The U.S. is now a "backsliding democracy"
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Champakian
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Democracy is a favorite catchword, but it is actually a pernicious evil
always doomed because the voters soon learn that they can vote
themselves the largess of the Treasury and the harder we work
to end the Republic as designed the quicker we get to that end.
When their greed is no longer able to be sated by the taxation
of their fellow citizens and the inflations and depressions
of fiat money, then the poor voters grow surely and
the middle-class grows resentful, minds are closed
and attitudes become positively tribal...
always doomed because the voters soon learn that they can vote
themselves the largess of the Treasury and the harder we work
to end the Republic as designed the quicker we get to that end.
When their greed is no longer able to be sated by the taxation
of their fellow citizens and the inflations and depressions
of fiat money, then the poor voters grow surely and
the middle-class grows resentful, minds are closed
and attitudes become positively tribal...
The first post represents the new way of seeing this ongoing problem.
The second is both an old, outdated mode, and also a bit if made up fantasy by fringe thinking.
Polarization is huge problem especially around propaganda such as "the big lie" which has been effective at convince citizens of some partisan agenda that has no factual basis or data points as evidence that it's true.
The use of current high tech media platforms and the use of repetition and "paid influencers" to root an idea (false, partially real, or real) is now a tactic that will be used on both sides(all sides)in the US. Disinformation campaigns are the source of the polarization. I'm not sure how one checks this without curtailing free speech.
The second is both an old, outdated mode, and also a bit if made up fantasy by fringe thinking.
Polarization is huge problem especially around propaganda such as "the big lie" which has been effective at convince citizens of some partisan agenda that has no factual basis or data points as evidence that it's true.
The use of current high tech media platforms and the use of repetition and "paid influencers" to root an idea (false, partially real, or real) is now a tactic that will be used on both sides(all sides)in the US. Disinformation campaigns are the source of the polarization. I'm not sure how one checks this without curtailing free speech.
Champakian
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You're slipping;
no mention of White Nationalistic Terrorists.
no mention of White Nationalistic Terrorists.
Champakian
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And your new way of thinking, is not at all new...
It's historic, full of monarchs, petty tyrants and mass murdering regimes.
It's historic, full of monarchs, petty tyrants and mass murdering regimes.
Champakian
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Victor Davis Hanson, Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization, American Greatness
bellisarius
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They're running around starting unattended camp fires in a tinder dry forest with no thought of the consequences. Los Angeles is ~10 days away from reverting to cannibalism.
Rightguide
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YooserName
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We are not now nor have we ever been a democracy. We are a constitutional republic governed by laws, not the will of the majority. Supposedly.
No, you're a Democracy.
Argue the form of Democracy, sure, but in the end, when you whittle down every possible form a Government can take, you end up at three.
Democracy, Monarchy and Dictatorship.
Those three are the choices, and the US is what form of government if you only have the three choices?
YooserName
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Three choices, huh? Where do you get this head trash?
I know - you made it up. Now run along.
Here, let me start you on the road to education....( although I am a self admitted poor teacher, but a good student and a poor teacher can lead to a better educated student).
https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/government/
I am starting you off at the grade 9 level, I trust that is ok??? However if you need pre high-school levels, I can point you to them as well.....
However if you can follow this I'll lead you on to the next level,eventually when you reach a college or university level basis, we can circle back and go through this, to break down Government to the three basic ones I listed earlier...
The_Trouvere
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Most people benefit when the government intervenes on their behalf.
An obvious benefit of democracy is that when democracy becomes traditional in a country it is more stable than a dictatorship. A country can shift from Czar Nicholas II to Vladimir Lenin, or from Mohammad Reza Shah to the Ayatollah Khomeini in a few months. The electorate of a country does not change rapidly. The United States turned to the left with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and we turned to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Nevertheless, most who voted for Herbert Hoover in 1928 voted for him again in 1932. Most of us who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 voted for him again in 1980.
Karl Marx's most obvious and serious error was to claim that loyalties of class are stronger than loyalties of race, nation, and ethnicity. For most people most of the time the opposite is true.
He also erred by claiming an inevitable transition from primitive communism - he meant the stone age - to slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, and from there to socialism, and eventually to the pure communism of the classless society. The revival of slavery in the Americas should have taught him that history can turn back on itself, and former institutions can be revived.
