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This is the most depressing thing on my mental radar right now. Feels like I’m back at square one given I grew up in an Indian state (Bihar) where elections were a joke, “booth capturing” by gangsters was rampant, and mafia orgs of various sorts determined who go elected.
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Americans don’t realize just how real the possibility of collapse of the electoral apparatus is. This is what it looks like. It’s not science fiction. Far too many of us from “democracies” have lived this shit that’s coming to the US now.
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At least things like gerrymandering and the electoral college have a veneer of procedural legitimacy to them. You may not like those things but at least they’re part of a legal scheme you can consent to. This is a kind of next level lawlessness taking root.
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I no longer trust native-born Americans’ sense of what’s going on. Exceptionalism is too deeply ingrained in your psyches for you to recognize how *not* unprecedented this is.
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You think you’re headed for an impossible state and surely something will stop it. The rest of the world sees reversion to the global historical mean 😖 This might be the least exceptional chapter in American history.
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To me it feels like a fatal flaw in our constitution. We didn’t plan for this level of corruption across all three branches of government (& so much of civil society). But you’re right it isn’t exceptional. It’s a universal flaw: Law is only as good as the humans executing it.
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