something is missing. Some form of illumination. — Banno

Like, a light unto the gentiles, so to speak?

How we got to where we have been for a long time is available in some (not all) history books. What one needs to do is follow the money, literally and figuratively. Any country's history is a mixed bag of progress and regress--not necessarily in balanced sequence. Look for historical accounts that do not gloss over the grave regressions.

You may well ask, "How will I know whether they are glossing over regressions?"

Look for deviant historical accounts. Some titles (These and similar books may not be your cup of tea at all -- I don't like some of them -- but they do cover American History from an angle quite different than the typical narrative):

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg youtube talk by the author

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (what Zinn thought about the other side of history from the more traditional "fundamental nationalist glorification of country)

A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism by Daniel A. Sjursen

Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: An Illustrated History of Labor in the United States, Priscilla Murolo

Noam Chomsky has all sorts of things to say about American history, most of it unflattering,

I like the idea of no force threatened against peaceful people, but it doesn't feel right in this context.

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths v making the rich pay a little bit more.

Obviously those in poverty aren't being helped by other means. Do you have any suggestions?

Taxes are quite an old concept and they haven’t helped much yet. I’m not sure a little more will do. And they might even have a worse effect, which is indifference. If the state takes a man’s quarter and promises it will help the poor with it, the man no longer has the quarter to give and less responsibility towards the poor. He has already done his part.

It is also an unjust mechanism for helping the poor. It is unable to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving, those who want and do no want help, and it operates through the theft and extortion of other people’s money.

My suggestion is we need more concerned people such as yourself to cooperate and help.

The question is, is there sufficient resilience in your democratic institutions, that they might be restored? Given the failure of the supremes, and of the GOP, things are not looking good.

The “checks and balances” are not working. Will time bring a rebound? Perhaps.

The failure of the left in the US is an international tragedy.

All your replies seem to echo my observation that the system doesn't quite work.. — Tim3003

Yes.

Yes, sending the matter to the states permits different laws in different places. But the legality of laws is a big part of what the Supreme Court has to figure out. Now that all of the precedents built from Roe vs Wade have been struck down, we don't know how far the Court will go. Or to be precise, they don't know far they can go.

Yes, sending the matter to the states permits different laws in different places. But the legality of laws is a big part of what the Supreme Court has to figure out. Now that all of the precedents built from Roe vs Wade have been struck down, we don't know how far the Court will go. Or to be precise, they don't know far they can go. — Paine

Thomas is the Trump of the Supreme Court.

I'm currently reading Rawls' Political Liberalism, which goes to great lengths to describe how the notion of justice as fairness emerges as a result of the healthy pluralism that is the result of a well-functioning society and a reasonable interchange between competing reasonable doctrines. What I see in the US aligns with none of that.

I no longer have any respect for the United States as any kind of reasonable constitutional democracy. It is horrific; I am horrified.

Will time bring a rebound? Perhaps. — Banno

Probably, rather than perhaps, but it matters how long it takes. A lot of damage can be done while we wait for balance to return.

It has mattered, still does matter, what happens on the state level. Some states have a slovenly political culture than tends toward corruption. Others have a much firmer political culture which avoids corruption to a large degree. Unfortunately what has happened at the federal level can happen at the state level.

I am not altogether sanguine about this country's future--and not just because of some idiot bastard sons and daughter on the Supreme Court. Congress has been a captive of the plutocracy for a long time -- nothing new there. The plutocrats don't seemed to care what happens to the world, above and beyond their immediate self-interest. Time has run out, or will soon, for environmental common sense to take effect (here, there, everywhere).

We could, of course, revolt. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish A NEW Constitution for the United States, and hereby consign to the dustbin of history the pre-existent government and its parasitic class of rich people. May it rot in the depths of hell."

A revolution in the US is about as likely as the Second Coming, but it could come like a thief in the night and surprise us all. (Don't hold your breath,)

I no longer have any respect for the United States as any kind of reasonable constitutional democracy. It is horrific; I am horrified. — Pantagruel

I am confused as to why Biden allows Trump to subvert our democracy.

The problem isn't external to the system, the problem is the system itself. It's not like some foreign agent invaded the US and bypassed all its laws - most of these developments went through the perfectly legal process so nobly enshrined by the Constitution. — _db

Yes. The pendulum swings back and forth between conservative and liberal. Both outlooks are valuable and they both have dark sides.

Give it time. It will swing back the other way eventually, although the SCOTUS is a long term procession. It will take decades to recover from the present conservative domination of the court.

I’d chime in to say the US isn’t a direct democracy and wasn’t designed to be either. The founding fathers were wary of the common man’s ability to vote and wanted to protect citizens from the “tyranny of the majority.”obviously if people don’t have trust in the voting system then the whole thing falls apart. But I personally don’t see a lot of reason to worry-at the end of the day I think most people will reason their way through and we will see Hagel’s dielectric at work.


Yeah, that’s how I see it too

Thomas is an odd factor. To some degree, he is anti-federalist about many of these issues. He wants a constitutional restriction upon what can be granted as rights.by states. He seems to be working on having rights for women to be bracketed the way the Hatch decision for gun rights superseded local control.