There is nothing inevitable about feudalism at all. It is what happens when a civilization collapses. Feudalism happened in Western Europe when the Western Roman Empire collapsed. The Eastern Roman Empire continued to exist until it was replaced by the Ottoman Empire. Feudalism happened in Greece much earlier, when the Mycenae civilization collapsed around 1100 BC. Greece passed into a dark age until the invention of the Greek alphabet about 800 BC. Much of the world never experienced feudalism.
There is nothing inevitable about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Each benefits from the failures and excesses of the other. Pure communism as envisioned by Marx requires too much of human nature to ever exist. The government will never "wither away," as Marx said it would. It certainly did not in Russia after the Russian Revolution.
Marx did not advocate the totalitarian methods used in his name during the twentieth century. He did inspire them, so he is not completely innocent. During the twentieth century millions of people were not killed in the name of John Stuart Mill.
Nevertheless, Marx had two valid insights. First, the natural tendency of capitalism - by which I mean unregulated capitalism - is to accumulate wealth and income at the top. Second, partly as a result of this, capitalist economies are doomed to experience increasingly destructive economic downturns. This is what did happen from 1847, when Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and the ensuring Great Depression.
The writings of Marx do not explain the First World War, the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism, and the fact that America's white working class has become a Republican constituency. They do explain the Great Depression.
The Franklin Roosevelt Administration countered the tendencies Marx recognized with efforts to reduce economic inequality. These included steeply progressive taxation, government employment of the unemployed, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, Social Security, minimum wage laws, and laws to strengthen labor unions.
Those who claim that it was not the New Deal but the Second World War that ended the Great Depression ignore the fact that military spending and employment are government spending and employment. I am glad that the United States entered the Second World War. Nevertheless, if the War had not happened, and if the money spent on that war had been spent instead on infrastructure, public health, public libraries, public education, public recreational facilities, cleaning up the environment, and so on, the benefits to the economy would have been greater.
Beginning with the administration of Ronald Reagan the reforms of the Roosevelt administration have been scaled back. Taxes have been cut for the rich. The minimum wage has lost ground to inflation and the increased productivity of our economy, labor unions have become weaker, and so on. As a result, and as Marx would have predicted, wealth and income again accumulate at the top. There are greater rewards at the top, but there are fewer of those rewards.
The U.S. economy has become less forgiving of bad luck, bad decisions, and failure.
Incomes for most Americans have stagnated as the cost of housing and secondary school education has risen. Recessions have become longer and deeper. They are followed by jobless recoveries, when gross domestic product (GDP) increases, but unemployment remains high.
An obvious benefit of democracy is that when democracy becomes traditional in a country it is more stable than a dictatorship. A country can shift from Czar Nicholas II to Vladimir Lenin, or from Mohammad Reza Shah to the Ayatollah Khomeini in a few months. The electorate of a country does not change rapidly. The United States turned to the left with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and we turned to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Nevertheless, most who voted for Herbert Hoover in 1928 voted for him again in 1932. Most of us who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 voted for him again in 1980.
Karl Marx's most obvious and serious error was to claim that loyalties of class are stronger than loyalties of race, nation, and ethnicity. For most people most of the time the opposite is true.
He also erred by claiming an inevitable transition from primitive communism - he meant the stone age - to slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, and from there to socialism, and eventually to the pure communism of the classless society. The revival of slavery in the Americas should have taught him that history can turn back on itself, and former institutions can be revived.
There is nothing inevitable about feudalism at all. It is what happens when a civilization collapses. Feudalism happened in Western Europe when the Western Roman Empire collapsed. The Eastern Roman Empire continued to exist until it was replaced by the Ottoman Empire. Feudalism happened in Greece much earlier, when the Mycenae civilization collapsed around 1100 BC. Greece passed into a dark age until the invention of the Greek alphabet about 800 BC. Much of the world never experienced feudalism.
There is nothing inevitable about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Each benefits from the failures and excesses of the other. Pure communism as envisioned by Marx requires too much of human nature to ever exist. The government will never "wither away," as Marx said it would. It certainly did not in Russia after the Russian Revolution.
Marx did not advocate the totalitarian methods used in his name during the twentieth century. He did inspire them, so he is not completely innocent. During the twentieth century millions of people were not killed in the name of John Stuart Mill.
