What is your line 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.
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.
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.
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.
I consider it an autocratic regime with strong fascist characteristics.
I consider America to be a plutocracy, which successfully propagandized the majority with the illusion of democracy, now transitioning into a Christian fascist kleptocracy… Basically a mafia state / corporate dictatorship using religion to control the masses (as is tradition).
If you think it’s not very Christian, that’s because most Christians consider Jesus’s teachings to be evil communism.
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.
I consider it a faux democracy. It still has the semblance of one, with people voting, believing they matter and that they have actual free speech, but the masses are being, increasingly less subtly, controlled by media corporations and rendered incapable of critical, independent thinking by an ever decreasing quality of education.
Don’t be fooled though! This isn’t happening in the US alone. It is widespread all over the globe. The US is simply doing it in a smarter, more cunning way, while leading the wealthy 1% in other countries by example.
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.
The power of the president did not start out like this. Congress kept giving their power to the executive for political reasons.
It happened over centuries.
Not at all, you are just an autocracy now but don’t fully realise it, and as the other commentator had said, not even really a good democracy in the loosest of terms before this entire mess going on ATM!
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
No but this isn’t recent. My line in the sand was Russian interference in the 2016 US election that came to light in 2018.
*United States Democracy Index
Yes, but a bad example of one very quickly heading towards autocracy. Some characteristics like screwing up your own economy and blaming ‘the foreigners’ rings a distant bell.
The answer depends of the reference point. I was born in Russia (I’m living abroad from 2022) and compared to the putin’s dictatorship US is a democracy. You guys still have a freedom of speech, not fake opposition to Trump and independent courts. From the other side, most of the countries are democracies if compared to Russia…
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
Pumpkin Spice Latte
It was never a democracy.
