Doubt it.
The rest of the world isn’t lucky enough to never have to hear about the perpetual US election cycle again, and frankly there’s just too much money in it for them to give it up.
It’ll be a fucking clown show for the next four years though.
Yes.
In my opinion we’ve already passed the point of no return and recent events have just confirmed as much.
This isn’t about having differing political opinions. A profoundly unfit, amoral criminal with a very public history of being an awful person came along and started spewing extremely dangerous rhetoric, some of which is almost verbatim to Hitler’s, and our society ate it up and made him president in 2016. This man, who leads a party who courts racists/sexists for their votes, utterly failed his tenure as president, bombing his response to the greatest American crisis since WW2 and presiding over the highest White House administration turnover rate in U.S. history. Since then he has become a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and illegally attempted to overturn our democratic institutions by various means.
This go around the American people were presented with a choice between that person, who only managed to make himself appear even more unfit during this campaign season, openly stated he is anti-worker rights, and is directly responsible for removing women’s federally protected right to bodily autonomy, or a successful prosecutor with a doctorate in law, backed by a party that, despite misinformation, has a voting history proving they vote in favor of the average American FAR more than the opposing party…and Americans STILL managed to drop the ball and go with the CLEARLY worse choice. And when I say clearly, I’m talking about by every conceivable metric that exists in reality.
At this point it isn’t about Democrat vs Republican or Trump vs Kamala or Biden. It’s about the American people. We are not a society of intelligent voters. We have failed our responsibility as citizens in a democracy by being too lazy to learn and by allowing misinformation to mislead us and emotions to cloud our better judgement. We are not engaged in responsible involvement in our own politics. We gleefully elect people that only offer hate and fear and lies, despite how hard they try to prove how awful they are to us. And THAT is why we have passed the point of no return. If you remove the parties and the politicians out of the equation, you still have a society that fails at responsibly preserving a democracy. That gives in to hateful rhetoric and fear. That wants to get the better of the “others”.
There is no happy ending for a society like that. A society like that can only decline. This was not an election about one political ideology against another. It was an election about morality. And we categorically failed that moral test.
There are excuses. We’ve been through a lot. Lots of people are desperate. Desperate people make bad decisions. But the bottom line is we don’t live in a society with a majority of responsible adults making responsible, fact-based decisions about the most important things.
In the arc of history we may end up reaching a better place, but personally I believe we’re embarking on a decline that will most likely last the rest of our lives. It simply isn’t a problem that can be fixed short term. And we’re about to experience a sort of deconstruction. A deconstruction of norms. A deconstruction of institutions. A deconstruction of education and safety nets. And those things take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to build back, because it’s easier to destroy than it is to create or maintain.
Buckle up. Try to find happiness where you can. It’s probably not getting better anytime soon.
I’ve never been more happy to he childless by choice.
And I’m childless, not by choice, and sadly glad too.
I don’t understand this line of thought. As in you are childless by choice BECAUSE of what is going on in the US?
I’m childless by choice because I don’t like children. I’m happy I don’t have kids because they’d be experiencing this shit storm during their formative years and I can’t even imagine how badly that would fuck them up.
I think it’s possibly the end of Western democracy. If Russia and China stroll through Europe with Trump’s help, that’s pretty much it, no?
Naw this is ridiculous.
Everyone knows it started in the 70s and we’ve been headed down hill ever since. Reality is this country died 60 years ago. It’s just taking awhile for the wheels to fall off the bus.
What?
Not OP; but probably referring to Nixon normalising relations with China; or maybe negotiating with the Viet Cong to prolong the Vietnam War so that he could be elected?; or the whole Watergate fiasco which directly lead to the creation of Fox News… I mean, that man is responsible for a lot of our modern ails.
But if it’s the former, it directly lead to outsourcing production overseas where labour was cheapest, resulting in the gutting of American manufacturing and the entire middle class that depended on it.
I more personally believe that Nixon severely injured the US, but it was Reagan who shot the killing bullet. But that’s honestly a debate for another time.
