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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.