• electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    Is the system so weak that one president can break it? If so then it is already broken. If Trump is able to leverage presidential power to such effect, then why isn’t Biden able to do the same? I think the word apathy obscures how a lot of non-voters feel. Give people some credit for their political motivations, even if they may present as lack of motivation.

    • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Democracy is fragile, and requires buy-in from a majority of politicians to maintain.

      The GOP have been evil for longer than you’ve been alive; and their grand scheme has always been “to shrink the Government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”. They are not in a position to do it.

      The Trump presidency brought to light a flaw in the existing systems, that a lot of processes and regulations weren’t sufficiently bound by law, but rather protocol.

      In that, one bad actor with support from their political party could ignore norms and standards set previously to withhold judicial appointments in an election year to deprive Obama of a seat, and then completely ignore that precedent when it happened again to Trump, giving him a 3rd appointment after one term.

      Could/should Biden try something similar? Perhaps, and in some ways he is (student debt forgiveness) - but he now faces an uphill struggle against an openly hostile Supreme Court which has already proved to have no care for precedent either (e.g. overturning Rowe v. Wade).

      Just remember, it takes a lot less time to destroy something, than it was to build it in the first place.

      • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        I just don’t think the Democrats are up to the task of saving democracy (if that’s what we even have). I think it’s an indictment of them as a party that they struggle to achieve decisive wins against the totally kookoo Republicans.