Discussion about this post

User's avatar
RMDolddave's avatar

What we have been witnessing for 50 years is a persistent and ever more sophisticated campaign of the morbidly rich stealing our democracy using the tactics Thom has identified countless times. Some of their tricks have been around for a very long time, like frightening and enraging poorly educated folks with racism (or any of the other otherisms) making them easy to manipulate (especially if they’ve been cultified). By leveraging the speed and reach of 21st Century tech, they can crank out propaganda that Joseph Goebbels could only dream about, and now they have a bloc of voters that is substantial and monolithic. I suggest that we refer to members of the two parties as Democrats and Autocrats and no one can be a Democrat without pledging to promote our citizens’ general welfare using best practice-based solutions, and that includes protecting us from those that do things adverse to our rights and our communities’ interests. (For example, the oligarchs who profit from wars, or those who commit multi-trillion-dollar frauds, or the evildoers who take trillions in subsidies to sell trillions in carbon while the 6th Mass Extinction is becoming inevitable).

Or just make sure that we get a critical mass of progressives elected in November.

Expand full comment
Hahn Bikey's avatar

The concept of American democracy being an "experiment" it not really appropriate.

Our democracy is more like an operating system.

Legislation is like installing updates (HR1 = major security patch!).

The 75-year retiree funding for the post office getting passed without awareness at the time is like someone opening an attachment with a trojan horse virus. And so on....

So just like installing updates and removing any viruses that get through is part of the daily life with a computer, so is the day to day operations of government.

If a virus infects an OS bad enough that your computer becomes unrepairable, does that mean the operating system itself is a failed experiment? No. It just means update patches and repairs couldn't keep up with the creators of viruses and more effort needs to be put into the race, and therefore the same with our political system. So as Thom & Bernie says we shouldn't despair. We should't despair that these onslaughts exist. The writers of anti-virus software don't despair that viruses exist. We should expect that it will always exist, and the test of our resiliency is how well we react and defend against it. Our collective efforts to keep this country running will always be subject to onslaughts so we just have to keep working to catch up and stay ahead of it. It's not an experiment pass/fail.

Expand full comment
7 more comments...

No posts