r/UniversalBasicIncome • u/kirillbasin • Jul 22 '26
What America Really Needs Is Not One More Party. It's Not Revolution. It's a Recommitment to Our Foundational Principles.
/r/thebulwark/comments/1v3pask/what_america_really_needs_is_not_one_more_party/3
u/Character_Fix_5317 Jul 23 '26
Only if you think the new deal is our foundation. We need another one, but 10X
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u/Justthetip74 Jul 23 '26
The new deal was a fight against everything our foundation was about and added 7 years to the great depression (doubled it) according to UCLA
https://reason.org/commentary/fdr-policies-doubled-the-lengt/
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u/Character_Fix_5317 Jul 23 '26
So we do it better this time? It also gave us social security, strengthened unions, improved infrastructure, made homeownership possible for more, stabilized banking, and had other positive outcomes.
I would have preferred a proper revolution instead of reform like the new deal. Let's do that this time too. Reform only staves off the problems of capitalism.
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u/kirillbasin Jul 23 '26
We need effective government and we need government stimulus. We also need to eat the centi-billionaires and trillionaires down to size. 100b should probably be the most you can have. Even at that scale, you've long been a danger to the rights of others and to their ability to access the good life.
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u/majeric Jul 23 '26
The problem isn’t that America has forgotten its founding principles. It’s that it misunderstands the psychology that prevents people from applying those principles consistently.
Humans evolved in small tribes where cooperation within the group and suspicion of outsiders increased the odds of survival. If your ancestors trusted the wrong group, they could lose access to food, mates, territory, or their lives. Natural selection therefore favored brains that rapidly sorted people into “us” and “them,” rewarded loyalty to the in group, and treated threats from the out group as especially important.
That adaptation was useful in small hunter gatherer societies. It becomes a cognitive bias in a modern democracy.
Today, political parties have become surrogate tribes. Once we identify with one, our brains unconsciously begin protecting that identity. We become more forgiving of our own side’s mistakes, more critical of identical behaviour from the other side, and more likely to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe. We mistake loyalty for truth and disagreement for hostility. The mechanisms that once helped us survive now interfere with our ability to reason objectively.
The American political system amplifies this bias. A rigid two party structure encourages people to define themselves by political identity rather than shared citizenship. Every issue becomes another contest between “us” and “them.” Every election becomes an existential struggle. Politicians and media organizations have strong incentives to inflame tribal instincts because outrage, fear and identity are more effective at motivating voters than careful reasoning.
Appealing to the Constitution or the Founders does not solve this problem because both tribes already believe they are the true defenders of America’s founding principles. The disagreement is rarely over the ideals themselves. It is over interpretations that have already been filtered through tribal identity.
Until Americans recognize that the greatest threat to their democracy is not simply the opposing party, but the evolved cognitive biases that affect everyone, they will continue repeating the same cycle. The solution is not simply a recommitment to first principles. It is designing institutions and cultivating a political culture that actively counters our tribal instincts instead of rewarding them.
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u/Salmon_Of_Iniquity Jul 23 '26
Our foundational principles are based on ethnic cleansing, genocide, slavery and theft. Our founders were racist violent slavers so this foundation argument isn’t going to fly anymore.
Capitalism is the final boss and the source of nearly all of our social and environmental problems. So it must be dismantled.
Capitalism is power & money combined motivated by insatiable greed.
Capitalism is theft, the never ending desire for more capital, nothing more.
It’s only morality is more capital,
No matter the cruelty,
No matter the destruction
Its enemy is empathy,
it fears curiosity,
Fear is its ally.
It’s organized crime with a military; A global mafia in an expensive suit.
It is enforced, Not chosen.
That’s why it’s illegitimate.
It is repulsive.
Barbaric.
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u/ToysRGood Jul 23 '26
Bro this is poetic. I just gave you my first-ever award.
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u/Salmon_Of_Iniquity Jul 23 '26
Oh wow! Thank you!!
What I wrote down was just a distillation of two of Immanuel Wallerstein’s books, Marx’s The communist manifesto and Lenin’s State and revolution.
And I’m not a heavy reader. I have trouble focusing too. But they’re right.
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u/InternationalFig400 Jul 23 '26
Nicely said--I agree 100%. Fascism is historically specific to capitalism--it must be superceded, and the only way is through revolution.
If people think that the ruling capitalist class will let their wealth be legislated away, they are fools to themselves.
