We’re working on it. It may take 10 years or 100 or 1000 (or it may never happen), but what can we do besides do our best to fix things?
…the argument I’m making in this thread is that this is it. This is the end result of the experiment. Sure, keep working on it. But it won’t materially make any difference.
Because you can’t “fix things” unless you get some consensus on what needs to be fixed. And as long as the Democrats are firmly on the side of “fund the police”, “oppose serious bail reform”, “not doing anything about the Supreme Court”, then this is it. This is what you get.
We’ll I personally don’t think immigrants and multiculturalism caused America to fail. I will accept, however, that some people think it has.
If everyone has your attitude then there’s no hope. Progress requires optimism, and thus I choose to be optimistic. The alternative is giving up any effort at trying.
- I still, after all this time, don’t know what it means to “fund” or “defund” the police. I keep imagining Officer Joe Friday not getting his paycheck at the end of the month.
- Bail reform is a work in progress.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fate-bail-reform-illinois - Do you really see Democrats as being firmly on the side of not doing anything about the Supreme Court?
…I’m simply calling it as I see it.
What would you prefer I do?
You want me to tell you that “I think it will get better?”
Because I don’t.
Progress requires much more than optimism. It requires action. It requires commitment. It requires political will and power. It requires you to be realistic.
Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m not telling you to give up. I’m pleading with you to prove me wrong. I’m begging you to not give up, because Black people and American Indians and indigenous folks and trans people and the unhoused and the undocumented…they all need you to not stop fighting.
My message is the same as its been for a while. I think that you have to do everything that you can to hold the line. Biden needs to win the next election. You need to hold the senate. You need to win back the house. You need to do something about the supremes. You need to get out and fight every single election, from the local sheriff to city council to the school boards.
It means stopping things like this.
Police overtime is a literal scam. Collars for dollars. Police budgets are out of control. Police departments are out of control.
Here is AOC explaining exactly what defund means:
I’m not arguing that bail reform isn’t a work in progress. I’m pointing out that without a serious commitment to not only bail reform, but an overhaul of the entire system, including things like plea-bargins, as well as getting the general public to buy-in, then we aren’t going to see any change to the prison population. America will still be locking up people at industrial levels. Because for most Americans, this isn’t something they even know about, let alone care about.
What are the Democrats doing about the Supreme Court?
How can anyone know what lies in the long run future? I mean sure, things don’t look good now, but nobody knows what the situation will be 50, 100, 1000 years from now.
…how long do you allow an experiment to run before you declare a result?
I think the American experiment has been a failure. I’ve laid out my reasons for that in this thread. I think that if things do get better, it won’t be because of a strict adherence to everything that allegedly “made America Great.”
I’m saying that optimism is not sufficient on its own, but it is necessary. Without optimism, there’s no hope at all. With optimism plus a bunch of other things, there’s a chance to succeed.
…if you want optimism, then perhaps a Great Debate thread discussing “is the American Experiment a failure” is the wrong place to look for it. My position remains unchanged. I think it has been a failure. I’ve explained why. I’m not going to change my position just because you don’t think I’m being optimistic enough.
But you said you want us to keep trying. If you want us to keep trying, then you have some optimism in you.
Note: this post was started a couple of hours ago and got interrupted.
The answer was given dozens of times in this thread alone.
American society is better now than at any previous time in history. Therefore, progress can be made. How? Glibly speaking, don’t vote Republican. Progress has always come from liberals and never from conservatives. Giving in to their nonsense is certain failure. Saying we’re fucked and throwing up your hands is worse than cherrypicking the evils and not acknowledging any of the gains.
Less glibly speaking, learn from history. (History always provides delicious ironies. The Constitution has numerous provisions that made the American penal system better than the British penal system it was breaking away from.) In my lifetime a thousand battles have been fought and won, many of them huge. The world of today is inestimably superior to the world of 1950 I entered. I got bored of the “we’re all fucked” mentality fifty years ago.
Isn’t the motto of this fucking site “it’s taking longer than we thought?”
In this case? Forever. I’m dead serious.
As a corollary, IMO the OP has no answer.
Moderating:
Just a nudge, I’m seeing too much “you” and that leads to needing real moderating. Please lets make this less personal. In particular, lets drop the specific appeals to Banquet_Bear. It looks almost like badgering at this point.
Several times I’ve been tempted to drop that into this thread.
…optimism is relative.
If you don’t fight, if Biden loses to Trump, if they lose the senate, lose the house, its all fucking over.
How long have Black people been in this fight? Have indigenous folk? Have the LGBTQ+ community? They’ve never given up the fight. They’ve had big wins. And many losses. But they keep fighting, even though the system is broken.
If you don’t keep trying: then the worst case scenario is genocide. I don’t think that’s the endgame here. I don’t think that’s where it ends.
But those are the stakes.
Then it isn’t an experiment.
The Democrat Governor of New York and the Democrat Mayor of New York oppose serious bail reform, support the NYPD, are dragging their feet on fixing Rikers.
It isn’t enough to just say “don’t vote Republican.” That isn’t going to fix any of the things I’ve talked about in this thread. It just stops things from getting exponentially worse. Not voting Republican is just the starting point. You also need to be holding Democrat politicians to account.
This thread is a Great Debate titled “is the American Experiment a failure.” My answer to that is…yes, it is.
I mean, it’s been centuries already. I think its okay to make a judgement at this stage on whether or not we think the experiment has been a success of a failure. We can see how it all ended up. This is it.
History provides some apt quotations here.
Galileo’s (probably apocryphal) “But it does move” wins.
‘It’s been ten-thousand-fucking-years and all you’ve accomplished is mastering fire, starting agriculture, and inventing the wheel. Clearly the human experiment is a failure!’
…but nobody is calling it “the human experiment.”
This thread is about the American Experiment. It’s a phrase that is in common parlance, and its what this debate is all about. Has the framework set up by the “founding fathers” achieved what they set out to achieve? Has it worked for everyone? Is the America of today maintained without privileged classes? Is the democratic principle of equal rights, general suffrage, and government by a majority, capable of being carried into practical operation, and that, too, over a large extent of country?
I don’t think its wrong to ask those questions. I don’t think its wrong to say “I don’t think its worked.” I don’t think its wrong to consider the consequences of staying the course. I don’t think its wrong to think that maybe there is a better way of doing things.
Indeed, it isn’t a real experiment, it’s a metaphorical experiment.