Agreed, although I don’t feel that “recovery” has to mean “unquestioned US primacy” in those or other areas. If the US is just one of several global powerhouses in education and research and international leadership, with constant jostling among other high-achieving nations striving for the top spot, that’ll suit me just fine. World domination ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
But yeah, post-Trump it’ll take a whole lot of work even to bring the US back to a stable “member of the board” position.
And part of the work is going to have to be tightening up formal legal limitations on Executive Branch power. This 250-year tradition of “protocols” isn’t cutting it any more, and hasn’t been ever since 2016 candidate Trump decided just not to release his tax returns.
And no one in any other branch of government did a goddamned thing about it. After that, it’s been one thing after another with muted reactions, media sanewashing, looking the other way passively and placidly. He has never been held seriously accountable for any of his crimes and outrages and never will be. The sooner this thread lives up to its name, the better for this country.
I strongly disagree. Whatever decline we might be experiencing China is half a century ahead of us. China is not the future, they are an example of where we might end up if things get truly bad.
China might be a worse place to live than the US, but i expect they will succeed in their hotel of becoming the preeminent world power, as we slide down the tubes.
China is absolutely and entirely fucked with zero chance at recovery from demographic collapse, there is absolutely no chance of them being a world power and might not even exist as we know them in our lifetime.
The legacy media are transfixed by Mamdani—partly because he’s genuinely smart and charismatic, and is making real changes. But MOSTLY because of the socialist label. Legacy media are owned by people who freak the fuck out over the word Socialism.
So we can expect coverage of Mamdani to continue to be copious.
A hypothetical sane, honest, and decent President*, on the other hand, will likely be less interesting to the legacy media. Mostly such a person would be doing things oligarchs hate, such as restoring the ‘guardrails of democracy’. In other words, that hypothetical President would be working with a hypothetically sane, honest, and decent Congress to make explicit all the should-have-been-rules that have been mere expectations for all these decades.
And that’s bound to be bad for the big-money boys who own our legacy media.
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* of course we don’t know if it will be possible for a sane, honest, and decent person to be President ever again in this forsaken nation.
I submit that Mamdani is a sane, honest, and decent Mayor (and I don’t think we disagree). So clearly, what’s needed, is a Democratic Socialist for President. Obviously can’t be Mamdani, but could be AOC.
I would be astonished if AOC got the nomination. She’s a smart and capable politician, but the twin issues will be ‘she’s too young’ (and that’s a fair argument) and ‘she’s never run anything.’ Also a fair argument. (Obama had at least run a community-development organization and a voting drive, even if not for all that many years.)
Talk to me again about AOC after she has a successful stint as Governor of New York.
As far as an avowed Socialist gaining the Presidential nomination for 2028: that would surprise me, too. Mamdani is by far the most talented of those on the scene now—and of course he’s ineligible.
I think there’s a significant chance that AOC is a world-level political talent, the likes of Obama or Bill Clinton. If so, none of the issues you mentioned will matter, and her political and communications talent will easily carry her to the nomination (if she decides to run).
I understand that you believe that there is not legal avenue for trump to be president again. I agree with you to that point, but the law has not stopped a lot of his antics and schemes so far. We’ll see. Having said that, please don’t act stupid. You know exactly what was meant by that post.
No legal paths, but that hasn’t really stopped him completely so far. Hell there’s no legal path for him to shut down USAID, but he did, or tear down the East Wing, he did that too, or fire the heads of almost all Federal agencies, but SCOTUS provided him with a legal avenue for that. How about accepting a over sized jet from a foreign nation? Did you say Emouments? Anyway, my point was you knew exactly what point the poster in question was making. If you wanted to argue it (as we are now apparently) why weren’t you honest about it?