crossdlThe American democratic republic has died. It was 236 years old.
Libra00Aside from this being a little fucking melodramatic and defeatist, the thing that really bothers me is the implicit assumption that if only we’d all just vote blue no matter who we wouldn’t have this problem, like the Democratic Party hasn’t been kowtowing to and enabling those same oligarchs to undermine our democracy. It’s like they’re standing in the rubble of a bombing and saying, ‘This is happening because you chose the short fuse on the bomb, if only you had chosen the long fuse we wouldn’t have noticed this happening quite so quickly wouldn’t be having this problem!’
Don’t get me wrong, boom tomorrow is definitely better than boom today, but it’s important to not forget that there was never not going to be a boom.
So cute copium, but it’s over. You can discuss what we can do with the next empire? I’m over this one and good riddance honestly it was cringe at the end.
Here’s a radical idea: let’s not have one. Let’s instead have a society that is committed to ensuring that the needs of all of its citizens are met instead of just those of the capitalist class. Voting (blue or not) will never get you there though, because both parties are on the same corporate dark money IV drip. This shithole is the way it is because the people with all the money and power want it this way, and if you think voting will dig you out of it you haven’t been paying attention.
Or, you know, you could just primary existing candidates. That’s always been an option. Take over the infrastructure from within is not as hard as you make it out to be with how it’s set up.
You cannot change the government without the will of the people on some level.
Listen, I voted blue for 30 years and watched them steadily run to the right so hard the party leadership is sitting in Reagan’s lap now, primarying candidates does not change the system because all of the candidates are just puppets hanging from the same set of strings (otherwise they don’t have the funding to get (re)elected.)
Also you definitely can change the government without the will of the people, Trump’s doing a pretty fair job of that while his supporters go ‘I was in favor of deporting the bad people not my mom!’ or ‘I was in favor of firing the lazy government employees not me!’.
It’s like saying “let’s all get rid of smartphones together” the cat is out of the box with having social structures (and therefore empires unfortunately)
Nah, more like ‘Let’s get rid of the ozone hole’, which we then did.
I don’t get it. No. We didn’t. We changed our behaviour and saved it. It is a success story.
You were effectively saying ‘we can’t change big stuff’, and then I provided an example of a big thing we changed because we decided to. My point, then, is: sure we can, we do all the time. We won’t because we’re all addicted to cheap goods and outsourced labor and shit, but won’t is a fair distance from can’t.
We didn’t decide to abolish social structures though. Ever. And it is something the same as fire. We don’t abolish fire. We won’t ever stop having social structures.
I’m not saying abolish social structures altogether, I’m saying change them, and we change them all the time too.
Specifically, you are saying we should try not having empires. It’s an impossibility. Stop using freon and banning planet killer chemicals was not in the same dimension as fucking stop having civilization after we had it for 2 millenia
You are conflating civilization with empire, the two words have different definitions for a reason. Imperialism is, according to Miriam-Webster, ‘the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas’. New Zealand qualifies as civilization in most peoples’ books, it’s not an empire, and there are lots of other similar examples out there.