I am increasingly pessimistic about the long term future of the US. What are the chances that we will still be one country in a generation or two? Trump might have poured gasoline on the fire, but the federal government has been in decline for years. Congress is completely dysfunctional. The filibuster prevents the senate from doing anything. The president is at war with the civil servants and more interested in grift, punishing percieved enemies and erecting monuments to himself instead actually leading.

Addressing climate change requires massive changes and a lot of political courage. There is none.

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oscillonoscope 2 days ago | parent [-]

There is no legal mechanism left that could correct course at this point. You would need to have a constitutional amendment to drastically reshape government and that's DOA. All that's left is snow decline and eventual dissolution

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dragonwriter 2 days ago | parent [-]

The absence of a legal mechanism does not imply the absence of a mechanism (or even the absence of a peaceful mechanism.)

While there is a legal process for amending the Constitution which, as you note, is likely intractable in the status quo conditions, Constitutional change—whether peaceful (even if there is the implicit consequence of force if compromise is not reached) or not—historically and globally is often an extralegal process that is retrospectively legalized, rather than a legal process under pre-existing rules.

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iamnothere 2 days ago | parent [-]

A sufficient crisis could trigger an Article V convention, which already has a large amount of states pledged to join, but the changes coming out of such a convention probably aren’t going to be good for the public.

	▲	dragonwriter 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		An Article V convention is a legal process and Amendments proposed by such a convention have the same ratification threshold (which is the barrier, not the proposal threshold in Congress) as Amendments that are Congressionally proposed. Now, an Art V convention could be seized on as an opportunity for organizing extralegal change, but then Art V process obviously isn’t necessary precondition for that, just a potential opportunity.