Earth will not care. Life on earth may suffer, but Earth will not care.
In the US, is this actually the moment past the point of no return?
Submitted 14 hours ago by Snapz@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
Treczoks@lemmy.world 59 minutes ago
themaninblack@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
It’s my point of no return. Leaving in two weeks forever. Good luck.
And009@reddthat.com 2 hours ago
Trump is all but a speck of dust in the grand scheme of time, luck gooded
jagged_circle@feddit.nl 2 hours ago
Where ya goin? And why there?
I’ve been trying to figure out the most popular countries where people are fleeing to, but I couldn’t figure out how to search for this.
Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world 58 minutes ago
Popular is irrelevant, you need to match your personality and skills with where you can thrive. Easy and familiar isn’t necessarily good.
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
Not really. Not to be dismissive of the harms of a 2nd term trump.
But you have to understand what American history has been.
People were literally enslaved in the early days, then the country was literally at war with itself over slavery. Then Jim Crow and Segregation. Black people were lynched. White mobs would kill black people.
Chinese people were targeted by the Chinese Exclusion Act and banned from entry, some were US Citizens too and they weren’t except either.
The US had a major economic crash in 1929. Got into 2 world wars. American Citizens of Japanese ancestry were literally arrested and held in camps because of their ancestry. Went through cols war, the red scare, mccathyism. People randomly getting accused of being “communists” and arrested. Unions get cracked down. Protests were brutally suppressed, more violently than in modern day. Black people protesting for their rights and took a bus down south got burned. Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. literally got assassinated.
That is the American history.
And here we are, through such a shitty history, democracy survived, and voting rights expanded to so many people. First to Black people, then to Women.
Back then a majority of the population supported segregation, institutionalized racism. But today, a majority of people are okay with interracial marriage.
I have high hopes we can survive another trump term.
It won’t be pleasent, but we’ll survive.
juli@lemmy.world 34 minutes ago
democracy survived
LMAO!!
Choosing between two candidate picked by lobbyists/corporations, and anyone else not having a slightest chance in hell isn’t a democracy, but hey, you do you.
It’s slightly better than China/Russia having a single candidate and everyone else is just for show.
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 minutes ago
It is a democracy.
Not a good type, but still a democracy.
Remember, Democracy and Autocracy isnt binary states of its either a Full Totalitarian Regime or a Full Direct Flawless Democracy.
There’s a sliding scale in between.
We don’t just go from Monarchies to a perfect Utopian Flawless Democratic system. Change is incremental.
I do agree with the sentiment that 2 party system isn’t really a good idea, that very much need to be changed.
But its not like the constitution says “The United States shall be a 2-party system”, its an emergent property of First-Past-The-Post electoral systems. But unfortunately, human brains always look for the first thing they think of, I mean “Most Votes Win” sounds simple right. People never thought about the fact that “Most” doesn’t mean majority, but by the time people realize, its too late, people go too used to it.
But its still a democracy, a very very flawed democracy. But if you argue that First-Past-The-Post isn’t a democracy, then most of the world are living in dictatorships.
Xanis@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
It should be noted that through all this people fought for those rights. So don’t fall asleep, dear America, because organizing even within small communities will make a difference.
AtomicHotSauce@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
The Beastie Boys certainly did.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The part about our history you’re forgetting is that we never, through any of that, gleefully elected a guy that has made it abundantly clear he doesn’t give a fuck about democracy and will work to subvert or destroy it if it doesn’t suit him.
This is new territory.
And we’re about to experience the deconstruction of things that will be very difficult to build back.
Your point is that we’ve been around for a few hundred years, so we can bounce back. But history would like to point out that nations that were around much longer than us have ceased to exist many times over.
I wish I had your optimism.
NineMileTower@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I feel like a lot of people online need to read this comment, go outside, and live their life. This is not defeatist, and it’s not unreal optimism. Thank you for this.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
On the other hand, do keep in mind that mighty empires have fallen. We cannot say for sure that things will be fine just because in the past the USA has survived
GelatinGeorge@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I think the problem here is the concurrent effects of climate change. The US couldn’t have picked a worse time to move from flirting with facism to full-on marrying it.
