#why do republicans hate democracy?

[isawthismeme]

She’s brown and a democrat, gotta get that birth certificate, that we’ll call fake news anyway. Apparently, if you can’t win in a fight, you gotta at least try to get your opponent disqualified.

Sad and weird.

[falinscloaca]

rewatched paranoia agent by proxy (reaction youtube), feeling emotionally akin to warm yet raw eggs again. great.

[qqueenofhades]

Obviously the main contrasting narrative of the Harris campaign is (rightfully, the ads almost write themselves!) prosecutor vs convict. But I keep thinking about how, in one of her first campaign speeches, she had Biden on the phone and he said something like "I'm here, I love you Kid" and she said "I love you too" and just... That compared to the Jan 6th Mike Pence situation. Like this election is about democracy over fascism but it's also about love and kindness and sincerity on the level of person-to-person relationships.

Well... yeah. As Minnesota governor Tim Walz put it when he was doing the TV rounds for Kamala the other day, the Republicans are just weird people. They are mean, petty, reactionary, focused on revenge and retribution and making people suffer, their rhetoric is about shame and violence and punishment, they are all about Who Your Enemy Is, and their drift into ever more extreme fascist positions is a reflection of that. And strongman/fascist authoritarianism is often popular during moments of chaos and upheaval in the rest of the world, because the unknown feels so scary and people keep falling for the lie that a helpful dictator strongman will turn up and make it all better. It never happens, but it is a powerful lie and it can work for several years at a time, as we have (unfortunately) seen. (And Tim Walz is definitely climbing the list of Old White Guys I Like; supposedly he is on Harris' initial VP shortlist, and while I certainly have favorites of my own, she could very much do worse.)

However, and this is why fascist movements always plant the seeds of their own destruction, this constant garbage spew of hate and vitriol never ever works forever, and usually not even all that long. Because once you spend your time destroying everyone else on your mean stupid crusade of mindless bigotry, you lose friends, you alienate the ordinary people who are more interested in having something to be FOR rather than just constantly against, and eventually you eat your own. And while it will shore up your ever-dwindling cult base, it will not be able to expand beyond the people who are already fully indoctrinated, and it will lose more people than it attracts. As I have said before, one of the key tenets of fascist movements is presenting themselves as powerful, inevitable, and almighty: just surrender to them now before We Crush You (tm) later! But they are not! They are goofy, stupid, mean, and just plain (thanks Gov. Walz) WEIRD! Nobody wants to be those guys!

So yes. With the whole fact of a party where one guy tried to get his first VP killed and now has picked another reactionary loser who is the least popular VP pick in 50 years, and the other is joyfully supporting his VP, a woman of color (after serving loyally to the first Black president, Biden has set the way for the -- knock on wood -- second, and that is also amazing), it's really easy to see the difference, and very clearly, people do. Kamala offers something to rally FOR, and that is always, always more powerful than mindless hate. Sucks to be the GOP. (As usual.)

[contemplatingoutlander]

That the Editorial Board of the premier U.S. newspaper of record is finally warning about Donald Trump is significant. As such, this is a gift 🎁 link so that those who want to read the entire editorial can do so, even if they don't subscribe to The New York Times. Below are some excerpts:

As president, [Trump] wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country. Now, as he campaigns again, his worst impulses remain as strong as ever — encouraging violence and lawlessness, exploiting fear and hate for political gain, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, applauding dictators — and are escalating as he tries to regain power. He plots retribution, intent on eluding the institutional, legal and bureaucratic restraints that put limits on him in his first term. Our purpose at the start of the new year, therefore, is to sound a warning. Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution. [...] It is instructive in the aftermath of that administration to listen to the judgments of some of these officials on the president they served. John Kelly, a chief of staff to Mr. Trump, called him the “most flawed person I’ve ever met,” someone who could not understand why Americans admired those who sacrificed their lives in combat. Bill Barr, who served as attorney general, and Mark Esper, a former defense secretary, both said Mr. Trump repeatedly put his own interests over those of the country. Even the most loyal and conservative of them all, Vice President Mike Pence, who made the stand that helped provoke Mr. Trump and his followers to insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, saw through the man: “On that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” he said.

[See more under the cut.]

There will not be people like these in the White House should Mr. Trump be re-elected. The former president has no interest in being restrained, and he has surrounded himself with people who want to institutionalize the MAGA doctrine. According to reporting by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies have been planning for a second Trump term for many months already. Under the name Project 2025, one coalition of right-wing organizations has produced a thick handbook and recruited thousands of potential appointees in preparation for an all-out assault on the structures of American government and the democratic institutions that acted as checks on Mr. Trump’s power. [...] Mr. Trump has made clear his conviction that only “losers” accept legal, institutional or even constitutional constraints. He has promised vengeance against his political opponents, whom he has called “vermin” and threatened with execution. This is particularly disturbing at a time of heightened concern about political violence, with threats increasing against elected officials of both parties. He has repeatedly demonstrated a deep disdain for the First Amendment and the basic principles of democracy, chief among them the right to freely express peaceful dissent from those in power without fear of retaliation, and he has made no secret of his readiness to expand the powers of the presidency, including the deployment of the military and the Justice Department, to have his way. [...] Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world. This is a time not to sit out but instead to re-engage. We appeal to Americans to set aside their political differences, grievances and party affiliations and to contemplate — as families, as parishes, as councils and clubs and as individuals — the real magnitude of the choice they will make in November.

I encourage people to use the above gift link and read the entire article.

[edited]

[decolonize-the-everything]

Libs: we can't let keep Republicans get their way! Things could be Way worse!!¡

Normal ppl: agree, things could be a lot better too. Glad you see that. We should be voting progressives and getting third parties national access to voting so we aren't always stuck with these two shit parties everyone hates.

Libs: well hey. First off. Slow down. Don't be unrealistic. We have to let them have some things, okay? Like white supremacist cops, the archaic electoral college, and a centrist president. Our democracy has to be a little unfair to someone or people won't like it.

Normal ppl: did u hear what you just said? I don't see any functional difference between you in this moment. Youre prioritizing your comfort over my life as a marginalized person. You are also literally the person pushing me to the margins right now. You are doing the exact thing Im talking about. Even advocating that a government built on a oppression should be upheld.

Libs: you're a Russian spy.

Queer libs™: who's also okay with homophobia. Psyop account.

Normal ppl: this is why ppl don't like u

[germiyahu]

A lot of terminally online Leftists were never liberals and will never be, so do not engage with them as if there's a secret liberal core inside of them that you can reach if you just try hard enough, are smart enough, are patient enough, are understanding enough.

You need to treat them the same way you treat far right lunatics. They're not interested in debate (they're not good at it either because they don't fundamentally want to live in objective reality).

I'd bet a lot of money that a majority of tankies grew up conservative, and merely repolarized their radical worldviews instead of dismantling them. They were never liberal! They don't care about liberal norms, values, or institutions. They don't believe in universal rights or fairness. They don't believe that everyone should get a say. They don't believe that democracy is actually necessary and certainly not a force for good in humanity. They do not under any circumstance believe in due process. If you try to invoke any of these and other libcoded stuff, it's like water off of a duck.

