05-07-2018, 01:11 PM
(04-20-2018, 08:58 AM)David Horn Wrote:(04-19-2018, 07:19 PM)Another Xer Wrote:(03-29-2018, 12:51 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I shudder whenever I hear on the news that our so-called president is making decisions for our country. Who is he to do this? He has no qualifications to be president, and deserves no respect for his behavior or policies. I think democracy has failed in the USA. It has not produced a leadership in any of the three branches of government that is worthy of the office. We can't trust the American people to make good decisions. Or is this a temporary aberration? The choices Americans have been making have been pretty bad for some time. Now it's just reached a breaking point. Where does the USA go from here?
Democracy hasn't failed in the USA it is being systematically removed from the process.
First, the President was not chosen from a democratic process. The President was chosen by the electoral college. Democracy would have produced President Clinton.
Second, gerrymandering has removed democracy from numerous states. The House of Representatives is supposed to be most responsive to the will of the people, however experts estimate that Democrats would have to win by 8 points to take the House. That is not democracy. A good example is Virginia where Democrats won statewide by 10 points and still lost the Legislature. Add voter suppression and Citizens United to the list.
All good points, but why does any of this exist in the first place?
Another Xer continued Wrote:The system is being rigged to make democracy a shiny front with no substance. The plutocrats are making their play for permanent power and permanent wealth. The institutions that preserve American freedom and democracy are being destroyed. We have to restore democracy in this country.
You can't restore what never was to begin with. The Founders were even more afraid of the mob than any King, so they created a purposely sclerotic system that kept power in the hands of the elite. Of course, what constitutes the elite has morphed over time, but the control still resides there as it always has. The one period when that was less true was the previous 4T and 1T. The restoration of elite power began in the 2T, when the easily frightened and manipulated began to take sides that often conflicted with their own best interest. By the beginning of the 3T, the restoration was complete, though elite power was never truly diminished prior to that.
The real question has to be, can a true democratic republic actually work in the US? It seems to be possible elsewhere, though many of those places are under stress today as well. We better start working through this problem now, because AI will make matters much worse unless it's under a more humane control system than the one where Silicon Valley, and it's world-wide clones, set the rules for the rest of us.
The bright spot in the narrative about when elite power was falling and rising again, was that in the early 2T many of those who had been shut out of democracy in Dixie and in some other places were allowed in, and that was a major advance for democracy over the elites. It was not enough of an advance to hold back the resurgence of elite power that was instituted to reverse those and other progressive gains in the 2T. But restoration of that increase in democracy would help create another period of downward pressure on elite power in the remainder of this 4T, the early 1T, and again on the cusp of and early in the next 2T. The hope is that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice, with many intervening pendulum swings.