this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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What is your line in the sand?

Edit: thank you all for your responses. I think it's important as an American we take your view points seriously. I think of a North Korean living inside of North Korea. They don't really know how bad it is because that is all hidden from them and they've never had anything else. As things get worse for Americans it's important to have your voices because we will become more and more isolated.

Even the guy who said, "lol." Some people need that sort of sobering reaction.

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[–] [email protected] 134 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

See, as a German, when I see a country go down the same route as the Weimar Republic after handing over the power to the Nazi party, I think it's just very obvious. Hitler took some two months to completely destroy democracy, and the US are juuust in the middle of that. History doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes, and the similarities are just remarkable.

So yeah, I guess that would be a big fat trench in the sand.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago

As a German also I agree with this statement. Ostensibly it is a democracy but in reality it's not. And yes, there is a lot of rhyming going on

[–] [email protected] 95 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

still consider

It has only two political parties, and a weird system where all votes are not equal and the actual vote majority doesn't always win.

It has frequently had multiple people from the same families running for office, and only wealthy people have a shot. Corporations get to lobby for laws in their favour.

It also spies on its own citizens, holds people indefinitely without trial, has a huge prison population, a militarized police with a high homicide rate, and is the only western nation with the death penalty.

Trump and Musk are laying bare how fragile the veneer of "democracy" really is in that country.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 2 weeks ago

A struggling democracy, in the beginning of an Orban/Hungary-like overtake of the country.

Its possible to revert, but you seem to have atleast a 1/3 of the country that would walk down a straight up facist line willingly and happily do so.

You need to fix your shit america.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 weeks ago

Line in the sand? Going after political opponents. Censoring information. Dismantling media. Abandoning rule of law. Business and government mixing too much.

USA is speed running these.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I consider it an autocratic regime with strong fascist characteristics.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Am Dutch. I have considered the US an incomplete democracy since I learned about voting in school. It’s not one person one vote, which to me is crucial for a democracy. The US right now is still a nation of laws, but democracy is sharply in decline. The voter-roll issues and Gerrymandering come to mind immediately. Not to mention the fact that guaranteed access to polls has been pulled by the courts. Which is insane to me.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Also president having so much power was clearly never democratic to begin with as we can see it all play out now.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

The power of the president did not start out like this. Congress kept giving their power to the executive for political reasons.

It happened over centuries.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Canadian here.

Before Trump? Ehhh, not really. I've always viewed the US as a place where you vote for which oligarch-backed monarch you'd want to put in absolute power for 4 years. Every 4/8 years the new incoming overlord just rips up whatever the previous one did and nothing of substance is actually achieved.

After Trump 2.0? No. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Trump is going to surrender all that power he and the GOP have accumulated. And why would he? He doesn't have to. He literally controls every branch of government that he can and ignores those that he doesn't. If the US ever has another election it will purely be for show, like China's elections. The mask is now fully off and the charade of US democracy is over as those who actually wield the power now do so openly on their sleeves.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (21 children)

Absolutely not. A two party system was barely nominally a form of democracy. Current government walks like a dictatorship and quacks like a dictatorship. They might hold a fake election one day like many of those do, but still no.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Absolutely not. When laws don't apply to the president, the jig is up. Trump clearly plans to be in power forever. Either there won't be elections or they'll be rigged.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I barely considered it a democracy as a two party system as the elites controlled it all, but now it's just even more messed up. They need to hold people accountable and not elect criminals to office.

I fear for the future of America as a country.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago

The US had always been a questionable democracy with the hyperfixation on the president and just two parties setting the agenda, but I'd argue that it's still a democracy, though it is a rapidly deteriorating one.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago

When was the US the last time a democracy?

You can vote democrats or republicans, which mostly get bankrolled by the same rich assholes. As a normal citizen of the US you have almost no influence at politics at all, because the media is controlled by rich people, the biggest internet platforms are controlled by rich people, elections are paid for by rich people, ...

The current situation is not a spontaneous, miraculous, magical result of Trump and his gang, it was years in the making by lobby groups, influential/rich/powerful people and neo liberal brainwashing of the masses.

Same holds true for most other western so called democracies.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago

I never considered it a democracy. It's one-party system with two parties, what can be democratic about it? Smoke and mirrors.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago

Nope, it's an oligarchy pretending it's a democracy.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago

Anyone who is eligible to vote, and chooses not to, implicitly throws their support behind whoever wins.

On 2024-11-05, ⅔ of US citizens who were eligible to vote told the rest of the world they don’t want to be taken seriously for at least 2 years.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

To me it never really was. If you look into how they do voting here, its insane, really.

US citizens always loved to make these "we'll bomb some democracy in to you" but they never brought democracy either. I think it's fair to say that no other country started asa y dictatorships as the US has

Add to that;

Bush lost the election and became president anyway.

Trump has heen successfully lying his way through the past four years (and well, yeah the 4 years before that too) instigated an insurrection and was never held accountable

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I consider it a faux democracy. It still has the semblance of one, with people voting, believing they matter and that they have actual free speech, but the masses are being, increasingly less subtly, controlled by media corporations and rendered incapable of critical, independent thinking by an ever decreasing quality of education.

