Trump saying he'll be a dictator only on day 1 is the strategy of normalizing it.

BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 531 points –

Just make it so normal that people accept it.

And for others they can say "he's joking, like he was always joking"

64

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

One day is all it takes for a dictator to destroy a democracy...

In that case, let's hope he's an absolutely incompetent idiot who will fail fast and spectacularly or an old guy who will die fast, so that when he's gone people all agree that this wasn't a great political experiment and all join in together to rebuild the political system much better than before.

That's definitely a nice thought, but you'd have better odds of winning the lottery.

I mean, it worked at least in Austria, Germany and Spain

The world was pretty different then.

Well, political forecasting is like reading tea leaves even for professionals and even when it's just for the next year.

So it's safe to say, nobody knows what's going to happen.

But generally speaking, political tensions like the one currently in the US need some form of release. They build and build until something lets all of this vent.

Historically, these vents have been (civil) wars on their soil, revolts or catastrophies that require the country to be literally rebuilt.

The US hasn't really had any of these for a very long term. Wars in foreign countries can reduce the temperature a bit, but only until the public's attention span hasn't passed.

The US system is also built for polarization, so let's see what happens.

If they are lucky, some kind of worker's uprising could be enough. If they are unlucky, they are going to have a dictatorship next year.

But nobody knows what's going to happen.

When has the death of a dictator by old age ever defaulted back to democracy? There's a lot of people helping him, I'm sure more than a handful are eager to step into his shoes.