Semidemocracy and fascism

[next_migration]

I want to return now to the topic of American political collapse, which I began earlier and quit in order to make a few digressions. Recall that civil war expert Barbara Walter calls attention to the perils of factionalization, especially when politics is based on the interests of “superfactions” that share multiple group identities, such as geography, race, and religion, and especially when a faction that has held disproportionate power feels itself losing it. That all sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Our politics, our social lives and even our science are increasingly eaten up by Red vs. Blue Faction battles. Many of us have not fit happily into either of the major-party factions and, if we do not feel personally threatened by one, wander back and forth according to which issue exercises us at the moment. Do you want low taxes or equal rights for women? Liberal gun laws or a functioning environment? They aren’t obviously mutually exclusive, but nobody’s offering both, so pick one!

I will make my position explicit: although I don’t love the Democratic Party, the text posted below is written from the position of a Blue Faction supporter, because the single issue I now consider paramount is whether we will continue to have free elections. (Free and fair would be nice, but our elections for many offices are now semi-fair at best.) I would vote for promoters of an easily accessible universal franchise who were anti-choice and pro-coal over pro-environment, pro-choice people who wanted to not just stop as many opponents as possible from voting, but arrogate to themselves (only) the right to simply discard the results of elections that didn’t come out their way. Unfortunately, that latter is increasingly the Republican Party’s official position. I have nothing against the majority of ordinary Red voters, for whom I will later have plenty of red-state destinations to suggest (I want them to be safe and happy too!), but I regard the Red factional leaders and their extremist followers as a profound danger to our country and many of its residents. If that will offend you, you may wish to skip reading this article.

 

 

Minority rule is common in American states today, even excluding the issue of voter suppression and considering only those people who actually can and do vote. With the detailed data now available on voter identities and locations, computer-assisted gerrymandering now allow the party controlling a state when district lines are drawn to guarantee itself a large majority in the legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives delegation even if they gain a minority of the votes. Both parties have gerrymandered and still do today, to be clear, but recently the practice has mostly benefitted the Republican Party, following the brilliantly strategized Project Redmap campaign in 2010 in which conservative megadonors poured money into conservative candidates for specific legislative districts in swing states.

Taking narrow control of many legislatures just in time for post-census redistricting, the GOP then imposed extreme gerrymanders that ensured they would hold majorities, or even supermajorities, in future elections even if they lost the popular vote. These gerrymanders frequently focus on minimizing the voice of city residents in legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives. As a notable example, Wisconsin voters in 2018 cast 203,000 more votes for Democratic than Republican candidates for the state assembly, yet Republicans claimed 63 of 99 seats, leading the Election Integrity Project to rate Wisconsin’s election integrity as comparable to that of Bahrain and the Congo.

Wisconsin’s congressional districts are similarly gerrymandered. As of this writing, their congressmen include three Democrats, one from a slightly Republican-leaning district and two from districts that lean Democrat by 18-25 points, and five Republicans from districts that lean Republican by 7-12 points. Thus, more Democratic votes than Republican votes are “wasted.” This is not an accident, but the result of meticulous data analysis. In a “war against cities,” as Paul London calls it, the Republican Party engages in ever greater efforts to ensure rural dominance of state legislatures regardless of voters’ geographic distribution or, of course, party preferences.

Democrats who are effectively disenfranchised by gerrymandering are naturally unhappy, but it’s not great for moderate Republicans either, which is why some states are facing enough citizen backlash that attempts to force reform are being made. Few people vote in primaries, and those tend to be the most dedicated partisans—or, put another way, the most fanatical. In a competitive district, to the extent that those still exist, partisans of both parties know that nominating an obvious kook will guarantee loss in the general election. In a non-competitive district, it is all too easy for extremists to win the primary and then automatically win the general election. Yes, when the extremist is a white nationalist or QAnon nut, it doesn’t speak well of the electorate that they prefer that to a Democrat. Still, most of them might rather have had a sane Republican, and if gerrymandering prevents that, then it’s a problem for them too.

