Yes, this. At this point my only real hope is that their incompetence breaks things to the point it all falls apart and they lose control of the government because there’s nothing functional enough left for them to be in control of.
Which given just how incompetent they are is at least a possibility. But even if it happens rather than a peaceful collapse I expect they’ll kill a lot of people in their attempts to hold on, and out of spite. Gorbachev wasn’t bloodthirsty enough to want to pull a Stalin and try to crush everyone into submission with a bloodbath; these people will gleefully do just that.
Yeah, but they’re the symptom, not the disease. They’re just two drug addled morons. If Musk and Trump disappeared today, the millions of people who voted for all this wouldn’t suddenly come to their senses.
I think they are way more than a symptom. They are the cristalizacion elements for their ideology, become a surrogate-deity, they are the combustion-material that keeps up the heat.
Just like Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Phol-Poht, the NK-ILL-Dim-Sums, etc… were - without them “flooding the zone periodically”, things start(ed) winding down pretty fast.
This is the kind of catastrophism that got us here. As demonstrated by what’s happening in the Ukraine and NATO, the collapse of the US would suck for everyone both in the US and outside. The idea people should be working towards the collapse of the US that rather than doing whatever it takes to try and oppose Trump and ensure the GOP does not stay in charge of government (not matter how hard that will be), is exactly how we got in this mess to start with.
The idea that everything is so crappy that the best thing to wish for is for the worst to happen sooner rather than later is how we got a Trump administration with a “mandate” from the majority of the electorate. All those people who decided the Democrats were so bad it was better to not vote as they were in a safe blue state. There is a little bit of fascism that is theirs. You get to own that little bit of fascism because you made it happen.
There is one outcome that keeps me going, however faint the hope is. Musk is doing his darndest to make the idea of a crippling wealth tax for billionaires quite incredibly popular. If DOGE keeps going like this for four years. Then a 90% wealth tax for billionaires will be as popular as supporting the troops and pictures of cute puppies and kittens.
Our best HOPE is that things get so broken, so fast, that by the midterms there’s a hue and cry for impeachment, and enough Republicans in congress realize they have to do it.
IF that happens, then maybe the damage won’t be so deep and we just have to endure a nasty recession.
The argument being made is that the US collapsing isn’t the worst thing that could happen; that the worst thing that could happen is that is doesn’t collapse. Because Nazi America will kill billions if it doesn’t.
I think you are right. Because the alternative is likely to go the way of the boiling frog.
I’m still holding out the faintest hope that there will be some meaningful pushback from Congress/the Courts against some of what impress me as his blatantly unlawful actions. But I’m not even sure I could put a numerical value on the odds for that happening. Might as well buy a lottery ticket or something.
I’m not sure if you are referring to an armed uprising or mass suicide.
Unless a significant portion of the police and the military joins the uprising, it has no chance of succeeding. The police and the military have better guns. They are properly trained in how to use them. They have supply chains and secure communications. The rebels with guns would still be arguing about who is in charge and who outranks who when they were shot.
As for mass suicide, suicide is not the answer. Call 988.
I think you mean 90% income tax instead of wealth tax but I take your point. Higher rates on really high incomes generally find high approval ratings. But they are the untouchable third rail of conservative ideology.
No, wealth tax. In addition to the fact that the super-wealthy play lots of games to re-define their income in ways that it’s not subject to actual income tax, taxing their income, even at 90%, doesn’t impact their already-accumulated wealth, which is more than enough to continue the kind of fuckery we’re seeing, and that we want to stop. Sure, Musk spent hundreds of millions to buy this election, but he’s got hundreds of billions to play with. He could buy elections every year for the rest of his life and still not run out of money (Say, 500 million per year, 100 billion would last 200 years. And he’s got over 400 billion. He could do this, and still be one of, if not the, richest people in the world).
It’s that shit that we need to kill, and we only do that if we confiscate the vast majority of his wealth, not just his income.
This may seem like wishful thinking but the reality is that the political pendulum really does tend to swing from one side to the other. The risk is that now that the Orange One is in control of the levers of power, it may be difficult to achieve fair elections. There’s already credible evidence that there were substantial irregularities in 2024, mainly in the form of voter suppression. The only peaceful hope for America is a major groundswell of anti-MAGA and anti-Republican sentiment in the mid-terms,
People have been telling me that for decades, but the swing back away from the right never seems to actually happen.
It’s a ratchet not a swing; the Republicans move politics to the Right, the Democrats stop but don’t reverse it, then the next time the Republicans are in power they push things to the Right again. And now they are in a position to push everything to the farthest right and lock it there permanently.
Of course it happens! Jimmy Carter replaced Ford, Reagan replaced Carter, the Reagan era did continue with Bush the elder, but ended when Bill Clinton replaced him, who was then replaced by Bush the stupid, who was then replaced by Obama, and then we had the Trump-Biden seesaw. It’s not absolutely predictable, but pretty close.
It’s also true that American politics has been slowly drifting rightwards, but that’s a different phenomenon with different causes.