American Democracy On Life Support

[Elixir]

He failed at pressuring local and state officials to certify him as the winner.

No worries - the GQP has gotten rid of almost all of those RINO types.

 

[SLD]

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13666&context=journal_articles

This is a bit of a long read but makes some interesting points. It’s from 2018. One of the key points is that income inequality is correlated with support for authoritarian regimes. This is why we find ourselves in a crisis today. For decades certain elites have managed to capture our democratic process for their personal benefit and the government no longer represents the interests of ordinary people. So they are abandoning it.

 

[Gospel]

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13666&context=journal_articles

This is a bit of a long read but makes some interesting points. It’s from 2018. One of the key points is that income inequality is correlated with support for authoritarian regimes. This is why we find ourselves in a crisis today. For decades certain elites have managed to capture our democratic process for their personal benefit and the government no longer represents the interests of ordinary people. So they are abandoning it.

Oh, this is absolutely getting the Watson Text to Speech with Tupac Instrumentals in the background over a stiff drink treatment when I get home today.

 

[lpetrich]

George Packer: The Four Americas - The Atlantic - "People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?"

Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.

...
The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity.

1. Free America

In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other people—the negative liberty of “Don’t tread on me.”

Mostly the freedom to practice capitalism, no matter what the consequences to others.

Also adopting an individualist picture of capitalism, notably expressed in Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged". That it is grossly contrary to how much of capitalism works in practice - big businesses are much more collectivist than small ones.

Right-wingers often disdain government as collectivist, but their favorite parts of government - the military and the police - are rather blatantly collectivist. They also often like team sports, and that's also very collectivist.

“Allston Wheat’s Crusade” is a good little joke. A right-winger sets out to prove that team sports are a tool of the Communist conspiracy since they tend to diminish the individual while glorifying the group. At one point, the author nicely parodies the Bircher prose style: “America is a country of team sports. We must see these sports for what they are. They are brainwashing stations for individualism. They are training schools for collectivism, socialism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism.”

From “Citizen Ken” by Gore Vidal | The New York Review of Books ( http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1963/dec/12/citizen-ken/ ) (paywalled) reproduced by Gore Vidal in “Reflections upon a Sinking Ship”. A review of “The McLandress Dimension” by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, written in 1963.

 

[lpetrich]

The article then discussed the US conservative movement. It has several strands.

One was traditionalist, a reaction against the utopian plans and moral chaos of modern secular civilization. The traditionalists were sin-fearing Protestants, orthodox Catholics, southern agrarians, would-be aristocrats, alienated individualists—dissidents in postwar America. They were appalled by the complacent vulgarity of the semi-educated masses. Their hero was Edmund Burke, the avatar of conservative restraint, and their enemy was John Dewey, the philosopher of American democracy.

Edmund Burke is famous among the more highbrow conservatives for his criticisms of the French Revolution as ideological and reckless and ignoring the experience of humanity over its history. But the Republican Party in recent decades has become more like Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary leader who ordered the guillotinings of thousands of supposed villains. Eventually his colleagues decided that they didn't want to risk being next, so they guillotined him.

The part of US history that such conservatives like the best is the antebellum South with its quasi-feudalism. Their approach to progress was summarized by William F. Buckley in the first issue of "National Review", the magazine he founded: "Stand athwart history, yelling Stop. "

Then the anti-Communists. Many of the earlier ones are former Marxists, like Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, who carried over their belief in a great struggle between good nations and bad ones, but with different identifications of them. They rejected such reformists liberals as Eleanor Roosevelt and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for advocating a weaker form of Communism.

The libertarians were different. They slipped more easily into the American stream. In their insistence on freedom they could claim to be descendants of Locke, Jefferson, and the classical liberal tradition. Some of them interpreted the Constitution as a libertarian document for individual and states’ rights under a limited federal government, not as a framework for the strengthened nation that the authors of The Federalist Papers thought they were creating.

...
What distinguished libertarians from conventional, pro-business Republicans was their pure and uncompromising idea. What was it? Hayek: “Planning leads to dictatorship.” The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, and little else. One sip of social welfare and free government dies.

