You know, DOGE, fascist president and corporations dictating what people can do, institutions being ruined, laws being ignored. Is there any way out of that or is it over? Is the USA done?
Not just the USA, their allies as well.
Screwed is always relative.
I’m hearing chat that immigrants from places like Turkey or India are going “oh yeah this is what it’s like back home”.
So it’s possible it just goes full neoliberal (i.e. no consequences or regulations for the rich) and the division of wealth grows even further.
Provided he doesn’t cause a war or some kind of other mass-death problem (chemical spills, reactor meltdown etc) it might just have a cost primarily in human suffering, as opposed to human life.
I wont give a knee jerk response to it. a country the size, economy, and history of USA doesn’t get done for by one President. While Muskrump will cause plenty of institutional damage and suffering on American and global populace, USA will come out stronger and better nation at the end of this (whenever this ends). Case in point, Germany before WWII and Germany after WWII
We need to weather the storm and come back strong. We need a FDR 2.0 to transition from chaos and oligarchy into a more equitable America with universal healthcare and more support for struggling Americans.
agree. USA will need a project 2030 plan to restore and strengthen Democracy in way that it can’be be ever again compromised by one mad man
The silver lining here is that with now 8 years of abolishing civil/workers rights, technology and social development being suppressed and Americans falling so objectively behind in most measurable fields, hopefully Americans can get over their blatantly false sense of exceptionalism and become comfortable just being another part of the world.
technology (…) being suppressed
What technology or technology development is being suppressed?
The USA are still leading in most technological fields and have a dominant position.
The US does not have a dominant position in:
microchips.
batteries.
solar.
material science.
fusion.
energy.
computer science.
automotive.
displays.
The list goes on.
If you still think the USA is leading in tech, you are sorely misinformed about the state of the technological world(to be fair, it Is startling how rapidly the US has fallen out of grace in many of these technological fields).
The US is either barely clinging to previous legacies of prowess in tech fields to match other countries or falling behind rapidly, and without innovative latitude, federal grants or funding for research, they’re falling behind even further.
the US does not have the technological edge it once did; scientists, officials from the department of defense, everybody in the know agrees and have been making public statements about how quickly the US is falling behind in critical scientific and technological fields.
The US is still leading in aerospace and defense. Boeing is in a slump, but military planes are top notch. SpaceX is a decade ahead of the global competition at least.
computer science
All the biggest and leading companies in that area are still based in the US. American companies dominate the market for software and internet services. The possibly most disruptive technology AI is also firmly in the hands of the USA.
You’re also missing biotechnology as another key sector, where the US is doing very well.
the US does not have the technological edge it once did;
That much is clear. It’s still doing very good though.
The amount of money spent on R&D is still huge in the USA and it attracts top minds from across the globe.
aoaoe
a private company innovated aerospace technology despite the US government’s reluctance to invest in aerospace technology.
Huh? The US government paying SpaceX made it possible to succeed in the first place. That’s literally the US investing in aerospace tech.
US dod officials have been very clearly saying for Over a decade that the US might already be behind China in key areas of defense
China is catching up, but still behind in defense and aerospace technology. The one area they are ahead is industrial capacity to build, especially ships. China builds a huge number of civilian and military ships.
despite spending 4 to 10 times as much on their defense budget
Wages, manufacturing, etc. are all far more expensive in the US. It’s also much easier and cheaper to copy someone else’s design than to discover and build for the first time.
they cannot even compete with a free operating system
Microsoft has good support for Linux nowadays with Windows services for Linux and Azure Linux for example. On the desktop Microsoft Windows is still leading in market share and Microsoft Office is dominating as well.
Where are the biggest Linux companies located?
Apple? they haven’t been innovative in 15 years, depend on slave labor
Apple’s AR/VR is innovative, if not particularly successful in the market. Their M-series chips are among the best chip available. Very fast with low power use.
Apple makes their products in same factories (Foxconn etc) as other companies. So the labor conditions aren’t unique to Apple at all.
it’s not leading in manufacturing, it’s not leading in most sciences, and it has one of the most awful education systems in the world, not to mention the living affordability crisis going on.
I mostly agree. The quality of the US education system is similar to the health care system. The US has some of the best education and health care in the world. However, it’s neither cheap nor affordable for the majority of the population.
you can’t do science without funding and support, and dumps has taken that funding away, and importantly does not believe in science or the benefits of research and development.
I agree mostly. Regarding funding under Trump, we will see. Elon Musk certainly know about R&D costs and benefits and is influential.
meanwhile, other countries are investing record amounts and setting technological records in innovative technologies like solar that the US has no hope of catching up to in the near future.
Yes, other countries are catching up steadily overall and are ahead in some areas, especially China.
aaoao
Not even close to being done. Right now the biggest changes are a reduction in non law enforcement/immigration government staff and contracts being paid out. The biggest thing coming down the pipeline is Trump clearly wants to free himself of the courts and congress. But it’s far too early to say he’s won that. And even that wouldn’t be the end of things. In the US the states have a lot of autonomy. They are actually the ones responsible for holding elections. So let’s look at a worst case scenario, where he tries to say we shouldn’t have elections.
The first thing that’s going to happen is all the blue states are going to tell him to fuck off and hold them anyways. The second thing that’s going to happen is some red states will also do so, although they’ll likely be less coarse with the language. Then a few more red states will be pressured into having elections by massive protests of people angry they can’t vote anymore. Then while Trump is having a fit because there’s no real way for him to stop this process, we get to learn about a fun feature of the US Congress. There is no law requiring it to meet in D.C. Trump would likely try to claim whatever is left over is the real congress, but without having been elected the Constitution is clear that those states forfeit representation until they hold an election.
