Socialism
Beehaw's community for socialists, communists, anarchists, and non-authoritarian leftists (this means anti-capitalists) of all stripes. A place for all leftist and labor news and discussion, as long as you're nice about it.
Non-socialists are welcome to come to learn, though it's hard to get to in-depth discussions if the community is constantly fighting over the basics. We ask that non-socialists please be respectful and try not to turn this into a "left vs right" debate forum by asking leading questions or by trying to draw others into a fight.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
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.
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.
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.
but anyone who had watched #45 knew that things were going to get a whole universe worse for Gaza
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.
And yet, there was that strange bombardment with "I can't vote for Harris because of Gaza" that seemed astroturfed.
You do realize that there were multiple large real-life movements about exactly that right? Like it or not that shit was real.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Do you think the constitution is a deeply flawed document written by the oligarchs of their time, which included among the institutions it codified slavery, misogyny, and war as a normal part of the human condition? Excellent, you're in good company and I (among many others) agree with you. That's why amendments and judges exist, also, so that we're not limited to its fairly flawed implementations and goals in governing what we're doing today.
Do you like having human rights, including the freedom to criticize the government, the right to due process, and the right to defend yourself against a tyrannical government? Great! So do I. As it happens there's a common phrasing that you can use as a quick code-word for saying that, which will engage the support of a massive range of people including among them conservatives, liberals, leftists, military people, police, lawyers, judges, and so on. And you know? It won't even made them want slavery back, if you do choose to say it that way. You could, of course, decide that it's more important to alienate 99% of those people immediately, and then provide fodder for extensive arguments with the remaining 1%. You could do that, that would be fun too.
Do you like having big performative "I'm more left than you so I'm superior I'm actually very smart because everything YOU think is good is actually bad" contests which assail whatever people are trying to do and distract from the most urgent issues of the day? Well... you're in good company with that one, too. This has always been a part of the left from the beginning, and I guess not for nothing; it's connected up with the freedom to speak your mind, not having to agree with any particular herd, and with having passion about issues and wanting to analyze everything and be on the right side of history. I get it. But I think the fight this person is picking is a pretty silly fight to pick right now.
100% of people you will talk to will understand what's meant by "the constitution," and literally nothing about it is anything other than urgent self-defense against a genuinely very urgent threat.
These people who spend their days trying to prove how "leftist" they are by destroying every tool we have are literally right-wingers.
Uhhhh, I don't think a document that outlines the basis for a type of democracy is anti democratic. There are plenty of things wrong with it though, maybe talk about those parts instead to build a stronger case against the constitution
Everyone knows that when the ship is having trouble and seems like it might be out of control, the first thing to do is destroy the wheel. After all, it wasn't working right, it was a big problem.
The supreme court is 9 ppl appointed for life, so that's antidemocratic. The Senate is 2 ppl per state regardless of population, that's antidemocratic. Amendments need 3/4 of the States, not people, to go through, that's antidemocratic. The federalist papers specifically discuss the desire to prevent the people ("the mob" they called us) from having much power.
Why are these things anti democratic? If you want to go down this path you first need to establish a clear definition for what is and isn't anti democratic. Is a doctor anti democratic because he wasn't elected by popular vote? The supreme court is appointed by the current sitting (democratically elected) president. Should every government position require a nation wide popular vote? Is that really the only way to have a democracy?
The supreme court is 9 ppl appointed for life, so that’s antidemocratic.
Yeah, we should change that.
The Senate is 2 ppl per state regardless of population, that’s antidemocratic.
Yeah, we should change that.
Amendments need 3/4 of the States, not people, to go through, that’s antidemocratic.
That one I'm a lot less sure about but we can talk about it.
The federalist papers specifically discuss the desire to prevent the people (“the mob” they called us) from having much power.
Yeah, they also said we shouldn't have a bill of rights.
Also, the need to protect government against "the mob" and how it's not as simple as just "let's let people vote and whoever wins the popular vote gets to rule because that's democracy" should be absolutely starkly apparent after November of last year. Trying to build a government that works is not really a simple thing, and just like in engineering, saying that some tool is deeply flawed isn't always necessarily an argument for why things will get better if we just get rid of it (without exploring what the alternate option is going to be and how it'll play out).
But mostly we're in agreement. Glad we worked all that out! It turned out to be really simple, who knew.
I dunno y'all, maybe just listen to the interviews?
They weren’t geniuses ...
Actually some of them were Enlightenment polymaths.
I mean they did great given the circumstances. Their first try was a total failure but the revised version worked. They were doing their best. We don't need to cling forever to the stuff they got wrong, but for the time they did a really incredible number of things right, far better than some governments that tried big ambitious reforms in the 20th century that I could name. (Although, they had a huge advantage by starting small and scattered with limited technology and then working out the problems of government in a sort of unnoticed backwater of the world as they went, without a lot of the pressures of a modern state in the modern environment. And even with that they still had to struggle a lot, a lot.)
almost every comment here reads like an LLM sharting out a light novel in response to a prompt that didn't tell it to format it as a comment..