I mean imagine if you could impeach the president without a majority. That would be the death of democracy. Just to put things in perspective: The GOP democratically won both houses of Congress and the presidency and because of DNC incompetence also has the Supreme Court. Them being able to do whatever the fuck they want is, in a way, democracy working as intended. It’d be weirder (and much more undemocratic) if there was a way to remove a sitting president without the Supreme Court or Congress.

Worse… The House makes the impeachment charge, that’s a 50% majority vote.

THEN it goes to the Senate for conviction where you need a 2/3rds majority to remove them. 67/100.

That’s the body which can’t do anything because they’re blocked by a 60 vote super majority to over-ride a filibuster.

So you get 218 in the House, goes to the Senate, needs 60 votes to end debate and proceed with charges, then 67 votes to convict and remove.

Trump’s first impeachment got 48 and 47 votes.
His second was 57 votes.

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

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

If he had been convicted, he would have been inelligible to run in '24.

If people democratically voted to end democracy, what are we suppose to do?

If enough people in a democracy decide that they want a dictatorship instead, then there is no stopping it, because rules don’t matter at this point. The trick is to not let it get this far. Tough shit for the US, though.

Well the country didn’t previously have a legion of mouth breathing retards screaming at the top of their lungs about micro-aggressions and declaring that the nation was illegitimate. I’d also question your metrics for deciding now that he’s an openly Nazi dictator, other than parroting what you hear from other people social media accounts.

It has been under corporate dictatorship for over a century.

The ruling class was able to get along well enough up until the US Civil War, at which point the slavers decided they were willing to tear the country apart to keep on slaving. I include this because the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow and how we did things over here. Fascism started bubbling up in the early 20th century because industrialization and capitalism polluted everything and made people work awful hours and all that, and liberalism and conservatism hadn’t fixed it. There was a serious coup attempt forming in the early 30s called the Business Plot, but they went to a war hero Marine general who told them to fuck off and told the federal government about it.

At least in the US, we’re in this situation now because authoritarians have been working toward it since the 60s (the Powell Memo was written in 1971 I think) and they’ve taken advantage of how terribly the Constitution is written, along with consolidation of wealth and stoking backlash to all the civil rights movements to get people to back them. The worst part is that it’s a feedback loop: since Reagan took power, Republicans campaign on “look how bad the government is!” and make the government worse once they’re in office, which feeds their cause.

tl;dr capitalism makes living conditions terrible, people abandon liberalism and conservatism for socialism/communism/etc and fascism, liberals don’t want much to change, fascism lives or dies based on how much conservatives sell out to/ally with them. The fact that we’re doing this all again shows to me that liberalism is a dead ideology and capitalism is going to kill us if we don’t kill it first.

I mean “No man shall hold office who committed insurrection” seems like a mechanism in and of itself. Dude just can’t run/be on a ballot. We just have two branches of government bought and paid for by the insurrectionist and America’s richest and most fanatical scum who refuse to follow the law.

Only if there’s anyone left in government who will enforce the law. We couldn’t get that done with a democrat pres and a democrat DOJ, we’re not getting it done now that the maganazis control everything.

Unless those Democrats still in washington have levers they can pull that none of us know about, or some Republicans grow a conscience (insert laughing hispanic guy meme here) I have legitimate fear about what the next four years will bring.

For the first time in my life I’m typing something critical of our government and elected officials and wondering if someone is going to bash my door down for it a year from now.

It’s like the ICC and UN. They just make suggestions. Whether they are followed or effectively enforced depends on who’s in the dock.

People who say they follow the Bible are usually lying too. And anything that’s allowed to be left up to interpretation and still be called “law” is bound to be corrupted when convenient and ignored when convenient.

The funny thing is that so much of it is based on the idea that everyone involved is going to be on their best behaviour, working for the good of the country, compromising with their opponents, and so-on. And, then it all falls apart as soon as one person realizes that they get an advantage as soon as they simply ignore the norms.

Also, don’t forget that there was less than a century between the revolution and the civil war. If your brand new form of government is so poor that a significant fraction of your population thinks a civil war is preferable to resolving things through that system, your system isn’t very good.

I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm.

He didn’t, that’s just a whitewashed version we tell ourselves.

He just didn’t want the President to be viewed as a monarch or a lifetime appointment. He turned down a third term because he feared he would die in office and the public would believe that’s the norm.

The US was the first large scale modern democracy. Of course it has design flaws.

Parlamentarism, as we know it now, had only been recently established in the UK in the 17rh century.

