this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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The Overton window is anchored by a series of landmarks. The most effective way to lose one of them, like the Constitution, is to start discussing whether it has merit.
Right now, the country is in the sad state that the absolute minimum, adherence to a Constitution to which government official swear an oath of allegiance, is in question. You gain absolutely nothing, right now, by questioning the Constitution. You wait until the constitutional order is re-established and actors that routinely violate it are punished, and when the Overton window moves back ... it's not really to the left, it's more towards democracy itself, then you discuss the flaws of the Constitution.
Yeah. Why do you think that Lemmy, a markedly leftist platform, is so inundated with people talking about how useless all our imperfect tools for making the world slightly less authoritarian are? Why do you think they're trying to get us to abandon them rather than bolstering their support?
I've been saying this for months. The people who are trying to get the left to abandon the effective means we have for shifting the overton window to the left are right-wingers or being manipulated by right-wingers.
The people who spend their days banging away about how we don't have democracy, we've never had democracy, the constitution is useless, the democrats never accomplish anything, etc, are literally agents of the right whether they know it or not. But many of them probably literally do know it.
Why do we see this more on Lemmy than in real life or on other platforms? Because we're being targeted.
Absolutely! I had the same impression with the Gaza protests. The Biden/Harris administration handled the situation absolutely horribly, but anyone who had watched #45 knew that things were going to get a whole universe worse for Gaza if Trump got reelected. And yet, there was that strange bombardment with "I can't vote for Harris because of Gaza" that seemed astroturfed.
I have a horrible feeling that we may, this month, be watching the final death of Gaza. And everyone's too distracted or too powerless to do anything about it.
They've just run out of food. There's none left. I think this might be the end. I think by this time next year, what was "Gaza" may simply be Israel.
There's a lot to criticize about Biden's response to Gaza (Basically all of it). But, it's outright absurd to pretend that all of that instantly applied to Kamala Harris, for more or less literally no reason at all, or that it represented a sensible reason to let someone come to power who turned "I'm going to hem and haw and at the end of the day support Israel in 90% of what they're doing while making noise about humanitarian aid" into "Fuck it, kill 'em all, I'll send their supporters to El Salvador to help support you."
Incorrect. I think it would have lost her a lot of support. A lot more American people support Israel than Palestine, because they're as unaware of the nature of the genocide as you are about the shockingly-good-for-American-politics steps Biden took to support the working class and a lot of the key issues the people on Lemmy are constantly clamoring about (police brutality, unions, climate change).
You really don't know?
There is 0 food coming in. The aid agencies inside have just run out. I'm not talking about "clean food." I'm talking about mass starvation.
People can't survive for a year with 0 food. That's what I am talking about. There was food coming in before, including with that pitiful effort to build a pier to get the US military directly involved in providing it. It was terrible, but whatever, it was something. Now it's 0.
No, Harris lost because masterpieces of propaganda convinced people that she would be worse for the working class and Trump would finally set things right. Her actual positions had literally nothing at all to do with it, and Gaza was a tiny sideshow to it that was only occasionally deployed to people on the left who it would influence.
They actually did opposite propaganda sometimes, depending on who was being targeted: To mainstream Americans, she was a friend to "terrorists" who was on Palestine's side, and that's why we can't vote for her, and to leftists, she was a friend to Israel who was responsible for 100% of Biden's Gaza policy, and that's why we can't vote for her.
And people bought it. Like you! Good job. And look at how we're fucked now.
Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.
I don't even want to make a joke about let's talk in a month, I want to be able to point to the material difference in Gaza. It's too horrifying to make light of or want to connect in any way with internet debate points. But yes, there is absolutely a material difference. Things were already hell on earth, and now they've gotten even worse. Beyond the slaughter that was already happening. Simply because you don't see it doesn't in any way make it go away.
I think I'm done talking now, and it sounds like you were already, I think we can go our separate ways.
lol, your mental gymnastics are impressive.
That's interesting, because unlike so, so many of the people that took on the mantle of the righteous cause of the Palestinians, I've been talking about it since last century. The Palestinians have been mistreated since at least the 80s, and in an ongoing fashion for now 40 years.
Did I hear anyone on the American left complain about it until 2023? Not really. It was really lonely in that camp. It somehow feels that if it hadn't been for TikTok taking up the cause, this would have been another one of those times when Palestine is forgotten.