Nevertheless, Marx had two valid insights. First, the natural tendency of capitalism - by which I mean unregulated capitalism - is to accumulate wealth and income at the top. Second, partly as a result of this, capitalist economies are doomed to experience increasingly destructive economic downturns. This is what did happen from 1847, when Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and the ensuring Great Depression.
The writings of Marx do not explain the First World War, the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism, and the fact that America's white working class has become a Republican constituency. They do explain the Great Depression.
The Franklin Roosevelt Administration countered the tendencies Marx recognized with efforts to reduce economic inequality. These included steeply progressive taxation, government employment of the unemployed, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, Social Security, minimum wage laws, and laws to strengthen labor unions.
Those who claim that it was not the New Deal but the Second World War that ended the Great Depression ignore the fact that military spending and employment are government spending and employment. I am glad that the United States entered the Second World War. Nevertheless, if the War had not happened, and if the money spent on that war had been spent instead on infrastructure, public health, public libraries, public education, public recreational facilities, cleaning up the environment, and so on, the benefits to the economy would have been greater.
Beginning with the administration of Ronald Reagan the reforms of the Roosevelt administration have been scaled back. Taxes have been cut for the rich. The minimum wage has lost ground to inflation and the increased productivity of our economy, labor unions have become weaker, and so on. As a result, and as Marx would have predicted, wealth and income again accumulate at the top. There are greater rewards at the top, but there are fewer of those rewards.
The U.S. economy has become less forgiving of bad luck, bad decisions, and failure.
Incomes for most Americans have stagnated as the cost of housing and secondary school education has risen. Recessions have become longer and deeper. They are followed by jobless recoveries, when gross domestic product (GDP) increases, but unemployment remains high.
The_Trouvere
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The government of the United States is a democracy.
Because of the will of the majority laws are passed.
As far as I have been able to determine the misconception, "The United States is a republic, not a democracy," originated during the Dwight Eisenhower administration. It may have originated with the John Birch Society, which preposterously thought Eisenhower was a knowing member of the Communist conspiracy.
Reactionaries disliked the reforms of the New Deal because they transferred wealth, power, and prestige from the business community to the government. They wanted the Eisenhower to reverse those reforms. Eisenhower did not because he realized that the New Deal reforms had broad, popular support.
At this point reactionaries concluded that popular opinion did not matter, because the United States is not a democracy.
The United States is a representative democracy. This is what Thomas Jefferson said about the topic:
----------
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 26 August 1816
To Isaac H. Tiffany
Monticello Aug. 26. 16.
Sir,
[The people of ancient Greece and Rome] knew no medium between a democracy (the only pure republic, but impracticable beyond the limits of a town) and an abandonment of themselves to an aristocracy, or a tyranny, independent of the people. it seems not to have occurred that where the citizens cannot meet to transact their business in person, they alone have the right to choose the agents who shall transact it; and that, in this way, a republican, or popular government, of the 2d grade of purity, may be exercised over any extent of country. the full experiment of a government democratical, but representative, was and is still reserved for us...
the introduction of this new principle of representative democracy has rendered useless almost every thing written before on the structure of government: and in a great measure relieves our regret if the political writings of Aristotle, or of any other ancient, have been lost, or are unfaithfully rendered or explained to us. my most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of it’s practicable exercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pure & perpetual. Accept my respectful salutations.
Th: Jefferson
----------
There is no contradiction between a democracy and a republic. A republic is simply a government that lacks a monarch. Now that many democracies have figure head monarchs the distinction between a republic and a monarchy has little significance. What matters is the distinction between a democracy and a dictatorship.
Those who repeat the cliche that "The United States is a republic, not a democracy" want a dictatorship that would repeal the economically egalitarian reforms of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
Every item in the domestic budget has a powerful political constituency to protect it. The largest and most expensive programs are the most popular. Republican politicians discover that quickly when they move beyond vague generalities about cutting "waste fraud and abuse" to making specific cuts in domestic spending items. The U.S. government has grown to its present size in response to popular demand because the United States government is a democracy.
Because of the will of the majority laws are passed.
As far as I have been able to determine the misconception, "The United States is a republic, not a democracy," originated during the Dwight Eisenhower administration. It may have originated with the John Birch Society, which preposterously thought Eisenhower was a knowing member of the Communist conspiracy.