They believe in might makes right. They believe that morality is wholly prescriptive and conveniently always aligned with whatever they want to do. They believe that humans are fundamentally disposable, and increasing human suffering is a valid strategy to "liberation" and worth the cost. They do not respect any ideas or even cultures they do not understand. They have simply rewired their bigoted brains to shift the West, white people, COLONIZERS, etc. to the "bad" pile, and no more nuance is needed. They themselves fly from privilege using whatever labels work best for them, but they do not believe in community or coalition building. It is still us vs. them, and even more basically me vs. you, to them.

(So if you see someone who identifies as a certain minority, and they spend most of their time disparaging other people of that or a similar group... constantly theorycrafting about omnicauses and kyriarchies that just so happen to put themselves at the bottom or at least exempt them from white/male/etc. privilege in some way... they're probably a tankie).

There are terminally online Leftists who have identified as liberal in the past, and they can be reached. We're seeing that as we come closer to a year of this insanity and many individuals and groups have disavowed the Movement, especially in the wake of the Election and how Uncommitted and its allies have been acting.

That's why I believe that most of these people demonstrably hate Democrats more than Republicans. And if you go further with the lobotomy I might even say that they inherently view Republican voters as real Americans, normal, not threatening, but Democrats are a cabal of coastal elites who condescendingly want to put Band-Aids on a broken system. I see how that's more obnoxious and would fill one with rage that there's no good outlet for. But they are colluding with conservatives, and there's no doubt about it.

[drunkenskunk]

So, despite knowing that it's probably futile, I called the office of my senator once again, in the vain hope that the staffer I talked to will pass on the message and get her to see reason in regards to KOSA.

Trouble is: how? Catherine Cortez-Masto is a cosponsor of the bill. I couldn't appeal to her sense of morality, as she's a politician; she had her ethics surgically removed before coming into office. I couldn't appeal to the stated goal of the bill, protecting kids, because if she had spoken to a single cybersecurity professional, she would know that the bill is dangerous to kids, adults, and anyone wanting to use the internet. I couldn't appeal to the Constitution, because if she actually gave a shit about the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights, she would already know its a blatant, flagrant violation of both the 1st and 4th amendments, and be trying to kill the bill, not cosponsor it. And I probably couldn't appeal to the fact that the bill was dreamed up by the same republican think-tank that dreamed up Project 2025, the plan to turn what little remains of our democracy into a theocratic dictatorship run by evangelical christians; she probably believes she's wealthy and influential enough that it will insulate her from the worst effects, assuming she isn't already in on it anyway.

It was a puzzler. And then I had an idea. This is what I said:

"Do you know who Steve Sisolak is? You do? Good. Do you want to know why he's the former Nevada state governor, and not the current one? It's because Sisolak was, without exaggeration, the most unpopular politician I've ever come across. No one liked him. Democrats hated him, republicans REALLY hated him, libertarians hated him, and even people like me, who have never felt represented by any of the major political parties in the state but still vote in every single election because we consider it our civic duty as American citizens, didn't like him either. I can't think of a single person who ever had anything positive to say about his tenure as governor, and as a result? The voter base in Nevada was willing to do anything and vote for anyone just to get him out of office.

"I tell you this, because if Senator Cortez-Masto does not change course, and continues to cosponsor and vote yes on the incredibly unpopular, incredibly dangerous, blatantly unconstitutional KOSA bill, then she will make Steve Sisolak's year, as he will no longer be the most reviled politician in the state of Nevada. If she does not reverse course, she will be committing political suicide on a scale hithertofore unknown to science. If she votes yes, then she might as well pull a Mitch McConnell and announce her retirement right now, because any of her political aspirations for the future, at least among the Nevada voter base, will be dead in the water.

"Now, I don't know how many phone calls you've gotten about KOSA. But I suspect it's not as many as you should. Most people in this state don't have time to call their senators. Most people are working two or three jobs to make ends meet with stagnant wages among the rising cost of living and landlords finding any excuse to increase our rent. Hell, I'm calling you on my lunchbreak right now. But despite all that... people here still find time to vote. And if there is one thing I've learned about voters in this state in the 18 years I've been able to? It's that if you piss us off, the people in this state will absolutely vote entirely out of spite, just to burn everything down. KOSA is so incredibly unpopular among the voter base of this state, that when she's next up for reelection? She will find herself out of a job, mark my words.

"Make sure you tell the Senator that, word for word. And if you can't remember, just play her this phone call that I already know is being recorded."

Will this do any good?

I don't know.

Probably not.

But it made me feel a bit better, at least.

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

Look at Elon musk spreading misinformation on the social media platform he turned into 4Chan lite! He'll do anything to earn praise and validation from other people including the fascist Republican who want to destroy democracy through Project 2025, why do you think he unbanned Republican accounts who spouted hate speech before banning liberal journalists? Everyone should expect Elon musk to continue spreading misinformation/disinformation throughout the election like he did with Trump and Biden, I mean how many times has he agreed with rascist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Twitter and in fact that's why he's made liked posts private?! Honestly it's kinda funny cause it won't be long before he does this again I swear it, then he'll deny ever doing then offer a limp apology when he gets called out then his sycophants will crawl out of the woodwork to defend him.

[the-paris-of-people]

but yk that marginalised communities are Also gonna be harmed by a harris government? ofc trump will be worse but acting as if it’s only privileged oppressive ppl who are willing to risk it for change & a 3rd party bc at least with kamala we’ll all be safe(r) is silly and privileged in itself. for many ppl four more years of either party is going to be hell. and we need to start pushing for change Now.

Okay, so what is this "change" that I've been hearing about for the last several years? How do we organize a revolution against the largest military superpower in the world? How do we dismantle our infrastructure and build everything from scratch? WHAT do we build from scratch across this giant country? How do we get other people on board? How do we reconcile this vision of a utopia with people from other cultures and backgrounds with a completely different framework to achieve a common goal? How do we protect the disabled, elderly, chronically ill LGBTQ+ populations who rely on federal government assistance? How do we protect children and their lives, education and development during this time period? How do we protect marginalized people in red states where they will be the first to be killed?

I'm frustrated because "pushing for change" is so fucking vague and fails to account for the actual repercussions and havoc that unleashing a revolution will lead to. "Pushing for change" when the left is so incredibly disorganized and unprepared and fighting simply about the most basic tool at our arsenal to push the system slightly to our advantage (voting) when the alt-right is incredibly well-organized, prepared, and violent. Everyone wants to be the flag planter and the face of the revolution, but the reality is because the left is ill-prepared and disorganized, we're going to fucking die before we realize the revolution is even taking place. I said it before and I'll say it again, you do not have the right to unleash death and violence among people who do not consent to it. You do not have the right to unleash death and violence among people who do not consent to it. It's not wrong for people to value their current lives and want to protect their home.

Also, I'm genuinely confused as to how voting 3rd party is going to help. How have some of the 3rd party candidates ever helped the people in the U.S.? What political experience do they have? What resources do they have at their disposal? How will they use those resources effectively to protect vulnerable populations in the United States and alter pro-expansionist US foreign policy and diplomatic ties? How is diverting money and resources to frankly more imperfect politicians working within the political system within the United States going to help? How is voting for a party that is not going to win a useful practice of one of the only tools we have left for democracy? I'm genuinely not as educated about third parties but I have not seen a single concrete reason to why I should support them, other than that Democrats and Republicans are both evil and people want to remain morally pure. Mostly I have been seeing/talking to marginalized populations from blue states who are protected by state laws, but you're the first person who is implied to perhaps live in a red/swing state and be a marginalized person.

