- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Summary
California officials warned that Trump’s order to release massive amounts of water nearly caused severe flooding for farmers.
Trump boasted about the move, claiming it would help fight wildfires, but experts said the water couldn’t reach affected areas, which are over 200 miles away.
The Army Corps of Engineers initially planned to release water at maximum capacity but scaled back after urgent pushback.
Experts warned the water could have been better used months later for irrigation.
He phrased it wrong but he’s sort of right. If Americans knew how to leverage their own political system , as designed by the founding fathers, to their advantage in a focused and rational way, we wouldn’t be here. Could it have been better? Sure, but ultimately there is no democratic system that can protect voters from themselves. Democracies grsnt the people immense power, including the power to destroy their own democracy. That’s what Americans have chosen.
A system that depends on the people running it not to make mistakes is usually a bad system.
Doesn’t every system of government require people running it to avoid mistakes in order for it to work long term?
It’s ok to depend on people being generally competent most of the time. It’s not ok to depend on people never making mistakes, nor is it ok to depend on people acting in ways that real human beings don’t act. I’m politics, one if there critical failures was depending on politicians to act in good faith, and another was depending on the voters to stay informed and use critical thinking enough to avoid voting for an obvious conman.
Maybe there’s just no truly good system for politics, and the best we can hope for is the least bad option. But we won’t even achieve that much if we pretend the US system was created by enlightened demigods. It’s a deeply flawed system created by men who had no experience with democracy and who clearly saw themselves as the leaders of a new kind of aristocracy.
I will give them unqualified credit for one thing, though. The Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution are some of the most effective works of propaganda ever created. Saying that all people are fundamentally equal while simultaneously excluding most people from the levers of power was perhaps the greatest con of all time.