In a recent piece on Democracy Docket, Marc Elias wrote about how the Biden administration failed to secure free and fair elections because officials below the president and vice president were fixated on preserving norms. Attorney General Merrick Garland was particularly strict about not wanting to appear partisan. In Elias's words, he "brought norms to a Trump fight."
The problem comes down, as always, to the conflict between electoral politics and operational politics. You might even say between electoral politics and actual government.
I read the complaints of Democratic supporters who say that they want their party to fight with the fervor and effectiveness of Republicans. But the Republicans win by trampling the rules and trashing the systems that made the country functional. They win by creating instability, promoting suffering, and profiting from the stress that they create. Maybe the price of gasoline drops a little bit for a while. This allows Republican propagandists to crow about the great economy while they continue to undermine the future prospects of entire generations.
If Democrats use Republican-style tactics to force policy changes, the right wing message machine will scream about it nonstop. Yes, the Republican Party is hell bent on destroying the country as we knew and loved it, but gosh darn it you don't want to look partisan by pushing the efforts of the other party, that wants to halt and reverse the destruction.
The elements who managed to seize control of the government in 2024 are tightly focused on a divergent array of entirely bad policies for the average citizen. That divergence is all that saves us from the imposition of more complete totalitarianism, whether it's a technocracy craving some sci-fi dystopia with their billionaires on top, or a Christian nationalist theocracy. Christianity has been notoriously divided for centuries, so the theocrats can't even agree amongst themselves about the details of that dictatorship. Praise the Lord(s). The mess we have now is a result of letting all of the allied autocrats operate during the first weeks and months of the current regime, wrecking things in ways that make sense to each mastermind, but add up to a disorganized mess.
The statistical average citizen is politically apathetic and not extremely religious. Zealot factions gain power when a party figures out how to rope them in and uses them as a reliable percentage of support. They seem like the majority, because they get pushier and pushier as they feel validated by political rhetoric. The Democrats haven't really enjoyed a reliable bloc like that in years, as the "left" is actually more divided by splintering purity tests. This reflects a basic naivete among Democrats and left-leaning independents, that they feel they have the luxury of insisting on perfection.
Independent voters are the key to winning elections. It's a diverse population under one misleading heading. Political campaigns have to find the right balance between terror and Utopia to spook each element among them in the desired direction and convince them where safety and prosperity await them.
As the deteriorating situation makes it obvious that this specific regime needs to be replaced as soon as possible, the party that seeks to replace them needs to represent the rules-based order that used to protect everyone. Its imperfections annoyed many and stoked paranoia in some. Our country definitely got up to some reprehensible hijinks in the post-World War II world, and for all of the decades since, but we also provided a great deal of humanitarian support. That's been chiseled away steadily by selfishness in the general population and in the leaders they elected. Since the 1980s, dedicated selfishness in business has led to a massive shift in wealth toward a small percentage that now controls every major institution.
The party in power now is clearly dangerous both domestically and globally. They're prone to violence on a local and international level. Their hard-core supporters respect and admire violence. They will make the country much less safe for nearly everyone. The threat is obvious to groups targeted now, lulling the remainder into believing that the winners in power will always consider them teammates. Good luck cracking that loyalty. You may peel off a few. The remainder will keep pushing talking points that undermine confidence in the progress of any administration that displaces them.
Most people would rather be alive than dead, most of the time. None of us ask to be born, but life becomes a habit. We don't know whether heaven, hell, or oblivion wait for us when we die. We put off the discovery as long as possible. If tyranny becomes the norm, most people will try to go along, get along as best they can. That was the secret to the Big Brother regime in 1984. The proles were never going to rise up. Their drab existence was better than the high likelihood of not existing at all. Find what happiness you can.
We are approaching the last exit for a long time at which we can exert what's left of citizen power to make citizen interests a top priority again. Most people today don't know what "the liberal consensus" is or was. Conservatives were taught to loathe it, even though many rely on its programs, like Medicare and Social Security. The bustling, improving United States of the second half of the 20th Century depended on the idea that government exists to improve the lives of everyone, not to enhance the power of the already privileged and rely on them to distribute benefits to the general population as they see fit. Government, not private enterprise, sent us to the Moon. Government funds most basic research, which leads to new and better drugs, medical devices, environmental safeguards, and much more.
It's not all good. But the good parts are all that the Republicans are destroying right now. They're beefing up surveillance, unleashing a poorly trained and unaccountable police force that appears focused only on "undocumented immigrant criminals" but which has no restraining rules to keep it from turning the same tactics of kidnapping and imprisonment on anyone the regime considers a threat, or just an annoyance. The Navy operates like pirates (in the Caribbean, no less!). The current occupant of the Oval Office operates like a mob boss whose territory is at least the Western Hemisphere, if not the world.
Only the citizens themselves keep any nation from operating like a criminal syndicate. Authoritarian leaders have varying success repressing their populations, based on the traditions of a region and its people. The United States as a country was formed by people who moved here, creating it from intellectual principles. By the time of the American Revolution, there were multiple generations of the native-born, but still plenty of young adults from away who believed in the philosophical basis of the new nation and its charter. And immigrants have played a major role ever since. It is based not on thousands of years of ancestral possession but on an idea, handed from generation to generation, evolving steadily as our species learns more and more. Some should not be more equal than others once a very basic threshold is met.
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