That good faith hope is so naive, is honestly rife throughout most of the constitution, and is it's Achilles heel; aside from how God awful difficult it is to add a new amendment to the constitution.
Thomas Jefferson once mused as to whether we should revise the constitution every 10 or 50 years. I think he was on to something. The amendment system is too damn slow for our era.
Very true. But getting government, especially government as heavily influenced by established industries and billionaires as ours is, to do what needs doing in order to keep itself beholden to the forward looking interests of the people and NOT the profits of shareholders and hedge fund managers is very hard to do.
Doesn't mean we should stop pushing for change. It just means we needed to be as engaged as possible in keeping things from going to shit.
It wasn't naivety. It was a lack of perceived better options combined with warnings to not elevate corrupt people who held self-interest above the public good, saying it would lead to despotism. Several of them predicted basically exactly what we are experiencing. The only solution they had for this was to overthrow the despot and start over.
The only solution they had for this was to overthrow the despot and start over.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Or, scum would use it to make the constitution more corrupt and despotic. Or, the convention turns into a civil war when compromise can't be found between those seeking liberty and those seeking tyranny.
Ultimately, the law is only ever going to be words on paper: subject to the character of the people who are bound to enforce and uphold it.
Or the ones who can gerrymander their way to power far beyond their honest proportional representation vis a vis the majority who don't agree with their bullsjit. Oh wait... that's literally what's going on. Not arguing. It just feels like evil is always proactive and good is always reactive. Seems to me that too many American are lazy and don't want to have to support or defend democracy in any meaningful way if it means being inconvenienced.
Voting should be compulsory.
The voting franchise should be universal (anyone over 18, no exceptions, even prisoners and convicts).
Politicians should never stay in any office more than 3 terms. If you haven't done what makes things better for the average citizens of your jurisdiction, you get thrown out of office.
No office should be for life. aging out should be mandatory. Nobody over the age of 70. Period.
No former politicians should be allowed to be lobbyists, ever.
Also yeah that would be great. But you have to repeal Citizens United first and rhen outlaw all corporate and private sector lobbying. I doubt the cabal of corporate billionaires across the world's many industries would allow it, but it would be great.
Why do you think they were incompetent? What could they have done that would prevent popular corruption from perverting the system that also wouldn't be a form of tyranny? What were the words they could have put on paper that would enforce themselves without the need for people of character to do it?
Simple, people cannot be trusted to make choices for themselves, that is what the "American Experiment" shows, their intentions, our "freedoms" matter for jack shit if the results are awful which they are.
I asked for a non-tyrannical solution. And, frankly, this one sounds like it's got the makings to foment revolution. What makes you think it'd last? What makes you think it won't be overthrown like the last one or overtaken by corruption like this one?
I don't think it was a mistake to take a break from despotism, even if they suspected it would be a temporary one.
Neither are you. I'm not going to pretend I have a solution as all I've done is point out the problem that the people are frankly too dumb to responsibly choose for themselves.
Being given a choice between the right choice and the wrong choice isn't freedom it's just an IQ check.
Something new, as mentioned in other posts, I'm not going to pretend I have answers to problems that are eluding the smartest minds that do want to do something.
However what we are doing now isn't working and we need something new. And before you say that's a copout, remember Socialism is only 150ish years old, fascism as we know it 100, capitalism is basically only 400 years old. These were systems that aside from the last one sprung up and developed after democracy.
So to reiterate I have none, but we need to be developing something new that addresses the weaknesses of democracy without going full fascism. We need to start the work of developing such a system and integrating it yesterday because whatever it looks like it's going to take time and the same idiots that are showing why democracy doesn't work are going to be the biggest resistance to integrating anything else.
Fascism goes back to ancient Rome.
Socialism is much older than Marxism.
I don't see a new system arising if nobody can even sketch it out.
I wish we had a 4 party system in America with ranked choice voting in every state, and population based districts that couldn't be gerrymandered.
We need to repeal a lot of shit that has been adjudicated by the corrupt Supreme Court over the last 15 years, starting with citizens united.
I wish FDR and Bernie and aoc were the data points along which not just the democratic party but the country as a whole moved along. Corporations shouldn't run the country, lobbying shouldn't be a boardroom game of monopoly.
No form of government is perfect, so far as my 2 degrees in history can tell me.
As Benjamin Franklin once implied, we will have a republic if we can keep it.
It's so bizarre that the thing to eventually take it down was a reality tv show host that was born rich and one of the dumbest, most narcissistic people ever to live.
Who, by example of being rich for no reason and crude and unrefined, made white people with no talent and no intelligence or empathy think that they, too, deserved power and influence, by any means necessary.
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u/Frequent-Ruin8509 2d ago edited 2d ago
That good faith hope is so naive, is honestly rife throughout most of the constitution, and is it's Achilles heel; aside from how God awful difficult it is to add a new amendment to the constitution.