American democracy is doomed

[KamaAina]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed

America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse.

Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent. If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we're less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen.

Very few people agree with me about this, of course. When I say it, people generally think that I'm kidding. America is the richest, most successful country on earth. The basic structure of its government has survived contested elections and Great Depressions and civil rights movements and world wars and terrorist attacks and global pandemics. People figure that whatever political problems it might have will prove transient — just as happened before.

But voiced in another register, my outlandish thesis is actually the conventional wisdom in the United States. Back when George W. Bush was president and I was working at a liberal magazine, there was a very serious discussion in an editorial meeting about the fact that the United States was now exhibiting 11 of the 13 telltale signs of a fascist dictatorship. The idea that Bush was shredding the Constitution and trampling on congressional prerogatives was commonplace. When Obama took office, the partisan valence of the complaints shifted, but their basic tenor didn't. Conservative pundits — not the craziest, zaniest ones on talk radio, but the most serious and well-regarded — compare Obama's immigration moves to the actions of a Latin-American military dictator.

[daredtowork]

1. Well we've already been declared an Oligarchy

so the Constitution is just for show at this point anyway.

[truebluegreen]

4. Has been for decades.

All this is just for show. Bread and circuses. Time to move on to a new paradigm, one that is about community, not domination, or Empire.

[Journeyman]

2. You'd be hard pressed to find any period in our history where the demise of democracy wasn't. . .

an undercurrent to every discussion of our future -- even Washington's contemporaries decried our slipping towards monarchy.

We have many problems, no doubt, and challenges galore before us, but pooh-poohing our eminent collapse instead of focusing on our options seems the more prevalent tone at DU, and has since I signed up 14 years ago. Mores the pity.

[hifiguy]

3. It is inevitable, and I have been saying it for a while now.

A population so distinctly split between the sane and the insane, between those who embrace reason and reality and those who categorically and universally reject all reason, reality and science in the name of Iron Age fairy tales cannot coexist in the same body politic over the long term.

I still think Gene Roddenberry posited as plausible a middle-term future as anyone did - planetary catastrophe and/or war that kills about 2/3 of world population, a lengthy reassessment of man's place in relation to the planet and the cosmos, and a radical reordering along atheistic, democratic socialist lines. Viz, the earth of the era of the UFP.

[AverageJoe90]

6. I'd go so far as to say that......

Roddenberry's prediction that we'd have go thru World War III(in the traditional nukes flying towards cities, etc. sense) before we'd reset our priorities was a fairly pessimistic in that regard.....but I'll freely admit I understand why that was; Star Trek was, after all, created just after the first peak in hostilities during the Cold War, in which global nuclear annihilation was a very real possibility(instead of rather remote, as it is today).

[AverageJoe90]

5. Being a student of history, I cannot *quite* agree.

Hell, this country even survived our own Civil War relatively intact, so a collapse is not yet in the cards.

However, though, he does raise a valid point-serious reform is needed. The only question is, what would work better than what we have now? Westminster-style politics won't do the trick-look at how Stephen Harper has managed to hang on up in Canada.