It has been under corporate dictatorship for over a century.

Worse… The House makes the impeachment charge, that’s a 50% majority vote.

THEN it goes to the Senate for conviction where you need a 2/3rds majority to remove them. 67/100.

That’s the body which can’t do anything because they’re blocked by a 60 vote super majority to over-ride a filibuster.

So you get 218 in the House, goes to the Senate, needs 60 votes to end debate and proceed with charges, then 67 votes to convict and remove.

Trump’s first impeachment got 48 and 47 votes.
His second was 57 votes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impeachment_trial_of_Donald_Trump

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_Trump

If he had been convicted, he would have been inelligible to run in '24.

If enough people in a democracy decide that they want a dictatorship instead, then there is no stopping it, because rules don’t matter at this point. The trick is to not let it get this far. Tough shit for the US, though.

I mean imagine if you could impeach the president without a majority. That would be the death of democracy. Just to put things in perspective: The GOP democratically won both houses of Congress and the presidency and because of DNC incompetence also has the Supreme Court. Them being able to do whatever the fuck they want is, in a way, democracy working as intended. It’d be weirder (and much more undemocratic) if there was a way to remove a sitting president without the Supreme Court or Congress.

If people democratically voted to end democracy, what are we suppose to do?

The ruling class was able to get along well enough up until the US Civil War, at which point the slavers decided they were willing to tear the country apart to keep on slaving. I include this because the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow and how we did things over here. Fascism started bubbling up in the early 20th century because industrialization and capitalism polluted everything and made people work awful hours and all that, and liberalism and conservatism hadn’t fixed it. There was a serious coup attempt forming in the early 30s called the Business Plot, but they went to a war hero Marine general who told them to fuck off and told the federal government about it.

At least in the US, we’re in this situation now because authoritarians have been working toward it since the 60s (the Powell Memo was written in 1971 I think) and they’ve taken advantage of how terribly the Constitution is written, along with consolidation of wealth and stoking backlash to all the civil rights movements to get people to back them. The worst part is that it’s a feedback loop: since Reagan took power, Republicans campaign on “look how bad the government is!” and make the government worse once they’re in office, which feeds their cause.

tl;dr capitalism makes living conditions terrible, people abandon liberalism and conservatism for socialism/communism/etc and fascism, liberals don’t want much to change, fascism lives or dies based on how much conservatives sell out to/ally with them. The fact that we’re doing this all again shows to me that liberalism is a dead ideology and capitalism is going to kill us if we don’t kill it first.

Well the country didn’t previously have a legion of mouth breathing retards screaming at the top of their lungs about micro-aggressions and declaring that the nation was illegitimate. I’d also question your metrics for deciding now that he’s an openly Nazi dictator, other than parroting what you hear from other people social media accounts.

I mean “No man shall hold office who committed insurrection” seems like a mechanism in and of itself. Dude just can’t run/be on a ballot. We just have two branches of government bought and paid for by the insurrectionist and America’s richest and most fanatical scum who refuse to follow the law.

People who say they follow the Bible are usually lying too. And anything that’s allowed to be left up to interpretation and still be called “law” is bound to be corrupted when convenient and ignored when convenient.

It’s like the ICC and UN. They just make suggestions. Whether they are followed or effectively enforced depends on who’s in the dock.

See, you think that doesn’t make it sound like desperate deflection after having handed the country to the nazis, but it does. I was here during the campaign, I saw how that went.

Nah, man, there is no amount of interference that justifies Trump having a fart’s chance in hell of not losing every single state in a country unwilling to hand the keys to these guys 1932-style. Beds were made, sleeping in them is to happen.

It just sucks that the rest of us are under the covers getting dutch ovened as well.

we just don’t know the extent of the interference and whether it changed the outcome.

We do.

There was close to zero in the polls. (Democratic and Independent poll watchers would’ve reported that, and I’m not seeing any of such reports)

The real interference was the far-right propaganda funded by unrestricted spendings thanks to Citizens United ruling.

We’ve always had interference, its just that now its getting more and more extreme, especially after Citizens United, exacerbated by modern technology (like social media that people use almost 24/7).

interference

If system relies on candidates not using legally allowed methods of advertisement (aka ‘propaganda’) that are deeply ingrained into every field of media and commerce, then probably there’s a problem with the system in the first place. Many popular musicians, games or products gained popularity by the same kind of ‘propaganda’ working by the same mechanics yet people were always okay with that.

Exactly my point.

I guess ignoring Washington’s wishes foreshadowed what the US would eventually become.

Except most of the Anti Federalists weren’t arguing against the specifics of the model, they were arguing against a centralized government at all. Which had literally just failed.

