Mr Biden’s speech is his first major campaign event of the 2024 election season

President Joe Biden marked the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol by warning that the issue of American democracy will be “what the 2024 election is all about,” as he runs against former president Donald Trump once more.

Mr Biden, who spoke near the Valley Forge historical site where George Washington and the Continental Army were encamped during the winter of 1777 and 1778, told attendees that they were there “to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?”

“This isn’t rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” he said.

Mr Biden said his speech, his first major event of the 2024 election season, was “deadly serious,” and about a topic that needed to be raised at the outset of his campaign.

  • @Candelestine
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    1511 months ago

    The French Revolution failed to get rid of the monarchy, they had their king back a generation later.

    History is full of important details if you really want to know the truth of why the world sucks so much. It’s not just easy.

    • that guy
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      311 months ago

      Moral of the story: never stop guillotining

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      Ya a king was forced on them by other monarchies, but their nostalgia for the Revolution set the seeds for the other revolutions that did eventually get rid of their monarchy. It’s not like it lasted long. They had another revolution one king later to get a stronger constitution to restrict the King, and then a revolution during the King after that. Their monarchs were on shaky ground after the Revolution. The common people now had rights and wants, and expectations. They also had a bunch of gains that persisted through the monarchy which I brought up in another comment.

      • @Candelestine
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        311 months ago

        Just to condense your two comments, it’s true, the French Revolution was not all bad by any stretch. Very much a mixed bag.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          Yup! I just don’t like when people say it completely failed. It encourages apathy in the face of oppression because of a fear of radical change. It’s the boogie man of revolutions, but for the common people, life was way better after than before, and for all their children who benefited from it forever after, I’m sure it was worth the period of tumultuousness.

          • @Candelestine
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            211 months ago

            Worth it was a different story. When there’s better ways to accomplish something, there’s terms for the guy that just wants the quick one that causes great suffering. I prefer the British model.

            Ends don’t justify the means imo.

    • Diva (she/her)
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      -811 months ago

      Yeah, that’s literally in Marx’s 18th Brumaire, maybe pick it up sometime.

      The problem is replacing a monarchy with a bourgeois dictactorship “democracy”

      • @Candelestine
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        911 months ago

        Ah, I see. If you can make a proof of concept work, I’ll be interested. Until then, you seem to just have yet another method for accidentally installing dictators.

        • Diva (she/her)
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          -911 months ago

          have fun ‘electing’ one of the rotating cast of rotting genocidal corpses and telling yourself it’s the best you could do.

          It’s so fucking nauseating talking to people like you.

          • @Candelestine
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            311 months ago

            Don’t get me wrong, we have a number of independent communes that exist here in the states. It’s a system that works well at small scales, anything around that village-size of human societies, where everyone knows everyone. It’s just when it gets scaled up to millions of people that problems start to pop up.

            I’m all for better systems. It’s just that I have a limited risk tolerance for really dark times.

            • Diva (she/her)
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              11 months ago

              I’m all for better systems. It’s just that I have a limited risk tolerance for really dark times.

              really dark times for who exactly? because unless you’re the white kind of person they’re already here

              Unchecked capitalism with a fig leaf of democracy sounds good in theory but eventually you run out of other peoples kids to feed into the blender.

              • @Candelestine
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                311 months ago

                I think you underestimate how much worse everything can, and quite possibly will, get. Unless you believe in some god that protects us, then literally everything is possible. Including a return to attitudes from two centuries ago, where slavery was enforced out in plain sight, with whips.

                That was worse than what we have now.

                One of the worst things we do is try to protect our children from the true horror of how ugly this world really is, and how rare happy endings actually are. This is why it remains so important to fight for real justice with everything we have, because what little progress we have actually made is trying to be stripped from us.

                That said, I fully agree that unchecked capitalism is rapidly returning us to the era of the robber barons, and doing tremendous harm. But the opposite of that bad thing can also be another bad thing, life isn’t so simple that the opposite of bad is automatically good. It’s so much trickier than that in everything but our fiction, and what we really need is some godawfully complex and nuanced middle ground that will make very little sense to most folks.

                Frankly, unchecked capitalism doesn’t even sound good in theory. It relies on humans being rational, which they very clearly are not.

                • Diva (she/her)
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                  -511 months ago

                  You say we need to protect our children from the true horror of how ugly this world really is, but I’m the one saying we need to stop inflicting the true horrors of how ugly this world really is on the children of Palestine.

                  Our democracy is a farce and frankly you are making the case for a deal with monumentally inhuman forces because they promise you, your family and your friends a better life, while they inflict untold horrors around the world in all of our names.

                  • @Candelestine
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                    111 months ago

                    You sound radicalized, I’m sorry to say. It’s all the exaggerated language. Try to remember that every side uses propaganda, it’s not always all true.