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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.
Me: the US constitution is anti-democratic
A liberal: um I’m not sure you know what democracy means, it comes from the Greek for “rule of the people”
Me: yes that’s explicitly how I’m using the term
A liberal: um you should know that no one else uses it that way
I remain immensely grateful to anarchism in general and all of you folks out there who have taught me about it. Anarchism is like a conceptual knife that lets us cut through all of this contradictory bullshit that so befuddles even the best-intentioned liberal and see things for how they actually work.
@HeavenlyPossum Trump is a fascist dictator because the US constitution is bad, actually. Turns out all of the checks 'n' balances were just gentlemen's agreements, and now y'all need to apologize to the "histrionic leftists" you've been sidelining for decades because they were 100% right about everything. Hope this helps
@HeavenlyPossum today's lesson: don't waste words on liberals.
I was listening to several episodes of Andrewism while cleaning yesterday.
So soothing. Stuff that makes ACTUAL SENSE, like a balm to my poor beleaguered and sizzling brain.
@HeavenlyPossum 
I always tested well
But, I made a choice in my 30s to change the use of my brain.. because as an opera singer, too much thinking kills the tone ..
Decided I was smart enough (empirically to not 'stay informed') to not need to hang on so tight
Work on my blood pressure etc
Not saying I'm good at it but..
20 years later I wouldn't go back.
An interesting fact tho, my clarity about politics is better than before, and no lib OR Nazi gish galloping phase me: it's the anarchy
@HeavenlyPossum
Thanks HP, you've been really helpful to spread this bullshit cutting knife.
@HeavenlyPossum Very much same. Though I will say one of the more frustrating things I've seen liberals do is confuse incoherence with complexity: the fact their ideology is full of contradictions, unlike anarchism, is proof that they embrace "nuance", not a sign of the many flaws in their worldview. 
Yes! It’s the worst.
@HeavenlyPossum don’t you understand, democracy is when a group of people rules and that doesn’t *have* to include all the people. Conversely, oligarchy is when a group of people rules and excludes some people. Why are you confused by my two definitions of people
It sounds silly but that’s exactly what this person was arguing and I am so grateful I don’t have to go through life trying to reconcile contradictions like this.
@HeavenlyPossum yeah also liberals honking and flipping off other liberals that chose to buy a tesla to save the environment, while other liberals on the sidewalk holding anti-elon signs in the 'free speech' zone cheer them on... democracy!
I'll try to put this into a better frame of disagreement:
Since "democracy" is almost universally used to mean a state that has rule by some delimited subset of the people rather than rule by the people, anarchists should oppose democracy.
Anarchists might approve of something called "direct democracy" or whatever, but then again might not. If direct democracy means majority rule in a small group, it's better but not that much better.
Sure—I have had plenty of disagreements with other anarchists about the usefulness of using the term democracy that I don’t need to rehash here.
But this person was all over the place—totally incoherent. The framers of the constitution were greedy slavers obsessed with guaranteeing cheap labor, but also somehow forgot to draft any of that into the constitution because they wanted to ensure democracy, which means “rule of the people” but not all of the people, that’s tyranny of the majority, but it’s good that the franchise has expanded to include more people because rule by a few is oligarchy, but they weren’t oligarchs because they had elections…and so on.
Sorry for rehashing the whole thing here! I generally try to rehash the common anarchist disagreement rather than go off on what some non-anarchist thought -- rehashing the anarchist disagreement may get people to think about something useful, but addressing some incoherence usually doesn't.
No worries. I like the term democracy, both because I think it is etymologically the most precise term I can think of for the concept I hold in my head and because of the common association that many people have with democracy as something good.
I fully appreciate why many anarchists are hostile to the idea—both because of how it’s actually used by states today and because of their rejection of the concept of *any* rule by anyone, or because of its suggestion of majoritarianism.
(I find the concern about majoritarianism to be misplaced. No system anywhere has actually operated along those lines, and if some majority of people *were* to come to rule over some minority, then they wouldn’t really be doing democracy!)
@HeavenlyPossum Spooner’s critique of the Constitution comes to mind
@HeavenlyPossum Phil Ochs was onto them 60 years ago.
https://youtu.be/3cdqQ2BdgOA?si=iQ5q55xzfq3kjkeU
"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"