You can deal with one crisis if you’re coordinated enough but the chaos that’s already occurring with the climate and is set to become exponentially worse doesn’t give me much hope for a harmonious conclusion to this. Obviously, I hope I’m wrong and you’re right.
lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
Dont forget the trail of tears.
The US has been through a lot and will likely recover, but it would be nice to avoid making the same mistakes again. How many more people have to get hurt before humanity learns?
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
How do you replenish the oceans and maintain life for any ecosystem humanity lives off of? Most of America is set to be desert by 4 average warmth increase. You won’t grow crops outdoors. We know we are guaranteed to blow past 1.5 now without being able to stop it as are actions are to late. Yet we are saying “drill baby drill”. The topographical map will change drastically.
mvirts@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Every moment is a point of no return, unfortunately.
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
Right now my mind is at, “it very well could be, but time will tell”.
Had Trump had the right people in places to make certain decisions, it could have very well ended in 2020 just as much. Well the world did change in a big way near the end of his term, with COVID, how he botched it and how he gave corporate handout after corporate handout which caused the inflation that Biden is being blamed for.
I’ve been still grasping for ways that the US still can be saved, which there are many, but they hinge on
1A. Trump going back on many of his worst promises and not doing them, because reneging is his thing, or
1B. Trump and his team being too incompetent to enact his agenda, or
1C. The backlash to Trump’s unpopular moves creates disobedience within government, military and writ large, preventing him from enacting his agenda, and
- Democracy not being rigged during his tenure, avoiding where elections become just as meaningful as Russia’s or China’s during the 4 years.
Apepollo11@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
From an outsider’s perspective, I think a lot of people think you guys sailed past the point of no return back in the 80s.
Magister@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Reagan, he is the starting point of everything: the tax cut from 73% to 28%. USA never got back on track after this.
NABDad@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Nope. Johnson.
No, not that one.
Andrew Johnson.
So many ways it could have been better.
He could have punished the Southern Aristocracy for starting the civil war. He could have ensured that the evil that led us there was exterminated forever.
Failing that, they could have actually removed him via impeachment instead of falling just short. That would have at least established forever that the presidency is not some sacred “unimpeachable” office.
I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
But Raygun did a great break dancing set in the Olympics.
wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Remember when the entire world was convinced there was absolutely no way Bush, an idiot, could get re-elected?
kitnaht@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Nobody thought that at all. Most presidents sitting during outbreaks of war retain their positions. You’d have to have been in a complete echo chamber to believe this stance.
Today@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Nucular. 🤦
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
What?!
The 80s were fucked, but if you’re saying it was worse than the response to the Civil Rights movement…
McCarthyism…
Jim Crow…
Or the KKK destroying reconstruction…
Like, I could see saying that last one was the point, only if you start the clock immediately after resolving the civil war. Cause obviously a Civil War is what really happens after a point of no return. We lasted a couple years in between the two points.
For as fucked as the last 40 years has been, as far as America goes we’re beating the average on basic human decency.
What’s happening now isn’t new, it’s a slip backwards, which is unfortunately common when you try to fight fascism with moderate politics. It works for a little bit because they’re coasting off the last people who really fought. But all moderate politcs really are, is giving fascist time to regroup in the shadows like fucking Sauron.
It’s a cycle, and we live in a time when you can learn pretty much anything about history in a few minutes on Wikipedia
America can not afford for voters to stay ignorant. We need people who know what happened last time, what worked then, and what might work again. Stop acting like we live in unprecedented times, and start reading up on how fascism has been defeated historically.
Cuz we’re up, like it or not shits getting real again. And the more people know what we’re doing then better.
Zip2@feddit.uk 12 hours ago
You mean the 1780s, right?
OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee 6 hours ago
We don’t know.
The US came back from a US president hiring private goons to spy on his political opponents.
The US came back from a US president illegally selling weapons to Iran to fund right wing militias in South America.
The US came back from a US cabinet member taking literal bribes from oil companies to give them oil drilling rights on federal land.
The US came back from a US president illegally firing a cabinet member and installing his own lackey.
But it didn’t HAVE to.
