It’s never one person. Democracy starts to fail when a substantial portion of the people don’t want it anymore, and that is a condition that has now arisen in the USA.
Trump probably won’t succeed, because he didn’t plan far enough ahead, but he could have, and American democracy is not in a healthy state.
This is true, but 70% of Americas economy occurs in the blue counties.
I don’t see the red counties giving up on the blue counties paying their bills and paying their taxes anytime soon.
That number keeps growing. It was maybe only 55% under Gore and about 65% under Hillary.
So the red states aren’t going to walk away from the blue states and blue counties that pay the bills. They’ll want to run everything plus enjoy the tax revenue from the urban areas. Which means they’ll go for conquest rather than separation.
In the civil war, the southern states tried to leave the union. In this situation, the division is urban/rural and the rural areas don’t want the urban areas to stop paying their bills. So sadly going our separate ways isn’t an option.
Not only do blue counties account for 70% of the GDP, 10% of America’s GDP uses the NYC transit system. Do both the Dakotas combined produce 10%?We carry red state America and all they do is bitch and moan. The thing is, they think they’re the hard working backbone.
What blue state America needs to do is fund secession movements in red states, they get riled up and go all Brexit on us and by the time they figure out that they need us, it’ll be too late. Call it Rexit.
Incorrect. I did not and would not suggest everything will be fine when Trump leaves office. I did not make this about Trump; the OP did.
I am sticking with the OP and concerning myself with the narrow question of whether Trump can steal this election; you and other respondents are shifting the goalposts to insist there will be long-term institutional damage from Trump. (And there will! And it’s bad! But that’s separate from the question of stealing the election. Seen Bill Barr dipping his paddle into this fiasco? Nope. He knows there’s nothing he can do)
Everything will not be fine when Trump is gone. But, speaking to the question in the OP, Trump will absolutely be gone and he will not steal this election. I have been pointing out since August that the rest of you are hyperventilating about him stealing the election; when he leaves office I will gloat unremittingly over my correctness.
Let me put forward my own analogy here: there is a foot race amongst five people. During the race, one of the racers pull out a gun and starts taking potshots at the other racers. The other racers, unsurprisingly, demand the other racer be arrested.
Under the type of argument you pose, the other racers would be considered “tyrannical” in demanding the arrest of a competitor. After all, they’re calling on a force external to the race to remove another racer. But what you’re doing in your analysis of the political situation is - very carefully and deliberately - excluding the rather critical fact that one party is acting in a manner that is disruptive, destructive, or questionable legality and on a wide enough scale to cause considerable (and potentially permanent) damage to the rules and institutions under which the competition is being held. And deliberately selecting - and, more importantly, excluding - crucial information in order to impose an alternate narrative inevitably produces a strawman, as you have indeed done.
It is not hyperbole to state that what the Republican Party have done and are currently doing poses a very real and existential threat to the conduct of free and fair elections in America. All the “gosh, gee whiz, it’s the Democrats who are the real villains here for demanding accountability for the Republican’s actions” arguments rely on that deliberate exclusion of the severity and scale of those actions. And while doing everything possible to avoid accountability (and to accuse the other side of doing what they themselves are openly doing is par for the course for the American right-wing, demanding that they be held accountable and appropriately punished for their actions is not tyrannical.
And let’s be clear: the problem is no longer a few “bad apples” in the GOP. It runs from the bottom to the top party leaders, most notably the President, the Senate Majority Leader, the Attorney General, as well as the vast majority of other elected Republican officials, appointees, party officials and assorted hangers-on. Stating that the current Republican Party is fundamentally incompatible with the tenets of American democracy is not tyrannical either.
I do accept that there are many people who
That seemed just a wee bit ominous.
Sorry - submitted too soon, then took too long to edit. Not dead yet…
What I was going to say: I do accept that there are many people who are perfectly happy for one race participant to gain an unfair advantage, even unto engaging in blatantly unethical and potentially illegal practices. And I have a pretty good idea which racer’s name is on those people’s betting slips.
