Don’t worry, one responsible billionaire will step in and put things right.
Anyone else have fantasies where aliens hover over the whitehouse?
cHeCkS aNd BaLaNcEs
If you pretend for a second this is a HoI4-like historical simulation, it’d be really interesting to see what the american dictatorship is going be like. Are we talking populist murder-happy forever-revolution? Shut-the-fuck-up-or-else secret police state? A digital surveillance state with never seen before levels of control? The suspense!
Alas, we live on this planet. Bummer.
More of what already works. Keep the masses busy with Disney, Fox, and fast food. Divide the population with wedge issues like abortion, LGBT, guns, etc. Give outsized presence to Trump‘s topics in corporate media. Consolidate media ownership further. Go hard on nationalist and imperialist rhetoric (MAGA). Wave the flag and cross. Blame immigrants. Blame foreigners. Stoke racial tensions. All the while make shitloads of money by manipulating the market and cutting regulation. Run elections but make sure democrats always lose. Depoliticize the population. Start a war. Spread so much crap information that people tune out. Privatize everything, empower billionaires.
Most of this was done by the Russians to destabilize America:
“Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke “Afro-American racists” to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present-day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.”
Just because fascism was depicted in a video game doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.
If there’s anything to fault games like HoI4 for, it would be that it doesn’t really depict how bad fascism is, it’s basically just choosing which team you’re on and which buffs you’ll get. I think the devs just expected people to know how bad it is from understanding history, but maybe people really do think of it like choosing a team.
If we got rid of the unconstitutional “executive order” system, this couldn’t happen.
Specifically unchecked authority. Executive orders are just as bad as legislation from the bench, or judgement by legislation. Whenever one branch of government overreaches into another’s territory, there should be hell to pay. But our system was established with the idea that the three branches would be fundamentally adversarial. The moment there’s any hint of cronyism, we’re screwed. Washington warned us against parties, others warned against the two-party system. Eisenhower warned us that the MIC would control both parties. Goldwater warned us that the MIC & the cult religions would take over.
We failed to heed the warnings. Here we stand.
Executive Orders aren’t unconstitutional on their own.
The president can do meaningless gestures in an Executive Order, like declare a happy birthday to a foreign head of state or something, and that’s not unconstitutional.
The president can also exercise the inherent constitutional powers of the office through executive order, too: grant a military medal to somebody, tell executive branch employees that they have Christmas Eve off, provide for a system of classifying state secrets, etc. Those might have real effects, but so long as it’s the exercise of power that the presidency actually has, there’s nothing unconstitutional about that.
Then the president can also exercise the powers given by Congress: tell the EPA to start a rulemaking process, declare a public health emergency and invoke some of the powers under the procedures previously defined by Congress, etc. If the powers involved were granted by Congress, and the power itself was not unconstitutional, then there’s no problem there.
The big issue is that a lot of people misunderstand when an executive order is performative and has no legal effect, or when an executive order merely directs an agency to do something with legal effect. That agency’s actions need to be evaluated for legality, but the executive order itself does nothing, except communicates the president’s preferences to that agency in a public way. The president could just as easily call up that agency head by phone and say the same thing, and wouldn’t even need to publish that order.
It’s not the procedure that’s unconstitutional. It’s the actual contents and substance of the orders that are probably illegal.
‘Relatively’ doing a lot of heavy lifting here.