I said the same thing in Trump’s first term when he was threatening to nuke the DPRK. Liberals were all up in arms that Trump would possibly do that, but NONE of them even questioned if the executive should have that kind of power in the first place.
That said, I’m currently reading Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. And it’s clear to me that the men who wrote that dogshit constitution clearly thought the executive and the judiciary should have a ton of power. Those rich assholes hated the poor and yeoman farmers, and so much of what they put in the final document was basically just “we can never let anyone challenge the sacred rights of property”, and saw the executive as the final check on democracy. The whole idea of the electoral college was that they couldn’t trust people to make that decision (and “people” here just means propertied white men anyway) so they would nominate aristocrats to make the real decision. They saw a powerful judiciary and executive as the real source of power. Really, this all is just a return to form.
The senate was designed specifically for the wealthy, it was seen as a sort of House of Lords for the US and was seen as the superior to whatever house of legislature had more democratic representation.
Such a great read, if not a bit boring when he’s just listing off their property.😅 But it was a real eye opener to the thought process behind this country, especially finding out the truth behind the Constitutional Convention and what the general population was moving towards with Shaw’s Rebellion.
I found it to be a great followup to Gerald Horne’s Counter-Revolution of 1776, if you’ve not read that yet.
I said the same thing in Trump’s first term when he was threatening to nuke the DPRK. Liberals were all up in arms that Trump would possibly do that, but NONE of them even questioned if the executive should have that kind of power in the first place.
That said, I’m currently reading Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. And it’s clear to me that the men who wrote that dogshit constitution clearly thought the executive and the judiciary should have a ton of power. Those rich assholes hated the poor and yeoman farmers, and so much of what they put in the final document was basically just “we can never let anyone challenge the sacred rights of property”, and saw the executive as the final check on democracy. The whole idea of the electoral college was that they couldn’t trust people to make that decision (and “people” here just means propertied white men anyway) so they would nominate aristocrats to make the real decision. They saw a powerful judiciary and executive as the real source of power. Really, this all is just a return to form.
Yeah, it’s not new. Wasn’t the senate explicitly designed as an anti-democractic body as well?
The senate was designed specifically for the wealthy, it was seen as a sort of House of Lords for the US and was seen as the superior to whatever house of legislature had more democratic representation.
Such a great read, if not a bit boring when he’s just listing off their property.😅 But it was a real eye opener to the thought process behind this country, especially finding out the truth behind the Constitutional Convention and what the general population was moving towards with Shaw’s Rebellion.
I found it to be a great followup to Gerald Horne’s Counter-Revolution of 1776, if you’ve not read that yet.
Yeah good point they’ve always been useless