‘It will be the end of democracy’: Bernie Sanders on what happens if Trump wins – and how to stop him

Yes. That's the end game of our type of voting system. You get two options and both suck.

We will get no progress until we get something like ranked choice voting.

Easier said than done I know but if Trump wins my wife and I would strongly consider emigrating to another country. There's only so much insanity one can take before needlessly going down with the ship. And if the calculus is that that my kids will have better prospects elsewhere, then so be it.

It always has been.

We might be tempted to think that our Democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. In fact, the precedent set by the founders demand that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny and consider the proper responses to it. - On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Chapter 1, Page 13)

I wonder if Haley is staying in the race betting that Trump won't be able to run in November

We need to focus on smaller winnable races. Unfortunately we can't shortcut our way into the presidential candidates we want, we need to replace the establishment and build a foundation of allies to support it. I know a lot of us are in conservative areas where you can't realistically get new candidates elected locally, but you can still volunteer for races in other parts of the country. If we can shift politics in the house and Senate the presidency will follow. It's hard work but it's possible.

When's the last time that hasn't been the case? 1964?

Always has been that way

Dems really underestimate what life is like for normal Americans. trump doesn't get it either obviously, but at least he acknowledges shit is bad for them.

If Biden tries to run in the economy it's going to hurt him because all the money is going to the wealthy.

Bernie acknowledges and actually has a plan to fix shit. And unlike trump points the finger at whose fault it is.

trump can't compete with that.

But neoliberals don't want to really address wealth inequality either.

It is known

Take with a grain of salt, considering Putin says Biden is better for him than Trump. While I don't necessarily agree with the argument, Republicans (and centrist dems) certainly believe Sanders would've been an easy target for smear campaigns.

I feel like people are so fixated on Trump that they can't see past him.

Well yeah, because if he wins there won't be anything past him for much of the country.

I agree that it's frustrating that Democrats use shitty Republicans as an excuse to be just a tiny bit less shitty. However, it's getting really annoying that you can't criticize Trump without someone chiming in with "whadabout Biden?!" and you can't criticize Biden without getting a "whadabout Trump?!"

You know they don't . Their strategy was, is, and will continue to be: "The other side is worse".

Just ask about DC statehood and the Dems' inability to enfranchise over a million US citizens.

As soon as you scratch this problem, you discover how shallow and unserious the party is in "protecting democracy".

The more he loses the less likely he'll be to win, plus he's old as hell and not aging gracefully. Rebuking Trumpism is shoring up democracy.

I don't think there really can be a plan. Like what would you want Biden to do to shore up democracy?

One of the inescapable, fundamental, bedrock concepts of democracy is that people will not vote for a corrupt, criminal, authoritarian, self serving demagogue.

If a society can't achieve that basic state then they can not be a democracy.

Honestly, I suspect that the best thing Biden can do is to "grey rock" the American people and hope that Trump self combusts, which seems to be what's happening.

That said, that's just the best Biden can do. The dems need an actual leader that can inspire the american people to see a better version of themselves.

Because Trump is great for me fundraising and keeping party bigwigs at the trough

Sometimes in life there is such a thing that is called: "Maybe there is no Good Vs. Bad just assholes all around". Good luck with that

.

Fuck it. I’ll write in Bernie. /s

how were republicans before trump? how was Bush? (i literally have no idea because I was 7 at the time)

Bernie is a Genocide defender and wants to keep funding israel even now.

Bernie has proven that he is Controlled Opposition

Yes. Better Biden than Trump but Bernie would have been better.

I volunteered for Sanders campaign but didn't do anything for Biden. He didn't earn my vote. Democracy at work.

I think an "equal air time" law that requires that corrections to misinformation and disinformation be provided at the same scope, scale and duration as the offending material. Since Fox news backed down on their dominion case, they ought to reprint every article, rehost every show and re-run every ribbon and banner on all of their platforms for next 3 years, admitting that they lied, linking sources to proof of their lies, and advising everyone that 2020 had no meaningful amounts of voter fraud on either side. Failure to do so should be fined at a rate of 1000 dollars per second of missed remediation time.

The massive polarisation in the media needs to be addressed and the outright blatant lies told by the Rightwing goons needs to be legally stopped. ‘Free Speech’ my ass. They need to be labelled ‘opinion’ or ‘entertainment’ or something other than pretending to be ‘fair’ or ‘news’.

Replace "rightwing goons" with "leftwing commies" and this is exactly Trump's plan lmao. Do you not see how that is a problem?

Funny how many comments just went poof!

Are they in the mod log? The link is at the bottom of each page.

Or maybe the mods are actually moderating by cutting out the off-topic arguments and BS threads that don't contribute anything to the overall discourse of the discussion.

So this place is basically /r/politics now?

👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

So what do you think that means for mod bias if they're deleting "liberal" comments on a platform that is largely home to leftists?

My thoughts exactly. Why is it that these "politics" sites just end up going completely Left? Is this "politics" or "Democrat Politics?" I get confused... apparently, the Right isn't allowed to have an opinion any where anymore..

What sort of plan do you think an incumbent president who has actually been doing policy should adopt?

