this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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You aren't the only one, this has been the rhetoric from the far right for over a decade now. The "Boogaloo Boys" were named for what they forsaw as "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo". They gained notoriety during Trump's first term, and later rebranded/forked into the Proud Boys. Now you don't hear about any of them as much because they're all hired as ICE agents, military, or working for Hegseth at the Pentagon.
The thing to recognize is, while we're all flirting with the idea that maybe, if we're not careful, we might see a civil war in the US' future, the Trump administration is talking and behaving like we're already in phase 1: determining allegiances and positioning forces.
The trump administration has a lot of factions involved with a lot of different long-term goals, but right now their common goal is to dismantle the US, and they are currently on track. If at some point one or more states decide the only way to put a stop to unconstitutional federal action is through force, they'll use the military to "keep the peace". But that will be the tipping point, and they've been preparing for a while...
What leads you to the belief that the elite have a common goal of dismantling the US?
First off, I'm not a fan of the fuzzy term "elite", but I'll assume we both know what that refers to.
People think the rich just like to get richer, that Musk and Bezos are competing to have the biggest number in their bank account. But no, they have no interest in "USD", they don't care about being crowned "richest person on the playground", they want to own the playground. They don't want to be confined by some government's laws. After a certain point, the only reason to keep accruing wealth is to one day become the government and write your own laws. To me, that goal IS what makes someone "elite". Conversely, a wealthy person who welcomes high taxes on the rich because it makes the society around them better is still wealthy, but not "elite".
The elite are always looking for a route to absolute power, and they all see the Trump administration as an opening and are all jumping at it. The only thing they have in common is they want the US govt to be weakened beyond repair, but where they differ is they all want to be the one to take its place (or retain a position of influence like Little Finger).
Got it. We generally agree on the elite motivation. But I think we disagree on government.
For me, bourgeois government is the structure of collaboration between and among the elite, not a separate entity. So I don't think Musk wants to dismantle the US government, he is playing the game between and among other elites and the field of play is the government that represents the collaboration. In so far as the government limits the power of the elite, it generally does so with the consent of the elite. The problem is that the laws remain even though the state of play changes. The system designed by and for the robber barons of the gilded age didn't work for the entrepreneurial 1950s and the system of the 1950s didn't work for the financial transformation of the 1980s and the regulation of the 1980s didn't work for the tech revolution. None of these were dismantlings of the US but reformations of the system from the old state made by the old elites for the old conditions into a new state by the new elites for the new conditions.
They fundamentally want the US to continue. It gives them a military, a way to repress the masses, access to massive natural resources, a reliable money spigot, and dominating power globally. They don't want to dismantle it. They just need to reconfigure the machine collaboratively to maximize their power.
The difference in what we're saying is semantic.
If this means a government "of the people, for the people, by the people" that maintains a monopoly on violence to ensure no one is above the law/Constitution, then I disagree.
If this means a puppet state that the "elite" holds oligarchal control over, but maintain whatever facade of democracy they need to, then I agree. But I would not call that the US govt. You could say that because they call it the "US Govt" it's still the US govt, and you could say that because they call it the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, it's a democratic republic. But I would disagree on both points.
Yeah obviously they're not going to personally crown themselves as supreme ruler on a towering citadel constructed where the whitehouse once stood like a caricature of a villain. But if the structure of "government" that we end up with is completely powerless against them, then it's objectively not the US anymore; it's just the "elite", the govt is whatever they say, they are the govt, wealth only flows wherever they say it's allowed to in order to maintain power.
And that's always their goal, to become the govt, that's what I mean.
Given that the US was never that, obviously that isn't what it means.
Incredible. No notes.
Fucking incredible
It's always been an oligarchy. At no point were the masses in charge of the US. It was founded by rich, landed gentry from Europe leading the common man to battle under the banner of liberal values, but they formed the entire government to be by of and for the land owners. They even gave MORE power to land owners who also owned people. That's how committed they were to oligarchy from the beginning. It's always been a structure by which the elite manage their affairs including how best to prevent a revolt by the masses.
Tell me not to go vote in midterms, then.
I don't waste time telling people how to vote. Electoralism is a total waste of time. I vote how I vote, keep it to myself, and spend the rest of my time not thinking about electoralism. None of these politicians deserve my free labor when 100+ Democrats just voted to expand ICE and DHS power to obtain consumer data from retail companies to use in their operation. I put my labor into deconstructing white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism in the hearts and minds of my people in my neighborhood and online, and when I do put in physical effort equivalent to door knocking, it's doing food distribution for the people around me who need food.
Go ahead. Vote in the midterms. The Ds in the house just proved to you that they're onboard with the whole fascist panopticon policing program. They've always been collaborators with the Rs. But vote. It's literally the least you can do. Don't let anyone stop you. And then, forget about elections immediately after and do something about the fact that your neighbors, their kids, and their teachers are all replicating the white supremacy myths of this country into every single generation and glossing over it all with a simple "vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys" narrative.
That's great!
And yet you agree that if everyone does all of the first part, but none of the voting, things get worse, right?
I'm sorry your teachers taught you that, I agree our public education system is in shambles. I was raised to believe democracy is the worst option, except for all the others. And that even if my options are between "Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche", informed voting is critical to a democracy.
