What is your line in the sand?

Edit: thank you all for your responses. I think it’s important as an American we take your view points seriously. I think of a North Korean living inside of North Korea. They don’t really know how bad it is because that is all hidden from them and they’ve never had anything else. As things get worse for Americans it’s important to have your voices because we will become more and more isolated.

Even the guy who said, “lol.” Some people need that sort of sobering reaction.

  • nonentity@sh.itjust.works
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    1 hour ago

    Anyone who is eligible to vote, and chooses not to, implicitly throws their support behind whoever wins.

    On 2024-11-05, ⅔ of US citizens who were eligible to vote told the rest of the world they don’t want to be taken seriously for at least 2 years.

  • tauren@lemm.ee
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    2 hours ago

    The US had always been a questionable democracy with the hyperfixation on the president and just two parties setting the agenda, but I’d argue that it’s still a democracy, though it is a rapidly deteriorating one.

  • JacksonLamb@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    still consider

    It has only two political parties, and a weird system where all votes are not equal and the actual vote majority doesn’t always win.

    It has frequently had multiple people from the same families running for office, and only wealthy people have a shot. Corporations get to lobby for laws in their favour.

    It also spies on its own citizens, holds people indefinitely without trial, has a huge prison population, a militarized police with a high homicide rate, and is the only western nation with the death penalty.

    Trump and Musk are laying bare how fragile the veneer of “democracy” really is in that country.

  • LetterboxPancake@sh.itjust.works
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    2 hours ago

    Yes, but hardly an example for a good one. Besides that, it has become a bad ally, if it even is one at this time, and a factor of uncertainty.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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    2 hours ago

    Kinda. On how the voting process works in general, I consider it a worse democracy than Brazil, since nearly anything only gets voted if there’s enough lobby money being thrown at it, not to mention the astronomic campaign costs. Each state having different voting laws makes the democracy weaker

  • TeaWalker@lemm.ee
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    5 hours ago

    Am Dutch. I have considered the US an incomplete democracy since I learned about voting in school. It’s not one person one vote, which to me is crucial for a democracy. The US right now is still a nation of laws, but democracy is sharply in decline. The voter-roll issues and Gerrymandering come to mind immediately. Not to mention the fact that guaranteed access to polls has been pulled by the courts. Which is insane to me.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Also president having so much power was clearly never democratic to begin with as we can see it all play out now.

      • RupeThereItIs@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        The power of the president did not start out like this. Congress kept giving their power to the executive for political reasons.

        It happened over centuries.

  • FelixCress@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    No. And I haven’t for a while now. Looking at your electoral system (electoral college, gerrymandering etc.), it probably never was but it was never as obvious as it is now.

    • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Yeah. My wake-up call was quite early in life, when SCOTUS handed the election to GWB. If I was born a generation earlier I’d have called it with Watergate. If I was an ancestor currently dead, I would have called it around the time an assassin put the presidency in the hands of the opposite party, and a drunk asshole subsequently decided reconstruction efforts should fail. Or possibly just prior, when we somehow decided not to hang every man Jack of the confederacy for treason.

      Edit: an earlier still version of me would have overseen the death of a culture brought on by poxy mad white religious extremists, and laughed ruefully to hear that centuries later the utter bastardy continues unchanged.

  • DasFaultier@sh.itjust.works
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    8 hours ago

    See, as a German, when I see a country go down the same route as the Weimar Republic after handing over the power to the Nazi party, I think it’s just very obvious. Hitler took some two months to completely destroy democracy, and the US are juuust in the middle of that. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes, and the similarities are just remarkable.

    So yeah, I guess that would be a big fat trench in the sand.

  • Intergalactic@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    Absolutely not. A country where two parties are the only two viable electoral options, is absolutely not a democracy. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop my membership for the PSL.