I've asked this question before and am interested, if the opinions about this changed.

[dgold@goblin.technology]

@weddige The executive branch is breaking every law they can lay their hands on, there is no action from the legislative branch's oversight functions, the judicial branch is sitting there doing the three monkeys (at best).

Its a dictatorship.

[bweller@mstdn.social]

@weddige @Bumblefish Trump said himself he would be a, "day one dictator."

That's enough for me, seeing as how it's playing out per his dictates.

[abramkedge@beige.party]

@weddige I was on a knife-edge between the first two options. I think a critical marker is that you can't vote out a dictatorship* - let's see what happens in 2028.

* In the case of the US, the dictatorship is embodied in the puppeteers, not the stooge riding the grifty-train.

[coba@gruene.social]

@weddige as long as they have free elections I´d say not yet.

wondering if there will be any elections for a next president.

[weddige@gruene.social]

@coba but how can we know if they have free elections? Waiting for 2028 (or November, if the manipulations in the midterms are egregious) makes it practically impossible to identify a dictatorship right now.

IMHO, criteria like free elections are good for a historical perspective, but severely limited for current events. Civil rights aren't taken away all at once, but "as needed". As long as the regime isn't challenged, freedoms can remain intact on paper, even though they are already gone.

[weddige@gruene.social]

@coba instead of checking if certain criteria (of a dictatorship/fascism/etc.) are fulfilled, I think it's better to look at instances where norms have been challenged and check whether they have been upheld.

Right now, it doesn't matter if Trump already declared himself leader for life, but only if it's likely that he will allow fair elections, and would accept the result if he lost, based on his past actions.

[weddige@gruene.social]

@coba for the question if the USA has the rule of law, it doesn't really matter if the Supreme Court still exists, but that it already had the chance to stop Trump and didn't.

It doesn't matter that the Congress has the power to impeach Trump, because it already had the chance and didn't.

Not only in the US, it's true that by waiting to admit the obvious until we can be sure, without a doubt, that democracy is gone, we allow it to happen!

[nonehitwonder@tenforward.social]

@weddige I would challenge anyone to look up "dictatorship" and tell me that what is described isn't exactly what has happened in the United States.

[maddiem4@raphus.social]

@weddige I answered "currently a dictatorship", but I think it's actually a very specific and subtle situation that we don't currently have good verbiage for.

At every job I've worked, I've inherited some big lump of legacy code. Now, we fully owned the code, we could technically make any changes we wanted to it and nobody could stop us. But of course, most changes we wanted to make were really ambitious, so we had to break them down into a series of smaller steps, incrementally dismantling the previous baked-in assumptions and obstacles of the existing system, with clear roadmaps how to get where we wanted to go.

The Trump admin is in this exact position of power over the United States government, and using that power for evil. No blue tie asking for your money is stopping this guy, and few are even trying to slow him down. The resistance is mostly coming from inertia and bureaucracy, which are non-sentient and mutable legacy code.

[kluthulhu@infosec.exchange]

@weddige Is, and always has been, a feudal aristocracy.