“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
This article must be written by naive children. The moment “American Democracy” died would be with the Patriot Act after 911.
Snowden, Assange and all that.
You sure it wasn’t when we had the balls to write that all men are created equal while simultaneously denying the rights of anyone who wasn’t a rich man?
Like I know it was a different time but the plot was lost long ago.
Most “democracies” started off with slavery so I think the counting needs to start somewhere in the middle.
We’re supposed to evolve, intellectually and physically. It looks like we tried for a bit, then got way too comfortable/complacent, blissfully ignorant that our (relatively) high standards of living came at the expense of people far away that we didn’t see, routinely. The banana republics never really went away, we just became distracted with more entertainment culture, and when something broke through, grabbed our attention and outrage briefly, we just collectively shrugged, declared there’s nothing we can do and went back to American Idol, Fear Factor, The Apprentice, Ice Road Truckers and whatever else fake reality garbage. Then it came to our doorstep and we continued doing the same, and still are. It’s almost like we need a certain level of conflict to avoid complacency.
And it was still seen as radically progressive
The moment “American Democracy” died would be with the Patriot Act after 911.
American Democracy flourished from 1864 to 1877, only to be killed by The Corrupt Bargain of Rutherford B. Hayes. It enjoyed a brief resuscitation following the 19th Amendment in 1919 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, before once again becoming moribund and unresponsive under the Nixon Administration of 1972. By the election of 2000 the institution barely demonstrated a pulse, enjoying one of the lowest turnouts in the nation’s history. Still, it was the Brooks Brother’s Riot that officially pulled the plug, with the democracy formally being pronounced dead on December 12th, twenty days later.
The Patriot Act was effectively just putting bullet holes into a corpse.
Subsequent gerrymandering in 2005, the ACORN controversy of 2009, and the 2016, 2020, and 2024 primaries were effectively just ritualized defacement of the grave.
Citizens United has entered the chat
Citizens United was about bribing the campaigns but there was still a “rule of law”.
The Patriot act basically threw the entire legal sysrem in the dumpster in a very blatant way.
Of course there were violations before that but the cut off needs to be made somewhere.
there was still a “rule of law”.
Who was actually punished for violating this rule of law?
I seem to remember a congo-line of Congressmen who flagrantly violated campaign finance laws, anti-bribery laws, and a host of other ostensibly liberal democratic strictures. But virtually all of them either had the charges dropped, were given fines far less than the sum of the corrupt money they received, or were pardoned or the decisions reversed shortly after conviction.
the cut off needs to be made somewhere
You can’t cut off what never began.
Eh, that was just a rebranding of “We the People”. Same bunch of rich white dudes with an aversion to taxes.
No, that was when we got Super Pacs which is how billionaires have a control over a majority of US Senators needed to break a filibuster.
“We the People” is how you got plantation-owning slaveholders to write the constitution (and be senators) so they could control U.S. policy despite being way fewer in number than their northern buddies. Kind of the same thing, all told.
Oligarchy masquerading as democracy.
No it was a democracy, but it wasn’t inclusive of everyone. What your argument is describing is a comprise that had to be made so that a new nation would not be divided almost immediately. Women weren’t able to vote either. Only land owning men.
But our democracy had a virtuous circle that expanded who was included in the political process. This expanded who could participate in our economic institutions as well, eventually. This is process also took place in England. And despite such an unequal start in America, it was working for most of our history.
It was with our adoption of neoliberalism in 1980 with Reagan’s election that the virtuous circle became a vicious circle. People were increasing excluded from our economic and political institutions. And our democracy has now fully transformed into a extractive fascist dictatorship.
Our capitalist system was always an extractive economic institution but our democracy had kept it in check. Things like trust busting, monopoly laws, and the New Deal prolonged the growth we were experiencing under the extractive economic institution of capitalism.
Now that our political and economic institutions are fully working in tandem as extractive institutions that growth will soon end. We can already see how Trump’s attacks on universities and scientific research are stifling innovation. Without any innovation fueling creative destruction, growth in our economy will stagnate. The extractive institutions run by the owner class will eventually run out of things to extract.
