Amerifat here. We could use some light restructuring. Some newer democracies have features I think are improvements that could benefit us if deployed here. But the fundamental structure isn’t that bad, and I’m worried we’ll just get something worse if we try a full rebuild.
Ive seen this kind of sentiment around (referring primarily to your initial comment on the OP about making a new foundation, but replying to this one because I wanted to have the context it adds with it).
Its a sentiment that sounds appealing (“this thing is hurting us, therefore me must destroy it/replace it” is a fairly cathartic notion after all). The problem I have with it is: the analogy doesn’t actually fit. Government and economic systems simply aren’t buildings. They dont have foundations in that sense, and the things metaphorically referred to as “foundations” do not have the same function and consequences as the real thing.
Take your examples. If you were to remove racism from the country overnight, say you somehow both make individual bigoted people all understand that their perceived enemies are people just living their lives, and adjusted the outcomes of various systems to remove systemic racist outcomes that can exist even without personal malice- that wouldn’t suddenly cause the government to collapse. It’d probably change who exactly gets elected and some of the laws for the better, but while racism has shaped the history of the United States, it doesn’t logically require racism continue to shape it in order to prevent calamity of some kind.
Settler colonialism has a stronger claim to being “foundational” in that the concept describes the process by which the country came to be- but there we have a different problem when one contemplates the consequences of removing it: it simply can’t be removed. Not because of some negative consequence, but simply became there is no way to undo what it results in. Numerous people were killed, and they and their would-have-been descendants cant be simply brought back. Hundreds of millions of people that have an entirely different culture to what would have been now exist, some of those cultures unique to the area despite not being indigenous to it, and it would be logistically impossible to send them anywhere else. The surviving indigenous people can be given some kind of reparation, and the poverty forced on them can be alleviated, but realistically it cant be nearly proportionate to what those groups lost. Unless one has a time machine somehow, whatever the US becomes, even if it was entirely destroyed and built anew, it can never be a society that doesn’t owe it’s existence to a settler colonial enterprise, any more than one can change who ones parents were.
This isn’t an argument against radical change, and I know its rant-y and pedantic, but I see the sentiment of “tear it all down” so often, and think that’s just too vague. It sounds dramatic and radical, but leaves the question of what it means too open. Does it mean “replace all the major government figures”? Probably not, that happens anyway given enough time, without radical changes necessarily occuring. Does it mean doing that, but also changing the mechanism by which those leaders are picked, and maybe also something like the economic model or ownership structure of various institutions? Maybe, though still, apart from the people at the top, a lot of what you’ll get will still be the same. You’re going to need bureaucrats and lawyers and teachers and auditors and soldiers and whatever, or some broadly equivalent roles, no matter how you organize your society, and since the people doing that now are the ones that know how, they’ll probably end up doing the same things under the new order (which could make some cultural problems, like racism for instance, very hard to root out. A biased teacher isn’t going to stop being biased just cause you changed their boss and the laws, for example). Maybe you conclude that that’s not enough, and that one has to change all the laws and ownership structures and bar everyone that participated in administering the old system, even on a local level, from an equivalent role in the new. But that has a rather disastrous history; you end up with a huge number of new and not yet competent civil servants, and a class of people that cannot easily make a living because they are barred from using the skills they actually have, that can turn to crime or reactionary militant groups.
This probably comes off as ranting at you in particular, I’m sorry about that, I just can’t reply to an entire general sentiment as that’s not how the platform works, and I’m sure Im guilty of saying these things too. But I feel like too many calls to action don’t really specify what specific action they call for, just analogies and notions of “there’s something about our society that’s hurting us, we must destroy”, or "we need to do something about [monolithic problem], or “organize” (which sounds like a specific action, except half the time people say it they dont really specify who with or how to do it effectively or what the organization should do once formed, and it’s not realistic to assume those things come naturally to the inexperienced), and I feel like they’d make for more effective tools of political discourse if they did advocate for unambiguous courses of action rather than just the vague result one wants that action to achieve.
Identity is the “skeleton” on-which ego “the flesh” forms.
Spontaneously-removing-racism’s distortion-of-government would have violent backlash, because it’d cost unearned-privilege greatly.
Political-process selects-for DarkTriad: therefore if anybody wants to create a categorically-better-system, they have to prevent DarkTriad from being advantaged in the replacement, even systematically-disadvantaged ( which they will fight violently to prevent ).
The best-for-the-world & best-for-civilization changes de-politics, de-ideology, make-rational, & make-objective, forcing better-for-the-world & better-for-civilization, but that is politically-intolerable.
