Nope.
The rise in hostility and acceptance of increasing violent hatred on the part of right wing extremists will happen no matter what we do.
Correct?
Holding back on doxxing or counter-protesting (time to fight fire with motherfucking fire - there is absolutely no other option now, no?) will not, even in the slightest way, mitigate the actions of America’s Scum. (uh, yeah - shit’s become totally that binary now, that the term “America’s Scum” will perfectly suffice)
Sadly (but most necessarily) purchases in shit like mace is going to skyrocket to ward off what will be - yes, fucking groups of America’s Scum ganging up on sole targets.
I’d waaaaay rather we fight back, then, than roll over.
Sadly - and, fucking terribly - it will soon become the only option.
Wish I didn’t have to come up with such a post, but I just honestly cannot see any other way out for you folks now.
I’m sorry, but people who attend and participate in fascist rallies, shout fascist slogans, and other hateful things absolutely should be doxxed.
It’s a pretty odd comparison.
On one side you have folks calling for an end to elections, armed uprisings against the will of the people, and murdering political opponents.
And on the other side, it’s just as bad, because they are snitches and they tell on them.
Jebus, that’s some false equivalency right there.
Oh, oh, Mister EP! I know I know!!.
You forgot that some criminals attended a rally or two and looted some stores. There are thieves in the midst of those unspeakably Evil LW protesters. Not like our wonderful property-respecting RW crew where nobody does anything worse than assault and murder people. Property is sacrosanct to us.
See (post by Fiveyearlurker on Nov. 13):
Excellent, chilling (long) article in The Atlantic
https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB1bGJXf?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare
(This link is to the MSN aggregator, so the article might be available to all.)
On the evening of September 11, 1980, my mom was approached by a neighbor who held rank in the Turkish military. He told her to stock up on bread and rice. “Oh, another coup,” she immediately groaned. The neighbor was aghast—he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what was coming. But my mom, of course, had immediately understood what his advice must have meant. Turkey is the land of coups; this was neither the first nor the last coup it would face.
A little more than two decades later, I walked up to a counter in Antalya Airport to tell a disbelieving airline employee that our flight would shortly be canceled because the tanks being reported in the streets of Istanbul meant that a coup attempt was under way. It must be a military exercise, she shrugged. Some routine transport of troops, perhaps? If so, I asked her, where is the prime minister? Why isn’t he on TV to tell us that? Another woman approached the counter. “This must be your first,” she said to the young woman behind the counter, who was still shaking her head. “It’s my fourth.”
I told the airline employee that we were not getting on that plane, destined for the Istanbul airport, which I knew would be a primary target. The other woman and I nodded at each other, becoming an immediate coup pod. I went out to secure transportation for us—this airport was not going to be safe either—while she and my 7-year-old son went to retrieve our luggage. “His first too,” I said to her.
In political science, the term coup refers to the illegitimate overthrow of a sitting government—usually through violence or the threat of violence. The technical term for attempting to stay in power illegitimately—such as after losing an election—is self-coup or autocoup—sometimes autogolpe.
Much debate has ensued about what exactly to call whatever Trump is attempting right now, and about how worried we should be. It’s true, the whole thing seems ludicrous—the incoherent lawsuits, the late-night champagne given to official election canvassers in Trump hotels, the tweets riddled with grammatical errors and weird capitalization. Trump has been broadly acknowledged as “norm shattering” and some have argued that this is just more of his usual bluster, while others have pointed out terminological issues with calling his endeavors a coup. Coup may not quite capture what we’re witnessing in the United States right now, but there’s also a danger here: Punditry can tend to focus too much on decorum and terminology, like the overachieving students so many of us once were, conflating the ridiculous with the unserious. The incoherence and the incompetence of the attempt do not change its nature, however, nor do those traits allow us to dismiss it or ignore it until it finally fails on account of its incompetence.
Part of the problem is that we haven’t developed linguistic precision to put a name to it all—not just to what’s been happening since November, but to the processes within which it’s embedded. That’s dangerous, because language is a tool of survival.
…
The U.S. president is trying to steal the election, and, crucially, his party either tacitly approves or is pretending not to see it. This is a particularly dangerous combination, and makes it much more than just typical Trumpian bluster or norm shattering.
…
In 1852, Karl Marx famously modified Hegel’s observation that historical occurrences tend to repeat by adding that they may occur the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.