But they were more radical than conservative. "No compromise with Social Security administrators and central bankers! Death to Keynesian fiscal policy!"

But they were willing to ally themselves with segregationists. "Their first hero, Senator Barry Goldwater, ran for president in 1964 as an insurgent against his own party’s establishment while opposing the civil-rights bill on states’-rights grounds."

Both the elitist traditionalists and the anti-Communists gradually faded, though some anti-Communists have found a new international villain: Islam.

"Libertarianism speaks to the American myth of the self-made man and the lonely pioneer on the plains. (Glorification of men is a recurring feature.) Like Marxism, it is a complete explanatory system. It appeals to supersmart engineers and others who never really grow up."

It was the Great Depression that provoked FDR's New Deal, and it was the stagflation of the 1970's that provoked the "Reagan Revolution", Gilded Age II.

After years of high inflation with high unemployment, gas shortages, chaos in liberal cities, and epic government corruption and incompetence, by 1980 a large audience of Americans was ready to listen when Milton and Rose Friedman, in a book and 10-part public-television series called Free to Choose, blamed the country’s decline on business regulations and other government interventions in the market.

...
In Reagan’s rhetoric, leveraged buyouts somehow rhymed with the spirit of New England town meetings.

...
As for ordinary people, the Republican Party reckoned that some white Americans would rather go without than share the full benefits of prosperity with their newly equal Black compatriots.

The majority of Americans who elected Reagan president weren’t told that Free America would break unions and starve social programs, or that it would change antitrust policy to bring a new age of monopoly, making Walmart, Citigroup, Google, and Amazon the J.P. Morgan and Standard Oil of a second Gilded Age.

"The shining city on a hill was supposed to replace remote big government with a community of energetic and compassionate citizens, all engaged in a project of national renewal." But it failed.

 

[lpetrich]

Ronald Reagan had a pleasant personality. His opponents found it hard to find a depiction of him looking threatening. Much like AOC today. Right-wingers find it hard to make her seem threatening.

Newt Gingrich was another story. "There was nothing conservative about Gingrich. He came to Congress not to work within the institution or even to change it, but to tear it down in order to seize power." As House Speaker, he acted like a prime minister during the Clinton years.

"His tactics turned the goal of limited and efficient government into the destruction of government. Without a positive vision, his party used power to hold on to power and fatten corporate allies. Corruption—financial, political, intellectual, moral—set in like dry rot in a decaying log."

The quality of Free America’s leaders steadily deteriorated—falling from Reagan to Gingrich to Ted Cruz, from William F. Buckley to Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity—with no bottom.

While the sunny narrative of Free America shone on, its policies eroded the way of life of many of its adherents. The disappearance of secure employment and small businesses destroyed communities. The civic associations that Tocqueville identified as the antidote to individualism died with the jobs.

 

[lpetrich]

Then the second group. "Smart America"

The new knowledge economy created a new class of Americans: men and women with college degrees, skilled with symbols and numbers—salaried professionals in information technology, computer engineering, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, law, journalism, the arts, higher education. They go to college with one another, intermarry, gravitate to desirable neighborhoods in large metropolitan areas, and do all they can to pass on their advantages to their children. They are not 1 percenters—those are mainly executives and investors—but they dominate the top 10 percent of American incomes, with outsize economic and cultural influence.

They’re at ease in the world that modernity created. They were early adopters of things that make the surface of contemporary life agreeable: HBO, Lipitor, MileagePlus Platinum, the MacBook Pro, grass-fed organic beef, cold-brewed coffee, Amazon Prime. They welcome novelty and relish diversity. They believe that the transnational flow of human beings, information, goods, and capital ultimately benefits most people around the world. You have a hard time telling what part of the country they come from, because their local identities are submerged in the homogenizing culture of top universities and elite professions. They believe in credentials and expertise—not just as tools for success, but as qualifications for class entry. They’re not nationalistic—quite the opposite—but they have a national narrative. Call it “Smart America.”

