“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.”
It already was dead for a long time.
No, it wasn’t, but it’s been dying since Reagan.
Since Johnson.
But it was Hoover that laid the framework for the rampant executive abuses of Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trumpolini.
It was the Mont Pelerin Society who came up with the neoliberal ideas that Reagan implemented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zswexNXorOE
Americans have a distorted sense of what democracy is, should be. Seriously, if you think that able to choose from two almost similar political parties that never shown any interest in making life better for their electorate is the pinnacle of democracy… you are very, very wrong.
I do not consider the vicious cycle of a neoliberal democracy to be the pinnacle of democracy. Only I acknowledge that American democracy was a democracy. It was never perfect, but it didn’t have to turn out this way. We didn’t have to embrace neoliberalism in 1980 and American democracy didn’t have to die in 2024 with fascism.
This is important to state because there are misconceptions about what might happen next. We aren’t any closer to the pinnacle of democracy now. In fact, we are even further from it. This fascist dictatorship will be even harder to change than the last neoliberal democracy was.
Building inclusive institutions is hard. The further you get from them the harder it becomes. Even revolutions that seem on the surface to be a complete overthrow of the previous regime can in fact turn out to be a changing of the guard. If the institutions of a society, both political and economic, are not fundamentally and radically changed to include as many people as possible the vicious cycle is more than likely to continue. There is no such thing as a clean slate or rock bottom when it comes to how bad things can get. Things can always get worse and they will unless people learn from our mistakes and apply what we’ve learned to make things better. edit: typos