• Pacattack57@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • orcrist@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    No. People always want some apocalyptic ending, but there’s always a chance to make adjustments in various ways. It’s just that some solutions, the ones that are less painful and involved less people’s lives getting destroyed and less death, some of those solutions become increasingly distant.

    And look, if you go back and check out the history of unions and labor rights in the US, it was a bloody history. I think we might be looking at that repeating itself. And that’s only if we’re lucky.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      So what is your solution when we blow past 4 degrees © rise in temperature and most of the land on earth becomes uninhabitable? Shift all the farms up north which will die of freezes annually, or move all agriculture and life indoors permanently? Surely mining all the resources to put all of human life indoors will be a non issue? Or is it just the 5% that get indoors to survive and then the lower 90% of that 5 become the poor disadvantaged driven to be the new poor slowly? Or is your hope that the top 5% after killing most the world’s population once indoors will simply accept a form of socialism then?

  • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Just to be the nihilist in the room, I honestly think that the point of no return for humanity occurred the moment we stepped down from the trees and started to evolve. And I’m not actually kidding.

    I’m not an evolutionary expert, so I’m more than likely talking out of my ass, but I was an Archaeology Major with a focus on the Bronze Age Collapse and what I can tell you is this…

    From a certain perspective, the same evolutionary traits that brought our species to this point, are the very same traits that will keep us from moving forward past it. Selfishness, resource hording, greed, the urge to continually expand at the expense of others. Fear of “others” outside of ones own community; all these things in some form were beneficial to growing from hunter gatherers to urban/agricultural societies. We needed organisation to build cities, so we created monarchies. We needed ways to control the growing population, so we created a fear of a deity.

    We needed a reason to not allow too many people in to our society so that we didn’t waste resources, so we created borders and the concept of “others” that aren’t like us. Now, all of that has to get binned if we have any hope of getting past this point because the only way forward is as single planet, not petty nation states. But every single thing that brought us to this point prevents that from happening. It’s ingrained in our very DNA, so to speak.

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    Not really. Not to be dismissive of the harms of a 2nd term trump.

    But you have to understand what American history has been.

    People were literally enslaved in the early days, then the country was literally at war with itself over slavery. Then Jim Crow and Segregation. Black people were lynched. White mobs would kill black people.

    Chinese people were targeted by the Chinese Exclusion Act and banned from entry, some were US Citizens too and they weren’t except either.

    The US had a major economic crash in 1929. Got into 2 world wars. American Citizens of Japanese ancestry were literally arrested and held in camps because of their ancestry. Went through cols war, the red scare, mccathyism. People randomly getting accused of being “communists” and arrested. Unions get cracked down. Protests were brutally suppressed, more violently than in modern day. Black people protesting for their rights and took a bus down south got burned. Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. literally got assassinated.

    That is the American history.

    And here we are, through such a shitty history, democracy survived, and voting rights expanded to so many people. First to Black people, then to Women.

    Back then a majority of the population supported segregation, institutionalized racism. But today, a majority of people are okay with interracial marriage.

    I have high hopes we can survive another trump term.

    It won’t be pleasent, but we’ll survive.

    • GelatinGeorge@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • LeadersAtWork@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      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

    • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • juli@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        It is a democracy.

        Not a good type, but still a democracy.

        Remember, Democracy and Autocracy isnt binary states of its either a Full Totalitarian Regime or a Full Direct Flawless Democracy.

        There’s a sliding scale in between.

        We don’t just go from Monarchies to a perfect Utopian Flawless Democratic system overnight. Change is incremental.

        I do agree with the sentiment that 2 party system isn’t really a good idea, that very much need to be changed.

        But its not like the constitution says “The United States shall be a 2-party system”, its an emergent property of First-Past-The-Post electoral systems. But unfortunately, human brains always look for the first thing they think of, I mean “Most Votes Win” sounds simple right. People never thought about the fact that “Most” doesn’t mean majority, but by the time people realize, its too late, people go too used to it.

        But its still a democracy, a very very flawed democracy. But if you argue that First-Past-The-Post isn’t a democracy, then most of the world are living in dictatorships.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      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?

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        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.

    • NineMileTower@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

  • logos@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    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?

    • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

        • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • logos@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            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.

    • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      You probably don’t.

