“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
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.