Yes. This is a big problem and has to be repaired with congressional actions. Laws are going to have to be made clear and we may have to add consequences down the line. Like heads of departments for the department breaking the constitution and not rectifying the situation within some timeline like a week. Citizens united has to be rectified. Patriot act and any other “laws” that provide exceptions to consitutional rights have to go. A “good” president is just a reprieve not a fix.

Rights as a political concept are essentially a form of social and cultural pressure that make it harder to oppress and abuse the populace. The idea that we have rights due to the passage of laws may not make it impossible for those rights to be violated, but it gives us a way to talk about it that lends legitimacy to pushing back against injustice.

Normalizing the idea that no one has any rights is extremely counterproductive to defending from tyranny. Frankly, trying to push the perception of rights from something we’re owed to a convenient fiction is straight out of the fascist playbook.

Anyone pushing this line of thinking should not be trusted. Whether it’s on purpose or not, they make themselves a tool of authoritarians by alienating people from the idea that they deserve to have their rights protected.

No, this is magical thinking, it failed repeatedly, over a century ago people dropped this shit. It’s so safe to powerful peolle that the CIA seeds all of its controllable strategy of tension movements with anti-organization ideology. They supply the organization. Works on ISIS and No Kings protestors.

Anyways, here’s why abolishing the state outright is impossible:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

“Rights” only make sense within an individualistic context. Rights can be asserted with violence alone, it is thus that only those with the capacity to express violence, or who can convince others to express violence on their behalf, have “rights.” We should, then, abandon the concept of “rights” entirely. We have, instead, obligations. We are obliged to defend the freedom of others that they may defend ours. We are obliged to support the community that has grown us. Our obligations build over time, and we fulfill them to the degree to which we have the ability to do so. We have obligations to our ancestors, and to those who come after us. Then we can’t simply walk away from others who are suffering and say, “I have my rights, and you have to fight for yours.”

This is simply more true to our reality than the concept of “rights” which itself comes from Roman laws about how men may control the slaves and women they “own.”

I’m sure Simone Weil said it better, but I only have a passing knowledge of her framework.

Wasn’t this basically a George Carlin bit, like, 10 to 20 years ago?

Anyway, yes, obviously agree.

We do not have rights, in an absolute or fully real way.

We have attempts to construct societies with the goal of making rights as absolute and real as possible… or, well, maybe not.

What we do actually, absolutely, really have, are owners, who grant us some privileges, with hundreds of asterisks, untill they don’t want to do that anymore.

Rights are fought for and won, never given away. Rights are power. If you don’t have power, you don’t have rights.

“Rights” as a concept is something that people generally take for granted without thinking very hard about. Rights are, in fact, a theory about how to keep populations content.

The theory goes that disrupting the status quo throws society into chaos, into a war of all-against-all, which is generally not desirable, except in extreme cases. Chaos is preferable to tyranny. If the choice is between, they get to mess with you but if you do anything back you’ll get locked up, then you’d probably be better off if everybody could mess with everybody, you’ll still get messed with, but at least you can fight back. Therefore, the way to go about keeping people content is to make orderly society objectively better for everyone than chaos.

For example, in a state of chaos, if I say I don’t like somebody’s hat, they might kill me (and vice versa). In a state of tyranny, one group of people can say they don’t like my hat, but if I say I don’t like theirs, they’ll put me away. In a state where rights are upheld, anyone can say they don’t like anyone else’s hat with fear of retaliation (knowing that if the other person attacks them, the state will defend the critic).

There has never been a state where slavery was practiced that didn’t experience uprisings. When the people are sufficiently discontent, you will start seeing disruptions to supply chains, slowdowns, strikes, malicious compliance, etc. If people decide that they’d be better off rolling the dice by opening the gates to an invading army, then your civilization isn’t going to last.

This theory may or may not be correct, but what we have today is a situation where nobody seems to understand that this theory even exists, that it’s the reason we even talk about “rights,” and that there is a pragmatism behind it beyond it just being a nice thing to do. And so we have, on the one hand, people willing to trample rights because they don’t see any reason to uphold them, and on the other hand, people unwilling to be disruptive the way the theory predicts because they don’t understand that disruptiveness is what defines rights on a fundamental level.

I see people all the time who are willing to write off disruptiveness on principle, saying that disapproval should only be expressed within the dictates of the system, nonviolent protests when the cops give you permission, voting for “the lesser evil,” distracting from every discussion by talking about how the state’s geopolitical enemies are worse - generally, redirecting dissent back into (for all intents and purposes) loyalty. The same people will also often willingly accept that the state is committing genocide, and is on the verge of fascism! These people are creating a reality where the theory of rights is wrong and false, where it is wholly unnecessary to uphold any rights whatsoever for the sake of maintaining order, where the state is free to do whatever the hell it feels like because it knows people will fall in line regardless. This is an extremely bizarre, and extremely dangerous perspective, but it’s where being in a permanent red scare for decades has brought us.

Exactly how can we magically make a system in which all rights are guaranteed, when they’re all literally an opinion in the first place?

Uhhh exactly what “rights” were allegedly in question here, I think that absolutely plays a part here

With everything except the third paragraph, which instead of “We don’t have / we have” I would write as “this doesn’t describes a system of / it describes”, followed by an emphasis that human rights exist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office and we need to start organizing if we want those rights respected.

But I appreciate that the original was shooting for punchiness and brevity, and also that it hits that mark.

Something something monopoly on violence

Hell even when the “good president” takes power he doesn’t actually give back any rights, he just stops actively taking them away. Or he just “lets the states decide” wither or not people should have rights.

Lol. People complain they don’t have a likeable candidate and use it as an excuse to sit out the elections, then act surprised at the result.