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
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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