Political-motivation & objective-rational-altruism are mutually-exclusive paradigms.
Ideological-identity won’t tolerate world-citizen/global-citizen/gaia-citizen to supplant them from authority.
That guy Franck, South African Black man, who bluntly says that the Whites civilized South Africa, but when the Blacks took-over, then civilization fell-apart, nothing working… he’s anchoring on the wrong thing: it isn’t skin-color, it is what culture someone grew-up-in.
Same as the gaslighters who pretend that it is race which decides criminality in the US, instead of class.
Just check the criminality-rates of Whites & Blacks of the upper-middle-class, the middle-class, & the underclass/ghetto, & then the truth’d be visible, but they WON’T ALLOW that framing, because it cuts into their ideological distortion/belief.
False-framing is a weapon of ideology.
I don’t know if Franck knowingly-rejects that it is culture instead of race.
But the evidence is that in the US, knowingly-rejecting truth is absolutely normal, for ideology.
Therefore, ideology is incompatible with national-viability.
Full agreement, and I think the “tear it down” narrative often impedes thinking of actual feasible ways that we can work to find more equitable paths forward. Landback is a great movement because rather than saying “kick white people out of North America” it says “there’s a lot of land that we can give back to the people we stole it from without drastic consequences to us, we should be doing that”.
I’m a huge supporter of working to give tribes further sovereignty and means to enforce it beyond treaties with the countries that keep breaking treaties with them. Now obviously we need to be prioritizing the wants and needs of individual tribes and nations, but those that wish to be treated as sovereign nations on the world stage should be. Hell, the Navajo Nation wants to be in the UN, and that’s a completely reasonable ask that you can advocate for even if you aren’t in a settler colonial nation.
There are more radical ideas as well, but there are realistic and achievable goals, that we’d be doing a lot more good by advocating for than just virtue signaling about how all this land is stolen and leaving it at that. Also free all indigenous political prisoners and treat the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women as the crisis it is.
The institutions that perpetuate law in this country are physical buildings, occupied by actual people. It is very much physical as it is metaphysical.
You can’t fix a democracy back into being democratic. For example neither of the two parties would allow fixing the issues causing a two party system.
If you need some kind of revolution event to fix the smallest things, you’re better off doing it in one go.
The careful consideration can be expressed by not going too far from the most modern successful democracies.
Changes loosely are:
multi-party system at all levels by never allowing winner takes all in any elections
removal of lobyism in favor of tech-enabled transparency for high officials (livestream of every meeting, publicky viewable bank accounts, …)
Severe nerfing of the president, potentially full demotion to a publicity role
Additional checks and balances like a separate constitutional court for handling laws independent of the courts for people (i.e. break up the functions of the supreme court and move some power away from legislature)
probably more I’m forgetting
But the fundamental structure isn’t that bad, and I’m worried we’ll just get something worse if we try a full rebuild.
The chance of making things worse is always a risk, but like the original American Revolutionaries, at some point, we have to bite the fucking bullet and make the gamble, because the status quo doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere good.
The American Revolution was largely a counter-revolution by colonial elites. It preserved existing property relations, entrenched slavery, restricted suffrage and replaced a distant crown with local ruling classes.
I’m not sure that’s something to favorably compare to unless you’re intent on historical revisionism.
The American Revolution was largely a counter-revolution by colonial elites. It preserved existing property relations, entrenched slavery, restricted suffrage and replaced a distant crown with local ruling classes.
You can cry “tankie” all you want, but you can’t refute any of it. It was a “revolution” led by slave owners who didn’t want to pay taxes.
That doesn’t make it a counter-revolution. Marx literally cites it as the example of a bourgeois revolution necessary for the development of a strong proletariat preceding a workers’ revolution. Not to mention the issue was taxation without representation, not taxation itself, as both the States and the Federal government would impose numerous taxes of their own more or less immediately.
Much more nuanced than expected. Okay, yes, the American revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and historically progressive in the sense that it unshackled the forces of production compared to continued British rule. It was still far less progressive and far less admirable than the French revolution, though.
Diva was incorrect in claiming that it was a counterrevolution, since there was no preceding revolution to react against, but the rest is all perfectly accurate.