At this point it becomes a race between the collapse of America and it’s ability to consume neighboring countries in order to keep extracting. Much like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unlike Russia, even with fascist incompetence, America has the most powerful military in the world going off budget alone. It’s likely we will conquer quite a few countries before our extractive institutions cannibalize everything.
So no, not oligarchy. Not the same thing as neoliberism either. Your argument is a critique of people from over two hundred years ago from a modern moral perspective. Whether or not that’s fair, it isn’t a useful means of analysis. Even though it was not as inclusive as we would like it to have been American democracy was functionally a democracy from the beginning. And it became more inclusive as it went on. There was nothing stopping us from making different choices at critical junctures along the way that would have resulted in us reaching the kind of democracy that includes all people.
It is important to understand that this outcome was not inevitable. It’s not worth staying in the judging pit arguing who to assign blame to so we can sling mud at them. But we need to acknowledge that we failed so we can learn from this and move on. There’s no shortcut around it. The sooner we learn our lessons the sooner we can build a better world.
Or with the implementation of institutionalized slavery.
Neo libertarian with capitalism pleasure doing business with you.
Was it even alive then?
Died upon birth perhaps?
time to flee to the old world from prosecution and religious pressure lol
Electric Boogaloo
And once Trump, the GOP and the oligarchs are deposed, we should declare the American Second Republic and write a new constitution.
we should all start delegitimising the USA and call it what it is: a long lasting colony committing multiple genocides
It’s not over yet
Or as AOC would put it: “Don’t consent in advance”
TBH I think peak democracy was between 2003 and 2010 before the Citizens United decision.
It gave us Obama and Medicaid expansion.
Nah, The US hasn’t been good since before Reagan. I’d say maybe the 1950s. Maybe 60s, space race years.
Maybe for you it might have been, or maybe not, but back then we didn’t have equal rights. After that Nixon actually helped save the Whales so that was cool, but he also perpetuated the war in Vietnam for seemingly no reason at all.
We like to fantasize about the past but quality of life has only gone up and crime has only gone down long term.
I personally am riding out the storm before I make any call on this type of stuff. As much as the current president is mucking things up, I’m holding hope.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Don’t just hope, Act!
Find and join your local democratic organization. The initial cost in time is almost nothing. Just meet up and introduce yourself.
Once part of the conversation, you can help influence your local party and select candidates for local office that share your values. You can select delegates who vote in larger offices, and through them promote your goals.
It’s not perfect, and we currently don’t have a flawless democratic system, but participating only every 2-4 years during the major elections is not how you get the results you want. A lot of complaints exist online around weak candidates, or ‘opposition party’ that exists only to be a foil for the Right. Those things can only exist if we are not engaged.
The time to be engaged is NOW. Help find or support new House and Senate candidates for your state legislature as well as federal. Contest every office. Even if your precinct/district seems 100% red, not having candidates on the ballot is a huge disservice to anyone who would want to vote for them and hides our strength.
Now is the time to be loud.
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I have voted every single time I could since I got registered to vote.
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If I didn’t absolutely jumble my words and such due to some form of anxiety when speaking with people over the phone, I probably would call elected officials in my area.
Best I can do outside of voting is going to some of the protests in my area and not posting anything about what happens online for safety reasons.
reviewing my replies much later.
What you are doing is perfect. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is normally a quote around material goods, but still applies to things like time and involvement. If you are uncomfortable calling your elected officials, that’s fine. Adding a person to a protest is still an addition that shows engagement.
Your points indicate you are not only voting in presidential elections. You have choices to make things better: ‘Vote blue no matter who’, ceding your choice of “who” to others more involved; or to become involved even though it’s uncomfortable.
I’m not talking to you alone, but also to all those who read your comment, identified with it, and then could use a prod to get involved. I’m also poking at those who vote once every 4 years and are unhappy at their options.
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If you’re not good at US history: 1789 was when the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation.
all men are created equal
IS SLAVE STATE
Never has been.
Is a two party system really a democracy?
If you think so, let me pick the two options you get to choose from for the rest of your life. Does that sound appealing to you? Would just fully represent the country?
