I suppose my consolation prize is that, having been vocal about all of this instead of hiding under a desk, if everything does fall apart I'll end up Marc Bloch'd by these asshats before having to live with the shame of being the broken link in a two-and-a-half-century tradition of being a republic.
Try raising an army against the enemies of the Republic
Sorry dudes, we live in the stupidest timeline— nobody gets to go down heroically like Marc Bloch. None of us are that important. Mostly we’ll die because of some treatable infection. Or we stroke out while pushing our shopping carts across an arid wasteland looking for cans to recycle.
💯 I totally agree with this whole thread. I agree that our system was reasonably well designed. During the decades leading to breakdowns of our three branches of government, Congress could have created laws to reinforce our Union. Relying on rules & norms to fill in the blanks was beyond reckless.
bsky.app/profile/tams...
2.5 centuries was a pretty good run though.
I've heard that this is the historical average lifespan of a democracy 👌
Don’t be too quick to call it, either. Things are going to get bad if we don’t reverse course soon, but it takes some *really* bad times to take down a country like the US.
All it takes is people not feeling safe enough to go to work, and we are all on a timer. 72 hours. That's it. At 24 hours, we're having a party. At 48 hours, we're panic buying. At 72 hours, people are killing their neighbors for food.
What counts as *really* bad times? We have an authoritarian government, that has taken steps to destroy our economy, our healthcare system, and our education system. Minimizing the situation doesn’t help us fix it.
The US survived the Civil War, and we’re not there yet.
How bad? Democratic politicians being executed in their homes bad? Faceless goons kidnapping people in unmarked cars bad? The wheels are well off the bus already.
Would have been nice to beat the Roman Republic.
For most of its history, the Roman Republic was smaller than the New York metropolitan area. I think just starting with the thirteen colonies beat them pretty well.
Maybe that was the mistake to begin with.
Nah. The thirteen states would never have survived on their own individual terms.
dont be so pessimistic, the united states can still live on as a creatue not too dissimilar from the diseased husk that is the russian federation if it splits apart into Sane and Insane states, well, given how long it took before constantinople fell, Newsomville, CA has a thousand years to go
“Marc Bloch’d” 😭😭😭 I mean, he was pretty badass though.
Honestly, if it all falls apart I'm going to be incredibly annoyed that the "250 year empire lifespan" dipshits will be right about us despite being entirely wrong on the concept. Because of course Trump can't miss a chance to piss me off, even when he isn't aware of it.