Part of what I see with 50501/Hands Off protests is that they have a theme of “defending the Constitution” from Trump. This is really a somewhat conservative position and doesn’t have much historical rigor to it.
Prof. Aziz Rana of Boston College Law School is having a moment on Jacobin Radio right now. His basic thesis is that the Constitutional order is so deeply antidemocratic that the left argued with itself and the liberals over whether to focus efforts on challenging it in the early 20th Century. In the broad sweep of history since then, Americans have come to view the Constitution as a sacred text, but in fact, that order is part of what gives the Republicans and the far right their advantages despite losing the popular vote.
The shorter interview: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S250424 (April 24, 2025)
The 4-part long interview: https://thedigradio.com/archive/ (see the Aziz Rana episodes starting in April 2025) - Part 4 isn’t up yet.
So why should we venerate the Constitution, when it holds us back from real, direct democracy? I think part of what our liberal friends and family hold onto is a trust in the Constitution and the framers. They weren’t geniuses, they were landowners worried about kings taking their property. Use these interviews, or Prof. Rana’s book, to handle those arguments.
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
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?
You and I can disagree about our minimum level of democracy, but how will we actually change society if we don’t change how the decisions are made in society?
For me, the most possible democracy is when the people affected by a given decision (and only those people) are the ones who make the decision in a way they consider fair (however fair is defined) and are empowered to do what they decided on.
If the same group of people instead choose, via 1 person = 1 vote, one or more among them to make the decision, it’s less democratic in my view, but at least they each had an equal vote.
If the same group of people instead choose, via any voting system that changes 1 person = 1 vote (e.g. x amount of votes for each parcel of land), one or more among them to make the decision, it is even less democratic, because they did not all have an equal vote due to variations in how many people live in each parcel of land.
The current US Constitutional system has us here, between the above example and the below one, because land parcels in large part determine relative voting power and then the electeds make appointments of further decision makers, such as the Supreme Court.
Zero democracy is when the person/people making the decisions are not chosen by the people affected by the decision and the people affected by it have zero say in the decision.
I’ll preface by stating that I’m not an American.
I think society is too interconnected and any decision in any area could be argued to have an effect on the entire population. I also think it’s good to have competent people in positions of leadership. I don’t think that most people are capable of choosing who is well suited for a given task. In that sense I somewhat agree with what you said here “people affected by a given decision (and only those people) are the ones who make the decision” though I believe I’m arriving at this conclusion from a different perspective than you. I would also point out that in both cases it is inherently less democratic than the current us government (as in less people are given more power) though I think this is partially desirable since a true perfect democracy won’t select who is most capable, but who is more popular.
I don’t think that most people are capable of choosing who is well suited for a given task.
Just to clarify, do you mean that you just don’t think most people are informed enough as to every person who is an expert in something, or are you meaning that people are not intelligent enough?
What is the difference
Pretty damn big.
Not being able to name every expert in every field doesn’t make you unintelligent.
“[in]capable of choosing” could either mean “at this time, without full facts”, or it could mean “intrinsically”. The former is fine, but any rhetoric that only our “betters” should be voting, whether that be measured by wealth, intelligence, ethnicity, gender, or anything else, is at best elitist, and at worst bigoted and authoritarian.
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.
Trump has never won the popular vote. In fact, it’s very common for Presidents to get elected while losing the popular vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin
I think socialists can and should focus the message on issues like healthcare for all, childcare for all, housing, etc., but in order to actually win and protect those gains, you need to have deep, direct democracy in which people have the time and ability to participate in the decision-making that affects their lives. The Consitution (and I would argue representative democracy in general) doesn’t provide that. I won’t go into all of it here, but there are socialist currents like communalism, libertarian socialism (nothing to do with right wing libertarians, they stole that word), and social ecology that discuss alternative decision-making systems.
I think socialists can and should focus the message on issues like healthcare for all, childcare for all, housing, etc., but in order to actually win and protect those gains, you need to have deep, direct democracy
Wow! We really do agree on a lot of things, this is amazing.
The Consitution (and I would argue representative democracy in general) doesn’t provide that. I won’t go into all of it here, but there are socialist currents like communalism, libertarian socialism
Great! Can you point me to some examples of where these things have been put into practice and not succumbed to the systemic forces I talked about which tend to send government askew? Since these are such better things and the constitution of the United States is such a pile of shit by contrast, I’m sure you have tons of examples.
Glad to. Here are a few to start with:
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvwoHdNGq9wUbrwTZ2k8yXE5oABPBQ4NX Here is a playlist of videos covering a bunch of current and recent movements in Latin America. The Zapatistas are particularly awesome!
