“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
The answer was to replace capitalism, an extractive economic institution, with socialism, an inclusive economic institution. And yes, it would have taken a lot of political will, which is why I argue it would have been hard, but not impossible. I’ve been arguing this with several users in parallel. If you want to see my argument in full it’s in my comment history.
What’s important is, now that the bomb has gone off and we have fascism, we still need to replace capitalism with socialism. But in addition we also have to defeat a fascist dictatorship on top of that. So now it’s even harder.
That was in fact my point, yes, that capitalism needed to be replaced with something that isn’t blowing up on the regular. But that’s not very likely to happen until it blows all the way up and the ‘silent majority’ who are content and propagandized into inactivity discover just how fucked they are and are forced to wake up.
No amount of hardship or things getting worse will make people wake up. People will unironically think they aren’t working enough if they’re before retirement age and if they’re after retirement age they will say something like ‘I did everything right, but I have no money’. They have an existing framework to view their material conditions thanks to neoliberalism.
This must be corrected if we want people to adopt socialist and progressive ideas. We have to educate people if we want to make things better. There is no way around it. Now we have to educate people during a fascist dictatorship.
Oh I know it’ll take a lot more than just circumstances, but the circumstances have to be right for most of them to even be interested in getting educated on the subject.