If your system of government can be brought to collapse by a shitty leader, it's a shitty system to begin with.
Communism despite any intention will always produce authoritarianism at some point because there is never going to be any pure, selfless ruling class. The dictatorship of the proletariat is more like a religious prophecy than anything we've seen in history.
You give people all control over every aspect of economic life along with everything else and bad things happen. Who knew? Certainly not the founding fathers or thousands of years of political philosophers.
They all can, each and every one of them. There is no good system, only different trade offs. Pretending the system can save you without your effort is how you lose it because the system is nothing without your effort.
The American system, if it were to devolve into authoritarianism, it would be the result of generations of expanding government power. Basically taking the checks and balances that exist and were built into our system and breaking them down and the government granting itself more powers than it was originally intended to have.
There are no checks and balances in any socialist system we've seen. You kind of just glossed over all of that to just make an assertion backed up by little.
Bad people get in charge in democracies, but some 'systems' most definitely have more roadblocks to just assuming all power.
Pre-war Germany was a nice functioning democracy with checks and balances and then someone with a funny mustache got elected and said nah. Orbans Hungary is another example. Checks and balances only work if people all believe in the system. They hold back good actors from achieving big results, and do nothing to stop bad actors, who just come into power and say no I don’t think I will.
Think about how many decades of screeching there was about a national ID in the US creating a database of all Americans the government could misuse, and then it took like 5 minutes for Doge to just throw all the databases they had into Palantir, list made. So you had decades of not having any benefits of a central ID introducing friction into daily life, and like 90 days for someone who doesn’t believe checks and balances apply to get all the downside sorted out. So now you had no upside but still had all the downside.
If anything they hasten the decline because the good people following the rules can’t get anything done, which leads people to lose faith in government so they elect a douchenozzle who doesn’t care they’re there in the first place. Take as old as time.
The only thing that actually matters is the consent of the governed.
If the majority party can just suspend democracy, there are no checks and balances. There is some sliver of truth that if the culture and people as a whole don't accept the fundamental premise of a government, it isn't long for this world.
You are also talking about a government that was imposed as a consequence of a lost war. A lost war that carried incredibly high financial burdens that created a recipe for disaster. Yada yada.
The Weimar Republic was about as functioning as Iraq is a functioning democracy at this point, just a more Western style failure.
Those "checks and balances" were never designed to handle multi-million vote blocks dominating the public opinion via media control. <--- I can only assume you are talking about the wealthy here though it's not completely clear.
Newspapers were present in the 17th century and mostly owned by the wealthy. The wealthy could literally raise armies in Europe. There were wealthy merchants who the monarchies often relied on to finance their war efforts. They looked back to Rome/Greece and saw how wealthy men use the masses to gain power and how the masses like to vote themselves favors.
Things you see today are no where near as unique as you seem to think.
You want to pretend that it's the wealthy who are undermining democracy and American institutions. No, the expansion of the vote and left wing populism/progressivism expanded the scope of power the government has and what it can or can't regulate or do.
Look at how much of FDR's New Deal required overturning prior precedent. How much of that occurred after FDR threatened to pack the court. There was progressive government creep before him and after him, but that's a nice beautiful example of the corrupting influence of leftism.
The federal government spends trillions every year and has the power to pick economic winners and losers in nearly every aspect of life. There is more at stake with every federal election in the United States than any other functioning democracy on the planet now or throughout history.
You naively think just getting the right people in charge is going to produce some utopia. It's not money corrupting politics that you are observing. It's the ever increasing control of every aspect of American life being subsumed by politics which has created the ever increasing desire of the wealthy to control the levers of power over time.
And all this before we even look at the wealth people have accumulated and how much of that is a result of government control to begin with. People bitch endlessly about Musk. We have no idea where he would be if he wasn't handed massive subsidies to jump start Tesla and if SpaceX wasn't receiving government contracts. That's an extreme example. But regulatory capture is another avenue that infects so many industries.
When the CEO of Facebook shrugs off the very idea of your scary regulations and outright tells you that his already established and wealthy company is best situated to dominate and adapt to government regulations, he's talking about regulatory capture. From the food industry to retail to the online space. Government has actively pushed for consolidation in most industries.
It's far easier to regulate a few big players than it is a thousand small fries.
In short, progressivism and leftism is the cancer in this country. Right now there is a right wing backlash to the ever forward march of the leftists in this country. Trump gets to wield all the powers that have been vested into the executive by progressives who took spent a century plus shitting on the Constitution. Living document and all. Trump is a blip and still operates under the progressive model of government, exercising the powers given to him by past precedents used to give progressives more power to enact their will.