Don't be fooled though! This isn't happening in the US alone. It is widespread all over the globe. The US is simply doing it in a smarter, more cunning way, while leading the wealthy 1% in other countries by example.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Not at all, you are just an autocracy now but don't fully realise it, and as the other commentator had said, not even really a good democracy in the loosest of terms before this entire mess going on ATM!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The amount of voter suppression, the broken FPTP system and mass media influence over the US electoral system, means that for all intents and purposes, the USA federal election is just picking your favourite of the two viable owning-class-endorsed candidates. "The people" never had a realistic chance of representation or empowerment. This is not a new critique, it's been discussed for at least a century and a half.

There is simply no real value in calling the USA a democracy at any point during our lifetimes, regardless of whether you are allowed to vote or even write-in candidates, regardless of the two-party system, because the power imbalance between the working class and the owning class surrounding that vote makes it as much a sham election as Russia's sham elections. But even compared to other (until recently) close allies, the US implementation of federal voting has long been an absolute circus.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Not since I saw this graph:

From this paper:

https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc/page/n7/mode/1up

This was published in 2014, back when Obama was in office.

The institutions are completely captured. Yes, even the ones you thought were on your side all this time.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

No and it hasn't been for a long time. As long as you can buy influence via lobbying then the playing field is not level.

The difference this time is they are not trying to hide it anymore

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago

Not for quite some time now. Not since I learned about the electoral college.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If a presidential candidate can lose an election and still become president, it's not a democracy.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

No but this isn't recent. My line in the sand was Russian interference in the 2016 US election that came to light in 2018.

*United States Democracy Index

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago

I'm inside the US, and the federal government is most certainly no longer a democracy. It still has all the trappings, but corruption will ensure that the will of the people is secondary to whatever those in power want - even more than has been the case in the past. Locally, democracy is still practiced, in places like blue states.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

How can you be a democracy if you have only two political parties?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago

The answer depends of the reference point. I was born in Russia (I'm living abroad from 2022) and compared to the putin's dictatorship US is a democracy. You guys still have a freedom of speech, not fake opposition to Trump and independent courts. From the other side, most of the countries are democracies if compared to Russia..

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago

It was never a democracy.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

Absolutely not. A country where two parties are the only two viable electoral options, is absolutely not a democracy. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop my membership for the PSL.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

One interesting thing I haven't read here yet (haven't read all the comments though) is religion. Sure, officially there's separation of church and state, but Christianity is everywhere in your country, including government. The amount of times I've heard "God bless the United States" being said is ridiculous. To me, that's undemocratic and I would feel very uncomfortable with that as an atheist.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

First off, I'm an American. Born a stone's throw from the location of one of the critical events in the history of the American revolution.

To answer the question, no. Leaving aside the whole Republic versus democracy argument, my point of realization was when one party seized upon a minor technical issue and disenfranchised countless voters via lawsuit, sufficient to allow the race to be called in their favor.

I'm sure there are many readers who believe I'm talking about 2016. For those readers, your keyword search is "hanging Chad".

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Nope Trump proved yet again the US is a Russian puppet today earlier in the week Ukraine destroyed a huge Russian Oil plant. Now a few days later Trump is giving them a Ceasefire against energy targets which Putin supposedly broke just a mere 3 hours later.

If anything this proves two things Ukraine really hurt them with that attack and Trump is again proving he's Putins lapdog and acting outright against Ukraine and Europe.

Actually saw some combat footage of that Ukraine attack and it looked almost like a nuke, from what I remember it's a 1000km ranged missile called Neptune.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

Yes, but a bad example of one very quickly heading towards autocracy. Some characteristics like screwing up your own economy and blaming 'the foreigners' rings a distant bell.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

Not for a long time. The Economist Democracy Index demoted the US to a "flawed democracy" since 2016, where it has been ever since.

Democracy index, 2024 - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

Maybe a flawed democracy at best and it's getting worse every day. At least on federal level, I don't much about states politics. Not really an expert but democracy can't really work that well if you are stuck in a two party system. Having more choice would sure help against populists and autocrats.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

I really never did, not a well functioning at least. They've practiced voter repression for decades, and then they had fun testing how low they could go after 9/11, doing a lot of unlawful shit, going after citizens who spoke out against their policies and wars.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It is still a democracy, but that democracy is in crisis. You will know over the next 2/years if it will survive, although the next federal election will be the real test.

  • if the judicial and congress still share power,
  • if elections are still fair.

Democracies can recover if they keep their representation.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

On paper, I guess so? In reality, and as is the case with pretty much every developed democracy, money and technology make a mockery of the whole idea. A society in which billionaires can buy their way into the Whitehouse - literally - is no democracy.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

No. I agree with the comment about the electoral system and gerrymandering as fundamental issues. And the current administration does not respect the judiciary branch, that much is clear, and their actions are completely undermining the supposed divisions of power, without which there is no democracy.

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