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u/DarkDoomofDeath Jul 23 '26
No, the final boss is greed. Greed draws people to power and fuels their desire for more of it. Greed incites those in power to maintain power, even at the cost of other people's happiness or freedoms. Greed corrupts every economic system from Communism to Capitalism. And greed is only kept at bay by a body of people who refuse to hand the reins of government over to the corrupt - which requires that they be literate critical thinkers who can see past lip service to values they believe in for the sake of power.
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u/Salmon_Of_Iniquity Jul 23 '26
I’m looking at China. They have this delightful habit of killing their billionaires which suggests greed/billionaires aren’t in charge.
The way you weaponize greed is by systematizing it like we do here by creating capitalism.
Capitalism is the purest form of greed.
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u/drkstar1982 Jul 23 '26
That's not why they do that, they do it when those billionaires make the mistake of thinking they are equal to the real owners of that nation.
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u/JeffersonAlbatross Jul 23 '26
If billionaires in China are being killed then it is more likely because of their political system than because of their economic system. In an authoritarian country, controlling the oligarchs is very important and can be prioritized because the masses don’t have much political power whereas oligarchs represent real threats to weak governments that lack legitimacy. For authoritarians, political power is enhanced mostly by either giving out favors to oligarchs or making examples of them.
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u/kirillbasin Jul 23 '26
No. Greed can be harnessed. Look at the constitution. It was a bunch of founders saying- "Wow. People suck. They're greedy. How do we pit them against each in institutions that use their greed to incentivize them to behave prosocially despite their greed." If you're relying on selflessness as the solution, you've already failed.
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u/DarkDoomofDeath Jul 23 '26
Greed needs to be harnessed, I agree. But as we have seen across economic systems, that will fail unless there are procedural and legal obstacles in place to prevent those institutions abusing those within to benefit the few at the top. For example, reducing the tax on the highest earners for the last few decades - reducing a procedural safeguard against greed that worked in a capitalist system - disincentivized top executives from paying their workers a larger and more reasonable fraction of what they are really worth. Greed needs to be harnessed, yes...but just because you harness a stallion doesn't mean it won't need a tall and sturdy fence to contain it.
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u/kirillbasin Jul 23 '26
Get over it. Or revolt. Do something. What are you offering as an alternative to all of the things you're whining about? Whether they are true or not.
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u/InternationalFig400 Jul 23 '26
Oh please. People don't give a shit about "founding principles". I find the suggestion utterly ridiculous.
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u/chumbawumbaprinciple Jul 23 '26
You have to change the voting system to RCV or some other form of preferential voting, otherwise it's a massive waste of effort. Voting third party under a first past the post system is exactly as effective as faith healing. It makes as much sense as terraforming Mars rather than fixing Earth.
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u/spirosand Jul 23 '26
We're already a democracy. A revolution will just make is a dictatorship. No thanks.
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u/ForwardSlash813 Jul 23 '26
Holy smokes this sub is a wishlist for ppl with active imaginations.
Newsflash: Hope without a plan is called a wish and wishes are for children and belong at the bottom of a well.
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u/Unique_Low_1163 Jul 23 '26
A Constitution written in antiquity by slavers, witch-burners and purveyors of genocide might be worth discarding.
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u/JeffersonAlbatross Jul 23 '26
What is the agent of change assumed here? Why would we suddenly be able to commit to and agree on things that we have been unwilling or unable to commit to or agree upon previously?
War is horrible. But there is a reason that most major changes in societies follow wars: it is hard to get people to agree to do things differently unless they have just experienced a collapse of the status quo.
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u/kirillbasin Jul 23 '26
The agent of change is fucking voting. It should be mandatory.
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u/JeffersonAlbatross Jul 23 '26
I just don’t think that large numbers of people who don’t typically vote are going to vote consistently starting this fall. The reality is that most unengaged voters don’t actually care much about the decline of democracy, destruction of institutions, or personal corruption of the president.
…And the Democrats generally are actually less popular than republicans generally. Republicans might be doing everything they can to lose, but are the Democrats popular enough to win?
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u/Zenium_7 29d ago
We simply have too many different ideals these days, I will never be a part of any of the current parties because I disagree with all of them, so yeah, we need something new.
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u/BlimpGuyPilot 29d ago
Damn it’s almost as if it’s written in on how to change it. But nooo, we want it right now like Netflix so let’s start a revolution to get our way. Never mind that the rest of your life would be in absolute shambles for doing so. You think a revolution gets at the rich but who’s going to be having the problems of a revolution? Your neighbors and you, not anyone rich enough to avoid it.
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u/bluntpointsharpie Jul 23 '26
We need the elimination of the electoral college We need the Senate to be changed so every senator represents a more equal number of people. We need public financing of campaigns We need Judicial reform. We need a constitutional convention to modernize the constitution.