The US was the first of the series of republican revolutions of that era and the most conservative of all of them (compare with the radicalism of 1789 France for example). There are things to admire about it, but I think it is better to call it a war of independence than a proper social revolution.
The reason to be critical today is we are _still_ living in that framework! We have to do better.
What would a better structure look like? And I don't think things like national healthcare, less racism, etc. are included, because those could be implemented in the current structure. I think history shows that we have a demonstratively good system. We have high social mobility, high political stability (peaceful transfers of power, Trump notwithstanding), consistently strong economics, world-class institutions, etc. Our system has scaled fairly smoothly from 2.5 million to 325 million and has lasted almost 250 years. Which system has done better?
It's not clear if our system can survive the current polarization, which could be seen as city values vs rural values, and the system is specifically designed to balance those. So if the cities and the rurals both take up opposing, fundamentalist positions and refuse to cooperate, the system is not designed to handle that. But we've had a history of craziness, and so far, comes the times, comes the man. I'll bet on our system over a lot of other extant systems! And change is not always better. (And if the electorate has a lot ideological-driven motivations, as present, the odds of change being worse is pretty high. Ideological-driven change has historically been pretty bad.)
I do think that if you stay within the system of liberal democracy, at minimum we need to implement a more modern constitutional order. We've learned a lot about liberal constitutions in 200 years.
However, practically speaking, the political machinery is so ossified that I think only marginal structural changes within the framework are possible (like court packing, electoral vote compacts etc). Political radicals have to do a lot of organizing to build a mass constituency that can make really dramatic alterations without empowering the right wing.
Rest easy, we just want democracy that poor people can participate fully in. Unfortunately, that means the 30-40% right-wingers will be outvoted every single time.
..and don't act like the right isn't trying to build towards calling a constitutional convention if they can capture enough state legislatures. It's well documented. We can be assured that if that came to pass all hell would break loose.
Hi, ex poor person here. It’s called not being lazy or making up excuses. Very rarely is someone actually disadvantaged. But yes communism will some how make people less lazy. And judging by the votes here, you’re wrong.
The reason to be critical today is we are _still_ living in that framework! We have to do better.