In several GOP minority-ruled states, legislatures have then passed laws to strip state-level executive officials, such as the governor or attorney general, of their customary powers whenever the people seek to keep some check on the legislature’s power by electing a Democrat to statewide office. Other comfortably GOP-ruled states have targeted the legal authority of African-American progressives elected to office in majority-Black cities. In such states, the “war against cities” does not only mean that state governments will not support expenditures that mostly benefit urban people and economies, such as public transport. They sometimes actively seek to harm urbanites’ interests: cutting funding for programs that are believed or claimed to benefit primarily urbanites, tying the hands of local officials who wish to reduce police brutality, forbidding urban mask mandates during a pandemic, sending COVID-19 vaccines first or more generously to rural counties even if the ruralites don’t want them, passing voting laws tailored to impede urbanites, attempting to throw out or confiscate all the ballots of urban counties, and passing laws entitling GOP state boards to take over urban election boards.

You will recall that civil-war expert Barbara F. Walter, in How Civil Wars Start, mentioned that nations transitioning towards or away from democracy are at particular risk of civil war. This was measured by a “polity index scale” running from -10 (absolute tyranny) to +10 (perfect democracy) as calculated by the Polity Project. Nations in the mid-range of the scale (“anocracies”), -5 to +5, were at much more risk than either democracies (+6 to +10) or full-scale autocracies; the -1 to +1 range was by far the most dangerous. Since 1800, the United States had always been in the +8 to +10 range, usually at +10. In 2016, because our elections were considered by international observers to have been free but partially unfair, our score dropped to +8. It later dropped to +7 when President Trump, as the culmination of a variety of efforts to expand his powers and immunity to law, simply ignored Congress’ “right and authority to oversee the executive branch,” and was backed in that by Congressional Republicans. After the 2020 election, the basic democratic criterion of a peaceful transition of power was not met, as on January 6, 2021, Trump responded to his loss by whipping up an intended lynch mob to violently assault the Congress. This attempted self-coup dropped our polity index temporarily to +5, into the “semi-democratic” range. “Let that sink in. We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes.

One potential outcome of current trends is a fascist coup d’êtat. Support by Republican elected officials for right-wing violence and even overthrow of the U.S. government has ratcheted upwards during the past year and a half, and become increasingly overt. For example—from late August 2021—consider extremist Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s claim that violent January 6 rioters who were arrested after trying to forcibly overturn the presidential election were “political prisoners” and that if other elections were “rigged” and “stolen” there would be “bloodshed.” Cawthorn gave lip service to not wanting to “hav[e] to pick up arms against a fellow American,” but made it clear that that’s what he thought should happen if elections continued to be “stolen” by Democrats’ winning them. As author Stephen Marche puts it in The Next Civil War, “The Republican Party has become a movement with a political and an armed wing.” This is reminiscent of parties in other countries that have been torn apart by violence, such as Northern Ireland.

Since we, as believers in climate change, are part of the reality-based community, let’s state as a fact that Biden, like him or not, won the 2020 presidential election by several million votes. No significant election fraud was found in several swing states that went for Biden, sometimes while electing Republicans to statewide offices. To the extremist wing of today’s GOP, “a steal” means enough Black people voting to affect the outcome of an election. They are responding by creating legal or pseudo-legal mechanisms to prevent urbanites and minorities from voting in future, or even to discard votes that have been cast and counted. Unfortunately, these mechanisms, including driving out honest election officials, replacing them with fanatics, and seizing power over urban election boards, are well in progress in several swing states. There is a national campaign, far more professional and better-funded than the shambolic 2021 attempted coup, dedicated to ensuring that if Democrats manage to vote in swing states in sufficient numbers to win the presidential race in 2024, Trump-loyalist Secretaries of State or gerrymandered GOP legislatures will be able to simply hand their states’ votes to presumed candidate Trump.

This would constitute a coup d’êtat, which would create a major crisis for other national governments and drop us into—at the very best, assuming that other elections weren’t also hopelessly tainted or nullified by decree of the GOP—that deadly semi-autocratic polity index midrange in which civil wars are most likely. You might assume that such a war would be started by the faction who were disenfranchised, who would reasonably lack faith in the possibility of a future democratic process. However, that faction is not a dominant group, and is far less well-armed and emotionally prepared than the dominant faction to start an outright civil war (more on that later). There certainly would be street protests, some either violent or met with police violence, which could be used as pretext to whip up further hatred and fear of the protesting faction and call for mass militia violence, which the coup government might well encourage.

