I highly doubt the left will do anything uncivil. How can they win back the country? Is it too late?
It’s over.
“Civil” centre ground/moderate politics are dying across the western world and the far-right are making big gains.
Messages of unity and other kumbaya shit be damned, give me some uncivil and nasty leftist politics to give the fascists a taste of their own vitriol.
So the way it looks now, Trump has won the presidency, and his allies will have the senate and house of representatives, and they already had the supreme court. The three branches of government will not be working as checks on each other’s power, unless we get very lucky and the various factions that make up the GOP split. This is obviously very, very bad, but there are still some checks on presidential power.
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Trump’s last term was a clusterfuck. Things may just be so disorganized that he struggles to actually get what he wants done.
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The states have limited power to defy the feds. While case law does state that federal law supercedes state law, that doesn’t mean all States will immediately cooperate wholeheartedly. Obviously a court battle will eventually get to the supreme court, but that takes time and requires a single panel of judges to beat multiple states into line on each new policy.
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Governments do have a small amount of caution when it comes to their people. One thing the crazy conservatives had right this whole time was that fundamentally, nobody was ever going to come for their guns because nobody wants to force a confrontation with a bunch of armed lunatics. In the same way, they’ll probably try to avoid massive riots and general strikes simply because it isn’t worth the fight to whoever is responsible.
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Citizens can resist. Go to protests, donate to political advocacy organizations (the ACLU will have its work cut out for it), and for Christ’s sake, go vote! Show up every year, just not every 4 years. Without the cooperation of congress, his power would be significantly curtailed.
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If nothing else, terms are limited. In 2 years we can swing congress. He isn’t going to be able to pass a constitutional amendment to do what he likes before that. If we swing congress in two years, it will slow him down significantly, and then we can replace him in 2028. Hopefully people will actually keep showing up long enough after that to reverse all the damage he’s likely to do in the next 4 years.
The states have limited power to defy the feds.
Case in point: legalized marijuana. That said, my fear in regards to states defying laws is:
- Targeted attacks by MAGA terrorists, particularly regarding anything LGBTQ+ or reproductive healthcare related.
- The fed withholding federal funds to punish states that don’t fall in line.
The former is particularly concerning as police and the national guard are predominately right-wing. My state passed the SAFE-T Act to address abuses in the police/justice system. Naturally, various police departments weren’t happy about this, and through obtuse interpretation of the act they’ll claim they can’t legally do vital parts of their job – something I’ve seen multiple times first hand. Refusing to do their job competently in response to MAGA terrorism isn’t hard to imagine.
The later gets tricky. Most of the states that would push back against unjust federal laws are also states that pay more in federal taxes than they receive in aid. The “obvious” solution withhold tax dollars going to the fed to make up the difference … which would be next to impossible in practice. Even if states mange to do it they’d be playing into Republican hands by defunding essential federal services.
What do you mean? Trump won decisively. Electoral, popular, in the senate, etc…
You’re really asking, “how does a minority continue to exist in the face of a fascist majority?”
The answer is, generally, they don’t.
I think that is an oversimplification. He won the popular vote, but that’s the majority of voters, not the majority of people, right? So we cannot accurately say that the majority is fascist. We can only say that the voting majority is fascist.
And then we need to look at who was conned, and how. Of course people who got conned need to work harder to avoid that in the future. We all agree on that. At the same time, the con artists and the people who enable the con, we also need to identify them and figure out what’s making them successful. If we talk about major newspapers and TV networks failing to cover how bad Trump actually was, or putting Harris on unrealistic pedestal, newspaper owners refusing to allow newspaper editors to endorse a candidate, the way Fox News preys on people who grew up trusting TV news and now have only watched Fox for the last two decades, open lies about who’s eating cats and dogs, a DNC that pushes centrist candidates even after 2016 when the weakness was exposed, and it’s clear that many left-wing voters are wildly unhappy, those are all things that smaller groups have done to help create the situation that we saw yesterday. And that’s just a short list.
So what I hope we can do, is I hope we can avoid saying something trite like, this is what the American people wanted, full stop. If you want to make that a conversation starter, go for it. But it shouldn’t be a dismissive conversation ender, because it ignores what actually happened and What will continue to happen in the future.
He won the popular vote, but that’s the majority of voters, not the majority of people, right?
Right, the rest are just so lazy and consumed by apathy that they could not be bothered to vote when THESE were the stakes. I think we can confidently rule them out for any advocacy for our freedom.
Realistically? It’s too late.
We now have an ultra-conservative SC for the rest of our lives. The Republican party openly stated and ran on making fundamental changes to our government if they won the House/Senate/Presidency and to “defeat the enemy within”.
It doesn’t even really matter if the suffering that is coming shocks our society into rebounding in 4 years. The locked in SC and fundamental changes to our government will have already been set in place. Government departments will be run by appointees with absolutely no experience. Entire departments could be re-staffed with partisan political appointees if we are to believe the words of some of the people Trump promised to appoint. We have been placed squarely on the path to decline. That decline won’t happen overnight, but in our lifetimes it will become undeniable. We will probably barely recognize this country by the end of our lives.
This election determined the political order we will live under for the rest of our lives.
Buy a gun. Try to find happiness within your immediate sphere. And stay safe, if you can. Very, very few people will come out on top in the scenario we now find ourselves in. Give it a few years and you’ll see. They have total control now, so there’s no one else to blame for the decline that’s essentially guaranteed to become apparent in the near future. But I’m sure if they do fail, immigrants will be at the top of the blame list.
It was a worthy experiment while it lasted.