I don’t think there’s really such a thing as a ‘point of no return’ for a Democracy. But it is possible to get to a point after which you don’t return.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
The next line of defense is 3/4 of state legislatures.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Yes.
In my opinion we’ve already passed the point of no return and recent events have just confirmed as much.
This isn’t about having differing political opinions. A profoundly unfit, amoral criminal with a very public history of being an awful person came along and started spewing extremely dangerous rhetoric, some of which is almost verbatim to Hitler’s, and our society ate it up and made him president in 2016. This man, who leads a party who courts racists/sexists for their votes, utterly failed his tenure as president, bombing his response to the greatest American crisis since WW2 and presiding over the highest White House administration turnover rate in U.S. history. Since then he has become a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and illegally attempted to overturn our democratic institutions by various means.
This go around the American people were presented with a choice between that person, who only managed to make himself appear even more unfit during this campaign season, openly stated he is anti-worker rights, and is directly responsible for removing women’s federally protected right to bodily autonomy, or a successful prosecutor with a doctorate in law, backed by a party that, despite misinformation, has a voting history proving they vote in favor of the average American FAR more than the opposing party…and Americans STILL managed to drop the ball and go with the CLEARLY worse choice. And when I say clearly, I’m talking about by every conceivable metric that exists in reality.
At this point it isn’t about Democrat vs Republican or Trump vs Kamala or Biden. It’s about the American people. We are not a society of intelligent voters. We have failed our responsibility as citizens in a democracy by being too lazy to learn and by allowing misinformation to mislead us and emotions to cloud our better judgement. We are not engaged in responsible involvement in our own politics. We gleefully elect people that only offer hate and fear and lies, despite how hard they try to prove how awful they are to us. And THAT is why we have passed the point of no return. If you remove the parties and the politicians out of the equation, you still have a society that fails at responsibly preserving a democracy. That gives in to hateful rhetoric and fear. That wants to get the better of the “others”.
There is no happy ending for a society like that. A society like that can only decline. This was not an election about one political ideology against another. It was an election about morality. And we categorically failed that moral test.
There are excuses. We’ve been through a lot. Lots of people are desperate. Desperate people make bad decisions. But the bottom line is we don’t live in a society with a majority of responsible adults making responsible, fact-based decisions about the most important things.
In the arc of history we may end up reaching a better place, but personally I believe we’re embarking on a decline that will most likely last the rest of our lives. It simply isn’t a problem that can be fixed short term. And we’re about to experience a sort of deconstruction. A deconstruction of norms. A deconstruction of institutions. A deconstruction of education and safety nets. And those things take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to build back, because it’s easier to destroy than it is to create or maintain.
Buckle up. Try to find happiness where you can. It’s probably not getting better anytime soon.
TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I’ve never been more happy to he childless by choice.
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 4 hours ago
And I’m childless, not by choice, and sadly glad too.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
I don’t understand this line of thought. As in you are childless by choice BECAUSE of what is going on in the US?
logos@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
I think it’s possibly the end of Western democracy. If Russia and China stroll through Europe with Trump’s help, that’s pretty much it, no?
Coreidan@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Naw this is ridiculous.
Everyone knows it started in the 70s and we’ve been headed down hill ever since. Reality is this country died 60 years ago. It’s just taking awhile for the wheels to fall off the bus.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Kenedy was the coup.
jagged_circle@feddit.nl 2 hours ago
What democracy? The US never had democracy
orcrist@lemm.ee 10 hours ago
No. People always want some apocalyptic ending, but there’s always a chance to make adjustments in various ways. It’s just that some solutions, the ones that are less painful and involved less people’s lives getting destroyed and less death, some of those solutions become increasingly distant.
And look, if you go back and check out the history of unions and labor rights in the US, it was a bloody history. I think we might be looking at that repeating itself. And that’s only if we’re lucky.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
So what is your solution when we blow past 4 degrees rise in temperature and most of the land on earth becomes uninhabitable? Shift all the farms up north which will die of freezes annually, or move all agriculture and life indoors permanently? Surely mining all the resources to put all of human life indoors will be a non issue? Or is it just the 5% that get indoors to survive and then the lower 90% of that 5 become the poor disadvantaged driven to be the new poor slowly? Or is your hope that the top 5% after killing most the world’s population once indoors will simply accept a form of socialism then?
