[evelant]

It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years. This has always been the plan, it hasn’t been hidden, corporate media has just succeeded in sanewashing it for decades. Abdication of journalistic responsibility in the name of profits has allowed construction of alternate realities for so many people that these atrocities are now possible with few noticing.

[glenstein]

The only part I would disagree with here is that there was a plan dating back to the George W. Bush Admin. I think "the plan" in earnest came into being between 2020 and 2024, and I don't think anyone from the Bush years would find a home in the party let alone the current administration. It's not that they had no plans necessarily, they just weren't the ones in charge anymore.

I do think the Bush years were the first major destabilization of rule of law domestically that helped create conditions for today, along with Obama's "look forward, not backward" enshrinement of it as bipartisan consensus. Bush also normalized a kind of partisan unresponsiveness to mass democratic uprisings that people used to believe were capable of influencing the government.

[Herring]

I don't like putting the blame on a "plan". Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and the US has had a strong anti-democratic strain since slavery. Probably even feudalism before that. Once you see it, you see it everywhere and can't unsee it. There's a reason Trump's best polling issue is immigration

https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...

[JeremyNT]

Yeah viewing it as a single plan is wrong.

I think the more complete view is that the current generation of fascists learned from the Bush admin's mistakes (or, I suppose you could say, they feel unshackled by Bush era "restraint").

Combined with a cult of personality frontman to distract, aided by a captured media ecosystem and a radicalized judiciary, they are empowered to build on the shoulders of giants.

It was not self evident in the 00's that we would end up with Miller/Vought running the show - the actual form could have been something completely different. Indeed, Rove himself recently popped back up to chastise them!

[MSFT_Edging]

I think it's because we've gotten so used to avoiding political speech as a method of "civility", we've collectively put our heads in the sand.

The people who were shouting their worries and concerns were told they were being political. Politics is just life now a days, I don't know how you can actually excise that.

[johnnyanmac]

I was just too young and things exploded by the time I really could start to understand what was gonig on.

I was very early Elementasry for 9/11, Middle school for the GFC. I was early 20's focusing on college in 2016, which would have been the 2nd nationals I could vote in. Then I was only a few years into my career when COVID hit.

The Obama era gave me hopes, but I didn't realize how easily it could be relinquished in the name of corporate interest. I just figured all the checks and balances would keep things from really going backwards. Obviously Trump winning was the first huge red flag, but things seemed fine. But the real red flag I (personally) saw was Ruth Bader Ginsburg not stepping down and instead dying during the Trump administration. Having 3 judges appointed by Trump (plus 3 from W. Bush beforehand) was a death knell for decades to come, even if Trump never got elected.

[soraminazuki]

I guess we grew up in the same era, but I couldn't disagree more about any administration giving hopes. While Obama mostly didn't make things dramatically worse, he did keep the status quo and all the troubling policies that came with it. Refusing to prosecute Bush-era crimes? Check. Keeping Guantanamo? Check. Expanding illegal mass-surveillance systems? Check. Expanding military drone programs and extrajudicially killing civilians outside of war zones? Check. Breaking the record on whistleblower prosecutions? Check. That's in stark contrast to the leniency given to those who caused the financial crisis. On the positive side, I guess he tried to fix healthcare, but it's still broken as ever.

It was so bad that it's unbelievable that subsequent administrations managed to make matters even more astronomically worse.

[antisthenes]

> I guess he tried to fix healthcare

Yeah, he tried, but anyone with working brain cells could tell you that ACA was just going to end up in a bigger payout to the healthcare industry. It was a status quo pro-corporate bill just like the rest of his centrist policies.

The actual solution has and always will be to reduce costs, which means people losing jobs and hospital admins not owning 3 vacation homes.

[MSFT_Edging]

Obama very much helped deliver us to this point, similar to how the current opposition party doesn't seem to be doing that much opposition. The old george carlin bit, it's a big club and you ain't in it.

[pxc]

I'm in the same age cohort. Obama's candidacy and election gave me hope. Obama's presidency disgusted me and disillusioned me.

[actionfromafar]

"Please avoid political speech" is often just shorthand for "you are not allowed to talk about how the current rules just so happen to be my rules".

[foogazi]

Flagged!

[sethammons]

And this post was flagged and is no longer on hn front page

[tempodox]

It is in https://news.ycombinator.com/active.

