America is Cooked
NOTE: the text was not written by me and is from 3 reddit users (Dragonfruit-Still, ReflexPoint and bgplsa). The only changes were minor formatting for readability. I would merely link to reddit if they had a way to highlight comments, but they do not.
The original post.
Dragonfruit-Still’s comment
The USA has crossed a threshold of illiberalism that will usher in a new era of oligarchy and authoritarianism
The US government is for sale. Fly to Mar a lago and join his membership club, make large purchases of DJT, invest in Trumps crypto shitcoin, or buy his untraceable NFTs. Or openly bribe voters to vote for Trump. Or just buy a social media company and tune the algorithm to favor one party.
We are miles beyond “manufacturing consent”. The corruption is in the open, and we have a media that cannot communicate that corruption effectively to a majority of its citizens. The facts are in the open and the people simply don’t care.
And in fact people are crying over the hunter biden pardon even though it represents a far lesser form of corruption (though still condemnable) by orders of magnitude than what Trump has done for example pardoning co conspirators.
The feedback loop is broken. I don’t see how we course correct here.
ReflexPoint’s reply
There won’t be any course correction. America is cooked. The fact that someone like him won the first time said that this nation’s soul was gravely ill, but given that he lost the popular vote and Hillary Clinton was so unpopular, I made myself believe it was just a black swan event. After everything we know about him out in the open, that he could win a second time and win the popular vote at that means that this is who we are as a country. Donald Trump is the “ugly American” in concentrated form that the world despises. Ignorant, yet arrogant. Knows little about the world and couldn’t care less. Selfish blowhards that can’t stop talking about how great they are. Unrefined. Anti-intellectual. Materialistic. Flashy. Indignant and prone to acting like they are the victims when they are the bully. Donald Trump is America personalified and America is Donald Trump. I’ve just accepted it at this point.
Every few years I like to glance at The Economist’s corruption index. We usually compare to S. European countries. Still within the norm of Western Europe, but well above places like Eastern Europe and Latin America. I think we are now on a fast track toward the latter.
I was reading an interesting post about this topic on another sub and someone was saying how corruption in places like Latin America isn’t just accepted, it’s expected and seen as a way of life. If your company needs something done, you have to curry favor with with the people in power. Everything is transactional and nobody even tries to hide it. You had to bribe someone to get things done. We’re headed there now. It was a nice run we had as a pluralistic liberal Democracy. It’s over. Fascism has won.
I’ve been saying for years that Trump is more like a Latin America caudillo than a typical Western head of state. He seems like a right-wing version of Hugo Chavez. With the same type of ride or die cultists that will look past all his lies, corruption and incompetence as long as they feel he’s weilding power on their behalf and attacking the people they hate.
Once you become this type of society and that trust is destroyed, putting it back together will be damn near impossible. It takes generations to build a trustworthy government, and only one despot to smash it all to pieces.
bgplsa’s reply to ReplexPoint
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Joseph Heller,-22