U.S. Democracy In Decline

[bush_cheney2004]

10 minutes ago, eyeball said:

It stands to reason it'll probably end that way.

Will it be as glorious?

 

It will be better...George Washington didn't have access to social media or nuclear weapons.

[eyeball]

24 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

It will be better...

It probably wouldn't take much but I'd have to see it to believe it.

24 minutes ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

George Washington didn't have access to social media or nuclear weapons.

There'll be a lot of resistance.

The people also didn't have access to social media back in Washington's day.

I'm also afraid the day will soon be upon us if it isn't already when access to nukes is easier too. Other crumbling empires out there are still crumbling after all. Who knows where or how those crumbs will fall.

Edited November 3, 2025 by eyeball

[CdnFox]

1 hour ago, User said:

Um. Nope.

We are still have no elections like always down here. 

Democracy isn’t falling apart. 

LOL so your argument is it was always fake but now the paint is peeling off?

I guess you could kind of make that argument if you wanted to and see how it went, but the bottom line is the American system works because people have faith in it. And the indications are that for the last 20 years faith has begun to fail and at this point is at a critical stage.

When nobody believes in the laws, and nobody believes in this system, and they feel disenfranchised with no hope of resolution, that's when you get lots of political violence and people picking up guns and shooting police officers they disagree with. And then it goes downhill from there.

When you make peaceful Revolution impossible you make violent revolution inevitable. JFK said that.

The American model is deteriorating. And I don't mean with just Trump or Biden, it's been walking towards this for a little while but certainly escalated heavily under Obama and you have to know that the next democrat to get in will be the democrat version of trump and we'll go even further

[User]

1 minute ago, CdnFox said:

LOL so your argument is it was always fake but now the paint is peeling off?

No. I didn’t say that at all.

I pointed out that democracy is working just fine here. 

 

[CdnFox]

1 minute ago, User said:

No. I didn’t say that at all.

I think you may have made the typo then in all honesty, You said:

"We are still have no elections like always down here. "

I thought you were making a clever joke that the elections are Rigged. I take it what you meant to say was that we still have elections like always and that the no was a mistake. Fair enough

3 minutes ago, User said:

I pointed out that democracy is working just fine here. 

But it isn't. For at least the last three elections the losing side is certain that The Winning Side cheated and more importantly is illegitimate. And that's just getting worse

There will always be a certain percentage of people who think that an election had cheating involved, and there will always be a certain amount of cheating for that matter as long as the majority of the people believe that the system is fair and honest and free you're okay.

But it's gotten to the point where the majority of people don't have faith in the election unless they won. 

And when that starts to happen democracy begins to crumble. Democracy only works as long as people believe in it

[User]

5 minutes ago, CdnFox said:

I think you may have made the typo then in all honesty, You said:

Oh yeah, stupid phone autocorrect 

[User]

8 minutes ago, CdnFox said:

But it isn't. For at least the last three elections the losing side is certain that The Winning Side cheated and more importantly is illegitimate. And that's just getting worse

This is a perception problem, not an actual problem. 
 

 

[CdnFox]

9 minutes ago, User said:

This is a perception problem, not an actual problem. 
 

 

In a democracy a perception problem is an actual problem. Democracies and government systems only work at the people believe in them. People don't have any faith in the legal system or the electoral system or the government checks and balances then  everything falls apart.

There's an old saying. If you know with certainty that you are not a twat, but everyone else thinks of you as a twat, then it doesn't matter if you're right.

And let me remind you that a fair number of people who are like-minded as you were screaming like crazy just a couple of years ago that the election had been stolen and the system was rife with fraud and rigged. 

Now it's the democrats who say that kind of stuff. Nobody has faith in the system. In Canada we hated Justin Trudeau and Justin one elections with less of the popular vote and his competitors twice. But no matter what you never heard people saying that the system was rigged.

Carney totally cheated his way in by abusing the system and still everyone accepts him as prime minister and even though they may think he's a complete slime bag who won using slime bag tricks they acknowledge that he is the legitimate prime minister

About 40% of America does not accept that trump is the legitimate president doing a legitimate president's job. And whether that's perception or not that's a problem

[User]

3 minutes ago, CdnFox said:

In a democracy a perception problem is an actual problem.

The claim here isn’t that there is a problem… or that perception isn’t one, it’s that democracy is in decline.

 

[bush_cheney2004]

58 minutes ago, CdnFox said:

...And the indications are that for the last 20 years faith has begun to fail and at this point is at a critical stage.

When nobody believes in the laws, and nobody believes in this system, and they feel disenfranchised with no hope of resolution, that's when you get lots of political violence and people picking up guns and shooting police officers they disagree with. And then it goes downhill from there.

 

 

Then why has American federal election voter turnout trended up in the past 20 years?  1960's America was far more violent than today...America survived and thrived just fine.

 

 

In comparison, Canadian federal election voter turnout has trended down for a long time:

 

Edited November 3, 2025 by bush_cheney2004