I don't know your situation, and I can't pretend to, and I'm sorry life in American has been terrible for you. Capitalism is terrible for many people and preys on vulnerable populations to support the ultra-wealthy. I absolutely hate it and I think everyone deserves human dignity, right, and basic needs. However, I'm genuinely confused as to when I said "everyone will be safe under Kamala Harris" I looked at my posts and I never said, nor do I believe it. I simply was advocating for harm reduction and expressing a sliver of hope and optimism, because the reality is, considering the ENTIRE AMERICAN POPULATION, we will be safer with Kamala Harris since she needs to young vote and is mutable than with Donald Trump and it's incredibly dangerous and harmful and frankly misinformation to say otherwise. Usurping millions of civil servants, fully stripping women of their reproductive rights and from receiving life changing healthcare (INCLUDING WHEN THEY HAVE A MISCARRIAGE OR HAVE A COMPLICATION WITH THEIR PREGNANCY), mass deportation of undocumented citizens, slashing funding for climate change, and promoting capital punishment is designed to disproportionately affect and eradicate marginalized populations across the entire nation on a scale that has never been seen before. There's hell but a hell in which we have one last semblance of democracy and leverage our power as young voters to push the Democratic party to the left while we try to work together, and organize something better, and then there's hell where we're all dead and cannot even vote anymore. And then there's the third party option, which frankly IS NOT VIABLE BECAUSE THERE ARE TWO MONTHS TO THE ELECTION AND WE HAVE TWO QUALIFIED, EXPERIENCED CANDIDATES WITH A COLOSSAL AMOUNT OF MONEY, POWER, AND NAME RECOGNITION.

Finally, IT'S NOT SILLY AND PRIVILEGED TO VOTE FOR THE CANDIDATE THAT HAS THE MOST VIABLE CHANCE OF WINNING IF IT HAS THE BEST CHANGE OF PROTECTING YOUR RIGHTS AND LIVELIHOOD OF VULNERABLE POPULATIONS IN THE STATES.

What bothers me most is that fracturing people into leftists who want to vote third party/don't vote vs. liberals who vote Democrat is used by the alt-right to divide people with the same ideology. Please understand that this way of thinking is a strategic move on the Republicans who, contrary to leftist belief, are far worse than the Democrats. I implore you to reconsider, read Project 2025 and consider the scope of it, but I understand your vote is yours alone.

I genuinely would love to work with people and research local initiatives we can advocate for/reach out to our representatives and actually take steps towards changing the infrastructure we need for the so-called revolution so in the near-distant future we actually have a fucking shot of winning. We all appear to agree on the same issues, so I would like to take action to actually move something forward rather than relying on a third party or revolution to save us.

[redjennies]

i'm going to start taking screenshots of "Things Liberals (yes, liberals. if you don't want to be called a duck, don't quack like one.) Say On Those Vote Blue No Matter What Posts" so y'all understand that I'm not just angry at the posts themselves. this not me telling you "rah rah, i'm your preconceived notion of an anarchist. no, don't vote blue! i hate democracy and sunshine and rainbows and love bombs and chaos!" I mean all of that is true, obviously, (/joke) but that's not why I'm saying it. I'm saying it because I'm exhausted because every single one of them inevitably features some borderline American propaganda nonsense like this in the replies that y'all are reblogging entirely uncritically:

truly! how fucking naive do you have to be to sincerely believe that Joe Biden is actually a secret ally in this? "advocating for justice and peace behind the scenes." I'm sorry but what? perhaps he will bring peace, though i suspect in the same way Henry Kissinger was called a "peacemaker," but justice? when has the United States ever been an instrument of justice? this is at best, a child's delusion that there are, in fact, good men in the government or at worst, the most cynical propaganda, and I must laugh to keep from screaming. tell of the United State's desire for justice to the people of near any other country, and they will laugh and scream at you, too. I will say this: in the matter of genocide, there is no difference between a man who calls for it in public and a man who decries it in public but still sends financial and military aid to those who commit genocide. there is no "just a dash of" genocide, and there are no bonus points for loyalty when the dead are still dead.

vote for Biden. I probably will tick the box, too, even though it really makes no difference in the state of Tennessee, but do not lie to yourselves. what you are saying is that you do not want to suffer under Trump and the Republican's policies and that Trump will make things even worse both in the US and through foreign policy, and that is not an inaccurate statement. you are saying that it will be easier to protest Biden than protest Trump, and that's not an inaccurate statement either. I'm not going to tell you it's all okay because you don't have a choice, that you're still a good person and the dead understand, absolving you of everything, but I am saying not to lie to yourself and others just so you can placate your need to feel good about yourself. I'm saying that when you vote for Biden, you should feel it. you should grapple with this double consciousness you exist under and feel repulsed by it. you should hate Joe Biden and the empire of this the United States, that has already committed and aided in many genocides and needless wars before this. you should do it, but not for a second should it feel like you're doing the right thing, proud of your contribution to American "democracy," as you stick your head in the sand.

[anniegetyourbubblegum]

I keep seeing posts from people in the US debating whether to vote for Biden in their upcoming elections to stop Trump from winning again or to punish the democrats for aiding Israel in the genocide of Palestine.

I'm argentinian and as far as I'm concerned, you should vote for whichever candidate you think will benefit you more, because you're from the US and that's all it's good for. The rest of the world will continue to suffer at your hands no matter what. Let me explain.

Democrats and republicans are not a representation of left and right wing politics: both parties are on the right side of the spectrum, only the GOP is more honest about it.

Republicans, as right wing parties do, run on promises of austerity, reducing taxes and being tough on crime. Democrats run promising to use tax money to ease your life: affordable healthcare, education and housing, all guaranteed so you can live the life of a first world citizen.

And then, they don't deliver.

You still have school shootings, massive incarceration, corruption in all levels of government, and the poorest pay a higher proportion of taxes than the richest. Healthcare, education and housing are extremely expensive and often require people to get into heavy debt to afford to have their most basic needs met, and that's only possible if you have good credit.

It's a reductive analysis for the sake of brevity, but you get the gist. The point is that having you be poor and afraid is the goal: it's a feature, not a bug.

You want to go to college? You need to buy a house? You want to start a family? Well, the military complex needs bodies! The US has far too many enemies to their way of life, so they'll need people to defend it! In exchange, they'll "guarantee" just enough money that you won't be destitute.

The US spends the most amount of money on their military in the world, by a long shot. To justify spending that kind of money, you HAVE to have wars. To have wars, you need enemies.

So, you get propaganda. "Muslims are extremists and hate our way of life." "Latin americans want to come to our country and steal our jobs." "China and Russia are communist countries that are waiting to destroy us." And you gobble it up.

You love it so much. It's in your news, in your videogames, in your movies and TV series and comic books. So, when they ask you to fight, you go running! You'll get some money out of it and you'll get to live your life the way you were promised. Sure, PTSD from the horrors is a given, but there's pills for that! And award winning movies about how difficult it is to go to war! It's all covered.

So the small, poor countries that you invade lose their money, natural resources, and their sovereignty but HEY, you brought democracy there! And the US is protected from this many enemies! Mission accomplished, right?

