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I’m sharing a document that I hope others will share freely. Feeling helpless sucks. It might have zero impact, or it might change some minds. It’s not comprehensive, but rather targeted to a general audience of people that might be persuaded to join forces AGAINST Trump and the right wing regime (can we call a spade a spade now?).

Democracy in the U.S.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRMmEEaP-UlhwY3DqB6lpTZzdUfBZtRtYL66xo1ulTw/edit

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I’m late to this party, but I have to throw in my two cents, which no one will probably see or care about. Our culture has degraded since the Cold War, 9/11, even since COVID in 2020. There is now half of American voters who think Trumpism is ok. Its negatives won’t affect them. A good percentage of citizens were apathetic and didn’t even bother to vote.

I see our country in a spiritual crisis. Values of right vs. wrong, truth even if unpleasant, personal responsibility, self-sacrificing service for others’ benefit, decency, kindness…are increasingly seen as irrelevant when it comes to our leaders. They set the tone when they see the citizenry not demanding otherwise. National unity is less and less coveted. Self is on a pedestal. “What I want. What Trump wants.” Not what’s best: Philippians 2:3

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves.”

Our country may move on, but not in a good way. Ennui will produce a spiritual apathy, laziness that leads to the allowance of not good things. I never wanted to accept that our country is in decline….defining deviancy down to the point of degradation.

Bork:

“Our country is being radically altered, step by step, by Justices who are not following any law.

It is a ship with a great deal of sail but a very shallow keel”

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Meh the problem with bulldozing and not dealing with what came before is that we don't start with fertile ground. We bulldozed slavery, the Civil War, and a sabotaged Reconstruction only to realize that the political rump that consistently bucked a multi-cultural, pluralistic democracy didn't go anywhere. Instead it lay in wait for a carnival barker to reanimate it and take it national. If we'd built statues of John Brown and hung Robert E Lee maybe we wouldn't be here mourning the reanimation of Lee's spirit 160 years later.

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Hope for the best, plan to mitigate the worst. There's no point in despairing in advance.

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I disagree. There is EVERYTHING in hoping for the best, but rather than just mitigating the worst, planning for it. And as it unfolds before our eyes, fighting tooth and nail against it is essential. At this point in time, anything else is foolishness. The time for politeness and hang-wringing is over. Those that wish to denigrate or Democracy are winning. I’ll say what I said in another comment: Our. House. Is. On. Fire. Not perhaps tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after. The time is NOW.

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Americans need to feel the consequences of this past election. We have become a country of people that seem to have a problem with empathy---if an issue does not harm you personally then it is OK if it happens to others, as long as you are fine. The only way to change things is to allow them to feel the pain. This will hurt many people, but we have to be prepared for this to happen. It will be painful to experience and difficult to watch--heart breaking. My mother used to say--(it was long ago--I am 69) "Sometimes we get the government we deserve." I think that what may be happening today. Sadly this is my view today.

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I think these scenarios are pretty realistic. Trump is, in fact, very bad at being the president. He is chaotic, his economic plans will hurt the economy, and he is not able to handle crises well. And managing crises is the most important part of the job of the president. And they happen every term. It’s terrible because people may really suffer, and, living at the center of where Helene hit NC, his climate change denialism is crazy and risky

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We must fight for a liberal democracy even if it means what is happening just ends and we move on. If we don't fight then we are guaranteed an illiberal democracy and all the corruption that comes with it. In my opinion we are fighting to maintain what we have until humans globally have another big pro-democracy wave. Humans just keep learning the same lessons just in different contexts.

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Precisely! The fight is not at our door. It’s already in our house.

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You and Heather Cox Richardson's latest column have lifted me partway out of my post-election malaise. Thanks. I needed that. Onward to 2026!

I also realized that we need to work with non-MAGA Republicans, who showed their concerns when they were able to do so in a secret ballot.

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Like all things in life, we’ll eventually move on from trumpism and MAGA awfulness, like the GWOT and Soviet-style communism. But my concern is that by the time that happens, so much damage will have been done to the framework of our society and how we fit within it, that, even without orange jesus and his cult in government, our country will be different. Weaker, reviled more than admired.

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Everyone knows the real event that sealed the fate of the Berlin Wall.

https://www.bigissue.com/culture/music/how-bruce-brought-down-the-berlin-wall/

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JVL – I do think there is some truth in what you are saying here. Americans do tend to move on, and we will in this case also … but (there’s that word), there is a complication, which is that you are ignoring the downstream effects of the thing being moved on from. For example, I think it is very likely that future historians will come to understand that the GWOT and the wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq were significant drivers of our current political clusterf*ck. An aside and example: I’m often reminded of Hannah Arendt’s point in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that the methods mass terror and intimidation used by the Nazis in Europe were learned by Europeans in their colonies. Europe went out to the World and brought some of the World back. Is it possible that Americans were conditioned to become more comfortable with sectarian division, “strong man”-ism, and, God forbid, political violence by the intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan? Perhaps, or perhaps not, but there were consequences. The real question is what will we take with us when we emerge from a period of Trumpian authoritarian chaos and degradation? The Germans and Japanese after WWII learned a new love of liberal democracy, but that required the firebombing of Dresden, atomic weapons, complete surrender and occupation, and significant economic assistance from the US. The Russians did not fare so well after decades of communism. Our experience will likely not be so extreme, and we will move on. But there will be scars, and consequences.

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Maybe not the greatest analogy? As a retired archaeologist, I feel bound to point out that many of those layers of Rome’s past were created through destruction by hostile forces.

So there JVL. There’s the darkness you didn’t deliver today💀

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The pessimistic view is that we become like Nazi Germany. Everything is going that direction right now.

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Before my first trip to Italy, I decided to prep by reading I Promessi Sposi and Alexander Stille's The Fall of Rome. Anyone read the latter? Stille describes piazzas where old men, conservatives or old communists, would put on their Sunday best (not cargo shorts and baseball caps, hint) and argue about politics. Stille contrasts this seriousness about politics, even among people to whom it should really no longer matter, to the sudden change in political culture that Berlusconi represented, or exploited. People, even liberals, thought he was fun. Why can't we have some fun? Whether corruption under Berlusconi was worse than before is a question outside of my qualification (I mean, the only books I've read about Italy are those two, and some histories of organized crime). But the corruption was gleefully overt for the first time.

And this is what, in 2016, I thought Trump would be, although Trump is notably stupider than Berlusconi. But Matt Gaetz? Tulsi Gabbard? These are somewhat funny appointments, but I don't think the United States is going to recover from turning itself in a joke, or from finally destroying the ideal of public service.

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Agreed. Except I would argue that Gaetz and Gabbard appointments are as funny as a heart attack.

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Just an aside: I was in a bar in Santiago Chile about a decade ago and was in the middle of a conversation between a self-described fascist and communist. I couldn't follow it all because my Spanish is not that good, but they argued, amicably.

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"Like theocracy, this new problem feels like a challenge to Fukuyama’s End of History."

Theocracy - the US Christian kind, not the foreign Muslim kind - is part of the of the overarching internal authoritarian challenge. It was always there, as was the "secular" challenge (racists, paranoid militia types, etc.), but they gradually became united in the years between the end of the Cold War and 2016, even as their priorities differed. I followed right-wing talk radio during those years, and even agreed often with hosts and callers, but I could sense the increasing paranoia, as callers of different stripes started "speaking the same language." But as late as 2016 I never would have guessed that the evangelicals would sell out to that foul-mouth serial adulterer.

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I am deliberately not commenting on the section headers. ;-)

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