No Stupid Questions

Assuming you are talking about who won the US presidential election. Happened 8 years ago too, it wasn't the end of America then. It won't be the end of America now.

Yeah pretty much. We're 2-3 generations deep into a cultural expectation that "some one else" will deal with all these problems.

The constant threat of this being "the most important election of our lives", when the party making that argument campaigned as if the outcomes were irrelevant (because from their privileged perspective, the outcomes are irrelevant).

Back during covid a boat got turned a bit sideways in a canal and it seemed like the whole world economy was going to collapse. The system we have is actually incredibly fragile and built largely on trust, both in one another but also in institutions and systems. Not only the US, but western Europe is about to get smacked up-side the head by the 2x4 of failing to maintain a civil society (US at fault within its borders, EU at fault beyond its borders).

It's the point of no return for something, but I suspect there's still a future to fight for. Anyone pushing a full doomer view is trying to suppress you. In case the worst happens, you should try to build a community around yourself and support other people. Join a mutual aid group if you can (or start one). If you grow produce or something, talk to your neighbors and exchange resources.

If we build a strong foundation, nothing that happens can break us. In the worst case, they'll try to break us and break themselves upon us. We need to be strong so we can come back stronger in the future.

Don't believe there really is an absolute point of no return without the plot of Genesis of the Daleks happening. The future is long, and we don't know how the next four to eight years will play out, but dictatorships have risen and fallen before. Spain was a fascist dictatorship for decades, now it isn't. Also, lots of people died in the meantime and not all vestiges of the dictatorship are gone.

Did Britain or Rome know the moments when Pax Britannia or Pax Romana had hit their tipping point to decline? I doubt it.

I think the tipping point will only be observable through the lens of history many years from now with a subject heading of: This event was the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.

1. It's unlikely.

2. That's hard to impossible to answer in the moment but easier for historians to determine in retrospect.

its going to be a shit 32 years.

I think it's possibly the end of Western democracy. If Russia and China stroll through Europe with Trump's help, that's pretty much it, no?

I choose to believe that we are not. The true fight for our democracy by the working/middle class hasn't even started yet. Some think it won't. I choose to believe that good will again triumph and life is roller coaster of good and bad.

So i agree that the second Trump administration is going to suck in most every way possible, like the first one but worse because they're prepared this time.

BUT

I think people overrate a government's ability to influence the conditions in a given country. I think a country is made what it is by history, geography, technology, sociology, ideology, economics, and the accumulation of small decisions over centuries.

If the Trump administration wants to end democracy in the US, or if a hypothetical based administration were to attempt a switch to ranked choice voting, both ideals would be impossible to implement because our ideals are limited by practical reality. Both would fail regardless of being good or bad changes, because radical change is really hard when the conditions aren't met for it, especially when it's opposed by the rest of the country. If the country just isn't ready to transition to fascism right now, there's not much that Trump can do to make it.

We talk a lot about how powerful people changed the world, but i think far more often they're just the embodiment of a societal trend, and they couldn't change the world if they weren't. Change isn't done by powerful people but deeper movements in humanity, with powerful people riding them like a wave.

As to where the deeper movements in humanity are leading us right now, i refuse to guess, trying to predict the future is the best way to look like an idiot

No. It will be bad and might set us back a few decades, but we will fight back or die trying.

Doubt it.

The rest of the world isn't lucky enough to never have to hear about the perpetual US election cycle again, and frankly there's just too much money in it for them to give it up.

It'll be a fucking clown show for the next four years though.

Every moment is a point of no return, unfortunately.

One definition of a collapse is a sudden drastic reduction in the complexity of a thing.

I'm not sure whether we're going to have a societal collapse or a slow decline, but either way the US is in a downward spiral. I think Trump increases the likelihood of us going into the collapse trajectory.

All that said, on the other side of a collapse, there is some room for hope. The incendiary portion of the collapse will definitely suck to live through (if you're lucky enough to do so), but our country could probably use some simplification long-term because the people within it largely cannot navigate a country this byzantine. A lot of this country's systems are too complex for an average person to understand let alone administer.

Most of these complexities were probably birthed via intentional decisions by the system creators, and others were a product of unintended consequences. I think the gap in education between our commoners and "the elite" -- to borrow a tired trope -- also played a part here.

No matter how we arrived at this point, I don't think the current population can actually operate these systems anymore and long-term one way or another our people require a drastic reduction in the complexity of our society.

There is another path in which the United States invests more in education and scales up the average intelligence of its citizens so that they can handle the complexity of modern life, understand nuance, do research, and create better policy....but at this point I think we're frankly too far fucked to ever go down that path.

The US has had presidents who were literally more evil than Mr. Burns.
They haven't been a real democracy (where the will of the majority influences policy) in decades, if ever.

Climate change is still the thing that's most likely to fuck us all, and it's not like the US were actually helpful in that regard under Democratic leadership.