But I personally don’t see a lot of reason to worry — Paulm12

Trump organized a violent coup. AG Garland refuses to indict Trump. Hell yes I am worried.

I’d chime in to say the US isn’t a direct democracy and wasn’t designed to be either. The founding fathers were wary of the common man’s ability to vote and wanted to protect citizens from the “tyranny of the majority.”obviously if people don’t have trust in the voting system then the whole thing falls apart. But I personally don’t see a lot of reason to worry-at the end of the day I think most people will reason their way through and we will see Hagel’s dielectric at work. — Paulm12

I agree.

I am confused as to why Biden allows Trump to subvert our democracy. — Jackson

I think the democracy is already subverted. It is a losing battle at this point.

I think the democracy is already subverted. It is a losing battle at this point. — Pantagruel

So, Biden wants Trump to destroy it? I hope that is not his strategy.

I am confused as to why Biden allows Trump to subvert our democracy. — Jackson

.

A) Trump was busy subverting democracy before Biden was elected.

B) Trump is not an isolated player; he has a substantial following with considerable political clout.

C) Some countries have traditions of liquidating inconvenient and overly annoying persons. We tend to put up with and ignore such types, unless they break laws that can be conveniently prosecuted.

So, Biden wants Trump to destroy it? I hope that is not his strategy. — Jackson

The people - the democratic system - have put the institutions in place already. Whatever damage has been done has been done to the fabric of the culture. It is the picture of the corruption of the human spirit. The American Dream has become the American Nightmare.

The people - the democratic system - have put the institutions in place already. Whatever damage has been done has been done to the fabric of the culture. It is the picture of the corruption of the human spirit. — Pantagruel

Count me in as not going down without a fight.

we will see Hagel’s dielectric at work. — Paulm12

You mean Chuck Hagel?

Sorry, flippant remark, I'm sure you meant Hegel.

Anyway - my view is that while there is a great deal of systematic rot in the entire American and for that matter Western political system, that the so-called 'right' - in the form of the rabid right, of the Tea Party and Trump Cult type, are the principle villians in the piece. Some of the ideological extremism of the left is also infuriating but overall, if I was American, which I'm not, although with American relatives, I would have to support the Democratic Party.

Let’s all help those in need. Just don’t do anything too big to help those in need.

Leave it all up to individuals, not their government. Because the government is always bad.

So you want to help those millions in need? Give a homeless person a few bucks. That’ll solve the issue.

Taking property away is unacceptable — never mind the fact that it’s precisely the owning of property and resources, especially hoarded by .001% of earthlings, that causes the millions of those in need in the first place.

So goes the tenets of antisocial personality disorder libertarianism.

Watch the faithful statist reserve a special code of ethics for his government that he refuses to hold to any other group of men and women. Wealth should taken away from those who earn it but we shall let it forever coalesce, without work or effort, in the politician’s coffers. Hundreds of millions of people cannot work together, but the faction we put in power can do it all. The private man should never earn and save too much wealth, god forbid, but our officials should take it and hoard it for their own uses. They, and only they, know how to spend it. This we know because we voted for them.

The paternal politics of the servile.

Which is why you are and remain an idiot. — Benkei

:ok:

Sociopathic statist libertarians talking to themselves is sometimes fun to watch.

The founding fathers were wary of the common man’s ability to vote and wanted to protect citizens from the “tyranny of the majority.” — Paulm12

Here in Colorado the citizens voted to give up our individual votes for president (electors) to whomever wins the nation-wide majority. There are conditions, of course. If a number of other states follow suite this will come into play. Hence an effort to revert to this "tyranny". This result surprised me.

Eh. This looks like a perspective which thinks these tickets (what else is a dollar?) are worth something.

If you follow back the reality of our world, however, I think you'll see -- tickets are worth things because people work.

We live in a world where that's not acknowledged. So I understand the confusion.

But it's a world only upheld by The State.

Tickets are worth things because people work—I’m not so sure what that means. As far as I know currency is usually valued according to what, if any, commodity backs it, or on the faith in the issuer of it, in many cases governments and their central banks.

What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something — you know, your wages are going down, etc. — you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous glitz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government.

(Chomsky)

—

Always worth repeating. In case anyone is taken in by the complete bullshit spouted by statist libertarians.

One wonders why, since corporations control the United States, one doesn’t just start one. It’s relatively easy and inexpensive to do. Once done he could let it loose on the battlefield and immediately possess the power and influence he claims they have.

But all that would involve effort. Much better to fall back on the hope that he may one day control social activity, capital, and most importantly the lives of other people with the monopoly on violence, so long as he can elect a body of benevolent angles with the swing of his vote.

Speaking of bullshit.

Don’t like oligarchy? Just become an oligarch. Bam.

Impressive logic as always. Just get in the fortune 500.

I guess the same applies for those who pretend to be anti-statist: just become the state. Run for something, get elected. Easy as that.

:yawn: Simplistic Nickelodeon political dogma. Always funny, always boring.

As usual, misrepresentations, made up logic, and other absurdities. The statist knows he can start a corporation and compete with the very corporations he despises, but won’t, because risk is best left to other people and other people’s money.