No Stupid Questions

If you really believe that the USA has "100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players" you are in delusion.

I believe this is where the second amendment comes into play. Luigi was on to something.

Yes, the President can be impeached and removed by Congress. On the opposite side of the coin a President can veto laws passed by Congress, which Congress can override but it's harder than passing a law. The problem is when Congress also goes nazi at the same time. In that case we're fucked. In fact I think Article 97 sub-paragraph E13/W even says, "Such conditions and circumstances shall by Law constitute Fuckage."

The voters were supposed to be that check and the Framers were explicit in that it was part of how they designed the Constitution.

Even regarding electing a felon, the Framers didn't want a case where one state pushed through a a felony conviction quickly to keep someone out of office.

It has impeachment. The list of reasons for impeachment are (quite possibly intentionally) vague. But it has to be done through Congress.

But who will wield these instruments? It'd be more relevant if he made an effort to hide his nature before the election.

Right now the majority voted fascism with open eyes.

In 1776, people didn't know what fascism was. Hell there wasnt even consensus on what capitalism was, Wealth of Nations was published that same year. They had never seen a capitalist system degenerate, as would happen in France under Louis Napoleon in the 1850s.

They knew what feudalism was, which was bad and a form of authoritarian autocracy, but this isn't Fascism. They were afraid that the kings and queens would get restored, as revolutionaries (and capitalism was revolutionary and progressive at that time) they were safeguarding against a counter revolution which would come from monarchists.

There is no way they could conceive of a movement to overthrow capitalism, which they barely understood although being the revolutionary capitalist class, that would come from a greater demand of social reforms, one where the class they were a part of would rule society rather than just administer it as they had for centuries, one where a class that they didn't even know about, the proletarian working class, would supplant them and bring greater prosperity and equality. This movement developed fully in Russia and Europe after the first world war when the last of the weakened feudal aristocracy destroyed their own continent to fight over scraps of colonial internationalism. A revolution in Russia inspired the global working class, especially where they were highly organized and industrialized such as Italy and Germany, and terrified the ruling capitalist classes of those countries.

In the shadow of the emerging workers movement grew the dialectical opposite and evil twin of German and Italian communism: Fascism. Fascists gleefully fight and kill communists, and desire power above all else, exploiting contradictions in liberal democracy (that's "liberal" meaning supports private property, not cool liberals that like freedom and justice) to confuse the masses and gain power. The ruling classes, weakened by decades of militant worker struggles, assented to the will of the fascists and in a last ditch effort to preserve their dwindling control, handed power over to them. The rest is history.

The founders couldn't conceive of the conditions you describe as they either didn't exist or wouldnt be developed enough to study for 50-70 years. Not all forms of authoritarianism are the same. They thought they were doing away with their version of it. Besides, the "founding fathers" gags violently would have fucking loved Trump

Not really.

In some countries, they have this idea of Defensive Democracy which would allow the government (via court ruling) to ban political parties that are deemed to be a threat to democracy.

In post WW2 Germany, the nazi party was banned, and later a "far-left" (aka: Marxist-Leninist) political party was banned during the cold war, because they meet Germany's definition of being anti-democratic.

Unfortunately, the US constitution does not have this concept of Defensive Democracy.

I mean we do have impeachment... but we all know how that is (doesn't work at all).

Our government leans heavily on decorum and good faith. Trump's success has been due to his refusal to adhere to decorum and good faith. Our system doesn't know how to handle that other than shaming and shaking fists so Trump gets free reign to do whatever he wants.

a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players

Your proof of this is... what?

Well isn't that the reason everyone uses on why America needs so many guns. So they can stand up to the government? But seems it ment standing up to a government giving more people rights not one taking them away.

The problem is he won the election.

The vote is the final check and balance.

49% of Voters are either sympatico or stupid.

The USA has had a literal Nazi party since the 50's. If they let George Lincoln Rockwell run for president while calling himself a nazi why would they do anything?

What’s your definition of Nazi? I would think Andrew Jackson still a worse president than Trump. And not even the Supreme Court was able to stop him

The Constitution assumes the people through the ballot box or through protest would clean up any issues like that

We really only have the Second Amendment. I am now on a list.

I’d never think that, of all places, American democracy would be the most volatile

Ignore the political system and look at the economic system. The US is capitalist and as it turns out- capitalism is not mutually exclusive with fascism.