      Even with a contentious subject like abortion. That’s a disagreement about a specific topic. You can reach a middle ground. It’s one of many topics to debate over and forge legislation regarding.

      But the majority gleefully electing a guy that effectively looked us all straight in the face and said “I don’t give a fuck about democracy and will attempt to subvert or overthrow it if it doesn’t suit me”? Yeah, there’s really no recovering from that. At least not without a long period of serious decline and suffering, followed by lots of struggle and death to earn back what we lose.

      We disrespected the shit out of our democracy and everyone that fought/died for it. There’s no way that ends well.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • AliSaket@mander.xyz
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    1 month ago

    Outside perspective: It doesn’t have to be. It is the moment democracy, its values and its people are tested. The path towards open dictatorship and/or fascism is not set in stone. What is clear is that some setbacks, even catastrophic setbacks, are unavoidable. But as a whole the free-fall can be avoided and you can bounce back from setbacks, even if it takes time. This is actually somewhat universal, since it’s not only the U.S. which is sliding more and more towards fascistic or anti-democratic tendencies. It’s just that, like with so many other things, everything does seem to be bigger in the U.S. (and Texas).

    Although I’m sure a lot are feeling economic pain and/or are generally under stress and uncertainty (IIRC 50% of households struggle to make an unplanned $1000 expense), and I don’t expect it to get better under the new administration, the U.S. is still a federated system. If you look at what affects your daily lives directly, a lot more is done on a local and state level, than on the federal level.

    From where I’m standing, organizing with like-minded people in your community around issues is the most promising way to go. Unfortunately the issues are back to basics issues like human rights and democratic principles, but that’s where we are. This entails more than just protesting, but actively pressuring elected officials around legislation proposals. Suggest ballot measures (find out how such a measure gets to the ballot in the first place, because it’s very different depending on where you are). And of course having people run for office and for the others to support them to get in, and get the anti-democratic forces out, once it is time. Don’t succumb to the nationalization of local elections. People can be reached way better and more directly on the local level, when they can see it directly affecting their lives and talking to the people responsible directly than for anything happening in Washington D.C. Counter the anti-democracy spewing media outlets with true alternatives (maybe there’s an entrepreneurial-minded person wanting to found a cooperative media outlet).

    It sounds like a lot to do. But you are more, than you think. Even the disillusioned might be good allies. Take yes for an answer. And more people than you might expect have been part of ‘the struggle’ for a long time. Welcome them. And yes: Coordinate with and support other local actions.

    Another view on what will happen with the federal institutions: Although Trump will put more loyalists than ever in powerful stations, there will remain many (even among the loyalists) who profit from the system’s status quo. This includes the Supreme Court justices and ironically corporate goons. So in furthering their own advantage, they might resist things leading to an overall degradation. Of course they will go along with and actively lobby for anything that gives them more power at the expense of the general populace, but that is already the case. Again, if you make unlikely allies on single issues: Take yes for an answer.

    Bottom line: Democracy and basic rights are ideas, made by humans. And they can only survive, as long as we believe in and fight for them. Always keep the belief, always keep on fighting. If you hit your head and fall down: Get back up. As the saying goes: This is a marathon, not a sprint. All the best!

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      You seem confident that there will be more elections. The dictator already promised that there won’t be.

      • AliSaket@mander.xyz
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        1 month ago

        You seem absolutely sure that this will materialize and that its implication means that you have no scope of action. Again, with enough institutionalists in important positions, even if he tries, it would be difficult for him to actually get rid of federal, let alone local and state elections. What is much more likely is that he will make it easier to skew or how he might call it “rig” elections. You know, like voter suppression and gerrymandering on steroids. So what I’ve written still holds: On a local and state level (or even federal level), pressure your elected officials and organize around the protection of voting rights. Be an active part of the legislative process. Democracy isn’t making a cross every four years. And she’s calling on all of us.

        Sidenote: For everything that man says, you can find a clip of him saying the absolute opposite. So watch what he and his lackeys do, not what he says.

  • Lightsong@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    It might be for some stuff. I’m worried that it’ll have a lasting impact on women inside the USA as well as outside. Inside, they’ll have their rights taken away over time. Outside, morale will be impacted. But I’m hoping it’ll cause an uprising rather than the other way around.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 month ago

    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:

    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?

    • BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io
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      1 month ago

      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

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month ago

        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

        • wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io
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          1 month ago

          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.

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.