And that's my point, you can't both think we don't live in a democracy AND think that voting is important. You can be cynical about the electoral process, or the direction of the country, but that's just called living in a democracy. This isn't even the first time the world has tipped toward fascism, and as dire as it looks, I maintain that until a system breaks apart completely, the only way we make a "more perfect union" on the other side is by voting.
All that other stuff is vital too, particularly when it comes to crossing the critical "when everyone knows what everyone knows" threshold. That's the "informed" part of the equation.
And how 'bout that Mamdani? Balanced budget! And he's not the only Democratic Socialist gaining steam. Maybe I'm naive, but it feels like people are finally figuring out which candidates they need to push for if they want to survive late stage capitalism.
I do think you're naive, but maybe I'm just cynical. I think the whole concept of "we live in a democracy" is not a materialist concrete sentence but a virtue signalling idealism. The Soviet system was democratic. The Chinese system is democratic. The US system is democratic. All of these statements are true given what you're willing to define as democracy. The USA has voting for representatives, but the research shows that only the wealthy have influence over what laws get passed. That's been true since the founding of the country and it was by design. The expansion of the franchise in the US was always coupled with a pulling back on the effect of the vote. There's a saying that "In the US you can change the party but you can't change the policies, and in China you can change the policies but you can't change the party".
I don't agree that voting prevents things from getting worse. I think the evidence is clear on that. Remember that people not voting is not the cause of the problems, it's the other way around. People don't vote for Democrats because Democrats have terrible policies and terrible behaviors. It's not that Democrats have terrible policies because people don't vote. The two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy and that's why people don't vote at all. It's not the case that the two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy because people don't vote.
You are literally saying that if we vote for the right people in an informed way that things will not get bad. This is your position, don't distance yourself from it.
I'm glad that you recognize this as social indoctrination instead of a conclusion you came to through rigorous analysis of history and political science. Now your task is to actually work through your social indoctrination to come to your conclusions based on reality instead of instilled beliefs.
The reality is that Western democracy has been both a great experiment in sufferage and also a failed experiment - one that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. When the settler states are finally dismantled we can finally begin the next series of democracy experiments in earnest. We can get back to exploring the functioning of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and how that form of democracy can be a better form of government than this blood thirsty genocidal rapacious form of democracy that exists primarily to legitimize what the European elite have been doing for at least a millennium. FFS we're a democracy but we're still executing King Richard's Crusades against literally the same people he was fighting. If this is the best system you can think of, that's a failure of imagination, and honestly a failure of research at this point. There are way better systems than the settler democracy.
Let's just take this. You do see how this entire framing is a complete failure of imagination and is completely coerced into you by external forces right? If I took a bunch of young non-white kids who grew up outside of the Eurocentric empire and said "Hey kids, we're going to manage this neighborhood together. We're going to govern ourselves to create the best outcomes for ourselves" do you really think they would think that this means voting for a representative from among a choice of two representatives, with both representatives being controlled entirely by people who don't share their interests? This is what you think democracy means? It's ridiculous. Yes, we are required to call this democracy because people can vote and we pretend they can run for office. But the reality is that the rich always get what they want, the bombs always drop, the corporations tell the military what to destroy (seriously, look it up), the prisons get bigger and more brutal.
I mean for fucks sake as a democracy we have fucking prison guards protesting that the legislature in NYS decided to restrict the use of solitary confinement, which is a form of torture recognized internationally. That's a democracy? Yes we love unions too, but that doesn't mean we need to defend the police union as a real union. This is the best you can imagine for democracy?
Meanwhile in the USSR and then again in China the single party system eliminated any possibility of the rich having direct control over the government and what happened? Massive and blindingly fast poverty alleviation. Massive and blindingly fast industrialization. The end of centuries-long famine cycles. The defeat of the Nazis. Incredible benefits of humanity in medicine, science, technology, food, energy, logistics, etc. These societies are democracies too, because they are literally organized around the masses interests and preventing the ultra minority of elite from controlling everything for their own benefit at the expense of the masses. They just don't look Western democracies, so we "are raised to believe" that these are not democracies and they are worse than our glorious homeland "despite our faults" when our faults are literally open execution of genocides and mass murders and war crimes all over the world.
No. The US has not gotten better from voting. It is fundamentally a flawed system, designed by ultra wealthy minoritarians, slave rapists, genocidaires, and ecociders, and they designed it to protect and empower people like them and to disempower the masses. They wrote about it explicitly, they designed the Constitution that way. The system's fundamental flaws remain 250 years later, first and foremost being that the entire country exists as a genocidal settler state that can never ever be brought to justice.
The big lie is that the whole thing can be reformed by all the various mechanisms in the constitution. The reality is that the levers of power are in the hands of the elite by design and the only power the masses have is the power to overthrow them through mass organizing. And when that finally happens, the Constitution will be fundamentally rewritten, not because we voted for the right set of presidents or senators but because we deposed all of those leaders and took control, cratos, back into the hands of the people, the demos, and actually reasserted a democracy over what we currently have, an mass murdering white supremacist oligarchy where we get to vote on the branding.
The US has always been a project of the elite; US democracy was only ever a facade.
The bourgeoisie will not allow their power to be voted away. There's a reason the choices in the voting booth are always so narrow; you're only allowed to vote for a candidate that they've pre-approved and bankrolled. Vote or don't, it doesn't actually matter.
I have a feeling we would disagree as to which countries are actually democracies.
I am curious, what is one country you would be willing to call a democracy?
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