hell no. I wouldn’t grant any president wide, “extra-Constitutional” powers. They’ll never be returned.
I want no part in creating a Palpatine.
I doubt he can tie his own shoes. So no.
Upvote
I would not, even if there were a guarantee of lived saved from COVID-19. People died to create this democracy, and people will die to keep it, one way or another. I believe that when the accounting is done, the number of lives spent preserving democracy will be fewer than the number sacrificed to non-democracies.
That may be hard to see when our faces are right up in people suffocating in their own body fluids, and a vaccine is still years away, but I really think that the net loss to COVID-19 will be less than what we would lose, and yes, I mean counting bodies, to retrieving a democracy if we gave it up, OR living without one, post-COVID.
I hate to say, “Some people have to die of COVID-19 to preserve democracy,” but as long as our duly-elected president is a bumbling twit, and governors can order masks, but not enforce cooperation at gunpoint, that actually is the case.
If someone could prove to me that in the very, very long run, deaths from COVID-19 would be less than deaths by US despotism, or a war to retrieve democracy, and that proof would be not speculative, but extraordinarily convincing, I might change my opinion, but only then.
Ok, but you’re replying to me and I think saying the same thing I did.
My answer is “no” to the OP.
If the OP was modified in some way that guaranteed it was still a net positive for lives in the long run, long after covid’s gone, then maybe. As much as I hate trump, and in the real world would never give him any power, in a “trolley about to hit 5 people” kind of hypothetical, then OK, I’ll play.
A lot of people here are too fixated on fighting the hypothetical.
(OP, please let me hijack a bit): What if we simply made it a trade-off:
Trump is tyrant for 1-2 years, but in return, there is no Covid-19 and never was any Covid anywhere in the world to begin with (that person in Wuhan never touches that pangolin). Deal or no deal?
I could see giving someone sweeping powers to institute measures to reign in the spread of the pandemic. That person should not be the president, because the president already has enough other stuff to deal with, and the president is, by definition, not an expert on anything to begin with.
I’d still have to say no. Even with a hypothetical guarantee that he wouldn’t remain a tyrant (as if!) he could still do immense harm, such as dismissing the Supreme Court, putting the DNC in prison, starting a war with Iran. The potential harm outweighs the benefit.
Also…there will be more pandemics. These things just happen from time to time. I don’t want to surrender the constitutional rule of law to them.
I think that most are following the hypothetical just fine.
In my opinion, and in that of many others here, the number of Covid deaths and suffering is insignificant compared to the death and suffering that is caused by totalitarianism.
The OP’s hypothetical is based on reality, cause and effect, even if it makes assertions that I would disagree with (that giving Trump dictatorial powers would improve the Covid response). Note even that the OP didn’t give a timeline for when Trump would give back his newfound powers.
Yours is not. You are not asking the people who are living in this world what direction to take, but having a discussion among time travelers or others who live outside of time who can compare the effects of different timelines.
“Oh, yes, this timeline where Trump was a dictator for 18 months before willingly returning power to the people, but there was never any Covid is better than this timeline where Trump was left with only the ordinary powers of a president and Covid went rampant.”
If we are able to step outside of time, and look at different timelines, then your hypothetical can be answered realistically. Hook me up with a time machine or a multiverse explorer, and then we’ll talk.
k9bfriender: What’s wrong with an alternate time-line thought experiment? The basic definitions were given: now explore what you think would be the follow-on ramifications. What-if questions are perfectly valid, although always speculative. You don’t need to see the whole time-line. You get to make that up, out of what you honestly believe would have (or might have) happened. Please don’t shoot down one of the more joyous pastimes of this forum!
Why not ask if we’d give Trump wide power if it guaranteed fewer smoking-related deaths? Both COVID and smoking kill about a thousand Americans a day, and I can’t remember the last time smoking deaths have been in the news.
We just passed the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. That and Nagasaki killed about the same number of people as have died of COVID in the US.
I wouldn’t give him the powers, no. An evil President bent on subjugating American democracy (to the extent that the US is actually a democracy) is a bigger deal, I think, in the long run.
The OP says “the current administration”, which leaves very little wiggle room. We know what that is, what it is like, what its tendencies are. Basically, the current administration is very astute at fucking things up. Three years of incompetence and bumbling have shown that. They even dangled the worm of war in front of Iran and Iran refused to bite.
Hence, to pose a reasonable hypothetical, one would have to retcon this or another administration that would be realistically capable of quashing the bug, because the one we have now only promises to make everything worse if allowed to run free.
As a simple proposal, nothing. As a complete change to someone else’s hypothetical, quite a bit.
The OP has a relevance, giving the govt the power to stop the pandemic, and whether giving that power would result in a better overall outcome.
Velocity’s is simply two completely unconnected things. At best, it will hijack the thread into a completely different discussion than the OP intended. In order to make such a determination, we not only have to know that Trump would in fact voluntarily give up said powers within 2 years, and we would have to know of a pandemic that never happened. These are things that can only be assessed by future historians or those with access to other universes.
Well I did try to allude to being a little quesy about the hypothetical.
In most "what if"s that propose you know X, it matters how you know. I’m fine to play along, but any answer you give can potentially be misconstrued.
What’s the worst that could happen? I mean, remember that time Congress (including many Democrats) granted GWB the powers to declare and wage war against Iraq so that he could - as he promised - use that to coerce Iraq into complying with various weapons inspections, thus obviating the need to actually use those powers? That turned out just fine.
Wait - he did what?
To the OP: You’re talking about an individual who not only adores dictators, but has made public statements the gist of which is he would like to look at remaining in office past the possible legal term for that office and is currently stating he wishes to delay the upcoming election. There is no way in Hell that I would be fine with him having greater powers than what he’s getting away with now.
Not Trump or anyone else. The feds did an awful job getting the word out about the virus and how it’s spread, but in August 2020 anyone with a pulse knows what they need to know. We don’t need a specially empowered Fed to start making and enforcing rules, we need to decide as individuals whether we want to grow up and work together against a common problem, or keep living the crippled lifestyle this problem forces onto us. It’s that simple.
So, less cover-up and incompetence and more competence? I’d go with New Zealand, sure. The trouble is, real authoritarian powers tend to look more like China…which sucks on just about every level. Giving those powers to Trump would be as bad as Xi having them, and the result would simply be that instead of a fuck up on the colossal level we have we’d have the same or worse with less information and the potential for folks in this thread going to a re-education camp or some other unpleasant outcome, or just having the entire thread magically deleted and all of us flagged. I could see Trump doing that with the power, mainly because we just have to look at what China (or other authoritarian dictatorships in history) has actually done with them to see.
Well, I agree with your conclusion, but I double disagree on the reasoning.
Unfortunately, no, it’s still not the case that we all know what to do and it’s just a matter of fighting it or not. Because sadly, the US is the epicenter of conspiracy viruses right now, and you get a very different version of this crisis from person to person. While many of these CTs are about the origin of the virus – and so are harmless in this context – others do concern personal behaviour, such as whether masks themselves cause illness, and whether HCQ can be a preventative.
Regarding the Fed’s role, the countries that have succeeded in containing this virus have done so with a great deal of central coordination. It’s a big ask for local governments to each reinvent widescale testing and tracing, and go tie them all together, and also figure out sensible guidance on things like e.g. school reopenings.
Cover up, yes. But incompetence?
We’ve had hardly any cases in China for months, and e.g. a new breakout in Beijing (one of the world’s most crowded cities) was smothered by the time it reached 300 cases.