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Yeah, that's a plausible way it would happen. Not allowing states to disqualify Trump under the 14th amendment already provided a roadmap to making the 22nd amendment a dead letter. But you don't get to that point and also have a scenario in which Trump is losing an election.

The only question you should have for that scenario is if they make it seem like the election was a close dispute or if the official story is that Trump put up Castro-like numbers in the "election."

The GOP doesn't have the votes to lawfully overturn the 22nd amendment, so what you're really describing is flagrantly violating the Constitution to keep Trump in power indefinitely in a dictatorship. They wouldn't go through the trouble of setting up a dictatorship just to lose an election.

The argument in question is that if a politician actively works to appeal to racists in a political coalition and supports racially discriminatory policy, that means they're a fascist. I am saying this describes FDR and FDR was not a fascist. I picked FDR because he was an archenemy of fascists.

Liberals tend to dislike Citizen's United and it overturned a piece of legislation liberals widely supported. Strong civil libertarians, which sometimes overlap with liberals, but also leftists, supported it on the argument that the law in question allowed the gov to censor core political speech.

I am not Will's alt, and the conspiratorial motive you've assigned to me is just bizarre. Unfortunately, you are not a very bright person generally and tend to trust poor sources, which in this case leads you to a bad conclusion.

I'm perfectly willing to forgive FDR (to an extent) over operating within a given political reality in a given time, but I'm not the one arguing that Reagan was fascist because Reagan fostered convenient political alliances with hardcore racists.

Were Japanese citizens let out of the camps to weep at his casket? Again, how a person is understood against the backdrop of their own cultural milieu is not one in the same with who they were against an set standard. The FDR admin was incredibly racist by contemporary standards.

So what? That's not a proxy measure of how much racism exists in a given administration.

Saying, "Well, not all that racist for a 1930's Democrat, though" is not a valid response when you are attempting to define fascism in terms of whether racism is afoot.

New Deal benefits were consistently compromised with Dixiecrats to minimize or exclude benefits received by African Americans. In the 1930's, this could still plausibly come from a person understood to be personally liberal on civil rights, but would be wildly racist in the context of the 1980's.

I don't think that's a particular sound measure of how different Presidents approached racial issues. Setting aside Japanese internment as an elephant in the room, people are understood in the context of their time.

What they do with that mocking is more or less what you are pointing to, but the reason the misunderstanding persists in the first place is because they all get their ideas from each other and they repeat it a lot amongst themselves.

It's a little dumber than this in that a couple people misunderstood the difference between having a history degree in a topic relevant to civil rights discussion as the same thing as an area studies degree and that misunderstanding took off as a insult about having a degree in "black people."

They still haven't figured out the difference between a degree in reconstruction history and a degree in African American studies, I see.

When you're that wrong about something that important, that's cause to reevaluate how you conceptualize the world and it's also cause for leaders to step down. American politics is often treated like sports, but in sports GM's and coaches are fired for losses (fairly and unfairly) rather fast.

I think that's correct. I think there was a chance the night of Jan 6th (not a certainty, but a chance) that was gone after right-wing media regrouped in the following 48 or so hours. But the trial would've had its own benefits and the logic of avoiding it had an utterly broken theory of politics.

No one paid any price for being catastrophically wrong about that as best I can tell. Not leaders who led us into a ditch. Not pundits taking time out of their day to personally condescend people on social media. Not normie partisan hacks insisting they know better than their critics. No one.

The primary argument Dems offered against an extended trial of Trump in the Senate was that this would delay much needed legislation passing that would ensure Biden's popularity and defeat Trump and his movement in the court of public opinion.

(It also wasn't legislation but that's presumably you misspeaking there.)

The intent and effect of Citizens United was not "make corporations near all powerful" and corporate supremacy isn't what fascist corporatism refers to, so you're confused on both ends here. That the ACLU backed Citizens United was just meant clue you in on you misunderstanding some things.

One of the foundational ideas of American democracy is that it only is legitimate insofar as the public doesn't elect tyranny. Our founders raised with an education steeped in classics understood the argument against democracy that it leads to tyranny and spent a lot of effort to preempt that.

This is due to historical developments in-between, of course, but you don't get to cheat here if your argument is appealing to those who want to engage in racial discrimination is sufficient to diagnose fascism.

Democrats under FDR were significantly more segregationist than Republicans were under Reagan, and FDR repeatedly compromised with the segregationist faction within his own party to pass legislation.

No. Citizens United and the immigration/customs reorg into ICE is not, in fact, sufficient to describe a fascist movement. Citizens United was backed by the ACLU. That's not even an example of fascist corporatism, which we're now getting routine examples of if you're confused about what that is.

This is one of his more obscure similarities to Hitler. Secular, atheist seeming while disingenuously appearing outwardly religious to appease religious elements of his coalition. Yet, at the end of the day, has unorthodox, incoherent personal beliefs that indicate some God-fearing sentiment.

That it's happening is more serious than my frustration over any one person's capacity to have a mental log at the ready of what's happening, yes. I'm just describing a specific point of frustration.

The result of this is you never can prove that it is as bad as it actually is in back-and-forth conversation with someone who is reflexively skeptical that it could be as bad as you make it seem if you just describe what's going on at a high level.

One of my continuing sources of frustration with the Trump admin is that you see "well, that's much worse than Watergate" stories come out on a near-daily basis and it's not realistically possible to keep track of all of them in your head even as someone highly attentive to news.

Trump: I want to do good works to get into heaven.

Conservative Christians fought literal wars over disagreeing that this is a thing you can do, yet idolize Trump: *crickets*