I think the government is like IT. The people assume they don't need it or as much of it because everything is fine. We're about to see what it's like when they fire half of the IT staff and slash the budget to ribbons.
That's a pretty good analogy IMO.
This is exactly what it is. Life is a movie and even if their guy isn't the hero, the hero will still come and save them. The complacency is astounding. I think it's because it was so long since they had any war on their soil and they have a superiority complex. Kids are indoctrinated with american superiority porn in schools, almost like religious indoctrination.
My school had tape on some of the windows, because of the bombings in WW2. They left it there on purpose as a reminder. My grandparents were adults when our country was blitzed (bombed) every night, and a lot of that history is learned and seen by every schoolkid. We remember.
The guard rails held last time. Barely. But the thing with guard rails, is that when someone smashes into them, you have to fix them or else they won't hold the next time they get smashed into. And we did fuck all to fix the government after the last trainwreck so there's no guard rails this time. There might not even be a chance to vote in a fix in a year and a half, things may be too fucked by then.
The guard rails last time where the democrats having a majority in one half of congress. That guard rail is gone.
The Neoliberals are fine with that.
They don't care if they lose, or are in the White House, they just want their half of the corpo bribe gravy train Reagan set up for them when the American people lost their vote on the shape or priorities of our economy.
Standing against the capital markets ending the country and the planet itself for short term profits would cost them those bribes. Those bribes are why most of them are in politics.
They had no incentive to fix the guard rails. Biden/Pelosi/Schumer still see Republicans as their esteemed opposition, aka partners in their culture war stoking divide and profit grift, and those with a desire to help us become a society again like AOC and Sanders as their enemies.
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/12/aoc-pelosi-oversight-committee-connolly-raskin Neoliberal priorities The month before Trump took power. Assembling Guard rails to their left, exclusively.
https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775 Neoliberal priorities in general.
Honestly I see Biden's parting comments, not actions but comments after a career of enabling oligarchs, as latent guilt by a senile old man who was an OG neoliberal sellout to the Reagan capitalist coup.
The myth of checks and balances.
The myth of checks and balances.
The myth of (checks notes) every single admirable or positive aspect I was raised to believe was true about our system of government and our values as a nation.
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.
Every single thing that has ever benefitted non-wealthy non-white non-male non-straight or non-cis people in the US has been hard won with blood over decades or centuries. And we're well on the way to undoing nearly all of those after not even two months of a despot in office.
Every thing I have ever been taught about what made the US great or special or even good has been a lie. It's very plain to see now. It turns out we had some elected people superficially following the rules, and that was really the only thing keeping it all together.
.
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.
It feels alot like margaret atwood wasn't writing fiction at the moment. The religious and/or far right wing seems to be getting their way over there and it honestly feels like the handmaids tale is their vision. At least that is my take here from the other side of the pond.
Good sci-fi is usually allegory
As an American woman, I’m just waiting for the day they disable my credit card… that’s how the show starts out.
That's scary as hell! I also worry about how the world is changing because of your current admimistration, if you can call it that, but actually fearing about your basic rights like that really sucks. Wish you all the best and hope it never comes to extremes like that!
she largely wasn't. she was writing a warning and no one took it.
Their vision is basically Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, I've been referring to them as the Gilead Party fairly often since the show came out. (I missed the book somehow.)
Well you're in luck because the book has a sequel after the success of the show
I did not know that either thank you!
Again, it’s enforced by willingness, a want to uphold the US Constitution.
Once you decide you’re done doing that the US Constitution is done.
It is done. Everyone will continue to sit on their asses waiting for a correction that will never come. It’s already broken. And people act like it’s not because they know no other way to be.
The checks and balances were there, but they've been methodically corrupted and dismantled over decades without anyone doing anything about it.
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.
Democracy is a mental construct. It only constrains you if you believe in it. But it can give you over power as long as you convince enough people to do it. It will, however, never be restored once broken through violent means without the use of violent means.
I mean the checks and balances are definitely there. They've just been taken over too. You just can't have democracy without the people having faith in democracy.
I've been asking myself since i turned old enough to vote, what the fuck happened to America's collective spine?
Another big part is that Americans have been taught that protesting is the only valid method of affecting change. Our history books spend a lot of time talking about MLK’s peaceful protests. It totally glosses over all of the violence and angry mobs that were the other side of the same coin. My history book in high school only had the Black Panthers as a footnote.
The government has a vested interest in not teaching Americans that violent protest is effective. It’s like the history books cover the American revolution, and paint the revolutionaries as proud patriots who were justified after dealing with an oppressive monarchy. And then there’s a hard pivot towards “oh and also violent protest is never okay, and you should just chant at your local park instead.”
Hell, look at the comments sections of any protest coverage, and you’ll see people blatantly stating that they’d make a point of running over protestors who blocked a highway. There are plenty of people who fully believe that protest is only supposed to be directed at the government, and should never inconvenience the citizens.
method of effecting* change
We sold our collective spines for the confidence scheme lie of oligarch urine raining down on us in the 80s.
We surrendered the class war with no terms, and have been living under class occupation ever since. Many to most Americans still defend that surrender even here at the end rather than admit the capitalists successfully played them for fools and got them to vote for their own desperation.
The Ronald Reagan Jack Welch confidence scheme was the end of the United States, it's just taken this long for a meaningful number of people to be willing to admit that we were and continue to be conned into giving away the store for not only nothing, but our own destruction. Unrestricted capitalism always leads to fascism, it is its natural goal and conclusion, a captured zombie government that exists solely to further the short term profit of big business, scapegoating using for profit media and captured political pulpits to blame the powerless without such pulpits for the capitalists sociopathic, avarice driven malice.
Citizens United was just pissing on the nation's already long dead corpse.
Died a while ago unfortunately. The realization for me was when they dems rolled over for W after the steal in Florida tho the weakness of the dems was present before even that.
Yeah that was just 12 white guys in suits chanting and it made them stop the entire recount
A democracy, if we can keep it.
Half the voting population doesn’t want to keep it.
It's arguably more than that. A lot of the people who voted Democrat don't want democracy either, they just want their neoliberals to be the ones fucking them instead of the loud crazies.
America rn is the result of over four decades of divisive propoganda efforts coming to fruition. Entire generations have grown up believing the wealthy elites of our nation are untouchable. We've been a plutocracy for at least a decade now, the mask has just fallen off.
If someone believes that USA was "blessed with stable government", then ofc they believe that some daddy is going to save them. These delusions are closely related.
Barring civil religion, the USA has had a relatively stable government during its history.
The country is on its second basic law since its founding, with the current basic law being in force for over 200 years.
There has been only one civil war and that war is long outside the memory of living Americans.
There was a recent national coup attempt in 2020, but the transition of power that the coup was trying to prevent still occurred.
National borders haven't been seriously threatened in the lifetime of its citizens, with the last loss of territory of the Philippines being carried out as a planned internal political matter.
You'd be hard pressed to find another country with that record.
The adults are supposed to be at the polls.
The adults didn't show up.
And why didn't they show up?
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