Well, as a citizen of a third world country whose current president is an insane pawn of the GOP, I'd like to say fuck you. He was placed so that the US could take our recently discovered lithium, and you'll get it. Enjoy your shitty iPhone 5000 I guess. It'll come at the small price of the hunger of my countrymen, but since Twitter user dan91883719 says argentinians all descend from escaped nazis, I guess it's alright.

Israel has killed Palestinians and illegally expanded its borders for over 70 years. Both democrats and republicans have sent aid and weapons to make this possible. It's in the US best interests to have conflict in the Middle East and have an ally control the area. Israel is a feature, not a bug.

And those of you who vote blue? You're trapped. Even if you know it's shit, you're unable to organize. Instead of rallying to form a new party, or a at least get a better candidate, you keep voting bad instead of worse and pat yourselves on the back for a job well done. Democrats are well aware of this and that's why they run on platforms that promise to make your life better and then sit back and say "our hands are tied" when you lose rights.

So, if you're still doubting it, vote for whoever the fuck you want. The war machine that you call 'country' won't stop no matter who's president, because those who hold the real power are already getting exactly what they want from it. Your suffering as US citizens is just as planned as the suffering of those who live outside of it.

TL,DR: Vote for whichever candidate you feel will defend your interests best. Lord knows it won't make a lick of difference for the rest of the world, because both political parties have the same plans when it comes to foreign policy.

[isawthismeme]

[utilitarian-blog]

Understanding Trump And Trump Republicans

The party of Trump is not the Republican party of our fathers. We all know Trump changed the party, but people do not understand the changes he made, or why. And so, Trump is condemned for doing what his detractors do not understand. Trump is vilified for the things that exist only in the hearts and minds of those who hate him.

We hate what we do not understand, and most people prefer to think negatively of other people and their motives.

We tend to gravitate towards the simplest explanation, and this usually involves some type of conspiracy or negative stereotyping.

Most people prefer to assume the worst than look for a motive.

Trump is financially successful and something of a showman. But this does not exhaust all he is. Perhaps if it did, he would be financially better off than he is.

The assumption Democrats make is that Trump does what they would do. They assume Trump is trying to benefit from his fame and position. But assuming a Republican is a Democrat, is a big mistake. Yet, the vast majority of Democrats assume Trump shares their outlook on life even while they reject him and everything he stands for.

The problem is, there is another explanation for what is happening, but this one is difficult to get at, and most people do not have the inclination to seek it out. That does not mean it does not exist or impossible to find.

First of all, Trump loves America, and he does respect the regular person. He is also motivated by a faith in Christ, even if it does not always manifest itself in ways we understand.

Unfortunately, for him, he does not play to the crowd. He is not a populist in the ordinary sense of the word, and he is absolutely not a demagogue.

Donald Trump is not artificial. He does not dress down to identify as a regular joe. He does not think his clothes, lifestyle and plane define him. They reflect his values but not his soul. He is more than what is seen.

This is difficult for those who think property gives people their value. Those who think property defines the person, cannot understand the link between Silicon Valley billionaires and the average joe. But Trump does understand the link, even if he cannot articulate it well. At best, most observers say that Trump is making the New Republican Party a Big Tent Party.

We know what is meant by this, but of course it is not true in the literal sense.

Amber Rose, a blogger, was given a voice at the convention. So was a Hindu religious leader. Hulk Hogan was also asked to speak. These are not the normal voices of the Republicans.

It of course seems natural to seek the vote of Black people, women and the young, but giving voice to other religions and those whose morality is suspect, is not what is generally thought of when we think of the Big Tent. But this means we have to dig deeper.

The first thing we have to understand is that political party’s have one goal and one goal only. If a business seeks to make a profit, then political parties seek to earn votes. Without profits for a business and votes for a party, there is no business or a party.

Perhaps some of these allies are not the ones we would prefer to have, but we are not in the system we ought to be in. If we live in a capitalist democracy, we need to operate as democratic capitalists. In this system the party with the most electoral votes wins. Who votes does not matter. What matters is who they vote for.

Is this a perfect system? Of course not, but it is the system we are in. If we do not like it, we need to come out of it. But so long as we are in a democracy and part of a party, that party needs to attract the most votes to win the election.

The point is, Trumps Big Tent is not inclusive, in the literal sense. The Republicans do not want illegal migrants and the woke in the party. And while they may not always be able to be weeded out, it is unlikely Trump desires to see Muslims and the criminally insane become members.

Yet, one ought never to become a politician if one is not driven, to some extent, by pragmatic considerations.

Despite the Big Tent analogy picking and choosing does exist and who is being invited to speak is not a random process. But the impression many get, when unusual voices are given space at the convention, is that the party is losing its vision. This might be so but perhaps it had an outdated vision.

There were concerns that Nickie Haley was permitted to speak. More voices of protest were raised at J.D. Vance being made vice president. These are not historically Trump supporters, far from it, but they reflect, if not a new vision, a more defined focus.

We cannot discount the pragmatic need to win. There were no doubt calculations made concerning who to advance and give space to. There will always be some degree of calculated hypocrisy in politics. But there has to be more than the desire to get votes, or one’s brand would suffer, and Trump is very careful about his brand.

Trump wants to win. He does not want to win so badly he will resort to winning as a Democrat. He does not wish to win as a woke politician, or as a socialist. Winning is important, and necessary if one is to be president, but it cannot be everything. There are limits to what Trump will do to win.

Trump wants to be the president of America and America is highly diverse, and despite all the talk of a Big Tent, there must be priorities. No one is all things to all people. There is a sorting going on and we need to understand it. The democrats are not the party of Christian White Men, but do these labels sufficiently encapsulate the Republicans?

The Democrats know they cannot be for Satan and support White Christian men. They have made their choice. But on what hill, ought Republicans make their stand?

Can Republicans be the party of America, if America is inclusive of all persons within the border, as Democrats suggest? What defines an American? Is it the passport one carries or is there more to being a citizen than what Democrats claim?

It ought to be apparent that no party can represent everyone, but perhaps we do understand why. We might say that the government cannot be supportive of criminals, aliens and terrorists, but some appear to be. No Party ought to say they represent everyone, even the enemies of the nation, yet do all parties everywhere fully endorse this position?  

However, these questions about citizenship are so general they do not really help us understand the problem. Biden considers Trump and his supporters a danger to America. Can the Republicans truly represent Biden and his supporters? Is the call for unity a commonsense response to the attempted assassination of Trump.

Republicans would say those who permit aliens to enter the country without proper documentation are not patriots. Those who promote unlimited migration claim those who put nation before peoples needs, lack humanity. But this kind of back and forth could go on forever, without a resolution. All it really tells us is that there is a division between us. There is a division between whom we think are part of our group and those who we exclude. Those whom are excluded make up a group of persons who similarly exclude us. Politics cannot reconcile these differences nor neutralize them. We need a different response.

We all think in terms of identity politics, though the members of the group we identify with, will change as we mature, and our values change. We are also a member of different groups. Those in our social group are not the same ones who are in our family group. Our family and occupation group probably do not overlap. Those who are in our church may not represent our recreation associates.

Those who are Democrats are not the same people who are Republicans. There cannot be unity if the group identity includes features incompatible with the values of one of the groups.

This brings us back to the problem of who does the party of Trumps Republicans represent? We know this is not the Republican Party of old, but does this mean the party is an ad hoc collection of voters?