So we’d be left with a House that is majority anti-Trump, after all, he tried to make them irrelevant at best. In the Senate we’d likely be looking at something of an even split in 2026. There’s probably 5-7ish red states that would hold elections anyways and combined with the blue states and senate democrats leaving DC they would be able to convene elsewhere with a majority to declare rules of the Senate without Trump’s interference. The new Congress would likely swiftly vote to impeach Trump. The remnants of the old one would protest this but they don’t have any legal power. Only the backing of Trump and propaganda power.
This leaves Vance with a choice. This would be by design because our democratic party leaders only appear to be stupid when convenient. Vance can throw his weight behind Trump and get impeached himself or he can order Trump removed from the White House thus acknowledging the primacy of Congress. If he chooses the first option then Congress simply repeats the process and the presidency goes to the next person in line, the speaker of the house. Yes, Congress can effectively vote one of it’s own members into the White House at any time. This president then declares an emergency and orders the military to secure DC. The military loves process, and loves the Constitution. It is highly likely this order would be followed.
However all would not be well, it’s not a fairy tale. It would likely be the start of an American Insurgency that would take decades to root out. It would certainly be the end of the US as the hegemonic world power. Our Aircraft Carriers would rust in port and our projection of soft and hard power over the world would wither. But we would still be here, just much diminished and never the same in our lifetimes. This is certainly scary but if we all do our part this is as close as we would come to losing our democracy. Far more insidious is the threat of slowly revoking the right to vote. They’d start by raising the age, then by requiring you to not have any debt of specific kinds, then by making harsh punishments for illegally voting, and other such things until voting is effectively restricted to land owners. Certain factions would like to get it to white christian male landowners but that’s probably a decade or more down that line if at all.
Notes -
Why wouldn’t he just send in the military?
2028 isn’t enough time to purge and train enough people to make the military loyal to him. He would be mid project on that at best and the states could effectively counter him into a stand still with their national guard. This would make many people stay home, but the determined voters are likely to be anti-trump because that’s the change incentive. Loyalists will feel like the elections don’t matter.
What’s stopping SCOTUS from declaring the elections invalid?
The states. SCOTUS is only relevant as long as they have reputation of being an impartial arbiter of Constitutional Law. That opinion is already in the trash heap. They could not make such a decision today, or after 4 more years unless they spend the next 4 years setting themselves as at least a mild opposition in a long game. But they haven’t shown that kind of patience.
What happens in Trump surrounds himself with thousands of armed loyalists in DC?
We select a new capital and wish him the best of luck dealing with DC. There is no law requiring DC be the Capital. The Constitution doesn’t even require the states to give up a district, it only provides the legal possibility. There’s no need to engage in that kind of a conflict. Such a group would be arrested bit by bit by Maryland, Virginia, and Federal authorities until it could be resolved swiftly.
I really only lurk on Lemmy, but I felt the need to comment. Thank you for writing this. I’ve been stressed out since the EO was announced. I felt like we were doomed, but this gives me some hope. Even if this doesn’t happen, I feel better knowing there is still a way to possibly course correct.
In the short term: Yes. Unless the US military decides to remove a sitting president but that is extremely unlikely.
In the long term: Yes, but also no. Fascism is extremely inefficient and expensive and the US is destroying its own economy and pushing away all of its allies and former trade partners. Things will get very rough but it will not last forever. There will be a lot of rebuilding that needs to be done.
Unfortunately this has been a long time coming. The United States has never really been united and it was only a matter of time before another possible civil war loomed on the horizon.
I would say it’s been coming since BEFORE the civil war.
People always take my words out of context when I say that life in general would have been better for everyone long term if the south won.
People take that to mean that I’m pro-slavery. I’m not. If the south won, slavery would have died out naturally by the early 1900s (assuming confederate america lasted that long)
But if the south had won, and been able to leave the union? I feel like they’d have made the worst possible choices for their country on a repeated basis. I feel like their country would have crumbled and disolved into multiple smaller countries. The united states would have continued expanding out west. Texas is probably the only former state that wouldn’t have crumbled.
The rest of the confederate states? They’d be struggling to survive, last in the world in education, terrible healthcare, basically a bunch of 3rd world countries. But the rest of the USA? SO MUCH HEALTHIER FOR IT!!! All these cancers trying to tear down OUR country today, wouldn’t be part of our country. They can go fuck up the country of Alabama. Go nuts.
The pure amount of butterfly effect policies that would be different is mind blowing.
To me, the south winning isn’t about slavery. It’s about taking this large lump sum of the worst people in the country, and cutting them free like you cut away a tumor to get rid of cancer.
How exactly would slavery have died out “naturally” in a union made up entirely of slave states who’d just fought and won a war to defend it? I get your point about letting the south stand in its own so it could fall, but you are too casually sweeping aside the issue of slavery. “Yeah yeah - that would pass naturally - now let me tell you my MAIN point….”
Northerners weren’t simply more high minded than southerners concerning slavery - industrialization lessened their dependence on slaves to the point where they could abandon slavery without the economy crumbling.
Presumably this would happen in the south as they industrialized as well.
Agriculture still has not eliminated manual labor, son.
Oh OK
Yep the South was invested in agriculture, to this day a labor-intensive sector, largely due to advantages in climate and geography which were basically fixed. So how again would slavery have spontaneously ended in the South again? It’s a question - please answer it.
