I have two friends who work for the USPS. One I don’t talk to that much, but the other is very vocal for how they are doing the USPS dirty. He’s a NY Republican and 100% for vote by mail, and 100% against Trump’s recent meddling in their operations.
Also the fact they have to pre-fund all the retirement plans so far in advanced is fucking bullshit and needs to be changed.
I’m sure some/many do have guns. But they seem to have a far lower propensity to use them in anger, to judge from many years of political shootings and public willygun-waving.
Very true…but if it comes to an actual armed conflict, that isn’t simply using them in anger but in the defense of the very foundations of the nation. You can bet that if right wing militias start supporting Trump in violation of the Constitution that they might start finding out how many of their neighbors are
a) liberals
b) gun owners
c) tired of their fascist bullshit
I think that the biggest difference is that most on the left would take such actions with much deliberate thought and regret while their counterparts have been looking for any excuse to start murdering “libs”.
I do sincerely hope so, but still fear not.
I hope it doesn’t come to something like that in the first place, but I think people have this mistaken impression that liberals don’t own guns, simply because most support sane gun control.
the trump family does illegal on the regular, and people follow right along - complaining all the way.
at this point, the democrats might as well force some constitutional crises of their own rather than just sit and hope for the best.
have the house march down to the post office general’s office and block access till he leaves, have some state governors assume control of the local post offices, seize on obscure laws to eject trump appointments and have their own house ones show up for work as well, have the guy with a mace go arrest the president.
if fox news isn’t screaming about government take over, the dems are clearly doing something wrong.
pretty much the only reason i think trump will leave office is he gets covid, or he gets bored of how much work it is to stay
It’s on us to vote. Vote out Nostradumbass and all the GOP who truly enable this shit. Then slowly but surely start voting out anyone who doesn’t push for change.
Don’t be so dramatic. Neither is possible in our lifetime. But what is all too likely is: 1890s-style, gilded age laissez-faire capitalism/corporatism.
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Regarding Trump’s and GOP’s (attempted) gutting of the USPS, his supporters in the hinterlands didn’t exactly vote to cripple their ability to send/receive mail without driving 10 miles to nearest post office. But if they know it’s a Trump-originated policy, their tribalistic brains will figure out a way to understand why they don’t “deserve” the “government handout” of mail delivery to their door.
It really depends how we’re defining fascism. When people say fascism, I assume they mean that rule of law in a democratic republic such as we have now, will cease to exist. That is not going to happen in our lifetime.
I think what you could intend, and what I readily concede, is that a corrupt de facto form of authoritarianism could succeed. That is, if one or two more 2-term Republican “Trumps” are successively President (God help us), they could install a 9-person GOP-SCOTUS, corrupt the FBI, CIA, IRS, DOJ. Ban abortion. Mass-deport DACA citizens. Disenfranchise millions. Albeit, even then, at the height of this “fascism”, they still won’t have control of blue states like NY or CA.
But, again, we have had fascism by another name in the US: Jim Crow and McCarthyism. We’ve had fascist executors like J. Edgar Hoover. We’ve seen Nixon’s quasi-fascist corruption of the Executive branch (FBI, CIA, DOJ, IRS et al).
FWIW I took a history class* about the period between World Wars 1 & 2.** The professor*** opined that while many people figure that period was the closest the US had come to a revolution (since the Civil War, anyway), the highest likelihood would’ve actually been during the Gilded Age.
I’ve long worried (not hoped; worried) that if a revolution did happen in our lifetimes, it is unlikely to be what the Left might expect (or want).
*30 years ago this summer, come to think of it
**It was also the second semester in a row that I’d had to read The Big Money for a class.
***Who looked like Geraldo Rivera, but that’s netiher here nor there
Not sure how long you expect your lifetime to be, but that’s a very difficult assertion to support. Maybe it’s unlikely or even very unlikely, but there are so many ways it could come about, with the right spark at the right place and time.
In the US, income inequality is already as high now as it was in the gilded age, and wealth inequality is higher. Sure we have more laws (albeit many of them rarely enforced) against some of the specific problems of that era, but capitalism has had over a century to “innovate” around those restrictions. We’re already there by many of the metrics that matter, and there are a lot of crises we’ve long known are coming at some point that we’ve done nothing to prepare for. Civil war, fascism, or not, it won’t be pretty,
I seem to remember many folks saying the same thing about the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency about 6 or 7 years ago.
Revolutions have a pretty terrible historical track record. Things need to be really bad before revolution is starting to look like a good option.
So, not just the egregious stuffing of positions with donors, dismantling the environmental protections of the past 60 years, turning the executive arm of our government into a fascist banana dictatorship without the bananas, and encouraging racism, sexism, and bigotry of all kinds, then the mishandling of a pandemic causing many times more deaths and lasting illnesses than necessary, then the upholding of police brutality, then the sacrifice of kids for education profits, then the messing about with the postal service just before the biggest mail-in balloting ever…
If things aren’t bad enough yet, they’ll get worse before the end of the year.
Considering that Trump’s admin regularly ignores subpoenas, what do you suggest?
It’s because people who rant about Marxists have never read Marx.
- To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm
Hey now!
Don’t forget a complete lack of interest in solving climate change which without radical action is going to kill literally all of us.
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Usually
If you apply for a ballot, you won’t be on the rolls if you try to vote in person. (I know. I’ve never had a successful attempt to vote absentee.)
They’ll simply deny that the post office ever offered such a service.
Might depend on the state. Here in Maryland, you can get an absentee ballot, but you can still show up and vote in person. What you can’t do is both of course.
Same here in Minnesota, you can get an absentee ballot, but if you don’t get it sent in or dropped off, you can still show up at your polling place in person on election day instead.
I wonder if the difference for kennykb is that Minnesota allows early mail-in voting for anyone for any reason, whereas it appears (from a very quick look at the New York State Board of Elections site) that New York has strict/narrow requirements for who is allowed to vote absentee:
[New York State]
Qualifications to Vote by Absentee Ballot
- Absent from your county or, if a resident of New York City absent from said city, on Election Day.
- Unable to appear at the polls due to temporary or permanent illness or disability; or because you are the primary care giver of one or more individuals who are ill or physically disabled.
- A resident or patient of a Veterans Health Administration Hospital.
- Detained in jail awaiting Grand Jury action or confined in prison after conviction for an offense other than a felony.
