I'll be looking forward to president Kamala Harris declaring the following national emergencies:
- A national health care emergency to institute single payer health care effective immediately.
- A national deficit emergency to institute a more progressive tax code.
- A national education emergency to made college tuition free.
- A national gun crime emergency to outlaw guns.
- A national crazy party emergency to outlaw the republican party.
You continue the list. If republicans don't stop Trump they brought this on themselves. When a president can declare national emergencies where none exists to bring about whatever he/she wishes, that is not a democracy, that is a dictatorship.
No! The answer to dictatorship is not "dictatorship that I like". The core problem here is that the Republicans are no longer interested in being legitimate participants in a democracy. (They are only interested in using the mechanisms of democracy as tools to advance their own interests with no care for the overall health of the nation. Like a cancer, they are quite capable of killing their own host.)
This is a very hard problem, because they are a large segment of our society. We can neither leave them, nor disenfranchise them. The only course I can see is to try and keep things together as much as possible, while educating younger generations in rationality, civilization, and critical thinking, and hoping we can keep our civilization from collapsing or turning completely cancerous until enough bad-faith Republicans (who skew old) have died to the point where democracy can function properly.
A functioning democracy requires a commitment to democracy as an ideal, a process, a goal. The GOP has abandoned that, but if the rest of us also abandon it too, that just makes the problem worse.l
How can we ensure that this won’t happen again with a rigged system plagued by gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and a fascist-loving media? How will this system work when right now, our census is hijacked by the same administration, essentially giving them a lifeline for at least on the representative level.
The reason Germany became a democracy was not due to caring about free speech nor human rights, but because of the real threat that either Communists or Fascists will upend the current elite. Aided by the world power, Germany built itself up from being an exploitable rump state.
Over here, we have none of that. We have no strong pressure groups threatening the elite to change the system, nor do we allow international law to be a care in our foreign policy. What’s worse is that we are on top, and have no actual repercussions for our politidiking on our borders or outside. So how do we fix our Democracy? By a combination of direct action, pragmatic assaults on these reactionary forces, and fixing our archaic system outside of the established channels. The status quo benefits only the forces that want to kill you, so what then is the problem with eliminating the structures trying to turn over the boat now? We’ve already seen that the Trumpists will do anything to get their way, so we need to hit harder just to survive.