It’s a bit like trying to figure out who invented the car but I would tend to agree it’s when people turned their power over to daddy Regan and went shopping after Carter treated them like adults…
Still don’t get what OP meant vis-à-vis Russia and Europe.
Honestly it sounds like Sino fear-mongering or Tankie wishful thinking.
It’s easy to forget because it’s made up of a multitude of smaller countries - but Europe has a population of ~750m, and a vastly more coherent and powerful combined military (even if the US were to pull out of NATO).
Russia can’t currently steam-roll one nation, how on Earth do you think they’d do anything against Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Finland - all countries with a deeply (& rightfully) ingrained distrust/hatred of Russia.
China isn’t likely to risk making themselves an international outcast just to aid Russia - they are more likely to make a play for Taiwan than anything else.
They’ve been Russia’s main aid all along. The no limits agreement?
https://hir.harvard.edu/chinas-aid-in-the-ukraine-war/
https://cepa.org/article/russia-and-china-two-countries-one-threat/
Russia has almost totally shifted to a war-time economy
But they’re not fighting a conventional war. They didn’t invade the US or Belarus on foot.
Once they have Ukraine and US is not supporting NATO it’s not looking good for Europe.
Der Spiegel agrees
There were similar levels of fear and worry when Russia was amassing troops just under the border ahead of their “3-day special operation”. But the truth of the matter is that Russia has shown itself to be a lot weaker as a military force than they purported themselves to be.
Their internal war-time economy is anyway starting to flounder as the >1.5K daily casualties they are amassing is having a noticeable impact on not only military production, but also civilian and agricultural. (‘ Russia economy crumbling with food prices skyrocketing as Putin’s problems mount’ - Express.co.uk).
They are relying heavily on Iran, China and NK to supplement their falling arms production; and are now also needing to supplement their conscript forces with NK forces.
Russia has continually been over-estimated, but don’t doubt for a second that it is being cooked like a frog in a boiling pot in a proxy-war solely using Ukrainian forces.
In the event of a handful of allied European nations joining the war to aid Ukraine, Russia would be expelled from the region quite quickly - but at the cost of additional human lives, which is why the escalations have been so slow.
Kenedy was the coup.
What democracy? The US never had democracy
For democracy? Yes.
The longer the rubes hold on to this pipe dream that the dems can make a come back the further we will slip and longer it will take to recover. Unfortunately, I don’t think democrat party members will ever give up on the democratic party and they will spend all their political goodwill investing in this farce of a party long after the elections are still free and fair.
Say, free and fair elections survive by some act of god. That doesn’t change the fact the GOP can beat them handley in a free and fair election. The only thing trump needed to cement his win was the Supreme Court to sign off on everything. Given immunity all the road blocks trump had before have been lifted.
We have till January and you will see what the executive is actually capable of, with limp dick biden kicked to the curb.
The terror that will be trumps deportation methods will have your jaw drop and I’m not kidding. We tolerated kids in cages, Abu Ghraib is coming to America and our own sex trafficker and chief will begin some truly despicable shit. You better believe media capture is part of it because there is no way other country’s will be let in on this side of the veil.
I’m not a doomer. It’s not hyperbole. Im not an oracle and would pay my with my own life just to be wrong.
I still am hopeful though that my countrymen can snap out of it and quit dismissing reality in real-time, allowing us an actual chance at resisting this upheaval. If we wait till the midterms though, this shit is cooked, packed, and on the shelf.
If you want to say, look at American history, I’d quickly defer you to the 90s. Whatever we might have once been we are no longer that. We are consumers educated by infomercials who only know reality TV and “influencers”. Coke was the first plague, Springer the second. Followed by real world and road rules. All of this media “culture” stripped us of what it ever ment to be American. No one sits around and wanes intellectual about the founding fathers unless you’re a fashie supreme court justice or Lin-Manuel Miranda. Today, in 2024, the Apprentice is more American than George Washington.
There was a time when a single black women sitting at the front of a bus could change a nation. Today Rosa would hit the front page of reddit on a Wednesday and fall off by the time Europeans woke up to see.
The longer the rubes hold on to this pipe dream that the dems
That’s how far I got before I could hear the aluminium hat.
