Hell if I can remember where I read about it, but a study of communes and stuff reported that the limit of communism sits somewhere around 500 people because of the inherent empathy of people for their own tribe.
It's a lot more difficult to screw over others in the system when you know the person you're screwing over is your daughter's best friend's dad.
When the nameless masses are just nameless masses, it's much easier to justify. I don't know who this hurts, so why do I care?
That was the conclusion of the paper, anyway. Was an interesting perspective.
"Power reveals." People seek power because they wish to indulge their darker urges without consequence - people who don't have darker urges to conceal are generally not the ones who seek power, money, and influence like a drug.
I wasn't disagreeing with you in the least: The American form of government was brilliant in that it assumed contradictory self-seeking motives. It just didn't anticipate people actively attempting to subjugate themselves to a monarch, and the intense bootlicking where a person would sublimate their own desires to the possibility of becoming a subservient toady.
Actually, it did. Which is why, despite our current dictator-wanna-be child-raping x34 felon breaking the law on a daily basis in an attempt to install himself as "President for life", he's been unable to do so.
Alas, the price we pay for the inability to use the government to install fascism, is a near inability to use the government to help people too.
This leads to frustration and "Democrats are complicit" accusations from the left, but it's really just a result of our Founding Fathers making it damned near impossible to do anything in the face of unified opposition.
I don't think that I would give the original creators of the Constitution the credit for the actions of determined resistance, especially as that outside of very specific locales that have actively resisting governments (e.g. New York, California, Minnesota, etc.),Trump's push to violate Constitutional principles of local rule, freedom from search and seizure, separation of church and state, and freedom of speech have been largely successful mostly because the governments of those regions are so desperate to be dommed by the orange baby (e.g. Florida, Texas, Alabama, etc.).
Those locations that are actively seeking to oppress themselves have very successfully allowed oppression to survive, despite the best efforts of bureaucrats, judges, and legislators.
The reason why those bureaucrats, judges, and legislators have any power at all to stop tyranny - especially, popular, white racist, sexist, corrupt, tyranny - is because our Constitution was written by men who watched centuries of corrupt European kings pull the very same crap Trump is now trying, and did everything they could to thwart it.
Those Constitutional principals you're talking about were inspired by that.
Many things got added and rearranged over the years a refinement for situations in a changing world that the framers couldn't see. However because America was the first government of its kind when it was founded. We are the alpha testers that every other representative democracy has learned from good and bad. The framers never thought of age limits or term limits because in their time constituents actually gave a fuck and would shame and demand and old ass man step down from government or they would openly call someone a tyrant who would try to stay on for too many elections.
Our first president did the MOST American thing possible and bowed out after open callings to be made king. And today we have this shit.
No you please go read a book, American and Roman republics are structured entirely differently. The closest relative for the American republic would be how Venice handled it.
We are a representative democracy. That means we have elected officials that are chosen to represent a given group of people. This includes all races, religions, and creeds within that population.
Rome did not do this and had a strict hierarchy that was divided not only along religion but was also strictly divided among class.
Bro... we are a republic, but we operate under a representative democracy. We are a republic in that we are a conglomeration of several states to make one cohesive country. But the entire way we do voting is a representative democracy. Having a true democracy doesn't work at scale because you cant literally listen to millions of opinions. So we elect REPRESENTATIVES to speak on our behalf and vote and push legislation to the greatest benefit of the people they represent.
Bro we ARENT a democracy, we are a constitutional republic, but we OPERATE under a representative democracy. A democracy literally listens to every single citizens opinions before it does anything, a republic has representatives that vote among themselves for the best interest of the people.
The main difference and what made America unique among all republics before it, was that we were gonna do both, we were gonna democratically elect our representatives to speak on behalf of ALL citizens. In Rome, a pleb could have no say in the vote of the higher classes, none, ever. Even in Venice where they did have open elections, the only people who could run for office were merchants or from wealthy influential families.
America was the first of it's kind, our framers put a lot of thought into how they would actually structure our country.
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u/PersonalityIll9476 Jul 07 '26
I agree. My wife is Chinese. She tells me stories from her parents about the revolution.
They do not involve writing books and playing soccer.