Democratic Primaries
In reply to the discussion: They better knock Buttigieg out of the running before any debates or the others are toast... [View all]Hortensis
(58,785 posts)of the enormity of what's at stake. This is not some frivolous opportunity to display what we imagine are flattering principles but to fight for all our liberties.
We are battling against increasingly neofascist, theocratic, and white supremacist forces on the right for the soul and future of our nation. To invite people to ignore in any sense either what will cause right-wing voters to rush out to vote in high numbers or what wobblies and nonvoters will vote for or against could be fatal. Anti-democracy forces are enormously powerful and could win.
Lose this battle, and most of these whose innocence leads them to imagine principle matters more than power and might of law will spend years in silent and passive self protection as by far most living in authoritarian states do. There must be a few potential true heroes here, but those are always very few.
Paul Krugman is only one among many warning of what's happening. Btw, he thinks everyone needs to read How Democracies Die because it's about what's happening here, now.
Donald Trump, it turns out, may have been the best thing that could have happened to American democracy. No, I havent lost my mind. Individual-1 is clearly a wannabe dictator who has contempt for the rule of law, not to mention being corrupt and probably in the pocket of foreign powers. But hes also lazy, undisciplined, self-absorbed and inept. And since the threat to democracy is much broader and deeper than one man, were actually fortunate that the forces menacing America have such a ludicrous person as their public face.
Yet those forces may prevail all the same.
If you want to understand whats happening to our country, the book you really need to read is How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. As the authors professors of government at Harvard point out, in recent decades a number of nominally democratic nations have become de facto authoritarian, one-party states. Yet none of them have had classic military coups, with tanks in the street.
What weve seen instead are coups of a subtler form: takeovers or intimidation of the news media, rigged elections that disenfranchise opposing voters, new rules of the game that give the ruling party overwhelming control even if it loses the popular vote, corrupted courts. Does a lot of this sound familiar? It should. You see, Republicans have been adopting similar tactics not at the federal level (yet), but in states they control.
As Levitsky and Ziblatt say, the states, which Justice Louis Brandeis famously pronounced the laboratories of democracy, are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/opinion/trump-gop-authoritarian-states-power-grab.html
Btw, many red states have kept anti-gay, anti-miscegenation, anti-abortion, anti- child labor rights -- ETCETERA -- laws on the books that would immediately become effective if our right to privacy were overturned. Others in the angry passion of this era have passed new, "improved" versions, just waiting for the time to issue indictments and arrest warrants.
If we're aware and principled, we will win this because the majority of people are too good to want this and only a minority are so evil or willfully ignorant that they'll support it. And even though Republicans currently hold a supermajority in Indiana's assembly, Mayor B's admirers still will be able to elect him Governor B or Senator B, instead of watching him be removed in disgrace from office.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden