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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.

This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.

I had to laugh when I read a title on the Washington Post today, "President Trump faced a wall of opposition from Senate G.O.P. lawmakers, in part over his plan to create a $1.8 billion fund to reward his allies", with of all people Susan Collins in the header image. Lol, I'm sure she'll release a statement saying how she's "very concerned" and end up doing nothing anyway.

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> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles.

I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this government was voted in, partly because of a toxic and polarised culture that sees compromise and consensus as weaknesses (and gerrymandering, and the electoral college, and disenfranchisement, fair enough), but also partly because a lot of people did not bother showing up. Republicans have had a grassroots strategy for decades, where they seized everything they could get, even very modest positions. That’s how they progressively ended up redrawing maps and steering politics at the state or county level. You need a long term plan and a good strategy to counter this. So don’t give up (I beg you, from the other side of the Atlantic). Even if things are bad now, they can get better tomorrow.

I think you would most certainly NOT prefer any Constitution, nor especially any Bill of Rights, that was rewritten by today's version of "We the People".

I don't think they can get rid of the constitution. It would require a near total control of all judges right now and I don't think they have that.

What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.

Happened before, for example in Germany. Not sure "fascinating" is the word I'd choose.

Godwin's law.

> At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience.

Which experiences? The US constitution was written with approximately 2,500 years of experience in democracies and the last 250 years has been mostly repeats of things that have happened before. It isn't obvious that anything has happened that the US constitution writers were unaware of. There have been a few innovations in public choice theory but it nothing leaps to mind as something so fundamental it would be part of the constitution.

how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles

This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this.

We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so.

We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.

It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.

Social media is allowing both views and the against is winning. But the mainstream media is under the thumb of fcc and too afraid to challenge so they keep neutral (or like Fox is a cheerleading) and that's where the disinformation is coming from.

No? In what world is there a government agency in the USA that prosecutes anti-Trump journalists? That's most of them, ffs. This is just conspiratorial bullshit not at all based in reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_attacks_on_journali...

You forgot the /s.

Or did you forget all the journalists kicked out of the Pentagon, the exclusion of the associated press over their use of the internationally recognized name for the Gulf of Mexico, the threatened cancellation of FCC licenses of ABC and CBS regarding their reporting, etc.

Proper information is readily available, and everyone on social media has been constantly exhorted to avoid scams.

At this point if people are being taken in by the really obvious and bald lies, the problem isn't a lack of information. They're just plain stupid.

Yes there are a lot of stupid people and they have been hacked by billionaires that can trick them a million different ways. Thats the entire issue!! Stupid people can’t defend themselves from this because they don’t realize how stupid they are.

When you have a bell curve of education and intelligence, around a third of the population will always believe simple lies based on vibes and outrage, and will vote accordingly.

If your media system profits directly from lies and outrage, and there's a class which specifically weaponises lies and outrage for self-servingly cynical ends, the outcome is predictably suicidal.

The people are fairly irrelevant these days. We just saw this week how Israel and billionaires can just spam AI slop adverts to replace a popular candidate with a complete no one.

Boomers will see the ai generated video and believe it immediately.

Nobody voted for this. People voted for the proclaimed plans , but that turned out to be lies and deception solely for getting the votes.

Tons of people voted for this.

It's like people forget Trump had an entire first term and a movement all over social media espousing their authoritarian ideals and accelerationist goals.

January 6th happened during his first term and half the country cheered. He had supporters in the government talking about a coup back then.

They literally published their plans in an itinerary. It had bullet points and everything.

And to this day people still support him. That's how you know the "nobody voted for this" line is just hogwash. A third of the country still supports everything he's doing, and they would vote for him again if they could.

No one who voted for Trump this time gets to plead ignorance. Complicity or stupidity, those are the options.

Absolutely.

Anyone who still voted for Trump is tacitly in support of the Jan 6th rioters and therefore, essentially, no rule of law, no Constitution, just "what this guy says, goes".

