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  • I'm not sure that we do. Not in our lifetimes anyway.

    With a functional justice department we'd have a chance. There's nothing to stop them from tweaking the electoral lines. There's nothing to stop them from not certifying an election. We're about to have the scotus filled with young like-minded Republicans. We're about to have every federal judge biased for them.

    Even having both sides of Congress the best thing we could do would be to status quo because every time a veto is overturned the scotus could just stamp it down as unconstitutional.

    The president has God King status, he can have opponents jail for executed.

    The thing is even if none of these things were in play, The popular vote just voted for a dictatorship. He was utterly and absolutely clear and anyone that says he was joking around doesn't actually believe that they're just too embarrass socially to announce that they themselves are racist/fascist/misogynist. There is nothing here to win back. We're better than 50% rotten to the core and those people aren't going away.

    Even this election wasn't right versus left it's right versus more right. If you put a true left candidate in they're just going to get murdered. (That may or may not be literal)

    • There's nothing to stop them from tweaking the electoral lines.

      Given that the Democrats have known the districts have been gerrymandered to hell and back for decades now, why haven't they spent any time at all doing their own redistricting, rather than strongly pushing agendas that affect 0.5% of the country?

      • Oh dems have. But you have to have control of the state to do that. Hogan (R governor) tried his damnest to unwrap central Maryland from Western Maryland.

      • The first bill filed in the House of Representatives and Senate after the 2020 election which resulted in the Democratic Party gaining nominal control of Congress and the White House was a bill to ban partisan gerrymandering, require independent redistricting committees, forbid states from imposing onerous voter registration or identification regulations, limit the influence of rich donors and wealthy PACs in federal elections, and generally just make the process of voting better for Americans.

        This bill was called the Freedom to Vote Bill and was numbered H.R. 1 and S. 1 for the House and Senate versions, respectively. It passed the House of Representatives in 3 March 2021 and received unanimous support among the 50 Democratic senators when the Senate held its vote on 22 June 2021. The bill was blocked from advancing due to a Republican filibuster.

        On 3 January 2022, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York announced plans to abolish the filibuster for legislation in order to allow this bill to advance. President Joe Biden had previously indicated he would sign the bill. Schumer made his move on 19 January 2022, moving to change the filibuster rule to require continuous talking, i.e. in order to filibuster a bill, someone must make a speech and keep talking for the duration of the filibuster, with the filibuster ending when they finish talking. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, members of the Democratic Party representing Arizona and West Virginia, respectively, got squeamish and voted against the change. All Republican senators voted against the change. This doomed the bill's passage through Congress as the filibuster could be maintained indefinitely by the Republicans.

        The bill died when Congress was dissolved pending the November 2022 general election, in which Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives.

        Manchin and Sinema's terms with both expire when the new Congress is convened on 3 January 2025 following the November 2024 general election. Manchin did not seek re-election in yesterday's election and will retire at the expiration of his term. Sinema was forced out of the Democratic Party and originally planned to stand as an independent before deciding against it. She will retire at the end of her term.

        Due to the innate malapportionment of the Senate, it is exceedingly unlikely that the Democratic Party will ever regain majority control of the Senate.

        So I point my finger at these two idiots for sinking American democracy as we know it.

    • I'm not sure that we do. Not in our lifetimes anyway.

      I don't understand this sentiment as I'm hearing it a lot.

      We've elected a fascist into the highest office. We're cooked. There's a lot we can do right now, but the most important thing is organizing. Organizing your community, your family, your town/village/city. Organizing mutual aid, direct action, and resistance. How much more do we need until people actually get off their asses and start doing something about it? Like the time for peaceful and democratic means of avoiding fascism was before the election. But a fascist is now in power, so are we going to wait until the troops are rolling down the street to do anything? I'm not saying go out and just commit wanton acts of violence in the name of revolution, but the longer we wait the more difficult it will become to get organized, involved, and yes armed.

      • I don’t understand this sentiment

        There’s a lot we can do right now, but the most important thing is organizing

        Organizing? Resistance? Armed? That's honestly insane.

        You're going to organize against half the US? Gonna start a civil war with every last (fully armed) enemy in your own backyard?

        They could blockade cities from food and shut down any movement in 3 days.

        The Civil War worked efficiently because there was a battlefront. This is more of a Republican Soup.

  • Realistically? It's too late.