I am delighted that Palestine has gotten more attention, and I am very hopeful that somehow the situation can be stabilized and improved for a people that has suffered way too much. But not preventing Trump from taking power was honestly a very bad thing to happen for Palestine.
It's fucking harrowing right now. The food is gone. The amount that can come in has been cut to 0, and the aid agencies that were operating inside the country have run out as of this week.
I think May might be the month that everyone dies. That's not an exaggeration. I hope I am wrong.
The best I can hope for, honestly, is that they didn't die in vain and the holocaust beginning for real, combined with the strength of the recent protest movements you talk about, is what finally motivates the international governmental community to act in a big way. None of this "divest." None of this "strongly worded statement." I don't know what it should look like instead, but it is heartbreaking that they want to just stand on the sidelines and watch it all happen. And, maybe with Trump and his dysfunction disabling the US's ability to defend Israel as they usually would, maybe there is a little window of opportunity to make a better life for the people in the West Bank and really hold Israel to account for once.
I am not hopeful, to be honest. But that is all I can see of hope, is that something better will come from it in the long run. Right now it is very, very grim.
What a shit world this has turned into if we let a whole people starve to death.
Yeah. Like I say, it is heartbreaking.
If elections could be won in the United States solely, exclusively, by denouncing Israel, the Dems would have done it. Dems want to stay in power don't they? As you said, it's not hard to set up a press conference and make a statement. So why didn't the Dems just win the election? It's so simple, right?
Of course, in reality, the answer is no, this elections was not decided on one issue. Single-issue voters are wrong, nearly every single time. Abortion, gun rights, Palestine, I don't care what the cause is, it's not the center of universe. Their analysis of why certain things happened are so blatantly biased by the one thing they care about, they fail to consider the many other factors that contributed to Harris's loss: nascent racism and sexism of voters who won't turn out for a woman of color, inflation and price gouging and stagnant wages, right wing propaganda going absolutely gangbusters, fears of violence at the polls, active voter suppression, fear mongering against LGBT and immigrants.
Nah, all that will go away because Kamala said "israel bad." Kamala wins 500 electoral votes. Trump flees to Russia, and brainwashed Republican voters denounce their evil ways and turn back to good.
In what way exactly? So far it's just a little more of what they've been doing since October 7th. Gaza was not a distinguishing factor between Republicans and Democrats in November unless you consider genocide with rainbows a distinction.
You do realize that there were multiple large real-life movements about exactly that right? Like it or not that shit was real.
I guess you have never heard of Mahmud Khalil then, or any of the other students arrested simply for speaking out about Palestine.
Nothing prevents an astroturfed movement from attracting real life supporters. I saw the genuine anger and upset at the protests. The problem is that it was all very convenient for Trump and his people. They were absolutely delighted at the self-inflicted vote suppression.
That's not a Palestinian problem; that's an American civil rights problem. It has absolutely zero impact on conditions in Palestine.
Not everything you dislike is astroturfing.
Impacting the policies of the United States is probably the single biggest thing on the planet that someone can do to help Palestine. A mass movement to spread awareness and force discussion of the issue is, I am sad to say, probably the best out of all the slimmest chances of being able to effect that.
It will not be very effective, because of awful problems in the US government, but I literally cannot think of anything at all that any person could do that has any better chance of helping the Palestinians than effectively organizing protests in the US that are as big as you can make them. The only other thing that I can even think of is a massive paramilitary attack on Israel, and I think that would be much more likely than not to backfire and be the end of Palestine.
Oh, also, not letting Trump get in office would have been a big thing, but we sure fucked that up, and God help them now.
True enough, but that was always a long-term goal. There wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of US policy towards Palestine meaningfully changing this decade no matter which party won the election.
I'm not going to have a conversation with you where I explain why, as bad as Biden and every other president has been, Trump is a meaningful change. I've talked about it already twice today and it is too grim. Look in my history if you want to see.
Yeah fair enough, but that's also not what I was trying to say. America's Palestine policy wasn't going to improve during the next eight years even with Democrats in charge. Even if you think Trump is somehow worse, we should be able to agree on that.
I mean, we'll never know now. And yes, Trump is worse.
