I know, I know. It's a republic not a democracy so 100% lol, also the person with the most votes lost so 100% lololol. I don't mean selective disenfranchisement either because while it's obviously a threat to democracy it's a bit too abitrary to decide when disenfranchisement becomes dictatorship.

I'm asking what odds do you think we are facing on the US no longer being broadly democratic but instead ruled under an obviously phony "democracy" like russia or an outright unelected dictatorship/oligarchy or whatever other scheme you can imagine (unelected capitalistic technocracy, socialist paradise etc). Poll answers are % chance of democracy failing.

edit : yes the poll options overlap, just assume I've made the effort and 0-1 really means 0-0.9999 etc.

I can give my answer on how long I think it would take, but have no idea how to figure out the chances we beat them.

Democracy is probably best thought of not as a binary condition but instead exists on a quality spectrum.

I think the in-vogue term in academia these days is 'backsliding democracy' -- e.g., people retain the right to vote, petition government, free speech, etc. but where laws are unevenly applied or one party retains control over the levers of power (legislative, or judicial, or executive) despite little popular support by twisting the law to ensure minority rule:

http://www.demdigest.org/democratic-...iding-happens/

That seems far more likely for USA #1: a superficial democracy of declining quality where the cops and the laws are unevenly applied to the poor, where wealthier whites erode the democratic political power of racial minorities and the poor, and even if they ever seize it, laws have been put in place to ensure things can't change. Simple and trite examples might be what we just saw with Garland/Gorsuch. A more drastic hypothetical example would be Trump declaring SCOTUS now has 29 justices and appointing 20 new young ideological Trumpkins or something dystopian like that which is functionally legal but has all the features of authoritarians establishing an autocracy.

The basic idea of backsliding democracy is that the law is not applied dispassionately and fairly but is instead contorted to ensure what used to be or should be democratically decided is instead moved out of the democratic process or into the hands of a minority of people shielded from popular will.

People who voted anything but 0% are doing it wrong.

The feds have been self-serving for many decades, but it's the people who have seen the biggest change for the negative in that time, not the big government boogeyman.

WAAF, but not because Trump is going to declare himself god-king.

None of the whiny children who participate in most modern political protests would last 3 minutes in an actual violent uprising. Their big contribution to the fight is to photoshop dildos in place of the Nazi tiki torches. The people who would be capable of holding their own in a fight are pretty fond of the constitution, so they'll keep the government at least somewhat honest for at least the next 20 years.

It's more likely that the snowflake movement dies off for lack of breeding.

Once a single group keeps power indefinitely, it's pretty much game over for Democracy, or whatever we are now, no?

Capitalists

People who study civil wars around the world are putting the average chance of a US civil war in the next 10-years at around 35%.

Take this as you will.

I guess it's hard to find room for reason when your mind is loaded with so many false stereotypes.

I think that's a little glib. Depends on what you mean and how you define a 'group.' Democracy can be a lot less vibrant and meaningful even if one single group doesn't keep power but uses the law to limit the effective democratic will of voters. That can come in a lot of forms.

Take what I mean using a historical example: America during the Jim Crow era is an example where power was shared between two genuinely competitive political factions but millions of voters excluded from the democratic process.

That is...

- not one single group keeping power indefinitely (unless you define the group as 'white people')
- a significant abridgement of democratic quality

Which is already the case

Right, this is possible. But at this point it seems unlikely. One good thing about the US election system is that it's not centralized, each state runs their own elections, TRUMP has no way to directly hijack the process. We've already seen that individual states (even blue ones) are more than willing to flip him the bird when his dumb election fraud commission asked for all their data.

That leaves us with a few things to worry about.

1) a stronger republican majority in the US congress emerges in 2018 and 2020. TRUMP's core is shrinking fast, so I don't think we're going to see a repeat of 2016.

2) TRUMP gets curbstomped in 2020 but refuses to leave the white house. seems like it's definitely a move that's in his range, possible outcomes are all over the map. Ditto for TRUMP gets impeached and convicted but refuses to vacate.

