[xyzal]

Excuse me? Of course you can do a lot of things. Talk to your neigbor, share gov't f-ups on social media, learn to argue for democracy and against common MAGA narratives, join protests, donate to good causes, make your political preference visible, spark dialogues.

We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.

[jrflowers]

> We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.

Jail time (and now deportation) has been a risk for protesting for quite a while in the US. I can see why someone that doesn’t live here would see America’s longstanding reputation of being a cool place to protest in and assume that that is still the case, but that is outdated information. Heck, quite a few Americans insist that is still the case, but the ones that insist that there is no risk are mostly folks that “protest” through tweets

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/08/columbia-university-protest...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/2/ucla-students-arrest...

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...

[CodeMage]

> We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.

As someone who was born and grew up in post-Communist Yugoslavia, there are a few things I can offer as an observation here. Please don't take these as a disagreement or a criticism. It's just additional context I would like to offer to everyone who happens to read this.

One is that people are perfectly fine with a dictatorship as long as the life is good enough for the majority. That's why no one toppled Tito, but they got rid of Milošević in the end, after all the wars, sanctions, and bombings.

Another is that all those things that you said Americans can do without risking jail time aren't the things that toppled dictatorships. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're worthless. On the contrary, things like talking to your neighbor, protesting, and sparking dialogues are all indispensable ingredients for overthrowing a dictator, but they're not the endgame. They're just the stepping stones.

Which brings me to my final observation: the only way to overthrow a dictatorship is through a revolution. It doesn't have to be a violent revolution, but it does have to be a revolution and not just a bunch of limited, scattered, uncoordinated protests.

Whether Trump's administration is a dictatorship or not is not something I'm interested in discussing on HN, but the fact remains that the sentiment GP expressed -- that they're "resigned to the fact that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it" -- indicates that the people who are trying to resist the erosion of democracy in the US lack organization and coordination. The things you listed could help them with that, but I don't think that will happen until there's a critical mass of people willing to take risks, and we're still not in the situation where things are bad enough for that to happen.

[rightbyte]

> the only way to overthrow a dictatorship is through a revolution.

No. E.g. quite many monarchies have been reformed without revolutions.

[Volundr]

Can you speak more about which ones and how that happened? The main one that comes to my mind is the British monarchy (to the extent that they don't really have much power), and my general impression (not a historian) is that that's a bit of a fluke. Looking at the French and American Revolutions, they sort of realized that their necks might stay better attached if they gave some ground. I'm not sure the monarchy being a participant in it's own reform is really applicable.

[rsynnott]

> The main one that comes to my mind is the British monarchy (to the extent that they don't really have much power)

They don't have much power due to _many, many revolutions_; they may not generally get called that, but the wars leading up to the Magna Carta, and later the English Civil War, were clearly revolutions against the monarchy, and successfully limited its power.

[microtonal]

There are more Western European countries with (constitutional) monarchies (The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway), that have become less powerful/more ceremonial over the past decades or even centuries.

[rsynnott]

There are few if any examples of a major absolute monarchy going non-absolute without _some_ sort of revolution (often a kind of limited aristocratic one which may not get _called_ a revolution).

Going from non-absolute to purely ceremonial or non-existent is easier, but generally breaking the power of the monarch in the first place does require some sort of revolution.

[CodeMage]

That's interesting and sounds like a hole in my knowledge of history. I'm curious, were those monarchies actually dictatorships? The UK still has a monarch, but it's not a dictatorship.

[tpm]

There are basically two kinds of monarchies, absolutist - the monarch has absolute power, so it is actually a hereditary dictatorship - and constitutional monarchy, which is mostly what you see today in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain etc.

Going further back in the history, some feudal monarchies were actually not absolutist in the sense the king had to manage various factions of landowners, clergy, etc (so-called Estates) or even share power with them. So it all depended on the relative power of the monarch and others in the society.

[CamperBob2]

Then they weren't dictatorships.

[ty6853]

Not being able to do those things probably nudged you towards revolution.

