this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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[–] Malkhodr@lemmygrad.ml 22 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I like how this article doesn't mention the fact that the Senate is a significantly larger roadblock to any possible electoral progress. Like even from a liberal perspective, the Senate is a completely batshit institution and only exists to stunt progress.

[–] chesmotorcycle@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

bUt tHe fOuNdiNg fAtHeRs...

[–] Bronstein_Tardigrade@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The fact that women didn't get the right to vote until 1920 tells you all you need to know about the founding fathers and the US constitution. It was a piece of crap when written, and is a piece of crap today. Its the reason they push the whole "the constitution is immutable" BS.

[–] demeritum@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 day ago

The founding fathers never intended the constitution to be so sacrosanct in the first place. That it should change with the needs of the nation.

[–] chesmotorcycle@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 days ago

Yep. Also how it used to count both indigenous and enslaved people as fractions of a full human. It's an incredible feat of propaganda that anyone can mistake it for being something different than what it explicitly says it is.

[–] Malkhodr@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Perhaps I've been a communist too long to understand the feeling anymore, but I don't think I've ever really understood the hero worship of the Founding Fathers. Even when I was a lib and accepted them as important and not totally evil figures in history, I didn't take their words as gospel. Like, the idealized whitewashing of the senate and electoral college were things I understood the historical context and reasoning for, but even hack then I viewed them as absurdly antiquated.

[–] p0ntyp00l@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Thanks to dogshit revisionist history like Hamilton, American civic religion is doing just fine. I’m not even being glib, its success and adoption by the actual modern US government represents a new strategy which is basically just make the mythos of America Inclusive™️ and turn the FF into lovable characters (rather than actual real historical figures that did real actual lasting harm to the world) so that people can make their crappy fan art and fanfic. I’m thinking specifically of the Miku binder Thomas Jefferson fan”art” shudders.
In this sense, it becomes self-reinforcing by fandom culture because trying to explain how it’s cringey and bad for the world becomes a conversation about Letting People Enjoy Things. Trust me, I’ve had this conversation and that’s exactly how it goes.

[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The people can keep Spongebob but they must reject Hamilton.

In all seriousness tho, it is very weird. It's likely that most Yankees, if they heard of a popular piece of media that makes Hitler into a lovable character, they would rightfully go "that's Nazis trying to sanitize his image and whitewash what he was like." But then they'll miss it when it's their own history. Cause us Yankees grow up being told how important and intellectual the founding fathers were.

[–] p0ntyp00l@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It IS weird! I remember when there were all these headlines during Trump the first about Mike Pence going to a production and getting an impotent finger wagging from the cast (before continuing anyways, the show must go on you see) and everybody was talking about how much of an epic own it was and it's like.... is nobody gonna ask why Mike Pence finds this play palatable enough to attend in person? Is nobody gonna ask why the drone striker in chief and his genocidaire VP and their ghoul friends welcomed Hamilton into the white house with open arms?? Also why is there literally not a single enslaved person character nor hardly a mention of slavery in the whole damn play? Lin Manual (idc how its spelt lol) Miranda was asked directly and he squirmed a bit and basically just said he didn't want to cuz he didn't find it relevant. Alright, then!

I could write a whole paper on why Hamilton isn't just critically bad but also genuinely, materially bad but i don't wanna eat up space on this post lol.

And the rap fucking sucks I'm sorry, I put a good faith effort into trying to watch the Disney+ production and got about 20 minutes in before checking out from the cringe. It's rappin' granny type shit.

TLDR: The american ruling class merging their mythos with modern pop culture/fandom culture was very effective to the point where even self-identified yank ""leftists"" can't see a problem with supporting it.

I always hated that dumbfuck ass play. It's an insult to Black people and our culture using shitty rap and replacing slaveowners with Black people. Fuck Hamilton and fuck that bum ass whoever the fuck who made it.

[–] chesmotorcycle@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They can get you when you're young enough. I was probably indoctrinated since kindergarten. Only much later did I realize that a few white male slaveholding land speculators maybe, just maybe, didn't have everyone's interests at heart with the "revolution" they started.

[–] Malkhodr@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 2 days ago

I was taught a lot of the indoctrination as well, but I think it was the fact I was a Muslim growing up post 9/11. I'd also been to the region where my parents were from a couple times. So I guess because I saw first hand and has experience with my anti-western intervention family and community, I'd been inoculated from US civil religion to a certain extent.

Like, it's kinda hard to deify a nation whose children call you a terrorist, and whose people hold sweeping beliefs about countries that you've seen are not true with your own eyes. I'd been in Syria a few months before the initial color revolution attempt, although I was young, I do remember many parts of it. Iran even more so.

Also, I was a contrarian little shit.

[–] REEEEvolution@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 days ago

As the founding rapists intended.

US version of the UK's House of Lords.

[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 21 points 4 days ago

Still, blaming politicians alone misses the deeper problem. Gerrymandering is not simply the product of partisan greed. It is a predictable consequence of a broken electoral system that rewards lawmakers for manipulating district lines whenever they can.

It's not broken, it's working as intended (to the benefit of the capitalist class).

If Americans want to meaningfully curb gerrymandering, they must look beyond partisan behavior and pursue structural reforms that make such manipulation far less effective.

Via what though. Policy changes done by... the very same legislators who don't represent their interests and are paid not to?

That was largely how the country began. In 1800, America had 106 House districts serving a population of just 5.3 million, meaning each representative spoke for roughly 50,000 people.

And in spite of this, it was a country committing genocide with legal slavery.

If Americans truly want to curb gerrymandering and strengthen democratic representation, they must stop expecting politicians to perfect a structurally flawed system. Instead, they should demand a Congress that once again reflects the representative vision the nation was founded upon.

Or they can follow a representative vision that is actually proven to work at scale, without doing genocide and slavery, like China's: https://news.cgtn.com/news/whitepaper/China+Democracy+That+Works.pdf (but this first requires Yankees obtaining collective ownership over the means of production and distribution or it's nothing but a pipe dream)

The "founding fathers" are more monsters than they are role models to look to. Yankees need to stop looking to the past for answers and accept that non-"white" peoples already developed the answers they need.

[–] p0ntyp00l@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 days ago

Why only 6000? Why not pull a super Augustus and make it 60 000?
Why not 300 000? As we all know, the more representatives there are the more representative the government, innit /s