-Denial <- you are here
-Anger
-Bargaining
-Depression
-Acceptance
Some very profound points.
I think we were fucked once we had a window to all the world’s knowledge in our pockets. The line was immediately blurred between having access to that knowledge and the capacity to truly know and process, to possess, that knowledge.
That used to be the casual dividing line between the adults that considered politics and the people puking up shrimp and strawberry wine at the jersey shore. Now the shrimp and strawberry people count fox-scented infotainment as “news” and really just as their sports team of choice - and they line the paths to polling stations holding automatic rifles. They feel emboldened by knowledge they don’t actually possess but feel confidence in the fact that they “could look up whenever, just don’t want to right now”.
All the “Good Liars” clips are a front row seat on American democracy bleeding out.
We don’t know.
The US came back from a US president hiring private goons to spy on his political opponents.
The US came back from a US president illegally selling weapons to Iran to fund right wing militias in South America.
The US came back from a US cabinet member taking literal bribes from oil companies to give them oil drilling rights on federal land.
The US came back from a US president illegally firing a cabinet member and installing his own lackey.
But it didn’t HAVE to.
I don’t think there’s really such a thing as a ‘point of no return’ for a Democracy. But it is possible to get to a point after which you don’t return.
The next line of defense is 3/4 of state legislatures.
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It should be noted that through all this people fought for those rights. So don’t fall asleep, dear America, because organizing even within small communities will make a difference.
If done correctly, massive change can happen. Dream big so that those who fear negotiate back down to the levels you’ll accept.
The Beastie Boys certainly did.
I share your broader view and cautious optimism. In fact I think that some of what we are seeing are death spasms of that white hegemony that used to lynch blacks at will. They lost their “hard” power long ago with the end of Jim Crow. And they have been losing their “soft” power ever since. Demographic trends point to white people in America eventually becoming a minority. Religion is also dying out. So much of what we see is a panic of a dying group that was once dominant. There is no way that’s ever going to be pretty, anywhere, at any time. But look at the trend behind it and it’s an encouraging one, even if the death spasms are incredibly difficult. TBH if the Democrats could just provide some real leadership into this future, America could flip into a totally different country, much like the liberal democracies of Europe (but way stronger) inside of 20 years. This is the reality that the old guard are scared shitless of, and why they are pulling out all the stops to go the other way.
democracy survived
LMAO!!
Choosing between two candidate picked by lobbyists/corporations, and anyone else not having a slightest chance in hell isn’t a democracy, but hey, you do you.
It’s slightly better than China/Russia having a single candidate and everyone else is just for show.
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Dont forget the trail of tears.
The US has been through a lot and will likely recover, but it would be nice to avoid making the same mistakes again. How many more people have to get hurt before humanity learns?
How do you replenish the oceans and maintain life for any ecosystem humanity lives off of? Most of America is set to be desert by 4 degrees c average warmth increase. You won’t grow crops outdoors. We know we are guaranteed to blow past 1.5 now without being able to stop it as are actions are to late. Yet we are saying “drill baby drill”. The topographical map will change drastically.
The part about our history you’re forgetting is that we never, through any of that, gleefully elected a guy that has made it abundantly clear he doesn’t give a fuck about democracy and will work to subvert or destroy it if it doesn’t suit him.
This is new territory.
And we’re about to experience the deconstruction of things that will be very difficult to build back.
Your point is that we’ve been around for a few hundred years, so we can bounce back. But history would like to point out that nations that were around much longer than us have ceased to exist many times over.
I wish I had your optimism.
I think the problem here is the concurrent effects of climate change. The US couldn’t have picked a worse time to move from flirting with facism to full-on marrying it.
You can deal with one crisis if you’re coordinated enough but the chaos that’s already occurring with the climate - and is set to become exponentially worse - doesn’t give me much hope for a harmonious conclusion to this. Obviously, I hope I’m wrong and you’re right.
I feel like a lot of people online need to read this comment, go outside, and live their life. This is not defeatist, and it’s not unreal optimism. Thank you for this.