…
What starts as farce may end as tragedy, a lesson that pundits should already have learned from their sneering dismissal of Trump when he first announced his presidential candidacy. Yes, the Trump campaign’s lawsuits are pinnacles of incompetence, too incoherent and embarrassing to go anywhere legally. The legislators who have been openly pressured by Trump don’t seem willing to abide the crassness of his attempt. States are certifying their election results one by one, and the General Services Administration―the agency that oversees presidential transitions—has started the process of handing the government over to President-elect Joe Biden. If things proceed in their ordinary course, the Electoral College will soon vote, and then Biden will take office.But ignoring a near catastrophe that was averted by the buffoonish, half-hearted efforts of its would-be perpetrator invites a real catastrophe brought on by someone more competent and ambitious. President Trump had already established a playbook for contesting elections in 2016 by casting doubt on the election process before he won, and insisting that he only lost the popular vote due to fraud. Now he’s establishing a playbook for stealing elections by mobilizing executive, judicial, and legislative power to support the attempt. And worse, much worse, the playbook is being implicitly endorsed by the silence of some leading Republicans, and vocally endorsed by others, even as minority rule becomes increasingly entrenched in the American electoral system.
…
We’re being tested, and we’re failing.
…
If most Republican officials are failing to police this ham-handed attempt at a power grab, how many would resist a smoother, less grossly embarrassing effort?…
I just wanted to highlight this part of what ThelmaLou quoted. It’s pwhat I’ve been saying for weeks.
Every single one of the Trump supporters that I know personally is still 100% smugly convinced that Donald Trump not only won the election, but will be inaugurated in January. The Predictit odds currently has Trump at 13% chance of being the next president.
For all the hand wringing about Democrats living in a bubble, at least that bubble is on this planet.
My wife is currently on the phone with one of her less-firmly-believing Republican friends, going on at length at the various measures which are currently happening which will definitely 100% absolutely without fail guarantee that Trump will be declared President again.
They all try to draw a parallel to the Democratic hope that the electoral college would somehow put Clinton in the office. I get that analogy, but at the same time, I think that Democrats saw that as a Hail Mary that was extremely unlikely to actually happen. Whereas, these people 100% “know” that something is going to happen in the next few weeks and Trump is definitely getting a second term.
It’s troubling, and the more I think about the situation, I think the illiberal experiment is what comes into view. It’s not necessarily an experiment that’s new to us, either. Jim Crow was an illiberal form of democracy if you think about it, as was most of what we labeled democracy before the 1960s and certainly before the 1920s.
One hypothesis I am increasingly willing to put forward is the idea that good governance, good political systems, “good ideas”, or political stability - whatever we want to call it - are inevitably going to fail if they aren’t updated. The key, as the Framers wisely understood, is to build a system that can bend and twist with the times so that people can update the software or even switch out a piece of hardware once in a while without having to take a sledgehammer to the whole system. But even good systems eventually need to be radically remodeled, and we are probably approaching that tipping point now. It’s a question of whether the remodeling job reverts back to majoritarian democracy or advanced forward to become even more egalitarian.
The challenge we face is that democracy naturally lends itself to majoritarianism, which can encourage a cynical majority to abuse the rights of minorities. A majority often bases its own legitimacy on its majority status. Because of this, it tends to assert its political legitimacy, often confusing its power through numbers and its political legitimacy with moral legitimacy. If a majority perceives that it has lost the share of power to which it is entitled, it can become hostile to the rights of inclusion that a constitutional democracy promises. I fear that is what’s exactly what we’re seeing now.
And that’s why I say that this is more dangerous than McCarthyism. This is no just a fear of an unknown enemy like communism or terrorism that we’re dealing with; we’re dealing with perceived deprivation of divine right. This is what happens when a tribe that has had prime fishing and hunting rights is now forced to share space with other smaller tribes because they have the protection of some invisible contract with an invisible power. The bigger tribe didn’t consent to this. It can still fish and hunt, and it can search for new ground of course, but it’ll be damned if it wants to. They’d rather just make bows and arrows instead.
Agree overall. The above snip is the nub.
I’ll point out Iraq under Hussein and the Ba’athists. Simplifying mightily, the ~40% Sunnis shamelessly ran the place over the ~60% Shiites. About as the 80+% Anglo whites did in the USA in, say, 1880 or 1910.
Iraq is now in an irreconcilable and IMO irremediable state. It cannot be made democratic because the new majority is the old out-group. A series of unstable quasi-authoritarian clientelist governments is the best that can be hoped for. Ideally ones that are content to merely exploit, not murder, the out-group.
The structure of Congress and therefore the EC give outsized electoral weight to the interests of white semi-rural traditionalists and their more urban/suburban working class fellow travelers. Folks who are rapidly dwindling in number. They’re well less than a majority now by headcount. They will be a much smaller minority when they finally shrink to the level that their inbuilt electoral advantages don’t deliver them a majority or at least parity of power.
That crash will more traumatic than they will be willing to bear when it happens. And far-sighted rightists can see where that road leads and are plainly determined to get off it sooner rather than later.
The window for the Right to permanently stop inclusive democracy is shortening and they know it. This gives them considerable urgency to keep heaving until they finally give the one last good enough heave that puts them over the top.
The funny thing is that an inclusive democracy is exactly the arrangement that would give them rights as the minority they are rapidly becoming. But it’s more important to take than it is to share.