It might seem that way but surely something must be common to the old Republicans and new, or they would be a Democrat or have some other party affiliation. Whatever changes were wrought there still must remain a connection or the shift could not have been made.

The new Republicans are more of a shift in focus than an actual novelty.

We all understand that the Democrats are on the left and the Republicans are on the right. But even here, we do not fully understand what this means. The assumption is that the left comprises the poor and dispossessed. So, all those who seem disadvantaged in some way, become the constituents of the left. All those who appear to have been othered by conservative rich white men, especially are considered to belong on the left. Therefore, the Democrats, especially the Democrats of the far left, pillorizes rich white men, especially those who are Christians. Therefore, we see a line emerging between the parties.

But this is not the true line. It was a line created primarily by the Democrats to suit their agenda.

The parties were never divided solely along the line of white, Christian males, especially those who are older, and others. The Democrats may think they gain a level of political leverage, by portraying the enemy of the other as the white, Christian male, but there are many white Christian males who are Democrats, not the least of which would be Biden. There are many in the other camp who are Republicans.

And this is another anomaly. There are many people who see the natural allies of one party, who belong to the opposing alliance. White women are famously more democratic than Conservative, though their husbands, brothers and fathers are likely to be Conservative. This does not seem to make sense. But the division of parties along racial and religious grounds is not tenable. The division is more political theatre than rational.

We ought to see Trump, as a leader who has inherited an old and invalid way of dividing people. What he has done is to reform the division in a way that makes more sense.

In other words, there is a left/right division that is purely political and pragmatic, but there is also a left/right axis not based on race, age, income, sex or religion, despite conventional thinking. Trump has simply cut through the false narrative of the left and gave us a truer picture of the real division.

This inability to draw a real line of distinction between the two camps is problematical because we all know there is a division, and we know the division is real. We also know this division is fundamental, it extends beyond politics even into metaphysics. There is good and evil, there are those of the flesh and those of the spirit. We know that throughout history there are wars, and each side has claimed they fight on the side of right and justice. The other side in a war or even in a police action, is evil. But is it, when we do not know where the line is? Possibly we are being played by some clever, but demonic people and forces.

People change their allegiance from right to left and from left to right, and sometimes they do both. But for thousands of years, we have had conflicts and disagreements about which side is on the side of history, and no one has yet proved which side is right and which side, in error. This ought to give us pause, it ought to be very troublesome. There ought to be a way to define what it means to be right. However, there is one thing we can be certain of, both sides cannot be right. But just as troublesome and important, we need to understand, both sides can and are wrong.

From this vantage point, we need to understand that what Trump is doing, is purifying the right. Donald Trump is ridding the right of its Satanic elements. He demanded total allegiance not to himself, but to his vision and to his value system. One must never soil one’s robes with a casual connection to the forces of evil.

But how does Trump know where the line is if no one else has understood where it is to be found? Not even the church has been able to identify the wolves among them.

However, lets re-establish the fact that there are two different viewpoints. Indeed, lets enhance this to the degree that these differences of opinion are grounded in two realities. This is not hyperbole. It is a necessary conclusion to the existence of the widespread realization of this being a divided nation. We will never understand the division, until we understand the depth and extent of it. This division is not about preferences or attitudes, it is about something so fundamental it points to the very structure of the universe.

If we can comprehend, at least provisionally accept, the idea of two realities, the next step is to consider the possibility of there being two races. The issue of racism as based on a person’s physical characteristics, is a case of misdirection. There are indeed racial differences, but they are fundamental to our very being. Our race is fundamental to what it means to be human. We are born in the flesh. That is not up for debate, but we also die in the flesh. There is no argument about this. When this happens is up for debate, and to a large degree, a matter of choice.

This may seem to be taking us far from our starting point and far from our goal of understanding where Trump is coming from, but the need to understand the nature of reality and race, is vital if we are to understand the nature of the political division. The political division is along a racial divide.

Those of the flesh are of one race. Those of the flesh live fully in the phenomenological reality composed of physical matter. Those in the flesh live and die in the flesh.

But why does this matter, because it does matter. It matters because it imposes on those who live in it, certain conditions. Those who live in the flesh, are under the law. They are under the law because the flesh has only one kind of organization. All flesh operates according to the law of the jungle. In the phenomenological world, might makes right and the end justifies the means. There is no methodology for determining right from wrong, other than brute force.

If you can beat up the other kids your view of right prevails.

The absolute truth and necessity of this fact has to be appreciated to understand Trump, and indeed, the nature of those who live in the spirit.

If you have the biggest gang or the most destructive army, your view prevails. But can a nation or world prosper, if success is tied to our capacity to effect reprisals, on those with whom we disagree? But on what other basis, can those who live in the flesh, administrate the law other than by force of arms? If there were another route, the state would not need to have a monopoly on power.

This is the situation Trump inherited. He did not create the situation, but he has attempted to rise above it. This is why the left hates with a fierce conviction.

The conventional core of the Republican Party was the rich. They too lived in the flesh. The early division between rich and poor was a false division, one that did not reflect reality. Therefore, the core constituency of the Democrats became the poor, to play out this pantomime of political theatre.

This war between a left and right based on wealth, was the situation for many decades. Indeed, this left view of things has been the norm from the beginning of the world. History has been about the conflict between the rich and the poor, with the middle class holding the balance of power.

But this changed. The poor are no longer so poor, and the Middle Class no longer hold the balance of power. The upward mobility that had motivated so many of the lower classes to side with the wealthy, no longer exists in any meaningful way. The lower strata no longer identify with the Republicans. Things had to change.

The division between rich and poor, that had served as the basis of the political divide, has been eroding since the 1970’s. Trump is the first to realize the division was an illusion and a diversion from what really mattered. In simple terms it was not that one was rich or poor, what mattered was how one earned his or her money. To put it another way, the greedy poor, was no more noble than the greedy rich. The ruthless criminal was no worse a person, than the ruthless capitalist. This is where he got his Make America Great Again, slogan from.

People have interpreted this slogan to refer to an historical period, but this is not what Make America Great Again means. It does not point to an historical epoch.

There was a time in America’s past when attitudes were different. America was Great in a moral and spiritual sense, not in terms of its economics or politics. The country was Great, because the people were motivated by great aspirations and ideas and even by great leaders. The land was spiritual in the way it lived. This is what the Make America Great Again, slogan harkens back to; the spiritual soul of America.

These leaders and ideals are being erased. The Great Replacement Theory does refer to the replacement of Whites with Blacks, but that is just the most visible part of what is happening. It is just another example of a racial division that has inserted what is physical, to represent what is actually, spiritual.

There is a lot of things we see, when we think in physical terms, without realizing the greater part of what we are looking at, is below the surface. The visible is just the tip of the iceberg.

The worst part of this, is that none of this had to happen. White people created their nations; therefore, it is Whites who own their nations. Whites have an inalienable right to what they created; this right is Biblical, it cannot be rescinded, abrogated or delimited. But we gave the vote to those who have no rights. Because subjects and aliens have no property they created, they exploited the right to vote to take from we who gave them the vote, what they had no claim to. Stop giving rights to those who never created anything. These are the culturally dispossessed, who simply freeload to get what they need. Stop permitting those, who produce nothing, to vote on how our wealth, will be allocated. Value belongs to the ones who produced it.

