No Stupid Questions

It has impeachment. The list of reasons for impeachment are (quite possibly intentionally) vague. But it has to be done through Congress.

We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.

Joseph Goebbels

Couldn't keep a:

34 count felon

Child rapist

Fraudster

Tax dodger

Draft dodger

Grifter

Deadbeat

Wife beater

Philanderer

Classified documents thief

Obstructionist

Out of office... so why would they be able to keep a Nazi out?

The Constitution assumes the people through the ballot box or through protest would clean up any issues like that

The problem is he won the election.

The vote is the final check and balance.

49% of Voters are either sympatico or stupid.

The US government is not (and has never been) against fascism for ideological reasons. Fascism and American-style democracy go hand in hand quite well. Our government fought a war against fascists because they disrupted the global trade status quo and threatened US economic prosperity and that of our primary trade partners.

We really only have the Second Amendment. I am now on a list.

I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile

Ignore the political system and look at the economic system. The US is capitalist and as it turns out- capitalism is not mutually exclusive with fascism.

If a human being lives long enough, he will eventually develop cancer. It's simply a natural physical consequence of repeated cell division. Eventually there's some mutation that leads to a chain reaction. The cancer spreads enough and there's no going back. Capitalism, similarly, will always inevitably embrace fascism.

Marx got it wrong. He believed that the workers, realizing their position as class consciousness increases, would inevitably revolt against the power structure. The reality is more depressing.

Capitalism has cycles of crisis. Sometimes the economy is doing good which leaves the workers content. Sometimes the economy is doing bad. The problem is when the economy is doing bad coincides with some other set of crisis, the combination of events radicalizes the workers. This part Marx predicted. However he was mistaken about human nature.

Really, our problem started back in 2008. The global economy never fully recovered. Interest rates were kept low in a desperate attempt to increase spending to keep the boat from tipping. Then COVID pumped up inflation to historic levels- supply chain shortages wrecked chaos. After that, the Russian invasion of Ukraine pushed up inflation even higher. Prices go up but wages lag behind.

Workers, naturally, become more radicalized- as Marx predicted. The issue is Marx was too optimistic about human nature. Humans as a whole are fearful herd animals. They need a shepherd to point somewhere. And eventually, inevitably, some megalomaniac with a vision will take advantage of a vulnerable system and point somewhere. In the 1930s it was to the Jews and the communists. Today, it's the illegals and "wokeism".

All this to say that this shouldn't be surprising. Left wing voices have been warning about this for a long time.

Hitler didn't take power democratically. Neither did Mussolini or Franco. They each found cracks in how liberal democracy worked in their respective countries. Those cracks were usually the places where the system was decidedly undemocratic, which in those three cases, was generally something where the old nobles still had some power and they lined up behind fascists to save them from leftists.

America never had nobles, but it does have plenty of cracks in its liberal democracy to be exploited by fascists.

So to answer your question simply, no, there are no instruments to fix this. Congress can potentially either reign Trump in with legislation, or even impeach him, but I don't expect either one to happen. If the GOP can be swept out of Congress in 2026, then we can maybe start to fix some things without resorting to extralegal methods. Even that is only a starting point.

I do know for sure that we can't go back to the old trajectory as if Trump was just an outlier.

Assuming America is a democracy is the first mistake. killing the native population, viewing non land owners, poc and many more as lessors. Let's not forget who wrote the constitution.

America's vaunted "checks and balances" are, in the end, just smoke and mirrors to lie to the population and hide the fact that American institutions give way too much power to the president and there are no institutional controls to make the president behave.

Second amendment

a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players

Your proof of this is... what?

This is the result of ever-expanding executive power.

2A

Depends how you define "instruments". For example, there was a recent survey that we have something like 500 million, uh, instruments.

Normally, it would be the electoral system that would act as the check. But otherwise, it doesn't put any other limits based on political belief and affiliation (other than having allegiances to other political powers). If the majority wanted to elect someone who wishes to abolish the democratic election system, then that is what they will get.

That's possibly for the better. Being able to bar given political alignments or affiliation from office would either need to be so specific so as to be useless (a modern nazi typically has little directly to do with the original), or be broad enough that it'd be a dangerous thing, since it could be used in either direction.

It's funny that Germany has safeguards against nazis in power in it's constitution which was designed ~~by~~ in cooperation with the USA, France and GB, yet afaik all three don't have similar mechanics in their own constitutions because they never belived to have to deal with the next hitler themselfs.

https://sadtrombone.com/