Voting feels like you've done something. Cast a vote between the lady rammed through without even a primary, or the other oh so fabulous option. Go home and pat yourself on the back, you did something, you tried, and hey it is democracy so you deserve what you get. Now you can relax and mission accomplished.

People under eastern europe 'communist' dictators didn't have any of that. Just whisper in the shadows, and then suddenly Ceaușescu is swiss cheese, because there was literally no other option than to reject the whole system dominating them rather than exhausting their energies squabbling on twitter.

[exe34]

Are you seriously saying that to get people interested in their own fate, it's better to have a brutal dictator than voting for the vice president who would have been second in line if you voted for the guy anyway? Well guess what, you have a fascist dictatorship on your hand. You just haven't figured it out yet.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Voting feels like you've done something. Cast a vote between the lady rammed through without even a primary, or the other oh so fabulous option. Go home and pat yourself on the back, you did something, you tried, and hey it is democracy so you deserve what you get. Now you can relax and mission accomplished.

It's worse than that. It's possible to have a democracy where some of the options are better, e.g. switch to score voting so there can be arbitrarily many parties and candidates instead of major party insiders filtering out every decent candidate before you get to the election.

But the party insiders want that control, so they set up a narrative where every problem is caused by the other team, instead of the problem being caused by there only being two teams.

[chrchr]

Had the Democratic Party's nomination won the election the worst outcomes of the second Trump presidency would have been prevented. You can blame the campaign and the primary voters and the party or whatever, but ultimately the general election voters could have chosen a normal politician who would have at least been a competent, law-abiding administrator and instead voters chose this. The two party system and the lack of ranked-choice voting are no excuse.

[AnthonyMouse]

The Democratic Party nominated a poor candidate who proceeded to lose the election. Because there are only two viable parties, that means the other party wins, even when the other party nominated Donald Trump.

If you use a cardinal voting system (note: not ranked-choice voting), there are more than two viable candidates, and then putting Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the ballet only causes them both to lose because they're both undesirable candidates and less undesirable candidates would score higher with the voters than either of them. And then you don't get Donald Trump. (Or Kamala Harris.)

[chrchr]

I don't know what third candidate you think could have beaten both Trump and Harris in a three way race. "Someone else" is always a popular choice until the someone else turns out to be RFK Jr. or Vivek Ramaswamy or Kanye West. And that's beside the point. Voters had a choice between Harris, who would have been a capable defender of the health research funding that the article discusses, and Trump. They chose Trump. That was a bad choice and it was clearly a bad choice at the time. If the general election is between Pinochet and Marco Rubio you can bet I'll vote for Marco Rubio.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I don't know what third candidate you think could have beaten both Trump and Harris in a three way race. "Someone else" is always a popular choice until the someone else turns out to be RFK Jr. or Vivek Ramaswamy or Kanye West.

Under the existing system, a three way race between Trump, Harris and Marco Rubio causes Harris to win because Trump and Rubio split the Republican vote. So the Republicans, in order to prevent this, only run one candidate. When that candidate is Trump and the Democrats choose Harris, oops.

Score voting is the thing they use in the Olympics. Voters rate every candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, highest average wins. Now if you add Rubio to the ballot, it only affects Trump's chances to the extent that Rubio could score higher than Trump. So there are no more primaries, every party just runs all their candidates in the general election.

Meanwhile Rubio will score higher than Trump among Democrats and not much if at all lower among Republicans, so Rubio defeats Trump. And if you put some Democrat the likes of Jared Polis on a general election ballot, he plausibly scores higher than Harris. If you had to flip a coin between Jared Polis and Marco Rubio, how is that not better than it being Harris and Trump?

[exe34]

> The Democratic Party nominated a poor candidate who proceeded to lose the election. Because there are only two viable parties, that means the other party wins, even when the other party nominated Donald Trump.

You had a choice between Trump again and not Trump. You can't keep blaming others for your choices.

[ClayShentrup]

score voting is the key.

https://asitoughttobemagazine.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/