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Accountability is coup-complete. The entire system as it exists is designed to launder and diffuse responsibility. You'd have to change how things work in a fundamental sense that requires a circulation of elites. The current ones can't be accountable because they rule through unaccountability.
I think what tends to happen is that lack of accountability makes it almost impossible for the system to correct course even as the need for such course-correction becomes absolutely obvious. There's no mechanism for filtering out incompetents, there's no feedback for the leaders to judge which decisions are actually improving matters, so we get the iron star catastrophe.
Covid kinda showed many of the seams. It really seems like the elites are running very low on effective tactics for reigning in discontent. I don't see how they'll effectively resolve the Israel-Palestine divide without alienating some large portion of the population. It seems unlikely that they'll achieve true 'victory' in Ukraine. They can't even solve the problem of drug overdose deaths in the heart of the capital, let alone the outer reaches of the empire.
You can only run away from consequences for so long. I'd wager most of them are gambling that they'll be dead before the chickens actually come home to roost.
Why wouldn't "brute force" be effective tactic enough?
By the time you're resorting to pure brute force you've probably lost so much legitimacy that you're asking for revolution or coup.
Of course this doesn't mean it'll actually happen.
From where? I know I keep harping on the German Peasants' War, but I think it's a good analogy for the relative positions of ordinary citizens and professional militaries. Modern governments like that of the USA are effectively "rebellion-proof." It wouldn't matter if tens of millions of gun-owning Americans decided to rise up in revolution, because it would only take ten thousand or so regime-loyal troops to crush them utterly.
As for coups, the upper ranks have all been too politically captured to want to carry out a coup, and the lower ranks don't have the capacity to organize one.
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Plurality failing the Independence of clones criterion so badly might suggest the easiest step forward. Switch to approval voting, where sparking a competition between "President Mediocre" vs "President AlsoMediocreButWillFireTheIdiots" no longer risks splitting the vote and getting "President Bad" elected instead (all candidate evaluations in the mind of a partisan voter, not necessarily objective), and we might then see a lot more voter control over the worst bureaucrats.
Though ... I can't actually say that that's not "coup-complete" still. It's hard for me to picture the existing parties agreeing to a voting system that will take away their insiders' power, and it's easy for me to picture a world where voters have been granted a way to remove idiot bureaucrats but never exercise that control because the marginal voters are also idiots.
Much as my Liberal heart loves electoral design, changes to the election system not only basically impossible, they are also not enough. Trump is about as much of an outsider as you're ever going to get and even if we replaced him with a smooth operator who actually wants to clear-them-out he couldn't do a damn thing because generals would tell him to fuck off, Hawaiian judges would stall his every move and the actual power structure would continue to tick the boxes it wants to tick while throwing just enough Russia related nonsense at him to keep him occupied. I say this completely independently of a partisan agenda, a President Sanders would have had the exact same issues.
The only way out of this is for power to diffuse away from administrations and into new hands. The only new set of hands available being private businessmen (as opposed to public corporations) and left wing postmodern revolutionaries.
The former seem to actually be telegraphing an attack at the moment (we shall see if it manifests into anything if Trump wins), and the latter have apparently made their move over Palestine and been soundly beat (though not into submission yet) by Israeli interests.
The tools are available for those who want to fight the battle though, especially with Chevron gone. But I've seen nothing ever happen for too long to expect an actual realignment in my lifetime without collapse.
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