you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 89 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Trump no longer needs any voter approval.

There will be no more elections, or the elections will be falsified Russia-style.

It’s game over in the US. The US is in the late stages of capitalism, falling like the Roman Empire.

  • source
  • hideshow 12 child comments
  • [–] 52 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    All my life, I've watched the US slide. But it's crazy it's falling apart right now. Seems surreal for some reason.

    I care about Americans and America. There are many good people, who care about me, and us. They deserve to thrive in a secure, prosperous country. I don't want to discount a nation just because of the idiots.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago

    Thank you. We’re all scared and angry here and it’s hard to know what to do that won’t get us deported to El Salvador supermax some day in the future thus letting our kids down

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    There will be no more elections, or the elections will be falsified Russia-style.

    We're going to test this hypothesis soon enough. Two big gubernatorial races in Virginia and Pennsylvania this year. The "voting no longer matters" crowd is going to assert that these will be landslides for heavy MAGA conservatives, I'm presuming?

    We've also got five out-of-cycle vacancy elections for House seats happening, two of which are scheduled for April 1st. FL-1 already had a primary for the GOP position, while the Dem candidate ran uncontested. FL-6 had primaries for both R and D candidates. Have these elections already been rigged? Is the outcome predetermined?

    It’s game over in the US.

    You wouldn't be the first one to make this claim.

    The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

    ...

    In 2014, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the original essay, "The End of History?", Fukuyama wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal again updating his hypothesis. He wrote that, while liberal democracy still had no real competition from more authoritarian systems of government "in the realm of ideas", nevertheless he was less idealistic than he had been "during the heady days of 1989". Fukuyama noted the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Arab Spring, both of which seemed to have failed in their pro-democracy goals, as well as the "backsliding" of democracy in countries including Thailand, Turkey and Nicaragua. He stated that the biggest problem for the democratically elected governments in some countries was not ideological but "their failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth and the basic public services ... that are needed to achieve individual opportunity." Though he believed that economic growth, improved government and civic institutions all reinforced one another, he wrote that it was not inevitable that "all countries will ... get on that escalator"

    But it's not a game and it's never over.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The “voting no longer matters” crowd is going to assert that these will be landslides for heavy MAGA conservatives, I’m presuming?

    Or votes being thrown out due to "fraud" or the election being cancelled or certain voters being rounded up by cops so they can't cast ballots or any other number of ways elections can be meddled with.

    And don't be too triumphalist just because the election goes off without any problems and Democrats win, this isn't really The Big One. The House and Senate races in 2026 will tell us what the future of elections will be.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Or votes being thrown out due to “fraud”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Eye_(United_States)

    or the election being cancelled

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

    or certain voters being rounded up by cops so they can’t cast ballots

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/texas-woman-sentenced-five-years-trying-vote-gets-new-appeal-n1262691

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/11/politics/hervis-rogers-texas-voting-charge/index.html

    or any other number of ways elections can be meddled with.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_caging

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States#False_information

    All common in US politics and heavily influential in shaping the outcomes of states like Ohio, Texas, and Florida. These are features baked into our election system and designed to shape the outcomes. They've been going on since the colonial era. This is not a bug of liberal democracy but a feature. To pretend Trump is changing the game, you need to ignore how its historically been played.

    And don’t be too triumphalist just because the election goes off without any problems and Democrats win

    Of course not. What could that possibly prove, except Democrats aren't nearly as far removed from the Project 2025 goon squad as they like to advertise.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago*

    To pretend Trump is changing the game, you need to ignore how its historically been played.

    Right, he's just reviving older parts of the playbook. Very few of the things he's done are actually new, they're just things the US isn't used to anymore or things that haven't been done on a massive scale.

    But it wasn't voting that made those older practices fall out of favor, it was more direct actions: labor militancy, mass protests, and radical organizing. What your examples demonstrate is that Trump is defeatable even if he revives every authoritarian trick in the US playbook, but none of that proves voting specifically still matters.

    I'll be watching the 2026 elections to see if we can still vote our way out of this, or if we simply need to do something else.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Trump may not care about approval ratings, but representatives and senators care about keeping their seats more than anything else.

    If baby boomers reject republican candidates, they’ll turn against Trump.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    You sweet summer child.

    Trump openly stated that Elon knows how to use voting machines to their benefit.

    Trump openly stated that we won’t need to have elections any longer.

    Your vote no longer matters. Oversight about voting has been dismantled.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    States run elections not federal government. They can't do that.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    They can fuck with the mail. They can have people outside polls intimidating people from even showing up. A state legislature controlled by the GOP will do whatever Trump tells them to.

    States run elections, but there are a bunch of ways that conservatives already use to fuck with elections. They aren't going to get any better now.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments