It’s easier to blame the heartland than it is to think about why it happened that way, isn’t it?

...among the people who voted. There are a lot of folks who opted out that bear responsibility for the way this country and its power is being dismantled.

He wouldn't win the popular vote today! Why is it that when you call yourself a Republican, you take a very narrow margin of victory and consider it a mandate to only listen to your fanbase? I bet it feels fun at first, and there are a few people who get very wealthy and powerful as a result, but reality always comes crashing back down.

I suppose that if the talk of suspending mid-term elections bears fruit, that changes the equation.

...with a plurality, not a majority.

It's really interesting how the same propaganda is applied by fascist governments everywhere. The ones supporting the "nationalist" government are the patriots and the others are enemies

striking is extremely tangible compared to protesting

That sounds extreme. Do you mean extermination as in mass murder? Or do you just mean he rejects the underlying ideology and would like to see policy that does the same?

There has always been an ends-justify-the-means element across the entire electorate and political class. It isn’t unique to MAGA, and it isn’t new.

All of the United States law and jurisprudence is a kludge of principle and practicality and naked self-interest. It’s an accretion of ideals layered onto compromises, expediencies, and power struggles. The Constitution itself is a bundle of moral claims stitched together with practical concessions to slave states, property interests, and elite fears of democracy.

To me, unfortunately, the mid-to-late twentieth century norm of relatively principled incorruptibility now looks less like a permanent achievement and more like a historical exception.

That period stood in contrast to much of American history before it, which was more openly transactional and tolerant of self-dealing. Think robber barons, Jacksonian patronage, open graft, speculative profiteering, outright theft of public funds, Tammany Hall. Against that backdrop, the period from roughly the 1940s to the early 1970s stands out.

What feels so unsettling today may just be a quiet reversion toward older historical norms. I'm sad to think that what once felt like progress was always just a transient anomaly.

What you’re describing is real, but it actually supports the opposite conclusion in my opinion. Watergate, Iran-Contra, Vietnam, and the Pentagon Papers were exposed because institutions, media, and elites still broadly agreed that certain lines existed. Nixon resigned because his own party, the courts, and the press treated those constraints as non-negotiable. Reagan officials went to prison because enforcement still mattered. Trump sits downstream of intervening decades of tolerated elite self-dealing, regulatory capture, and partisan blindness that have trained voters to believe that rules only ever apply selectively. When people see one side excuse its own violations for years, it lowers trust in the legitimacy of enforcement itself. Trump’s novelty is the abandoning of pretense. Calling him a symptom doesn’t excuse norm violations, but it does explain why so many people are willing to tolerate them. The collective decision to lower standards didn’t begin with Trump; it culminated in him. Stress tests don’t create weaknesses, they reveal where faith in the system has already eroded. That erosion happened long before 2016.

I like my politicians to be professional.

There will be many loyalists who will just side with the Trump administration. And then what?

Turns out, when the law has failed, the only solution is a fight to the death. And after such a fight, we do not return to our normal state and live happily ever after, we remain deeply unstable and untrustworthy for decades to come.

The party is already being taken over by the energy we need -- AOC, Mandami, and more. Trump going full fascist fuck is a catalyst. We can have the left-wing reaponse to the tea party that really changes the country back to decency. Or we can just sit around all defeatist and whining, because that's worked so well in the past.

Seemingly? Do you have any indication that this is a consistent pattern in the world outside of imagination?

I don’t think that book was well regarded by historians. It’s more of a pop-sociology thing, right?

EU has a much better tool ready, the anti coercion instrument. Party leaders in EU have been talking over the weekend about deploying it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument

Deutsche Bank made a statement recently that Europe holds about double what the rest of the world does combined in US bonds and equity.

China sold off their holdings pretty slowly as they didn’t want to drive the price down

So the occupier and country occupied signed an legal agreement making the occupation officially legal?

De facto and de jure are two very, very different things...

(not saying the US forces are occupying Germany, just commenting on op's logic)

You are right. But it's a matter of perspective. In the mainstream perspective those bases are based on contracts and a method of mutual security. But there is indeed also the perspective in Germany that those bases are factually occupying forces and given their history the option of having those bases removed have been limited.

And there is a kernel of truth in it. The USA likely wouldn't give up Ramstein under any circumstances safe the German military mobilizing against them, the base is (was?) too important for the US. When Trump invades Greenland we will see this play out (how the base stays active and Germany is powerless to stop that).

Threats are always a part of negotiations. There was also a proposal to trade Greenland for 1/3 of the Philippines (which the US got from Spain just for showing up to a war that nobody wanted).

"European hostility" is not going to matter when there's no EU. No matter how weak, Russia will always be stronger in terms of the number of warm bodies they are ready to throw into the meat grinder than any country in Europe.

UPD: If you don't believe me, look at the European right-wing leaders (including a sitting head of state, Meloni) currently banding up behind Orban, a widely known Putin's shill in Europe.

Nope. The US One China Policy (not to be confused with China's One China Principle) only "acknowledges" China's claim over Taiwan. The wording is intended to be vague so that each side can interpret the meaning according to their own interests (like China claiming "acknowledge" actually means "recognize").

Dear Leader already asked for something like 1.6 trillion for the military budget, but that probably doesn't even cover this.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-defense-spending-3bbea1ccc6...

Indeed, but it might be many decades - once this lesson is first learned, it will take a long time to unlearn because it tends to become self-reinforcing.

To give an illustration of how long institutional memory over things like this can be:

As of when I went to primary school in Norway in the 1980's, we were still taught at length about the British blockade of Norway during the Napoleonic wars due to Denmark-Norway's entry into the war on Napoleons side and its impact on Norway (an enduring memory for many Norwegian school-children is having to learn the Norwegian epic poem "Terje Vigen" about a man evading the blockade).

