Nope. And even when useless shitheads try to pull this stunt, they are charged criminally fairly promptly. And then when they lie under oath during a bail hearing, they get new charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
We’re fighting back here in CA…
“We’re fighting for your freedoms too,” one convoy participant said as eggs flew amid shouts of “get the f—k out of here” by the gathering crowd. A few ill-advised convoy drivers had their windows rolled down, resulting in eggs splattering the insides of their vehicles. Passersby watched in confusion and amusement, with some adults stopping to cheer on the kids.
The “overthrow the government” aspect gets a bit extreme, but in general a huge part of the failing is the flawed American theory that making it hard to legislate is good. When voters can’t get what they want the normal way (i.e. through legislation) they figure out all sorts of unorthodox methods.
In a more straightforward parliamentary system, the incentive (while not completely eliminated) is not nearly as strong.
One kind of weird dynamic between Canada and the US, is that the house of commons in Canada and the house of representatives in the US have natural gerrymandering in opposite directions. If you just try to draw “normal” looking constituencies in both cases, Canada winds up putting the liberals at an advantage whereas the US puts the republicans at an advantage vs. direct proportionality to population. Of course this dynamic would change somewhat in the US if the house was uncapped.
And the reason there has been steady progress is that minorities and their allies have refused to listen to people telling them to put off fighting for their rights until some time in the future when it’s more politically expedient; a time which will NEVER COME.
You really need to read Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
I don’t get the argument that Democrats should drop everything else and just concentrate on voting rights as their campaign message. Many of the Republican voting suppression laws are fairly popular, at least among Republicans. Protecting abortion rights, fighting climate change, and increasing minimum wages are all examples of issues on which Democratic positions are far more popular with swing voters than Republican ones.
Of course, I agree that Democrats, once in power, should aggressively move to protect voting rights, but I don’t see any reason to believe that running on that issue to the exclusion of all others is going to be a winning strategy. Why should people care whether Democrats have a fair chance to win elections, if they have no reason to believe that they would benefit from Democrats winning?
I know a few people who voted blue in 2008, who saw the Democrats squander a 4-month (now retconned to two years) supermajority on the ACA then and are still resentful.
If they had done voting rights rather than the ACA, who knows where we’d be today? Those people I know would still be resentful because they were sold on lots of change, not just one thing.
~Max
These ideas may be popular with people. But elections and voting are the process which turns popular ideas into things that exist in the real world.
We’ve been seeing what happens when we don’t have voting rights and fair elections. Things like abortion rights, fighting climate change, and increasing minimum wages may be popular - but Republicans in office are free to legislate against them because voter suppression means they don’t have to face the consequences of doing unpopular things.
I feel it’s a winning strategy because pretty much everyone in America believes in democracy. It’s not like the Democrats would have to sell the benefits of a new idea to people. The Democrats just need to make it clear that the Republicans are undermining democracy and the Democrats want to safeguard democracy.
And this isn’t just a message to win an election. The Republicans really are undermining democracy.
It may already be too late. Even if voter rights is a popular issue, Republicans may already have taken steps to squelch enough voters who support it.
It’s very possible to have secure and convenient elections; other western democracies handle this routinely. But we have a major political party in this country which prefers suppression and chaos and it has done a brilliant job of convincing its supporters that severely restricting the franchise is the only way to save the country.
I’m sure liberal leaning Iranians and Afghanis reassure themselves with this idea every day, but they don’t dare say or write it openly. History has shown time and again how an oppressive anti-humanist regime can be locked in for decades, or longer.
Republicans are much smarter than this… they won’t open LGBTQ camps, their first target is homeless people. They will move homeless people, with or without their consent, into camps. They’ve been working on this for a while (in case you’ve been wondering why Fox routinely runs articles about the plight of the homeless, it’s not compassion, it’s this)
"One such proposal, the SHELTER — Serious Homelessness Engagement Leads to Effective Results — Act from Sen. Phil Fortunato (R-Auburn), would require counties of a certain size to have at least one large shelter facility, guarded by police, that would also have counseling and job services at hand.
“It’s fenced, it’s secure, we’re going to give you a tent, we’re going to give you a sleeping bag, there’s a police presence,” Fortunato said, noting that the fence was to keep bad people out, not the good ones in."
And very few will object because, although liberals support shelters, etc, they want those shelters to be in someone else’s back yard. No one objects when cities do sweeps of homeless encampments, this is just the next step. And everyone will be glad to walk city streets without stepping in human feces or being accosted by a mentally ill person. Everyone will convince themselves this is really a positive thing. As seen in the linked article, this is presented as being for the good of those poor homeless people – we’re providing food, shelter, security, etc, what is there to object to? And now the roundup and incarceration of undesirables is normalized. (Are you going to take to the streets in protest of helping homeless people?) It won’t be difficult to move to the next group – just a matter of framing trans folks, for example, as a group that would benefit from being rounded up and placed into centers (providing companionship, mental health care, etc) – with very little outrage, if the pr is good. It’s a chilling vision, and it’s underway.
To be fair, at the time of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, it was probably southern Democrats who were the most opposed to integration.
While true, many of those pro-segregation southern Democrats were courted and won over by the Republicans’ Southern Strategy, and have been a major influence in the GOP since.
As I see it the mid-20th century Democratic Party was a coalition of urban Labor-Populists, Southern segregationists, midwestern AND southern rural-agrarian-populists and northeastern progressive liberals. The segregationist branch just plain gave up on them after Wallace was out of the picture. Meanwhile many of the labor and rural populists weren’t particularly sanguine about the Great Society and the cultural changes, anyway, so they were easy pickings for Reagan. The Republicans eagerly gathered all the “don’t change my culture” votes… and now that faction has taken over the Republican Party.