Comment on Chat are we cooked?
taiyang@lemmy.world 4 days agoI mean, it is still a whole course of civics but you sorta have to be paying attention in school. It’s also usually late high school and your average tiktok user may not have graduated yet. Kinda makes sense since you’re hitting voting age at that point.
Plus international audiences, although if I’m being honest I think they have better odds of knowing what the constitution is.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah and it’s a small part of civics because it’s a lot of organizational stuff, some of which is relevant to everyone, but a lot is only significant to some people unless things completely jump the rails. Followed by a bunch of amendments which vary in importance from freedom of expression, prohibition on unlawful search and seizure, banning of cruel and unusual punishment (yeah I’m firmly of the opinion that one hasn’t been followed in my lifetime), the abolition of chattel slavery, and the extension of citizenship and suffrage to prohibiting the government from forcing you to quarter troops (it really pissed us off when England did that) to the one that banned alcohol until we realized it was a bad idea and repealed it with another. You also have shit like the direct election of senators, making president and vice president run together, and the establishment of the income tax in there. Boring procedural amendments that solved 18th and 19th century problems so you don’t think about how important they were.
Also like, the us constitution is in many ways still a radical document. The bill of rights is still controversial to actually apply. It’s easy to say no cruel and unusual punishment, but a sincere application of that would prohibit everything from the death penalty to solidarity confinement. A sincere application of the 4th amendment would strike down the entire internal surveillance system and the purchasing or requesting of it from external bodies. It would also prohibit that bs where cops charge your stuff to rob you. The fact that juries are expected to take you pleading the fifth as neutral is huge, and the fact that you’re allowed to not talk to cops is awesome. Hell we’re supposed to provide far more in public defense than we do these days. And that’s all before we get to the explicit statement that there are inalienable rights that the government is not allowed to violate that aren’t included. That’s vital for things like the implied right to privacy which was an amazing right we used to have.