This is the message of Trump. Those who do the work, have the right to the wealth they produced. No one else has a claim on the property produced by someone else.

The message of Trump is two-fold and it is grounded in the Biblical view that there are two races, the flesh and the spirit cultures. There are parasites and there are the productive group. The parasite take from the productive wealth they have no right to. To do this they gain the support of the Democrats and other liberal governments. Because they take without giving, what they have and what we have, has no value to them. So, it is wasted.

The message of Trump, and the Trump Republicans is that this injustice will no longer persist. We will no longer continue supporting those who will not work. We will no longer permit those who have not created the nation to claim a right to it or to any share of it.

Those who earn the wealth will keep the wealth they generated, and those who do not work, neither will they eat, they will not sit down at a table prepared for the worker and those who are of his family, by his hands.

[qqueenofhades]

I would like to... gently shake the people going 'Dick Cheney/Alberto Gonzalez/[insert neoconservative architect here] endorsing Harris is entirely and only a bad look for Harris' because that's not the point. And like, I get feeling weird about it (I've been unimpressed with Dick's backpedaling since Liz Cheney got primaried), but: Trump is proving too extreme for THE PEOPLE WHO MADE HIM POSSIBLE. This is their consequences. THAT'S the point.

Look, this is what I think about it: I fucking hate Dick Cheney and all the architects of the Bush Junior neoconservatism-early-aughts-War-on-Terror-Patriot-Act-No-Child-Left-Behinding Republican Party that laid the groundwork for the Tea Party and then for Trump. If there was any justice in the world, Dubya would be at the Hague for a war crimes tribunal and not allowed to sit in Texas painting dogs and enjoying a quiet retirement. But he was fortunate to be the president of the most powerful country in the world, and America doesn't obey international law unless it feels like it, so that's what we get. (And yes, someone asked Dubya if he was going to endorse in 2024, following Cheney, and was told, no doubt with much pious handwringing, that "President Bush retired from presidential politics many years ago." But he's still raising money for MAGA Senate candidates in Pennsylvania, evidently. Fuck you, George W. Bush. Kids these days don't say it enough.)

However, since literally the entire pre-Trump establishment Republican party is now deciding that Trump is too insane, fascist, and dangerous even for them, I'm not surprised but still annoyed that Online Leftist Logic (TM) has translated that to "Harris must secretly be an early-noughties hard-right neocon Republican and that's why they want to vote for her!!!" Most if not all of them have said that they openly disagree with her policies but are voting for her anyway because she is the only way to maintain American constitutional democracy. And yes, we're all shocked that DICK FUCKING CHENEY, architect of the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, felt that there was in fact a line of fascist government overreach that he wasn't willing to cross, but if that's the case -- if even these completely terrible warmongering corporate assholes are like "uh Trump is too bad even for us to support," then you should, I don't know, maybe listen to that. But as ever, I search for logic in vain.

Likewise: Harris has made zero policy concessions to these Republicans and she never went fishing for Cheney's endorsement specifically. She didn't suddenly declare Iraq a totally okay and normal thing in order to get Cheney and his warhawks on board, and yes, Old Dickhead probably has no small amount of personal motive to get back at Trump considering what he did to Liz. But that's the thing where apparently political motives should only ever be pure, moral, and Perfect, and taking the right action for the "wrong" reasons is still disqualifying because you weren't thinking enough pure moral thoughts while you did it, or something. I don't give a fuck why Cheney decided to vote for Harris, because I don't respect his opinion and can't foresee myself ever doing so. But because we are in an unprecedented historical moment where even DICK GODDAMN CHENEY thinks that Donald Trump is too dangerous to ever have power again, I will thank him for doing that and that alone and then tell him to hit the f'n road if he thinks he deserves a scrap of credit or Democratic policy concessions for it. He doesn't. He sucks. But he's still making a choice that we need to see made at this moment, and people who don't get that, as usual, can STFU.

Basically: Cheney's endorsement is not directed at you, and it's not intended to move voters who already fit your profile and therefore think, like I do, that Cheney can eat shit. It's directed to all the career-Republican-politician types who can see him doing that and decide that they can do the same thing. Hell, we just had 17 former staffers of Ronald Reagan announcing their Harris endorsement (in addition to the 200+ Bush, McCain, Romney alumni who already signed on and all the ex-Trump officials at the DNC) and going so far as to insist that Ol' Ronnie Raygun himself would have supported Harris. Now look. I hate Ronald Reagan more than any other twentieth-century president. The degree to which he ALSO laid the groundwork for incredible damage to America cannot be overstated. But because I am not an idiot, I can see that this does not mean Harris has suddenly turned into Reagan in her policies. So. Yeah.

The other thing to note here is that Harris has seen the advantage in cultivating a bipartisan coalition and making a cross-party case for voting her to preserve American democracy. Now, a lot of the Republicans have said that they are going to stay Republicans and they want to purge their party of Trump and MAGAism, they are trying to buy time for that transition to happen by voting for Harris, and while I have never voted for or agreed with a Republican in my whole life, I actually think that's a good thing! I don't WANT to fear the end of American democracy every four years because the Republican Party has become a screaming shitgibboning insane vehicle of American Gilead while inciting stochastic terrorism against Springfield, Ohio and everyone else who doesn't bow down to Trumpist Dear Leader and his KKK alt-right Elon Muskified supporters! I don't WANT this howling fascist conspiracy-theory-puppet-of-Vladimir-Putin black hole of violence to be just what we have to accept as the center-right (except you know, now far-far-far-far-can't-see-it-with-a-telescope-right) party in America! I would prefer it if we had a functioning democracy again where both parties were engaging in fair competitiveness and good faith and had the basic premise of making people's lives better, even if they disagreed about how to do it! I would REALLY like it if we could go back to the days of disagreeing about taxes and foreign policy and social welfare -- you know, NORMAL THINGS -- instead of Commander Vance and the Project 2025 foot soldiers trying to install a theocratic fascist dictatorship! I WOULD LIKE THAT A WHOLE LOT!

That said: I have pretty much reached my limit with asking people to vote. I have done it for 8+ years (since before Trump was elected the first time) and I'm done. Either you know the stakes of this election at this point, or you're so blindly and stupidly committed to misunderstanding them that there's nothing I or anyone else can possibly do to convince you. I still see people posting a lot of stuff from the bad-faith anti-democratic leftist cranks and arguing with them endlessly and... why? Why? Why are you giving them the oxygen and exposure that they crave, and which is giving them more attention than anyone else is giving them? Block them. Mute them. STOP ENGAGING WITH EVERYTHING THEY SAY EVEN IF YOU'RE TRYING TO REFUTE IT. It's not going to work, and at this point, it's not remotely conducive to winning this election. The Great Myth of the Undecided Voter (TM) is another one that, I hope, can finally bite the dust, and the actual undecided voters who are out there are not the ones posting dirtbag leftist bullshit about Harris on The Website Formerly Known as Twitter. This election is now completely down to a numbers game: who can make their identified voters turn out to vote. So please. Spend your time and energy on reaching those folks, who might want to or have said they will vote but need a push or extra help to make sure they do.

