@Lightfighter@infosec.exchange
Post #1532702
2026-04-02 18:10 UTC
Replies (2)
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@Quasit@kolektiva.social 2026-04-02 18:46
@Lightfighter @coolcalmcollected @tiotasram The only real check or balance is the people themselves. We should have risen up and overthrown the rich bastards DECADES ago.
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@tiotasram@kolektiva.social 2026-04-02 19:41
@Lightfighter @coolcalmcollected @Quasit also worth noting that the founders made choices like giving suffrage only to wealthy white landowners in order to create a system that helped a wealthy industrialist class take power from the old nobility, but from the start all the talk of "freedom" was just window dressing to get the commoners to go along. They explicitly choose mechanisms like the electoral college to prevent the common people from having too much power, meaning that the entire system of checks and balances was never designed to prevent the concentration of power entirely. Obviously it was supposed to prevent the exact situation we find ourselves in now, but it didn't work (and no similar system can work in the long run) because power corrupts, and any system that tries to prevent the corruption of laws using laws is doomed to failure. What the present moment also shows is that power is not as simple to wield as the fascists would like, and that centralized power inevitably crumbles. Minnesota was able to break ICE not through military prowess but through pressure of norms, Iran is able to resist Trump's overwhelming military power through persistence and economic revenge, Assad's regime couldn't endure as popular support finally eroded and international allies were distracted, etc. None of these offers a simple or painless path to defeating fascist power, but they show things aren't as hopeless as the fascists would like us to believe. Masses of people organized autonomously into formations of resistance can absolutely stand up to opponents that seem to have overwhelming forces because those forces also boil down to a lot of individual enforcers and deploying them is contingent on the backing of an even wider public that can be swayed by a lot of things. The point is that the ultimate defense against corruption and fascism, with or without official checks and balances, is a politically active mass of common people.