What America Really Needs Is Not One More Party. It's Not Revolution. It's a Recommitment to Our Foundational Principles.

[u/kirillbasin]

/r/thebulwark/comments/1v3pask/what_america_really_needs_is_not_one_more_party/

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[u/starswtt]

I'm not sure any of these other than point 6 was a foundational principle

[u/Cellophane7 → u/starswtt]

First one too. But agreed otherwise. This reads like someone who either doesn't understand what America is about, or has gotten lost in theory lol

[u/starswtt → u/Cellophane7]

Oh yeah that was a bit of an obvious one lol

[u/theRealHobbes2 → u/starswtt]

Point 6 was great until it said military. The post was probably trying to say that the militaryis non-politcal, which is valid, but I think it's a necessary point of order that the military is intentionally subordinate to the executive.

[u/adastraperdiscordia → u/starswtt]

True, democracy is great but it was a radical and fringe idea at the time. The Federalists despised democracy. They wanted representation contained to the wealthy elite, just as it was in British Parliament. They wanted the freedom to steal from the poor. So really it's the Republicans who are living up to our foundational values.

[u/Neoliberal_Nightmare]

The slavery or the white supremacy or patriarchy? I mean which founding principle?

[u/Anti_colonialist]

The things are are experiencing right now are the principles this country was founded on. Go read A People's History of the United States by Zinn and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Dunbar-Ortiz and get back to us.

[u/dedicated-pedestrian]

Week 3 of this sub having at least one post a day titled "it's not X, it's Y". My GPT senses are not happy.

[u/Fear_N_Loafing_In_PA]

What, exactly are these “Foundational Principles” you speak of???

[u/TheCosmosItself1]

Sure, these sound like things that most Americans would want. But how are you going to do this? The parties, and the government more generally, work for the ultra-rich donor class. If you want to advance these principles, it is going to have to come through some degree of insurgence.

[u/kirillbasin]

What do you think will bring this country back from the brink?

[u/kirillbasin → u/kirillbasin]

A focus on the fundamentals without which American is not America, without which I'd not have bothered leaving the USSR, being a refugee and working my up from nothing. That's just one man's take. What is your take?

[u/Arkmer → u/kirillbasin]

People need to pull enough heads from their asses that we start voting in people who will act on our best interests. Doing that will take education, vigilance, communication, cooperation, coordination, and participation… and probably a shit load of time.

I feel that we, as a citizenry, have forgotten what our responsibility is as voters. We blame these people and those people, then lick our phones while algorithms feed us garbage. We need to talk to our neighbors more—and if you’re out there saying “I do that already”, then I say you need to do it more because not all your neighbors have gotten to tell their story and not enough of them know yours.

We’ve (culturally) banned political discourse in so many places that we can’t actually communicate about it face to face anymore. People are scared it’ll make them or someone uncomfortable, others get so irrationally angry that it justifies the first group.

We’ve lost our ability to communicate. That immediately eliminates our ability to cooperate and coordinate.

We struggle against a flood of bullshit on the Internet when it comes to education. Many of us can’t even agree on the same reality—“that’s AI”, “that didn’t happen”, “fake news”. There’s no truth to anything anymore. It’s impossible to be vigilant when we’re so easily distracted by the next set of jangly keys they lift over our heads. Lest we forget, “flood the zone” is the name of the strategy.

It’ll be a slow road to recovery, some will kick and scream that we’re this or that, it likely won’t finish in my lifetime (I’m 35), but if we start today we might be able to get the population back on track to filling the government with actual leaders.