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

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Will Bunch
@Will_Bunch
·
Follow
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

No paywall
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*