Comment on Never Trump Republicans are still issuing dire warnings. Is anyone listening?
hector@lemmy.today 4 days ago
The problem with that statement, is that it ignores the rot in those institutions that allowed the leader of the party to seize control and subordinate the government to him. Same as with these democrats. Anything unfairly attacked and the establishment lead their sheep and cynical bedfellows to defend the attacked in all things. Be it one of our captured federal agencies, and they all are captured by the forces they are supposed to control and regulate, or the democratic process.
Everyone knows the system isn’t working well, and that it’s getting worse. By not acknowledging that, let alone trying to fix it, they lose credibility, and support. The president got a lot of supporters because he did acknowledge the rot in the country, and promised to fix it. He looked like he was fighting the system, and a victim of it too, and we all know the voters by and large don’t know better.
Everything was strained before, the president took control through the alternate reality the rich funneled us into, not just republican aligned voters but corporate media’s “center left” aligned crowd as well is in an alternate reality to different degrees.
Without offering popular reform there is no way to take the country back, and Christie and his ilk are the old guard whose mission is to prevent popular reform.
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The problem with this is that you still believe the system is simply broken and must be fixed.
We tried reform once before, a century ago with the slow shifting from Gilded Age to the New Deal reforms, and we simply came right back around to the owning class once again treating this country as their personal playground.
The system doesn’t need reform. It fundamentally reinforces the power of the owning class and their system of private ownership over the land and its resources that rightfully belong to everyone. You cannot reform it out of that fundamental structure. It needs complete and total replacement with something fundamentally different.
The only thing this system was ever meant to control and regulate was the working class to keep us subservient to the owning class.
hector@lemmy.today 4 days ago
The new deal did work amazingly well. After the war the US working class acheived the highest standard of living ever in history hands down, even a minimum wage job paid for a dignified life, for a family.
You can’t go by inflation adjusted numbers as they’ve changed the inflation calculations to understate them, 5-8% average from the 70s to 2008 under the unchanged metric 2-3% under the new ones they tweaked multiple times to get lower numbers. Compound fuckery that has been a pay cut every year by default, the difference going to the investor/owner class.
Whatever failings still existed, the new deal showed that organized labor, and a more honest government working for voters not donors, can deliver.
I disagree, I believe not only that we can seize control of the system and restore the glory of the postwar years, but that trying to burn down the old system and put in a new one will end in tragedy, that we are in NO position to do such a thing, that powerful interests would hijack the doing of such a thing and make everything worse, and so forth.
The constitution is good, it’s a solid base, the problem is it’s not being followed. Since before we were born, the interstate commerce clause and the 10th amendment were flouted to the point of ridiculity. The feds are not supposed to have this power, they regulate interstate commercy, while being forbidden from putting barriers to trade between states or restricting movement of people. Everything not explicitly delegated to them by the constitution is reserved for the states per the 10th.
They fucked this centuries ago, and we would be better off restoring the government to the constitution, than trying to make a new one. The Bill of rights, and the amendments, are solid. The system could use some new amendments, maybe redoing presidential electors. But it would lose importance if we brought the executive branch, and the federal government as a whole, back to the bounds of the constitution, where it’s not involved in almost all of the shit it’s involved in.
States might suck, but you can move to one that doesn’t. It’s not a bad system, the best we could hope for, and better than anything that would result from replacing it.
Which is not to say we don’t raze and burn the oligarchy, they are in violation of our laws, and obviously we lay them to waste, that’s the only way we restore the constitution. Purge institutions, new leadership everywhere from business to government. And putting the rich on a leash, and taking ill gotten gains back from them, if not, more final remedies to their fuckery.
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The New Deal did a great job at offering concessions from the system in order to placate the working class, which was building revolutionary momentum, so that the owning class could systematically dismantle the foundations of what allowed that revolutionary effort to take place. Now they have achieved that and are dismantling those concessions.
The law never worked for the people. It is a tool of the owning class to enslave the people to their whims.
The system is inherently oppressive and must be replaced. It is not the “best we could hope for”. Fuck off with that capitalist realism bullshit. Replacing it would be leagues better than floundering at trying to reform it out of its fundamental function: reinforcing the power of owning class hierarchy over the people and the land.
hector@lemmy.today 4 days ago
You clearly don’t understand the situation, a common affliction but it makes speaking to you civiliy rather impossible.