The cosmopolitan outlook of Smart America overlaps in some areas with the libertarian views of Free America. Each embraces capitalism and the principle of meritocracy: the belief that your talent and effort should determine your reward. But to the meritocrats of Smart America, some government interventions are necessary for everyone to have an equal chance to move up. The long history of racial injustice demands remedies such as affirmative action, diversity hiring, and maybe even reparations. The poor need a social safety net and a living wage; poor children deserve higher spending on education and health care. Workers dislocated by trade agreements, automation, and other blows of the global economy should be retrained for new kinds of jobs.

Still, there’s a limit to how much government the meritocrats will accept. Social liberalism comes easier to them than redistribution, especially as they accumulate wealth and look to their 401(k)s for long-term security. As for unions, they hardly exist in Smart America. They’re instruments of class solidarity, not individual advancement, and the individual is the unit of worth in Smart America as in Free America.

In effect, the professional class. At least the upper-middle-class part of it, even if not much of this class is true upper class.

I think that I'd define upper class as someone who could live a middle-class or upper-middle-class life without needing to work to earn money. All that would be necessary are returns on one's investments. In this state, they might not be able to buy a big yacht, at least not sustainably, but they could buy a motorboat without any trouble.

 

[lpetrich]

This hierarchy slowly hardened over the decades without drawing much notice. It’s based on education and merit, and education and merit are good things, so who would question it? The deeper injustice is disguised by plenty of exceptions, children who rose from modest backgrounds to the heights of society.

...
But it’s this idea of fairness that accounts for meritocracy’s cruelty. If you don’t make the cut, you have no one and nothing to blame but yourself. Those who make it can feel morally pleased with themselves—their talents, discipline, good choices—and even a grim kind of satisfaction when they come across someone who hasn’t made it.

Then why Smart America became associated with the Democratic Party.

If the party had refused to accept the closing of factories in the 1970s and ’80s as a natural disaster, if it had become the voice of the millions of workers displaced by deindustrialization and struggling in the growing service economy, it might have remained the multiethnic working-class party that it had been since the 1930s."

...
In the early 1970s, the party became the home of educated professionals, nonwhite voters, and the shrinking unionized working class. The more the party identified with the winners of the new economy, the easier it became for the Republican Party to pull away white workers by appealing to cultural values.

Free America was associated with the Republican Party, but it nevertheless set the boundaries of discourse for the Democratic Party.

The narrative of Free America shaped the parameters of acceptable thinking for Smart America. Free trade, deregulation, economic concentration, and balanced budgets became the policy of the Democratic Party. It was cosmopolitan, embracing multiculturalism at home and welcoming a globalized world. Its donor class on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley bankrolled Democratic campaigns and was rewarded with influence in Washington. None of this appealed to the party’s old base.

The turn of the millennium was the high-water mark of Smart America. ...

As a national narrative, Smart America has a tenuous sense of the nation. Smart America doesn’t hate America, which has been so good to the meritocrats. Smart Americans believe in institutions, and they support American leadership of military alliances and international organizations.

But Smart Americans are uneasy with patriotism.

Patriotism may seem like gross self-congratulation and xenophobia to many Smart Americans. It doesn't help that the people biggest on patriotism are very much like that.

"The other problem is that abandoning patriotism to other narratives guarantees that the worst of them will claim it." Like such self-congratulators and xenophobes.

 

[lpetrich]

Then "Real America", the other part of the Republican coalition, alongside "Free America".

In the fall of 2008, Sarah Palin, then the Republican nominee for vice president, spoke at a fundraiser in Greensboro, North Carolina. Candidates reserve the truth for their donors, using the direct language they avoid with the press and the public (Obama: “cling to guns or religion”; Romney: the “47 percent”; Clinton: “basket of deplorables”), and Palin felt free to speak openly. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit,” she said, “and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us.”

What made Palin alien to people in Smart America prompted thousands to stand in line for hours at her rallies in “Real America”: her vernacular (“You betcha,” “Drill, baby, drill”); her charismatic Christianity; the four colleges she attended en route to a degree; her five children’s names (Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, Trig); her baby with Down syndrome; her pregnant, unwed teenage daughter; her husband’s commercial fishing business; her hunting poses. She was working-class to her boots. Plenty of politicians come from the working class; Palin never left it.

