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I think America made critical missteps between 1930-1980 in terms of updating our government. Congress especially started to break down, with corruption heavily seeping in and things becoming more and more gridlocked until we get to today, where effectively nothing at all productive really happens in Congress.
Can anyone imagine any constitutional amendment happening these days, no matter how benign? I don't think you could get them to agree water is wet.
Congress was the first branch to fall and rather than work to fix that, we've allowed the corruption to spread. Now the judicial branch is lost and the executive branch has taken supreme control.
America was founded on what is effectively an alpha version of democracy. Most other countries built upon that success and addressed obvious issues to varying degrees of success. Meanwhile America, instead of respecting the idea of a 'living document' instead venerated their constitution as a holy document and then calcified their government into total dead lock until it's now about to collapse.
We really fucked up when we didn't hang all the slave owners and give their land to the slaves like was promised. And just let the Southern states basically recreate slavery. The whole leadership and political apparatus of the South should have been destroyed for good after the Civil War ended not the milquetoast bargain that we ended up with.
The Union should have occupied those states and reformed the education system, the moral code and made damn sure anyone glorifying the Confederacy was hung. That and making sure the laws were just and fairly enforced.
We still are dealing with the consequences of it to this day.
The supposition that the USA's government was founded as an alpha version of democracy that failed to update seems ripe with American Exceptionalism. The claims suggest reform could have fixed a system built to serve a specific class. The system is working as intended with continued expansion of power into fewer hands.
The USA is not different in character from previous and existing systems of extraction. There is, and will continue to be, a class that benefits from said system. There are continued fomentings among the marginalized. Given the hegemony of the USA, Lemmy is a space where fomentings are happening. May such fomentings prefigure an end to extraction and heirarchy.