No Stupid Questions

That's up to Trump, because your vaunted checks and balances are gone.

Think he's going to show restraint? Insight? Empathy?

I was as surprised and disappointed as anyone, and I think we WILL take a few more steps backwards over the next few years, but I don't expect an unstoppable fall into fascism.

Most of the votes for Trump weren't actually FOR Trump. They were against the current situation they are in. They see him as the revolution. The anti-politician that will bring real change. They think all his court battles are the "Man" trying to hold him down and keep him from disrupting a system that gave up on its people long ago.

Of course that's all bullshit, but, assuming that all "normal" people can see through his lies and that only evil, woman hating racists would support him, is a big part of why he was elected.

Trump denied Project 2025 because he knew most people wouldn't want it. (Honestly, I would be surprised if he even knew what was in it) If he lets the Christian nationalists push that whole agenda on day one, he'll become the oppressive government that is taking away their freedoms. And nothing is more important to Trump than making Trump look good.

I think the real answer is that we end up kind of like the UK -- going from the worlds ultra-dominant superpower to a sort of slow regression to the mean, as China, India and others take the spotlight.

When you look at what China is doing with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their move to dominate the transportation infrastructure of developing nations -- the US isn't anywhere near equipped to counter that. We're still in a cold war mentality thinking that we will dominate as the world's police force.

Meanwhile, all the actual economies will be run by Chinese companies operating with state support.

Unless there's nuclear war, there's no such thing as the point of no return. Just a further slide into more egregious civil rights violations. Eventually it will get better, hopefully through democratic means and not violent ones.

Doubt it.

The rest of the world isn't lucky enough to never have to hear about the perpetual US election cycle again, and frankly there's just too much money in it for them to give it up.

It'll be a fucking clown show for the next four years though.

Sure the US may be past it's glory days. Hell even the Rand Corporation (who write a bunch of stuff for govt leaders and other high ups) says it's been trending downhill since some point in the early 2000s. They didn't mention 9/11 but it seems like a good historical milestone.

Essentially the paper says the last 200 years have been an anomaly and we're slowly sliding back to historical norms. They call it the neomedieval era and it's not just the US.

Yeah pretty much. We're 2-3 generations deep into a cultural expectation that "some one else" will deal with all these problems.

The constant threat of this being "the most important election of our lives", when the party making that argument campaigned as if the outcomes were irrelevant (because from their privileged perspective, the outcomes are irrelevant).

Back during covid a boat got turned a bit sideways in a canal and it seemed like the whole world economy was going to collapse. The system we have is actually incredibly fragile and built largely on trust, both in one another but also in institutions and systems. Not only the US, but western Europe is about to get smacked up-side the head by the 2x4 of failing to maintain a civil society (US at fault within its borders, EU at fault beyond its borders).

Don't believe there really is an absolute point of no return without the plot of Genesis of the Daleks happening. The future is long, and we don't know how the next four to eight years will play out, but dictatorships have risen and fallen before. Spain was a fascist dictatorship for decades, now it isn't. Also, lots of people died in the meantime and not all vestiges of the dictatorship are gone.

Assuming you are talking about who won the US presidential election. Happened 8 years ago too, it wasn't the end of America then. It won't be the end of America now.

Did Britain or Rome know the moments when Pax Britannia or Pax Romana had hit their tipping point to decline? I doubt it.

I think the tipping point will only be observable through the lens of history many years from now with a subject heading of: This event was the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.

One definition of a collapse is a sudden drastic reduction in the complexity of a thing.

I'm not sure whether we're going to have a societal collapse or a slow decline, but either way the US is in a downward spiral. I think Trump increases the likelihood of us going into the collapse trajectory.

All that said, on the other side of a collapse, there is some room for hope. The incendiary portion of the collapse will definitely suck to live through (if you're lucky enough to do so), but our country could probably use some simplification long-term because the people within it largely cannot navigate a country this byzantine. A lot of this country's systems are too complex for an average person to understand let alone administer.

Most of these complexities were probably birthed via intentional decisions by the system creators, and others were a product of unintended consequences. I think the gap in education between our commoners and "the elite" -- to borrow a tired trope -- also played a part here.

No matter how we arrived at this point, I don't think the current population can actually operate these systems anymore and long-term one way or another our people require a drastic reduction in the complexity of our society.

There is another path in which the United States invests more in education and scales up the average intelligence of its citizens so that they can handle the complexity of modern life, understand nuance, do research, and create better policy....but at this point I think we're frankly too far fucked to ever go down that path.