Blood and circuses, and those in power have no problem feeding the mobs they control.
Argentina in 2001, the comparison fails in that the actual government was not strong in any sense, but my point goes deeper than that.
What we saw in 2001 was the middle class completely losing faith in the government, I think that if the economy goes down you’ll see a lot of middle class republicans suddenly deciding that they were misled by Trump and that “he was never truly a republican”, once that crucial support is lost the army and the police follow and that’s it.
Now, there are a lot of ways this could not happen, but the possibility exists.
Then you are probably fucked, it will all go down to the stability of (small d) democratic institutions, which seem to be failing right now.
But is kind off a political singularity, our existing models fails and no one knows what will happen.
This is the biggest problem with hoping for an economic collapse. The US economy is so large, it has an insane amount of reserve capacity. Losing even 25% of its value will be a disaster, but it will still leave an economy larger than almost anything else in history. Not even the Great Depression lead to an actual collapse of the US government, and the US is more robust now than it was then.
And let’s not forget, we just went through a major pandemic, that involved a lot of people losing their jobs overnight, all at once, not spread out over a couple of years, and we survived that without an actual collapse. Does anyone here see a bigger economic crisis than that coming?
My ignorance, but was the middle class resistance accomplished WITHIN the previously existing governmental system/safeguards? (Did/do you have a constitution?) Or were NEW systems/protections instituted?
I guess there is enough interpretive “wiggle room” in the US system, that much of what is being done requires no blatant legal changes. It COULD be possible that at some point Congress and the Supremes could stand up and say, “Oh - did we say THAT? What we REALLY meant was THIS!”
A crazy aspect of the US is that we are so ridiculously strong and rich, that the economy could reqlly go far into the crapper before it got so bad that the folk who were doing OK saw a need to do anything. A somewhat lower standard of living for Americans is still well above what a mojority of folk worldwide enjoy.
‘When the world’s economies get pneumonia, with some of them in the ICU on ventilators, the United States gets the sniffles.’
Easily, if another pandemic hits and the governmental infrastructure that fought the last one is not only torn down, but is actively battled with lies and bullshit.
The point that made the middle class revolt was the government limiting the amount of money that could be taken from bank deposits to a small amount.
We had (and still have) a constitution but the government still had a couple of years before the elections.
The poor had been protesting for years at that point because the economic model was exclusionary to the extreme, but until the middle class took to the streets too nothing seemed to happen.
The government tried to keep firm by having the police kill around 20 protesters (thus my extrapolation of 200 for the US which as about 4 times the population and a madman instead of a boring politician in command) but eventually the president had to resign, his successor had to resign, we had 5 presidents in a week, until a senator of the opposition got the presidency through “practically constitutional” methods and things stabilized a bit.
That senator has been credibly accused of orchestrating the whole thing, but in any case without the middle class taking to the streets the whole “regime” in power at that point would not have fallen.
So, two once-in-a-lifetime things happening again at the same time.
Sure, then things might fall apart, but the likelihood of another pandemic in the next few years is pretty low.
Thanks for the succinct history lesson!
Kinda crazy that it almost seems I need to hope things get THAT bad, for the possibility to exist that they get better. 
A military defeat could also do it, specially if combined with a bad economy, it has happened a lot of times before, again in Argentina you had the Falklands war defeat causing the fall of the military dictatorship.
I don’t see that happening. The US is so terribly strong compared to everyone - w/ the possible exception of China. So long as Trump realizes it is in his and his cronies’ interest to avoid all out war and keep the missiles from flying, we can accept any number of “defeats” - see Viet Nam/Afghanistan/Iraq… and simply either declared them victories, or ignore them as the cost of doing business.
How many trillions did we pour down a hole in the desert in Iraq, with no justifiable purpose and accomplishing nothing?
That is true, but you could, for example, lose an aircraft carrier.
Knowing Trump it’s very possible that he would want nuclear retaliation for that or any other humiliation, and that’s were the crisis would start.
With the infrastructure torn down and replaced by lies and bullshit, the odds have jumped through the roof.
The other problem with getting people to take any action is that Trump’s “assaults on democracy” are subtle enough that they don’t look like assaults on US democracy. We have not seen something truly obvious to the Average Joe like the Trump administration outright suspending and banning an election in Michigan or something like that. Of course, by the time such a thing did happen, the water temperature would already have cooked the frog.
Or two nuclear submarines. Or three B2 bombers. Or Taiwan.
ETA:
First time I hear the word subtle used in a sentence with trump in it.
Does anyone think this administration is preparing the nation for the AI revolution? Not to mention the slow creep of automation? The final straw will be economic, but not necessarily the economy. It will be the massive job loss that’s headed our way. In the not too distant future, 20% unemployment will look like an unattainable pipe dream. Need a job? Better start picking that produce before you’re replaced by the AI picker drones.
Once tens of millions of jobs are gone…and they won’t be all blue collar jobs, either…that’s when the real shitstorm begins. There will be violence, and then there will be the crackdown, and then game over.
Now that I think of it, enough years of military quagmire could do the trick too, one of Trump’s main selling point is that he will avoid that kind of thing (I don’t think it’s true but his base does), kinda like the Epstein thing, being rubbed in the face with something like that could debilitate his coalition enough.
That and the money that comes from being so well connected.
I was thinking more at the voting booth than via Congress.
I think that over the past 40 or so years we’ve seen western democracies become kind of bureaucratically moribund. There was a time we’d dig miles of subway tunnel in a day, or put up a bridge in a week*. We’d do big things, not just in the physical space but in the policy space too. Of course, a bunch of workers would be killed and maybe a lake drained, but shit got done.
Now, in reaction to those things, the permitting and lawsuits and rules and regulations means nothing ever gets done. And everything costs a fortune. I believe that is PART of what’s driving this decline in democracies, a general frustration with a sense they’ve become ineffective.
The sudden importance of culture wars I cannot explain.
*Not actual researched times- you get the idea
This is almost certainly true. I spent a few days in Singapore back in 2019, and it kind of amazed me how they were so good at just deciding to do things, and then doing them. It seemed like half the city was being rebuilt, as the stuff they built in the 80s and 90s were no longer meeting their demands.
For example, they made a big point about their new water control systems. They buy a lot of their drinking water from Malaysia, and Malaysia had recently announced that when the current contract was finished, they were going to increase the price of water significantly. So Singapore said, “Screw that! We’re going to build our own water system!”
Now, Singapore has no natural sources of water, other than rain, but what they did was decide that, as much as humanly possible, no drop of water that enters Singapore will ever leave it. They built whole new reservoir systems for fresh water, and whole new systems for water recycling. And not just public systems either, they encouraged private investors to do the same. There was one new building I saw as part of a tour that incorporated a self-contained water recycling system, such that the building required almost no replacement of water from the city systems.
And they did this in just a few years.