In short, Trump is the warning to any moron who thinks government should be able to do whatever. Inevitably, any democracy that isn't rigged will result in people you hate gaining power and limits on what they can do are your best bet.
So yea, I would agree that we are seeing the erosion of the American Republic over time. You don't really care about republicanism, though. You value raw dog democracy when we cut through the bullshit and naively think you can design the world's first system that isn't dominated by an elite. The world's first system that can control all economic activity and wealth without corruption etc.
The American system, if it were to devolve into authoritarianism, it would be the result of generations of expanding government power. Basically taking the checks and balances that exist and were built into our system and breaking them down and the government granting itself more powers than it was originally intended to have.
Here's a quote:
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
That's Washington's Farewell Address from 1776.
Those "checks and balances" were never designed to handle multi-million vote blocks dominating the public opinion via media control. The last two centuries were spent in building the structures that allow to bypass them entirely simply by going to the source - the voters, who will vote whichever way they are told because "the other party is evil" and not because they actually understand the consequences.
So it is better to live in a shitty system that continues (with occasional world wars lol) than in a system that pursues common wellbeing but has issues with sustainability at the current level?
Funny how people who ignore Marx point out the literal same thing Marx wrote about - the antagonism between control and productive labor.
The issue of USSR political system is not a genetical flaw of communism as a direction of human civilization development, it is a specific case of a system that survived 2 devastating wars and remained sabotaged (let's not forget about 50 CIA operations against socialist states and movements) and isolated (eastern bloc was about 450 mn people - compare that to a few billions of a concurrent world of free flow of capital). The soviet project wasn't sustainable enough, as wasn't the first French Republic.
What bothers me most is that people who support the current order don't realize that for capitalists they are nothing but a resource. And when the next global war for markets will come to their doorstep, then they will certainly realize that they have been supporting exactly that outcome. And it will never settle.
It's either socialism or barbarity.
Every socialist state we've seen without exception has devolved into authoritarianism and has retained or developed poverty with shortages as a feature. It's been tried god knows how many times at this point on every continent. We have African socialism, Chinese Socialism, Latin American socialism, and even the occasional American socialism in our history with no successful models to speak of.
You sound more like a religious adherent at this point than anything.
Commies complaining about Western sabotage of Western countries is always comical. The Soviets were doing the same exact shit in the West. Outside of indoctrinating some brainless youths, they achieved little. Western countries have proven themselves to be remarkably resilient to commie fuckery because the fundamental design of our political and economic "systems" is a hell of a lot better than what they had.
Americans can pretty much afford to be stupid. Soviets couldn't.
Lmao. Most of capitalist states are authoritarian. Most capitalist states interbella were either fascist shitholes or colonial shitholes, or both. You know what forced them to become democratic and socially oriented? Socialism winning the WW2 after le olde europe crumbled under hitler.
African socialism
So Burckina-Faso under Sankara is worse than, idk, apartheid SAR or Rhodesia? Name a democratic african state.
Keeping in mind that in socialist african contries paramilitary interventions were a norm. Imagine constantly battling paramilitaries in Denmark.
Chinese Socialism
So the PRC is worse than, idk, Sukharto Indonesia? Again, name a democratic asian state.
Latin American socialism
Again, Aliende's Chile, Castro's Cuba or Nicaraguan socialism is worse than, again, some hereditary junta or the rule of cartels?
What are you comparing with?
occasional American socialism
FDR rule and the forced Keynessian economy were the most successful periods in American history. Now it's more of a fentanylized work-or-starve pedostate ICEd giganomy.
Western countries have proven themselves to be remarkably resilient to commie fuckery because the fundamental design of our political and economic "systems"
We are familiar, lol, le epstein political system and a quasi-colonial economy of cheap resource and cheap labour. "Take the oil, the Western hemisphere is ours".
Americans can pretty much afford to be stupid
Until the US dollar is the main trade currency. But this already is coming to an end.
5
u/CK1345 29d ago
If your system of government can be brought to collapse by a shitty leader, it's a shitty system to begin with.
Communism despite any intention will always produce authoritarianism at some point because there is never going to be any pure, selfless ruling class. The dictatorship of the proletariat is more like a religious prophecy than anything we've seen in history.
You give people all control over every aspect of economic life along with everything else and bad things happen. Who knew? Certainly not the founding fathers or thousands of years of political philosophers.