The endless stream of bad news

[_Temp. Admin.]

You're not in a liberal democracy in a country where this kind of thing is expected and unaccountable.

The United States of America is a liberal democracy?

[_EAllusion]

You're not in a liberal democracy in a country where this kind of thing is expected and unaccountable.

The United States of America is a liberal democracy?

It was. It's rapidly falling apart, which, you know, sucks.

[_EAllusion]

The regimes in the "full democracy" part of this democracy index closely map on to the true liberal democracies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

[_honorentheos]

The United States of America is a liberal democracy?

It was. It's rapidly falling apart, which, you know, sucks.

I feel like we've had this discussion multiple time where small "d" democracy and liberal values being fundamental to the concept of the American experiment flipped a few Fox News-fed foie gras brained people out. And worse, Putin explicitly attacks Western Liberal Democracy as a concept he is seeking to undermine...and had seen it as the enemy of the old Soviet state.

[_EAllusion]

I don't think you can refer to the US as a true liberal democracy until the settled aftermath of the civil rights act, and even then, *waves hand evenly in the air.* It wasn't a liberal democracy for very long. It was more a nation that had an idealized image of itself that lionizes the values of liberal democracy while falling well short in those efforts. One way to think about US history is a march of progress installing liberal democratic norms and institutions, but another is a temporary blip in the span of world history.

[_EAllusion]

Vladmir Putin and his gangster state want to dismantle Western democracies and their system of alliances. And his efforts to do so in the US are well-documented. I think focusing on this can cause people to ignore that most of this is the enemy within. An more than that, if you want to direct your ire at malign foreign influence, then Rupert Murdoch is a far bigger culprit here.

[_honorentheos]

The previous reason Putin's outspoken opposition to liberal Western democracy got brought up was to help illustrate the knee jerk reaction to "liberal" or "Democrat" manufactured by Fox is part of the problem. If a person hears, "liberal democracy" and bristles without understanding what is being said, they are being conditioned in a way that aligns with the aims of traditional enemies of the United States.

[_EAllusion]

I think that's mostly just an unfortunate coincidence of verbiage and the fact that the confusion most appeals to people who are ignorant. I don't think most disputes over liberal democracy concern the term liberal democracy, though. That's just our way of talking about a bird's eye view of more fine-grained problems. When Mitt Romney condemned Trump today, he didn't appeal to liberal democracy even though I know what he's saying is an appeal to liberal democracy.

[_EAllusion]

Now that some dust is settled, Democrats have been virtually unified in their strong stance of burying their head in the sand and hoping for the best while issuing some mean tweets.

Brian Beutler knows where this leads:

Trump: [commits hideously unpopular crime in public]

Democrats: our only tool of accountability is the election.

Trump: [commits crimes to win the election]

Democrats: see you at the ballot box in 2022, Mr. President.

[_EAllusion]

As the United States becomes a country where it is more and more obvious friends of the corrupt regime may do anything and its enemies will be pestered by malevolent application of the law, you will get more people deciding the social contract is broken and lose respect for the law. That's already happened with the intense focus on police impunity which, if it hasn't already, will probably drive up violent crime rates as people decide the the deal of society is a lie.