Tag: democracy

Traitors to Democracy

Whoa, there.

I have been seeing some things online lately that give me pause. People seem to have forgotten that this is a free country, ruled by the demos. So let me clear this up.

You don’t have to do anything Donald Trump or Elon Musk or Robert Vought tell you to do. While they are clearly authoritarian, this is not a totalitarian state. Never has been. It is a free country, founded in liberty. Nathan Hale, Aaron Bushnell, and countless others have died ensuring it be so.

To be plain, you are dishonoring their sacrifice when you obediently toe the line drawn by some authoritarian telling you what to do.

There is nothing in the Constitution of this country that imbues authoritarians with the power to arbitrarily dictate to the citizens of the United States of America what they must do. The default state is that you are free to do as you choose. Yes, there are laws established by Congress, laws that we must generally abide by. But should you not, there is due process established in the Bill of Rights that must be followed in addressing your transgression.

Importantly, it is your responsibility to demand that the government, especially the Federal government, complies with the Bill of Rights. That, not a well-stocked Walmart, is the defining characteristic of a democracy. That you, the citizen, holds the government accountable to following the letter of the law.

A bunch of you, by ceding this responsibility, are traitors to democracy.

I challenge you to renew your commitment to democracy. Perhaps you agree with the sweeping changes that are occurring in this country currently. That is fine, even though they are mostly a smokescreen for blatant grift and larceny. But where you cross the line is in imagining that the President of the United States has any say whatsoever about how individuals live their lives.

I’m here to tell you, he (since you won’t elect a woman) doesn’t. The second you let him, this ceases to be a free country.

There is a notion that because a significant portion (31.6%) of the voting-eligible population cast their ballot for the ticket of Donald J Trump and JD Vance that this has somehow given these individuals a “mandate” to remake the United States of America. It has not.

To be clear, more people (36.5%) chose to abstain from this vote than voted for either candidate. What that actually indicates is that the majority of citizens do not desire the proposition regarding governance (i.e. the platform) forwarded by either of them.

In plain language, more people want to be free than want authoritarianism.

I hope that you are among them.

In the Wake of Election Night 2024

You all should be ashamed of yourselves. Whether Republican or Democrat, whether you voted to accelerate our slide into fascism or remained entrenched in your refusal to abdicate your personal comfort on behalf of real progress, you should be ashamed. No one won last night. All that happened is that we all lost.

How am I not complicit in this? What allows me to presume to point a finger at you, and yet absolve myself?

Firstly, I did not vote for a Fascist platform. This isn’t name calling; I’m being serious here. Read Mussolini. This isn’t partisan inspired vilification. The plank that the individual who a majority of people in this country voted for ran on is openly fascist, as Mussolini defined it. You can pretend you were voting for something else, but the fact is, that’s what he ran on and what you voted for. If my saying that makes you angry, perhaps you should direct that anger at your own guilty conscience, not me for pointing it out.

Secondly, I did not vote for the same uninspired, interest-laden political-industrial complex that failed to inspire in 2016, 2020, and last night. In fact, 2024 election numbers demonstrate that that platform has been in steady decline for over a decade. Those of you still clinging to that plank would do well to recognize you are alone in a vast and stormy sea, and that bit of flotsam is not going to save you, let alone magically become shipworthy again. It was your blind adherence to self-interest, your commitment to a centrist neo-liberal agenda, that allowed this to happen, not my refusal to vote for your pathetic candidate.

I tried to point this out to you. I told you that you had to offer a more progressive platform that addressed the material concerns driving our slide into nationalism and fascism thereafter. You scoffed and replied that those who supported such a platform just needed to get their heads right. I noted that they didn’t know they were supporting a fascist platform, that they were merely looking out for their own interests in the best way they knew how, just as you were looking out for yours. You denied such motivations and called the other side racist and misogynist, completely deflecting your own culpability in the matter. If they would just stop being bad people, you claimed, and come over to the “right side of history”, your side, everything would be fine.

That was never going to happen. Structural inequities, the benefits of which you assume for yourself, on the basis of merit mostly, were always going to result in a growing dissatisfaction. You ignored this at your own peril.

For those celebrating today, under the false assumption you have won something, let me assure you – you have won nothing. All the concerns you have will remain unresolved. Any claims made to the contrary are unfounded, and had you been courageous enough to have critically analyzed them when they were first proffered, you would have seen them as empty promises aforehand. Now you will have to learn that lesson after the fact, to all of our detriment.

I will close on this. You all must open your eyes. We will be forced to pass through the crucible, whether you want to or not. There is no going back to the chimerical age of US greatness touted by your pseudapostle or even the real neoliberal era of prosperity his detractors pine for. A new system must be, if not actively pursued, at least allowed to rise from the ashes. It is impossible that it should be indistinguishable from the previous mode, the one that both sides sought to maintain, despite their rhetoric to the contrary. The material conditions of the world are such that it demands a new system of human organization and mode of reproduction. Further resistance is futile and will make clawing our way out of this grave only all the more painful.