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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.
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.
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.
I have voted every single time I could since I got registered to vote.
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.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Exactly what I was thinking.
And once Trump, the GOP and the oligarchs are deposed, we should declare the American Second Republic and write a new constitution.
It's not over yet
Or as AOC would put it: "Don't consent in advance"
we should all start delegitimising the USA and call it what it is: a long lasting colony committing multiple genocides
"Democratic" in the loosest sense of the word.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And it was still seen as radically progressive
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.
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.
Or with the implementation of institutionalized slavery.
Neo libertarian with capitalism pleasure doing business with you.