No you don’t ever get a chance to change your two options, I picked them for you. You will fall in love with one of them, the other you will hate. This is democracy, you being forced to pico from the two options I gave you.
It already was dead for a long time.
No, it wasn’t, but it’s been dying since Reagan.
Since Johnson.
But it was Hoover that laid the framework for the rampant executive abuses of Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trumpolini.
It was the Mont Pelerin Society who came up with the neoliberal ideas that Reagan implemented.
Americans have a distorted sense of what democracy is, should be. Seriously, if you think that able to choose from two almost similar political parties that never shown any interest in making life better for their electorate is the pinnacle of democracy… you are very, very wrong.
I do not consider the vicious cycle of a neoliberal democracy to be the pinnacle of democracy. Only I acknowledge that American democracy was a democracy. It was never perfect, but it didn’t have to turn out this way. We didn’t have to embrace neoliberalism in 1980 and American democracy didn’t have to die in 2024 with fascism.
This is important to state because there are misconceptions about what might happen next. We aren’t any closer to the pinnacle of democracy now. In fact, we are even further from it. This fascist dictatorship will be even harder to change than the last neoliberal democracy was.
Building inclusive institutions is hard. The further you get from them the harder it becomes. Even revolutions that seem on the surface to be a complete overthrow of the previous regime can in fact turn out to be a changing of the guard. If the institutions of a society, both political and economic, are not fundamentally and radically changed to include as many people as possible the vicious cycle is more than likely to continue. There is no such thing as a clean slate or rock bottom when it comes to how bad things can get. Things can always get worse and they will unless people learn from our mistakes and apply what we’ve learned to make things better. edit: typos
…what you call neoliberalism is nothing more than deepening inequality, empowered the corporate interests and weakened democratic accountability …in other words, empowering the neo-nobles. Your country is an oligarchy with a temporary king every 4 years, coated with a thin veneer of democratic rituals.
It is obvious how meek the Americans are. Based on recents polls more than 40% still supports the antics of the current king and the other 60% doesn’t do anything significant to oppose the idiotic decrees. People are deported, mistreated, lose their jobs thrown into poverty total disrespect of their gender etc etc and even foreign travelers put into jail without any reason. Still… Mr. President is unchallenged despite all the lies of his office and even starts arresting judges (and threatening people that make polls).
…what you call neoliberalism is nothing more than deepening inequality
This is demonstrably false. Here’s a video to learn more about neoliberalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zswexNXorOE
Neoliberal ideas were thought up and implemented by people deliberately to create a state of inequality to benefit a few wealthy individuals. So it is not another label for inequality, but a political ideology with a set of policies designed to create inequality.
empowered the corporate interests and weakened democratic accountability …in other words, empowering the neo-nobles.
This was by design, not an accident of spontaneous inequality. Neoliberalism is a political invention. We did not trip over it.
Your country is an oligarchy with a temporary king every 4 years, coated with a thin veneer of democratic rituals.
We are now a a christo-fascist techno-feudalist dictatorship. We have a christian theocratic dictator who is supported by an oligarchy of tech billionaire feudal overlords that together rule over us like we’re serfs.
It is obvious how meek the Americans are. Based on recents polls more than 40% still supports the antics of the current king
Fox News has brainwashed millions of people over the last thirty years, so that’s not particularly surprising.
and the other 60% doesn’t do anything significant to oppose the idiotic decrees.
I’m genuinely curious what you consider to be meaningful action at this point. People are doing all kinds of non-violent action. The fascists took control of this country largely non-violently, Jan 6 being an exception. And even Jan 6 didn’t succeed in any kind of violence against its purported targets, but seems to have helped Trump more than it hurt him due to the lack of consequences.
We’re unlikely to get a fair and free election at this point if we even hold elections at all. So short of fascist incompetence getting us 2026 and 2028 elections, there’s not a lot of peaceful levers in a fascist dictatorship besides building a movement that is oppositional to the administration. Such a movement will be essential for toppling this fascist dictatorship whether we hold elections or not. Even the CCP had to roll back its Covid-19 restrictions because of protests in China.
