“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
It’s not wishful thinking. It was possible, but hard, to make a course correction, but we failed to even give ourselves the time to do it.
The bomb, for the record, is capitalism, and it’s going off all the time but the blast radius has started growing sharply of late. The only even theoretical way to stop it from encompassing everyone is to dismantle it and replace it with something else, but that requires a level of political will that we’ll not see until even the oligarchs are feeling it. So we’re absolutely going to get an earth-shattering kaboom, no getting around that, it’s just a question of what we build in the smoking crater.
The answer was to replace capitalism, an extractive economic institution, with socialism, an inclusive economic institution. And yes, it would have taken a lot of political will, which is why I argue it would have been hard, but not impossible. I’ve been arguing this with several users in parallel. If you want to see my argument in full it’s in my comment history.
What’s important is, now that the bomb has gone off and we have fascism, we still need to replace capitalism with socialism. But in addition we also have to defeat a fascist dictatorship on top of that. So now it’s even harder.