind. But I’m uncertain, and struggling with the idea that nothing I or my nieces and nephews are doing or accomplishing with life right now is meaningful. I almost wish I did believe what you think, because then I’d at least be able to go to work without wondering in the back of my mind if I’m not whistling past the graveyard by doing so, or if I’d be condemning my sisters’ and cousins’ family to death and despair if I didn’t do everything in my power to get them to abandon everything in their lives to flee the country right now. Because I’m too afraid that I’m wrong, and that I’d ruin there and my lives for insufficient gain. If I were certain about the worst happening in the future, it’d be self evidently the right, maybe only rational, thing to do. So I ask about other people’s experiences to figure out if there’s any worth to living life as I currently do.
Again, I thought all this was abundantly clear, but apparently not. I am just one poster among dozens, I guess.
Contemplating eventually buying a gun for the purposes of suicide. Because killing myself is the only thing I could do to “prepare” for that.
This article by Anne Applebaum very aptly describes what happens at the moment in the US Government with the consequences of this development for the American society at large.
It reminds me of the situation in Nazi Germany: intimidation of the population, neighbours and colleagues spying on each other, priority of loyalty over competence, people completely depending on the mercy of the Führer. Sadism and extortion as a way of treating subordinates, see Vaught’s comments to Government employees. There will always be those who support the new system with their obedience, opponents will be silenced. It is like a brainwashing: today Vance lectured Germany about democratic values. The same Vance who works on the destruction of democracy in his own country. It is an Orwellian world. How is this going to end? Another democracy demolished, one more society under authoritarian rule. Life will go on. It will be different.
However it ends, it will be Biden’s, and to a certain extent, but we just don’t know how much, Obama’s fault.
No, it will be the fault of Trump, the Republicans and the American public for putting them where they are.
It’s really hard to predict. If this were just a self-contained domestic US political crisis, it would make sense to talk about different trajectories. But given that the US is (for now) the most powerful country on earth, with the Republicans in bed with all manner of foreign dictators and transnational crime syndicates, and another potentially deadly pandemic brewing, the domestic forecast is overshadowed by the possibility of an international Black Swan event. (I mean, other than the one that already happened, which is Trump’s re-election).
I don’t know exactly what form that takes, if it’s an outright hot war, or a sudden traumatic rebalancing of alliances, or something else. Just that the uncertainty and insecurity I see in the international situation really makes it hard to project domestic outcomes. Americans at war will accept just about anything. If that turns out not to be true, then we have not 1 war to worry about, but 2. Or 3. Or possibly many more.
This is a common way for dictators to engineer a power grab; simply contrive some kind of external crisis to use as a tool for internal oppression. They may do it purposely, but just as often it’s a failing-up maneuver where they’re salvaging some other misguided scheme, either way the effect is the same.
The Black Swan event was Trump’s first election.
An impossibly unqualified political neophyte running on a platform impractical populist fantasies vs the most qualified candidate ever to stand for the office.
Presidential systems of government require luck to work. The U.S. was the last one in the Americas to have never collapsed, and we were on the way to collapse, due to gridlock, before Trump. See:
American Democracy Is Doomed (Matthew Yglesias, 2015)
As for what will happen, I am hoping for the Indira Gandhi 1975-77 emergency model, where a collapse in polling support, in a country where elections are still relatively free, forces rule by decree, on the basis of phony emergency declarations, to stop. However, my link gives little real hope this will go away so quickly.
I suspect one of two scenarios over the next few years. The first, and I consider this unlikely, is that Trump’s destruction of the US economy leads GOP members of the House and Senate to repudiate him followed by the American voters. Unfortunately past behavior is the best indication of what someone might do in the future, and if people haven’t abandoned Trump by now I fear they’ll never abandon him.
What I think more likely to happen is that a few GOP members will come out against Trump but it will be too little, too late. MAGA will have to find a scapegoat to explain why Dear Leader’s actions haven’t brought the price of eggs down to a reasonable level. They might also have to find a way to explain why so many people are getting sick from the flu and airplanes keep falling out of the sky. When this happens, I expect Trump to start having Democrats, members of the GOP who weren’t sufficiently loyal, reporters, arrested on the pretext of treason, fraud, or some other obviously trumped up charges.
I suspect it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.
The pre-Trump Yglesias piece was pretty prescient and, like the author, I too believe that our constitutional structure is in for a crash.
Also like Yglesias, I hope that what rises from the ashes is the greatest democratic system ever devised by the mind of man and that we should demand no less. However, I don’t think a sufficient number of Americans can envisage that and the possibilities of conservatives constructing their autocracy instead are far too great.
Oh please no … not another “most perfect document” to act as a tourniquet or
lightning rod for a century.
What would be much improved is a current document that either, with due encumbrance, can be amended as national needs dictate, or which doesn’t intrude into the ingress and egress of daily life.
I still believe there’s a level of awfulness that will get through to them. But, remember the pandemic? Tens of millions out of work, millions sick, tens of thousands dying every month, hospitals overflowing, temporary morgues being set up in parking lots?
It has to be worse than that.
We hold this truth to be self-evident: You’re the adults now, so you get to decide what that means. There’s shit you’re dealing with that we’ve never even heard of! Figure it out.
That last sentence makes an assumption without benefit of evidence.
Did Yglesias say that?
There are two main systems, presidential and parliamentary. We have the one more likely to collapse.
Generations of American children have been taught in school that having the executive and legislature check each other’s power is a good idea. It is not. Parliamentary supremacy, maybe with a check by a high court, is the good idea.
However, this is not going to end with congressional districts becoming ridings. Experience elsewhere in the Americas is that strongman rule can come and go without big constitutional changes.
Eventually we’ll get back to something like the Biden years – a more democratic form of governmental paralysis – or maybe even a bit better. The constitution may be tweaked, such as by limiting the presidential pardoning power, but I do not see any permanent fix coming. We will be more like Brazil or Argentina.
I’m rooting for a nice Hemorrhagic Fever.
There’s something about seeing folks bleeding from their eyes and ears that makes it impossible to dismiss it as ‘It’s just the Flu!’.
I think that the best outcome for humanity is a quick collapse of the US similar to the Soviet collapse. Trump seems to be doing his best to bring it about.