No Stupid Questions

It would seem that way. The people elected a guy that tried to overthrow democracy

How do you recover from that

I think the real answer is that we end up kind of like the UK -- going from the worlds ultra-dominant superpower to a sort of slow regression to the mean, as China, India and others take the spotlight.

When you look at what China is doing with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their move to dominate the transportation infrastructure of developing nations -- the US isn't anywhere near equipped to counter that. We're still in a cold war mentality thinking that we will dominate as the world's police force.

Meanwhile, all the actual economies will be run by Chinese companies operating with state support.

That's up to Trump, because your vaunted checks and balances are gone.

Think he's going to show restraint? Insight? Empathy?

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.

We’ll be fine. It will be a hard 4 years but based on last time trump will spend a fuck load of money to keep the masses happy. 2028 and on are going to be harder because trump will get some bullshit tax cuts passed that will target the middle class when he’s out of office.

Sure the US may be past it's glory days. Hell even the Rand Corporation (who write a bunch of stuff for govt leaders and other high ups) says it's been trending downhill since some point in the early 2000s. They didn't mention 9/11 but it seems like a good historical milestone.

Essentially the paper says the last 200 years have been an anomaly and we're slowly sliding back to historical norms. They call it the neomedieval era and it's not just the US.

Yeah pretty much. We're 2-3 generations deep into a cultural expectation that "some one else" will deal with all these problems.

The constant threat of this being "the most important election of our lives", when the party making that argument campaigned as if the outcomes were irrelevant (because from their privileged perspective, the outcomes are irrelevant).

Back during covid a boat got turned a bit sideways in a canal and it seemed like the whole world economy was going to collapse. The system we have is actually incredibly fragile and built largely on trust, both in one another but also in institutions and systems. Not only the US, but western Europe is about to get smacked up-side the head by the 2x4 of failing to maintain a civil society (US at fault within its borders, EU at fault beyond its borders).

Assuming you are talking about who won the US presidential election. Happened 8 years ago too, it wasn't the end of America then. It won't be the end of America now.

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?

Don't believe there really is an absolute point of no return without the plot of Genesis of the Daleks happening. The future is long, and we don't know how the next four to eight years will play out, but dictatorships have risen and fallen before. Spain was a fascist dictatorship for decades, now it isn't. Also, lots of people died in the meantime and not all vestiges of the dictatorship are gone.

Every moment is a point of no return, unfortunately.

According to history? Yes, but I guess there's a chance that the USA will beat the odds

Did Britain or Rome know the moments when Pax Britannia or Pax Romana had hit their tipping point to decline? I doubt it.

I think the tipping point will only be observable through the lens of history many years from now with a subject heading of: This event was the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.