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Kathy Hughes's avatar

I fear we are in for a very difficult battle. If we are to preserve democracy in an environment where one of our major political parties expressly no longer believes in government of, for and by the people, it will be up to ordinary people to fight this political battle. Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, the authors of “How Democracies Die,” have a new book out called “The Tyranny of the Majority,” in which they detailed how other countries in Europe made political reforms we failed to make to prevent our current situation. Ziblatt and Levitsky recently had an article in the New York Times in which they admit they were surprised at the January 6 insurrection. I was not especially surprised at it, and it was fairly obvious that Trump was at the center of events.

We may not be able to prevent Trump from trying the same tricks again, or prevent him from receiving a majority of the electoral college vote and having his groupies vote for him again. They live in a fantasy world. Trump is fundamentally a political symptom of our current problems, and it isn’t enough to deal with him through the court system. He has to be dealt with politically, and I’m not certain our system is capable of that.

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Annabel Ascher's avatar

Last night a friend of mine, a lifelong Democrat, said that she couldn’t stand the situation we are in, she feels the Democrats have abandoned us, and she is considering voting Green in 2024.

This is my response:

That won’t get us out of this mess. Sadly we have only two parties. And only one that is anywhere near functional.

It isn’t that the Dems are not listening. It is that the system itself is broken.

If you vote green the Republicans have a better chance of winning. And they have already announced the plan for American fascism if they win. That is not a campaign tactic by the Dems. It’s a fact.

And even if the Dems win, they do not have nearly the latitude to govern that people think they do.

The corporate oligarchs are more powerful than this government. That is the true enemy. Not the Democrats.

The choice is how much harm will be done. The Republicans are in alignment with the oligarchs. The Democrats will do what they can to avoid the worst harm.

So what can we do? Vote blue to keep the level of authoritarianism where it is, instead of a bare fascist dictatorship. Which would be a hell greater than we can imagine.

And figure out how to either bring down the oligarchy or take ourselves en masse out of its control.

We won’t be able to do any of that under Republican Christo-fascist rule. We will be too busy surviving and maybe risking our lives in the resistance.

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