The myth of checks and balances.
The myth of checks and balances.
The myth of (checks notes) every single admirable or positive aspect I was raised to believe was true about our system of government and our values as a nation.
I'm in my 50s. Somewhere WAY down the list of shit that I'm absolutely furious about is that I can no longer pretend that a single thing about US values or the resilient and balanced design of our government has turned out to be true.
Every single thing that has ever benefitted non-wealthy non-white non-male non-straight or non-cis people in the US has been hard won with blood over decades or centuries. And we're well on the way to undoing nearly all of those after not even two months of a despot in office.
Every thing I have ever been taught about what made the US great or special or even good has been a lie. It's very plain to see now. It turns out we had some elected people superficially following the rules, and that was really the only thing keeping it all together.
I’m in my 50s. Somewhere WAY down the list of shit that I’m absolutely furious about is that I can no longer pretend that a single thing about US values or the resilient and balanced design of our government has turned out to be true.
You should be mad at yourself for believing this bullshit for 50+ years.
The checks and balances were there, but they've been methodically corrupted and dismantled over decades without anyone doing anything about it.
That’s just it. There is no perfect government. The government is made of humans, and humans are imperfect. Any government, no matter how pure/noble its founding intentions, will eventually become corrupt need to be replaced.
We’re finally feeling that in America after a good 250 year run.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman sent to analyze the American government in its early days— specifically studying its checks and balances—called it way back in 1835. There’s nothing to stop tyranny in America. Well worth reading his writings, “Democracy in America.”
The checks and balances were never what they were advertised to be. They haven't really been corrupted, just revealed to be more something people followed out of convention than an actual working system.
The US founding fathers were a bunch of mainly rich dudes, mostly in their 20s, from the 1700s. Their knowledge was limited to what a rich kid could in the 1700s. They had a decent grasp on how the English parliamentary system worked, some vague ideas of how systems worked in ancient Rome and Greece, they'd read a bunch of philosophers, and had a lot of youthful enthusiasm.
They come from a time 200 years before Game Theory and a century before the beginnings of Political Science. When they came up with these checks and balances, they didn't do it in any kind of formal way, trying to attack the system as a clever adversary would. There were all kinds of assumptions baked into their models of how the system would work that they never questioned. As a result, their system of checks and balances doesn't stand up to a popular party that wants the US to be a dictatorship.
Again, it’s enforced by willingness, a want to uphold the US Constitution.
Once you decide you’re done doing that the US Constitution is done.
It is done. Everyone will continue to sit on their asses waiting for a correction that will never come. It’s already broken. And people act like it’s not because they know no other way to be.
And when you complain, the rest of the world calls you alarmist
Democracy is a mental construct. It only constrains you if you believe in it. But it can give you over power as long as you convince enough people to do it. It will, however, never be restored once broken through violent means without the use of violent means.
States, rule of law, democracy (and every other government type) and constitutions are mental constructs. They are linked together by the idea of a natural dependency. The only thing upholding any and all of these is the willingness to uphold the oath sworn by all those granted public authority, be that legislature, executive or judicial. They all check each other - in theory. Which is why they swear on the constitution - not a person - because that is the very thing that granted them the power and that acts as the web that weaves them all together.
If they stop checking and balancing each other than there's nothing holding the statedom together - there's afterall no natural consequence to breaking the web
I mean the checks and balances are definitely there. They've just been taken over too. You just can't have democracy without the people having faith in democracy.
I was born in a war, in the third world. I often say that Americans wouldn’t be so gung ho about war if the war was fought on their soil for once. They’ve had it nice and cozy, using other people’s homes as battlefields and policing what everyone else is doing globally.
I don't think it's a war thing at all. America was THE world power, and there were a lot of people working against American ideals because it was the largest economy/country that could fight back, but if you look around, even countries that have seen war are struggling with the rise of the right. Brexit, the AfD, and Poland/turkey in general, not to mention Russia have all shown that what's happening in America isn't America specific. There's a collection of bad actors everywhere and it's happening regardless of if a place had seen war or not. Governments everywhere are being corrupted by the wealthy and/or being dismantled in favor of religious authoritarianism/nationalism.
If anything, you're seeing Trump pull back from war, and soft and hard power that would prevent war, and it's in an effort to lessen Americas impact on the world stage.
I think the government is like IT. The people assume they don't need it or as much of it because everything is fine. We're about to see what it's like when they fire half of the IT staff and slash the budget to ribbons.
That's a pretty good analogy IMO.
The guard rails held last time. Barely. But the thing with guard rails, is that when someone smashes into them, you have to fix them or else they won't hold the next time they get smashed into. And we did fuck all to fix the government after the last trainwreck so there's no guard rails this time. There might not even be a chance to vote in a fix in a year and a half, things may be too fucked by then.
The Neoliberals are fine with that.
They don't care if they lose, or are in the White House, they just want their half of the corpo bribe gravy train Reagan set up for them when the American people lost their vote on the shape or priorities of our economy.
Standing against the capital markets ending the country and the planet itself for short term profits would cost them those bribes. Those bribes are why most of them are in politics.
