Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The short tl;dr answer is, we don't. For me, it's something I contended with around 2003-2004 when my father stood with most staunch Republicans in advocating for extrajudicial torture of POWs and eventually of civilians including Americans who were mistaken for terrorist agents.
On the other hand, the same event drove me to study moral philosophy so I could explain at length why torture was wrong; he didn't care, which was the gaze into the abyss moment. I saw who my dad was in the dark.
Cut to 2024, and even if Harris wins (and any coup d'etat attempts are put down) we are a long, long way from the scare being over. This has been reviewed at length by CIA and we've heard from experts on civil wars, how they erupt and historically what must happen to prevent social unrest from turning violent to the degree that it overwhelms responders.
The universal panacea is the restoration of power to the people. So that's not to say we can merely preserve elections in the US. Our election system is corrupt and relies on FPTP voting models (one person, one vote) which means third parties cannot be competitive. It also means the two principal parties don't have to be very public-serving to stay in power.
This means Harris not only needs a cooperative Congress (and cooperative state populations) but also the impetus to operate against the interests of her party for the good of the public, and we all struggle to discard the One Ring. She'll also have pressure from establishment politicians, as well as progressives who are not progressive enough to go the distance and let power be diffused to a wider body of persons and interests.
What we can expect are some shorter-term measures, maybe some social safety nets, some relief for people caught in the debt crisis or homeless crisis, even some labor reform so that most of us aren't one crisis away from homelessness and a ruined life. But this will kick the can down the line, and allow the Republican party (whose only trick now is election subversion and procedural coup d'etat when not violent coup d'etat) to persist as it is (and has been at least since Reagan).
Election reform would force the Republican party to reconsider its far-right-wing position and actually offer a platform worth voting for. But so long as we don't get that, they still have viable pathways to seizing power.
All this said, some people will come to their senses as the precarity lets up. Some people will realize they can afford to be less afraid, and that a public-serving society is something worth fighting for. But that is a long, and personal process for each of them, and usually they're pretty repentant when they realize what they had become.