In Reply to: The entire world is beginning to learn a lesson… posted by Gainsborough on March 05, 2025 at 13:15:41
around the notion of democratic backsliding, but prior to US, that only happened in countries that were either new to the concept of democracy or were never quite there in their history. The US may be the first one of the established democracies to fall ... and as I've been saying this for a while, a lot of that has to do with how our political system is structured. Plenty of European democracies have had more success at firewalling their democracy than we've been.
The founders understood democracy as a concept but only saw half the picture, entirely because they were the early adopters. They worried about checks and balances but only focused on branches of government competing with one another for power and did not see a group of people (= parties) aligning across these institutional boundaries, so they developed no mechanism of checks and balances between parties, which is what the parliamentarian system is more adept at.
I'm going to disagree. The Republican Party can do absolutely nothing at this point. They have been captured. The party is now an effective incubator of MAGA. It will continue to be dominated by Trump and continue to consolidate power, turning elections into an exercise of rubberstamping.
The only hope, assuming we have any at this point, is an opposition party emerging as a major force that is able to shift the public narrative and move the voter base massively away from MAGA (= Republican Party). Our misfortune is that currently the party that is best positioned for that role is the Democratic Party, which is terminally dysfunctional, delusional, and pathologically afraid of taking sides, and fully devoted to not making any mistake (where inaction is the only known guarantee).
The Supreme Court will enable all that. Don't even have the slightest doubt about that.
My take is, we need to gear up for a massive reconstruction, including the constitutional order, and just hope this happens soon. THe only known endpoint to what we're going through is Trump's lifespan. We'll get a chance when he finally croaks.