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Finally, some "good" news . . .

torbee

HB King
Gold Member
Anne Applebaum was one of the first - and fiercest - harbingers of how bad Trumpism is and how similar his playbook is to previous authoritarian movements. She has been spot on for around a decade so far, usually predicting bad things that people thought couldn't happen until they did.

At any rate, she is seeing some signs of hope in Trump's flailing - at least in terms of undermining his power.

Good read (I will only post most of it because @The Tradition is a little narc try-hard mark):

This Is Why Dictatorships Fail​

The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason.
By Anne Applebaum

original.jpg

He blinked. But we don’t really know why.

Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name.

But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.


 
I don't see the good news in that piece.

Agreed, it’s merely the shortcomings of our government, its failures to uphold the principals and ideals of the founders, and the fact that we have a would be tyrant and nobody throwing up many guardrails.
 
Anne Applebaum was one of the first - and fiercest - harbingers of how bad Trumpism is and how similar his playbook is to previous authoritarian movements. She has been spot on for around a decade so far, usually predicting bad things that people thought couldn't happen until they did.

At any rate, she is seeing some signs of hope in Trump's flailing - at least in terms of undermining his power.

Good read (I will only post most of it because @The Tradition is a little narc try-hard mark):

This Is Why Dictatorships Fail​

The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason.
By Anne Applebaum

original.jpg

He blinked. But we don’t really know why.

Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name.

But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.


I <3 Anne.
 
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Our democracy works best when there are checks and balances
being done by the legislative and judicial branches of government.
Trump is a wannabe dictator and he is a danger to everyone in
America and the rest of the world. Hopefully we will see some
action from Congress to stop these ridiculous executive orders
about tariffs. The world does not need an economic depression.
 
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I think the point is cracks are starting to form and there is some expectation that the legislative and judicial branches might actually grow a spine if things continue spiraling.

You did notice I put "good" in quotes, right? :)
What do you envision they can or will do about it? Judicial has no power of enforcement. Congress has the power of impeachment but that seems far fetched.

I agree there are some signs that have been obvious to some of us are getting through to many who didn't think these things could happen. I'm not sure it's in in time, though.
 
Eff Ewe Torb, I thought you were going to say the orange turd threw a clot...
 
If we fail in this endeavor it just becomes another signpost on the roadway to the fulfillment of the Antichrist prophecies. And if that's the case, perhaps we cannot prevail no matter our actions. Just saying.
 
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