The US constitution was drafted by a cabal of wealthy slavers and landed aristocrats who repeatedly announced “we hate democracy because poor people might vote to not be exploited by us anymore” and crafted a political system to ensure their perpetual class rule and people are really unsure how the US could have ended up in the situation it’s in now.
Liberals in my mentions are working overtime to reconcile “Trump is a fascist dictator” with “the US constitution is good actually” as if he just came out of nowhere and suddenly found himself with absolute power over the state.
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist." - Lysander Spooner
But also:
" My own approach has normally been to openly embrace both terms [anarchism and democracy], to argue, in fact, that anarchism and democracy are—or should be—largely identical.
. . . What we are experiencing today is not a crisis of democracy but rather a crisis of the state. In recent years, there has been a massive revival of interest in democratic practices and procedures within global social movements, but this has proceeded almost entirely outside of statist frameworks."
- David Graeber , "There Never Was a West Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between"
"What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we wished to pursue it, and what sort of commitments we wish to make to them in the process? Equality, then, would simply be a matter of guaranteeing equal access to those resources needed in the pursuit of an endless variety of forms of value. Democracy in that case would simply be our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems—since problems there will always be—a capacity that can only truly be realized once the bureaucracies of coercion that hold existing structures of power together collapse or fade away."
- David Graeber, "The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement"