THere is no constitutional avenue for a regime change in the White House until 2028. The 2024 election was critical election for the US. It was our last chance to right the ship, and the Democratic Party failed on that mission. It had been a habit of the party to call every election a "critical election" in the past couple of decades, which became a wallpaper claim after a while. Guess what though? 2024 was that critical election that the party had been warning about and it happened.
I understand the initial shock where the party leadership decided to keep going like this was just another "critical election" that they had been talking about such that they could just mumble and grumble a little, but then everything would go on as before and the wheels keep turning until the next general election which they would most certainly declare another "most critical election of our lifetime", hoping that they would perhaps win that one.
Sorry folks. That was it. And all the supposed checks and balances that the system supposedly relied on was simply a mirage. It turned on a gentlemen's agreement, which in turn, depends on gentlemen being in charge, not barbarians.
The mechanisms to take down a dangerous government that strays from the basic tenets of democracy or is becoming increasingly apocalyptic and destructive are extremely weak. They are virtually non-existent. How do you know they are virtually non-existent? Not a single president has been removed from office due to impeachment. The only thing we have to keep faith in is the hypothetical that if Nixon had been impeached, he probably would have been removed. But it didn't happen. And with that, perhaps our only good shot at creating a precedence.
Impeachment, by the way, turns on the nebulous concepts of "high crimes and misdemeanors". Pursuing a disastrous policy is not an impeachable offense. Which brings us back to that work around of imprisoning Al Capone based on tax evasion, which is a sign of systemic failure, not success. Getting Trump for the crimes of self-dealing or Epstein files pretty much is an admission that there is no political avenue for regime change for political reasons.
The slowness of the system to respond to bad policies (wait for the next election in 4 years) would be acceptable in a slow moving world but not so in contemporary world where 4 years is an eternity as far as the implementation of bad policies and the destruction those policies can cause.
So my take on all this is rather pessimistic by the usual American political standards: We are living through a systemic failure. The 250 year experiment is finally returning its results and the picture is not a democratically sound system. What we have is a system that is highly successful in separating the people from their representatives and the governed from the government. The ruling class can pretty much live in their own reality while the masses can only watch them go through the same motions again and again with growing frustration and a sense of helplessness.
One of the major roots of the problem we're facing is the chasm between what the people want and what the people get. There is no effective feedback loop between the two. And the Democratic Party is as much part of the problem as is the Republican Party in terms of their malicious agency, but the foundations of the problem go straight back to the structures in place. Well-intentioned and well-crafted for its 18th century roots, no longer workable in the 21st century.
If I care about anything at this point politically, I want more Americans to be aware of this fundamental failure and start paying attention not only to the players on the field, but also to the rules of the game.