 

Slouching towards genocide

If even those anti-democratic schemes aren’t enough to let the right wing hold power in an increasingly urbanized and brown-skinned America, they are making it increasingly clear, Plan C for some is to simply seize power and shoot the winners and anyone who stands up in their defense. The fact that many Republican Congressmen say they would have favored the overturning of the presidential election through a violent assault on Congress is emblematic of the problem. A poll in June 2021 found that about 8% of surveyed Americans agreed not only that the 2020 election was “stolen” and Biden “illegitimate” (which over a fifth of respondents espoused), but that “use of force is justified” to place Trump back into the office. The poll had a 4% margin of error, so this violence-supporting group might range from 10 million to 31 million in size, though the middle-of-the-road estimate was 21 million. Assuming the number to be 21 million, at least 7 million own guns; 3 million have served in the military and been trained to kill; and 6 million would espouse support for right-wing extremist groups, though less than a million actually belong to one. More than half also express support for elements of white nationalist and QAnon conspiracy theories.

That’s a lot of potentially violent and dangerous people. Try to imagine if seven million armed urban Americans had espoused the belief in 2016 that Hillary Clinton’s loss after Russian and FBI intervention (and her own crappy, self-centered campaign) was illegitimate, therefore she should be installed in office by killing whoever stood in her way. It’s hard to imagine such a counterfactual, but imagine the frothing among conservative talking heads if it had been the case—even if it was all talk, and not one shot was ever fired or fire extinguisher swung at a Capitol police officer.

Moreover, that survey wasn’t a one-time aberration following the stress and conflict over Trump’s attempted coup. A poll of over 8000 U.S. citizens in May 2022 found that half expected a civil war within the next few years; nearly a third claimed to believe Trump’s Big Lie, while a fifth espoused belief in QAnon conspiracy theories; even more claimed to support white nationalist conspiracy ideas. As a result, almost a quarter said they would support violence “to preserve an American way of life based on Western European traditions,” and about half of those said they would participate to some degree; 7.1% said they would personally kill to support a political goal. That would equate to 18 million Americans.

There are crazy extremists in every political faction, of course, and the left is no exception. However, right-wing violence driven largely by dissatisfied rural men, sometimes traveling long distances to cities to do anything from intimidating residents to killing them, has hugely increased in recent years, and greatly exceeds serious leftist violence. Increasingly, anyone doing anything perceived as “liberal,” whether executing the duties of an elected legislator or school board member, peacefully assembling to petition for redress of grievances, or even attending a book reading in a bookstore or library, has to fear the possible appearance of armed and menacing militia members.

We are also seeing overtly eliminationist rhetoric that calls for the mass killing of disliked groups, put out mostly by civil war advocates and plotters, white nationalists, and bloodthirsty conspiracy theorists (groups that have considerable overlap). In 2019, white nationalist Congressman Steve King posted a meme on his Facebook campaign page saying “Folks keep talking about a civil war. One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.” He “annotated the image with a smirking emoji and mused, ‘Wonder who would win....’” He doesn’t quite say that trans people will be slaughtered en masse in his planned future, but it’s certainly implicit.

In the previous chapter we noted how the escalating costs of a complex society lead to resentment among working classes who have to pay for it. The solution some of America’s resentful workers or self-proclaimed workers envision, egged on by fascist or “populist” opinion molders, is to exterminate everyone whose jobs appear overly complex, leaving the Real Americans free of the burden of their existence. Here are two anonymous comments responding to conservative blog posts on the subject of COVID-19 vaccination:

 

[A] lot of non-covaxxers have guns and ammunition and know how to use them, and they will not meekly submit to the PMC coronapansies of whom they know they could make very short work. Not only that, these Flyover-Folk know how to do for themselves and get things done while the coastal PMC office-fauna would prove entirely useless in a situation where modern urban amenities are scarce.

 

When does the majority lose enough faith in the system that they begin taking the law into their own hands? ... It does not take a lot of intelligence to go through an employee list of an institution and compare it with a local tax map. Do you happen to have the same name as someone on the Pfizer board and have a fancy car parked in your garage? It's probably time to start thinking about that stuff.

