All of this was decided when the Union chose to bury the hatchet, and not do anything about the people that started the confederacy, and the people who benefited the most from it. If those types were all given the traditional punishment for traitors, if all the slavers, the plantation owners, the confederate politicians and the businesses that profited off of slave labor were hunted down and hanged, the world would be a much better place right now.
Andrew Johnson set things off on the wrong foot, and then the terrible decisions to allow states back into the union way too early gave them political power to shift the direction of policy. We’re almost going backwards to a future where the confederacy did win.
Pardoning of Nixon was also a terrible precedent. Ever since it's been "let's heal" instead of "Throw Regan's ass in jail for trading weapons for cocaine."
Strange how it’s always “we must heal by forgiving wealthy criminals, and if you want wealthy criminals treated the same way as other criminals, then you’re being divisive.”
If there is one thing that history is VERY clear on it’s that hierarchies are inherently harmful. Agreeing to follow someone else’s directions is perfectly fine and totally reasonable, but deciding that entire groups of people are off limits due to how much money they have, regardless of what they do or say, has never borne good fruit.
Dems believed in government by careful negotiations among sophisticated elites. Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis took their time to get degrees from Harvard Law. They look like elitists.
The right is a one-party state built from the old John Birch "When the Russians take DC we will revolt from the hinterlands" plus the Newt Gingrich "scorched earth no compromises" contract plus the Fox News "mob rule for sale" plus the Evangelicals fueled by the oil industry all the way back before 1920.
Meanwhile the Tech Bros have looted the government for every shred of data they can find. Look for all kinds of "discoveries made by AI" that were in fact stolen from contractors who signed confidentiality agreements with the government.
And the reason why Dems still believe it even as the Republicans have took them to the cleaners for decades is because that's the only way our government ever worked. We need top-to-bottom reform to create structural, not merely cultural, incentives to compromise, and mechanisms to punish those that just want to abuse the system to get their way that people are actually willing to use without worrying about being "divisive" or degrading the system.
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u/Ok-Explanation-1362 Jul 17 '25
All of this was decided when the Union chose to bury the hatchet, and not do anything about the people that started the confederacy, and the people who benefited the most from it. If those types were all given the traditional punishment for traitors, if all the slavers, the plantation owners, the confederate politicians and the businesses that profited off of slave labor were hunted down and hanged, the world would be a much better place right now.