Also, I would like to point out that while it is true that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable, violence is still our least useful tool. The current administration is shockingly incompetent. Trump, his cabinet, and Musk are perhaps the best people to have as political opponents in this moment as they truly seem to have no real clue what they are doing or how to do anything properly. Peaceful change is still our more likely avenue of success so it’s what we should pursue for the time being.
So… Neoliberalism is a deliberate political project, not just a label for inequality. Its policies were designed to empower the wealthy and corporations, weaken democracy, and make inequality structural and self-reinforcing. 🤭 much shorter and one doesnt have to watch a youtube video.
And action…
“Democratic” in the loosest sense of the word.
Inch by inch, in play at little games.
Name one year that the US was a democracy.
You’re being downvoted but you’re not far off. Women and minorities couldn’t vote for a very long time. We had slaves and still do through incarceration. It’s only been in the last few decades that we were closest to be what we claimed to be, and yet still quite a ways off. And that progress was greeted with the system coming down on us attempting to “fix” what we had broken by moving towards true freedom for all.
If over half of the population is unhappy with the election results after an election takes place, I think its clear you’re not living in a democracy.
I think a Parliament and rank choice voting are prerequisites to democracy. The only reason the US doesn’t have these things is to ensure that the power remains in the hands of the plutocrats
2024 when fascists won a fair and free election. Our democracy was never perfect, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a democracy.
Insisting America wasn’t a democracy isn’t clever analysis. It’s factually wrong and it’s not even an effective narrative to fight fascists.
It wasn’t fair or free. What part of that can’t you see?
If we fix the democracy, they never would have taken power. We had like 8 parties running, and only 2 very similar parties got the majority of the votes. That’s not because people wanted to vote for them, but because progressives are legally denied access and violence was used against them when they tried to attend the debates.
That’s neither fair nor free. Its an illusion of choice where the only options support the status quo of oligarchy
It wasn’t fair or free. What part of that can’t you see?
This is a baseless assertion. Our elections have been self-evidently fair and free so far, including the recent Wisconsin and Florida special elections. Musk tried to buy the Wisconsin election and failed to get the candidates he wanted. We’ll see what happens with the North Carolina 2024 Supreme Court election, but even that is an attempt to overturn the election results publicly not a secret rigging of the election. If they succeed that makes future fair and free elections even less likely than they are now.
If we fix the democracy,
We also need to people to reject neoliberalism and fascism and accept socialism. Or else we will eventually have to deal with a fascist movement that is so large it is a majority of the population.
We had like 8 parties running, and only 2 very similar parties got the majority of the votes.
We live in a two-party system which is what our first-past-the-post systems trend towards, so that it isn’t surprising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
but because progressives are legally denied access
Bernie wasn’t legally denied access. He was allowed to run when he wanted to run. The courts regrettably ruled that political parties are private organizations and can run their elections however they want despite the inherent public interest in there being a formal standardized process that political parties should be legally mandated to honor. Especially since the Republicans and Democrats are the only serious vehicles for political platforms in the US.
and violence was used against them when they tried to attend the debates.
This is conspiracism.
That’s neither fair nor free. Its an illusion of choice where the only options support the status quo of oligarchy
The choice between neoliberalism and fascism was a real choice. With neoliberalism we prolong our democracy with the hopes of co-opting the Democratic party with socialist and progressive candidates. With fascism we get progressively efficient death camps until society collapses or everyone is dead. It’s worth going into a bit more detail with the fascism choice since that’s what we have gone with. In addition to showing the consequences that further establish this was a meaningful choice, it’s important to drive home how terrible this choice was.
Now that we are a christo-fascist techno-feudalist dictatorship our ability to change society depends on the failure of that fascist dictatorship. This is not accelerationism, but anti-fascism. The first step to making things better is getting rid of the fascist dictatorship. The fascist dictatorship is both actively making things worse while also blocking attempts to making things better. So if we want to make things better then the fascist dictatorship needs to go.
