Or are just fucked and perma kicked out of NATO and the UN? Or will we have to do a big World Wide Appology saying yes we fucked up but we are trying/will fix it.?
Trump isn’t the disease, he’s just the most visible symptom.
Wilders still exists. Orban still exists. Netanyahu still exists. Weidel still exists. Putin still exists. Etc.
From the perspective of a non-influential Canadian citizen, you need to clean house before trust can be restored.
You don’t trust a crack addict because they told you they’re clean. Trust needs to be rebuilt and it takes a lot of time and effort.
Your democracy is sick, and Trump is the symptom, not the problem.
I don’t think there is a plan other than: Republicans will retain power at all costs. I don’t see anything changing for the positive.
If Democrats somehow do win, they’ll pull their usual “we need to look forward not backward” bullshit punishing no one. Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, hosts will have visually disturbing bloody strokes as they scream every night about how the Democrats are coming for you and you conservative beliefs and the Democrats will lose again in the very next election, continuing the decades long trend of: Republicans break everything, Democrats talk about fixing it, have no power, do nothing, and lose again.
I’m fun at parties. :/
And this is why true grass roots movements are so powerful, instead of co-opted movements. Our local election cycles just finished, and there were some decent changes that occurred with city council members, who voted in favor of data centers, getting handed their asses. But guess what. The turn out was record setting, yet abysmal, sitting somewhere around 18-22%. You start putting in real progressives into positions of power, and not fake ones, and changes start to be made (a full on data center blockade is in the works), which gets people to realize they actually have influence, which they then get more involved, and increases turn out in the next election.
We need to send a message to these centrist Democrats so they realize they need us WAY more than we need them or their pandering to fascists for money.
The next fix i would say is that news media needs to become federated and/or open sourced. I’m not sure what this looks like, but probably something like a mix of Ground News (i currently pay monthly for btw) and Patreon, where journalist post their stories to a decentralized platform, that people subscribe to them. Idk, that sounds like that could get clickbait-y. But i would be willing to cut a streaming service off, and give some of that to something that’s decentralized and not owned by some billionaire handing down memos about what can or cannot be mentioned in a story, or straight up axing a story all together.
Then we keep hammering at the injustices and calling the leadership out and spreading the word, and putting up better progressives in the next election cycle.
But to answer the original OP’s question, like you, i don’t think the current Dem leadership has the spine to actually prosecute Trump or any of his cronies and billionaire Epstein buddies, or take a few pages from Trump’s play book and go the low road to hold those fake news organizations liable for things they say erroneously, or to prosecute corrupt foreign governments who helped facilitate this current mess.
Progressives should continue putting forth bills and amendments that force Dem leadership’s hand to show the people how they vote, which to no one’s surprise, it’ll be the same handful of useful rotational idiots. Then progressives should spend every cent raised campaigning in those districts to primary every one of them.
Trump is just a symptom of a country that’s been sick for years, especially since Bush. The relationship you had before and the position the US enjoyed is gone thanks to Trump setting fire to whatever soft power the US had left. All the middle powers, such as the UK, EU nations, Canada, Australia, South Korea etc are pivoting away from the US, strengthening trade with themselves and China and reducing reliance on US tech, US banking especially Mastercard and VISA, and US military equipment. The end of the petro-dollar has also begun.
Since Reagan, even.
What I’ve come to understand is that even if Trump and MAGA become histories villains, with their ideology, ascetic, and personas become toxic and reviled, everyone will just forget after a few generations and it’ll happen all over again.
The only way to purge MAGA is to overcome American bigotry; the strongest god in the pantheon.
Well, considering that Trump is a small part of the problem, which includes:
- Oligarchs heavily funding politics, corrupting the entire system and most (but not all) politicians
- Decades now of propaganda supporting extremist right-wing propaganda and pushing centre-right propaganda
- Control of SCOTUS
- Republican party is essentially fascist
- Large support base thanks to the propaganda
When Trump goes, all of those problems remain. And the people who “woke up” to the problem of Trump will go to sleep again, and the number of people caring to resist fascist will drop again.
So we’re basically fucked.
The peaceful solution:
- Continue to talk online and convince people of the problems, which should help encourage:
- Protests, which by themsevles accomplish little - except to show how many of us are willing to stand up, and how many realize the problems exist, and also the online talk helps encourage:
- People need to run for office who are progressives - little offices, so they can build up to larger offices. We need more AOC and other similar types.
- We need to increase the protests and demand change. We need to shut down the nation and force change. Which means we need a plan / demands, and people to run for office.