On the other hand, do keep in mind that mighty empires have fallen. We cannot say for sure that things will be fine just because in the past the USA has survived
Remember that time we as a country condoned owning people as property? No matter how bad shit gets in the next four years, there’s no point of no return
Mass deportations sweeping up agricultural workers will need to be replaced when a national emergency is declared because crops can’t be harvested. President declares the crops can be harvested by prison populations…what’s the word for captives forced to labor for no pay indefinitely?
Slavery. Notably not the same thing as chattel slavery. I’m not saying we can’t get worse than we are right now, what I am saying is that no matter how bad things get, we can come back from it. Hell, Germany came back from being controlled by the actual Nazi party.
I know someone is gonna reply saying how awful life was in Germany for several decades between Nazi rule and modern Germany, and I’ll note again that I never said life can’t get worse, I only said there’s no point of no return for a country.
What makes me really sad is knowing it didn’t have to be like this, and it doesn’t have to get worse to get better…but it likely will, and that tears me apart.
No. There were two ways the trump admin was going to go. He was either going to run an effective fascist regime, or become the ringmaster of the largest dipshit fucknugget circus. Seeing how things are going so far (and he isn’t even the president yet) it’s going to be the latter.
Sure, there will be long term damage that is going to take years, if not lifetimes of hard work and good policy to undo, but it can be undone. Assuming 2024 was a wake up call and people vote more effectively instead of throwing their voice away at propped up Russian disinfo candidates.
That’s what the Americans said after the first Trump election
And the Americans are still here because he ran a clown show last time too. Palestine might not make it through the next 4 years though, but that’s what the abstainers and 3rd party voters were pushing for.
Are you one of those people who seriously thought that Harris was going to do anything to help Palestine? If so, you bought into something much dumber than Russian disinfo.
Nope I’m not.
we don’t actually know what Harris would have done to be intellectually honest, we just have what she said.
Out of the two and only two choices Americans had (thanks, first past the post), she was overwhelmingly and objectively the best.
But yes she was weak on Palestine and that was bad. Ranked choice for actual third parties, please.
the problem is that people learned nothing. The pandemic gave trump a get out of jail free card, I guess, even though he fucked it up
Every moment is a point of no return, unfortunately.
I’m 14 and this is deep?
One definition of a collapse is a sudden drastic reduction in the complexity of a thing.
I’m not sure whether we’re going to have a societal collapse or a slow decline, but either way the US is in a downward spiral. I think Trump increases the likelihood of us going into the collapse trajectory.
All that said, on the other side of a collapse, there is some room for hope. The incendiary portion of the collapse will definitely suck to live through (if you’re lucky enough to do so), but our country could probably use some simplification long-term because the people within it largely cannot navigate a country this byzantine. A lot of this country’s systems are too complex for an average person to understand let alone administer.
Most of these complexities were probably birthed via intentional decisions by the system creators, and others were a product of unintended consequences. I think the gap in education between our commoners and “the elite” – to borrow a tired trope – also played a part here.
No matter how we arrived, I don’t think the current population can actually operate these systems anymore and long-term one way or another our people require a drastic reduction in the complexity of our society.
There is another path in which the United States invests more in education and scales up the average intelligence of its citizens so that they can handle the complexity of modern life, understand nuance, do research, and create better policy…but at this point I think we’re frankly too far fucked to ever go down that path.
Someone who has been president before, for four years, was elected president again.
I cannot think of anything less similar to a “point of no return”.
You may think of him or his policies what you want (I personally have a mostly negative opinion of him too!), but we have all had four years of opportunity to observe what he does when he is president.
If you are thinking that Trump is like Hitler, then please point me to anything similar to:
- a Capitol Fire Decree of 2017 that says several parts of the Bill of Rights are suspended until further notice
- an Enabling Act of 2017 that gives the president full power to make law including law that violates the constitution
- laws on the Coordination of the States with the Federation of 2017 or a Law on the Reconstruction of the Federation of 2018 giving the federal government full legislative and executive power over the states
- a Law Against the Formation of Parties of 2017 declaring that the Republican Party was the only political party in the US and anyone attempting to form another party would be imprisoned
- a Law on the Abolition of the Senate of 2018 doing exactly what the title implies
- a Law on Measures of State Self-Defense of 2018 retroactively legalizing dozens of extrajudicial killings of Trump’s political rivals
Oh, none of those things happened in the late 2010s? Then why exactly are you expecting them to happen in 2025 or 2026? What is different now?
