- cross-posted to:
- Mirror@50501.chat
- cross-posted to:
- Mirror@50501.chat
cross-posted from: https://50501.chat/post/54068
Time to break free of traditional political ideological labeling and divisions. Time to abandon old, divisive sociopolitical labels like “liberal” and “conservative”.
A new political party based on a vastly, commonly held virtures lends itself to embrace over 66% of Americans, and it clearly embraces progressive principled thinking. In the most ideal American sense of unity, a political party should not be able to be defined or placed as “to the left” or “to the right” of where the Democratic or Republican parties currently are. Just let it exist organically based on present-day principled thinking. The American Progressive Majority.
Originally Posted By
u/AtlanticbboyAt2025-03-23 04:38:18 AM| Source
Because only a handful of rich and educated landowners could vote at the time.
Once you include the uneducated masses, it becomes a popularity contest about who can create the most rage.
Living in a historical moment in which the US is on the cusp of tipping into full on autocracy, and I get to hear about how our problem is “Not enough rich people with advanced degrees making the decisions around here”.
The whole premise of democracy is that individuals bring useful perspective at every walk of life. The education system exists because the uneducated masses desire them and construct them and socially replicate them, not because the elites foist it on the public unwillingly. The accumulated social wealth exists because the masses build it, not because elites magically summon it into existence. The institutions that define normal public life persist because the masses endorse them and gladly participate in them, not because landlords own and operate them.
Without the “uneducated masses” you do not have a social contract or a labor force capable of implementing any meaningful public policy. Leaving decision making exclusively to landlords gets you to theocracy and cult demagoguery, not modern post-industrial plenty.
You misunderstand my post. They asked why it was set up that way. I explained why it was set up that way. I didn’t say it was smart.
Democracy, as an institution, was insurgent within the colonies long before the American Revolution. Early local settler colonial governments preferred democratic governance over authoritarian rule because there was no clear overwhelming political force to exert this kind of control. Later efforts to consolidate power nationally failed for similar reasons - the territory was too large and too sparsely populated to be dominated from a distant capital, market economies followed organic and cyclical patterns that defied strict authoritarian policies, and the culturally diverse public reflexively rebelled when any single minority faction gained too much power.
Popular demagogues, divorced from the centers of intellectual orthodoxy and economic command, could still sway their peers and influence the Lockean social contract more easily than autocrats issuing dictates from a capital.
Democracy isn’t something a handful of intellectuals created from whole cloth. It is a mass movement that those intellectuals sought to steer through formal institutionalization.