.

Honestly, I am just hoping that the new country/countries that emerge from the smoking heap of America will try harder to enshrine democracy. Likely that will take decades.

hijacks thread

Whoa. Instance switch? Or impostor? 🤔

I’m in my 50s. Somewhere WAY down the list of shit that I’m absolutely furious about is that I can no longer pretend that a single thing about US values or the resilient and balanced design of our government has turned out to be true.

You should be mad at yourself for believing this bullshit for 50+ years.

And when you complain, the rest of the world calls you alarmist

That’s just it. There is no perfect government. The government is made of humans, and humans are imperfect. Any government, no matter how pure/noble its founding intentions, will eventually become corrupt need to be replaced.

We’re finally feeling that in America after a good 250 year run.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman sent to analyze the American government in its early days— specifically studying its checks and balances—called it way back in 1835. There’s nothing to stop tyranny in America. Well worth reading his writings, “Democracy in America.”

The checks and balances were never what they were advertised to be. They haven't really been corrupted, just revealed to be more something people followed out of convention than an actual working system.

The US founding fathers were a bunch of mainly rich dudes, mostly in their 20s, from the 1700s. Their knowledge was limited to what a rich kid could in the 1700s. They had a decent grasp on how the English parliamentary system worked, some vague ideas of how systems worked in ancient Rome and Greece, they'd read a bunch of philosophers, and had a lot of youthful enthusiasm.

They come from a time 200 years before Game Theory and a century before the beginnings of Political Science. When they came up with these checks and balances, they didn't do it in any kind of formal way, trying to attack the system as a clever adversary would. There were all kinds of assumptions baked into their models of how the system would work that they never questioned. As a result, their system of checks and balances doesn't stand up to a popular party that wants the US to be a dictatorship.

States, rule of law, democracy (and every other government type) and constitutions are mental constructs. They are linked together by the idea of a natural dependency. The only thing upholding any and all of these is the willingness to uphold the oath sworn by all those granted public authority, be that legislature, executive or judicial. They all check each other - in theory. Which is why they swear on the constitution - not a person - because that is the very thing that granted them the power and that acts as the web that weaves them all together.

If they stop checking and balancing each other than there's nothing holding the statedom together - there's afterall no natural consequence to breaking the web

Yeah... Kinda miffs people blaming the balances and checks. Like, they are there. They're just being ignored. Lmfao. Cause some dipshits gave the fascists all 3 branches