 

These comments are quoted not because they are extreme, but because they’re relatively moderate, since the website’s owner at that time censored direct calls for violence. PMC means Professional-Managerial Class, that is, anyone who has a college degree and an office desk, except for those in a few professions viewed as blue-collar or reliably conservative. If you fall into that category, or expect to once you’re out of college, you might be surprised to know that there are possibly millions of Americans who not only want you dead, but fantasize about personally killing you. It will come as no surprise to Black Americans, immigrants, sexual minorities, etc. that many such people count them among the evil Elite, whatever their income, often with the rationale that their groups are favored by the PMC or failed to support Trump.

We must ask about current violence, as we do about electoral-suppression efforts: where does it go from there? Remember Stanton’s “ten stages of genocide”? Walter estimates that we are at least in stage five (“organization”), if not stage six (“polarization”). The first can’t be argued with: there are militias hoarding and training with weapons and ammo, extremist youth joining the military for the purpose of learning to kill, and extremist veterans passing on their training to others. These activities have been going on for decades. They used to ramp up whenever a Democrat was elected; an alarming difference is that they did not decline when Trump was elected, but actually increased. As Steven Marche puts it:

 

Calls to violence . . . [and] to resist white replacement are normal in rightwing media. The inevitable result is the promotion of violent resistance to white replacement. . . . [Republican officials’] calls for violence, while never direct, create a climate of rage that solidifies into regular physical assaults on their enemies. The technical term for this process is stochastic terrorism. . . .

 

There’s a continuum between stage four, dehumanization, and stage six, polarization, where the aspect of hateful speech is concerned. Some might say that we aren’t into stage six yet. Others might suggest that people’s increasingly sorting themselves geographically by faction, because their physical safety or livelihood was explicitly threatened when they lived among the other faction or they feared that it might be, is an early “lite” version of coerced segregation. Some might also say that new state laws making it legal for drivers to mow down peaceful protesters who step into a street (or are even crossing a street) or for armed citizens to shoot anyone in a public place who is perceived as threatening—with the clear, if unspoken understanding that these will never, ever be applied to leftists running over abortion-clinic picketers or to Black people shooting confrontational rednecks—amount to early declarations of open season on the dangerous, subhuman Blue Tribe. Once polarization reaches a certain level, only the stage of “preparation” remains to create the practical requirements that pave the way for acts of genocidal violence much more severe and numerous than the white supremacist mass shootings seen to date. We may be closer than we think to widespread eruptions of terrorism that will make today look like the good old days.

I’m largely criticizing the right wing here because they are most of the problem. To be clear, bigotry and hatred are increasing among both major factions; that’s how polarization works. It’s easy to find liberals who will assert that all Republicans are evil and stupid. This is wrong, both factually and morally, and just as ugly as right-wing bigotry. The difference is that you’ll have to search much longer to find a large group of armed leftists who will tell you that their hope and plan for the future is to kill all of those people, down to their kids and old folks.

It’s still the case that many people who say hateful things and even espouse violence are just shooting their mouths off out of frustration. Middle-class, educated, and/or nonwhite urbanites should have sympathy for the difficulties faced by working-class ruralites (even if those people are often notably unsympathetic to the problems of the urban working poor). However, they also need to recognize, for their own safety, that there’s a strong fascist tendency among the American right that sees them as ideal scapegoats. Fascists despise “the weak.” If you don’t own guns and can’t imagine yourself killing a human being even in self-defense, that doesn’t make fascists think it would be unfair to murder you. Your very helplessness makes such people, like the guy who mowed down a bunch of bicycle racers with his truck just for being bike riders, think that you deserve death even more. People who have adopted fascist ideology can rarely be reached by moral arguments, because, after eating up years of propaganda about how subhuman and threatening outgroup members are, they simply do not value those people’s lives.

The history of colonialism shows that whenever a group that has lots of guns decides to wipe out a group that lacks guns, the result is a slaughter. Statista reported in 2021 that 50% of Republicans admit to owning at least one gun, versus only 21% of Democrats. Steve King, imbecilic as he is, had a real point that his intended victims ought to pay attention to. More urban liberals and minorities are buying guns and learning to shoot these days because they have come to believe that the best way to deter fascists from showing up on their doorstep to kill them the day after the rule of law breaks down, or killing them on the streets today, is to make that a risky proposition. (They may also get around to noticing that it’s a problem if one side of a gunfight has military-grade body armor, not to mention hard-to-monitor personal radios, and the other has sweatshirts and bike helmets and easily spied-upon cell phones.) I believe they are wise to do so, and in fact, would be wise to step up the pace of it tenfold or a hundredfold.