She went after Barack Obama with particular venom. Her animus was fueled by his suspect origins, radical associates, and redistributionist views, but the worst offense was his galling mix of class and race. Obama was a Black professional who had gone to the best schools, who knew so much more than Palin, and who was too cerebral to get in the mud pit with her.

Sarah Palin was never very competent as a politician, but she was a premonition of Donald Trump.

Then some history of US anti-intellectual populism. "Making money didn’t violate the spirit of equality, but an air of superior knowledge did, especially when it cloaked special privileges."

From time to time the common people’s politics has been interracial—the Populist Party at its founding in the early 1890s, the industrial-labor movement of the 1930s—but that never lasted. The unity soon disintegrated under the pressure of white supremacy. Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way, it renders the Black working class invisible.

Such an interracial working-class coalition may be easier now.

On religion, they are evangelicals and fundamentalists, big on how much they beeelieeeve in Jesus Christ and the Bible.

 

[lpetrich]

Finally, Real America has a strong nationalist character. Its attitude toward the rest of the world is isolationist, hostile to humanitarianism and international engagement, but ready to respond aggressively to any incursion against national interests. The purity and strength of Americanism are always threatened by contamination from outside and betrayal from within. The narrative of Real America is white Christian nationalism.

They used to be anti-Catholic, back when many immigrants were Catholics, but Catholicism doesn't seem like much of a threat anymore. Especially when they can join conservative Catholics in anti-abortion fetus worship.

Though "Real Americans" consider themselves an exploited working class, a class of makers exploited by takers, many Real Americans have been in decline.

They often serve in the military, even if the Smart America class seldom does so, and they have suffered a lot from the continued fighting in the Middle East, and not very successful fighting at that.

The financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting recession had similar effects on the home front.

The guilty parties were elites—bankers, traders, regulators, and policy makers. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman and an Ayn Rand fan, admitted that the crisis undermined his faith in the narrative of Free America. But those who suffered were lower down the class structure: middle-class Americans whose wealth was sunk in a house that lost half its value and a retirement fund that melted away, working-class Americans thrown into poverty by a pink slip. The banks received bailouts, and the bankers kept their jobs.

The conclusion was obvious: The system was rigged for insiders. The economic recovery took years; the recovery of trust never came. ...

When Trump ran for president, the party of Free America collapsed into its own hollowness. The mass of Republicans were not free-traders who wanted corporate taxes zeroed out. They wanted government to do things that benefited them—not the undeserving classes below and above them.

As he campaigned, Trump rhetorically violated conservative and Republican orthodoxy in several ways. "I want to save the middle class. The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky." He also ran against globalization, and he acknowledged that many people were in very bad shape. "These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they are forgotten. But they’re not going to be forgotten long."

"Trump’s language was effective because it was attuned to American pop culture."

As to his boorishness, he seems to have tapped into a voting bloc that many politicians have been reluctant to court. The boor vote.

 

[lpetrich]

"But racism alone couldn’t explain why white men were much more likely to vote for Trump than white women, or why the same was true of Black and Latino men and women." - Trump likely seems very virile, and virile in a way that turns off many women. Lower-educated people were also more likely to vote for Trump than higher-educated ones.

Then the final one, "Just America", the second part of the Democratic coalition, alongside Smart America.

A large and influential generation came of age in the shadow of accumulating failures by the ruling class—especially by business and foreign-policy elites. This new generation had little faith in ideas that previous ones were raised on: All men are created equal. Work hard and you can be anything. Knowledge is power. Democracy and capitalism are the best systems—the only systems. America is a nation of immigrants. America is the leader of the free world.

My generation told our children’s generation a story of slow but steady progress. ...

Of course the kids didn’t buy it. In their eyes “progress” looked like a thin upper layer of Black celebrities and professionals, who carried the weight of society’s expectations along with its prejudices, and below them, lousy schools, overflowing prisons, dying neighborhoods. The parents didn’t really buy it either, but we had learned to ignore injustice on this scale as adults ignore so much just to get through. ...