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
For democracy? Yes.
The longer the rubes hold on to this pipe dream that the dems can make a come back the further we will slip and longer it will take to recover. Unfortunately I don’t think they will ever give up on the democratic party and they will spend all their political goodwill investing in this farce of a party.
Say, free and fair elections survive by some act of god. 5hat doesn’t change the fact the GOP can beat them handley in a free and fair election. The only Trump needed to cement his win was the Supreme Court to sign off on everything. Given immunity all the road blocks trump had before have been lifted.
We have till January and you will see what the executive is actually capable of, with limp dick biden kicked to the curb.
The terror that will be trumps deportation methods will have your jaw drop and I’m not kidding. We tolerated kids in cages, Abu Ghraib is coming to America and our own sex trafficker and chief will begin some truly despicable shit you better believe media capture is part of it because there is no way other country’s will be let in on this side of the veil.
I’m not a doomer. It’s not hyperbole. Im oracle and would pay my own life to be wrong.
I still am hopeful though that my country men can snap out of it and quit dismissing me in a timely manner that will allow us to actually resist this upheaval. If we wait till the midterms though, this shit is cooked packed and on the shelf.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
The longer the rubes hold on to this pipe dream that the dems
That’s how far I got before I could hear the aluminium hat.
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Progress isn’t a straight line, and sometimes there are setbacks on the way. I’m disappointed, of course, but I’m optimistic that we’ll manage.
tanisnikana@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
We may yet manage as a country, but the millions that die from this election won’t get to see it.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
And progress without testing it’s resiliency against malicious actors will not last. As much as we hate Trump being elected and staffing clowns in each position, it will test what has been made so far. Row v. Wade, as we now know, should have been stronger. The Voting Rights Act too. The states that required the law to be fair have pulled back the law and reveal little has changed.
No one likes getting burned but fire is useful for showing us what burns easily and what withstands the heat. We will rebuild stronger and know what works.
indigomirage@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
I hope not. But I am fearful that the US electorate has not grasped yet what it threw away.
4grams@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
This is based on nothing but vibes and my observations but I think so. We were cooked the moment we elected the clown the first time, just been a slower slide than I anticipated. In truth though we already had the disease at that point but it was then it became terminal.
I desperately want to be wrong and will do what I can to prove myself a moron. Fingers crossed.
AnyProgressIsGood@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
It would seem that way. The people elected a guy that tried to overthrow democracy
How do you recover from that
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
You probably don’t.
Even with a contentious subject like abortion. That’s a disagreement about a specific topic. You can reach a middle ground. It’s one of many topics to debate over and forge legislation regarding.
But the majority gleefully electing a guy that effectively looked us all straight in the face and said “I don’t give a fuck about democracy and will attempt to subvert or overthrow it if it doesn’t suit me”? Yeah, there’s really no recovering from that. At least not without a long period of serious decline and suffering, followed by lots of struggle and death to earn back what we lose.
We disrespected the shit out of our democracy and everyone that fought/died for it. There’s no way that ends well.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
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.
7fb2adfb45bafcc01c80@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I’m way more concerned with Vance. Like you say, Trump does what’s best for Trump. If Vance becomes VP for whatever reason then suddenly takes center stage.
Quadhammer@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Vance and Bannon
Modva@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
That’s up to Trump, because your vaunted checks and balances are gone.
Think he’s going to show restraint? Insight? Empathy?
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Happened 8 years ago, it wasn’t the end of America then. It won’t be the end of America now.
NineMileTower@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Be prepared for the doomers to tell you why you are wrong. God speed, brother.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 14 hours ago
Well, by now the Supreme Court has been supplanted and intent to overthrow democracy has been shown. That’s a big difference to last time. So it’s not exactly the same situation.
But we’ll see how robust American democracy is.
RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
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.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
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).
SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
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.
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.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 hours ago
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.
Wilzax@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
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.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
You don’t vote out a dictator. The only way out is through violent revolution.
Jackthelad@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Trump is the worst dictator ever, seeing as he literally got voted out last time and could do nothing about it.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 10 hours ago
No. Just the next chapter in the story.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Rome had a final chapter.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
The Germans are good at ending things, aren’t they?
aesthelete@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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 an awful trope – also played a part here.
