- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- Three of the seven pillars of democracy laid out in the Democracy Playbook 2025—protect elections, defend rule of law, and fight corruption—have been put under acute stress by the actions of the new Trump administration.
- While there have been resistance efforts from across sectors, such as civil society organizations, media, and state officials, there is a need and opportunity for more efforts to preserve and strengthen the cracking pillars of democracy.
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Nothing will change until their necks are cut/swinging. Protests have been neutered completely. The rule of law holds no comfort.
Ace the King and Jack. The rest will fold.
Smaller protests have a purpose: meeting likeminded citizens and building your network. This may become very relevant in the future.
People can also be pushed to open their eyes when protests are frequent and grow in size over time. When 10 million people are in the streets, that’s enough momentum to really change things.
And if we’re just talking about sheer numbers, 10,000 people were enough to overwhelm Capitol security, and only about 2,000 people entered the building. I’m making no comment about whether or not that’s desirable, just that people tend to overestimate the number of people required to be effective.
Millions of people in the streets did not stop the second Iraq war, and all the pussy hats in the world didn’t keep Trump out of office.
Maybe the protests should be more REDACTED
Too small (domestically).
The biggest Iraq War protest in the US (global protests don’t matter for US policy) saw around 2% of the population turn out. If you were around at the time, you’ll recall the war was relatively popular in the US at first, although the protests did help influence public sentiment.
The 2017 women’s march had even less participation, around 1-1.5%.
You need around 3.5-5% to get real results.
I’m under no illusion the protests on Monday will make a difference in the short term. If they get large enough, they can begin to influence public sentiment. But if there’s a major shock to the public psyche (something big enough to jar the people who don’t follow the news awake), it means organizers at all levels will be prepared and ready to go.
Trump also refused to defend the capital with national guard, the same ones they used to fuck up the black lives matter protesters back in the summer when they wanted an upside down bible photo op.
Protests have been neutered completely.
Not quite; many have simply forgotten (or more accurately been made to forget) what it means to protest. You gotta put a lot more energy into it than just standing around for a few hours and maybe blocking traffic if you want non-marginal results. Modern protests in America simply don’t have the juice. For another example look at how the French do it.
I think that’s what they mean. The history of protesting in the US has been white-washed to the point of ineffectiveness with the obsession on peaceful protests done “in the right way” (out of sight where they can be ignored), and the crackdown on protesters is merciless and cruel. Thus, they’ve been neutered.
That makes sense.
Its not cracked its collapsed. We’re an authoritarian dictatorship now.
Ah yes, let’s have some views on democracy from the Brookings institute.
I don’t get it, what is their problem?
From what I’m reading, they’re a centrist think tank that on occasion takes funding from private sources to write pieces that are in line with their donor’s interests. Bill and Melinda Gates also appear to be major donors
Like all these think tanks they are warmongering mouthpieces.
This is what they do: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/69aba7b3-8162-43f5-aa57-7fa603840b21.png
Problem, this all would’ve been fine and dandy if more people got off their ass. We wouldn’t be facing this if the lazy got up and voted.
It wasn’t laziness, they just flat out refused this time. Sometimes I wish Trump had won that second term, so he wouldn’t be “back with a vengeance,” and this shit would be all over with.
No, you’re wrong to blame voters. It’s the responsibility of parties like the Democrats to campaign and win votes. They are not owed votes.
Fuck around by aiding and abetting genocide, campaigning with the Cheneys, offering absolutely nothing to the working class, and planning to do nothing different from one of the most unpopular administrations ever - and you’ll find out that people won’t vote for you.
You’re both right to some extent. Both sides are guilty in this. As MLK said, the biggest threat to equality is not the white supremacist but the white liberal who cares more about a negative peace than true justice. If the 50% of voters who never vote did something, we could not only have kept Trump out of office, but we could vote out the corporate Dems who prevent any actual change from occurring.
At the same time, those corporate Dems keep pushing the right farther and farther into extremism with their strategy of “vote for me because I’m not the other guy” and take for granted that people will vote for them anyway. It’s the oldest campaign strategy out there, because it works, but when you fund the most extremist of your opponents and appeal to the middle, you just end up pushing the entire political spectrum to one side. And that’s exactly what the Dems do. They even go so far as to fund the most extremist candidate in their race to set up an easy win. A lady wrote a book on how she did that, and then she lost to that same extremist in the very next election.
Protest votes are ineffectual, and so is not voting because at the end of the day, the leaders of the Dems think that they’re safe and the status quo won’t change, and it doesn’t matter whether they got less votes than last time, so long as they’re in office. We need a sweep of radical leftist candidates to shake the very foundations of the party if we expect to see any change.
We need a sweep of radical leftist candidates to shake the very foundations
YES.
Yes because letting something worse happen to you is… Good?
What a dumb argument.
Yes I will blame voters still.
Look, there is no excuse for anyone to not know whether or not they’re being lied to. They had ALL YEAR if not FOUR YEARS to know and work in ways to prevent a Republican take-over. And you know what? They failed themselves once again in catastrophic fashion.
You don’t really know how elections work, apparently.
Democrats didn’t fail, fail suggests they even tried. Trump, as president, is a direct indictment of the Biden presidency.
Biden did keep one of his promises, to donors: “nothing will fundamentally change.” He delivered on that, and by the end of his term oligarchs and corporations held more power over our system of government than ever before.
Elections work by campaigning to win, and democrats failed spectacularly on that front. They are not owed votes, that isn’t democracy.
