Mr Biden’s speech is his first major campaign event of the 2024 election season
President Joe Biden marked the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol by warning that the issue of American democracy will be “what the 2024 election is all about,” as he runs against former president Donald Trump once more.
Mr Biden, who spoke near the Valley Forge historical site where George Washington and the Continental Army were encamped during the winter of 1777 and 1778, told attendees that they were there “to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?”
“This isn’t rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” he said.
Mr Biden said his speech, his first major event of the 2024 election season, was “deadly serious,” and about a topic that needed to be raised at the outset of his campaign.
It’s a pleasant fantasy, but unfortunately it’s just not that simple. Otherwise it’d have been fixed decades ago during the civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s. Real life has no magic that just makes things end well, so they’re far more likely to backfire. This isn’t a hollywood story.
Just, “things” in general, fail more often than not. Businesses, trial runs, new experiments, etc. The ones that succeed are the exceptions, not the rule.
Like, the French Revolution for instance. Did “getting rid of them” work out at all?
The French Revolution gained the common people lots of gains that even their kings weren’t able to roll back without risking pissing off the populace too much. It was a huge improvement on life before. They drastically reduced the power of the church, fixed the antiquated tax system, made nobles taxed, arranged the military by merit, fixed up the laws with the Napoleonic Code, made the government more representational by giving the Third Estate a voice, etc. These things stayed even through Napoleon and the kings after.
Monarchies shouldn’t exist, getting rid of them is good actually.
Revolutions are messy, but if you’re locked in stasis eventually it’s going to break.
“Israel” has killed more civilians in a few months in this one area, as big bad Russia did in almost 2 years of fighting across an entire front line. Any politician who supports that is dead to me.
The French Revolution failed to get rid of the monarchy, they had their king back a generation later.
History is full of important details if you really want to know the truth of why the world sucks so much. It’s not just easy.
Moral of the story: never stop guillotining
Ya a king was forced on them by other monarchies, but their nostalgia for the Revolution set the seeds for the other revolutions that did eventually get rid of their monarchy. It’s not like it lasted long. They had another revolution one king later to get a stronger constitution to restrict the King, and then a revolution during the King after that. Their monarchs were on shaky ground after the Revolution. The common people now had rights and wants, and expectations. They also had a bunch of gains that persisted through the monarchy which I brought up in another comment.
Just to condense your two comments, it’s true, the French Revolution was not all bad by any stretch. Very much a mixed bag.
Yup! I just don’t like when people say it completely failed. It encourages apathy in the face of oppression because of a fear of radical change. It’s the boogie man of revolutions, but for the common people, life was way better after than before, and for all their children who benefited from it forever after, I’m sure it was worth the period of tumultuousness.
Worth it was a different story. When there’s better ways to accomplish something, there’s terms for the guy that just wants the quick one that causes great suffering. I prefer the British model.
Ends don’t justify the means imo.
Yeah, that’s literally in Marx’s 18th Brumaire, maybe pick it up sometime.
The problem is replacing a monarchy with a bourgeois
dictactorship“democracy”Ah, I see. If you can make a proof of concept work, I’ll be interested. Until then, you seem to just have yet another method for accidentally installing dictators.
have fun ‘electing’ one of the rotating cast of rotting genocidal corpses and telling yourself it’s the best you could do.
It’s so fucking nauseating talking to people like you.
Don’t get me wrong, we have a number of independent communes that exist here in the states. It’s a system that works well at small scales, anything around that village-size of human societies, where everyone knows everyone. It’s just when it gets scaled up to millions of people that problems start to pop up.
I’m all for better systems. It’s just that I have a limited risk tolerance for really dark times.
really dark times for who exactly? because unless you’re the white kind of person they’re already here
Unchecked capitalism with a fig leaf of democracy sounds good in theory but eventually you run out of other peoples kids to feed into the blender.
I think you underestimate how much worse everything can, and quite possibly will, get. Unless you believe in some god that protects us, then literally everything is possible. Including a return to attitudes from two centuries ago, where slavery was enforced out in plain sight, with whips.
That was worse than what we have now.
One of the worst things we do is try to protect our children from the true horror of how ugly this world really is, and how rare happy endings actually are. This is why it remains so important to fight for real justice with everything we have, because what little progress we have actually made is trying to be stripped from us.
That said, I fully agree that unchecked capitalism is rapidly returning us to the era of the robber barons, and doing tremendous harm. But the opposite of that bad thing can also be another bad thing, life isn’t so simple that the opposite of bad is automatically good. It’s so much trickier than that in everything but our fiction, and what we really need is some godawfully complex and nuanced middle ground that will make very little sense to most folks.
Frankly, unchecked capitalism doesn’t even sound good in theory. It relies on humans being rational, which they very clearly are not.