And a majority of voters choose that. That's scary for the upper 50% of the bell curve.

It's also scary for pretty much any other country because whilst the US has its own cultural bias, there's something deeply humanly emotive that's being tapped, and can therefore be tapped in many, many other democratic countries.

"This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this."

In many ways the current evils of the US are abusing the ways our government is least democratic.

The way the Senate and the electoral college weakens the power of some votes, the checks of Congress on the executive branch, and the appointment system of the Supreme Court all relied on political norms to confer stability. Those norms are being broken in favor of raw political power which is undermining the checks & balances fundamental to our country.

In few other stable democracies would such slim electoral victories result in such sweeping power. Our nation has relied on norms and civility for its stability as much as law, and discarding those makes our democracy substantially worse.

Trump received 49.8% of the vote, 1.5% more than Harris, and his power and ability to engage in corruption is virtually unchecked. In other countries with stronger democratic systems he would be forced to compromise to attain a stronger majority.

"landslide"

According to Alex Karp, who leads a data analysis company. And therefore it should be impossible to trust any data analysis coming from said company.

While I do agree this is an "us" problem, let's not pretend that the populace at large comes to their conclusions in a vacuum. Leadership is actually still a thing, even in a democracy, and I'm just dismayed at the utter spinelessness of so many in the leadership class, who are happy to indulge the masses in their fantasies and lies.

There was a recent video that made the rounds where judicial nominees were testifying in the Senate and they were all asked "Who won the 2020 election?" These people are not complete idiots - they know who won the election. They all gave the same bullshit "well, Biden was certified as the President elect" non-answer simply because they knew that if they told the truth they would face Trump's wrath. Profiles in Total Cowardice, every last one.

And the ‘wall of opposition’ was ‘we won’t vote right now because if we do we might vote to stop this!’.

But we need to believe that the USA can come back. The spoils system was eliminated once before. Slavery was eliminated. The USA ‘came back’ from Jim Crow and segregation. From Japanese internment. From the Gilded Age. From the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. From a civil war. Our modern mistake was assuming that anything is ever truly eliminated without constant effort.

I would argue we had a few good years of Reconstruction before President Johnson put an end to it and it took a century for this country to partially rectify this with a few constitutional amendments and Supreme Court decisions(that were cursed by not having time limits) and those changes have been chipped away again so we are close to returning to a pre Civil Rights era federal government similar to Woodrow Wilson except the guys who would be in the KKK are now federal law enforcement in Homeland Security and the Justice Department is trying to equate anti fascism with terrorism. I would agree that democracy requires a constant fight against but my impression is our education system/news media presents government as done deal and “we have democracy and we don’t have to worry about it” and most Americans are too complacent and politically detached - A third of Americans not voting during presidential elections.

> it really feels like I'm grieving a death.

Jimmy Carter's funeral a few days before Trump was inaugurated really felt like the funeral for America. The moral gulf between Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump is just so vast. To imagine that the US elected someone with the integrity of Jimmy Carter in 1976... and then elected someone who is as morally bankrupt as Trump is in 2024.

Indeed. Well said. I doubt we'll ever see the likes of a Carter again in the Whitehouse.

But why was Carter elected? Partly it was disgust at Watergate. Could we see someone of integrity elected as a result of a backlash of disgust at Trump? Yes, we could.

Will the Democrats run such a person? I don't have much hope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidentia...

Carter won basically because Ford pardoned Nixon.

Carter was basically the prototypical example of a politician whose good intentions eclipsed their ability to govern. You need to be a little bit of a high functioning sociopath to be an effective leader. The key is properly controlling those high functioning sociopaths by training them that doing good things is in their best interests.

Say what you will about Carter, he kept the Strait of Hormuz open through his strength. He governed well. It was inflation that did him in, not his governance.

Trump maganed to hand the Stair of Hormuz over to Iran, and instigate massive inflation personally. The US is laughed at or ignored or treated as a problem on the world stage now, rather than being the leader.