They had no incentive to fix the guard rails. Biden/Pelosi/Schumer still see Republicans as their esteemed opposition, aka partners in their culture war stoking divide and profit grift, and those with a desire to help us become a society again like AOC and Sanders as their enemies.
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/12/aoc-pelosi-oversight-committee-connolly-raskin Neoliberal priorities The month before Trump took power. Assembling Guard rails to their left, exclusively.
https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775 Neoliberal priorities in general.
Honestly I see Biden's parting comments, not actions but comments after a career of enabling oligarchs, as latent guilt by a senile old man who was an OG neoliberal sellout to the Reagan capitalist coup.
100%
The guard rails last time where the democrats having a majority in one half of congress. That guard rail is gone.
This is exactly what it is. Life is a movie and even if their guy isn't the hero, the hero will still come and save them. The complacency is astounding. I think it's because it was so long since they had any war on their soil and they have a superiority complex. Kids are indoctrinated with american superiority porn in schools, almost like religious indoctrination.
My school had tape on some of the windows, because of the bombings in WW2. They left it there on purpose as a reminder. My grandparents were adults when our country was blitzed (bombed) every night, and a lot of that history is learned and seen by every schoolkid. We remember.
I've been asking myself since i turned old enough to vote, what the fuck happened to America's collective spine?
Another big part is that Americans have been taught that protesting is the only valid method of affecting change. Our history books spend a lot of time talking about MLK’s peaceful protests. It totally glosses over all of the violence and angry mobs that were the other side of the same coin. My history book in high school only had the Black Panthers as a footnote.
The government has a vested interest in not teaching Americans that violent protest is effective. It’s like the history books cover the American revolution, and paint the revolutionaries as proud patriots who were justified after dealing with an oppressive monarchy. And then there’s a hard pivot towards “oh and also violent protest is never okay, and you should just chant at your local park instead.”
Hell, look at the comments sections of any protest coverage, and you’ll see people blatantly stating that they’d make a point of running over protestors who blocked a highway. There are plenty of people who fully believe that protest is only supposed to be directed at the government, and should never inconvenience the citizens.
Hauntingly true
method of effecting* change
Died a while ago unfortunately. The realization for me was when they dems rolled over for W after the steal in Florida tho the weakness of the dems was present before even that.
Yeah that was just 12 white guys in suits chanting and it made them stop the entire recount
We sold our collective spines for the confidence scheme lie of oligarch urine raining down on us in the 80s.
We surrendered the class war with no terms, and have been living under class occupation ever since. Many to most Americans still defend that surrender even here at the end rather than admit the capitalists successfully played them for fools and got them to vote for their own desperation.
The Ronald Reagan Jack Welch confidence scheme was the end of the United States, it's just taken this long for a meaningful number of people to be willing to admit that we were and continue to be conned into giving away the store for not only nothing, but our own destruction. Unrestricted capitalism always leads to fascism, it is its natural goal and conclusion, a captured zombie government that exists solely to further the short term profit of big business, scapegoating using for profit media and captured political pulpits to blame the powerless without such pulpits for the capitalists sociopathic, avarice driven malice.
Citizens United was just pissing on the nation's already long dead corpse.
A democracy, if we can keep it.
Half the voting population doesn’t want to keep it.
That's the fallacy ..... it was never a democracy
How do you define democracy?
It's arguably more than that. A lot of the people who voted Democrat don't want democracy either, they just want their neoliberals to be the ones fucking them instead of the loud crazies.
America rn is the result of over four decades of divisive propoganda efforts coming to fruition. Entire generations have grown up believing the wealthy elites of our nation are untouchable. We've been a plutocracy for at least a decade now, the mask has just fallen off.
Well that's just an insane way to think about it
Half your voting population isn't nearly representative of even 20% of the actual population. Get more people to vote.
closer to a 1/3rd not a 1/2 but yeah
2/3rds actually. The people who didn't vote also don't care about keeping it.
Democrats: "I'd like to speak to your manager, Mr. Trump."
Trump: My hand- uh, manager will be back soon. He's the one in the black ballcap.
No worries. The kingdoms that replace democracy will be responsible and enlightened. /s
(Sadly, a real thing.)
If someone believes that USA was "blessed with stable government", then ofc they believe that some daddy is going to save them. These delusions are closely related.
Barring civil religion, the USA has had a relatively stable government during its history.
The country is on its second basic law since its founding, with the current basic law being in force for over 200 years.
There has been only one civil war and that war is long outside the memory of living Americans.
There was a recent national coup attempt in 2020, but the transition of power that the coup was trying to prevent still occurred.
National borders haven't been seriously threatened in the lifetime of its citizens, with the last loss of territory of the Philippines being carried out as a planned internal political matter.
You'd be hard pressed to find another country with that record.
That’s what the congress is for. The problem is that the president can easily bypass it with executive orders.
Also Congress is complicit.
The people have to be the adults
True. But hard when they've only ever been in a daycare.
It's interesting the maturity, views and domestic priorities of an American that has travelled to other parts of the globe and one that has never left. To some, the daycare is their world, so it's hard to imagine them acting as though they're in "the real world".
The daycare relies on that.
The adults are supposed to be at the polls.
The adults didn't show up.
And why didn't they show up?
"Lord of the Flies" type feeling.
Inertia rules human behavior.
