[eunoia]

I think you’re fundamentally right. Trump is obviously the worst we’ve seen yet, but power has been accumulating unchecked in the executive branch’s hands for decades now.

Trump is merely a symptom of the problem that is the Imperial Presidency. If we can’t tackle the problem itself we’ll get another politician doing the exact same shit after Trump.

[pjc50]

Most of which is downstream of 9/11 and the War on Terror. That provided lots of bipartisan support for state sponsored killings.

[anon84873628]

It's been going since Reagan. Justice John Roberts is in the "unitary executive" camp and has been working to expand presidential power his whole career.

[api]

Not sure why this is being downvoted when it's quite an obvious trend in American politics. The executive has been getting stronger and Congress has been getting weaker and more dysfunctional for many years.

We have been setting the stage and preparing the throne for an American dictator or emperor for at least 50 years, just waiting for one to decide to sit in the chair and wield the power we've laid at their feet. The only thing that stopped this from happening sooner is that none of the prior administrations truly wanted to do this.

Bush, in particular, could have become dictator easily after 9/11. I dislike George W. pretty strongly but I do give him a little credit here.

[atlanta90210]

They raided Trump's wife's underwear drawer too so Trump is a victim of this FBI overreach as well.

[Hikikomori]

Its not really overreach if they get a warrant and find the things they were looking for.

[embedding-shape]

Indeed, don't blame the individual (all thought the individual has plenty of individual blame going their way, rightfully so), blame the system.

Unless the system changes, it'll continue to let people misuse it to their own gain. Trump was hardly the first one, and depending on how things will go, he might be the last, but "last" in a good way or in a bad way remains to be seen.

[pksebben]

I have an ongoing debate (argument? fight?) with my father about this. He recalls a time when it felt as if there were 'good guys' in politics, and can't understand why it is that I'm so hard on the democrats (this has begun to shift in recent months as Chucklefuck and Aipac Shakur have consistently disappointed him). Besides the obvious issue of republicans being a lost cause, it's policies like too big to fail and dodd-frank and nafta that created the conditions for our current mess, all the while expanding and allowing basic, obvious bad policy to persist (presidential pardons, executive order powers, life terms in the supreme court).

A five year old can see the problems with a lot of this stuff, which once upon a time you'd defend with vague notions of a self-policing culture or the ghost of ethics in governance. Those kinds of non-safeguards can work fine in a stable system, but they inherently rely on foreknowledge of future conditions not changing in unpredictable ways.

The self-reinforcing recursive loop underlying all this is that the systems of governance can only be changed by the governors. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that democracy will fail so long as it's representative - the incentives to fix the system itself are simply not there because any inefficiency is exploitable for personal gain (so why fix it?) The doomsday proposition that comes out of that though is that the system cannot be changed - only replaced once it decisively breaks. Maybe that's what all this is. I would hate to find another bottom but I fear there's more to go before we get there.

[anon84873628]

Government is of course the quintessential multi-agent coordination problem.

It has big problems when the people running it don't embody the values that it depends on.

[AndrewKemendo]

I absolutely blame the individual.

Who is responsible for the system if not the individual - and the collective thereof?

The fundamental problem is the citizen not being educated or caring enough about their own independence and state of being in the framework of a global economy and sovereign nation state

[eunoia]

I would highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death if you are looking to understand how the populace got to the point where truth is irrelevant and nothing really matters.

It helped my mental model a lot at the very least.

[AndrewKemendo]

I’m extremely aware of amusing ourselves to death

I think we came away with very different conclusions

To me it is abject proof that individuals do not have the mental emotional or other capacity to actually behave in the modern world such that they retain their mental independence and develop a sense of personal epistemology

Humans are way too dumb and prone to propaganda to actually have a coherent society at the scale needed so that we don’t collectively kill each other through poorly identified and attributed externalities

[eunoia]

Unfortunately I think we actually agree on this and did come away with the same conclusions.

[specialist]

I believe, but cannot prove, that our malleability was an evolutionary advantage. It enabled homo sapiens to gather in ever larger social groups.

Media, from obelisks to tiktok, enables exploitation of our evolutionary quirk.

[embedding-shape]

Similar to how we investigate and figure out airplane crashes, the system should not allow you to get into those situations in the first place, that's the solution that works across time, instead of for just individual situations.

For example, how is someone who led/incited an insurrection against the government able to become head of said government? Already there, something is gravely wrong. You don't let undemocratic leaders lead a democratic society. So the system is broken, and the current administration is proof of that.

Otherwise what other commentators said will happen, someone who might even be worse than Trump will eventually lead the country.

[AndrewKemendo]

So then again my question is who ultimately audits and holds the system accountable such that if the system needs to be fixed it gets fixed?

The only answer to that is the people who form the citizenry.

If the citizens cannot influence the system such that they can actually affect change on the system then they are irrelevant in it and the system needs to be replaced

As long as they continue to fail to organize then they will continue to be dominated by it

That’s just reality

There is no alternative organization that can counter the global capitalist system currently

[lawn]

We must blame the system and the individual, otherwise the system will never change.