💣: Is "the system" a good start that needs to be fine-tuned, or is it fundamentally bad and needs to be destroyed?
(I’m ignoring recent events for the purposes of this question.)
On one hand, it’s delivered economic growth to the point of relative prosperity (which is really underrated), social norms that are good by historical standards (in practice, I can do whatever I want at home and no one will care as long as I don’t bother anyone), we in the US have good protections for freedom of speech thanks to the First Amendment, etc.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people who denounce these aspects and what makes them possible. The popularity of anti-market and anti-growth rhetoric. Negative-valence terms for good norms like "alienation" or "impersonality". Denouncing hands-off policies as “sociopathic”. Pressuring companies to regulate speech when the government won’t do it. This is considered socially desirable, and the system gives them some levers with which they try to destroy what’s good about it.
On the third hand, the system is straightforwardly bad in too many ways to list. Some of them, like foreign wars, are at least controversial. Others, like medical gatekeeping, are broadly accepted without question. And because there’s no incentive to vote well, democracy is more equipped to perpetuate these problems than solve them.
On the fourth hand, revolutions rarely have good outcomes, bad economic times generally make public opinion worse, and if they drafted a new constitution today, it would probably lack many of the protections of the current one. While it’d be great if we could preserve the good aspects of the system while blowing up the bad ones, the opposite would be more likely.