America is not under threat of communism. The Democrats are not remotely communist, nor are they Marxist or socialist (also, “communism”, “socialism” and “Marxism” are not synonymous, as you would know if you’d “read up” on them). The Democratic Party remains staunchly corporatist, and the distinctly capitalist American economy has thrived under the previous two Democratic administrations.
As for “socialism” killing, I’m not particularly socialist but - having read up on it - I know that “socialist” healthcare leads to far better outcomes at far lower cost and without excluding anyone from receiving it. The heavily capitalist system America has, however, “killed” thousands every year and bankrupted thousands more. Furthermore, many Western countries - most notably the Scandinavian ones - have varying levels of socialism and enjoy the highest levels of happiness in the world. So frankly, Trump’s not saving us from anything.
So you are replicating the mistake of the OP.
We do now, yes.
I agree with your entire post, but will comment on the quoted bit: We’ve learned that depending on office-holders to behave with honor and integrity is no longer a viable means of running a government. There will be increasing calls for those “norms” on which we’ve relied to be codified into law–particularly for Presidents, but at other levels of government, too.
A long article in WaPo boils down to this list of violations we can no longer leave up to the “good faith” of a President:
To be pedantic, they certainly don’t. “Corporatism” doesn’t mean “in favor or corporations doing business.”
So they’re not stealing the car; they’re just taking the tires and the engine out so nobody else can drive it.
Go ahead and gloat, I guess.
I think that’s even more unlikely to work than the faithless electors. See Michigan.
I thought the point of the thread was to talk the OP out of worrying about something that’s unlikely to happen. Nothing is impossible, of course, but there are things that are more unlikely than others.
Sidney Powell is a nut job. When Tucker Carlson calls you a nutjob about the Trump fraud election conspiracy theory, you’ve raced past alien invasion level of conspiracy theory. Tucker Carlson says she has no evidence. UFO sightings have more evidence.
I started a thread asking if she was nuts. It’s not just that what she’s saying is nuts… she SOUNDS nuts. There is a straining in her voice, and a way that the longer she talks she keeps adding more, increasingly crazy accusations that she obviously made up on the spot, that really reminds me of people struggling to hold their sanity together.
I hear the strain in her voice as well. And there are times it is worse and it does seem to depend on what she is talking about, like it mirrors her internal stress.
Perfect.
This is not a prediction but a warning. If we want the United States to continue to be a constitutional republic, we cannot assume that Joe Biden’s election victory assures his inauguration on January 20, 2021. Not without a lot more work by those who care about this country.
More from there—
My central point in this column, however, is quite simple. Trump’s losses are piling up, making it tempting to think that he has become an ineffectual loser with no cards left to play. That is a dangerously complacent idea, however, because Trump has shown that he will try anything to illegitimately seize power—to commit a coup against the legitimately elected incoming President of the United States.
One can hope that his losing streak will continue, but hope is not a plan. People must make it clear that any avenues by which Trump might try to stay in power are illegitimate—and then we will hold on tight and hope that enough people in responsible positions listen to reason, allowing us to keep our democracy intact for at least a few more years.
Here I’m wondering if anybody has even read the OP.
Or maybe there’s some board rule where every Trump-related question must devolve into a hand-wringing jeremiad of “he’s broken everything and he can do whatever he wants”. That’s not even a falsifiable position (until Jan 20th, of course), but even a cursory tour of the facts suggests it’s not remotely realistic to suggest everything is broken and Trump is wholly unconstrained.
In fact, insisting that Trump has already attained autocracy, in my opinion, is a direct contributor to him and so many of his supporters behaving as if it’s true. You’re helping supply the feedback loop when you do this.
A lot of us are having a discussion here about what Trump says about America and where it is. You want to focus on one very narrow slice of that discussion to win a very narrowly defined argument. You point out why that argument is flawed and not worth having and then you dig in on it.