There would never have been an end to the laughing and jeering from the right if Dem politicians and voters had gone on and on whining and filing suits/appeals like this after HRC lost. Republicans called Dems sore losers even though their actions after the loss were only a fraction of what the GOP is doing now. I don’t understand how they don’t see it.
It’s easy to understand Republicans if you factor in that the majority of them are some combination of:
- Stupid
- Delusional/Profoundly misinformed/Gullible
- Evil
- Single Issue Voters
- Nearly completely uninformed/ignorant
Every one of those categories would have no trouble supporting Trump’s attempts at a coup. The stupid, misinformed, uninformed don’t know what’s actually happening, the evil think it’s funny, the single issue people don’t care about anything but their issue.
The hard-charging, raging, howl-at-the-moon partisan in me agrees with you. When I’m using my gray matter, I concede it’s more complicated. I’d even propose that Republicans are behaving in ways that are predictable – if they weren’t behaving predictably, they would be advocating a political system without precedent in the United States and absent of any concurrent global trend. In fact, what they advocate is illiberalism, and it has a history in the U.S. and is spreading in the neighborhoods of some of the world’s strongest democracies, even if not necessarily within them just yet.
The key is to find a way to convince people who subscribe to an illiberal and majoritarian agenda to buy into a better form of liberal democracy, and it starts with a 21st century version of a square deal. We have to convince people it’s in their interest to avoid swallowing the illiberal pill and get them to see that it’s in everyone’s interests to have a world based on cooperation and competition, not the latter only.
Perhaps off-topic but this brings me back to the debate about whether Democrats should embrace the politics of Bernie/AOC or centrism. I’d actually come closer to arguing the former: I think Biden needs to be not just a soft-reformer but an aggressive one. He and Democrats are taking the wrong message if they believe that people don’t really want much change; they abso-fucking-lutely want change. There are just certain labels that people have an allergic reaction to and one of them is [fill in the blank] “socialism”.
I’m not being partisan. I’m looking at their behavior. Trump is obviously barely-literate, weak trash. It’s not subtle. He constantly whines. He’s petulant. He’s without a doubt weaker than any adult I personally know. And I grew up in abject poverty and saw all sorts of hustlers and low-lifes. But they rally to his side like he’s fucking Aragorn.
Republicans are 100% all-on Trump. They don’t want to be reached. Are there corner-cases that can be convinced? Sure. But think of every single Trump supporter in your life. Are they going to be convinced by policy positions, or any conceivable outreach?
One Trump supporter I know posts memes outright accusing Dems of literally working to overthrow the US government for China. He really believes it. He thinks Biden is gonna turn us into a client state.
Another posts Prager U. He believes Dems are delusional children throwing a tantrum for free stuff, and only the strong men of the GOP are keeping us afloat.
Another is 100% convinced Biden is stealing the election. He’s simply unable to think otherwise. He posts every conspiracy theory Newsmax has to offer, with complete sincerity, and seems to be itching for the civil war that is to come. Oh, he also thinks Covid is a hoax, and vaccinations will track you.
My father in law has a Trump flag on the side of his house, and the dude would snort Dinesh D’Sousa’s smegma if they sold it on a FOXNews commercial. He only cares that his 401k is doing well. He has no understanding or comprehension that it also did quite well under Obama.
These people cannot be reached. Ever. They will die muttering abut Hillary. The majority of the Republican party is made up of duplicates of these people, in the millions. We’re only gonna get an onion skin’s worth of these people back. The rest need to be marginalized. Outvoted. We need to make their lives better as they kick and scream and beg to lose their healthcare and the social programs they depend on.
IMHO, anyway.
I agree they need to be outvoted - absolutely. I think that’s crucial going forward: double down on voting and out-voting them. It’s vitally important to be even more obsessed with winning elections than they are, and not just presidential elections every four years.
You are so right about that last, particularly when the single issue is abortion. “Single issue voters” is almost a cliche nowadays, and IMO doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, but they really are driving quite a lot of this. I have read countless religious anti-abortion people explicitly state that they will vote for ANYONE who is not a Democrat because of this single issue.
I’m pretty sure they mean it, and would very willingly vote for absolute tyranny if it meant they could say they were on the right side of the abortion issue. Of course from their point of view, this is far more important than having a constitutional system, or having a rule of laws (save that one law they’re after.) Supporting outright tyranny is simply trivial, compared to opposing abortion. From where they sit, Democrats are literally evil murderers. That trumps everything else.
This isn’t 70 million Republican voters, or even most of them, but it’s quite a few of them. They will always be with us, and must be accounted for. So long as any of us are allowed to vote, they will vote for the party that positions itself as anti-abortion no matter what else.
Pence joins the fight to overturn Democracy:
Will be interesting to see if FOX News and others refer to this as the “disputed presidential election of 2020” or the “controversial election” of 2020 in the months and years ahead.