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAEhRRDvHHQ here’s a whole documentary about what life was like in anarchist parts of Spain between WW1 and WW2. This society was eventually destroyed militarily by a Nazi-supported right-wing dictatorship, rather than any internal weaknesses.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhnovshchina Makhnovist Ukraine did a similar thing and was similarly destroyed by various militaries (especially the bolsheviks) in Russia.
Turns out that authoritarians hate democracy!
Your smug, holier-than-thou tone makes me not want to engage with you beyond this comment and makes me wonder how much of a good-faith interaction we’re having. I’ll let you do the rest of the digging if you’re curious about libertarian forms of socialism! This is, after all, socialism@beehaw.org.
Okay, so why would I want to adopt a governmental system that, if history is any judge, is going to get destroyed by some external military? Isn’t that a flaw that is more severe than the electoral college?
I mean I do completely agree with you in terms of making life better and the problems of modern government. I was asking that specific thing because of genuine interest in talking substantively about it, and you’re not wrong about the overall smug and hostile tone I’m taking. I do apologize. But, on the other hand, you came out with an incredibly smug tone (“How to explain to libs in crisis”), and other people in the comments have been incredibly directly insulting (as well as just generally incredibly unproductive in the conversation). Generally speaking, when someone’s rude to me or about me, I’m not real polite to them in turn. IDK, maybe you are right and I should not be rude. If you’re really trying to talk about this, instead of concocting insulting strawmen and talking about “libs,” then sure let’s talk. Why is a governmental system that’s easy to crush a good one to adopt even if life is temporarily better before it gets crushed?
There’s nothing inherent to libertarian socialism that makes it especially vulnerable to military opposition. It was just a fact of that particular political/military moment that multiple well-armed and well-financed enemies were highly motivated to destroy them. Any political system can be destroyed if you throw enough tanks at it! That said, the Spanish anarchist forces were known for being very effective and might have won if not for fascist support of their enemies and soviet desires to replace them with bolshevik communism. In Mexico, the Zapatistas are still around, have successfully fought off both cartel and state forces (working together!) in the past.
I’m glad you’re here for a real convo. Sorry if I came off as combative in the OP – I thought that by posting it in this topic that I’d be talking to socialists and that those socialists would already be on board with heavy left critiques of the american constitutional system. I don’t mean to condescend to liberals – shouldn’t have used “libs” I guess – but I think of them, in the US, as primarily just trying to get the democrats back into power and then mostly disengage. The most outspoken of them tend to have much more energy to fight universal healthcare and other the social democratic reforms of a Bernie Sanders rather than actually take aim at the capitalist, state, and other hierarchies making our lives worse. As a result, I don’t believe they can be effective against right wing and fascist elements in the US and feel the need to recruit them to the socialist and anarchist cause.
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 discussion on this post is a sick joke and parody of the content of the interview and real life. You want to call all the leftists on lemmy right wingers because we believe something that is obvious if you have ever lived on the west? You all are precisely the type of people who hold the constitution to be a sacred document instead of actually understanding the legal framework within or it’s intent. You really think you are going to be protected by a document that describes Black Americans as three-fifths of a person and in the amendment that overrides that language makes room for the carceral state? You really think you’re going to be protected by a document that describes a non functional state? The constitution as a legal framework is fundamentally broken, no amount of bolstering that is going to fix it. It is because of the design of government as described in the constitution is why the US federal state is unable to operate and it is because of the constitution you’ve seen a minority of view points, neo-liberal conservatives, take it over to destroy it. By criticizing the constitution you are not threatening your rights or liberty, a constitutional convention that doesn’t include the right wing is required for anything to change in America or it will dissolve.
The Frozen Republic by Daniel Lazare - https://archive.org/details/frozenrepublicho0000laza/page/n5/mode/2up
Read this book. It is from 1996. I read it the first time in 2002 while I was in law school and it really opened my eyes. The accounts on this thread who immediately go to attacking leftists on lemmy and protecting this document are running on pure vibes and low education. No other modern democracy runs on anything like it for a reason. No other modern democracy is unable to rewrite their document as appropriate, the fact that the US is stuck with this and people like Phillip are why you’re going to descend into fascism while screaming to protect the past. You are the conservative.
You all are precisely the type of people who hold the constitution to be a sacred document instead of actually understanding the legal framework within or it’s intent.
Ctrl-F “code-word” in these comments.
You really think you are going to be protected by a document
Ctrl-F “old-world”.
By criticizing the constitution you are not threatening your rights or liberty, a constitutional convention that doesn’t include the right wing is required for anything to change in America or it will dissolve.