Trump has proven that in every country there’s a segment of the population that wants the head of state to be some entitled asshole, born into a life of luxury and surrounds himself with gold. Having a constitutional monarchy neutralizes this emotion, as these people mostly care about that person being on a fancy chair (or at a fancy desk like the beautiful Resolute Desk) and their family to be the royal family (or first family). Subservient people want some person that they feel like showing their loyalty to proves their patriotism to their country.
Political cults of personalities are less likely in constitutional monarchy as the subservient people already have a person in that role. Sure the UK had Boris Johnson, but he was a guy that had to mess up his hair so he could look like one of the lads at the pub to get support. And as soon as some dodgy behavior was uncovered, he was quickly removed from power and no one was going to storm Parliament to put him back into power. The subservient types would probably feel like the Queen wouldn’t approve of that kind of thing.
Also note that the only source for casualty numbers in Gaza come from the Gaza Health Ministry which doesn’t make any attempt to distinguish between civilian and non-civilian casualties. By some estimates, the non-civilian casualties in the Ukraine war is up to 500,000.
Also democracy is about choosing the least worst option. Do you think Trump will make as much efforts towards humanitarian pauses and an eventual ceasefire as Biden will? Try to see past your hatred and consider what the best course of action is.
someone’s a free thinker 🙃
Not interested in your spin of the casualty numbers, occupations brutality is clear for everyone to see. You can tell yourself “it’s not so bad” I’m sure some other equally “free thinkers” will believe you.
Biden has been worse than useless when it comes to this, he’s an active enabler. Trump would also be an active enabler, but he’s also a massive pussy and would probably back down once too many US troops get killed or some shit like that. Biden I could see riding this out to the bitter end because some grima wormtongue political consultant wants to cash in on the next election.
Who exactly do I “hate”
Yeah, someone that wants to maintain monarchy and is in alignment with US foreign policy is somehow the contrarian “free thinker”.
You may have been spending too much time online only having discussions with other internet contrarians. The internet lies. This is a propaganda rich environment you’re in right now. The fact that you see someone that thinks a democratic country has a right to exist as being an alien concept to you indicates you should go outside and touch grass or whatever.
You hate Israel so much you’re willing to risk the democracy of your own country as an expression of that hatred. Hatred makes people feel like they’re taking a strong stance on an issue while they’re actually just engaging in self-destructive behaviour. It’s why fascists use hatred to get control over people. It’s an easy way to control people.
If my elected government is using its military to aid a genocide, and my “harm reduction” elected representatives have all forgot the word “ceasefire” I’d say that this “democracy” is a democracy on paper only.
You are the fascist as far as I’m concerned, supporting your new little reich as it uses its American precision weapons to make sure no refugee camp is left un-bombed.
Fascists de-legitimize democracy when they don’t agree with the leadership chosen by the people. Which is what you’re doing right now.
Gaza hasn’t had an election since Hamas took power. It’s a violent, misogynistic, homophobic movement that seeks to restore an ethnic map from a history book. Blood and Soil. And the chosen method to do so is genocide.
Yeah I don’t much like Netanyahu either. But in all likelihood he’ll lose the next election because of his failure to protect Israeli civilians. Hamas gains power because of the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Because those deaths increase the anger and hatred which they derive power from. Because Hamas is a fascist movement.
A democratic society that considers it a failure to protect civilians vs. a fascist society that puts their civilians at the mercy of an invading army while its leadership hides underground.
Crack open a history book and look at photos of German cities at the end of WWII. Sometimes fascist societies can find their way out of it over generations like in Spain did. But sometimes fascism ends with complete destruction. This is one of the possible endgames for the politics of hatred.
You’re the one supporting the genocide, dog of American empire.
If the “democratic decision” is “we must commit a genocide” then sorry but I must dissent.
What Hamas did was genocide, that is deliberately killing people solely because of their ethnicity.
What Israel is doing is war. A war that was started by the aforementioned genocide that Hamas committed.
So you’re “dissenting from democracy” because the genocide of Jews doesn’t register as anything to you. Fascist much?
I wonder if that has anything to do with the civilian density of the places. Eh probably not.
Yeah, it’s got more to do with the difference between monumental restraint and an intentional genocide.
I’m sorry… did you just praise Russia for its restraint after it invaded Ukraine unprovoked?
Considering they have killed fewer civilians in 2 years than “Israel” in 3 months? yes
And yet they still killed a shit ton of people. Why doesn’t that matter to you?
It does, but as a resident of the US I would like the “harm reduction” government I have to stop literally funding and using our military to protect a genocide
And so you praise Putin. Gotcha. Not surprising from someone who is gleefully cheering on mass murder in this thread.