Yeah, don’t have political parties.

The funny thing is that so much of it is based on the idea that everyone involved is going to be on their best behaviour, working for the good of the country, compromising with their opponents, and so-on. And, then it all falls apart as soon as one person realizes that they get an advantage as soon as they simply ignore the norms.

Also, don’t forget that there was less than a century between the revolution and the civil war. If your brand new form of government is so poor that a significant fraction of your population thinks a civil war is preferable to resolving things through that system, your system isn’t very good.

I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm.

He didn’t, that’s just a whitewashed version we tell ourselves.

He just didn’t want the President to be viewed as a monarch or a lifetime appointment. He turned down a third term because he feared he would die in office and the public would believe that’s the norm.

The house voted on impeachment, but the senate has to remove him, or decide on a punishment.

If it was bad enough (by that, I mean if he starts taking away the ability for the senate to have power) then he would be removed.

Check and Balance was intened to stop bad individuals, not an entire political party working in unison to destroy the system.

I used to land at basically this analysis myself, but there are definitely some assumptions that need to be addressed. We can probably agree that to a significant degree “money is power”, or at least, money can elicit power, especially in terms of directing the actions of the desperate. We witness in our society - which is not pure “free market capitalism” - that inequality is rampant. There are theoretical explanations for this blaming both government intervention and just simply the behavior of individuals within the market that centralize wealth. And, conversely, there are theoretical explanations for how government can decentralize wealth, or how market participants can decentralize wealth (including boycotts, unions, etc.). The biggest challenge with this age-old “communism vs. capitalism” debate is that establishing overall tendencies for state vs. private actors requires exhaustive historical analysis, and is not even inherent to the nature of either actor, i.e., someone as a private actor, or state actor, can act in a way that either centralizes or decentralizes wealth. The only overarching principle you can even safely state is that the actions of a state are distinct from those as a private actor because of the “monopoly on violence” factor, i.e., the ability to enforce unfair demands that people can’t escape in practice (a behavior that leftie types usually accuse capitalism of, inversely, by pointing to corporate monopoly power - which of course, depends on the dictates of a state or equivalent body to enforce).

The only way I was able to resolve the problems with this whole analytical framework - communism, capitalism, state, private - was to reject this terminology entirely and perform the analysis in terms of individual behavior, actions, inanimate vs. animate, and the ethical properties deriving from those. A “state” is a useful abstraction at times and a confusing complication at other times. “Capitalism” and “communism” as terms have no universally agreed upon definition, resulting in unproductive, endless, circular debates. What we’re really trying to do is design a social system that maximizes outcomes for every criteria we like - equality, prosperity, individual wellbeing, health, lack of environmental externalities, etc.

The state is the historical apparatus that manages the inherent contradictions between classes. It administrates capitalism for and by the ruling class. Capitalism is maintained by the state, the state sustains capital and private property, through violence.

Capitalism is a form of class domination, various forms of slavery stitched together to exploit the masses for the benefit of the few. Only a democratically organized working class can “fix” capitalism, by eradicating it. The government is the apparatus that temporarily fixes the contradictions of capitalism, but the relations defined by this irrational, inefficient social system (unless you consider monopolies efficient) are what state governments under capitalist rule try and eventually fail to “mitigate”. The contradictions compile until you have an economic crash, which is actually good for monopolistic capitalists who can purchase the productive capital of their competitors at a fraction of the cost, leading to systematic downsizing; while the rest of the population suffers recession, inflation, and mass indignity.

The poor exist because there are rich. The capitalists are in control, as a class, and governments merely mitigate the worst tendencies. This is why reformism isn’t a long term strategy. Capitalism can’t be reformed, it can only be replaced.

And if we, the working class will be able to replace it with a system of greater freedom, equality and democracy, then the aims of socialism will have been reached without the “authoritarian” tendencies becoming reified in any significant way.

You can have your doubts about this, but your libertarian perspective is one of false appearances. If you want to understand the state and the economy, it must be considered as a series of relations brought about by human activity, using the tools laid before us by history and nature. If you think of the world like this, considering the subjective nature of politics and the economy, such as incentives, motives, etc., then your investigation will uncover the true relations that comprise this mass wage slavery to the billionaire class, known as capital.

Please elaborate.

As far as I know a very important side effect of the capitalism is the great concentration of power (aka money) in just some small individuals and how this creates an oligarchy which the only objective of extracting value form the other layers of the society. And of course the self perpetuation.

This have been happening since monopolies were created since centuries ago.

I really want to see how a system that by nature is concentrating power in some individuals really is really a de federated thing.

That conviction wasn’t rushed. But imagine it was the fall of 2020 and Trump thought there was a decent chance he might lose. Order his attorney general to indict candidate Biden on some random charge, force it through the courts to get a conviction, removing any judges that object or stall. Voila, Biden has a conviction and can’t run against Trump.

Are you ready for some tearing up and redoing of constitution now?

I know about Jefferson and his 20 year automatic sunset phase for laws at all levels, except for Constitutions, charters, and other founding documents that can be amended. Hadn’t heard that Franklin wanted to sunset the Constitution itself as well. Not sure that we would have lasted this long if Franklin had gotten his way there. I do think that Jefferson and Madison were on the right track with the federal, state, and local laws though. Tyranny of the dead and all that.

Trump has said that Elon “knows those computers better than anybody … And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide”.

First of all, we know that to be false because we know Elon doesn’t know shit about computers. But, aside from that, there are multiple possible interpretations of what he meant, anything from “Elon rigged the election” to “Elon ensured the integrity of the election”.

My policy is “Don’t believe anything Trump says about anything”. I don’t change that policy when he says something that I want to believe is true.

Where did you hear that?

Where would ancient Greek democracy

They had slaves, so it wasn’t particularly democratic.

I don’t know if there’s a meaningful way to treat that as a spectrum and to place political systems on it. I mostly pointed out the different definitions one might use so that people wouldn’t read my examples of rights violations and think “what’s that got to do with democracy?”.

Also, there’s no ancient Greek democracy. Greece was a bunch of city-states, each with its own political system. I know that in Athenian democracy there were slaves, and as you would image they didn’t get a vote. Neither did the women. If it existed today it would probably not even be called a democracy by western standards.