At the same time, as Walter suggests, preparations for self- or community defense can create a security trap. If a dominant superfaction’s leaders are training it to fear and hate another faction as an existential threat, seeing that faction arming itself will be interpreted as evidence that “Them” really are plotting to wipe “Us” out, creating a rationale for the ingroup to escalate its preparations for war even further. A vicious cycle can all too easily ensue. Still, since each member of each faction only has two hands, twenty guns per capita vs. one is a far less unbalanced scenario than two vs. 0.1.

Since I strongly oppose Republican fascism, you may assume that I’m a Democrat. In truth, I’m very displeased with the Democratic Party for several reasons, and vote for them only as the lesser evil. They’ve become a party dedicated to comfortable business-as usual. Their more liberal wing admit that we have environmental problems, yet seldom admit that we face fundamental resource supply problems that will limit how we can handle the environmental problems. Cornucopia economics is alive and well among them. The moderate BAU majority refuse to consider solving solvable problems, while resources are still plentiful, by reinstating the high taxes on the super-rich that were a feature of America’s most prosperous decades. The party’s geriatric leaders aren’t actively seeking to make matters worse, unlike the GOP’s leadership, but they sure aren’t doing much to make them better. In an ideal world, I’d like to see the whole party dumpstered and replaced with a new party.

That said, we used to have a nation in which two major parties competed for votes in semi-democratic elections by proposing different platforms. Whoever got more votes held power for the next couple of years, and whoever got fewer faced the need to either change their platform or learn to make it sound more appealing. That’s changed, and not only due to extreme gerrymandering. Perhaps when the GOP had no platform at all in 2020, except “Whatever Donald Trump wants,” that was the inflection point. Now, we have one party that seeks to win votes, and one party that seeks to suppress or discard votes and hints ever more openly that if that’s not enough to give them total power, perhaps someday soon they will take it by killing Democratic officeholders and candidates, killing election officials ... maybe party activists and voting rights campaigners ... maybe voters, as happened in the South up to the 1960s? Again, I wonder, how far would it go? The fact that elected officials keep speaking in support of armed white nationalists and QAnon goons is a really bad sign.

The fundamental choice the two parties are now offering us is not between two party platforms neither of which we love. It’s whether we will continue to have a democratic system at all in the future. As you will see throughout my writings, I favor secular democracy, whatever its failings, and I assume that most of the people who take the threats we face seriously enough to read this will too. Those of you who don’t should really ask yourselves how certain you are that the would-be dictators or theocrats would create a nation you’d be happy in, long-term—because if you weren’t, your ability to protest, riot, or even whine about it on the Internet would be gone. Those who do need to start asking themselves what they will do, and how they will try to survive and protect their loved ones, if the United States sinks into fascism, not in some distant post-industrial future, but in 2025. The possibility is all too real.

Another possibility, which might follow after a fascist regime or, at least for some states, provide a superior alternative to it, is that in the relatively near future there will be no United States. All states and empires eventually cease to exist as such; the time when the U.S. as we know it vanishes might be sooner than we think. Let’s consider that possibility and its implications next.

 

 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Well, while I strongly disagree with your assessment -- and in case you're curious, feel strongly that neither party deserves support -- thanks for being forthcoming about your political views.

[next_migration]

You're welcome. There is no such thing as an unbiased person. I figure it is best to be very clear about where my bias lies and let people decide for themselves whether my opinions of things related to their own are worth reading or not.

I too do not really feel that the Dems deserve support. I support them because if I don't like what they do in 2025, they won't try to stop me from voting to replace them in 2028. If a reasonably sane third party had any chance of getting off the ground and gaining national leverage, I would happily vote for it.

[lincoln_lynx]

I support them because if I don't like what they do in 2025, they won't try to stop me from voting to replace them in 2028.

I find the whole thing funny.

