I posted this story in another trump thread (IIRC), and it’s relevancy scares me a little. Where the racists/bigots were once expected to STFU about their racism/bigotry, or, at the very least, they knew how most others viewed those ideas and kept quiet about them (at least in the context of public statements). Our jackass trump has opened those gates far and wide such that the norms I was raised with are seemingly gone:
As Richard Youngs writes in his excellent study of non-Western democracy, liberalism and democracy have historically been “rival notions and not bedfellows.” Liberalism is about non-negotiable personal rights and freedoms. Democracy, while requiring some basic protection of rights to allow for meaningful competition, is more about popular sovereignty, popular will, and accountability and responsiveness to the voting public. Which, of course, raises the question: What if voters don’t want to be liberal and vote accordingly?