The thing is that revolution vs. counter-revolution is a VERY important distinction to make here. In characterizing it as a counter-revolution, and, as acknowledged by other comments by the same user, characterizing it as regressive, the point implied by the facts mentioned is not “The American Revolution was deeply flawed”, which I would never dispute, but “The American Revolution was backwards and a negative thing.” The flaws and hypocrisies of the American Revolution ran deep, but it was also a legitimate struggle for bourgeois democracy (complete with the start of privileging of capitalist over feudal modes of production) against a distant imperialist power which denied self-determination to millions who lived under their rule.
That I brought up the American Revolution in the context of the idea of getting rid of the Constitution - with me supporting the idea of scrapping the Constitution despite the danger by that even the ones who wrote it up had to struggle with the thought of "This could get worse, but at some point, we have to take that chance or it will never get better" - and it gets ‘refuted’ by someone claiming it was counter-revolutionary and a bad example (for choosing to roll the fucking dice???) is just campist dribble from that user, whom I am unfortunately familiar with.
French Revolution was much a better bourgeois revolution though, I agree.
I should pay more attention when posting, clearly. I see someone say “tankie” and I fire up the tank, but it appears that our disagreements aren’t that substantial. Unless you’re a trotskyist, of course…
Ah, yes, the anarchist position of vigorously bootlicking Russian genocide and imperialism. I keep forgetting that you’re an ‘anarchist,’ probably because of the boot lodged down your throat, which I generally don’t associate with anarchism. It must be a new strain.
Anything to get off to your favorite genocides, right? Of course, you have to play at Uyghur genocide apologia too. But hey, what’s an anarchist without a little simping for [checks notes] the PRC having PEOPLE’S billionaires?
Not only is that a caricature that doesn’t represent my position or opinions, it’s whataboutism. The topic was how our government has always been a bourgeois dictatorship created by slaveowners. It’s no wonder that a pedophile cabal ended up influential in such a government.
Not only is that a caricature that doesn’t represent my position or opinions,
I believe this is you, fascist.
it’s whataboutism.
I just noted that tankie bootlickers like you are beyond parody. You were the one who objected to the label of tankie, all I’ve done is back up the point you disputed.
I’m an anarchist, I organize with anarchists irl, like multiple days out of my week, every week. Just because a turbo liberal who can’t stop bootlicking american/roman empire doesn’t like my opinions doesn’t make me anything else.
I think one of the best changes the USA could possibly do is to move to a Westminster style system, where a coalition is typically needed to form a government. Break the two party system, and force a much more representative government.
Amerifat here. We could use some light restructuring. Some newer democracies have features I think are improvements that could benefit us if deployed here. But the fundamental structure isn’t that bad, and I’m worried we’ll just get something worse if we try a full rebuild.
The foundations are settler colonialism and racism. Like you said, there are other democracies to look at we don’t need this blueprint.
Ive seen this kind of sentiment around (referring primarily to your initial comment on the OP about making a new foundation, but replying to this one because I wanted to have the context it adds with it). Its a sentiment that sounds appealing (“this thing is hurting us, therefore me must destroy it/replace it” is a fairly cathartic notion after all). The problem I have with it is: the analogy doesn’t actually fit. Government and economic systems simply aren’t buildings. They dont have foundations in that sense, and the things metaphorically referred to as “foundations” do not have the same function and consequences as the real thing.
Take your examples. If you were to remove racism from the country overnight, say you somehow both make individual bigoted people all understand that their perceived enemies are people just living their lives, and adjusted the outcomes of various systems to remove systemic racist outcomes that can exist even without personal malice- that wouldn’t suddenly cause the government to collapse. It’d probably change who exactly gets elected and some of the laws for the better, but while racism has shaped the history of the United States, it doesn’t logically require racism continue to shape it in order to prevent calamity of some kind.
Settler colonialism has a stronger claim to being “foundational” in that the concept describes the process by which the country came to be- but there we have a different problem when one contemplates the consequences of removing it: it simply can’t be removed. Not because of some negative consequence, but simply became there is no way to undo what it results in. Numerous people were killed, and they and their would-have-been descendants cant be simply brought back. Hundreds of millions of people that have an entirely different culture to what would have been now exist, some of those cultures unique to the area despite not being indigenous to it, and it would be logistically impossible to send them anywhere else. The surviving indigenous people can be given some kind of reparation, and the poverty forced on them can be alleviated, but realistically it cant be nearly proportionate to what those groups lost. Unless one has a time machine somehow, whatever the US becomes, even if it was entirely destroyed and built anew, it can never be a society that doesn’t owe it’s existence to a settler colonial enterprise, any more than one can change who ones parents were.