We did plan ahead, I'm sorry you don't like what we planned but you were also fully welcome to participate in the process the entire time.

"Republicans are going to end democracy"

"Why would Joe Biden do this to us??"

This.

If we do an election and the wrong candidate wins, the democracy goes away.

So you can't vote for the wrong candidate.

And also, you can't vote for a third-party candidate.

And also, you can't abstain from voting.

So, really, you have exactly one choice that you're allowed to make.

Democracy!

It is for anything besides president. That's the sad part.

i’d say it’s largely, tho not completely, a de facto oligarchy now.

Yeah. It’s super frustrating living in the United States and having these two old fucks as the voters choice. To be clear, I’m voting Biden, because he and the Democrats are the lesser of the evils by a pretty large margin, but they both fucking suck.

Trump is a result of the systems failure to address underlying problems. The underlying problems can all be associated with a single common source: Inflation.

Governments printing money at a rate greater than value is created in the economy, nets you inflation - and that has been going on since around the mid 90's in a very real way, and even before that. We can more or less call this the "NeoLiberal Era" if you like. Around the 90's is when things get bad - and to more or less cover it up, the CPI was manipulated (read: Fixed like you would fix a wrestling match) to make inflation look acceptable - in reality: Replace Steak for Ground beef in the CPI shopping cart and tell people it's still relevant.

End of the 90's you get the ,Com bubble and crash. 2008 Market Crash - and you get "Quantitative Easing" being sold as a fix - when all it is is, PRINTING MONEY. Then during the pandemic a huge push to shut down the economy (largely impacting the lowest wage earners the hardest just FYI) requiring the government to provide stimulus, coupled with grands, loans, and such to businesses in hopes they would keep people employed (hint: They didn't). And so we have had a series of the most NeoLiberal thing possible: Publicize the risk, privatize the profits, and screw the poor over in the process.

The fix: Reduce the Money Supply. Drive to a negative inflation number. But the kicker is? The wealthiest hedge funds, realestate investors, and what not would basically go belly up from that type of move. And why? Because if inflation lowers - the debts accrued cost more to maintain the interest on, than they can gain with inflation flipping for real profit over time. Once you reduce the money supply by at this point about 2/3eds - we can move to aiming for a 0% inflation number. The government should at that point be focused on reducing debt one way or another.

The real problem for the US Economy is, if any action is taken to reduce the debt - it will be a clear signal that the US economy is not gaining value, and that the Dollar Value is currently overvalued. And that could in a very real way cause a spiral. And a fear of the Spiral is making the long term problem worse as it's kicked down the road.

By the way: You can take the US out of this and replace just about any western nation into the mix and find the same problem. Actually, China really fits in here. And oh boy a correction is coming and it's going to be ugly.

*Cue

You know perfectly well why he means. US democracy is shitty as it is, but it can become a lot LOT worse, and Trump will make sure that happens

Well whatever we have is still better than a dictatorship.

So, which country with 300 Million people is doing it the right way? China? India? Do tell...do tell!

I don't think it's a coincidence that "this line" became normal at the same time the GOP has been enacting antidemocratic legislation and putting forward antidemocratic candidates.

Were you alive in 2000? Bush & Gore were often parodied as too similar

Also, The End of History

It hasn't been forever. It's been since Trump started running, and the Republcan party pulled the Southern Stratgy Part 2.

Did climate change stop being real when we started breaking the record temp every year?

Most presidential elections have had some kind of doomsayers. This particular election has a candidate that supported (supposedly indirectly) an insurrection, stated it's ok to execute political opponents, and has openly said some very nazi like things. This election is a bit different than the others.

Then the left puts up a weak candidate, again, and says eat that shit sandwich, so I get the frustration.

Democracy is more of a sliding scale than a true or false. The US has had significant democratic decline during the last decade or two, and it was definitely not helped by Trump.

Slide far enough and well, that’s the end of democracy.

It was true last time. It's true this time. That's the funny thing about fascism - it is usually a one-way choice. You only need to let fascists win once to forever lose your right to choose your leaders.

And?

Good needs to win each time. Evil only needs to win once.

Nice try. Go back to Truth Social and/or Russia.

Well Trump did actively support an insurrection, I don't know how you can't see this as a threat to democracy in the US...

How did you get to this conclusion? What in the article makes you think that?

It's a good thing no one who was ever democratically elected dismantled democracy so they could never lose the power they gained.

Like Hitler, who was democratically elected before ending democracy in Germany?

Yes, exactly.

Trump doesn't seem to really care whether he wins or not, just in case you haven't noticed...

Just like last time, he'll claim that he's won if he's ever even slightly ahead, and he and his cult will harass people to "stop the count".

Just like last time, he and his cult will resort to violence and insurrection to overthrow democracy even if he loses.

You have to remember that a large swath of (generally) younger people are wildly misinformed/uninformed on the actual power of the presidency. They have the idea that the president can universally override all powers of the other branches at any given time and/or that both other branches will be captured (conveniently while a given dictator-to-be is in office) in a significant enough way that whatever piece of legislation the president outrightly wants, they will receive.