When it comes to getting rid of the fascist dictatorship, societal collapse, or at least political collapse, is more likely but who knows how long that will take. It’s also not clear if it will be caused by internal or external factors. External factors being a foreign military or economic policies aimed at the US. It will probably be more likely be internal factors given the size and capabilities of our military and our leading and foundational role in the modern world economy we created after WWII.
Internal factors could include a whole host of causes. Like disease or famine. Fascist incompetence will probably be what drives whatever the ultimate cause is. We might get infighting when Trump dies of old age or is too debilitated to do anything more than be a figure head. It could also be a revolution that is either peaceful or violent. The peaceful revolution being the statistically more likely to succeed of the two.
It seems like any political violence will result in a civil war at this point. Most of the users on lemmy never spare any thought for the backlash political violence would cause if the MAGA movement had a martyr to justify atrocities. Considering that, it seems unlikely that those advocating for political violence are prepared or even care to fight a protracted and bloody civil war.
None of these possibilities would even be on the table for discussion let alone likely in the immediate term if we had gone with neoliberaism for four more years. We are at the point where we need some kind of a revolution to stop death camps here at home. Our failure to stop a fascist movement that wants to kill the most vulnerable groups of people was a choice. And a clear choice at that.
Jesus, if you think Bernie is the progressive candadite that I’m referring to, you just proved my point.
Maybe you should start by researching the progressive parties in the US.
Jesus, if you think Bernie is the progressive candadite that I’m referring to, you just proved my point.
What point? Your argument is a collection of a few short false statements. I was attempting to be generous by assuming you were talking about Bernie even though he’s not a progressive, he’s a democratic socialist. That example about Bernie and the DNC court ruling is a real event.
Maybe you should stat by researching the progressive parties in the US.
What other parties are you referring to?
The Green Party is a scam that only fields a presidential nominees with no chance of success. Jill Stein is yet another Russian asset who has been seen meeting with Putin.
Again, this is me being generous and assuming good faith to get at an actual discussion about real things. The Green Party is what people usually refer to when they mean a progressive third party. The Green Party and the Libertarian Party are the only third parties worth discussing because they are the only third parties that act as spoiler candidates. The rest don’t even manage that. Republicans and Democrats are the only parties that had a chance to win our democracy back when it was still a democracy last year.
What is your position? What are you talking about?
America was designed to be a confederacy ala the EU. Post civil war Federalism was the beginning of the end for the small ‘d’ democracy that the framers intended. Everything since has been duct taped together. Prior to the civil war the Federal Government had very little power. Liberal progressives spent the last 150 years centralizing power in the Fed and are now being hoisted by their own petard. It’s funny actually.
Heritage Foundation tier nonsense
Error 404 argument not found
Most of the Lemmy crowd would probably side ideologically with Thomas Jefferson and he called the Federal government the “foreign department”.
What exactly do you want them to refute? You offered opinion they rebutted with essentially “your argument is shitty and stupid” simple as.
I’ve come around myself. Centralized government allows those mutants a shot at an expanded Executive seat of power. Federation allows them to fester in their own state.
We can’t forcibly save dumb white trash. We can just make Illinois, California, and New York capable of taking the refugees in.
Yeah but having desperately poor states bordering wealthy ones would require lots of security. There will be lots of desperate, unhappy people with lots of guns and potentially no reciprocity. I worry it would just lead to modern day bleeding Kansas or an Amercan wide version of the Troubles.
Like they’re already trying to take over the federal government, what’s stopping them from trying to take over a neighboring state?
Imagine believing USA was ever a “democracy”.
I think it’s more important to realize the harm that’s happening now than the 200+ year old technicalities, though being important themselves, aren’t what’s most vital at this current moment.
I’d argue the exact opposite, because I see a whole lot of people who seem to think all we need to do is remove Trump and the American government will be A-okay. Until we recognize and start to deal with the rot at the core of the U.S. we’re just going to keep doing this same ol song and dance again and again. Until people recognize that fascism is not a bug but a feature, we have no hope of moving beyond it to a better system of governance.
Many people think fascism came out of no where recently. It is a direct result of 45 years of neoliberalism. We need socialism.
The US was a democracy. Having a civil religion has no bearing on whether or not a country is a democracy.
Neckbeard comment