Reactionaries disliked the reforms of the New Deal because they transferred wealth, power, and prestige from the business community to the government. They wanted the Eisenhower to reverse those reforms. Eisenhower did not because he realized that the New Deal reforms had broad, popular support.
At this point reactionaries concluded that popular opinion did not matter, because the United States is not a democracy.
The United States is a representative democracy. This is what Thomas Jefferson said about the topic:
----------
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 26 August 1816
To Isaac H. Tiffany
Monticello Aug. 26. 16.
Sir,
[The people of ancient Greece and Rome] knew no medium between a democracy (the only pure republic, but impracticable beyond the limits of a town) and an abandonment of themselves to an aristocracy, or a tyranny, independent of the people. it seems not to have occurred that where the citizens cannot meet to transact their business in person, they alone have the right to choose the agents who shall transact it; and that, in this way, a republican, or popular government, of the 2d grade of purity, may be exercised over any extent of country. the full experiment of a government democratical, but representative, was and is still reserved for us...
the introduction of this new principle of representative democracy has rendered useless almost every thing written before on the structure of government: and in a great measure relieves our regret if the political writings of Aristotle, or of any other ancient, have been lost, or are unfaithfully rendered or explained to us. my most earnest wish is to see the republican element of popular control pushed to the maximum of it’s practicable exercise. I shall then believe that our government may be pure & perpetual. Accept my respectful salutations.
Th: Jefferson
----------
There is no contradiction between a democracy and a republic. A republic is simply a government that lacks a monarch. Now that many democracies have figure head monarchs the distinction between a republic and a monarchy has little significance. What matters is the distinction between a democracy and a dictatorship.
Those who repeat the cliche that "The United States is a republic, not a democracy" want a dictatorship that would repeal the economically egalitarian reforms of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
Every item in the domestic budget has a powerful political constituency to protect it. The largest and most expensive programs are the most popular. Republican politicians discover that quickly when they move beyond vague generalities about cutting "waste fraud and abuse" to making specific cuts in domestic spending items. The U.S. government has grown to its present size in response to popular demand because the United States government is a democracy.
Cubantripod
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This article doesn't mention covid-19 mandates that were unnecessary.
https://reason.com/2021/11/23/covid...uthoritarian-and-authoritarianism-even-worse/
https://reason.com/2021/11/23/covid...uthoritarian-and-authoritarianism-even-worse/
CornusKousa
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A republic is a representative democracy.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic
https://www.britannica.com/topic/republic-government
BidudeinWi
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Your public K-12 education is showing again! The United States is not and never has been, a Democracy!
CornusKousa
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Your total lack of education is showing again.
It's been a democracy from the get go.
The_Trouvere
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The United States is the second oldest democracy in the world after England. I would like for the U.S. government to become more democratic by getting the money out of politics, reducing the power of the Supreme Court, and by eliminating the Electoral College and the Senate, but the U.S. government is a democracy.
Once the U.S. government becomes more democratic it will be easy to raise taxes on rich people and corporations, because that is what most Americans want.
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They are just pawns in this new high tech. Game...not worth mentioning.
In all of human history, the process you describe has never happened. No republic has ever self-destructed by way of the plebs voting themselves largesse from the treasury.
When a republic is destroyed, usually it is either by 1) foreign invasion or 2) corruption and power-seeking among the elite. The Roman Republic ended because certain noblemen figured out that after the Marian Reforms, the professional mercenary legions would be more loyal to their general than to the state.
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Bud_Spencer
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I think the OP is correct. We haven't been a constitutional republic for quite some time. Congress doesn't really make laws anymore, and the Senate has all but abdicated its power of treaty ratification. Subsidiarity in powers is observed only in fits and starts, and the permanent bureaucracy has shown that our elected leaders are in charge only in theory.
We are a democratic republic -- as opposed to an aristocratic republic, like the Roman Republic, or the Venetian Republic.
In my experience, anyone who says "America is a republic, not a democracy!" is not arguing but ranting. When he actually means anything at all by it, what he means is, "America is a federal state, not a unitary state." Which is both true and important, but has nothing to do with any supposed distinction between "republic" and "democracy."
Don't forget Oligarchy. It's much more widespread than any of those.
Marx was not wrong in supposing class more important than ethnicity or nationality. Perhaps the proles of Europe couldn't see it, but they really did have more interests in common with foreign proles than with their own ruling classes.
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