What is your line in the sand?
Edit: thank you all for your responses. I think it’s important as an American we take your view points seriously. I think of a North Korean living inside of North Korea. They don’t really know how bad it is because that is all hidden from them and they’ve never had anything else. As things get worse for Americans it’s important to have your voices because we will become more and more isolated.
Even the guy who said, “lol.” Some people need that sort of sobering reaction.
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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.
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.
exactly, two party system completely pulls the pants down for top1% lobbyism to be rampantly in control
This
also the media influence on elections is out of control
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.
As a German also I agree with this statement. Ostensibly it is a democracy but in reality it’s not. And yes, there is a lot of rhyming going on
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”. Come on, be serious. Words mean things.
Second, America’s two-party system also has internal factions and primaries, many of them completely open (you don’t even need to declare allegiance to the party). The primaries are effectively the first round in a two-round electoral system (of which there are plenty in the world). The whole point is to create a binary choice in the final round. For some reason this always gets missed by otherwise informed observers. “There are only two parties” is just not a valid argument in this debate.
Of course, none of these facts will be popular here, since the real point of this thread is to allow participants to performatively dump on the shared hate-object. Classic social media, I get it.
Firstly, the USA is obviously not a “dictatorship”.
You sure about that? Have you read the news lately?
Yeah I have and saying that kinda just makes you seem uninformed.
Like the people who call the US “a 3rd world country in a Gucci belt”. It just makes it super obvious that you don’t understand how high quality of a life the average person has in the US. Especially globally.
I’m not going to list all the red flags, but there is a reason people feel like this. A few major ones, president talking about taking over other countries out of the blue, attacking our allies to the point where Americans are suffering much more than necessary, his sidekick doing Nazi salutes on stage, literal commercials for his $idekick on the white house lawn.
It’s pretty clear there is no rule of law for blatant corruption and no accountability. Replace USA/Trump with Russia/Putin or NK/Un, guess what, same shit, different smell. Either follow orders or get shipped out is the example they’re trying to set, as well as making free speech illegal.
We’re FAR from a functioning democracy.
Well think about a lot of the characteristics of the US and maybe you’ll at least see where they’re coming from. It’s not about 100% accuracy as much as perspective. And it seems like it’d hard to shatter illusions some people there have.
High poverty rate compared to developed countries, low literacy rates compared to developed countries, Highly authoritarian, highly propagandised, militia compounds spread throughout.
You you can be taken and imprisoned in a desert camp, fed expired food, put in a chain gang and not that it would be OK otherwise, but you haven’t been convicted of a crime.
Constant terrorist attacks.
You can be put in solitary until you have psychosis and youre smearing feces on the walls, and then the confessions you give after that can be used in court.
There was a mass protest of slave Labour and the slaves were starved until they went back to work.
You can be disappeared and have your residency revoked for protesting war crimes. You had someone who worked in your torture camps run to be a candidate for president and they got far.
Child marriage is legal.
People are sent back to a polluted industrial hazard town after train derailment and all the animals are dead and they’re complaining of chemical burns. If they complain the get dragged out by cops.
Food standards not accepted elsewhere. Companies can poison large parts of the population and even if they’re punished its an amount that still means the profited from it
They took a guy who promoted health misinformation that led to dead kids and they put him in charge of health, even though a worm ate his brain.
Expansionist, aggressive, worships the military but fucks over veterans, complains about first responders injured on the job getting health care, so they scrapped it. Constantly chasing culture was BS, never quite left the satanic panic.
While I don’t consider the system of governance there very good, I’ll have to agree. While I do absolutely worry for the American democracy, it isn’t a dictatorship in its current form. I also agree that the primaries do make the system better and more democratic. I still think that the two part system is abysmal, but the primaries do make the claim to democracy stronger.
That’s a balanced and fair-minded take. Unfortunately it won’t be appreciated here, because what people are looking for in this thread is catharsis and confirmation of their biases.
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The USA is categorized by people who have studied this subject more closely than you (or me) as a flawed democracy. This is a dumb discussion. That’s all I have to say here.
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I don’t discuss with people who downvote my comments. You clearly don’t care what I have to say. Good night.
How do we see who downvotes?
I know they had that on kbin but not Lemmy. I want to see it too. Which client or frontend are you using?
I just extrapolated. Their comment was posted at the same time as a downvote.
If they denied it I would apologize.
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Its not about popular. You are simply wrong.
In practice, however, it is a two-party system.
The primaries that are not required to be democratic and can simply be rigged by the party?
I wouldn’t call America a dictatorship yet, but I would claim that it is heading there at a rapid pace. Trump and Republicans actions such as disregarding the Constitution, removing rights, beginning mass deportations including legals, bringing in a billionaire to shred the government, and ignoring court orders is not a good look for a democratic government.
Yes, I know all that and I completely agree. It’s all but impossible to imagine that the USA will ever be an actually dictatorship, despite the ignorant shrieking around here. Because of its traditions of individual freedom and federalism.
But it’s obviously looking less and less like democracy.
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.
To be honest, not even from the start was it a true democracy, the Electoral College is a layer on top of democracy to give different weight to each vote.
Nope, it’s an oligarchy pretending it’s a democracy.
Absolutely not. When laws don’t apply to the president, the jig is up. Trump clearly plans to be in power forever. Either there won’t be elections or they’ll be rigged.
all those images of venezualen immigrants … being handled like the absolute worst possible being… its crazy
Nope Trump proved yet again the US is a Russian puppet today earlier in the week Ukraine destroyed a huge Russian Oil plant. Now a few days later Trump is giving them a Ceasefire against energy targets which Putin supposedly broke just a mere 3 hours later.
If anything this proves two things Ukraine really hurt them with that attack and Trump is again proving he’s Putins lapdog and acting outright against Ukraine and Europe.
Actually saw some combat footage of that Ukraine attack and it looked almost like a nuke, from what I remember it’s a 1000km ranged missile called Neptune.
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.
I’m inside the US, and the federal government is most certainly no longer a democracy. It still has all the trappings, but corruption will ensure that the will of the people is secondary to whatever those in power want - even more than has been the case in the past. Locally, democracy is still practiced, in places like blue states.
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.
With one not giving a fuck, and the other severely fractured due to conflicting ideals none the less
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.
It was never a democracy.
Nyet.
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.
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.
$ is votes, who could have seen where that would go.