If a human being lives long enough, he will eventually develop cancer. It's simply a natural physical consequence of repeated cell division. Eventually there's some mutation that leads to a chain reaction. The cancer spreads enough and there's no going back. Capitalism, similarly, will always inevitably embrace fascism.

Marx got it wrong. He believed that the workers, realizing their position as class consciousness increases, would inevitably revolt against the power structure. The reality is more depressing.

Capitalism has cycles of crisis. Sometimes the economy is doing good which leaves the workers content. Sometimes the economy is doing bad. The problem is when the economy is doing bad coincides with some other set of crisis, the combination of events radicalizes the workers. This part Marx predicted. However he was mistaken about human nature.

Really, our problem started back in 2008. The global economy never fully recovered. Interest rates were kept low in a desperate attempt to increase spending to keep the boat from tipping. Then COVID pumped up inflation to historic levels- supply chain shortages wrecked chaos. After that, the Russian invasion of Ukraine pushed up inflation even higher. Prices go up but wages lag behind.

Workers, naturally, become more radicalized- as Marx predicted. The issue is Marx was too optimistic about human nature. Humans as a whole are fearful herd animals. They need a shepherd to point somewhere. And eventually, inevitably, some megalomaniac with a vision will take advantage of a vulnerable system and point somewhere. In the 1930s it was to the Jews and the communists. Today, it's the illegals and "wokeism".

All this to say that this shouldn't be surprising. Left wing voices have been warning about this for a long time.

We have the second amendment, but I don't know how bear arms will help.

we have systems for putting people like him in jail but we just didn't want to do it

I'm told three marked bullets work wonders.

Hitler didn't take power democratically. Neither did Mussolini or Franco. They each found cracks in how liberal democracy worked in their respective countries. Those cracks were usually the places where the system was decidedly undemocratic, which in those three cases, was generally something where the old nobles still had some power and they lined up behind fascists to save them from leftists.

America never had nobles, but it does have plenty of cracks in its liberal democracy to be exploited by fascists.

So to answer your question simply, no, there are no instruments to fix this. Congress can potentially either reign Trump in with legislation, or even impeach him, but I don't expect either one to happen. If the GOP can be swept out of Congress in 2026, then we can maybe start to fix some things without resorting to extralegal methods. Even that is only a starting point.

I do know for sure that we can't go back to the old trajectory as if Trump was just an outlier.

So, giving the public a means of dealing with tyrannical leadership, either through intimidation or something more, is literally and unironically one of the intended use cases for the second amendment. That's not to say you won't face prosecution, but there it is.

He's just a symptom of the real problem, which is that he exposed himself as a nazi a long time ago and still got reelected.

That's what 2a is supposed to be for

You’d think a hegemony with a 100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy against major non-democratic players, would have some mechanism that would prevent itself from throwing down it’s key ideology.

"100-years tradition of upkeeping democracy"? That's not even true in a very minimal definition of democracy, let alone if we also mean equal rights for all. Just off the top of my head:

The vote of racial minorities was not protected before 1965.

COINTELPRO was a thing just over 50 years ago, targeting whatever political group was considered undesirable by the FBI. The FBI was found to be using unlawful surveillance targeting protesters for the inexcusable killing of a black man by police as recently as five years ago.

Last election there was an attempt to overturn the election results. It's not taken as seriously as it should have because it failed, but it was literally an attempt to overthrow democracy. It's important to note that Trump was allowed to run for president and the case against him was dropped as soon as he got elected. I'm pointing it out because the system was already there to protect him and it's not something that he caused through his own actions as president.

There are so many unwarranted invasions of other countries, assassinations, and human rights violations that I don't even know where to link to as a starting point.

Don't forget the large scale surveillance both within and without the country.

And then there's all the undemocratic qualities of unregulated free market capitalism. Politicians are lobbied. News outlets belong to wealthy individuals who often have other businesses as well. Social media too. Technically, you get to cast a vote that is equal to everybody else's. But your decision is based on false data, and your representative is massively incentivized to lie to you and enact policies that server their lobbyists and wealthy friends instead. Do we all really have equal power?

So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense, that the people have some sort of power through their vote, that's technically still going on. If you mean in it a more general sense, where people have fundamental rights that are always protected regardless of race or other characteristics, and where power is not unfairly distributed between individuals and racial groups, then again not much has changed. Because that was never the case. If you think fascism was universally condemned then you just hadn't realized how widespread and normalized it always was. Maybe fascism is growing. Maybe it's becoming more blatant. But it was always there.