Contemporary to US early democracy were absolutist monarchies based on aristocracy. Separation of powers envisioned by Montesquieu, Rousseau‘s social contract, were still new political ideas. The federalist papers and later US constitution were cutting edge political theory at the time.

It’s very impressive that the US has lasted so long actually and was able to adapt. The French established their first democratic republic later and were unable to create a stable state.

I mean, I think they’d have considered a civil war less than 100 years after the founding of the country to be a pretty good indication of failure.

As for the modern world, they explicitly talk about trying to design a system so that a tyrant doesn’t become president. All the supposed checks and balances that were supposed to prevent that turned out to be as effective as wet tissue paper. The founders also cared a lot about the president not being corrupt, and drafted the emoluments clause(s) to prevent that, and Trump has just completely ignored those clauses. I think they’d have been pretty upset about that, and wondering why the law of the land was just being ignored.

Had the defensive democracy been in place after the civil war, we could have banned Confederate symbolism, the Dixiecrats and the then Democrat party.

A new conservative party would probably have been created.

The problem with any government system is that it’s still operated by humans. It would have become corrupted but hopefully with a system in place to overturn the corruption.

I mean, if implemented properly, it can work.

Do you think Germany should legalize nazi salute and swasticas, because of “potential abuse” of the power that was used to ban those things? (Those things mentioned are currently illegal in Germany btw).

we just don’t know the extent of the interference and whether it changed the outcome.

We do.

There was close to zero in the polls. (Democratic and Independent poll watchers would’ve reported that, and I’m not seeing any of such reports)

The real interference was the far-right propaganda funded by unrestricted spendings thanks to Citizens United ruling.

We’ve always had interference, its just that now its getting more and more extreme, especially after Citizens United, exacerbated by modern technology (like social media that people use almost 24/7).

See, you think that doesn’t make it sound like desperate deflection after having handed the country to the nazis, but it does. I was here during the campaign, I saw how that went.

Nah, man, there is no amount of interference that justifies Trump having a fart’s chance in hell of not losing every single state in a country unwilling to hand the keys to these guys 1932-style. Beds were made, sleeping in them is to happen.

It just sucks that the rest of us are under the covers getting dutch ovened as well.

interference

If system relies on candidates not using legally allowed methods of advertisement (aka ‘propaganda’) that are deeply ingrained into every field of media and commerce, then probably there’s a problem with the system in the first place. Many popular musicians, games or products gained popularity by the same kind of ‘propaganda’ working by the same mechanics yet people were always okay with that.

Exactly my point.

That is by design. If the “majority” of the country wants the US to be Nazis, that is the direction it will go. That is how a representative democracy works. The flaw was the founders assuming retarded puppets would not be elected by even an uneducated public. But, they also didn’t plan for automatic weapons either. Well, they sort of did, they said we should be rewriting the constitution every so many years so it can evolve with the times, but we chose to enshrine and misinterpret it like a civic bible. Oops.

Then maybe they should have their own shithole country and stop taking our tax dollars.

I think the US is beyond fucked already. The fact that Bonespurs could get elected president not once but twice is a clear sign that America’s collective intelligence has dropped below Idiocracy level. A complex society can withstand a lot of stupidity as long as there are enough people who can keep the opportunists in their place, but that’s not true anymore. I’m not just talking about people who voted for him, I’m including the several million people who voted for Biden in 2020 but refused to vote for Harris in 2024. They were the safety net that decided to fold itself up and go home. We’re done.

Hold your ponies. The US is very much still a democracy, if a flawed one in many ways. The US has always been a country run by the wealthy elites, as are most countries in the world.

Buying politicians works, especially in the US, regardless of party. Democrats and Republicans are both the parties of big business and capital interests.

Besides laws around spending money for political purposes, the media landscape has revolutionized over the last 20 years. The role social media has played in Trump‘s ascendancy can’t be overstated. Trump spent less than Kamala Harris in this election and still won, because of his exceptional way to use media to his advantage.

Sometimes a voting population needs to be protected from the consequences of their vote

Who should have the power to make that decision?

Do you want a benevolent king at the top that can dissolve parliament, dismiss government, call for new elections, make parties illegal, and censor the press?

Or maybe have something like an electoral college?

Or the army coups, if things get too far?

The ultimate check on power is the people. A general strike, large scale protests, and occupation of public buildings can topple a government. Institutions from military, police, local government, government agencies, and so on value their positions and won’t go down with a sinking ship.

Your first question is pretty philosophical. All I can say, is that most representative governments place a huge emphasis on giving the people the power to write their own collective destiny.

A military takeover based on the desires of a minority of citizens would violate that principal. I don’t think any reasonable person can call it saving democracy.