What is your line in the sand?
still consider
It has only two political parties, and a weird system where all votes are not equal and the actual vote majority doesn’t always win.
It has frequently had multiple people from the same families running for office, and only wealthy people have a shot. Corporations get to lobby for laws in their favour.
It also spies on its own citizens, holds people indefinitely without trial, has a huge prison population, a militarized police with a high homicide rate, and is the only western nation with the death penalty.
Trump and Musk are laying bare how fragile the veneer of “democracy” really is in that country.
Am Dutch. I have considered the US an incomplete democracy since I learned about voting in school. It’s not one person one vote, which to me is crucial for a democracy. The US right now is still a nation of laws, but democracy is sharply in decline. The voter-roll issues and Gerrymandering come to mind immediately. Not to mention the fact that guaranteed access to polls has been pulled by the courts. Which is insane to me.
Also president having so much power was clearly never democratic to begin with as we can see it all play out now.
Nyet.
It was never a democracy.
Absolutely not. A country where two parties are the only two viable electoral options, is absolutely not a democracy. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop my membership for the PSL.
What does PSL stand for?
Plus Sized Lobsters
Pink Sexy Lizards
No. I also don’t consider the United States to be a democracy.
I don’t recognise the current American regime as a valid government. Just like I don’t recognise the Israeli occupation force as a valid state.
It’s not remotely binding or even meaningful to anyone but myself of course. But hey, nothing matters these days.
Is demos how you say money in Greek?
I really never did, not a well functioning at least. They’ve practiced voter repression for decades, and then they had fun testing how low they could go after 9/11, doing a lot of unlawful shit, going after citizens who spoke out against their policies and wars.
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.
How can you be a democracy if you have only two political parties?
With one not giving a fuck, and the other severely fractured due to conflicting ideals none the less
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.
I’m not sure even with a successful election and it going to the democrats we’ll be able to tell. At least from today’s view. It will largely depend on how institutions and the justice/court system can hold out against the current administration right now and during this phase.
I feel like they may have already created damage that won’t be cleared just from one election or one election period’s fixups.
At the same time, hopefully, this is the wake-up call for opposition and a transformation one way or another. It’s plainly obvious what is happening now, and I am hoping opposition will become more apparent and prevalent because of it. Not just in citizens, but institutions too.