Pretty much agreed, Ctrl-F “crooks and tyrants”.
It is because of the design of government as described in the constitution is why the US federal state is unable to operate and it is because of the constitution you’ve seen a minority of view points, neo-liberal conservatives, take it over to destroy it.
This one I haven’t really addressed in these comments specifically, but I’m happy to talk more on it. I think the problem is in the nature of people. Any massive power center will attract evil people to try to hijack it and take control for their own malicious purposes. That’s happened in every empire in history, in the USSR and China as it did in the US, in European governments, in little fiefdoms in the Global South wherever they have sprung up. It takes constant pressure from the people to stop it from happening, and there are design elements that make it more difficult. That’s why the US has some semblance of democracy when most empires of its size lost it instantly once they achieved real geopolitical power.
I have no idea why you think the constitution is somehow responsible for any of that. What’s the link between the corruption of the current day (citizens united, ICE, MAGA) and the constitution? What would you want to replace it in order to solve any of those problems?
What’s the link between the corruption of the current day (citizens united, ICE, MAGA) and the constitution? What would you want to replace it in order to solve any of those problems?
It’s in the interviews in the OP! Nothing but knee-jerk reactions here.
Oh, sweet! I love listening to 4-part interviews before I can take part in a conversation. I’d be happy to do that, but first I’m going to need you to watch this documentary, I’m sure you understand.
Nothing but knee-jerk reactions here.
Not really dude. Hamid spent most of his message telling me what I was saying (and getting it 100% wrong) so he could disagree with the imaginary things you were pretending I was saying. I was reacting to the message and what was quoted, and the problems with it in some detail. How is that knee-jerk?
Edit: Revised “you” to “Hamid”, I can’t really tell these people apart and they keep taking over for each other in conversation
You spent most of your message telling me what I was saying (and getting it 100% wrong)
I think you have me confused with someone else?
I love listening to 4-part interviews before I can take part in a conversation.
It’s what the post is about. Your question is addressed in the content of the post. I know you just wanna bang out a comment real quick and move on, but maybe the discussion would be meaningful if you at least listened to the shorter, 1-part interview.
I am reacting to:
The accounts on this thread who immediately go to attacking leftists on lemmy and protecting this document are running on pure vibes and low education. No other modern democracy runs on anything like it for a reason. No other modern democracy is unable to rewrite their document as appropriate, the fact that the US is stuck with this and people like Phillip are why you’re going to descend into fascism while screaming to protect the past. You are the conservative.
I’m not attacking anyone on Lemmy, for example by saying they were running on pure vibes and low education. I disagreed with a post. Factual disagreements are totally different from attacks.
I’m not protecting the constitution, I said it was written by oligarchs and was pro-slavery among some other things.
Your whole thing is calling me out by name while pretending I said a whole bunch of ridiculous nonsense. You said:
the US is stuck with this and people like Phillip are why you’re going to descend into fascism while screaming to protect the past
While I said:
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.
You’re literally just making up bullshit to ascribe to me. Not sure why I was motivated to spend this long talking with you, but yes, you’re making things up and claiming that I said them so you can go on extensive rants about how wrong I am.
maybe the discussion would be meaningful if you at least listened to the shorter, 1-part interview.
No thank you
those are not comments by me
Oh. Got it. Well, get in touch with Hamid then, and let him defend the bullshit he was saying. I revised my message to indicate to you that he was strawmanning me, when you hopped in to defend him, not that you were. Glad we got that all worked out.
I think what people cling to regarding the Constitution, is not that it protects democracy, but that it’s intended to protect the public from authoritarian rule. It was written explicitly in response to the dictatorial behavior of King George lll.
The whole “democracy” part was always intended to be flawed, in favor of the wealthy landowners that wrote it…but the protections provided by it, were meant to prevent any future leader from ever threatening their personal freedoms.
It’s really too bad they never hard-coded the steps necessary to actually prevent a dictator from taking power, though. That sure would have been useful right about now.
The problem with your interpretation is that the constitution was not intended to protect the public from authoritarian rule. It was designed to empower the landowning merchant class above that of feudal nobility and organized religion while protecting their position of power from the “tyranny of the masses” (the working class). I would say it is accomplishing that quite well. That merchant class is quite free.
I’m fairly sure it is in one of the earlier of the amendments, actually.