The less peaceful solution:
- Well, I won’t go into details. I don’t like it because it means even more people die, and as someone who believes this life is all we have and is therefore precious, I’d prefer not to see this happen.
- I will suggest that guillotines are not a bad place to start, though.
(Then again, how many are dying from fascist policies already? Healthcare, poverty, violence… thanks to Republican making things worse)
Yeah I don’t think there’s fixing what America’s got anymore. The country is orcs and people too morally weak to handle an orc problem. I don’t know about you but I need to look inward about why I fall into group 2 before considering what the country is in the context of the world.
UN: USA along with a few other countries have a veto. Anything they don’t like they can say no to and it will not pass. I’m not sure how you think you’d be kicked out.
NATO: has no provision for kicking out a member. The worst you can do and that can be done in return is that when article 5 is invoked US (or other allies) offer 3 copies of the book “the art of the deal” (other allies would offer the US how to win friends and influence people).
Are you old enough to remember the Iraq war in 2003 and the general sentiment among other western countries back then?
At this point, it’s hard to say. It’s still a bit early in the presidential cycle to ask if anyone has a plan for post-trump. You won’t really see that rhetoric popping up until early 2028.
Is it possible/likely the next admin will be able to repair America’s reputation abroad? Again, hard to say at this point. Anyone telling you we’re all fucked forever or whatever is a silly doomer. Even someone worse than trump couldn’t dismantle the kind of influence/power America has diplomatically irreparably in such a short time. However, to help inform us of how things might look in the future; every region is the world has pivoted to moving to be more isolationist. Distrust and tensions are and will probably continue rising. Corporate capture is continuing to be a major worldwide problem. Conflict due to climate change is also on the rise. Many conservative movements, strongly encouraged by corporations, are doubling down on old tech in energy infrastructure and strongly pushing a [kinda] traditional nuclear family. Now without consequences, corporations are jumping hard into enshittification. Polarization in American politics just keeps getting worse and so much more stupid. I think these are many of the major issues that the trump admin has been directly responsible for either creating or making worse.
Many of the elements that are currently changing the political landscape because of the trump admin really falls into two major categories: alignment of foreign powers and the problem of domestic corporations. NATO is likely to survive as-is. However, Europe is not only talking about becoming more independent militarily, they’re already actively making it happen. NATO will still be the primary military alliance for the foreseeable future, but if the American government continues to prove unreliable and the EU military reorganization is successful enough, I don’t see NATO continuing to be relevant. As for the trump admin cozying up to dictatorial states, I don’t think those relationships are sustainable due to their very nature, let alone the kind of attitude a Democrat administration would have toward those countries. More neutral countries are finding the increasingly unstable nature of American politics as a kind of vindication. While they aren’t exactly running into China’s arms or whatever, they’re certainly using the time of trump’s second term to ‘play both sides’ and are building some economic goodwill with China. Optically, China is looking pretty alright right now. It’s nothing that will guarantee China true superpower status that the ccp seems to be so horny for, but they can be kinda comfortable with their current position. Their aggressive rhetoric and economic practices will continue to hold them back in the eyes of the rest of the world, though. Russia/Putin? lol.
So, all these things considered, America losing superpower status is extremely unlikely still. The dollar still reigns, the American military is still oversized, and American political influence is still very strong despite being weakened. Life in the west is still too comfortable to shake up the world order. While the trump admin is really fucking it up, the infrastructure to leave American hegemony is still fairly nonexistent. China is still not trustworthy and just not really built right for the task. It seems American allies are kinda holding their breath for the next admin to be more cooperative because they don’t have much of a choice. However, for Europe being put in this kind of position, it seems as though it was enough of a wakeup call for them to seriously make an effort to build themselves an exit. Canada is kinda geographically and economically stuck with the US. And Australia? lol, their government officials are basically just as unhinged as their American counterparts. While the political rhetoric of traditional US allies has been pretty vocal about permanent loss of trust in the US, it’s far from being so irrevocably broken as to kick the US out, less so because they don’t really want to leave, but more so because American power and it’s resilience tends to be underestimated somehow, realistic and desirable alternatives don’t exist, and the amount of damage trump can do/has done is usually blown wayyyy the fuck out of proportion. American hegemony isn’t under existential threat, but it has been weakened. Less like “THE CRACKS ARE SHOWING” and more like HP is at 95%. I’d keep an eye on how things develop over the next two years, but the needle only just showed it’s ability to move.
