[WastedCucumber]

In principle I agree that change is possible and good under democracy, but your comment seems wildly out of touch in the present context.he change that I see happening in the USA now does not seem like a change of democratic form, but a move away from democracy, because a lot of core rights/freedoms/structures are under threat: freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, right to protest, and maybe we'll see free and fair elections get weakened too before this process is done.

And none of that seems like a feature to me.

[johncoltrane]

You can have the core things you mention in other political systems and you can have democracy without them. Those are characteristics of the particular form(s) of democracy currently in place in most of "the west", not of democracy itself.

> maybe

I know, it's more exciting to play the worst scenarios in one's head, but… _maybe not_?

[avmich]

How you can have meaningful democracy without those features?

[RealityVoid]

> you can have democracy without them

Wholly disagree you can.

> I know, it's more exciting to play the worst scenarios in one's head, but… _maybe not_?

I don't know where I read this recently that russians never believe that something good can happen and americans never believe something bad can happen. It feels so real these last couple of years. You are obviously having democratic backslide and going into a bad place, but the absolute inability to realise this (at least from a large segment of the population) looking from the outside, is bordering on the absurde. There have been many dominant empires that fell. It is the peak of hubris that it can't happen to you.