Let's talk about the last days of democracy in the United States
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Unseen 1 year, 7 months ago.
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I see that many Americans think that we jumped the shark regarding Trump by getting Joe Biden installed on January 6, despite Trump’s mob action. They sleep comfortably thinking that the President-Reject has been neutralized.
There’s only one problem: Trump’s attempt to overthrow America’s constitutional government by breaking the electoral process is ongoing largely out of sight of the general public who don’t immerse themselves in the news the way people like me do.
What makes his ongoing coup so concerning is that he seems to have the full, complete, and enthusiastic help of the GOP, especially at the “out of sight, out of mind” level of state and local politics. Sure, you have GOP governors trying to ride Covid fatigue into winning reelection, but what’s really scary is what’s going on in the state legislatures which have largely been taken over, even in largely blue states, by Republicans. They are working diligently to keep nonwhite and/or non-English speaking Americans from voting. They do this by a combination of clever obstacles to voting that apply more to nonwhites than whites and cleverly redrawing voting districts (a practice known to Americans as “gerrymandering”).
For decades, the GOP has posed as the law and order party, the party that values and wants to preserve the Constitution. However, clearly, when push comes to shove, if they can’t get what they want constitutionally and legally, their concerns are so important that the Constitution be damned. They’ll take a fascist dictator along the lines of Vlad Putin or Viktor Orbán if that’s what it takes.
While President Biden isn’t the President I wanted (Bernie Sanders was my choice until he was eliminated), he does have to do a difficult dance if he wants to be reelected in 2024. Difficult because he has to work hard on the virus on the one hand without making Covid fatigue even worse than it is now. And many fully vaccinated people are not taking the news that they shouldn’t put their masks away just yet with enthusiasm,
So, I’ve opened the discussion. What are your thoughts?
I regard myself as a progressive, but if progressives don’t hold back on two of their most cherished demands, Medicare for All and defunding the police*, I fear for my country because if Trump wins a second term, I believe the United States will look a lot like Hungary or Russia than The Land of the Free and The Home of the Brave.
Given the GOP’s efforts to rig the 2024 election, Biden needs converts among those who voted for Trump in 2020 to offset the dark-skinned voters the Republicans successfully keep from voting. If the GOP can flip back just two of the more populous states Biden won by small margins in 2020, or even flip some of the more populous voting districts, Trump could be back in The White House through the insane Electoral College process despite losing the popular vote by an even wider margin than he did in 2016.
* “Defund the police” typically does not mean what the GOP and conservatives say it means, literally largely doing away with the police. More typically, what it means is shifting, perhaps even within the police departments, some of their funding to de-escalatory approaches rather than just sending a guy with a gun out to solve a problem that’s way above his pay grade.
The tendency of conservatives to overlook or forgive Trump’s obvious flaws is amazing. They talk constantly about Biden having Alzheimer’s because of his often stutter-driven verbal fumbles, meanwhile Trump was recommending injecting Lysol, bragging about molesting women, talking about the Continental Army taking airports, and talking about military stealth aircraft being literally, not figuratively, invisible. They shrug all that off with “But I love his policies.”
You don’t need to be a genius to tell these idiots what they want to hear. In fact, I bet it helps if you are not. But you do need to be a cruel and vicious SOB. So many were seething and waiting for their demagogue because an intelligent black man had power. It ate them up inside. It had been said the end of our democracy will be wrapped in a flag and a carrying a bible.
The tendency of conservatives to overlook or forgive Trump’s obvious flaws is amazing. They talk constantly about Biden having Alzheimer’s because of his often stutter-driven verbal fumbles, meanwhile Trump was recommending injecting Lysol, bragging about molesting women, talking about the Continental Army taking airports, and talking about military stealth aircraft being literally, not figuratively, invisible. They shrug all that off with “But I love his policies.”
You don’t need to be a genius to tell these idiots what they want to hear. In fact, I bet it helps if you are not. But you do need to be a cruel and vicious SOB. So many were seething and waiting for their demagogue because an intelligent black man had power. It ate them up inside. It had been said the end of our democracy will be wrapped in a flag and a carrying a bible.
Sad if the ultimate end of the Republic is due to the election, twice, of a really fairly conservative black man. You just can’t trust an electorate that does that.
Maybe Biden should not only initiate the weekly talks i mentioned but inspire a grass roots movement that is wrapped in the flag. Portray the current struggle as an attack that is akin to Pearl Harbor. At that time the country came together and real sacrifices were made. People went overseas to fight fascism and to protect their nation. Many died. Women took men’s jobs in factories. There were rations. Kids did volunteer work. Just cuz ya can’t see the smaller virus and ya can see the larger virus does not mean the one is not as big an existential risk as the other. But get people involved. And educate the bejesus out of citizens. Flip the script. Make the intransigent and ignorant republicans the traitors.
Somehow, I don’t think the American public of today, primed as they are to distrust the Federal Government, would buy into that. It might even widen the division between the anti-vaccination die-hards and the rational people.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by Unseen.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by
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