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5,000 for every American citizen? Might sound farfetched, but the president just proposed it https://apnews.com/article/trump-dividend-5k-5000-check-republicans-cc80644e3168acd31c892129fb849436
First of all this is obviously retarded, there's no ability to mince words here, it would be about 1.3 trillion dollars almost doubling the annual federal deficit, causing massive inflation, and generally fucking the economy. Second of all, it's obviously not happening just like the DOGE dividend and tariff dividends and all the other free money constantly promised. We all know it, there's no need to pretend that this isn't just constant lying.
Rather I'm more interested in what this suggests, here's some thoughts.
Trump is really worried about the midterms to the point he's trying to outright suggest bribing voters. This concern makes sense given the Dems have a 50% chance of a complete sweep. Trump arrived, disappointed Americans, and his legacy is already ending.
As I spoke earlier about the plan to pay parents to stay at home, it's another highlight of how modern "conservativism" just doesn't give a shit about money anymore. The entire concept of fiscal responsibility is just a joke now. If we take the president seriously (which I would hope we could given the prestige of the office but obviously we can not), it's one of the most destructive singular policies someone could possibly suggest.
Likewise, there's not even an attempt to hide the corruption anymore. I can not even imagine how much more blatant he could get that this is attempted bribery. People can play the whataboutism game of former admins if they want, but at least those had the shame to hide it behind closed doors a bit.
The magical tariffs continue to do everything. Trump has promised so much with tariff revenue (a number I can't even cite him on since like many of his claims, it fluctuates widely). CATO has an excellent list of everything they're claimed to fund. It's not just fiscal responsibility that is a joke, the entire idea of government funding has become one.
And this isn't occuring in isolation, it's another sign of the GOP transformation into a populism powered welfare socialist party. Fiscal responsibility is a joke, redistribution from the rich to the poor in bribes is based, trade is evil and companies should be owned by the government.
And what political coalition now exists to point out the obvious and say this isn't smart? The stereotypical conservative response before was "how will we pay for that?" in regards to big sending. The response now is crickets. Negative polarization has gone so far that the DSA, a group that literally calls themselves socialist are now the most free trade voting bloc, so will we reverse polarize ourselves into a small government balanced budget "socialist" president at some point?
But most importantly, what does this say about politics now where promising $1.35 trillion in direct payments to voters is presented as the conservative campaign message. How much further into the slop can we possibly descend, and how we can ever pull ourselves out of it? Maybe the Dems can just promise 5,001 dollars or something.
Can we just agree Trump is now Caesar?
I think it’s clear the American Republic has fallen. The question is will we get an Augustus?
Democracy just doesn’t work in non Anglo and definitely non European societies. It’s time for an emperor.
Edit: I’m probably being too dramatic. It likely felt like the Republic had fallen during the last migration wave in the thirties and fourties. But we likely only have a window to fix it.
If we're insisting on historical analogies, Trump is a less dignified Peron, but if we're actually exercising our faculties we should realize that these analogies obscure more then they reveal.
Japan and Taiwan seem to manage alright (admittedly, Japanese democracy is kind of weird by western standards, but they have real elections and democratic accountability); the South Koreans got off to a rough start but pulled themselves together in the past few decades; non-Anglo western Europe has unambiguously functional democracies, including some of the most desirable countries to live on the planet; much of post-Soviet Eastern Europe has done quite well for itself under democracy despite a lack of democratic traditions to fall back on.
I don't know on what basis you declare "democracy doesn't work" versus the US have a current problem with an anti-democratic right-wing populist president and his cult of personality. If anything, the evidence points the opposite direction - nearly all of the most functional countries in the world are democracies and virtually none are autocracies.
Democracies are undermined in the long term by unassimilated ethnic or religious minorities which vote for political parties that promise them material benefits at public expense.
Some small degree of ethnic or religious differences is sustainable in a democracy, but in general democracies provide better governance with a population that has one dominant ethnicity and one dominant religion. See Taiwan, Japan, and most of the successful and stable Euro democracies.
This is both different from Opt-out's initial proposition (that democracy was only compatible with Anglo/European cultures) and doesn't seem to match empirical evidence either. The UK is a multi-ethnic democracy and has been since the 19th century (arguably earlier, though its democratic credentials were more contestable before 19th century reforms). The US has had a more or less continuous infusion of ethnic and religious minorities for its entire existence (many of whom remain both unassimilated and uncontroversial, e.g. the enormous number of Catholics who failed to convert to the dominant religion in the US). Patronage relationships between voters and politicians is a problem in Latin American democracies, but this does not follow ethnic or religious lines. Hell, India is ridiculously multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and its rapid economic growth continues apace.
This line of thinking seems to be taking the US' relatively unusual system with respect to durable anti-black racism and concluding that it is a) a universal feature of democracy, rather than a particular problem with a large block of American voters being hostile to African-American civil rights b) an existential problem for democracy.
Nonsense. The UK had been effectively genetically unified for a thousand years, we didn't have any meaningful numbers of non-native-ethnics in the UK until the second half of the 20th century and they didn't have meaningful political representation until the 70s. If by multi-ethnic you mean Scottish and Irish then you have to deal with the fact that they are more similar to the English than to any other group of people by genetic distance, far more so than eg the average Portuguese to the average Spaniard. There is nothing in English history that even approximates the current position of having 10% of the population coming from different continents.
Ethnicity is not a function of genetics. Balkan slavs (e.g. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes) have a high degree of genetic proximity and yet would generally take exception to the proposition that they are basically one people.
Unless we're positing some kind of psycho-genetic resonance, genetic proximity of the English, Scots, and Welsh is irrelevant to the hypothesis. The important thing is that they regard themselves and each other as being distinct peoples.
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