Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

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"It's not meant to be purely democratic. The founders were students of history and recognized the inherent instability of pure democracies."

Many of the founders were also elitists who didn't want anyone but landowning white men to run the country. They were wary of "mob rule" (ie. direct democracy), and preferred to have the elites rule. The jury's still out on whether they were right or whether direct democracy is actually better. Considering how much power and wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority in the US, I'm siding with having more direct democracy, not less.

"I get that it's easy to point out the hypocrisy of the phrase "all men are created equal" when slavery was still a thing in half the states, but it was a very tenuous situation to go against the crown of England in 1776."

The existence of slavery in the US wasn't just about 1776.. it lasted until 1865. The US was one of the last countries to end slavery.

"All of human history is filled with bloodshed, tyranny, endless wars, conquering, slavery, piracy, vandalism, raiding parties, human sacrifice, religious battles and authoritarianism..."

"Interning the Japanese Americans was of course wrong, but when you're fighting a world war and tens of millions are dying at the hands of Japanese (they slaughtered Chinese by the tens of millions)...it's very touchy isn't it? The lesser of two evils in that particular war was certainly the U.S."

The point of my post wasn't to say there weren't reasons (some might say excuses) for the US to behave the way it did (extreme, widespread racism against minorities is one such reason and excuse), nor to deny that some countries were just as bad or even worse, but to recognize that massive, serious oppression did in fact happen in the US, despite it being some sort of a democracy.

Oppression in the US is still happening, is likely to continue, and will probably be greatly enabled by the easy availability of identifying information on the people within and without its borders.

I want to express a frustration with this type of response I have.

Inevitably, when this topic of discussion comes up, I almost always see a response of this type, calling into question the entire foundation of the USA on the basis of the founding brothers being white slave owners, and it really bugs me, but I'm having a hard time trying to articulate it well...

I think it mostly centers around a very superficial understanding of the evolution of the enlightenment and the renaissance into the culmination of those that was the US. I would probably respond better if, when these arguments get thrown about, I heard discussion of the philosophical underpinnings the founders, in particular Madison, based their proposals on. Discussion or reference to individual liberty, natural law and natural rights, and such, as learned from study of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Hobbes and Spinoza, Montesquieu, etc.

I almost never see these referenced in this responses though, and to me it seems very dangerously close to "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", and I fear that the sentiment is growing so rapidly, as shallow as it may be, that the lack of understanding why America truly is a revolutionary country and is exceptional in history will potent some very turbulent times in the future.

Yes, the system was imperfect from the start, and has been even more imperfect in implementation, but to say then that the whole system (not saying you said this, but it seems thinly veiled to that affect often) must be thrown out is foolhardy at best. The shining light of America is that it has, in it's founding documents, a system designed to self-improve over time. I see our main problem as being the lack of memory of why each piece of that system is so important, and have allowed it to become corrupted. The path forward then is in seeking to enforce the core foundational principles the founders thought very hard about (such as Montesquieu's checks and balances system), and not to discard them just because they came from people that were imperfect.

My main point was that there's been plenty of oppression in the US despite it being to some degree a democracy.

It doesn't sound like you're actually disputing my main point at all, but wanting to shift the discussion on to whether the American system of government needs to be replaced and why, which is really off-topic.

Still, in response to your tangential point, I want to make clear that I'm not advocating discarding the entire American system of government, and my dissatisfaction with parts of it as they stand now does not stem from who the founders were.

I do think the system has proven itself to fail at meeting the high ideals that some of the founders professed to have. The system has proven itself to be highly corruptable, the checks and balances built in to the system have failed, and much of the Constitution is widely ignored or reinterpreted to mean whatever the people in power want it to mean.

These failures are not due to the founders owning slaves, but due to them being unable to foresee or adequately prepare the nation for things such as mass media, the internet, modern advertising and propaganda, and a slew of consequences of modern warfare, mutually assured destruction, the military-industrial complex, corporate dominance of the economy, enormous amounts of money being thrown at elections, the shutting out of third party alternatives, the poor civic education, widespread apathy and easy manipulability of the electorate, and on and on.

Despite the founders' short-sightedness and all the fialures and weaknesses in the American system of government, I am not an advocate of eliminating it wholesale. I believe reform is possible, and that it could be made more democratic, more accountable, more fair and just, and we don't have to scrap it all to do it.

However, I very much doubt the political will or consensus is there to make significant positive changes. If anything, I expect it to get much worse before it gets better.. if it ever will.

> I do think the system has proven itself to fail at meeting the high ideals that some of the founders professed to have. The system has proven itself to be highly corruptable, the checks and balances built in to the system have failed, and much of the Constitution is widely ignored or reinterpreted to mean whatever the people in power want it to mean.

It arguably failed so long ago that virtually nobody notices. For the first ~century, corporations were allowed only in the public interest. To some extent, that reflected outrage at the excesses of corporations chartered by the English Crown. But there were also concerns about the concentration of money and power.

But that began to fail in the mid 1800s, with the rise of the railroad corporations, and their growing political power. And it ended with the 14th amendment and some Supreme Court opinions, which granted many citizenship rights and legal protections to corporations.

Overwhelmingly, I believe the issue we're facing is somewhat to do with identity and property being tied together, and not something specific to the US. And this is a factor that precedes 1776 in the rise of national identities: monarchs had a strongly individualized identity, but identity across a people via a national boundary was a more limited consideration until trade growth had sufficiently developed a reason to use such: language, religion and local allegiance did most of the work. The locals could often evade legibility by obscuring their identity.

But property-based identity held a lot of currency by the time 1776 rolled around: it established credibility as an actor with some real agency and independence within trade relations, and therefore our modern nations have built their legibility around property. And what we've done since is to either try to position everyone somewhere within the property system, or to turn towards an authoritarian model to create identity without ownership(as in the various communist experiments, or the flat, hidden authority in "Tyranny of Structurelessness").

So when we have the idea of something like identity theft, or corporate personhood, that's a thing generated of having an identity to own, cascading down into human relationships as property, personal branding, etc. And the largest, most developed function of the legal system in the US is to make judgments about property. But we also have systems of identification that are imposed in an authoritative fashion(the SSN, DL, passport, etc.) - every nation is a mixed identity market in this way.

And in this respect I think the philosophy is truly starting to fail in a world which has so greatly automated ownership, and we will need to consider both identity and property at the same time to reach useful alternatives.

I guess you are right I wasn't really disagreeing with you too much, but rather pointing out that I see this type of response very often, but without the more in-depth discussion as you and the other commentator go into.

So to use your example of more democracy. One of my pet peeves is when people say we are a democracy. We are a constitutional democratic republic to be precise. There are elements of democracy, but we elect representatives. The problem to me is that the representatives no longer represent us. If you consider moving them towards representing the people democracy than I am all for that. What I am not for is a move towards rights of groups as opposed to individuals, because history has shown that ends up being abused.

All in all, I hope that reform is possible, but it is hard to see the pragmatic path there with how bad the system is currently, so we agree there. I just hope it doesn't devolve too much, because if it does, in this age of technology it will be extremely bloody for all involved.

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