[MSFT_Edging]

It's easy to forget the Hacker website is actually just a VC discussion board and the "avoid politics" is simply "avoid talking about our future business lines"

[actionfromafar]

Haha, yes. I meant more in general discourse though. Maybe HN should shift to "how to prosper in a dictatorship". :)

[lapcat]

> It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years.

This has been happening long before W, and the Democrats are complicit too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

[piva00]

It might take a couple more generations, a lot more misery, and maybe even a complete breakdown of democracy in the USA, for its population to finally learn that Democrats or Republicans are bound to the same higher power in the USA: money.

Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either party will always look out for the moneyed interests, anything else they might champion for is just there to give a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's the foundation of American democracy, donations, aggressive lobbying, business-first mentality, the votes are there just to decide which side of the coin will move these interests forward, not to decide what platform is best for the citizenry in general.

[throwaway173738]

How convenient that you have an argument for lumping together both a party that wants to continue the liberal democracy and a party that wants to cling to power at the expense of creating an actual authoritarian state complete with a secret police.

[thrance]

In short: republicans are the effectuators, democrats are the enablers. The democrats have been deferring to moneyed interests too over the last decades, just in a less agressive way. They spend a great deal of energy pushing actual leftists out of the party or keeping them ineffectual. And most importantly: they don't push back against the GOP's terrible policies and destruction of our democracy at all.

[lapcat]

The two parties are not the same, but the privately funded electoral system of the US applies to all parties. Democrats cannot escape the corrupting influence of money.

Consider, as a revealing example, the Patriot Act of 2001. There was more resisitance to it from Democrats than from Republicans, yet there was still not nearly enough resistance. In the Senate, the vote was 98-1, with only Democrat Russ Feingold against. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act?#Legislative_histo...

In my "free speech zone" link above, the Democrats were the first to use that blatant violation of free speech, at their national convention.

Republicans take advantage of the precedents set by both parties.

[johnnyanmac]

>Democrats cannot escape the corrupting influence of money.

They could. These are not people struggling to pay rent, they do not live paycheck to paycheck. Heck, the median age of congress is 58 so a good portion of them are free to retire and never work another day in their lives.

But they in general choose not to escape it. The money, the networks, the power. I guess the sad thing is that the populace aren't aware enough to properly primary anyone who does turn their backs on them.

[lapcat]

By "Democrats" I meant the Democratic Party.

Democratic politicans are not a fixed group of people: anyone can run for office. The issue is not so much that money is corrupting otherwise good people. Rather, the issue is that political campaigns are self-financed, and wealthy donors put their money behind candidates who they know to be friendly to their interests. The wealthy do not fund candidates who are unfriendly to their interests and indeed may throw their money behind an opponent, or just directly fund "interest groups" that malign candidates whom the wealthy dislike.

> I guess the sad thing is that the populace aren't aware enough to properly primary anyone who does turn their backs on them.

The fundamental problem is that primary campaigns require money, just like general election campaigns. The situation may be even worse for primary campaigns, because the news media provides much less free coverage for primary campaigns than for general elections campaigns. And the news media tends to distribute coverage based on "electability," which is invariably a euphemism for the ability to raise campaign funds.

[throwaway173738]

What do you want people to do about the current crisis? What action could be taken to resolve the situation today?

[lapcat]

This appears to be a marked change in subject. How are your questions directly responding to my comment?

I would say that, if taken literally, resolving the situation today is not possible. We're currently living in a deep hole that was a very long time in the making (one might even say hundreds of years in the making), and it would likely take a very long time to climb our way out of it. There's no magical, immediate solution.

The US political system has always been corrupted by money, but modern technology has enabled a vast increase in the scale and efficiency of such corruption. It used to be said, "all politics is local," but now it might be said that all politics is international.

[johnnyanmac]

we didn't get here in a day, or even a decade. So it won't be solved overnight.

But sure, in the ideal world:

1. Call every bluff Trump makes. Do not capitulate to anything. Drown him in lawsuits. He's lost at least a 3rd of the DOJ so they cannot handle suing every company, college, and state at once.

2. Anyone in a red and especially purple states, make it a habit to call your represenatives every day. emails can (and probably will be) ignored. Don't let their lines be anything but people telling these congressmen to knock it off and actually do their jobs. Collorary: anyone in a blue state calls in and makes sure their congressmen know they need to also resist, fight back, and not capitulate.

3. If you can, townhalls are even better than calling. If you see the local townhalls you know this scares the GOP congressmen stiff.

