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i wish Americans had founding mommies instead
Are you trying to imply that the ideas of slave owners from the 18th century are not the gold standard on which society must be based for all eternity going forward?
I think they are implying that George Washington eats fruity snacks and Thomas Jefferson is a bit fruity
i think he was implying that the founding fathers said we should a2 the government for the health of the people
Blatantly false. After the Constitution went into effect, a whopping 6% of the population could vote. You had to own a certain amount of property, be male, and not be a Native American or black person. It wasn’t a democracy. It was an apartheid oligarchy, and very intentionally set up that way. The founders didn’t want the masses of people to vote; several of them were quite afraid of it.
The USA only became a democracy in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act and its guarantee of universal suffrage. America became a democracy in spite of its origins, not because of it.
Compared to most other countries at the time, it was very democratic.
Yeah the only places that had more democratic means were basically a handful of weird German city states or were gone by the 1700s. The Icelandics arguably were more democratic before being brought under Norway and the Witan of medieval England was similar but both were gone by then.
Even then, it’s still not a particularly democratic democracy, e.g. disallowing felons from voting means people experiencing problems with the current law have no power to change it. When a citizen’s right to vote is conditional, suffrage is not universal.
I wouldn’t say it was “fundamentally” founded in democracy when originally only white property owning men could vote.
It was fundamentally founded in the concept of “a king having power over everyone is unfair, but obviously having a ruling class of oligarchs is okay”, and basically has never moved from that point. Just rich white dudes mad at one more powerful rich white dude. They never intended to give up an inch of their own power. They were just salty about the king
And the still provided the role of president with a lot of kingly powers.
Benjamin Franklin, in the background, already has four grindr dates lined up for the night
More like Ben Franklin is already four rounds in with your mom, after figuring out how to use your time machine all on his own and borrowing it to go pick her up.
Ben Franklin: “you’re telling me these people on the Internet post pictures of their feet… For free?”
Good for her!
I wouldn’t have thought of ol’ Benny as gay, considering his taste in women.
No no, he’s the bottom.
I’d like to think he’s also ripping the penjamin like a chimney
To be fair, Trump wasn’t corrupted in power, he had already been corrupt for decades. Unless you’re using a very broad definition of power, I suppose.
He was born with power. Rich parents that owned swaths of land in NYC that gifted a billion dollars worth of assets.
He was corrupted by a lack of love and a surplus of wealth and no repercussions in his life. We really need to stop letting wealthy people get so detached from the human condition. We let people like Ethan Couch argue his wealth doesnt let him understand killing 4 people and then give then probation as if we agree.
Money is power, and its our favorite flavor of corruption.
Why do discussions on the American voting system always insist on a single winner? You don’t need Star voting or Preferential voting or instant runoff voting. All of those are trying to elect one candidate from an enormous spectrum of political opinions. Even the best system is going to give poor results.
Instead, try proportional representation: X% of the vote gets you X% of seats. Let them form a coalition with a majority of seats. No shenanigans. No gerrymandering. No vote suppression. No two party system. No negative campaigns.
Well, you can’t very well proportionally elect a president.
Yeah, and therefore the president should have basically no power. Their job should mostly just be going to meetings with other countries on behalf of the government, and other ceremonial stuff.
Originally, the president did have basically no power. The whole federal government wasn’t supposed to do that much, and the executive branch by itself was supposed to do almost nothing compared to today. They didn’t even think there would be a standing army. States not being willing to put in strong reforms by themselves led to more executive agencies and executive branch influence over the country. (Which is all controlled by the President, since that made sense for the things that they thought in the 1790s the executive branch would be doing.)
The whole system was made around an idea of who would do what, which has turned out to be completely different after 250 years. It’s not really surprising that it isn’t working very well.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. To even get a sane and effective Congress, we need voters to be aware of the real world, which seems like the largest hurdle right now. In the past, large and effective reforms have mostly been lead and advertised by the President, although it’s possible that with better voting systems and less presidential power parties would be able to cohere behind consistent and strong visions. Conservative think tanks seem to be able to do that currently, but they’re very quiet about it and I don’t know of a progressive equivalent.
Lottocracy enters the chat
