The Overton window is anchored by a series of landmarks. The most effective way to lose one of them, like the Constitution, is to start discussing whether it has merit.

In any kind of public, widespread platform/ venue, I agree with you 100%. Discussing whether the US is a moral entity at its root is not something you do on CNN or even Facebook, because it is going to be weaponized by the Right to paint you as anti-US to the politically-disengaged Center, and also to justify their unconstitutional actions as being less harmful via whataboutism.

I don't think Beehaw- a small, intentionally Leftist space- is equivalent. No one here is going to say, "hmm, maybe Trump ignoring the constitution is the same as people discussing whether a document that first enshrined slavery and then sustained it in a carceral system, is capable of reformation. Makes sense." Nor is anyone outside this space reading or broadcasting it. And there does have to be space for free political discussion somewhere, or you've just abdicated free speech out of fear of politicization.

You wait until the constitutional order is re-established and actors that routinely violate it are punished, and when the Overton window moves back … it’s not really to the left, it’s more towards democracy itself, then you discuss the flaws of the Constitution.

This presupposes that the form of democracy it will move "back" towards will be the same as where it was before all this. There is no reason to think that will be the case, and certainly major political events of the past in the US (Civil War, Civil Rights movement, WW2, 9/11, etc) have often included large constitutional shifts either through amendment or interpretation. This is certainly a major political event.

We could go on a tangent about whether political capital is real, and whether (if it is) we are capable of returning to where we were before even if we wanted, but suffice it to say that many people would likely disagree with the premise that we can ever perfectly revert to pre-2024 Election America. A lot of people (even in the Center) believed that our checks and balances under the Constitution would prevent a dictator. Now that we're seeing otherwise, I highly doubt most Democrat voters will ever again fully trust the Constitution to protect them, without serious amendment.

So discussing what those amendments might be, how that reform could work, or whether those protections are even possible to regain via the Constitution without e.g. giving congress or the judiciary enforcement abilities (or via some other means entirely), seems like a pretty important discussion for people to be having.

Re-establish the system that got us here in the first place? The status quo before Trump... in which Trump got elected twice? I wonder if, once balance is restored, you'll say "now's not the time to question things" again because "our people" are in power?

I'm not saying the point is to make questioning the Constitution the most important leftist platform. I'm saying that the protest moment we have here is an opportunity. The Democratic Party wants to use the opportunity to get people to vote Democrat in elections and nothing more. It's fine to vote that way, but it just creates the opportunity for the next charismatic "outsider" figure to arise after we've had a Dem administration again. My point is that the left needs to offer a real alternative to the failing constitutional system and to the dictatorship the right is offering.

The Overton window is anchored by a series of landmarks. The most effective way to lose one of them, like the Constitution, is to start discussing whether it has merit.

Yeah. Why do you think that Lemmy, a markedly leftist platform, is so inundated with people talking about how useless all our imperfect tools for making the world slightly less authoritarian are? Why do you think they're trying to get us to abandon them rather than bolstering their support?

I've been saying this for months. The people who are trying to get the left to abandon the effective means we have for shifting the overton window to the left are right-wingers or being manipulated by right-wingers.

The people who spend their days banging away about how we don't have democracy, we've never had democracy, the constitution is useless, the democrats never accomplish anything, etc, are literally agents of the right whether they know it or not. But many of them probably literally do know it.

Why do we see this more on Lemmy than in real life or on other platforms? Because we're being targeted.

You wait until the constitutional order is re-established and actors that routinely violate it are punished, and when the Overton window moves back ... it's not really to the left, it's more towards democracy itself, then you discuss the flaws of the Constitution.

But then your alleged temporary allies will turn back to enemies and you'll be back to square one with neoliberals and conservatives playing their farce of a tug of war game.

So… wait for never?