knightly the Sneptaur

If the rising tide doesn’t lift all boats then it can’t be said to be a golden age, merely a gilded one.

It allowed segments of that generation to be comfortable at the expense of the rest of that generation.

That was the beginning of the collapse, when American politicians finally reversed the advances made by their economic base during the postwar boom and started capturing the value of our increasing productivity for themselves.

It’s the fall of the empire, America never had a golden era of the Republic.

Every accusation is a confession.

If there’s no due process then it isn’t legally a deportment. Just government sanctioned human trafficing.

It’s because the exchanges don’t want to have to maintain three times as many support staff in rotating shifts.

I highly recommend this title. It’s got a wonderfully meditative pacing.

This isn’t defeatism, it’s realism.

We’re already knee-deep in the constitutional crisis. Admitting that there’s a good chance that Trump will simply ignore the rulings against him isn’t discouraging, it’s radicalizing.

In short, we as a species have had a lot of practice designing governments in the centuries since the US constitution was written, and by their standard America is a dysfunctional backwater.

The checks and balances between the branches of our federal state were designed without political parties in mind, and they’ll need to be restructured to minimize interdepartmental collusion and prohibit self-dealing at least.

The executive should not be the sole issuer of pardons. The judiciary should be responsible for enforcing the penal system rather than the executive. The legislature should not be a competition between two sports teams. The Senate and electoral colleges shouldn’t exist. Representatives should be elected proportionally by state rather than winner-take-all for each congressional district. Recall votes should be implemented automatically if a representative trends down into negative favorability. The president must be subject to the law, and it should be easy for the citizenry to recall them as well. Judges should not be allowed to affiliate with political parties. Nobody in the government (federal or state) should be allowed to maintain ownership or control over commercial entities, and they should be audited frequently and randomly to ensure they have no conflicts of interest. The top marginal tax rate should be 100% and kick in as soon as an individual’s income exceeds some reasonable multiple of the minimum wage, which should itself be pegged to consumer price indexing of the cost to raise a family. Every elected position should have term limits. Etc etc etc.

The greatest revenge would be to simply take his money and ban him from working any jobs that pay more than minimum wage.

Rewriting the constitution is essential, or else the flaws in our government that permitted this state of affairs will not be addressed.

Rewriting the constitution is impossible, not only because of the polarized nature of our politics but because the existing system is designed to prevent amendments our rulers don’t want.

The government does not “give” power, it claims our power for its own and persists only because we allow it to.

I’ll say nothing more except to note that those who make peaceful revolution impossible also make violent revolution inevitable.

Because the system is designed to give people like us zero levers of control.

The only idealist here is the person sugesting that reform from within the system is possible.

It’s not the voters you need to resist, it’s the idea that a government can be valid when it purposefully acts against the best interests of those it is supposed to represent. Our implied consent of the governed is false and should not be respected.

The poor primary turnout isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s the inevitable result of an electoral system that is designed to prioritize money over people.

Merely improving turnout is not our goal, at best it is a means to an end. The actual end goal is the establishment of a government that represents the interests of all, but there’s no way to get there from here even with 100% turnout.

I’m not “throwing my hands up in disgust”, I’m offering a clear-eyed perspective on the challenges we face and the hardships that must be endured to achieve democracy.

If your organization isn’t treating the U.S. government as a threat actor then it can be safely ignored. If it is, then your opsec shouldn’t allow you to talk about it online.

Yeah, because America isn’t a democracy. It only pretends to be one.

There’s no fixing this without rewriting the constitution and there’s no way to do that when our politics are this dysfunctional.

Our government persists in its current form only because the American public is too cowardly to resist it. Those districts could disappear and reform overnight if enough of us stopped treating them as valid.

What country do you think we’re talking about?

Obama proved that turnout improves when politicians make specific promises about the things they’re going to fix and the only message folks got from the Harris campaign was that everything is fine and nothing needs fixing.

Nobody’s bitching about the term limits on presidents, we bitch about term limits in congress because it’s the only way to get the dinosaurs holding back progress to step down.

Maybe when the Democrats stop taking the corporate campaign dollars that align them financially with their Republican colleagues and kick out the blue MAGA assholes like Fetterman.

And once they do it, he’ll very quickly learn where real power comes from.