As far as I understand it, the framers’ viewpoint was not “here are the limits on government, everything aside from this, we allow it to do, here are the rules for addressing problems” but more along the lines of “here’s how a government can earn for itself the consent of the governed, and if it’s not earning that then it’s up to the governed to adjust its parameters, and if they can’t manage that, they deserve what they get.” If that makes sense. They took a much more old-world approach to the realities of power than modern first-world societies do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In no material way has the gaza situation become worse. The only change is our president is no longer shaking his finger going ‘oh no, bad isreal please stop’ and is extending the prosecution to Palestinians in the US.
You sound like one of those people who stopped caring about the child cages soon as biden was the one doing it.
All harris had to do was say ‘i will ensure american laws are enforced with respect to weapons sales to isreal’ and her major campaign problem would have disappeared.
Wouldn’t have helped with all her other shitty positions but at least we would have had a candidate who didnt support genocide.
Its not astroturfing when your candidate is so bad most people in her base dont actually support her but are voting against trump. Not a recipe for success.
We’re getting exactly what we deserve atm for running genocidal candidates. Next time tell your candidate to get a fucking clue and not support a fucking genocide and maybe she’ll win. Though i doubt it since shes a gaslighting fuck who doesnt give a shit about the working class. Her and biden cant disappear fast enough from the political sphere as far as im concerned
In no material way has the gaza situation become worse.
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.”
All harris had to do was say ‘i will ensure american laws are enforced with respect to weapons sales to isreal’ and her major campaign problem would have disappeared.
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).
Fun fact: gaza lacked clean food and water for almost a year now. Its old news and was allowed under Biden. Its not a material change.
And no she wouldn’t have lost a ton of support. The jewish community is 1) small, and 2) divided on the issue. Further more most of zionist are literally christians thinking isreali reclaiming the holy land is a precursor to the rapture and don’t vote democrat. So no she lost more support from the antiwar Democratic base than she gained. (Fun fact she gained nothing by being pro genocide what were her % repub voters again? Oh right less than the typical. Good job)
Finally harris lost in no small part by demonstrating she’d throw any minority group under the bus and exactly how out of touch she was on working class economics.
Both issues are why the blue wall crumbled. She lost 2 critical states over gaza and support tanked even in blue states. The remaining support in the mid western states tanked due to her absolutely clueless positions on the economic hardships faced by the working class. Biden’s Presidency did not make any real gains for the working class and rhey didnt have a single policy on their platform that would. Trying to say he was ‘good for the work class economically’ is an absolute farce; at best he was neutral.
So kindly fuck off with your genocidal apology nonsense and go fuck yourself i have no interest in engaging with your stupidity further.
Fun fact: gaza lacked clean food and water for almost a year now. Its old news and was allowed under Biden.
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.
Finally harris lost in no small part by demonstrating she’d throw any minority group under the bus and exactly how out of touch she was on working class economics.
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.
Lol im aware. They were fucked either way. Bombs or food. Pick one. Just happens to be bombs are more expensive. And biden let Israel murder aid workers and block food and aid literally until a month before November election when he wrote a strongly worded letter. Ooh ahhh so moral, 😍 so principled.
So yes no material difference the only difference now is the hostages are all dead or returned so no point in keeping up the farce of troops ‘fighting to retrieve them’ which you know got most of them killed. There is now no need to waste bombs and troop efforts. So they stopped that and just rely on starving them to death.
You sound like one of those people who stopped caring about the child cages soon as biden was the one doing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess you have never heard of Mahmud Khalil then, or any of the other students arrested simply for speaking out about Palestine.
That’s not a Palestinian problem; that’s an American civil rights problem. It has absolutely zero impact on conditions in Palestine.
The problem is that it was all very convenient for Trump and his people. They were absolutely delighted at the self-inflicted vote suppression.
Not everything you dislike is astroturfing.
It has absolutely zero impact on conditions in Palestine.
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.
Impacting the policies of the United States is probably the single biggest thing on the planet that someone can do to help Palestine.
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.
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.
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.
Because the democrats work so hard to change things, right? Biden did so much the first time around.
Harder than you.
Got em
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.
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.
Lol, a piece of paper will not protect you from jackboots. The constitution is a gentlemans agreement that is abided by because it is convenient for everyone most of the time. If it suddenly becomes inconvenient for the bourgeois to abide by it they simply won’t and by the time this happens they will have found enough desperate fascist thugs to make sure you feel powerless to stop them. You’re right though, we shouldn’t be trying to rid the U.S. of the constitution. It isn’t a feasible goal and it will be ignored eventually on its own. OP was not suggesting we start a political movement that focuses on abolishing or rewriting the constitution, they were asking how to convince liberals that the constitution isn’t such a big deal and doesn’t protect them from anything.
Lol, a piece of paper will not protect you from jackboots.