That being the case, if lifelong Republicans want to vote for Harris and help defeat a Trump dictatorship, they're actually being more helpful for the cause of American democracy than every single shrieking Online Leftist out there, and maybe they should think about that. I'm amused at how they still think they can make demands of the Democrats, because -- when your entire plan from the word go has been "I'm not voting for the Democrats and there's nothing you can do to make me!!!" -- why are you surprised that they don't take your thoughts and opinions into account? That's the basic simplest Democracy 101 version of how electoral politics works. If you have removed yourself from their voter pool and laugh and scoff at any suggestion that you should enter it, then they're not gonna listen to you or think that they should make policy to appease you (which is good, because most of these people are fucking nuts). That's why they're blowing a gasket disowning AOC, still one of the most left-wing members in the House, because she wants to actually win and make real changes in society and has reached a happy-ish marriage with the Democratic party, instead of virtuously losing her seat and becoming irrelevant like some other members of the Squad who got primaried out this year. And the Democrats have accepted many of AOC's views as mainstream policy! She didn't change, but she stayed in the party and worked with it, and the party as a whole is moving to where she was all along. But because any hint of compromise or working to get results, rather than just posting self-righteous screeds on the internet, is Bad, she had to go, I guess. Or something.

Anyway. That's the that on that. If you want to win this election, target and talk to the people who have already identified themselves as likely or possible voters, they just need that extra push to become definite voters. I'm over the anti-democratic hypocritical leftist cranks as much as I am the screaming shitgibboning racist-mob-inciting fascists. If it takes some Republicans gritting their teeth and getting on board the "let's save American democracy" boat with me, then fine. They're actually willing to do the smallest tiny thing to make that outcome come about, and that means, for right now, they are the enemy of my enemy and I'll accept their help. After that, I would in fact like it if we had a sane center-right party again, once Trump is in jail and we can fumigate the MAGA rot. It's up to them.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Billboard project

* * * *

Trump lashes out at women accusing him of sexual assault

In a second bizarre appearance this week, Trump spent 45 minutes in a grievance-filled “press conference” overflowing with defamatory attacks on women who have accused him of sexual assault. The one thing the “press conference” did not include was questions from the press.

Trump's 45-minute rant reminded voters of the multiple accusations of sexual assault against him. And in a breath-taking admission, he said he did assault one of his accusers because, “[S]he would not have been the chosen one.” That defense repeats his claim that he did not sexually assault E. Jean Carrol because “She’s not my type.”

It is Kafkaesque that one of the major party nominees has so many credible claims of sexual assault lodged against him that he can spend 45 minutes denying them. In any other era in American history, such allegations would be instantly disqualifying. But the major media focuses on horse-race polling to the exclusion of character and demonstrated unfitness for office.

Even as Maggie Haberman of the Times provided an accurate recitation of Trump's rambling discourse, she acknowledged, “As a one-off event, Mr. Trump’s diatribe was already receding from view in headlines by late afternoon.”

Of course, as long as the Times continues to lose interest in Trump's meltdowns in four hours, it is no wonder that Trump's depravity is overlooked by the public.

There is a growing consensus that the press is failing to hold Trump accountable for his criminality and corruption. Rebecca Solnit of The Guardian addresses the failure of the press in her op-ed, The mainstream press is failing America – and people are understandably upset.

I recommend Solnit’s essay to your weekend reading, but to whet your appetite, I excerpt the following:

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences.

Solnit’s criticism that the press “translates Trump's gibberish into English” was also discussed by Isabel Fattal in The Atlantic | Daily, A new level of incoherence from Trump. Fattal writes,

But the biggest problem, the problem that all journalistic analysis of Trump's response ought to lead with, is that his answer makes absolutely no sense. Earlier this summer, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, warned about “one of the most pernicious biases in journalism, the bias toward coherence.” Journalists “feel, understandably, that it is our job to make things make sense,” he wrote. “But what if the actual story is that politics today makes no sense?”

When Joe Biden stumbled in attempts to express himself—a lifelong characteristic driven in part by his stutter—the Times wrote dozens of stories suggesting that Biden was unfit to be president (despite his spectacularly successful current presidency). But when Trump speaks gibberish, the Times strains to glean meaning and coherence where none is to be found.

The question is, “Why?” Why does the media believe it is their role to filter and correct Trump's incoherence? The answer to that question will vex historians for decades and centuries to come.

In the absence of a satisfying or clear answer to that question, my default assumption is that the major media sees Trump as good for business, even if he is bad for democracy. Profit über alles. Shame on them.

Trump is a uniquely unfit candidate for the presidency The presidential oath of office requires the president to swear to protect and defend the Constitution—which Trump has already attempted to overthrow on one occasion and has promised to do so again.

Before Joe Biden withdrew from the race, there was a general sense that “the need to defend democracy” was not an argument that resonated with voters. It should be. Perhaps it is time for Kamala Harris to revisit and reframe the argument, especially given the renewed activity around Trump's legal and criminal jeopardy. It sure would be nice if the major media viewed Trump's threat to democracy as newsworthy.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Julian Adorney and Mark Johnson

Published: Jun 10, 2024

There’s a sense that the liberal order is eroding.

What do we mean by that? By “liberal order” we mean three things: political liberalism, economic liberalism, and epistemic liberalism.

Politically, it’s tough to shake the sense that we’re drifting away from our liberal roots. Fringes on both sides are rejecting the liberal principle that all human beings are created equal and that our differences are dwarfed by our shared humanity. On the left, prominent activists are endorsing the idea that people with different immutable characteristics (race, gender, etc.) have different intrinsic worth. For instance, in 2021, Yale University’s Child Study Center hosted a psychiatrist who gave a speech titled, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” where she compared white people to “a demented violent predator who thinks they are a saint or a superhero.” In response to Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, Yale professor Zareena Grewal tweeted, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” Across the political aisle, Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams called black Americans a “hate group” whom white Americans should “get the hell away from.”

If a core component of political liberalism is that all human beings are created equal, then many prominent voices are pushing us rapidly toward an illiberal worldview where one’s worth is determined by immutable characteristics. 

Increasingly, members of both parties seek to change liberal institutions to lock the opposition out of power. Their apparent goal is to undermine a key outcome of political liberalism: a peaceful and regular transfer of power between large and well-represented factions. On the right, prominent Republicans have refused to concede Trump’s loss in 2020, and many are refusing to commit to certifying the 2024 election should Trump lose again. “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump,” Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) said in response to repeated questions about whether or not he would accept the election results. On the left, prominent Democrats advocate for abolishing the Electoral College, partly on the grounds that it favors Republicans; and for splitting California into multiple states to gain more blue Senate seats. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Tina Smith (D-MN), among others, have called for expanding the Supreme Court explicitly so they can pack it with Democrats.

This disdain for democratic norms isn’t limited to political elites on right or left; it is permeating the general populace. According to a 2023 poll, only 54 percent of young Americans (aged 18-29) agree with the statement, “Democracy is the greatest form of government.”

Economic liberalism is also under attack. In 2022, Pew found that only 57 percent of the public had a favorable view of capitalism. Those numbers are even worse among young Americans; only 40 percent among those aged 18-29 had a positive view of capitalism. By contrast, 44 percent of the same age group reported having a positive view of socialism. Faced with the choice of which system we should live under, it’s unclear whether young Americans would prefer economic liberalism over the command-and-control systems of socialism or communism. And while young people typically hold more left-of-center views and often become more conservative as they age, the intensity of young peoples’ opposition to capitalism should not be discounted. From 2010 to 2018, a separate Gallup poll found that the number of young Americans (aged 18-29) with a positive view of capitalism dropped by 23 percent. 

