• Curious_Canid@piefed.ca
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    6 hours ago

    I keep seeing responses along these lines and I feel that, while essentially correct, they oversimplify the situation in ways that are misleading.

    The US government has undergone a huge qualitative change in the last year. It was far from perfect before then, but the rule of law, however badly realized, is now gone. The mechanisms are still there, and could still be restored, but when we have to ask whether the executive branch will abide by court rulings, we do not have it at present.

    The current situation had its origin around fifty years ago, when the rich took over the Republican party, stopped acting in good faith, and began seriously gaming the system to take power and become richer. Before that, there were still plenty of issues, but we had been heading in the direction of improved civil rights and better protections for individual citizens. Now we have a two-party system where one of them does not represent most of its own members and is intent on completely subjugating the other party. It does not want to govern, it wants to rule.

    Our system of government has always had problems, it has never been entirely fair, but it had been gradually improving over time. Acting as if nothing special has happened with that lately is ingenuous.