3) GOP makes more gains at the state level and starts passing constitutional amendments. this is the thing that is most likely to occur but I am hoping they're approaching the limits of what they can gerrymander their way to. The democratic party seems to have zero ability to organize on this level, though, so who knows.

This is obviously completely untrue. Everybody, including whatever group you're talking about here, is fond of the parts of the constitution they think are important and couldn't care less about the rest.

Assuming you're talking about the gun-toting peeps - they'd be quite fine with the constitution being rendered meaningless as long as they get to keep their guns, mock liberals, and keep the brown people in line. As proof, see Trump.

Cite?

what would a TRUMPesque civil war even look like? States aren't the semi-sovereign entities they were before 1860 (making the idea of entire states all-or-nothing seceding less likely) and they have relatively rinky-dink military forces of their own.

are you talking about the people who get really sad and cry when statues are torn down?

Also man that last line by Inso.

Antifa and left wing forums aren't where we learned about incel and volcel. The alt-right is to virginity as Eskimos are to snow.

Sure. I think that's all fair stuff to consider. I would also note that we should be careful to put aside partisan considerations, sometimes. That competitive political factions aren't the only sign of a healthy democracy. I think the risks of permanent GOP rule are overstated but other forms of democratic backsliding understated. Use my historical anecdote from earlier about how the US was ruled until say the 1960s, where millions of people were basically disenfranchised and the tenants of white dominance were a shared consensus by both parties. Let's assume a future KINDA like that, just less explicitly racist. But call this the traditional libertarian 'duopoly' criticism. It would be very, very easy to imagine an increasingly stratified legal system (I mean ****, don't we already have it?) where both parties and the elites use the cops, the law, nefarious government spying and surveillance to pick the winners and losers, to punish the poor, to prevent meaningful political opposition from organizing. We already have insane amounts of people, many racial minorities, left in jail to rot. Finance sector criminals appear basically immune from prosecution. Most information is filtered to the masses via a small number of firms with tremendous market powers (Google, Facebook, a few media companies).

I'm far more concerned about that then say -- what does the Congressional party breakdown look like in 2024. What I'm describing, imo, is far more historically common and in fact is a huge danger to the quality of our democracy right now; in fact it's been deeply problematic long before Trump arrived. People can spot partisan chicanery very easily and I think the system has proven adept at fighting back against it (e.g., various potential schemes by the GOP to install themselves as the permanent party). Although I agree that's a risk. But I think the far bigger risk and frankly the far more alarming present reality is a state where democratic quality is eroded outside of the party system but by drastically unequal application of the law that both parties more or less tacitly accept.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...d-of-civil-war

I think a civil war ending in victory for the alt right is unrealistic. Something resembling a civil war where the military has to step in and then Russia/NK/Iran creating nuclear annihilation as a mistake thinking it was a good time to capitalize has a chance. Or some actual war similar to that in the COD Modern Warfare franchise (I can't believe that their single player storyline actually seems plausible now with Russian hackers taking down the American defenses and them combining with Turkey/Iran/North Korea to destroy the US)

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...d-of-civil-war

Ok, so that definition of civil war is:

Edit: As an aside I'm skeptical of the whole 'survey'. The motivation here is for sensationalism (as it always is) and so you ask people that give you the answers you want and then use vague terms like "national-security experts".

Of course in countries with a weak or non-existent military infrastructure, civil wars of attrition with set-piece battles are still possible and continue to happen. But I have no idea how anything remotely like that could play out inside USA#1 with all the war-fighting technology available. I know nothing about military strategy or tactics, so maybe this is oversimplifying things but it seems like whoever wrests control of the Pentagon wins?

A civil war is insane. A more plausible scenario is a bunch of alt-right whackos go full ****** and start more guerilla terrorism type engagements.

By that definition of "civil war" then we're already in one, pizzagate was the fort sumter.

Right. A guerrilla campaign or something like Syria are way more plausible than Civil War II.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a guerilla campaign by the left.