Will Bunch: America 1.0 had jumped the shark before Roe decision, but we can start anew

[Nevilledog]

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Will Bunch
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Look, the truth is the American bus plunged off the cliff in 2016, and this Roe catastrophe is a really big bounce off the rocks. We are ruled by a minority, in a broken system

We can watch the bus crash, or build a new one. My bonus column

inquirer.com
America 1.0 had jumped the shark before Roe decision, but we can start anew | Will Bunch
Roe overturn showed how America drove off a cliff in 2016 ... and hasn't hit the bottom yet. Saving democracy must mean starting from scratch.
3:26 PM · Jun 24, 2022

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/roe-overturned-future-american-democracy-20220624.html

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https://archive.ph/Cu7aP


There were perhaps a couple of dozen abortion-rights protesters outside the venerable U.S. Supreme Court steps at 10 a.m. on the gray summer Friday when Roe v. Wade’s nearly 49-year run as law of the land finally and predictably ended. As soon as news spread of the justices’ 6-3 ruling spread, there were hundreds, and as morning turned into afternoon there were thousands, as tears morphed into defiant chants: “We won’t go back! We won’t go back!” and “Our bodies, our choice!”

Across the way, Democratic members of Congress — having failed for decades, or arguably not trying too hard, to codify women’s reproductive rights — streamed out of the Capitol and burst into a confusing chorus of “God Bless America,” apparently celebrating the passage of gun safety legislation and oblivious to the protest.

They were shouting, and singing, into a vast abyss. The object of the crowd’s rancor — the six right-wing justices, including several who’d lied to the nation during their confirmation hearings that the 1973 Roe decision that established national abortion rights was settled law — probably were not there. America’s angst-ridden afternoon seemed to prove how hard it is to know what to say, or sing, or do, when something is dead or dying.

Because let’s be honest: America 1.0 — the analog version of democracy that was drafted here in Philadelphia in the late 18th century — drove off a cliff in 2016. That was the year that Mitch McConnell — the soulless, corporate-funded, respectable face of the movement to deny legitimacy to this nation’s first Black president — grabbed the steering wheel while stealing the Supreme Court seat that helped make Friday possible. That was the same year that the kind of authoritarian clown that Alexander Hamilton and James Madison tried to warn us about hopped into the driver’s seat and, fueled by populist resentments, slammed through the guardrails.

*snip*

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Blue states only country would be a vastly richer one than the US now.

But the red states folks are just itching for a reason to shoot every single one of us dead.

[Ocelot II]

2. I have always been a pretty committed institutionalist, but

after watching the 1/6 hearings so far and reading the recent opinions of a no-longer-legitimate Supreme Court, as off this evening I'm kind of like, "FUCK IT! BURN IT ALL DOWN!" We don't have the country we thought we had, or even could have had, because too goddamn many people in power suck and too many other people like it that the people in power suck, and the system just does not fucking work. Maybe this country is just too big and complicated for the original system to work, or maybe it never really did but for 200 ears wheezed along just well enough for us to think we were the Shining Fucking City On The Shining Fucking Hill and didn't notice the rot in the basement. Or chose not to notice it.

So the gaping holes in the system allowed TFG to crash through the guard rails that were really only made of toilet paper straight from Mitch McConnell's bathroom, and 2/3 of the Supreme Court just stood there and said, Hell, yeah, as the car rolled down the embankment.

The founders knew it was all an experiment anyhow, and I guess the lab just blew up.

[Nevilledog]

3. I don't disagree with a single thing you said.

We're leaving the country as soon as hubby retires in 3 years. Maybe sooner if things keep going as shitty as they are.

[BootinUp]

4. K&R