No matter how we arrived, 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, 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.
superkret@feddit.org 14 hours ago
The US has had presidents who were literally more evil than Mr. Burns.
They haven’t been a real democracy (where the will of the majority influences policy) in decades, if ever.Climate change is still the thing that’s most likely to fuck us all, and it’s not like the US were actually helpful in that regard under Democratic leadership.
Snapz@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Would you ever allow yourself to accept that truth if so, or will you need to see actual bodies in the streets before you believe it’s over?
ShepherdPie@midwest.social 14 hours ago
This isn’t something you’ll be able to determine in the moment. It will only be clear in hindsight.
Snapz@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
People do see it, it’s not easy to see it and act, but they did. I know directly of people that gave up ownership of multiple factories and a very comfortable life in Germany in about this phase of the fascist uprising there. They left to America and Australia, split family, with what they could carry, and started back over from a very modest place. Not too long after, the worst gained momentum in Germany, nazis took over the factories and a horrible fate befell many in their community who didn’t acct when they could have.
theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
The exact point will be the advent of the internet.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
USA was still very much on the rise at the advent of the internet. If you define the advent of the internet to be Arpanet, then that was 1969, the same year the USA landed on the moon. If you define the advent of the internet to be the first use of the World Wide Web that would be 1989 the same year the Berlin wall came down and 3 years before the Soviet Union collapsed, which was arguably the most powerful the USA has ever been as it was before China’s rise.
AliSaket@mander.xyz 25 minutes ago
Outside perspective: It doesn’t have to be. It is the moment democracy, its values and its people are tested. The path towards open dictatorship and/or fascism is not set in stone. What is clear is that some setbacks, even catastrophic setbacks, are unavoidable. But as a whole the free-fall can be avoided and you can bounce back from setbacks, even if it takes time. This is actually somewhat universal, since it’s not only the U.S. which is sliding more and more towards fascistic or anti-democratic tendencies. It’s just that, like with so many other things, everything does seem to be bigger in the U.S. (and Texas).
Although I’m sure a lot are feeling economic pain and/or are generally under stress and uncertainty (IIRC 50% of households struggle to make an unplanned $1000 expense), and I don’t expect it to get better under the new administration, the U.S. is still a federated system. If you look at what affects your daily lives directly, a lot more is done on a local and state level, than on the federal level.
From where I’m standing, organizing with like-minded people in your community around issues is the most promising way to go. Unfortunately the issues are back to basics issues like human rights and democratic principles, but that’s where we are. This entails more than just protesting, but actively pressuring elected officials around legislation proposals. Suggest ballot measures (find out how such a measure gets to the ballot in the first place, because it’s very different depending on where you are). And of course having people run for office and for the others to support them to get in, and get the anti-democratic forces out, once it is time. Don’t succumb to the nationalization of local elections. People can be reached way better and more directly on the local level, when they can see it directly affecting their lives and talking to the people responsible directly than for anything happening in Washington D.C. Counter the anti-democracy spewing media outlets with true alternatives (maybe there’s an entrepreneurial-minded person wanting to found a cooperative media outlet).
It sounds like a lot to do. But you are more, than you think. Even the disillusioned might be good allies. Take yes for an answer. And more people than you might expect have been part of ‘the struggle’ for a long time. Welcome them. And yes: Coordinate with and support other local actions.
Another view on what will happen with the federal institutions: Although Trump will put more loyalists than ever in powerful stations, there will remain many (even among the loyalists) who profit from the system’s status quo. This includes the Supreme Court justices and ironically corporate goons. So in furthering their own advantage, they might resist things leading to an overall degradation. Of course they will go along with and actively lobby for anything that gives them more power at the expense of the general populace, but that is already the case. Again, if you make unlikely allies on single issues: Take yes for an answer.
Bottom line: Democracy and basic rights are ideas, made by humans. And they can only survive, as long as we believe in and fight for them. Always keep the belief, always keep on fighting. If you hit your head and fall down: Get back up. As the saying goes: This is a marathon, not a sprint. All the best!