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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Got to say, I expected Trump take 2 to be bad, but I am quite surprised at how _rapidly_ the US is moving towards the Russian mafia state model, and how quiet the legislature is being about it.

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The legislature that spent the last 20 years not legislating and ousting anyone who tried legislating across the aisle with Democrats? They’re mostly feckless cowards serving now. I don’t think they would actually know how to write real legislation that benefited the people and not their lobbied interests.

It’s mostly because most Americans have very little clue of what the end state and the process to get there looks like. A lot of commonalities like borderline legal or gray area business practices are often extolled as virtues here or “clever business hacks”. It takes only a few to apply them in the direction that a lot of folks are simply unfamiliar with without having lived in the Soviet bloc.

They also think they can reverse it easily. "How bad could it be in 4 years?"

We have a 28 year blueprint of how bad it can get and it starts in 1997 Russia

One thing people don’t anticipate is that the government can step in and nationalize enterprises. US hasn’t done that in a while but I’d be watching for hostile political takeovers at some point in the future. Last time it happened was with General Motors in 2008 but it’s a tool that exists and can be used in a different direction.

I’d expect the _optimistic_ case is that the US is still cleaning up the mess in the late 30s.

The pessimistic case, of course, is that it is not recognised as a mess that needs cleaning up.

I wonder if the rates of firearm ownership in this country make it different than other countries that descend into madness.

I’d say that in the top 10 US is an outlier. Let’s hope we don’t regress to the mean

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian...

If it comes to that the US may actually fall apart, so I hope we won't find out.

Yes, even more people will get killed.

The legislature are the henchmen. Why would they be anything but quiet?

The 2016 legislature, esp Senate, was still mostly the "GOP old guard" and wouldn't have put up with this. But they're either gone, or "converted" to avoid Trump's direct retribution (now even more powerful as backed by Musk's reach and dollars), which is no joke.

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