Plashet Grove Pete wrote: ↑Wed May 25, 2022 9:21 pm
Great post Pete, albeit a very depressing read. Actually it sounds to me like it's very close to acknowledging America as a dictatorship - essentially you've ended up with a small group possessing absolute power without effective constitutional limitations. And the majority seemingly unable to change or even threaten the status quo. Hardly the land of the free. Hardly the definition of a democracy.
How did the USA get itself into this mess?
In the simplest of nutshells: a two hundred year old written constitution.
Over the years the majority of Americans understood and still understand that this document required amending as society progressed (slavery, voting rights, civil rights, abortion, even gun control etc) and were happy to adapt accordingly.
An increasingly vocal and fundamentalist minority believe that constitution is sacrasanct and should be followed as closely as possible as it was originally intended - this is known as originalism - although they are often vague, contradictory and dishonest about it for obvious reasons, picking and choosing what they’re prepared to admit publically.
This minority - conservative, right-wing, patriarchal, fundamentalist Christians - began to align themselves with the Republican Party just before and during the Reagan era. The NRA came on board at around the same time. Even they believed in some form of gun control up to that point - It was pretty much universally accepted accepted that the 2nd amendment (although pretty vague in original form) was designed to allow militias to form in times of war and then later to allow people to use rifles for sport and hunting. Now funded by arms manafacturers the NRA became the most powerful PAC in America and gun ownership in itself began to be talked of as a fundamental ‘right’.
Outdated dogma meets political expediency.
Fast foward to Trump and the whole thing ratchets up 10 gears because he’ll do anything his backers want as long as there’s a pound note in it and he stays out of the big house. Thanks to that **** the Supreme Court is now dominated by originalists who are intent on surreptitiously rolling back the various common sense amendments to the constitution (the 14th amendment being the biggy) which will ultimately hand back control of the legislative branch to the various States. And we know what happens every time the individual States have free reign.
The lunatics have officially taken over the asylum.
EDIT: it’s worth repeating: 90% of Americans want gun control.