Don't elect a geriatric compromise candidate. The current administration's excesses create a massive opportunity for a pendulum swing. It's really not that hard. Hold yourself, your neighbors, your family and your friends accountable for who they vote for. And as tempting as it is, don't give into cynicism. It will take work but change for the better is always possible, and really in America, is far less out of reach than it would often seem.
You're also up against a large population which has been brainwashed, and even if someone deprogrammed is still not intellectually capable of reasoning beyond their own immediate interests. In other words, a democracy where ignorant people can vote is ultimately doomed to look quite like what we have now.
Impossible. Democratic Party power is concentrated into a gerontocracy mostly interested in preserving their own wealth/power. Appeasement and encouragement of status quo will be the result of any Democrat victory.
Of course all this Trump shit is good precedent for them to use similar tactics to line their pockets next time.
Does everyone still believe this will be possible/happen/allowed by the current regime?
People with strong political beliefs are going to turn their head to keep their side in power rather than put someone in power that will push policies they are fundamentally against.
Blagojevich was not replaced by a Republican.
At this point presidential elections are won by getting members of the other side to stay home. So encourage young people to get out and vote if you want a Democrat. Don’t waste your breath telling someone who cares about gun rights to vote for a Democrat.
There was an AskHistorians post about the French revolution a few years ago that really stuck with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w18qt5/what_...
> Stability had hardly been a hallmark of the Revolution til that point, and really what we have seen is a revolving door of men rising to the summit of power, only to realize that once your head is above the rest it's a prime target for the guillotine. Of the early years of the Revolution, virtually any man who had been considered a leader was either dead or in exile. The King was executed in January of 1793. The Girondin, formerly indistinguishable from the 'left,' went en masse to the guillotine in October 1793. Danton & friends (dubbed by Robespierre 'the indulgents'), the literal authors of the Insurrection of August 10th which overthrew the King and declared the Republic, the 'giant of the Revolution,' had been executed in April 1794. Interspersed with these prominent deaths were hundreds of individuals who had been important players in the Revolution, whether in national or local politics, and who had now paid the price for their notoriety
In times of crisis and scarcity, the usual outcome is that anyone whose ego is big enough to think that he can lead or profit finds that they become a target for elimination. The folks who survive are the ones who focus on, well, surviving. We're headed for one of those times of crisis now, though most people don't want to admit it, and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks.
Seems like it'd be pretty easy to diversify into inflation-protected assets after taking big profits.
But I also don't see the dollar collapsing any time soon. The dollar's strength is built on the US economy, and the US economy is still one of the strongest in the world, with high productivity per person. We'll see some inflation, sure, but nothing that the rich insider traders can't hedge against.
I do not expect that there will be any real justice here. They're not gutting the average American -- they're bleeding us, extracting a small enough amount of value that they can get away with it. And we don't live in a just world.
They believe, rightly or not that they can withdraw from the world with their wealth more or less in one piece to some kind of safe zone.
sorry but this is such a coping mechanism, or doomsday talking. Neither is dollar collapsing nor US government is collapsing, as there has been no evidence whatsoever of any of that even moving towards happening, at least on any meaningfully predictable timescale (i.e. 3-5 years? while even that's rich for predictions). Anything past that is just broken clock being correct.. at some point in time.
What would it take for dollar to "collapse"? What are the exact mechanisms that would be required to start that process?
What is the evidence of US government being "toppled" with layers and layers and layers of diverse (financial, legal, military, political, social, you name it) protections in place? It's the kind of thing preppers like to dream of but it's not happpening in our lifetimes.
When things of that scale happen you see it YEARS in advance in true poverty (as in people starving), in anger (as in people getting increasingly violent) at scale, in mass mobilization of masses actually looking to topple the government. Nobody is working right now to overthrow US government, there were never any organized attempts at that, not even demonstrations of a vector that can once lead there, as in it's simply not happening (sorry you can't in all seriousness put Jan 6 there as that was shocking for US political PR, but shockingly irrelevant for any country that has gone through real upheaval). US is extraordinarily rich even in it's poor version, everyone has everything to lose and nothing meaningful to gain from any "revolution".
I believe the Constitution and related artefacts should be stored in the British Museum with other historical documents. Civic religion needs to be done away with.
And what does that new framework look like to you?
No, it is mostly just the one party.
If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective
Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.
This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.
i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.
this is pretty much how things will unfold in USA. Everything that has to happen will happen but very slowly. There is all the evidence supporting that.
Also something to keep in mind in the future: Old people have no reason to fear prison, they will die before they can get convicted.
The odds are too low of anybody getting meaningfully punished while they get to openly setup their entire family for generations using means and information not available to any normal citizen.
And while not guaranteed they are statistically more likely to suffer age related cognitive decline while still in office.
And then to compensate they should be paid more in terms of salary, even if that salary seems absurdly large it would be less than most of them gain from the insider info they use to make deals.
Take the median income, multiply it by 5-10 and thats their salary.
I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.
But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.
(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)
Elect people who will make justice a priority.
There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
FYI it may not be technically illegal it depends on all sorts of things.
If trade were made public it could be very damaging.
And realistically we don't want that. Similar with Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, better to sit on things until Trump is out of office, so there can be no pardon.
Americans have been a democracy for 200 years and have no healthcare, no public transit, a crippling drug and homeless problem, a crippling gun violence problem... The list goes on. Democracy doesn't seem to be having the desired affect there.
Why should that suddenly change? Where's this hope coming from?
At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.
That said, it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done. And even in the best case scenario, we wouldn't expect Trump himself to live long enough to face much justice.
The optimism left in me hopes that this era can serve as an enduring cautionary tale for future societies.