Then came one video after another of police killing or hurting unarmed Black people. Then came the election of an openly racist president. These were conditions for a generational revolt.

Then how Just America is another rebellion from below. "As Real America breaks down the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just America assails the complacent meritocracy of Smart America."

"Unjust America" might be a better name. "For Just Americans, the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled."

 

[lpetrich]

Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality, freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which one dominant group subjugates another. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions. In place of objective reality, critical theorists place subjectivity at the center of analysis to show how supposedly universal terms exclude oppressed groups and help the powerful rule over them. Critical theorists argue that the Enlightenment, including the American founding, carried the seeds of modern racism and imperialism.

Although I think that there is often a grain of truth in such theorizing, that grain of truth may be described as  Motivated reasoning. That argument seems to be that *all* reasoning is motivated reasoning, something that is totally absurd.

What is the narrative of Just America? It sees American society not as mixed and fluid, but as a fixed hierarchy, like a caste system. An outpouring of prizewinning books, essays, journalism, films, poetry, pop music, and scholarly work looks to the history of slavery and segregation in order to understand the present—as if to say, with Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The most famous of this work, The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, declared its ambition to retell the entire story of America as the story of slavery and its consequences, tracing contemporary phenomena to their historical antecedents in racism, sometimes in disregard of contradictory facts. Any talk of progress is false consciousness—even “hurtful.” Whatever the actions of this or that individual, whatever new laws and practices come along, the hierarchical position of “whiteness” over “Blackness” is eternal.

That position is overly simplistic, and it ignores cultural differences across the US, differences that go back to colonial days. But slavery did have a big impact on the parts of the US where it was practiced.

Also, social privilege should not be understood as some absolutely fixed thing. In a 1989 Rolling Stone interview, pop singer Madonna stated that when she was growing up, she wished that she was black, so that she could have braids that stuck up. She painstakingly tried to weave wire into her hair to achieve that effect.

"Just and Real America share a skepticism, from opposing points of view, about the universal ideas of the founding documents and the promise of America as a multi-everything democracy."

Just America’s origins in theory, its intolerant dogma, and its coercive tactics remind me of 1930s left-wing ideology. Liberalism as white supremacy recalls the Communist Party’s attack on social democracy as “social fascism.” Just American aesthetics are the new socialist realism.

The dead end of Just America is a tragedy. This country has had great movements for justice in the past and badly needs one now. But in order to work, it has to throw its arms out wide. It has to tell a story in which most of us can see ourselves, and start on a path that most of us want to follow.

 

[lpetrich]

All four of the narratives I’ve described emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid.

That's very generous.

All four groups have their idea of winners and losers.

In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

Then how author Joseph Packer doesn't think that the US is dying. He notes that "US is dying" in various forms was said in 1861, 1893, 1933, and 1968.

 

[Swammerdami]

Chris Hedges is even more pessimistic than I am. In this podcast interview he explains much about America; but I'm afraid you will be disabused of any remaining optimism.


Irrelevant?: Chris Hedges (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of several books) is an ordained Calvinist (Presbyterian) minister. My own ancestors include devout Presbyterians and the hero John Brown, a Calvinist (Congregationalist) lay minister.

 

[FreeMan88]

Does anyone think we are headed towards a leftist or theocratic dictatorship? Thoughts anyone?

 

[FreeMan88]

Maybe we are headed towards a civil conflict?

 

[FreeMan88]

I live in GA . Rural southeastern part. Hardcore Trumplandia.

 

[Elixir]

Does anyone think we are headed towards a leftist or theocratic dictatorship? Thoughts anyone?

We’re definitely heading for an autocracy if Republicans capture Congress, either by force a la 1/6 or by suppressing/striking down the vote.
It will be anything but leftist though.