Republicans truly believe Biden won because Democrats changed voting laws. (I don't know if that's true, since Trump shanked his base like a meth-head having a manic episode, and when people in your own base feel betrayed then Rust-Belters he flipped probably felt even less positively disposed.) Naturally, thinking Democrats won unfairly, Republicans want voting laws tightened...and are accused of cheating for doing so. You, a Blue Faction member, will probably say your side was justified in making those changes, I don't care to argue the point, but Red Faction feel equally justified.

While Blue Factioners demonize Red Faction, voting Blue No Matter Who, convinced if they don't keep playing along, in what was recognized for quite some time as a rigged game, Democracy itself will die; Red Factioners demonize Blue Faction, convinced if they don't keep playing along in what they too recognize as a rigged game they'll suffer disenfranchisement; when in actuality the elite will dispense with democracy, disenfranchise Red and Blue, and leave both sides morally and financially bankrupt.

Silver Lining? 20 years from now when I'm bald and rockin' wooden dentures I can remind everybody I was right as usual.

[next_migration]

It is very true, and dangerous, that both sides are unreasonably demonizing each other. And yes, both sides are inclined to assume they are always right. I would say that both sides are usually wrong, but that one has been a lot wronger than the other in the past decade.

Voting has mostly become more difficult in recent years, but many states encouraged mail voting during the pandemic. Our poll workers around here are all senior citizens and protecting them, as well as high-risk voters, as much as possible did seem very reasonable to me. The assumption that it is Blue people who vote by mail is not supported by surveys; supporters of both parties like vote by mail, and Red voters are more often elderly, so making mail voting easier didn't only benefit Blues.

However, those suggesting that states should be flipped post-facto by discarding all the ballots from the most urban counties claimed that it was because of "fraud." They did not say, in public, "Too many non-white legal registered voters managed to vote, who we think might have been unable to if voting had been more difficult, so let's toss them all." The claim was that those votes were faked: the voters weren't real, the votes were cast by paid operatives voting repeatedly or the counting faked by the Urbanites or voting machines altered by Italian satellites or bamboo ballots or Sharpies or something.

None of these claims held up. They were all lies. Yet Trump and his acolytes continue to tell the Big Lie, which is dangerous, because it encourages everyone to distrust the basic mechanisms of democracy, and encourages violent extremists to believe that their hold on power, hence "their country," is being "stolen" from them - and, therefore, might rightly be "taken back" by anything from skulduggery to bloodshed. The Democratic Party has a lot of incompetence to answer for, but this is one game they have not been playing.

[lincoln_lynx]

The Democratic Party has a lot of incompetence to answer for, but this is one game they have noto been playing.

Au contraire, establishment Democrats, media flacks, and a not insignificant number of Left-leaning voters declared or implied Trump was a illegitimate President. Some I know personally told me Russians hacked voting machines.

[next_migration]

I didn't know anyone who was promoting Russian-hacking conspiracy theories, but I don't doubt that they existed. Polarization means more paranoid BS on both sides. It's equally garbage no matter who does it.

However, I must note that we didn't then see a bunch of swing-state Dems win 2018 primaries for state offices governing elections by ranting that the 2016 election was stolen and they would not have certified their states' votes - with the implication that if those states voted again for Trump in 2020, they would sabotage the electoral count or certification. The possibility that those in power will openly discard election results they don't like was unthinkable in the U.S. before the Trump era. The paranoid or lying psychos on the extreme left might equally desire to end democracy because the results usually don't suit them, but they aren't winning primaries and on the brink of taking high office, while those on the right increasingly are.

As for Democratic Party leaders or Dem-friendly media, all I saw them do was grouse and grumble because our system yet again allowed the loser (by a large margin) of the popular vote to take office. But nobody of any influence suggested that Joe Biden should refuse to accept the Electoral College votes or that someone should send a lynch mob to bust up the Congressional vote-counting session, two other things that even Richard Nixon would have hesitated to do.

The problem with polarization is that everyone is inclined to look at the Other tribe and say "see how terrible what They are doing is", even if it is the exact same thing as their own tribe is doing, which is often the case. Because this hypocrisy is so widespread and widely known, media bothsidesism is presumed to be reasonable, and often is. But almost all of us like to think there are certain ways in which the other faction *really is* worse, and we then need to admit that there might be other ways in which our own faction *really is* worse - or else admit that we are simply demonizing the Others, in which case we definitely are part of the problem.