    We now have an ultra-conservative SC for the rest of our lives. The Republican party openly stated and ran on making fundamental changes to our government if they won the House/Senate/Presidency and to "defeat the enemy within".

    It doesn't even really matter if the suffering that is coming shocks our society into rebounding in 4 years. The locked in SC and fundamental changes to our government will have already been set in place. Government departments will be run by appointees with absolutely no experience. Entire departments could be re-staffed with partisan political appointees if we are to believe the words of some of the people Trump promised to appoint. We have been placed squarely on the path to decline. That decline won't happen overnight, but in our lifetimes it will become undeniable. We will probably barely recognize this country by the end of our lives.

    This election determined the political order we will live under for the rest of our lives.

    Buy a gun. Try to find happiness within your immediate sphere. And stay safe, if you can. Very, very few people will come out on top in the scenario we now find ourselves in. Give it a few years and you'll see. They have total control now, so there's no one else to blame for the decline that's essentially guaranteed to become apparent in the near future. But I'm sure if they do fail, immigrants will be at the top of the blame list.

    It was a worthy experiment while it lasted.

  • So the way it looks now, Trump has won the presidency, and his allies will have the senate and house of representatives, and they already had the supreme court. The three branches of government will not be working as checks on each other's power, unless we get very lucky and the various factions that make up the GOP split. This is obviously very, very bad, but there are still some checks on presidential power.

    1. Trump's last term was a clusterfuck. Things may just be so disorganized that he struggles to actually get what he wants done.
    2. The states have limited power to defy the feds. While case law does state that federal law supercedes state law, that doesn't mean all States will immediately cooperate wholeheartedly. Obviously a court battle will eventually get to the supreme court, but that takes time and requires a single panel of judges to beat multiple states into line on each new policy.
    3. Governments do have a small amount of caution when it comes to their people. One thing the crazy conservatives had right this whole time was that fundamentally, nobody was ever going to come for their guns because nobody wants to force a confrontation with a bunch of armed lunatics. In the same way, they'll probably try to avoid massive riots and general strikes simply because it isn't worth the fight to whoever is responsible.
    4. Citizens can resist. Go to protests, donate to political advocacy organizations (the ACLU will have its work cut out for it), and for Christ's sake, go vote! Show up every year, just not every 4 years. Without the cooperation of congress, his power would be significantly curtailed.
    5. If nothing else, terms are limited. In 2 years we can swing congress. He isn't going to be able to pass a constitutional amendment to do what he likes before that. If we swing congress in two years, it will slow him down significantly, and then we can replace him in 2028. Hopefully people will actually keep showing up long enough after that to reverse all the damage he's likely to do in the next 4 years.

    • The states have limited power to defy the feds.

      Case in point: legalized marijuana. That said, my fear in regards to states defying laws is:

      • Targeted attacks by MAGA terrorists, particularly regarding anything LGBTQ+ or reproductive healthcare related.
      • The fed withholding federal funds to punish states that don't fall in line.

      The former is particularly concerning as police and the national guard are predominately right-wing. My state passed the SAFE-T Act to address abuses in the police/justice system. Naturally, various police departments weren't happy about this, and through obtuse interpretation of the act they'll claim they can't legally do vital parts of their job -- something I've seen multiple times first hand. Refusing to do their job competently in response to MAGA terrorism isn't hard to imagine.

      The later gets tricky. Most of the states that would push back against unjust federal laws are also states that pay more in federal taxes than they receive in aid. The "obvious" solution withhold tax dollars going to the fed to make up the difference ... which would be next to impossible in practice. Even if states mange to do it they'd be playing into Republican hands by defunding essential federal services.

  • The us is ground hog day, they won't win it back instead they will spend two years bickering then two years bad mouthing and it will continue to repeat as they believe they've got 'democracy' you guys don't your being played by the political elites and the capitalist. Also stop throwing liberal around as a broad left notion, liberalism is an insult to any leftist.

    If you want change then join a socialist party that is connected to an international. Make moves in unions. Build workers power. Be willing to fight. Educate yourselves so you can educate others. Marxism isn't some silly notion or wond waving. Its a scientific approach to a healthy and just society, Karl Marx watched the birth of global capitalism, predicted its failures: failures we are still seeing today, and sort to tackle the issue with years of research and analysis. What he made is a solid base for us to build on.

336 comments