Wednesday, July 13, 2022

National Citizens Conferences Part V

 


This CounterPunch article from Patrick Mazza says what I've been fumbling towards: "Ditch the Constitution and Start Over: When a Government Becomes Destructive of the Rights of the People":

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve a political system grounded on the rule of minorities over majorities, and to assume the powers of democratic self-government to which common sense says they are entitled, a decent respect for the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare why.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That to protect these rights, we institute governments that derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.

Paraphrasing those words of the Declaration of Independence, they seem uniquely fitting in a week just preceding the anniversary of their adoption 246 years ago. A week when the Supreme Court of the United States limited the power of the Environmental Protection Administration to regulate carbon dioxide pollution from power plants. The ruling in West Virginia v. EPA has many technical ins and outs that do not bar this power entirely. But it shifts critical carbon-reducing decisions to a Congress that has so far failed to act on climate. Thus, in practical effect, the court has become destructive of rights. It has undermined a vital protection for the life of people across a nation and planet already suffering and dying from a disrupted climate.

But I've been talking about fascists and shit-libs because it is the divide between these two camps, plus the power they collectively wield over more normal people, that stands in the way of sensible compromise.

Mazza's essay is quite good.  It deals intelligently and comprehensively with the need for a new constitutional order and the likelihood of a new constitutional order actually arising as well as what it might look like.

I guess the last thing I'll say on this topic is "Can ordinary people, including fascists and shit-libs come together to build something they can all agree on?"  My answer is "No."  But from here on out I'm going to stop it with the quotation marks.  No. Obviously fascists and shit-libs can't sit down and break bread together and craft a polity that would please both sides.  But genuine fascists are a minority.  The actual hard-core, proud deniers of the original Holocaust whilst openly calling for a second Holocaust comprise no more than 10-15 percent of any large population.  As well, hopeless shit-libs are an even smaller minority.  Even hardcore shit-libs operate under the premise that their stupid liberal parties (Democratic, Liberal, Social Democrat, Labour etc.,) are necessary ["lesser"] evils to save us from the spectre of fascism.  Once the liberal parties are rejected for the fascist-enabling shams that they are, I think most shit-libs will acknowledge the new reality.

It is the vast majority in the middle, the "live and let live" people and the "well that ain't for me but I'm not going to call the cops" social conservatives, who will come up with something.  The people who don't watch FOX News who like Bernie Sanders and the people who DO watch FOX News who like Bernie Sanders, who will discuss oligarchs and how to either control them or eliminate them (as a class, not as breathing humans) and prevent them from arising again.

It just seems that the status-quo is completely untenable.  And I'm tired of typing and I need to make my lunch.  



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