Kimmel, who has been absent since June 24, will resume his hosting duties on Monday, September 2. His return marks the end of a summer filled with guest hosts and reruns, much to the delight of his loyal audience.
>much to the delight
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/09/scholars-warn-of-danger-in-an-outdated-constitution-democracy-tyranny-of-the-minority/
‘Tyranny of the Minority’ warns Constitution is dangerously outdated
The U.S. Constitution desperately needs updating, say Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
“We have a very, very old constitution; in fact, the oldest written constitution in the world,” notes Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government. “It was written in a pre-democratic era. It hasn’t been amended much compared to other democracies. As a result, we have these institutions in place that most other democracies got rid of over the course of the 20th century.”
In their new book “Tyranny of the Minority,” the comparative political scientists argue that these antiquated institutions, including the Electoral College, have protected and enabled an increasingly extremist GOP, which keeps moving farther to the right despite losing the popular vote in all but one of the last eight presidential elections. The scholars also survey governments worldwide for examples of democratizing reforms. And they draw from history in underscoring the dangers of our constitutional stasis.
Levitsky and Ziblatt’s 2018 bestseller, “How Democracies Die,” drew from global case studies to argue that Donald Trump represented a threat to core democratic principles, even flagging the possibility that he would refuse to cede power. Today, in light of the 2020 election — and the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted to overturn the results — the authors say it’s clear the threat is larger than Trump.
“The new book makes the case that large segments of the Republican Party leadership have lost commitment to democratic rules of the game,” said Levitsky, the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. “The fact that the party remains radicalized means the challenge is ongoing.”
The Gazette spoke with Levitsky and Ziblatt, who this week was named the next director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, about the state of the nation. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/books/review/constitution-secession-democracy-crisis.html
https://archive.is/T7Vv7
The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?
One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.
The United States Constitution is in trouble. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he called for the “termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Outraged critics denounced him for threatening a document that is supposed to be “sacrosanct.” By announcing his desire to throw off constitutional constraints in order to satisfy his personal ambitions, Trump was making his authoritarian inclinations abundantly clear.
It’s no surprise, then, that liberals charge Trump with being a menace to the Constitution. But his presidency and the prospect of his re-election have also generated another, very different, argument: that Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.
After all, Trump became president in 2016 after losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College (Article II). He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court (Article III), two of whom were confirmed by senators representing just 44 percent of the population (Article I). Those three justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a reversal with which most Americans disagreed. The eminent legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, worried about opinion polls showing “a dramatic loss of faith in democracy,” writes in his new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever”: “It is important for Americans to see that these failures stem from the Constitution itself.”
Back in 2018, Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley’s law school, still seemed to place considerable faith in the Constitution, pleading with fellow progressives in his book “We the People” “not to turn their back on the Constitution and the courts.” By contrast, “No Democracy Lasts Forever” is markedly pessimistic. Asserting that the Constitution, which is famously difficult to amend, has put the country “in grave danger,” Chemerinsky lays out what would need to happen for a new constitutional convention — and, in the book’s more somber moments, he entertains the possibility of secession. West Coast states might form a nation called “Pacifica.” Red states might form their own country. He hopes that any divorce, if it comes, will be peaceful.
The prospect of secession sounds extreme, but in suggesting that the Constitution could hasten the end of American democracy, Chemerinsky is far from alone. The argument that what ails the country’s politics isn’t simply the president, or Congress, or the Supreme Court, but the founding document that presides over all three, has been gaining traction, especially among liberals. Books and op-eds critiquing the Constitution have proliferated. Scholars are arguing that the Constitution has incentivized what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call a “Tyranny of the Minority.”
The anguish is, in some sense, a flip side of veneration. Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.
Trudeau looks more Cuban
never heard of it
https://t.me/s/ResistanceTrench
Protesters are asking for fall of Netanyahu government
https://t.me/ResistanceTrench/30502
Chairman of the Israeli Labor Committee:
I decided to react to the neglect of the prisoners in Gaza, the displaced in the north, the collapsing economy, we are no longer one nation. We have to stop this.
We will close the economy from tomorrow at 6 am. I ask the people of Israel to take to the streets tonight and tomorrow.
The commander of the 8200 unit, the largest intelligence gathering unit of the Israeli army, plans to announce the end of his career and resign in the coming weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M577_command_post_carrier
>it's basically acid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Ball
feel the joy