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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
There needs to be a differentiation between the regime and then nation. The country can continue on with a new regime, the regime can't survive without the nation. Lots of countries have changed regime. The US can survive with a different form of government.
The US needs to avoid going bankrupt. It needs to avoid being over-run by migrants. The US should worry less about institutional restraints and realize that the US needs to reform radically to survive. The checks and balances arguments are like people in Russia in 1912 and France in 1785 talking about the need to respect the old ways. If France had been able to overcome people worrying about formal procedures in 1785 they could very well have avoided the revolution.
The US won't be able to solve its debt crisis if all procedures and checks and balances have to be followed.
Even if the US debt is unsustainable, I do not think that it puts the US into a similar situation as Tsarist Russia or the French monarchy where it is unavoidable that the streets will run red with the blood of millions.
Not every financial crisis leads to Hitler, the last one only lead to Schaeuble. While being on the receiving end of his troika was certainly unpleasant for some Eurozone countries, it also was not the Holodomor.
If the market does not feel that US$ are a good investment, it will let the US know, and their policy of borrowing to give the voters expensive gifts will stop working, even with all the checks and balances. It will certainly be painful, dropping from being #9 of PPP GDP per capita to German or Greek levels would not be fun (though the US might rank higher than either even if it's currency was not in demand, simply from tech and natural resources), but it would also not lead to a Mad Max apocalypse where gangs of cannibals roam the countryside.
I am definitely the wrong person to give a lecture on the reasons for the French revolution, but from what I recall from school, there was a conflict between the king (Luis XVI?) and some sort of proto-parliament (which WP calls Estates General). I think at some point the King decided to leave the country incognito and his countrymen took that poorly and turned him into a more portable version.
While I think it is possible that a king might have kept his head (but probably not his office), I think a reading of history where the Jacobins and sans-culottes would have been satisfied with the king just suspending a few formal procedures is likely wrong.
The French revolution happened when the king decided to call the parliament in session to address bread riots in Paris during a fiscal crisis; the parliament had so long been disused that the arguing about voting procedure spiraled into the French revolution.
Not just about voting procedure - that argument was itself a proxy for a large number of other policy fights over, e.g. getting rid of the nobility's exemption from most taxes, reform of the Gabelle and internal trade barriers, abolishment of mandatory tithes to the church/forced labor on church lands, conspiracizing about food hoarding, proto-socialistic agitators in Paris, etc.
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You mean the Estates General, right? That's the assembly that hadn't happened for a century and a half and squabbled about procedures and then split apart so the Third Estate could found the National Assembly. The Revolt of the Parliaments was a year or two earlier, and the problem there wasn't that the parliaments' judges couldn't agree with each other, it was that they could agree that even impending bankruptcy wasn't a reason to approve new taxes.
(This is confusing as hell because as far as I can tell neither the "parliaments" nor the "Estates General" assembly were actually what modern English would refer to as a "parliament", a legislative body; they were just there to give either a judicial or "popular" stamp of approval to laws that the King made?)
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