I have been in and around many discussions that center on worry. Worry about what is going to happen after the election. But this tweet from historian Michael Beschloss made me realize what a passive-voice pitfall that is:
We are the ones who will be remembered by history a century from now, maybe 500 years from now, for how we did or did not respond to this looming historic crisis. Do we have the courage and determination to rise up at the crucial moment? To refuse to let a coup stand?
I don’t know, but I sure hope so. In any case it’s how I believe we must frame the situation before us: not as something we are spectator to, that we worry and fret about from the sidelines, but as the greatest civic challenge since Watergate for sure, and one of the most serious of the past 150 years.
We will either meet the moment or we will not. It’s up to us. All of us.
I’ve lived in one and traveled in many countries that din’t have even a pretense of democracy. The people were doing OK, they still had a good measure of personal liberty. Try not to confuse the two.
No, I would not take up arms and kill millions in defense of Democracy. Was already offered that opportunity, and passed on it.
IMO we need to somehow start making our elected and appointed officials adhere to their oaths to uphold the Constitution. That means roll back or punish all bill of rights infringements, including the first (freedom of press, freedom of peaceable assembly), second (gun bans and restrictions), and fourth (civil asset forfeiture) amendments, just to name a few. And roll back greatly on government authority Congress has granted itself in their interpretation of the Commerce Clause.
If Trump wins, millions should protest peacefully in the streets carrying RESIST! posters and wearing pink hats. Then the House should impeach Trump again. That will finally show Trump and his MAGACult that Democrats and liberals mean business.
As best I can tell there are two ways to fight for democracy, against a group that has conducted a coup against it (which is what it is if they suppress votes to win).
Grab your guns and assassinate the perpetrators of the coup. This method isn’t actually guaranteed to work, and probably isn’t survivable.
Reject the orders of the authority, and engage in polite civil disobedience to encourage them to give up - and by “polite civil disobedience” I mean shutting down society, refusing to do anything (like go to work) until they give up.
I have no gun and am not a murderer, so I’m not prepared to take approach 1.
I actually have the savings to take a sabbatical from work for six months or more, if that’s what it takes, but I’m not really prepared to get fired over walking out. So…not prepared?
Over here the people pushing to abolish democracy are white nationalists, incompetent morons, religious fundamentalists, plutocrats and other undesirables who will make life more miserable for larger and larger swaths of society if given the ability to do so.
Yes, this is what I have in mind. Although it didn’t work out so well in the long run, one modern-day example to follow is the short-lived Soviet coup of 1991. It actually succeeded for a couple days: if everyone had just stayed home and obeyed orders from on high, it might have been permanent.
I have many guns and a will to fight. I also a have a family and think the first people will be cannon fodder. My plan is to go full nutter for a year and then slaughter the mother fuckers at a meet up.
It’s weird, it all depends on a lot of shit going down that I don’t think will happen. It’s also weird that it seems close enough that I’m planning.
How about an ounce of prevention instead of planning to fight after the election is stolen? Do everything you can to make the election an undeniably overwhelming win for Dems up and down every ticket.
Volunteer to make phone calls, register new voters, write post cards, serve as poll workers or watchers.
Persuade everyone you know to vote early or by mail.
If you are a lawyer or have other special skills or credentials, volunteer to help monitor for potential voter intimidation, ballot fraud, etc.
Donate as much as you can to as many Democratic campaigns as you can.
My wife and I have been doing phone banking and post cards and have already donated thousands to our US senate candidates, several other other campaigns that could flip the Senate, and Stacy Abrams’ Fair Fight organization.
Why does it have to be either/or? There are a few implicit elements to the flowchart you could write here. First of all, yes: hopefully if it’s a very clear result, that will preempt any post-election resistance. OTOH Democrats should not have to win big to be credited with the victory. But if it’s really close and contested, I don’t think the kind of mass (peaceful) uprising I’m talking about can succeed. It needs to be clear, and therefore stolen, beyond the shadow of a doubt.
So my point in this thread is to say “What if Trump loses decisively, but claims it was all rigged and refuses to go?” After all, he claimed that Hillary only won the popular vote in 2016 because of millions of illegal votes from undocumented immigrants. He even appointed a commission to investigate this, which found absolutely nothing. This time he might have learned not to bother with the commission, or maybe Barr can find some stooges to better cook the books for him. Naturally, it will still be obvious bullshit which hopefully the vast majority of people will see right through. But we still need to take a stand and say “Nuh uh. You’re not getting away with this shit.”
There is no conceivable path out of this that doesn’t involve violence. Trump is just a symptom of a much deeper rot. Our democracy was designed to disenfranchise the majority from the get-go, and we’re seeing its inevitable outcome. Fighting for democracy means fundamentally overhauling the electoral system, Constitution, congress, courts, all of it and the dinosaurs along with them. Anything short of that is just putting band aids on a cancer, and the Trumps and Bushes will just keep coming back again and again. The Right has always and will continue to embrace violence as a pathway to power. A monopoly on violence is a monopoly on power. All democratic means have already been exhausted. We can sit here and whine all we want, it doesn’t change a thing. Even an accepted Biden victory just postpones the inevitable. America is corrupt to the core.
Edit: every time the Democrats move the needle a tiny bit to the left, the GOP shoves it a lightyear to the right the next election cycle, while further entrenching antidemocratic measures. It’s one step forward, a hundred steps back. This isn’t a fight, it’s a massacre.
There’s so much there to disagree with, I don’t even know where to begin. (I’m guessing you helped get us in this mess in 2020 by helping spread negative “oppo” attacks on Hillary, and probably voting for some no-hope third party candidate, if you voted at all.)
Somehow it’s always the third parties to blame, instead of the big two who keep fielding shitty candidates. What’s the point of a democracy if you can’t vote for people you actually want to empower?
The GOP long ago deccord, “fuck the country, power is the only thing that matters”. The Democrats decided to bend over.