“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
How much time would you need and what would you do?
I effectively answered this in the comment to M0oP0o, but I’ll go into more detail here. We needed one or two more election cycles for a candidate with a populist narrative about progressive and socialist change to co-opt the Democratic party. By co-opt I mean totally control it, the way Trump has taken over the Republican party. This would be hard, since the owner class has a class interest in stopping progressives and socialists and supporting neoliberals and fascists, but it wasn’t impossible. As far as policy, the short answer is a serious of constitutional amendments to ensure majority rule in all branches of government and mandate worker own corporations while also completely redistributing wealth.
Considering the death toll and the long term destruction to the Earth’s environment a four year Trump term would cause, it seems like it would be worth it to go for a political Hail Mary. Especially when a christo-fascist regime starting with Trump will undoubtedly last much longer than four years. The damage will not be constrained to America, but will be global.
Not mention people seem to forget that before Nazi Germany was defeated it conquered most of continental Europe. Even if it doesn’t happen in the next four years, this fascist Trump administration is laying the ground work for conquering North America. People on lemmy tend to use the word imperialism a lot when describing America. So they jump ahead to assuming that American empire is dying when it is American democracy that has died. American empire is getting started now. In the sense that America, as a fascist nation, is going to exert itself on everyone it deems to be in its regional sphere of influence. I don’t know how long it will last, but it’s going to take a lot to stop North America from becoming a one to one match with America.
It is theoretically possible to get out of this in the next elections, but it was highly unlikely before Trump’s inauguration. Now that he’s trying to tip the scales in his favor in future elections this becomes even more increasingly unlikely. The nature of fascist regimes is that the dictator prioritizes loyalty over everything. Which means competent individuals are completely overlooked for consideration in hiring and appointments. Hence fascist incompetence. We cannot rule fascist incompetence out, but we cannot predict where it will strike. Incompetence could cause the fascists to lose at the ballot box, but it could also strike when they try to invade a neighbor. Since we don’t know when or how an opportunity will arise we have to keep an open mind so we can exploit it when it does.
The 2024 election was our last scheduled opportunity to defeat fascists. So we really should have given it everything we had while we had a chance even if it was a long shot. We don’t know when we will get another now. It might be in 2026 and 2028 with elections. Or it might be in 2029, in a completely hypothetical scenario, where after winning a third term Trump dies of old age and infighting creates an opportunity for rebellion. We’ve gone from having a regularly scheduled opportunity to try to make things better to who knows when we get another. And we still have to do all the same work we had to do before, but it will be harder because now we have to defeat a fascist regime first.