Just to be explicit about this argument you’re making, at one point would you be willing to die for the constitution’s sake? You said it was fuzzy but what would be a point where you would feel it was justified?
I'm partial to some form of Decker's list as a starting point:
"If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution."
It's most certainly a worthwhile philosophical question. However, I would like to see a principled moral justification behind the badness of America becoming a dictatorship. Is this on par with a thousand men on a train track? Or a couple million? I'm more inclined to think couping the current government from the liberal American ethos is akin to pushing hundreds of thousands just to delay the American empire and its beneficiaries (tens of millions) on the train tracks from being slaughtered by two to three generations. The macro implications of politics make it extremely difficult to fit such moral analogies in my opinion. Although if there were such a calculus, this is one of many things where I would prefer to be shown wrong.
Just to be explicit about this argument you’re making, at one point would you be willing to die for the constitution’s sake? You said it was fuzzy but what would be a point where you would feel it was justified?
I'm partial to some form of Decker's list as a starting point:
"If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution."
I think those should be uncontroversial.
It's most certainly a worthwhile philosophical question. However, I would like to see a principled moral justification behind the badness of America becoming a dictatorship. Is this on par with a thousand men on a train track? Or a couple million? I'm more inclined to think couping the current government from the liberal American ethos is akin to pushing hundreds of thousands just to delay the American empire and its beneficiaries (tens of millions) on the train tracks from being slaughtered by two to three generations. The macro implications of politics make it extremely difficult to fit such moral analogies in my opinion. Although if there were such a calculus, this is one of many things where I would prefer to be shown wrong.