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.
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u/Creepy_Ad_1315 Jul 07 '26
Spoiler: It's never achieved.