This isn’t an argument against radical change, and I know its rant-y and pedantic, but I see the sentiment of “tear it all down” so often, and think that’s just too vague. It sounds dramatic and radical, but leaves the question of what it means too open. Does it mean “replace all the major government figures”? Probably not, that happens anyway given enough time, without radical changes necessarily occuring. Does it mean doing that, but also changing the mechanism by which those leaders are picked, and maybe also something like the economic model or ownership structure of various institutions? Maybe, though still, apart from the people at the top, a lot of what you’ll get will still be the same. You’re going to need bureaucrats and lawyers and teachers and auditors and soldiers and whatever, or some broadly equivalent roles, no matter how you organize your society, and since the people doing that now are the ones that know how, they’ll probably end up doing the same things under the new order (which could make some cultural problems, like racism for instance, very hard to root out. A biased teacher isn’t going to stop being biased just cause you changed their boss and the laws, for example). Maybe you conclude that that’s not enough, and that one has to change all the laws and ownership structures and bar everyone that participated in administering the old system, even on a local level, from an equivalent role in the new. But that has a rather disastrous history; you end up with a huge number of new and not yet competent civil servants, and a class of people that cannot easily make a living because they are barred from using the skills they actually have, that can turn to crime or reactionary militant groups.
This probably comes off as ranting at you in particular, I’m sorry about that, I just can’t reply to an entire general sentiment as that’s not how the platform works, and I’m sure Im guilty of saying these things too. But I feel like too many calls to action don’t really specify what specific action they call for, just analogies and notions of “there’s something about our society that’s hurting us, we must destroy”, or "we need to do something about [monolithic problem], or “organize” (which sounds like a specific action, except half the time people say it they dont really specify who with or how to do it effectively or what the organization should do once formed, and it’s not realistic to assume those things come naturally to the inexperienced), and I feel like they’d make for more effective tools of political discourse if they did advocate for unambiguous courses of action rather than just the vague result one wants that action to achieve.
Just tossing you levers:
Identity is the “skeleton” on-which ego “the flesh” forms.
Spontaneously-removing-racism’s distortion-of-government would have violent backlash, because it’d cost unearned-privilege greatly.
Political-process selects-for DarkTriad: therefore if anybody wants to create a categorically-better-system, they have to prevent DarkTriad from being advantaged in the replacement, even systematically-disadvantaged ( which they will fight violently to prevent ).
The best-for-the-world & best-for-civilization changes de-politics, de-ideology, make-rational, & make-objective, forcing better-for-the-world & better-for-civilization, but that is politically-intolerable.
Political-motivation & objective-rational-altruism are mutually-exclusive paradigms.
Ideological-identity won’t tolerate world-citizen/global-citizen/gaia-citizen to supplant them from authority.
That guy Franck, South African Black man, who bluntly says that the Whites civilized South Africa, but when the Blacks took-over, then civilization fell-apart, nothing working… he’s anchoring on the wrong thing: it isn’t skin-color, it is what culture someone grew-up-in.
Same as the gaslighters who pretend that it is race which decides criminality in the US, instead of class.
Just check the criminality-rates of Whites & Blacks of the upper-middle-class, the middle-class, & the underclass/ghetto, & then the truth’d be visible, but they WON’T ALLOW that framing, because it cuts into their ideological distortion/belief.
False-framing is a weapon of ideology.
I don’t know if Franck knowingly-rejects that it is culture instead of race.
But the evidence is that in the US, knowingly-rejecting truth is absolutely normal, for ideology.
Therefore, ideology is incompatible with national-viability.
_ /\ _
The foundations are the laws in place and most importantly, the Constitution. That itself is a deeply flawed document that could use a rewrite.
Full agreement, and I think the “tear it down” narrative often impedes thinking of actual feasible ways that we can work to find more equitable paths forward. Landback is a great movement because rather than saying “kick white people out of North America” it says “there’s a lot of land that we can give back to the people we stole it from without drastic consequences to us, we should be doing that”.
I’m a huge supporter of working to give tribes further sovereignty and means to enforce it beyond treaties with the countries that keep breaking treaties with them. Now obviously we need to be prioritizing the wants and needs of individual tribes and nations, but those that wish to be treated as sovereign nations on the world stage should be. Hell, the Navajo Nation wants to be in the UN, and that’s a completely reasonable ask that you can advocate for even if you aren’t in a settler colonial nation.
There are more radical ideas as well, but there are realistic and achievable goals, that we’d be doing a lot more good by advocating for than just virtue signaling about how all this land is stolen and leaving it at that. Also free all indigenous political prisoners and treat the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women as the crisis it is.