[lincoln_lynx]

The paranoid or lying psychos on the extreme left might equally desire to end democracy because the results usually don't suit them, but they aren't winning primaries and on the brink of taking high office, while those on the right increasingly are.

I'll grant you that.

As for Democratic Party leaders or Dem-friendly media, all I saw them do was grouse and grumble because our system yet again allowed the loser (by a large margin) of the popular vote to take office.

From a few seconds of searching:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html

https://www.insider.com/joe-biden-says-he-agrees-trump-is-illegitimate-president-2019-5

But almost all of us like to think there are certain ways in which the other faction *really is* worse, and we then need to admit that there might be other ways in which our own faction *really is* worse - or else admit that we are simply demonizing the Others, in which case we definitely are part of the problem.

Indeed.

[next_migration]

Three years after Biden's party lost, he verbally agrees with some lady at a rally who views Trump as illegitimate. Is that a big deal? When the chips were down and Trump was coming to power, he didn't refuse to count the electoral votes, and Hillary didn't send a mob to Congress to stop the counting. Grumbling the word "illegitimate" and actually refusing to recognize or obey federal law because you don't like the party in power are two very different things.

You could also compare it to all the racist liars who pretended Obama wasn't a legitimate president. That wasn't good - it was a large step on the road to where we are now - but as long as they were just flapping their gums on the internet, it wasn't actually an act of raising themselves to be higher authorities than the state.

The current concern is that Trump and his cronies are threatening prosecutors that if they charge Trump with any of the several crimes he's rather obviously committed, there will be mob violence. I can't think of any modern incident in which a liberal crook threatened to send a lynch mob after prosecutors. Prosecutors have to know that seating 12 honest, impartial jurors will be nearly impossible; if they fear that making the attempt will inspire a Kristallnacht, they won't even try. And then Trump, even while not in office, is literally untouchable.

[lincoln_lynx]

I should think you'd be concerned about your party's leadership questioning a President's legitimacy since that rhetoric made possible the outrages you point out. When you normalize the idea of a President being illegitimate you pave the way for convincing people it's right to prevent a President from assuming or keeping his/her office.

On the latest Trump episode, in my opinion Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he took those files, he knew the DoJ would go after him, and wants the drama that's unfolding. The worst thing the DoJ could've done to Trump was ignore him but instead they somehow thought it sensible pursuing him on a matter of improper behavior surrounding top secret files when not many years ago they let Clinton slide.

[next_migration]

They're not exactly my party, first off. I voted for both George Bushes - two men who these days would be screamed down as RINOs. If the GOP ever starts running candidates like that again, I might consider voting for them again someday.

Before some Democrats muttered about Trump's legitimacy, some Republicans lied about Obama's. Before that, some Democrats spoke of Bush as having an asterisk by his name because he also won despite losing the popular vote, and after the Florida recount was prevented. Was that the start of it? I am not so sure, because I remember that during Clinton's administration, some of the nut wing claimed that because he had gone on a trip to Russia as a student, they believed he had renounced his citizenship while there (being a Commie, ya know, Commies do that sort of thing) and was therefore ineligible to be president. Was that perhaps the start? I don't recall any such rhetoric being directed at GHW Bush, Reagan, Carter, or even the unelected Ford, aka His Accidency.

I don't see how the government could just let Trump hang onto top secret federal property, apparently including nuclear secrets. Aside from wondering what he might do with them - could be anything, as the man has zero scruples - what happens when he dies or goes to a nursing home, and then Don Jr. or Javanka has possession of unguarded cardboard boxes full of critical secrets? Clinton did nothing close to that bad. Let me ask you: Obama was far too smart to do that, but what if he HAD? Just suppose that Obama had boxes full of stolen federal property that could get people killed, or help us lose a war someday, sitting around his house in Chicago and refused to give them back. What should the feds do? Would you really not want them to go take the stuff back because it would be controversial and upset the liberals?

[lincoln_lynx]

They're not exactly my party, first off. I voted for both George Bushes -

We all make mistakes. :D

Before some Democrats muttered about Trump's legitimacy, some Republicans lied about Obama's. Before that, some Democrats spoke of Bush as having an asterisk by his name because he also won despite losing the popular vote, and after the Florida recount was prevented. Was that the start of it? I am not so sure, because I remember that during Clinton's administration, some of the nut wing claimed that because he had gone on a trip to Russia as a student, they believed he had renounced his citizenship while there (being a Commie, ya know, Commies do that sort of thing) and was therefore ineligible to be president. Was that perhaps the start? I don't recall any such rhetoric being directed at GHW Bush, Reagan, Carter, or even the unelected Ford, aka His Accidency.