Epistemic liberalism is on the ropes too. As the Harper’s Letter warned, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” In recent years, even prominent intellectuals have been terrified of being canceled for daring to write outside of the lines set by a new and predominantly left-wing orthodoxy, adversely affecting out discourse. Again, this disdain for liberalism is more acute among young people: a 2019 survey found that 41 percent of young Americans didn’t believe that the First Amendment should protect hate speech. Furthermore, a full majority (51 percent) of college students considered it “sometimes” or “always acceptable” to “shout down speakers or try to prevent them from talking.”

As Jonathan Rauch argues in The Constitution of Knowledge, a necessary precondition of epistemic liberalism is that everyone should be allowed to speak freely, a precondition increasingly unmet in recent years.

In their book Is Everyone Really Equal?, Robin DiAngelo (of White Fragility fame) and Özlem Sensoy even challenge the foundation of epistemic liberalism itself: the scientific method. This method mandates that hypotheses be tested against reality before acceptance. “Critical Theory developed in part as a response to this presumed infallibility of scientific method,” they write “and raised questions about whose rationality and whose presumed objectivity underlies scientific methods.” Of course, once we jettison the principle that ideas should be tested by holding them up to reality, all we have left are mythologies and accusations. One of the great triumphs of the Enlightenment was giving us the scientific tools to more accurately understand the world, but those tools—like other facets of liberalism—are increasingly under attack.

So, what went wrong? Why do so many Americans, particularly young Americans, harbor such disdain for our liberal order? Why have we seen the rise of widespread social censorship, and why do books telling us that not all humans are created equal become mega-bestsellers? We believe a key reason is that too many proponents of the liberal order (ourselves included) have failed to defend our ideals vigorously. In the face of our complacency, a small but impassioned minority intent on dismantling the pillars of liberalism has been gaining ground, both within institutions and within the hearts and minds of the younger generation.

Why haven’t many of us stood up for our ideas? We posit two reasons. First, there is a sense of complacency: a lot of us look at illiberalism and think, “It can't happen here.” The United States was founded as an essentially liberal country. We were the first country to really seek to embody Enlightenment ideals (however imperfectly) from our birth. Throughout our 250-year history, despite fluctuating levels of government intervention in Americans' social and economic lives, we have never lost our political, economic, or epistemological liberal foundations. This long track record of resilience has led many of us to overlook the rising threat of illiberal ideals, assuming our liberal system is too robust to be torn down.

Adding to this complacency is the fact that many threats to our liberal social contract are largely invisible to those outside educational or academic circles. Cloaked in the guise of combating racism, Critical Race Theory takes aim at the liberal order; however, most people who haven’t been inside the halls of a university in the last 10 or so years may not be aware of this aspect. Critical Theory—including Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and others—generally opposes Enlightenment thinking, but its arguments are wrapped in jargon and mostly live in academic papers. For example, the book Is Everyone Really Equal? criticizes political, economic, and epistemic liberalism, but it’s not a mainstream bestseller; instead, it’s a widely-used textbook for prospective teachers. What begins in the academy often seeps out into schools and eventually permeates the broader society, and many teachers and professors of these ideologies explicitly describe themselves as activists or as scholar-activists whose goal is to turn the next generation onto these ideas. The threat is real, but the more anti-liberal facets of these ideologies aren’t exactly being shouted by CNN, which makes it easy to miss.

Second, as humans, we often abandon our ideals in the face of social pressure. Consider an organization consisting of ten people: one progressive and nine moderates. In 2020, each member starts to hear about Black Lives Matter (BLM). The progressive enthusiastically supports BLM, and loudly encourages his colleagues to do the same. What happens next illustrates how prone we are to jettison our ideals if doing so brings social rewards.

The first moderate faces a choice. He could thoroughly research BLM by investigating police violence nationwide, examining the evidence of systemic racism or system-wide equality, exploring BLM’s proposed program and what they actually advocate for, and making an informed decision about whether or not he supports the organization. But that’s a lot of work for not a lot of return. After all, his job doesn’t require that he understand BLM; the only immediate consequence is his colleague’s opinion of him. Consequently, he engages in what Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman calls “substitution.” As Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” For example, when participants were asked how much money Exxon should pay for nets to prevent birds from drowning in oil ponds, they did not perform an economic calculation. Instead, what drove their decision-making process was emotion: “the awful image of a helpless bird drowning, its feathers soaked in thick oil.”

Thus, the moderate engages in substitution. Instead of tackling the complex and difficult question “What do I think of BLM?” he asks himself an easier but more emotional question: “How much do I care about black people?” For any decent person, the answer is “quite a lot”—and so he signs on with his progressive colleague. The fact that he’s now supporting an illiberal ideology—one of BLM’s co-founders said in 2019 that “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society"—never occurs to him.

When the next moderate is asked the same question about whether he supports BLM, he has the same incentive as his colleague to engage in substitution, but with added social pressure: now two of his nine coworkers support BLM, and he risks losing social capital if he does not. As humans, we are social animals. Sociologist Brooke Harrington explains that we often value others’ perception of us more than our own survival, as social ostracism in our distant past often meant death anyway. As she puts it, “social death is more frightening than physical death.” And so, motivated by the social rewards for supporting BLM and the fear of social punishment if he does not, one coworker after another agrees to support BLM.

Adding to our social calculus is the fact that we all want to be seen as (and, even more importantly, see ourselves as) empathetic. In the example of BLM, we don’t want to be perceived as racists. If this means going along with an organization that says that police “cannot [be] reform[ed]” because they were “born out of slave patrols,” then that’s a small price to pay. This same desire to be seen as empathetic (again, especially by ourselves) holds when we are called to cancel a professor for saying something insensitive, or to condemn cultural appropriation, or to read and praise books and articles claiming that liberalism has failed marginalized people and that a new, totalitarian system is necessary for their salvation.

But why shouldn’t we be complacent? Why shouldn’t we go along to get along, and let our values bend here and there so we can fit in with the new illiberal crowd? One reason is that the stakes are no longer trivial. There is nothing magical about the liberal order that guarantees it will always triumph. History shows us that liberalism can give way to totalitarianism, as it did in Nazi Germany; or to empire, as in ancient Rome. In England, new rules regulate what people are allowed to say, with citizens facing fines or imprisonment for saying something the political establishment does not like. In Canada, a new bill supported by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would criminalize speech that those in power consider hateful. The United States is not immune to these dangers. Our Constitution alone is not a sufficient defense, because laws are downstream from culture. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be interpreted by illiberal justices (and have been in the 20th century); and when this happens, our rights can erode very rapidly indeed. Our freedom is sustained not by our geography or even our founding documents, but by our willingness to fight for liberalism—to defend it in the court of public opinion.

If we’re going to preserve the freedoms we cherish, that is what it will take. We must find the courage to stand up for our ideals—to speak and act based on principle alone. We must be open to new evidence that might change our views, but at the same time resist having our minds changed for us. We must prioritize truth over popular opinion.

In essence, we must think and act more like August Landmesser.

[ Source: The Lone German Man Who Refused to Give Hitler the Nazi Salute (businessinsider.com) ]

--

About the Authors

Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving our liberal social contract. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.

==

Whatever its flaws, every alternative to liberalism is a nightmare.