It's amazing how often I see someone proclaiming to have a deeply held belief only to turn around and immediately support a political pathway that is objectively detrimental to their cause and crow about how their position is the most moral while ignoring the 100% predictable consequences. Bonus points for them also arguing that picking the obviously better choice is wrong because both sides are the same, or the other person would have done the shit that only one of them was saying they'd do.
Almost as if they are being disingenuous, and the theory under which what they're doing makes perfect sense is more likely than the one at face value which makes 0 sense.
So… wait for never?
I think of this as an opportunity. The administration seems to be incredibly incompetent in addition to corrupt. The resulting economic calamity will probably taint everything they advanced with the stink of failure - from anti-trans policies to willy-nilly suspension of constitutional rights and declarations of phony emergencies.
It's never good to have enemies, but it's almost tolerable when they are incompetent.
Seriously. What this country actually needs is a massive people movement to get the crooks and tyrants out of government. Trump didn't invent any of that or even close to, but if him trying to have the government kill everybody who looks at him funny or gets in his way is what it takes to get that going, let's fucking take advantage and accomplish some things, lord knows we need it.
Because the democrats work so hard to change things, right? Biden did so much the first time around.
Harder than you.
Got em
But then your alleged temporary allies will turn back to enemies and you'll be back to square one with neoliberals and conservatives playing their farce of a tug of war game.
Yeah, the constitution has a whole bunch of problems with it that are the direct cause of the issues the US has been seeing for decades (weighting a lot of the votes towards empty states, many of which were actually created explicitly in an effort to make sure the political balance remained the same).
At the very least talk about an amendment that fixes those issues, or you'll just go back to a ratchet towards more inequality, neoliberalism and authoritarianism.
Re-establish the system that got us here in the first place? The status quo before Trump... in which Trump got elected twice? I wonder if, once balance is restored, you'll say "now's not the time to question things" again because "our people" are in power?
I'm not saying the point is to make questioning the Constitution the most important leftist platform. I'm saying that the protest moment we have here is an opportunity. The Democratic Party wants to use the opportunity to get people to vote Democrat in elections and nothing more. It's fine to vote that way, but it just creates the opportunity for the next charismatic "outsider" figure to arise after we've had a Dem administration again. My point is that the left needs to offer a real alternative to the failing constitutional system and to the dictatorship the right is offering.
I wholeheartedly support David Hogg's movement to primary away status quo Democrats. I have seen Chuck Schumer's "negotiating skills" with the continuing resolution, I have seen Newsom's equivocation on trans rights, I have seen Biden's handling of Gaza. Believe me, I understand how useless it is to have one party be radically authoritarian and the other wants to play nice and get along.
What I am saying is that I think it makes more sense to get rid of the status quo party now than in 2024.
In any kind of public, widespread platform/ venue, I agree with you 100%. Discussing whether the US is a moral entity at its root is not something you do on CNN or even Facebook, because it is going to be weaponized by the Right to paint you as anti-US to the politically-disengaged Center, and also to justify their unconstitutional actions as being less harmful via whataboutism.
I don't think Beehaw- a small, intentionally Leftist space- is equivalent. No one here is going to say, "hmm, maybe Trump ignoring the constitution is the same as people discussing whether a document that first enshrined slavery and then sustained it in a carceral system, is capable of reformation. Makes sense." Nor is anyone outside this space reading or broadcasting it. And there does have to be space for free political discussion somewhere, or you've just abdicated free speech out of fear of politicization.
This presupposes that the form of democracy it will move "back" towards will be the same as where it was before all this. There is no reason to think that will be the case, and certainly major political events of the past in the US (Civil War, Civil Rights movement, WW2, 9/11, etc) have often included large constitutional shifts either through amendment or interpretation. This is certainly a major political event.
We could go on a tangent about whether political capital is real, and whether (if it is) we are capable of returning to where we were before even if we wanted, but suffice it to say that many people would likely disagree with the premise that we can ever perfectly revert to pre-2024 Election America. A lot of people (even in the Center) believed that our checks and balances under the Constitution would prevent a dictator. Now that we're seeing otherwise, I highly doubt most Democrat voters will ever again fully trust the Constitution to protect them, without serious amendment.
So discussing what those amendments might be, how that reform could work, or whether those protections are even possible to regain via the Constitution without e.g. giving congress or the judiciary enforcement abilities (or via some other means entirely), seems like a pretty important discussion for people to be having.
All very fair points, I agree.