The institutions that perpetuate law in this country are physical buildings, occupied by actual people. It is very much physical as it is metaphysical.
You can’t fix a democracy back into being democratic. For example neither of the two parties would allow fixing the issues causing a two party system.
If you need some kind of revolution event to fix the smallest things, you’re better off doing it in one go.
The careful consideration can be expressed by not going too far from the most modern successful democracies.
Changes loosely are:
probably more I’m forgetting
Removal of the presidency as a dictatorial office, and replacement with a 9 member democratically elected council
Sorry but the fundamental of that nation were BUILT on yay for me nay for you.
The chance of making things worse is always a risk, but like the original American Revolutionaries, at some point, we have to bite the fucking bullet and make the gamble, because the status quo doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere good.
The American Revolution was largely a counter-revolution by colonial elites. It preserved existing property relations, entrenched slavery, restricted suffrage and replaced a distant crown with local ruling classes.
I’m not sure that’s something to favorably compare to unless you’re intent on historical revisionism.
You tankies are utterly beyond parody.
You can cry “tankie” all you want, but you can’t refute any of it. It was a “revolution” led by slave owners who didn’t want to pay taxes.
That doesn’t make it a counter-revolution. Marx literally cites it as the example of a bourgeois revolution necessary for the development of a strong proletariat preceding a workers’ revolution. Not to mention the issue was taxation without representation, not taxation itself, as both the States and the Federal government would impose numerous taxes of their own more or less immediately.
Much more nuanced than expected. Okay, yes, the American revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and historically progressive in the sense that it unshackled the forces of production compared to continued British rule. It was still far less progressive and far less admirable than the French revolution, though.
Diva was incorrect in claiming that it was a counterrevolution, since there was no preceding revolution to react against, but the rest is all perfectly accurate.
The thing is that revolution vs. counter-revolution is a VERY important distinction to make here. In characterizing it as a counter-revolution, and, as acknowledged by other comments by the same user, characterizing it as regressive, the point implied by the facts mentioned is not “The American Revolution was deeply flawed”, which I would never dispute, but “The American Revolution was backwards and a negative thing.” The flaws and hypocrisies of the American Revolution ran deep, but it was also a legitimate struggle for bourgeois democracy (complete with the start of privileging of capitalist over feudal modes of production) against a distant imperialist power which denied self-determination to millions who lived under their rule.
That I brought up the American Revolution in the context of the idea of getting rid of the Constitution - with me supporting the idea of scrapping the Constitution despite the danger by that even the ones who wrote it up had to struggle with the thought of "This could get worse, but at some point, we have to take that chance or it will never get better" - and it gets ‘refuted’ by someone claiming it was counter-revolutionary and a bad example (for choosing to roll the fucking dice???) is just campist dribble from that user, whom I am unfortunately familiar with.
French Revolution was much a better bourgeois revolution though, I agree.
I should pay more attention when posting, clearly. I see someone say “tankie” and I fire up the tank, but it appears that our disagreements aren’t that substantial. Unless you’re a trotskyist, of course…
I’m an anarchist tyvm
Ah, yes, the anarchist position of vigorously bootlicking Russian genocide and imperialism. I keep forgetting that you’re an ‘anarchist,’ probably because of the boot lodged down your throat, which I generally don’t associate with anarchism. It must be a new strain.
Anything to get off to your favorite genocides, right? Of course, you have to play at Uyghur genocide apologia too. But hey, what’s an anarchist without a little simping for [checks notes] the PRC having PEOPLE’S billionaires?
Not only is that a caricature that doesn’t represent my position or opinions, it’s whataboutism. The topic was how our government has always been a bourgeois dictatorship created by slaveowners. It’s no wonder that a pedophile cabal ended up influential in such a government.
I believe this is you, fascist.
I just noted that tankie bootlickers like you are beyond parody. You were the one who objected to the label of tankie, all I’ve done is back up the point you disputed.
I’m an anarchist, I organize with anarchists irl, like multiple days out of my week, every week. Just because a turbo liberal who can’t stop bootlicking american/roman empire doesn’t like my opinions doesn’t make me anything else.
I think one of the best changes the USA could possibly do is to move to a Westminster style system, where a coalition is typically needed to form a government. Break the two party system, and force a much more representative government.
Good News: The UK looks like it has finally broken the two party system.
Bad News: The new party is run by an even worse grifter who has his tongue up Trump’s arsehole.