You are evil and I am just jealous of your style!
Hah, I remember many, many years ago debating with a (small-r) republican who said that the Queen doesn’t have to listen to the electorate if they turned against her and there’s no avenue for the majority to remove her from office, and that would never happen in a republic like the USA.
Wish I could go back in time…for many reasons.
Exactly. There are 3.4 million U.S. government employees, civilian and military, and each and every one of them ultimately decides whose orders they obey.
Not just U.S. employees. If there are two presidential claimants, they will start appointing ambassadors and diplomats to other countries. Then those countries will decide whose ambassadors to receive and which ones to reject.
I don’t think people realize how any organization, including a government, is essentially a shared delusion. They’re just fictions, which exist and function only because the people involved believe that they should. Once the delusion is fractured - say, when people aren’t sure who’s in charge - then the whole construct may collapse.
This is what I mean by people not taking this threat seriously. You genuinely believe you just say he isn’t still president and that means something. But why do you believe that?
It’s not that simple. Or at least it need not be that simple.
e.g. Case 1: It’s obvious to substantially everyone that Trump lost yugely. He simply declares “I refuse to abide by the results. I hereby appoint myself President for Life”. Darn good bet as you say that on Jan 20 Biden takes over and Mr. Delusional is dragged bodily out of the WH. Net of whatever insanity he executive ordered between Nov 3 & Jan 20 that the R factions of Congress and SCOTUS supinely accepted. Alternatively, Pence & the cabinet grow a pair and 25A him the minute Trump makes his treasonous announcement and the R faction lines up to support the return to normalcy by removing Trump and leaving President Pence as the caretaker until Jan 20 when Biden is inaugurated.
e.g. Case 2: The vote as initially counted is very very close in a lot of states. The EC tally based on those counts is all but tied. There are suits and counter-suits, injunctions, and counter injunctions flying all across the land. By late Nov, nobody but the lawyers can begin to keep track of which overlapping contrary orders apply to what. The state of play is all but indeterminate. The normal deadlines for states to certify their results are fast approaching and chaos is the order of the day. The courtroom warfare continues with some sensible, and some outrageous, rulings. On-the-street violence begins. We get past the date for the states to deliver their EC counts and a hefty fraction have not done so; hamstrung by pending court action and or political paralysis at the statehouse. etc. Need I go on?
But perceived legitimacy matters. If you have 40% of the country questioning whether Biden is even legitimately in office, that’s a problem. And by questioning I don’t mean bar stool chatter about whether his birth certificate is real - I mean questioning whether he has the moral and/or legal legitimacy to raise taxes, change healthcare laws, impose a nationwide pandemic shutdown. A leader needs legitimacy and cooperation, or else he’s the leader of a divided nation that not only openly resists him but defies and confronts him.
If you carry the what-ifs far enough on this question, then eventually you have civil war, and the question of who’s really in charge is decided by who has more people fighting for them, and how well they fight.
Quoting myself for context:
Here is an excellent post in another thread that contains a cite that bears reading:
Good post. I think it’s important to keep in mind that underlying it all is economic inequality, which inevitably leads to perceived differences in terms of power. Any society that permits the kind of inequality that we have, for as long as we have, is going to have problems over the long term. The party that represents wealth is a minority political faction that is perpetually thinking and strategizing in terms of how to maintain power - even when they are out of power. A classic example of this is how Mitch McConnell used his senate power to obstruct a lot of what Obama wanted to do in his first two years, and how he blocked judicial picks when they had the senate majority. Obstruction is a tool. Undermining confidence in normal democracy is the goal. They don’t want totalitarian rule; they want a democracy, but it has to be their brand of it.
But to your point and that brought up in the post you cite, could this happen in the UK, in Canada, or elsewhere? Absolutely, if you have a faction that can successfully bend institutions that bend the public interest. It should go without saying that the media - both mass media and social media - are a major game-changer, too, for they can shape how people perceive governance. Social media is particularly dangerous because it can give what were once elements on the fringe a kind of platform and legitimacy they never had before. And there can be many versions or copies of the same fringe element.
Ask a person in given country X if “it” could happen in given country Y, and they’ll say “of course! It could happen anywhere,” which history has demonstrated is the correct answer.
Ask that same person if “it” can happen in country X, and you get some answer about why it’s more complicated than all that. Which is, of course, part of the way that “it” keeps happening.
ETA: @asahi 2 above …
Agreed.
One of the fascinating things to me is how the Establishment political Rs, the uber-wealthy and Corporate Rs, and the RW media have somehow awakened a sleeping giant of RW populism. Which populism, once it got the bit in its teeth, would have most of that existing power elite swinging from lamposts.
It’s almost like they’ve been taken over by a short-term nihilism: America is doomed, let’s just profiteer until it crashes then fly away in our private jets. As if there was a safe place to go after the US implodes.
Of course a simpler explanation is the “riding the tiger” effect. The Southern Strategy got the politics part of the tiger moving, the economic changes of globalization & tech progress got the economic part of the tiger moving, and the demographically growing non-white non-evangelical fraction got the racial part of the tiger moving.
Now the tiger has grown & picked up speed, a lot of opportunists from Rupert Murdoch to Glenn Beck have made a fortune along the way, and nobody knows how to slow it down or jump off.
There will be blood. And tears.
my prediction is he and some family members leave the country and don’t come back until he has a deal where he does not serve time. If he can’t get that deal , he never comes back. It would be interesting if Melania stays here with Barron. The kids other than Tiffany might want to leave too to avoid jail time .