“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
The only way to have time to stop the bomb from going off is to choose the longer fuse. We didn’t even give ourselves a chance to replace neoliberalism with socialism, people let fascism win in 2024.
The longer fuse was still a fuse and was picked over and over for so many years without anything else done. At this point other then being able to say “don’t blame me I voted for kodos” there is little value in the “long fuse” party. The us needed real options outside of fascism vs fascism lite.
Neoliberalism isn’t fascist lite, but it does lead to fascism. I doubt I’m alone, at the time anyway, in thinking Obama was at least a progressive candidate. Hindsight is 20/20. Obama was yet another neoliberal. But considering American history, electing a Black president whose slogan was hope seemed like we were bucking trends, when in fact we were doing more of the same.
It has become more obvious now with two Bernie runs and three full Trump runs that neoliberalism is a sales pitch for the scam that is late-stage capitalism. But it’s not for a lack of trying people have been picking the long fuse party. This country rejected Hillary Clinton twice, probably not for the right reasons in all cases, but at least some people were looking for alternatives to what they saw as Bill Clinton’s version of the Democrats.
We need socialism. And I can’t guarantee we would have gotten there in one or even two more general elections. But if Trump showed us anything, it is possible to co-opt a modern political party with a populist narrative. What Trump did to the Republicans is what Bernie tried to do to the Democrats. Someone else younger, I don’t know who, needed to be given a chance to do that and we did not create an opportunity for them to even try.
How much time would you need and what would you do?
I effectively answered this in the comment to M0oP0o, but I’ll go into more detail here. We needed one or two more election cycles for a candidate with a populist narrative about progressive and socialist change to co-opt the Democratic party. By co-opt I mean totally control it, the way Trump has taken over the Republican party. This would be hard, since the owner class has a class interest in stopping progressives and socialists and supporting neoliberals and fascists, but it wasn’t impossible. As far as policy, the short answer is a serious of constitutional amendments to ensure majority rule in all branches of government and mandate worker own corporations while also completely redistributing wealth.
Considering the death toll and the long term destruction to the Earth’s environment a four year Trump term would cause, it seems like it would be worth it to go for a political Hail Mary. Especially when a christo-fascist regime starting with Trump will undoubtedly last much longer than four years. The damage will not be constrained to America, but will be global.
Not mention people seem to forget that before Nazi Germany was defeated it conquered most of continental Europe. Even if it doesn’t happen in the next four years, this fascist Trump administration is laying the ground work for conquering North America. People on lemmy tend to use the word imperialism a lot when describing America. So they jump ahead to assuming that American empire is dying when it is American democracy that has died. American empire is getting started now. In the sense that America, as a fascist nation, is going to exert itself on everyone it deems to be in its regional sphere of influence. I don’t know how long it will last, but it’s going to take a lot to stop North America from becoming a one to one match with America.
It is theoretically possible to get out of this in the next elections, but it was highly unlikely before Trump’s inauguration. Now that he’s trying to tip the scales in his favor in future elections this becomes even more increasingly unlikely. The nature of fascist regimes is that the dictator prioritizes loyalty over everything. Which means competent individuals are completely overlooked for consideration in hiring and appointments. Hence fascist incompetence. We cannot rule fascist incompetence out, but we cannot predict where it will strike. Incompetence could cause the fascists to lose at the ballot box, but it could also strike when they try to invade a neighbor. Since we don’t know when or how an opportunity will arise we have to keep an open mind so we can exploit it when it does.
The 2024 election was our last scheduled opportunity to defeat fascists. So we really should have given it everything we had while we had a chance even if it was a long shot. We don’t know when we will get another now. It might be in 2026 and 2028 with elections. Or it might be in 2029, in a completely hypothetical scenario, where after winning a third term Trump dies of old age and infighting creates an opportunity for rebellion. We’ve gone from having a regularly scheduled opportunity to try to make things better to who knows when we get another. And we still have to do all the same work we had to do before, but it will be harder because now we have to defeat a fascist regime first.
Stopping the bomb from going off is wishful thinking, but I agree, that’s why I said 'boom tomorrow is definitely better than boom today`.
It’s not wishful thinking. It was possible, but hard, to make a course correction, but we failed to even give ourselves the time to do it.
The bomb, for the record, is capitalism, and it’s going off all the time but the blast radius has started growing sharply of late. The only even theoretical way to stop it from encompassing everyone is to dismantle it and replace it with something else, but that requires a level of political will that we’ll not see until even the oligarchs are feeling it. So we’re absolutely going to get an earth-shattering kaboom, no getting around that, it’s just a question of what we build in the smoking crater.
The answer was to replace capitalism, an extractive economic institution, with socialism, an inclusive economic institution. And yes, it would have taken a lot of political will, which is why I argue it would have been hard, but not impossible. I’ve been arguing this with several users in parallel. If you want to see my argument in full it’s in my comment history.
What’s important is, now that the bomb has gone off and we have fascism, we still need to replace capitalism with socialism. But in addition we also have to defeat a fascist dictatorship on top of that. So now it’s even harder.
That was in fact my point, yes, that capitalism needed to be replaced with something that isn’t blowing up on the regular. But that’s not very likely to happen until it blows all the way up and the ‘silent majority’ who are content and propagandized into inactivity discover just how fucked they are and are forced to wake up.
No amount of hardship or things getting worse will make people wake up. People will unironically think they aren’t working enough if they’re before retirement age and if they’re after retirement age they will say something like ‘I did everything right, but I have no money’. They have an existing framework to view their material conditions thanks to neoliberalism.
This must be corrected if we want people to adopt socialist and progressive ideas. We have to educate people if we want to make things better. There is no way around it. Now we have to educate people during a fascist dictatorship.
Oh I know it’ll take a lot more than just circumstances, but the circumstances have to be right for most of them to even be interested in getting educated on the subject.