Grumbling on the fringes here and there doesn't normalize a idea. When mainstream media spend the better part of four years suggesting a President was elected due to Russian interference and heavily implying that President is Putin's puppet, well now, that would normalize a idea.

I don't see how the government could just let Trump hang onto top secret federal property, apparently including nuclear secrets.

Presidents can declassify whatever they want from what I've heard. I'll wager this will go to the Supreme Court, where, rightly, we'll see them decide that was dumb, and going forward Presidents won't have that ability.

Clinton did nothing close to that bad

We obviously won't agree here. I, and many other Americans, not just Republicans, will see them on par.

Let me ask you: Obama was far too smart to do that, but what if he HAD? Just suppose that Obama had boxes full of stolen federal property that could get people killed, or help us lose a war someday, sitting around his house in Chicago and refused to give them back. What should the feds do? Would you really not want them to go take the stuff back because it would be controversial and upset the liberals?

As I said earlier, Presidents can declassify whatever they want, yes, it's exceedingly stupid, but they have that power.

[next_migration]

Apparently that's not true of nuclear documents - but a point people keep missing is that even had the documents been unclassified (without a word to the agencies involved in managing their status), they would still have been federal property. Because the president is supposed to be the people's representative, rather than their king, and is supposed to be replaced in short order by others who need to be able to know what happened in the past, the administration's documents are federal property, to be kept by the national archives, rather than the president's personal property. He's free to keep a diary, if he can, or have photocopies made for him, if legalities permit. He's no more free to take away important documents than to pull paintings off the walls when he's leaving.

While the media and the Democratic Party leadership are different groups, the idea that Trump was Putin's *puppet* was certainly way overplayed by left-wing media. No trustworthy evidence that Putin had blackmail material on him ever turned up, so most, let's say mainstream media gave up that idea. However, they continued to remark upon his unusual, sometimes almost obsequious fondness for Putin, which is not made up; it was on camera repeatedly. People can't be blamed for wondering what motivated that.

If you asked me to list a couple of major areas in which the Dems are now doing a significantly worse job than the GOP, I could do that. (Never mind for the moment what they are.) Would you say the same about the GOP, and if so, would their legal, rhetorical and physical attacks on elections be one of the things that you agree they are handling poorly?

[lincoln_lynx]

I have no interest in the legal minutiae so I'll defer to you on that. That said, one would assume there are copies, and I find the National Archives gatekeeping (in FOIA requests not always getting approved) nonsensical. If a file is truly declassified then anybody should be able to read them at will otherwise they should've remained classified.

If you asked me to list a couple of major areas in which the Dems are now doing a significantly worse job than the GOP, I could do that. (Never mind for the moment what they are.) Would you say the same about the GOP, and if so, would their legal, rhetorical and physical attacks on elections be one of the things that you agree they are handling poorly?

Yes and yes.

[next_migration]

"If a file is truly declassified then anybody should be able to read them at will otherwise they should've remained classified."

Agree regarding the second part. (Plenty of information is not classified but still rightly treated as sensitive.)

Like I said, I'm not happy with some of the policies supported mostly by the Democratic Party. (I do hesitate to mention which and maybe start an ugly argument with someone over those things, which are not relevant to my interests here.) In a democracy, or even a two-party semidemocracy, if I am particularly unhappy with one of those policies I can, as Joe Rogan recently remarked, vote Republican. "Throw the bastards out" is what people always used to say. But the GOP seeks to make it impossible to throw them out. IMHO, that's more dangerous than almost anything else a party might do. If I dislike my current employer and think of leaving, but an alternative would require me to sign myself into permanent servitude, I can pretty well assume that that employer would start abusing me even worse in the future, once I was trapped.

[lincoln_lynx]

Needless to say I think you have too much faith in government but to each their own.

I'd be interested in what your problems are with the Democratic Party, you can send me a private message on Dreamwidth if you like, but I'll understand if you don't want to spend anymore time on digressions.