If there are still history books in the future... what will they think of all this?
It turns out if you can spend decades saying things unchallenged people believe it.
People bring this up regularly, but I don't think it's that relevant. Studies regularly show that campaign contributions actually have very low influence on elections.
Trump notably had much smaller campaign budgets than his opponents in both winning elections, not even including the massive amounts of brazen fraud he used to pay himself with the money.
Fundamentally, it's presidential democracy that is flawed. We have a very powerful high office, and if enough people want to willing vote in a corrupt president, there's really not many checks against the damage that they can do.
The problem with money in politics is not that money guarantees a win, but that the presence of large donations distorts the entire incentive structure of campaigning and governing: Courting big donations means spending time with big donors (who expect access in exchange for their money) and when it comes time to govern, studies have shown that campaign contributions and lobbying are dramatically more influential to what gets proposed and passed than the preferences of the general public.
Focusing on the problems with presidential campaigns re: money in politics is missing the forest for the trees: All politicians have limited time to spend between campaigning and governing, and if they're constantly raising money the governing gets delegated to lobbyists.
(This is why people are always so shocked when politicians who don't accept corporate PAC contributions have drastically different priorities than those who do. Of course they do! They don't have to spend all their time hanging out with corporate lobbyists!)
(Also, there has been the opposite trend, which is that more money than ever comes from private donations from billionaires and other wealth.)
Why do people do this though? Maybe it's inevitable, but I think there was a lot of pent up frustration with the government that led a lot of people to just say "fuck it". Not really excusing it (especially for his second term), but I feel like we're reaping years and years of a dysfunctional and ineffectual congress. Not that that's an especially easy problem to solve either.
I think this also explains a lot of the frustration with SCOTUS. In-theory, SCOTUS is supposed to just interpret and flesh out the policies decided on by congress. In practice, congress doesn't really do anything, and people started depending on SCOTUS's ability and willingness to make far-reaching and impactful decisions. Now a more conservative SCOTUS isn't doing that.
Countries that follow the presidential model regularly succumb to strong man type leaders. Ironically, in the modern era when the US had a hand in helping other countries establish their governments, we specifically helped them establish parliaments.
But yeah, it prevents an ineffective legislature from leading to strong-men, which does seem nice. :)
At the risk of my analogy making something serious sound like a game, I'd like to see another team have a chance at bat.
In congress this means a complete inability to compromise, resulting in the current stalemate. In the presidency, you end up with someone who thinks of his opponents as criminals deserving prosecution.
> Trump notably had much smaller campaign budgets than his opponents in both winning elections
I'm not sure where you're getting this information.
> Fundamentally, it's presidential democracy that is flawed.
No disagreement
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240633007_Measuring...
TL;DR: Spending might matter up to a certain point, but becomes very inefficient. It's also more effective for challenges than incumbents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_in_the_2024_United...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_in_the_2020_United...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
b. July 4, 1776, d. January 20, 2024. It was good while it lasted.
Everybody loves a good off-by-one error.
Slavery was actually bad though and it's fascinating because one reads about all these deeply moral Americans who cared strongly about others, often along Christian lines, and you realise how deeply far the US has fallen culturally since doing something as intrinsically good as abolishing slavery. I mean can anyone imagine American society doing something as deeply good as abolishing slavery? The same people who elected Trump twice? I don't think so.
There's a mechanism deep inside the fundamentals of strategic nuclear weapons that has permanent and profound effects on the society and nation holding them[2]. One obvious thing that is easy to perceive even from our own vantage point: nuclear powers suffer from an always-expanding executive branch. Nuclear weapons make the Westphalian state system structurally obsolete . . but we have no replacement, so we're left with zombies. The nuclear states inevitably evolve into these sort of executive-branch security zombies, able to fixate on nothing but destruction.
I'm not going to pretend I have the answers here, but, well, we need to stick around for the future histories, don't we?
[1] The Soviet system having the disadvantage of being beaten the hell up by the great wars of the 20th century. You don't lose 2/3rd of your working age men and just go back to the mines like normal.
[2] Vaclav Smil has written extensively on energy transitions, and the quantitative point is incontrovertible: the jump from chemical to nuclear energy release is on the order of a million-fold, comparable in magnitude to the jump from metabolic to combustion energy. When genus Homo tamed fire, it forced speciation. We would be fools to expect less from the power of the atom.
One only has to look at the stock market - some with insider knowledge are pocketing away a lot of profit right now.
A few people thinking they are better than the rest meet the same fate everyone in the history of humanity met if they step on enough toes.
The people enabled Hitler to do Hitler things. The people enabled Trump to do Trump things.
It was all laid out in plain sight what Hitler wanted before he got the power from the people to do so. He was largely supported by the people who enjoyed living their lives right next to the concentration camps.
It was all laid out in plain sight what Trump wanted before he got the power from the people to do so. He was largely supported by the people who enjoyed living their lives right next to the deportation camps.
This just feels important, special, and new to us because it’s the first time for most people dealing with an insane man in power, as our lifespan as humans is rather short.
There are always three options for any citizen that goes through these kinds of historic repeats.
You can resist. You will most likely die doing so without accomplishing your goals as there is no more secrecy even offline with everything leaving a digital footprint and 24/7 surveillance with AI support. They will end your bloodline in retaliation, so resisting means being okay with having everyone you love murdered by the group of people who want to profit, likely working in a government position.
You can profit. Swim along and use the opportunity to gain generational wealth by supporting the goals of the insane man in power, or using the opportunities the cruelty he creates allows.
Dozens of families got rich selling the gold from the teeth of Jews who were murdered. There is a value chain in the deportation industry Trump is building. You really think people get deported with all their belongings and ICE agents not cashing in robbing people blank and then still deporting them?
Or you can decide to look the other way. You know exactly what happens, but neither want to risk your life and that of the people you love by resisting, nor do you want to profit from the cruelty value chain.
Either way, just like every German in 1933 and beyond that was of voting age, every us citizen is part of one of the three groups, and if you’re not resisting or profiting, you are no less responsible for what happens to your neighbours and fellow citizens than the people who profit from it.
So the only universal truth is, humans are evil, miserable creatures that do evil and miserable things. You decide for yourself where your place is in all this and then deal with the consequences of your actions.
Nobody is coming to save you. There is no "right" decision. You only have one life and the freedom to decide what to do with it.
Everyone has to figure this out for himself. That’s the downside of having free will.