Yeah, don’t have political parties.

But gullible people voting or not certainly is.

I’ll bite: What is democracy to you?

Hmm… it kind of is really. How do you separate democracy from the narratives that campaigning representatives espouse? It’s a part of every democracy.

No democracy is perfect.

America’s is less perfect than many.

That said, Trump won the popular vote.

USA military interventions in Asia have been a constant concern for a long time, and the USA allied Korea and Japan directly oppose Chinese expansion and Chinese allied North Korea. The USA military control of the pacific ocean is seen as a wall to be overcome. The Chinese deeply despise the existence of NATO; the world’s largest mutual defence pact, and the US Government as barriers between them and their expansionist goals.

For examples, the takeover of Hong Kong and Taiwan almost failed due to US support, and their econimic use of Philippine and Australian seas have faced setbacks.

China is openly allied with other USA adversaries such as Iran and Russia.

It also helps that President Trump has repeatedly praised and admired Xi Jinping openly in public. The USA Tariffs will have no effect on Chinese trade profits at all as USA citizens will instead pay the fees. The less average faith a US Citizen has in their country and the more easily radicalized they are to harm their country, the better it is for China. They constantly predict the downfall of America and the rise of China in a single breath.

If you want evidence of all of this then look no further than the quotes of Chinese officials and the ideals of “communist parties” of the USA.

2. The brakes would be electing 60 democrats to senate to pass campaign finance reform, public healthcare with no concessions, and tax reform. As they have repeatedly tried to do for many years but always come up short of votes. Bonus points if they expand the court, house, and senate but I dont know if its an achievable goal until after the campaign finance reform.

The funny thing is that so much of it is based on the idea that everyone involved is going to be on their best behaviour, working for the good of the country, compromising with their opponents, and so-on. And, then it all falls apart as soon as one person realizes that they get an advantage as soon as they simply ignore the norms.

Also, don’t forget that there was less than a century between the revolution and the civil war. If your brand new form of government is so poor that a significant fraction of your population thinks a civil war is preferable to resolving things through that system, your system isn’t very good.

I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm.

He didn’t, that’s just a whitewashed version we tell ourselves.

He just didn’t want the President to be viewed as a monarch or a lifetime appointment. He turned down a third term because he feared he would die in office and the public would believe that’s the norm.

The US was the first large scale modern democracy. Of course it has design flaws.

Parlamentarism, as we know it now, had only been recently established in the UK in the 17rh century.

Contemporary to US early democracy were absolutist monarchies based on aristocracy. Separation of powers envisioned by Montesquieu, Rousseau‘s social contract, were still new political ideas. The federalist papers and later US constitution were cutting edge political theory at the time.

It’s very impressive that the US has lasted so long actually and was able to adapt. The French established their first democratic republic later and were unable to create a stable state.

I mean, I think they’d have considered a civil war less than 100 years after the founding of the country to be a pretty good indication of failure.

As for the modern world, they explicitly talk about trying to design a system so that a tyrant doesn’t become president. All the supposed checks and balances that were supposed to prevent that turned out to be as effective as wet tissue paper. The founders also cared a lot about the president not being corrupt, and drafted the emoluments clause(s) to prevent that, and Trump has just completely ignored those clauses. I think they’d have been pretty upset about that, and wondering why the law of the land was just being ignored.

Decade? More like 3 months. He’s already doing wildly unconstitutional things. If the Supreme Court refuses to take on challenges to it or outright approves it, well, they didn’t work.

Ich sage: nieder mit diesen Gesetzen!

Macht Deutschland wieder Groß

You mean that way, approximately?

How were they proto nazi? That’s a first.

Are you ready for some tearing up and redoing of constitution now?

I know about Jefferson and his 20 year automatic sunset phase for laws at all levels, except for Constitutions, charters, and other founding documents that can be amended. Hadn’t heard that Franklin wanted to sunset the Constitution itself as well. Not sure that we would have lasted this long if Franklin had gotten his way there. I do think that Jefferson and Madison were on the right track with the federal, state, and local laws though. Tyranny of the dead and all that.

Trump has said that Elon “knows those computers better than anybody … And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide”.

First of all, we know that to be false because we know Elon doesn’t know shit about computers. But, aside from that, there are multiple possible interpretations of what he meant, anything from “Elon rigged the election” to “Elon ensured the integrity of the election”.

My policy is “Don’t believe anything Trump says about anything”. I don’t change that policy when he says something that I want to believe is true.

Where did you hear that?

That is by design. If the “majority” of the country wants the US to be Nazis, that is the direction it will go. That is how a representative democracy works. The flaw was the founders assuming retarded puppets would not be elected by even an uneducated public. But, they also didn’t plan for automatic weapons either. Well, they sort of did, they said we should be rewriting the constitution every so many years so it can evolve with the times, but we chose to enshrine and misinterpret it like a civic bible. Oops.