4. if you see federal agents in the wild, always be recording. The truth is the beth antidote to corruption. Make sure you livestream as well so they can't just seize your phone. The more live feed out there the harder it is to spin.

5. heck, if we're really dreaming big we plan some general strike. Shut down the country for a day and you'll have everyone reeling to try and backpedal.

Varying levels of realism there, but the theme is clear: resist and make sure others resist. They can't ignore us all if we work together. But that "working together" in such a hyper-individualistic society is the hard part. It may just be more realistic to wait until someone dies or midterms happen.

[piva00]

It's not convenient, it's quite sad to be honest. I'm not American nor live in the USA so seeing it from the outside makes me quite sad that Americans believe to be under a democratic system where choosing their representatives matter.

Not even the liberal democracy that one of the parties want is properly a liberal democracy, it is to the limits where it infringes into business needs, and moneyed interests. They can't fight the system that enables them to exist.

There are the token attempts to make it look less than that, to appear more altruistic: ACA, better paths for immigrants to be legally integrated into society, etc. but overall the majority of Democrats are also entirely bound to the powers that fuel their campaigns, money is the only real power in the end.

The issue with the other party increasingly becoming more authoritarian and extreme over time is a side-effect from grievances caused exactly by the issue of the people not having actual any power to course-correct policies, there aren't many policy choices, it's business and money or business and money and fascism. Normal people were led to believe they can just become one of the moneyed elites if they just work hard enough, and government stays out of their way, so they vote against their interests as what they are: common people.

I wish the USA would learn that a two-party system eventually will breakdown, that it will eventually cause the fracture to be too great, and that some members of the politician class would use this wedge as a weapon to achieve power, just like what happened with the GOP. You simply cannot have only 2 parties to determine the political will of 300+ million people, it's impossible that either of them represent the variety of wants and needs of the whole population but you are stuck with that.

Continuing democracy as it was before also doesn't seem to be a good solution, it was exactly the system that brought into power the current tyrants. Too many norms, protocols, and procedures relying on tradition and decorum rather than codified, it was bound to be abused at some point, and it's quite incredible it has lasted this long.

[atmavatar]

We are a frog in a pot of water placed upon a stove.

Every time the Republican party gains power, they turn up the burner.

When the Democratic party gains power, they don't turn the burner up any further, but the most we can give them credit for is they may occasionally toss an ice cube in the water.

They do not turn the burner down.

They do not remove the pot from the stove.

They do not take the frog out of the water.

The Democratic party isn't as bad as the Republican party, but they're still ultimately boiling the frog.

---

For all their crowing about how bad Republican policy is, how often do you really see them repealing bad laws passed by Republicans - especially the disastrous tax cuts and sabotage of government agencies? Biden couldn't even be bothered to replace all of Trump's appointees.

The last few decades have demonstrated that at the very least, we need a number of constitutional amendments to fix the cracks and gaping holes in our current governmental structure that allowed us to get here, and it'll probably take burning down both major political parties and starting with new ones to make that happen.

[myvoiceismypass]

> how often do you really see them repealing bad laws passed by Republicans - especially the disastrous tax cuts and sabotage of government agencies?

how often do you see a D majority in the House AND the Senate with a D president?

[atmavatar]

We saw (an admittedly razor-thin) majority in the first half of Biden's term and a much more solid majority in the first half of Obama's first term. Clinton also had a solid majority in the first half of his first term, and Carter had a solid majority throughout his entire term.

It may feel skewed in favor of Republican majorities across the executive and legislative branches due to GWB having it for 6 years, but the fact is, every president in the last 30 years has had a majority in both branches at the start of their first terms.

[Herring]

The last time Democrats tried to turn down the heat, they lost tons of seats countrywide, up and down the ballot.

https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...

Your problem is the people. The call is coming from inside the house.

Biden is given 4 years to grow a tree, Trump is given 8 years to cut down as many trees as he can. The government is also intrinsically hard to change (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc).

[yubblegum]

> This has always been the plan

This implies a (bipartisan) conspiracy to agitprop the nation into violent division as pretext.

[tremon]

Why does it imply that? You only need one side to consistently antagonize the other and turn everything into us-vs-them rhetoric. The other side can either choose to ignore it, try to maintain higher-level discourse, or start playing the same game; the end result is still the same. I don't see why a bipartisan conspiracy would be required.