• Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    Intelligence is knowing the US is not a democracy. Being a complete fucking idiot is thinking that's because it's a republic.

    • emizeko [they/them]
      ·
      8 months ago

      "the great mass of people don't have any power"

      "ah but we're not supposed to. we're just not a monarchy"

      not the airtight case they think it is

    • quarrk [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      8 months ago

      The whole myth of the American Revolution was that the Americans were fighting for their individual freedoms from the European colonial powers. They wrote a masturbatory declaration of independence about how this will be the land of personal freedom and individual rights. It’s America’s big thing, its source of national pride.

      The same people who believe that, the people who fetishize Benjamin Franklin and blabber endlessly about the Federalist Papers and watch the Hamilton musical weekly, will then turn around and say America was not even intended to be democratic from the beginning. They hold two wholly incompatible mythologies.

      Quote from the American Declaration of Independence:

      … to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

      This is clearly a call for a democracy. Chuds can squabble about what kind of democracy it was intended to be (no need to bring up the practical absence of genuine democracy) but the intent has always been unambiguous.

        • quarrk [he/him]
          ·
          8 months ago

          Totally right. By mythology I meant not necessarily the history, but the collective view of that history which has turned the events and characters into a quasi-religion. Like all myths, there is a kernel of truth.