America is a country with concentration camps that Obama administered and handed off to Trump. So the American government is bad isn’t exactly wrong.
Don’t give me that shit. I vote early and often, I donate to organizations to push things to the left. But I’m keenly aware that everything good can be taken away.
Neither of us are old enough to remember first hand the glory of the 1870s. All races could vote, public accommodations were desegregated, and the Department of Justice prosecuted white supremacists. But then the Reconstruction Acts were repealed, SCOTUS knocked down Sumner’s Civil Rights Act, and the people DoJ was created to suppress were put in charge of it.
Our last chance for liberation died on December 2nd 1859 when John Brown was hanged and we’re all just fighting to mitigate damage now.
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We aren’t nihilistic about Government, in fact I think most are huge proponents of having more democratic control of our lives vs. corporations.
What you are conflating is nihilism in the current political parties, which have clearly failed our generation.
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I’d heartily argue that Millennials are less nihilistic and more involved in politics than most Gen X’ers. Pessimistic? Sure, they fit that bill some but at least do their damnedest to affect change in the world, even when it treats them terribly.
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lol… I’m not going to point to anytime in the 1800’s as a glory time considering women still were not really equal at all at that time.
Not to mention overall our laws and government work infinitely better now than they did in any time in the 1800’s except maybe that short time the south wasn’t involved :-p
It’s how you want to go about “solving” things is where your nihilism comes in. Maybe not you personally, but too many posters on here want to burn the village down to save it.
Political parties are never going away. The two party system is never going away, barring some huge upheaval and revolution, that could end up being worse than the current system.
Again maybe not you personally, but when some people see that the system isn’t working, instead of thinking that it can be fixed, they just want to break it altogether.
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Again, you are misunderstanding their grievances.
For many the system is already broken. Seriously, it’s fundamentally broken and cannot be repaired. They just want people who care about them to actually use the system to make the world better. The two party system may never go away, but we can certainly get rid of the current parties. It’s been done before and it should be done again.
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The 1800s aren’t glorious because they were perfect, they were glorious because they were the most rapid period of progress in democratic history, possibly human history. People who were property in 1864 were voting four years later. Many of them served in State Constitutional Conventions and some even served in the federal Congress. No other nation in the world that had slavery went through such a rapid humanization of it’s former chattel.
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I think it’s way easier to have one of the parties to die and we are all looking at the party over there…
Honestly at this stage in the game I’d be in favor of a violent revolution if it weren’t for the US having the largest military in the world by several orders of magnitude.
Should give you the idea of how much there is a blacklash to rapid progressive change that we reverted back far enough that it took till the 1960’s for black people to even get a legalistic framework back in place to protect their rights and give them equal status again.
And that change cleaved the Democratic party in two and shifted the Republican party in a direction that has lead to this spot.
I already addressed this in The History Thread.
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It was a failure because it wasn’t able to hold those changes or build on them at that time.
This is unquestionably wrong. The Republican Party remained the champion of Civil Rights into the 1920s. The Dems were already in two parts before The War, and the years 1861-1877 did major damage to the toxic southern wing to make way for Progressives like William Jennings Bryan, who was the first to envision a true social democracy in America. The toxicity of the Republican Party would be more aptly summed up by the election of Richard Nixon and his administration than anything that happened before WWII even.
It held the changes mentioned in the History Thread post.
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Yes, and if you replace one party with another one, we’ll end up in the same place. That’s the nature of the two party system.
I’m optimistic. As bad as things are, I believe that they can get better. That people want things to get better. That through education and meeting new people and being exposed to new ideas, progress can be made.
But I’m also a realist. Only very rarely will that progress be major. Most of the time it will be incremental. Also, that progress will have setbacks, both minor and major. But throughout all that, I believe that things will get better.
For the most part, things have gotten better. Is there still massive inequality and injustice? Absolutely, but overall, things are improving. Maybe not all the time, maybe not at the rate I’d like, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not hopeful.
Again, to go back to my statement, I feel like many younger people have given up hope, or they put their hope in unrealistic things that will never happen, and then get angry and frustrated when those unrealistic don’t happen.
And if we had a violent revolution, who do you think would suffer the most? It’s always the poor who suffer in violent revolution. Nothing really improves for them after the revolution.
I’m talking about the 1960’s civil rights law in that sentence.
Also we’ve been unable to curb a world ending cataclysm thanks to climate change after decades of warnings.
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I can’t imagine why we’re not excited over choosing between a party that denies climate change and a party that acknowledges it but refuses to try to fix it. Why we’re not jazzed about picking how polite our president is while doing/supporting war crimes.
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Then you’re just repeating the point I addressed in the first post.
I envision something like the French Revolution of 1848 tbh.