This is not a drill. The Rubicon has been crossed. The barbarians are at the gate. Choose your metaphor. Once again, Thom has cut to the chase and walked us through the history and shown us the reality as no one else can. He is not alone. There are a few others who know and who can articulate what we are facing, although very few with hi…
This is not a drill. The Rubicon has been crossed. The barbarians are at the gate. Choose your metaphor. Once again, Thom has cut to the chase and walked us through the history and shown us the reality as no one else can. He is not alone. There are a few others who know and who can articulate what we are facing, although very few with his insight and talent. Historian Tim Snyder is another person whom we need to look to and listen to.
We should be very afraid when Republicans, or former Republicans such as Stuart Stevens, Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, Jennifer Rubin, and Robert Kagan are declaring an emergency and warning of impending doom for democracy. They too are all eloquent and incredibly brilliant. I believe Thom spoke about Kagan’s editorial today.
It turns out that democracy entails much more than just voting, presidents leading their party, and legislators passing laws. Democracy is high-maintenance. Thom implores us to all be involved, but one often wonders if even activism is enough. What forces are we up against and how many citizens will ever maintain a high level of participation, and will that ever be enough?
Sacrifices are a part of the deal. Total focus and dedication on the part of many will be required. Leaders who recognize the urgency and refuse to back down or compromise are essential. All hands on deck. It may already be too late. Or the ugliness may take years to dissipate and recede into a far-out fringe again.
Unfortunately, irrationality, once it reaches a certain critical point and fever pitch is quite unaffected by rationality. All the words of the people listed above and of others fall on deaf ears when ignorance leads to extremism and fanaticism. If democracy survives this test, it will because enough people are still resistant to irrationality and fundamental insecurity. It will not survive the next test, as I have harped on incessantly, unless we stop miseducating our citizens in authoritarian bureaucracies.
Thom prescription to remedy what ails America is (as always) spot on when he noted that “All genuinely patriotic Americans must unite to repudiate this quick-spreading cancer in the Republican Party.”
Although we need to defeat the oligarchs and their teams of co-conspirators in the public, private and academic sectors, I believe that must start with first breaking the control that the oligarchs have over our government. Until that happens they will continue to silence the voices of any number of individuals or individual movements, thus perpetuating their harm inducing status quos at our expense. Some time ago, Thom observed that the Lucy Van Pelt Effect governs public sector decision-making, because no matter how many times our citizens use our citizen-government feedback and collaboration mechanisms that are in the First Amendment, the oligarchs will quash their efforts. Although this used to work decades ago, since the oligarchs have misappropriated those rights (with legal fictions like Buckley, Bellotti, Citizens United and social constructs like racism), American progress has been in reverse for at least 50 years. I submit that for The Green New Deal to be made, or for Black Lives to truly Matter (and stay that way), or for labor to unionize as it should to ensure a living wage, corporate personhood must be ended. This also applies to the amazing folks who are part of the Indivisible groups, #MeToo, Dreamers, and myriad other citizens’ movements that exist because the oligarchs have provoked people into expressing their grievances.
To reverse our decay into fascism, it will take 3.5% of our fellow citizens to engage in the strategic application of persistent nonviolent resistant. In addition we need to deliver a whole lot of teaching for the masses about the truth of what has happened to our government and why. This strategy, found in Erica Chenoweth's latest book "Civil Resistance : What Everyone Needs to Know," is simple and proven. However, it would also be hard to do for a bunch of bad reasons that only benefit the oligarchs. Regardless, I believe we “just” need 3.5% of us (~12 million citizens) to unite with persistent nonviolent resistance, and do it with 21st century technology and knowledge, (i.e., best practice-based solutions). The urgency of such an endeavor requires that our most respected and influential progressive leaders collaborate with each other to inspire enough of our citizens to participate if we are to avoid the final environmental tipping points on Earth. We don’t have time for the big individual progressive movements to act on their own anymore. We need them to pull together starting with severing the control that the oligarchs have over our government, or the oligarchs will continue to swat them down individually like they have since Reagan’s reign solidified their control.
