America 2.0
What's Your Plan
From a Google Image Search - america2.news
What happens next in America? If we rid ourselves of our troublesome autocrats, will we want to return to our historical Constitutional roots? Will we allow the Republicans who planned and executed this abominable government takeover to sit in Congress once again? Will we overlook their seditious acts? Taking a clue from history, that would be planting a mine field for future generations. When Reconstruction ended too soon and leaders of the Confederacy were allowed back in Congress and high office, when no humility was required of the losers in the Civil War, our ancestors laid the groundwork for Jim Crow, for segregation, for continuing to put forward a message that some people are more equal than others.
The mercies of the US government after the Civil War are still reverberating in today’s conservatives and in the Republican Party. Some people see kindness and forgiveness as weakness. If Abraham Lincoln had lived, he might have used wisdom and victory to knit our nation back together, to avoid all the anger the Confederate states nurtured. He might have offered higher ideals than his successor or practical solutions to the aftermath of war, and inspired reforms that could defuse the push for retribution. However, now it seems that the anger of losing, barely buried, has found expression again in the men the old confederacy chose to represent their cause, Donald J Trump, the Republican Party, and the authors of Project 2025.
The campaign to stamp out Democrats is especially ironic, because the Democratic Party was once the Party of the Southern slave owners. It gets confusing. But the Democratic Party of today does not hold the inheritance of the Confederacy. It is the party of Liberals, who have taken the ideals of the Constitution seriously and have fought for people’s rights and equality. Wealth skews the whole picture as it always has. The wealthy find it hard to accept that all are born equal with the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Billionaires pushed the disgruntled folks on the right to go back to the founding and The Federalist papers, and to choose the path that our founders discarded.
What will we want to do when we take back our democracy/republic? Clearly, many people have thought about this. Our Constitution had great laws, but it had no teeth. In the face of political obstruction and reinvention, one party made it impossible to use the tools of impeachment, the emoluments clause, the insurrection section of the 14th amendment, or the 25th amendment to basically fire an unfit president. Even if a tool were to have adequate support there is no mechanism of enforcement.
Do we make a list of all who took part in the government takeover and ban them from serving in public office? Trump should have been banned because of J6, but because the sentiments of the nation were evenly divided between right and left, he was allowed to sit in the Oval Office once again. All the things we were unable to do, all the unconstitutional actions we were unable to counteract, have weakened our documents. If Trump were to disappear tomorrow, would we go back to where we were before he came down the golden escalator? Could we? The Republicans, conservatives, billionaires would all still be present. And we haven’t even talked about the Evangelicals who were in it to fight against America’s supposed moral decay. Or about the Supreme Court, stuffed for life.
One writer on Tremr.com recently attended a convention of the Democratic Socialists. They have some ideas about what they want the American government to look like in the future. Here are some of the things he heard and an informal conversation he had:
The panel spent a few minutes talking about other stuff. Finally, the French panelist made a gruff statement in response to my question.
In response to our engineer friend, we will solve the problem by destroying capitalism and then create a world of democratically elected councils
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But what is “the root cause, Julian Taylor asks himself.
The real problem is that the deeper root cause of capitalism is probably the same root cause as that of organized religion, self-help grifts, and insurance scams. All of these are tied to the promise and occasional fulfillment of the elusive dream of extreme wealth: that a person may, through largely legal means, wrest wealth from others and hoard it without practical limit.
(Later at the hotel bar.) At that moment I had a little revelation.
“Councils,” I said, “You mean like soviets?”
“Yes,” she responded confidently.
“Would these soviets be organized into groups of soviets that would coordinate with a centralized planning authority.”
“Yes,” she beamed.
“You mean like the Soviet Union.”
“Yes.”
“But” I mansplained knowingly, “the Soviet Union did not prove to be stable.”
“You are correct,” she responded, “but it doesn’t have to be that way.”
https://www.tremr.com/julian-s-taylor/solution-or-revolution
As we say these days, “are you down with that?” Soviets? Really? America has no history of autocracy and only a small group of intellectual idealists ever considered communism, the communism of Marx and Engels, not the communism of Stalin and Lenin. They were humiliated and ostracized by Joe McCarthy as the world began to see what happened when human nature was added to communism. The reality did not resemble the ideal.
I wouldn’t vote for a communist future. You decide where you fall on this option.
What would Democracy 2.0 look like? Will it be a true democracy where we all vote on our computers? The internet is untrustworthy. We would never be sure if the votes were accurate or distorted by foreign nations or hackers or gambling apps.
Getting rid of the Electoral College would be a start. Strengthening the Constitution would be essential. Perhaps we would want to put a citizen’s enforcement group in place, independent of government, although we have seen independent agencies are easy targets for bad actors.
It might be helpful to see some more articles that look ahead and share their visions for the afterlife of American democracy, it there is an afterlife at all. We could languish in totalitarianism until violent weather and rising waters take us out in the manner of the dinosaurs. It is a source of great grief that the 250th birthday of our republic has brought us to this. We should plan for America’s future as a land of the free and home of the brave, even if we don’t think there will be one. Parliamentary government seems to be resilient. Perhaps we should consider that.
Note: Julian Taylor is beginning a series of articles that offer an engineer’s suggestions for after the fall. You might want to go read his articles. He’s from a younger generation than me. The future will belong to the next generations. What they have to say is important, although not necessarily definitive.
https://www.tremr.com/julian-s-taylor/the-us-constitution-an-engineering-assessment