However, the more sociopathic in society see Trump as strong, for some weird reason, and Carter as weak, for some weird reason. Very strange.

> It was inflation that did him in, not his governance

And that was mostly hanging around from earlier oil shocks and the spending on Vietnam. He did the right thing by choosing Paul Volker to be Fed chair. In Carter's interview of Volker he asked what he would do to bring down inflation. Volker replied that he would significantly raise interest rates. Volker figured that he didn't get the job based on this honest response and was surprised when Carter picked him.

I don't think the people who see trump as strong are sociopaths. They are people who desperately need the structure of heirarchy. They are as comfortable at the bottom as they would be at the top, so long as there is someone below them. The heirarchy is only valid so long as the people above them are good and strong and the people beneath them are contemptible and weak. The very highest member of the heirarchy being weak throws the whole thing into doubt, and must be avoided at all costs. The leader is strong and wise and we must ensure that everyone else thinks so.

The sociopaths (at least the high functioning ones) are simply doing what they can to climb the ladder.

The primary system means that nobody with any principles is left in the Republican Party, unfortunately.

But not all is lost. Many are very eager for the reins of power to come back and for laws to be enforced. Sure, the Trump regime may tell itself that it's immune from tax audits ever again, but that's not legal and as soon as the force of law is back there are many eager attorneys with high principles that will be hired back into the DoJ and enforce the law.

We saw this after Nixon's lawlessness too. Those who abetted Nixon in breaking the law were disbarred.

Prosecutions will come. Trumps's key mistake is thinking that his popularity doesn't matter anymore. It does. It means that people with morals and ethics can legally gain power and legally enforce the law.

If Trump was at 60% popularity, I would be singing a different tune. But at 35% popularity and 60% unfavorable, there is appetite left in our democracy to remain a democracy and to go after the crooks. Even if a good 30% of that unfavorable opinion is just about people's own pocketbooks rather than the principles of law and democracy, that's enough for those who care to actually enforce law.

Be concerned, but be ready tk supppprt those who will correct the course of our ship.

I wonder, is there an appetite left to remain a democracy, or more like an appetite for an autocrat who pays a little more attention to the façade and doesn't go out of his way to offend even his most loyal followers?

Right now, there is a lot of support for candidates who do go out of their way to offend even their most loyal followers. They like the offense, even if it occasionally hurts their own feelings, because it hurts other people more.

Politicians have long understood that it's easier to get elected by being fearful of their opponents than with your own merits. We've just taken the next logical step: actively attacking them, in words and with restrictive actions. It hasn't yet proceeded to violence, for the most part, but that's only because people still haven't gotten bored with this level of harassment.

I wish I could share your optimism. But just because a voter has an unfavorable opinion, it doesn't mean that they won't vote for them. Many will choose "the lesser of two evils", and the current administration has devoted a lot of effort to convincing supporters that their opponents are even worse.

The President is not in fact on the ballot this year, and quite a few will say "I don't like the President, but I like the local Republican candidate more than the local Democratic candidate". Except that the President should be on the ballot: the only serious question facing Congress is whether they will support his policies or take measures to oppose them. That's going to happen exclusively along party lines. Nothing else that either candidate promises actually matters.

It's all made worse by efforts to put a thumb on the scale. That, above all else, makes this feel like the last chance we'll have to fix this. I'm going to hold out hope that we'll take it.

Sometimes you have to die to get back stronger. Ask the chinese.

I'm not sure that works for democracy. Autocracy is basically the default human state. All it takes to build it back up is a sufficiently powerful faction. Democracy is relatively fragile by comparison and requires more specific initial conditions - I would make the argument that democracies are the lower entropy condition.

Ask the Germans what happens when a democracy degenerates.

That's a good example. The west forced reconstruction of German democracy. If the Nazi state had been less aggressive it might have still been around today as a North Korea style autocratic state.

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