This is not a drill. The Rubicon has been crossed. The barbarians are at the gate. Choose your metaphor. Once again, Thom has cut to the chase and walked us through the history and shown us the reality as no one else can. He is not alone. There are a few others who know and who can articulate what we are facing, although very few with his insight and talent. Historian Tim Snyder is another person whom we need to look to and listen to.
We should be very afraid when Republicans, or former Republicans such as Stuart Stevens, Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, Jennifer Rubin, and Robert Kagan are declaring an emergency and warning of impending doom for democracy. They too are all eloquent and incredibly brilliant. I believe Thom spoke about Kagan’s editorial today.
It turns out that democracy entails much more than just voting, presidents leading their party, and legislators passing laws. Democracy is high-maintenance. Thom implores us to all be involved, but one often wonders if even activism is enough. What forces are we up against and how many citizens will ever maintain a high level of participation, and will that ever be enough?
Sacrifices are a part of the deal. Total focus and dedication on the part of many will be required. Leaders who recognize the urgency and refuse to back down or compromise are essential. All hands on deck. It may already be too late. Or the ugliness may take years to dissipate and recede into a far-out fringe again.
Unfortunately, irrationality, once it reaches a certain critical point and fever pitch is quite unaffected by rationality. All the words of the people listed above and of others fall on deaf ears when ignorance leads to extremism and fanaticism. If democracy survives this test, it will because enough people are still resistant to irrationality and fundamental insecurity. It will not survive the next test, as I have harped on incessantly, unless we stop miseducating our citizens in authoritarian bureaucracies.
Thom prescription to remedy what ails America is (as always) spot on when he noted that “All genuinely patriotic Americans must unite to repudiate this quick-spreading cancer in the Republican Party.”
Although we need to defeat the oligarchs and their teams of co-conspirators in the public, private and academic sectors, I believe that must start with first breaking the control that the oligarchs have over our government. Until that happens they will continue to silence the voices of any number of individuals or individual movements, thus perpetuating their harm inducing status quos at our expense. Some time ago, Thom observed that the Lucy Van Pelt Effect governs public sector decision-making, because no matter how many times our citizens use our citizen-government feedback and collaboration mechanisms that are in the First Amendment, the oligarchs will quash their efforts. Although this used to work decades ago, since the oligarchs have misappropriated those rights (with legal fictions like Buckley, Bellotti, Citizens United and social constructs like racism), American progress has been in reverse for at least 50 years. I submit that for The Green New Deal to be made, or for Black Lives to truly Matter (and stay that way), or for labor to unionize as it should to ensure a living wage, corporate personhood must be ended. This also applies to the amazing folks who are part of the Indivisible groups, #MeToo, Dreamers, and myriad other citizens’ movements that exist because the oligarchs have provoked people into expressing their grievances.
To reverse our decay into fascism, it will take 3.5% of our fellow citizens to engage in the strategic application of persistent nonviolent resistant. In addition we need to deliver a whole lot of teaching for the masses about the truth of what has happened to our government and why. This strategy, found in Erica Chenoweth's latest book "Civil Resistance : What Everyone Needs to Know," is simple and proven. However, it would also be hard to do for a bunch of bad reasons that only benefit the oligarchs. Regardless, I believe we “just” need 3.5% of us (~12 million citizens) to unite with persistent nonviolent resistance, and do it with 21st century technology and knowledge, (i.e., best practice-based solutions). The urgency of such an endeavor requires that our most respected and influential progressive leaders collaborate with each other to inspire enough of our citizens to participate if we are to avoid the final environmental tipping points on Earth. We don’t have time for the big individual progressive movements to act on their own anymore. We need them to pull together starting with severing the control that the oligarchs have over our government, or the oligarchs will continue to swat them down individually like they have since Reagan’s reign solidified their control.