What is your line in the sand?
See, as a German, when I see a country go down the same route as the Weimar Republic after handing over the power to the Nazi party, I think it’s just very obvious. Hitler took some two months to completely destroy democracy, and the US are juuust in the middle of that. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes, and the similarities are just remarkable.
So yeah, I guess that would be a big fat trench in the sand.
No. And I haven’t for a while now. Looking at your electoral system (electoral college, gerrymandering etc.), it probably never was but it was never as obvious as it is now.
I grew up in the US and have lived outside it for 10 years now. I would agree with this. Voting and representation have never been total and is definitely less available for many groups. Further things are being stripped away.
Yeah. My wake-up call was quite early in life, when SCOTUS handed the election to GWB. If I was born a generation earlier I’d have called it with Watergate. If I was an ancestor currently dead, I would have called it around the time an assassin put the presidency in the hands of the opposite party, and a drunk asshole subsequently decided reconstruction efforts should fail. Or possibly just prior, when we somehow decided not to hang every man Jack of the confederacy for treason.
Edit: an earlier still version of me would have overseen the death of a culture brought on by poxy mad white religious extremists, and laughed ruefully to hear that centuries later the utter bastardy continues unchanged.
Line in the sand? Going after political opponents. Censoring information. Dismantling media. Abandoning rule of law. Business and government mixing too much.
USA is speed running these.
A struggling democracy, in the beginning of an Orban/Hungary-like overtake of the country.
Its possible to revert, but you seem to have atleast a 1/3 of the country that would walk down a straight up facist line willingly and happily do so.
You need to fix your shit america.
The next election will tell, my tin hat is on Puting the US into a situation where an election can’t be held so they can have a third term.
Maybe a flawed democracy at best and it’s getting worse every day. At least on federal level, I don’t much about states politics. Not really an expert but democracy can’t really work that well if you are stuck in a two party system. Having more choice would sure help against populists and autocrats.
Not for a long time. The Economist Democracy Index demoted the US to a “flawed democracy” since 2016, where it has been ever since.
Democracy index, 2024 - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu
Yes, but a bad example of one very quickly heading towards autocracy. Some characteristics like screwing up your own economy and blaming ‘the foreigners’ rings a distant bell.
I consider it a faux democracy. It still has the semblance of one, with people voting, believing they matter and that they have actual free speech, but the masses are being, increasingly less subtly, controlled by media corporations and rendered incapable of critical, independent thinking by an ever decreasing quality of education.
Don’t be fooled though! This isn’t happening in the US alone. It is widespread all over the globe. The US is simply doing it in a smarter, more cunning way, while leading the wealthy 1% in other countries by example.
I consider it an autocratic regime with strong fascist characteristics.
How can you be a democracy if you have only two political parties?
No but this isn’t recent. My line in the sand was Russian interference in the 2016 US election that came to light in 2018.
*United States Democracy Index
Not at all, you are just an autocracy now but don’t fully realise it, and as the other commentator had said, not even really a good democracy in the loosest of terms before this entire mess going on ATM!
Unfortunately, it’s still a democracy. The electorate wanted what’s now going on. That could rapidly change at this point, but for now not yet.
Democracy is a sliding scale and the US is still on it. Could the people choose something different without resorting to violent revolution and protest? Yes
I am inside and I want to get out