 

[FreeMan88]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/lett...vzT70mUZSnY0DB1-rhoBYYgxutxuZKUqVSysejaUpr1tw

I think it was Ipetrich who made the comment that eventually we’ll just exhausted fighting the fascists and let them take over. This article discusses that point and interviews the authors of How Democracies Die. I read that book after Trump was elected. I think this will inevitably happen here. But it will be different. Democracy is dying in America because it has failed to deliver its promises. This is because our democratic process has been captured by an elite few who control it with their wealth. This in turn has been possible due to decades of very bad Supreme Court rulings that have favored wealth over people. The result has been decades of growing wealth inequality, and growing apathy among working class voters. They’re ripe for the picking by a fascist mindset like Trump.

Don’t get me wrong, the real coup will be too hard to recognize when it happens. It happens through voter suppression bills, and through a thousand small ways, all whilst giving lip service to protecting freedom. In outward form, we will appear democratic, but it will be a repressive regime for those of us who disagree.

I agree that we are in dangerous times. I put the odds at 50-50 that Trump will win in 24. And if elected, I expect him to put people in power who won't let him lose an election again. However, I see no need to try to find a scapegoat here: the rich. The people voting in Trump and not wanting to follow the constitution are White middle class to lower class (non college educated people). There's far more wealth on the progressive side.

But why are lower class whites supporting Trump? Simple. Because the Uber wealthy have controlled the political outcomes for too long resulting in larger and larger wealth inequality. Democracy no longer works for them. It represents only the interest of an elite few. That’s what makes them ripe for the picking by someone like Trump. This has been going on since the election of Ronald Reagan.

But why are lower class whites supporting Trump? Simple. Because the Uber wealthy have controlled the political outcomes for too long resulting in larger and larger wealth inequality. Democracy no longer works for them. It represents only the interest of an elite few. That’s what makes them ripe for the picking by someone like Trump. This has been going on since the election of Ronald Reagan.

I don't agree. For one, the working class white vote is just one group that is voting for Trump. But I think that they are far more motivated by social issues: abortion, gay marriage, religion and guns. They are trying to save the country from the godless socialists who want to take their guns. The left is not going to get this crowd back, nor should we try. The good news here is that their side is falling... But they are still a formidable voting block.

The above is certainly true, but a good amount of the wealthy also supported Trump due to his successful efforts at lowering their taxes. I personally know a few of them. They are just as difficult to reason with as someone with very little education. Having a lot of academic letters after one's name doesn't necessarily equate with good sense or superior intelligence. I've known some brilliant high school grads that had far more sense and intelligence than some with advanced degrees. Sadly, too many wealthy people only care about how much money they can accrue and how little taxes they must pay.

Voter apathy is a huge problem in my state and probably in some other states. I've known people who voted for the first time in 2020 and some of them were well into middle age. Trump is what motivated them to finally vote in hopes of defeating him. That is probably how our two Democratic Senators in Georgia were able to defeat the Republican candidates.

Will this continue? I sure hope so but as you all know, states like mine are doing everything they can get away with to make it more difficult for urban minorities, who tend to vote for Democrats, to vote. So, those who live in such areas must be very motivated to vote because they may either be waiting in lines for hours or they will need to request an absentee ballot early enough for it to be valid. And, voter apathy is much worse during the midterms here in Georgia.

I can only hope that Stacey is able to do her magic and motivate people to vote. People like her may be our only hope. The Republicans are so afraid of her, that they've been doing everything possible demonize her, so her job will be more difficult than it was last time.

That’s terrifying. I read today in an article that the Russian Orthodox Church in America is really pushing missionary work in the South. What’s scary is that in these churches, I know because I know people who are members, they view Russia and Putin as the savior of Christianity. Most of these people are fascistic. Makes sense though Eastern Orthodoxy has always had more hardcore authoritarian leanings than western Christianity. A priest one time told me they don’t believe in the separation of powers. Here is the article: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-hybridity-of-rural-fascism

 

[FreeMan88]

That’s terrifying. I read today in an article that the Russian Orthodox Church in America is really pushing missionary work in the South. What’s scary is that in these churches, I know because I know people who are members, they view Russia and Putin as the savior of Christianity. Most of these people are fascistic. Makes sense though Eastern Orthodoxy has always had more hardcore authoritarian leanings than western Christianity. A priest one time told me they don’t believe in the separation of powers. Here is the article: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-...-rural-fascism