Norwegian agricultural policy to this day has had a costly cross-party support for subsidies intended to provide at least a minimum of food idependence as a consequence of learning the hard way first during the Napoleonic wars with a reinforcement (though less serious) during WW2 of how important it can be.

A large part of the Norwegian negotiations for EEA entry, and Norways rejection of EU membership was centered around agricultural policy in part because of this history.

The importance of regional development and keeping agriculture alive even in regions that are really not suited to it is "baked in" to Norwegian politics in part because the subsidies means that on top of those who are about the food idependence a lot of people are financially benefiting from the continuation of those policies, or have lived shaped by it (e.g. local communities that would likely not exist if the farms had not been financially viable thanks to subsidies), so structures have been created around it that have a life of their own.

Conversely, a lot of support for the US in Europe rests on institutional memory of the Marshall Plan, with most of the generations with first hand experience of the impact now dead.

Create a replacement memory of the US becoming a hostile force, and that can easily embed itself for the same 3+ generations after the situation itself has been resolved.

It may not be possible to do perfectly, but here are many things that can be done to make it harder.

E.g.:

- no direct elections of a president with such broad powers.

- Separating the head of state and head of government, and split their powers.

- Proportional representation to reduce the chance of the largest party obtaining so much power alone.

- Not letting the president appoint supreme court justices.

- No presidential pardons; basically removing the chance of getting out of protections against legal sanctions after leaving office, and removing one of the strongest means of protecting loyalists.

The US isn't uniquely vulnerable, but it is a whole lot more vulnerable than governments in countries where the head of government is easier to replace and have fewer powers vested in their own personal mandate.

A direct election of a single powerful leader is also fundamentally creating a less democratic system - it reduces the influence of a huge minority of the electorate far below what their numbers justify.

You are talking about the US, the others do not.

It's different. 9/11 was an outside foe, which was dismantled by US forces, and its leader was executed. America "won" against the perpetrators of 9/11 in the conventional sense.

You cannot defeat MAGA the same way: the "enemies" are among us, and they aren't going anywhere.

There's how the people in general remember, and then there's how the politicians and the institutions remember. If nothing else, the changes in institutions will have effects reverberating for decades, with the most obvious institution being the military in each country that expected to fight a war under a NATO umbrella with an American general in charge.

If I'm a German or French or Swedish officer, especially if I'm suddenly in Greenland, I'm going to be thinking hard about the changes to come in the next few years so that they're not all dependent upon a friendly America. If nothing else, they're all getting ready now to operate without any Americans in the loop, since it might be Americans they're fighting. That means the entire NATO command structure, which presumes American dominance of it, is now an obstacle to avoid rather than a resource to share. Every PM is asking the head of their air force if they can fly their F-35s without the Americans knowing about it and possibly shutting them down remotely.

There's a story going around today in French newspapers about how French and Ukrainian intelligence fed US intelligence some false strategic info to see if it ended up in Russian hands, which it did within days. Now Ukraine is consciously breaking its relationship with US intelligence because it can't be trusted, while getting closer to French and German intelligence. I suspect that the UK is also carefully looking at what's shared via the Five Eyes and decided what it can/needs to withhold.

9/11 - and the US response to it - is still very much remembered by people outside of US as an example of how US foreign policy works in practice.

Why? Russia didn't have a protracted civil war between 2000-ish and now?

Isn't Trump busy replacing US Army leadership with those loyal to him? Why would Army and ICE be on opposite sides?

Seems MAGA just have to continue the present course and apply just enough pressure to the election system to keep "winning" half-credibly and autocracy is there in not too many years.

I mean they are already past pardoning those attacking congress for not accepting the election result.

It is just a gradual process which is well underway, at what point would California and Washington suddenly prop up a militia?

>Autocracy isn't a switch you can flick.

Plenty of precedents for Autocrats to assume power in legit democracies and seem to flick it handily enough.

Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Erdogan, Orban etc.

No battles or violence, just democracies that become autocracies through election.

Yes, people expect SCOTUS to rebuff Trump on the tariffs. [0]

Lately SCOTUS has been providing stricter textual interpretations of Constitutional questions. Many of these have aligned with Trump administration arguments based on the power of the executive as outlined in Article II. The text says, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," and, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." One of the key arguments is that Congress can't take that power away from him. For example, Congress can't tell him that he can't fire executive-branch staff, because the executive power rests with him, not with Congress.

One thing the Constitution is very clear on, though, is that only Congress can impose tariffs ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"). Furthermore, recent rulings of this Court have established the major questions doctrine, which says that even if Congress delegates the specifics of implementing its powers to the Executive branch, that delegation cannot be interpreted broadly. It can't be used to create new broad policies that Congress didn't authorize.

Therefore, because the text of the Constitution explicitly grants the right to impose tariffs to Congress /and/ Trump's imposition of tariffs is both very broad and very substantial, many people believe that SCOTUS will deny Trump's tariffs.

The case as argued is about Trump's right to issue tariffs under the IEEPA (a law Congress passed to give the President some ability to take economic actions due to international emergencies, which do not explicitly include tariffs), and there is some debate about what a negative ruling would mean for the return of tariffs to merchants who have paid them. Both of those points require careful consideration in the decision. Will the ruling limit itself to just tariffs issued under the IEEPA or to the President's ability to establish tariffs under other laws? If the Court rules against the tariffs, will the government be required to pay people back, and if so, to what extent? It's not surprising that the decision is taking some time to be released. There's a lot of considerations, and every one is a possible point for disagreement by the justices.

[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/prediction-market-trade...