You are giving examples in history and changing the dates to the first Trump presidency, which is somewhat confusing.
Those things certainly didn’t happen because the GOP did not have a majority in the legislature. I agree that it is unlikely that these will occur during this term as well, given that the majority in the house will be very small, but I assure you there will be bills passed that will continue to strip away power from the legislature and grant those powers to the executive. There will also be interpretations of the law that will disenfranchise the citizens and/or will have repercussions for years to come.
LegalEagle gives a pretty good rundown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG_L3fLLG3c
You are giving examples in history and changing the dates to the first Trump presidency, which is somewhat confusing.
I was attempting to tell you when those things would have happened if Trump were doing the same things as Hitler. (It’s convenient they both became heads of government in January.)
Those things certainly didn’t happen because the GOP did not have a majority in the legislature.
what? It did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/115th_United_States_Congress#Party_summary
I stand corrected. My memory served me incorrectly.
Nevertheless, there are more prepared now and the MAGA party holds more of the power compared to last time. It’s a bit like putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse - I suppose we’ll have to see where those that remain of the former GOP are willing to push back.
Thank you for the solid points. People are dooming way too hard, simply because their preferred candidate lost this round. There is an opportunity for Democrats to improve themselves. They had that wakeup call 8 years ago, and they didn’t take it. Hopefully they will this time and strengthen the quality of the party and the candidates. Simply being ‘not Republican’, their primary strategy, isn’t enough.
Absolutely not. It’s the moment where everyone digs in harder.
Ask anyone with skin darker than yours, or whose sexuality or gender was once or still is illegal. You don’t fuckin give up
Unless there’s nuclear war, there’s no such thing as the point of no return. Just a further slide into more egregious civil rights violations. Eventually it will get better, hopefully through democratic means and not violent ones.
You don’t vote out a dictator. The only way out is through violent revolution.
Trump is the worst dictator ever, seeing as he literally got voted out last time and could do nothing about it.
No. Of course not!
Failing to Reject the Reagan Revolution, and mass embrace of the Jack Welsh style “trickle down” economics lie, by BOTH parties was the point of no return, almost half a century ago at this point. This car was already totaled.
Citizens United years later was just a victory lap by the owners pissing on the long dead corpse of the dream of societal equity.
Trump is just another symptom of that intransegent reality we all live in.
I’d say hope for collapse, as painful as it is, to have any hope for a better life for our children, maybe, but oligarch greed made climate change and at this point inevitable ecological collapse in the coming decades means there really isn’t hope for a better society/civilization for generations(if they eventually develop technologies to better cope with the new hellish climate reality) if at all.
Why would US collapse though?
I am not following.
The current regime showing zero signs of distress, in fact they could extract even more and it seems plebs will accept it.
Half the country is doing OT on bootlicking and regime white worshipping.
Most people on here too, and fedi is pretty redical by mainstream lol
In the near term, people not being able to afford basic necessities will lead to increased societal violence, but that likely won’t cause collapse.
Climate scientists are increasingly warning of ecological collapse, meaning core climate systems will fail, like the Atlantic Gulfstream which will cause global famine and destruction, and that might be the end of human civilization all together, we won’t know until we do it within the next half century, and see the full extent of our fine work, a climate hostile to agriculture, dependable fresh water, possibly even standing structures not made of steel and concrete.
But man are we speeding towards that cliff for private shareholder profit, wheeeee!
Yeah but even the bleakest estimates would take generations. Owners are getting paid today.
Also, us is the holy land, food and energy sufficient. So us itself can survive the climate change unlike most other countries.
Sure some plebs will die but that’s a small price to pay for success.
Time will tell
its going to be a shit 32 years.