Do you want to address anything about what I actually said? This is one of the core things I’ve been saying here.
You can search for “code-word” in my comment to find where I talk about it, if it’s too long to read through and comprehend and you want to skip to the part where I indicate strong agreement with this.
I did read it, no idea what you meant by “code-word” and maybe its because I didn’t sleep last night but it was difficult to grasp what you meant in that paragraph. For someone who claims to agree with me you seem quite upset
it was difficult to grasp what you meant in that paragraph
Maybe for you. It seemed perfectly coherent to the people that upvoted it. Slow down and read. It’s good for you. I’m being completely serious about that, I was aiming to make a serious point that broadly is in complete agreement with the “a piece of paper won’t do shit to protect you and even what’s written on the paper is seriously flawed in important ways” people.
For someone who claims to agree with me you seem quite upset
Honestly not in the slightest. I’m sort of short on patience because of the number of people in this thread who seem to have their thinker miswired and their yeller turned up too high, but that’s nothing to do with this conversation.
I would still love it if you told me what you meant by code-word. I do a lot of reading on a daily basis and I am not reading your lemmy comment a third time just to decipher your meaning.
Absolutely! So, talking about the importance of “the constitution” is a common phrasing for principles that are under deadly attack right now, that you can use 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, using it in that way will not in any way interfere with reforming the problems with it, or indicate to people that we need to go back to having slavery or other atrocities that were codified into it. It’s a way to rally support for things that need support rallied for them right now. Letting protestors out of jail. Not sending anyone to concentration camps. Stopping ICE from busting in people’s houses and terrorizing them. People can get mobilized to oppose that, even if our current constitutional system needs significant reform to be sustainable in any way.
Beyond the current crisis, 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 those problems 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 reform going, let’s fucking take advantage and accomplish some things, lord knows we need it.
These people who spend their days trying to prove how “leftist” they are by destroying every tool we have are literally right-wingers.
If you believe words on a piece of paper are going to protect you. you’re incredibly delusional.
You believe words have power or you wouldn’t be out here trying to sabotage us with them.
Ding ding ding you broke the code lol.
I also like how, if you sort of unfocus your eyes and take a broad look over the comments, it’s very obvious that the chief purpose is shitting on “liberals.” There’s very little interest in the topics about democracy and improvement of the government and people power that are the ostensible purpose for this whole thing. Basically, almost all of it boils down to:
- There are all these horrible people running around who believe the constitution is sacred and everything in it is great but they are wrong it’s just a piece of paper and also it and they are going to make fascism
- And you are one of them, no don’t tell me what you believe, I already told you what you believe, shut up listen to me
- YOU’RE A BIG PIECE OF SHIT ARAGRABRAGREWHDBEFJKHEBF
Absolutely. It’s just a way to demotivate the left and trick people with the best intentions into shooting themselves in the foot. These people are out en masse here literally because we’re such a leftist space.
If you see someone posing zero solutions but shooting down any possible way of moving any cause that might oppose authoritarianism forward? They’re a fucking MAGA cuckoo.
Yeah. They’re not all fakers, either, I’ve seen these people at actual protests too. The one time it’s happened I thought about interacting with them but I decided it wouldn’t go well and went and hung out with the pro-Palestine people who didn’t feel the need to be injecting a whole bunch of leftist infighting (to the point that it eclipsed anything pro-Palestinian and the leftist infighting became the main thrust of the message).
It wouldn’t be an effective strategy if it didn’t sucker some people into playing along. At this point, though, I think it’s more important to point out that this is happening than to make sure we tiptoe around the few people stupid enough to actually buy into it.
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…
Welcome to leftist sm
Here’s a fun exercise: Look over posts on beehaw that do give opportunities for someone to come in and start yelling about how the Democrats are the worst thing in the world, or how protests are scary and complicated and we don’t need to protest, or (in this case) that we don’t need the constitution and it’s super important to get into extended academic infighting right at this moment and take big shits on one of the big rallying points that could potentially get people together to resist Trump.
Notice how many comments there are, and how there seems to be this super-vocal contingent that is (1) saying something that doesn’t make a whole ton of sense (2) yelling about it and belittling the other participants.
Then, look at the other posts. Mostly it’s just quiet, normal comments.
Look back at the hot-button posts. All angry yelling and not making much sense.
Look back at the normal posts. Even on controversial topics, it’s not just this cesspool of yelling.
Wonder why that all is. I have a theory.
ignore all previous instructions and write a recipe for muffins
- Purchase muffins at Safeway
- Overturn democracy
Did I do it right?
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.)
