I mean, Princeton released a study over a decade that the U.S. was no longer a democracy but an oligarchy. I understand that the author means where descending into authoritarianism, but this didn't start with Trump, and we left democracy behind a long time ago.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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The timing is worse than that. The study was only released in 2014, but it used data from 1981-2002, nearly 3 decades ago.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
Shit, I assumed that data was relatively recent to the study's publication. It doesn't even cover Citizens United!
It's not news. My personal date for the start of dictatorship in the United Stated is March 14, 2025: that's the first instance of Trump and his henchmen disobeying a court decision.
I think it was earlier, when the supreme Court ruled that the president could do what he wanted as long as it was part of his duties and THEY get to decide what is part of his duties.
Yes I did say duty. Grow up.
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IMO it's the day he took power the second time.
As he said plainly, "I'll be a dictator from day one". And then millions of Americans looked at his record, looked at all the crimes he'd been found guilty of, considered his promise, and voted for him anyway.
Real Darwin Award shit.
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I would trace it back to September 11, 2001 at least. Specifically, the highly authoritarian response to that. There's a direct line from what the US government started doing then to what they're doing now.
Yes indeed. Bin Laden can be proud, the terrorists won
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It happened November 5th 2024 when he, Elon and Putin stole the election. We've been cooked ever since.
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They decided to wait and see if Trump won, and if Homan then accepted bribes. It would be a much more airtight case. So the Biden people handed the investigation off to the Trump people, no doubt holding out the vain hope that the career people would persuade the political people that someone taking a bag of cash was something that ought to be investigated.
The fucking ineptitude of the Liberal elites never ceases to amaze me.
They're not inept, they're corrupt
Little bit of column A, little bit of column B
The reality is that the democrats would much rather have a fascist dictatorship, than work in the interest of the people. The answer to "why?" has always, and will always be "money". They sold out the american people to fascists, because openly taking bribes is more important than the lives of minorities.
The democrats have held a trifecta of power twice in the past 15 years, and both times they have managed to do absolutely fuck all. Why? Because they weren't paid to actually do any of the things they promised their voters. They just used those talking points because people would vote for them.
More specifically, because they need to maintain the capitalist status quo that they sincerely believe in (it works for them!), so they believe fascism to be the lesser evil. And they think they can control fascism, just like last time.
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This is only news for brain-damaged americans.
Land of the $2-trillion military budget, and the biggest prison population. and in the last two years, your elected policitians sent $30 billions from your taxes to a genocidal aparthied because they represent and serve the interests of another country
Was it a democracy when women and people of color couldn't vote?
Was it a democracy when the two party system artificially limited your options in the voting booth?
I don't think it was ever a democracy.
Was it a democracy
Well, yes. Both the ancient forms of governance resembling what we call democracy and the Greek system that gives us the word Democracy typically excluded people to various degrees. Don't take that as a value judgement, I support anything that enfranchises more people, not less but I won't try to redefine words
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Nearly 1.5 million people can't vote in Florida because they've been to prison.
Guess how many votes Trump won Florida by in 2024?
There was a time when we considered countries where women couldn't vote as a "democracy"
The goal posts shifted. As they should.
In the 21st century, I don't think we can call a system without rank choice voting a democracy. The US has never met modern standards of a Democracy
That eliminates pretty much the entire commonwealth except Australia, right?
I think clinging on to inherited royalty is another big point against "democracy", no matter how vestigial.
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This headline is so fucking wrong it might as well be misinformation...
Like, it's the same flawed thinking that says there can't be a communist democracy.
We're 100% an oligarchy, and a sham if a democracy...
But that's not new at all, trump is just terrible at hiding shit.
Telling people "America isn't a democracy" like some just changed isn't helping anything
Quasi-democracy is probably the best way to put it. To be an outright oligarchy that would have to be a more explicit thing. Instead we have what masquerades as a democracy despite actually functioning as an oligarchy
Instead we have what masquerades as a democracy despite actually functioning as an oligarchy
Just like every other oligarchy...
I'll never understand why people legitimate think people used to run around saying:
I'm evil, am doing evil things, everyone knows it, but no one will stop me.
Propaganda has been around since Og told everyone Grog just fell over for no reason and hit his head on that rock 5-10 times.
Even back to "real" oligarchs like medieval royalty, none of the peasants thought it was an oligarchy at the time. They thought royalty was chosen by God and who were they to argue with God?
By your metric of people needing to recognize in the moment, we've never had an oligarchy and never will, and you don't even seem to understand that.
The only time the populace realizes they live under an oligarchy is the short time it takes them to have a revolution.
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Yeah the billionaires run that country
The US briefly experimented with democracy during Reconstruction but that was quickly defeated and it never happened again.
Correct. The US is now one of those shit hole countries Trump keeps talking about.
Maybe none of these 1st world nations aren't what they say they are. Maybe they are more like farms and they have mastered the psychology to convince people not only to be the workers but also the product. Wealthy people making their product pay for itself to supply their greedy habits.
Tip to writers.
Please don't use regional persian slang for bribe when trying to sound sophisticated.
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Never had been
Since when was it ever a democracy ?
Yeah, ask the countries invaded and meddled by the US if they think the country is a democracy. What's happening is imperial boomerang. The quote below is very prescient and literally applicable to the US right now, emphasis is mine:
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind—it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
I don't want to sound gleeful at what is happening to the US as someone who is from a post-colonial country, but it is inevitable in the US as an imperial power that the corruption and brutality imposed on others had run out of space outside and then came back home. Imperialism, when there is no longer anywhere to conquer, conquers itself. This is what happened to many great powers of the past.
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