Hard to say what would have happened, but I feel like I was pretty much unaffected as an European the last time.

The right wing in America has been sliding further right for a long time, and tending to drag the left along with it. (Nobody is under the impression that the US “left” isn’t actually center-right.) In the last decade, that rightward silde has accelerated. Trump, being the presumptive Republican nominee for president, is the “best” that the lunatic far right - not America - can push forward.

The Democratic party, representing the left center-right, is no longer allowing itself to be dragged further right. And there remains a fairly large proportion of people who still call themselves Republicans who oppose the burgeoning fascism. Those are the people who feel politically homeless right now; they just need someplace to go and someone to vote for. Liz Cheney is floating a third party run, and I think she’s easily able to consolidate “sane conservative” support.

I was predicting that the Republican party would split back in 2015. I had no idea they would drag on like this for so long.

We were fucked 24 years ago.

Exactly: that’s when the first coup (the Brooks Brothers Riot) succeeded.

Were fucked, We just get a 50% chance to choose what hole.

I wished I could be so optimistic. They have had endless chances to reject him and haven’t. It’s almost like Putin has some leverage on a bunch of em lol.

He will get nominated, but hopefully my fellow Americans will not let him return to the white house.

I wish that were true, but I suspect that the American people have become too passive to resist a dictator. He won’t take over by force, but cloaked in legitimacy, just like Hitler and Mussolini did. Heck, you don’t even have to go back that far. That’s Putin’s playbook, too. A Republican President also has a Supreme Court that favors very strong presidential powers and a permanently divided and largely impotent Congress. No real resistance there.

So, what’s left? The police? American police would love having more power under a dictator. The public hates cops these days, and a dictator would restore their “rightful place” as respected and feared enforcers who will “clean up the streets”.

The military? Well, that’s a wild card. They may not support a dictator, but they also don’t want to start a civil war. I think a US dictator will give himself enough legal cover and legitimacy to convince the military to hang back from interfering in politics.

The most likely source of resistance is from individual states. However, I’m not sure what they can do, realistically. Secession would certainly start a civil war, which would play right into the dictator’s hands, giving him the perfect excuse to suspend rights and use the military for domestic purposes.

They literally had the chance to stop him during his second impeachment after the attempted insurrection. Anyone who didn’t do it then, sure as hell isn’t going to do anything now.

The last thing the GOP wants to do is piss off his supporters right before the next presidential election. The electoral college could have ousted him during the 2016 election (as people had floated around) too. There’s just not enough people are willing or have the desire to reject him. Many would love to have him as a dictator, they just need the right pieces in the SCOTUS to say it’s in the constitution.

He’s 100% going to be the nominee now. Even if he goes to jail, he’s still going to be the nominee. The time for anything different is LONG past.

Slight correction, he wasn’t assassinated by most of the senate. There were about 60 conspirators out of 200-300, and only a dozen or so actually participated in the assassination (and only 5 actually confirmed to have stabbed him while still alive). Regardless, it’s still true that they came to that conclusion after Caesar was declared dictator for life and started taking away senate power

Yeah, but he was rustled since they wanted to disband his legions and all that. Who wouldn’t be

Anyone who wants power, shouldn’t have it.

Given how the reality can get modified over long periods of history, I have to wonder how much those old dictators stepping down were motivated by threats of stabbing if they didn’t.

I’m so happy that a fellow history nerd came here and said it before I could.

Honestly it’d probably work better than our current system.

Just give one random guy carte blanche to run everything. Get immortalized if you do a good job. Get executed if you don’t.

And I’m sure lots of people would take it up, and think that they’d do a good job. And more than likely, they wouldn’t.

I definetly could

I don’t think dictatorships are meant to be long term anyway, but I would be careful who I would hand over any power to.

Cincinnatus is always the classical example, as a senator who was named dictator twice and in both cases relinquished his power as soon as the crisis was resolved.

What’s less often mentioned is that the second “crisis” was just a prominent plebeian undermining the prestige of the Senate by providing cheap grain to the poor during a famine—Cincinnatus presided over the plebeian’s extrajudicial murder, and it’s that as much as his subsequent resignation that made him an eternal hero to the Senate.

He was facing heavy domestic and international pressure as well as sanctions on the country. He didn’t do it out of honor.

Can’t dictate from a burnt down house. Can’t dictate with a bullet rattling around your head. I don’t know about the rest of you’se, but I’m not going to be dictated by any rat fuck righties. They can have, and lose, their second civil war.

This is exactly what the Second is intended to take care of

Not it isn’t. The idea that the 2a is supposed to prevent government overreach is revisionist history.

The intention of the 2a was to make a standing federal army unnecessary. Madison didn’t want a federal army, but knew the nation would need some form of military, so he wrote militias into the constitution.

(He changed his tune when the War of 1812 showed him how necessary a true military was.)

It’s laughable to think that people in power wanted others to be able to overthrow them with guns. In fact, rebellions were attempted with guns in the years after the revolutionary war. And they were put down. Never did George Washington say, “Ah, these men with guns seem to think we are being tyrannical. We should reconsider.” No, he said, “Pay your fucking taxes.”

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I would love to hear an example.