Then maybe they should have their own shithole country and stop taking our tax dollars.

I think the US is beyond fucked already. The fact that Bonespurs could get elected president not once but twice is a clear sign that America’s collective intelligence has dropped below Idiocracy level. A complex society can withstand a lot of stupidity as long as there are enough people who can keep the opportunists in their place, but that’s not true anymore. I’m not just talking about people who voted for him, I’m including the several million people who voted for Biden in 2020 but refused to vote for Harris in 2024. They were the safety net that decided to fold itself up and go home. We’re done.

That conviction wasn’t rushed. But imagine it was the fall of 2020 and Trump thought there was a decent chance he might lose. Order his attorney general to indict candidate Biden on some random charge, force it through the courts to get a conviction, removing any judges that object or stall. Voila, Biden has a conviction and can’t run against Trump.

I used to land at basically this analysis myself, but there are definitely some assumptions that need to be addressed. We can probably agree that to a significant degree “money is power”, or at least, money can elicit power, especially in terms of directing the actions of the desperate. We witness in our society - which is not pure “free market capitalism” - that inequality is rampant. There are theoretical explanations for this blaming both government intervention and just simply the behavior of individuals within the market that centralize wealth. And, conversely, there are theoretical explanations for how government can decentralize wealth, or how market participants can decentralize wealth (including boycotts, unions, etc.). The biggest challenge with this age-old “communism vs. capitalism” debate is that establishing overall tendencies for state vs. private actors requires exhaustive historical analysis, and is not even inherent to the nature of either actor, i.e., someone as a private actor, or state actor, can act in a way that either centralizes or decentralizes wealth. The only overarching principle you can even safely state is that the actions of a state are distinct from those as a private actor because of the “monopoly on violence” factor, i.e., the ability to enforce unfair demands that people can’t escape in practice (a behavior that leftie types usually accuse capitalism of, inversely, by pointing to corporate monopoly power - which of course, depends on the dictates of a state or equivalent body to enforce).

The only way I was able to resolve the problems with this whole analytical framework - communism, capitalism, state, private - was to reject this terminology entirely and perform the analysis in terms of individual behavior, actions, inanimate vs. animate, and the ethical properties deriving from those. A “state” is a useful abstraction at times and a confusing complication at other times. “Capitalism” and “communism” as terms have no universally agreed upon definition, resulting in unproductive, endless, circular debates. What we’re really trying to do is design a social system that maximizes outcomes for every criteria we like - equality, prosperity, individual wellbeing, health, lack of environmental externalities, etc.

The state is the historical apparatus that manages the inherent contradictions between classes. It administrates capitalism for and by the ruling class. Capitalism is maintained by the state, the state sustains capital and private property, through violence.

Capitalism is a form of class domination, various forms of slavery stitched together to exploit the masses for the benefit of the few. Only a democratically organized working class can “fix” capitalism, by eradicating it. The government is the apparatus that temporarily fixes the contradictions of capitalism, but the relations defined by this irrational, inefficient social system (unless you consider monopolies efficient) are what state governments under capitalist rule try and eventually fail to “mitigate”. The contradictions compile until you have an economic crash, which is actually good for monopolistic capitalists who can purchase the productive capital of their competitors at a fraction of the cost, leading to systematic downsizing; while the rest of the population suffers recession, inflation, and mass indignity.

The poor exist because there are rich. The capitalists are in control, as a class, and governments merely mitigate the worst tendencies. This is why reformism isn’t a long term strategy. Capitalism can’t be reformed, it can only be replaced.

And if we, the working class will be able to replace it with a system of greater freedom, equality and democracy, then the aims of socialism will have been reached without the “authoritarian” tendencies becoming reified in any significant way.

You can have your doubts about this, but your libertarian perspective is one of false appearances. If you want to understand the state and the economy, it must be considered as a series of relations brought about by human activity, using the tools laid before us by history and nature. If you think of the world like this, considering the subjective nature of politics and the economy, such as incentives, motives, etc., then your investigation will uncover the true relations that comprise this mass wage slavery to the billionaire class, known as capital.

I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?

In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it’s pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.

However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can’t just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.

Please elaborate.

As far as I know a very important side effect of the capitalism is the great concentration of power (aka money) in just some small individuals and how this creates an oligarchy which the only objective of extracting value form the other layers of the society. And of course the self perpetuation.

This have been happening since monopolies were created since centuries ago.

I really want to see how a system that by nature is concentrating power in some individuals really is really a de federated thing.