But they won’t. Will they. That’s really my point. It’s not in their blood (any more). They think it’s just fine and dandy to be in power, when they are, and good enough to howl in the wilderness when they are not.
Kier Starmer in the UK started out with great promise, but unless he starts properly fighting what the Tories are up to (voter disenfranchisement, aggregating executive power, reducing the authority and power of Parliament, removing the courts’ powers of intervention, and so on) he will be toast.
And mostly he needs to do deals with every other non-Tory party and arrange an ‘anything but a Tory’ coalition. But he won’t do any of that. Gordon Brown will have been the last non-Tory Prime Minister for a generation or more, at this rate.
It is entirely possible Biden will turn out to be the last Dem President for a generation, if the GOP ever regains power.
Well, that’s the problem. Using the “same tools that authoritarians use” turns you into an authoritarian, no two ways about it. It’s not a strategy that beats authoritarianism in the long term, or even the short term, really.
Maybe I chose my words carelessly. Perhaps I should have said ‘battlegrounds’.
See the areas in the UK that I listed:
If Labour ever gets power it MUST make changes in these areas to reverse what the Tories do, and make it very hard for future Tories to roll-back. That is what I mean by using the same weapons - the same strategies.
In the US it was
Also
is perilously close to saying we should tolerate intolerance. I’m not going to find it now and I hope you are familiar with the graphic that explains the one thing we should be utterly intolerant of is intolerance. Saying we are authoritarians if we use the same methods is tantamount to enabling their intolerance of real democracy and tolerating their destruction of it.
I’ve thought for some time that Liberal democracy is in a death spiral and largely for the reasons you’ve outlined. The obsession with power and massive wealth is obscene.
Not every democratic nation has reached the same depth of decline, but the trajectory is there. It seems to me that the US is ahead of the pack, but to be fair I’m not a US citizen so can only base my thoughts on what I read, from as many diverse sources as I can.
I admit to being truly shocked at some of the people who have reached positions of power in the US, in politics and the corporate world. A good example was the video clip of Michael Flynn demonstrating to the world, with great pride, that he’s a raving lunatic.
Of course, most nations have plenty of dead wood at the top of the tree.
Yeah, I would think that “the fascists have already won” is a good reason to push back. The trick is convincing people that it’s not too soon to push back when they haven’t taken Steven Colbert and Seth Meyers from their homes in the middle of the night yet.
Ok, maybe you and I have a different understanding of what “the tools of authoritarians” are. I think of such tools as lies, disinformation campaigns, political oppression, and power maintained through military force without the consent of the governed. What specific authoritarian tools are you referring to that you think we should start using?
For the record I also don’t support using torture on torturers, rape on rapists, or murder on murderers. Becoming the thing that you’re fighting against is not just a risk but a near certainty once you go down that road.
I think the problem is that a lot of people who say, “We can’t use their tools or we become as bad as them” say that to come out against something like de-platforming people who spread disinformation. So there is this worst-of-both-worlds “middle” position that basically buys into the fascist attack on reason that basically tells us we can’t tell the difference between different things.
There’s one group that’s stabbing people who disagree with them, one group saying, “We’ll stop you from stabbing, even by force,” and a third group saying, “If you take away the right to use knives, how will you cut your vegetables?!?” So people who are anti-authoritarian are suspicious of anyone who says “don’t use their tools”, because I think a large number of them are ridiculous dupes living in a hyperreality where equivocation is more important than murder.
That’s just ridiculous. Things aren’t perfect, but we the people, have made a LOT of progress in several areas. Major rivers don’t catch on fire anymore. Our waterways are overall cleaner than 50 years ago. Entire species have been saved from the brink of extinction. Overall, violent crime is on a downward trend.
Acting as if because we haven’t solved all the problems, our work means nothing is defeatist, neglects history, and is exactly the kind of bs I learned from my middle school textbooks about workers’ rights and other movements.
Hmm. I’m really not sure that other countries have always needed the US as a shining example before deciding to care well for their own ordinary people. Hell, for a long time now, many countries have been doing that better than the US ever has.
As for being a global example, many can see that the US has long been a colonizing, resource-extracting abuser of other countries in the service of its greedy elite, and thus hardly an example of what others should strive to be.
You’re going to fight another Civil War at some point. I’m hoping it is not during my lifetime, because unlike the last time you did it, you’re a global empire, so it will make everyone’s life difficult.
Your system of government is too inflexible to be changed any other way, and it needs some major updates.
A civil war requires a lot of buildup, including two armies and two political power centers to wield them. Jethro and his AR-15 don’t count and there’s no confederacy. No, things will get fucked up, but we have a while before that happens.
There is an argument that the civil war was still another proxy in the endless England vs France thing. I don’t think it’s a great argument but certainly some of the setup was a result of European politics.
That presumes that the next American Civil War will look like the last American Civil War: grand engagements between two organized, uniformed, military forces more or less neatly defined by a clearly marked geographic division. That’s very unlikely to be the case next time around.
It’s far more likely that the next American Civil War would look like the recent conflicts Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq: with a central government struggling to maintain control as the nation gradually collapses into warring groups, with unrest developing in fits and bursts. The kind of conflict that doesn’t have a clear beginning with a formal declaration of war or a clear ending with representatives of two sides signing a peace treaty.
