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Love Bernie, but this:
They don't believe in democracy. That's it. That's the core of the problem.
That's the problem with the Democratic leadership - they honestly still believe that the MAGAs still have a good-faith belief in Democracy, and want to preserve it.
We ALL recognize that it is no longer true. Clearly, the MAGA leadership no longer embraces Democracy. Worse, they are enthusiastically hostile towards Democracy, and are actively working to subdue, subvert, and ultimately end Democracy.
It is OBVIOUS to ALL of us, why isn't it obvious to our elected Democratic representatives?
If we're talking about the Democratic Leadership, I'd go further and say they don't believe in democracy either, judging from the response to Mamdani's primary win in the NYC mayor's race.
Valid.
I would make the argument here that they don't know what democracy is, at least not in terms that they can directly make applicable to their lives, their homes, their immediate concerns. To most Americans, not just the right, terms like "democracy" carry a negative connotation now.
This is also by design, we have so many conflicting ideologies screaming at each other through bot-wars and large-scale social manipulation efforts and psy-ops that people have pretty much tuned out, and there are plenty of factions who want that result as well and have worked to amplify the worst ideas and thoughts from every angle of every issue.
The last three election cycles saw the highest voter turnout in American history, so it's not that people aren't involved in politics, they just don't really have any idea what's going on. Exit polling showed most people were almost ambivalent towards either candidate and didn't really have a clue who to vote for and just went with their concerns over grocery prices and whatever their facebook feed was showing them.
People don't believe in democracy because they don't believe we have a working government because everyone, everywhere is locked into their own feeds, their own perspectives of the world, they are not sharing realities and not talking to each other.
Conservatives are largely dumber than dirt, you can sway most of them to believe in socialism and freedom of identity and ANY other issue you care about if you engage them directly and know how to push their emotional buttons in specific ways. But we don't do that anymore because we have no shared spaces, no shared perspective, no single source of truth that we can even debate or engage with each other about anymore, so the nation is splintering into a million shards that hate each other.
"A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence."
Politics and violence cannot be separated. The only relevant factor is "legitimacy", which is determined politically.
At what point, during the incremental rise of the Nazis, would it have become "legitimate" to take action against them, and how would this legitimacy be determined? Too early, and it would have been seen as illegitimate murder or "political violence" - too late and... Well, we know what happened.
Damn that is excellently put.
Very understandably, most reasonable people are uncomfortable with violence* but then we seem powerless at the state level to stop the gradual rise of violent ideology that everyone knows will end in classes of vulnerable people who are no longer protected by the prohibition on non-state violence.
* state violence that is part of the script of life isn't scary for some reason though.
Saving your comment.
Yep, same people on the right who are pissed and talking shit....talked shit when the 3 dems in Minnesota were attacked and one killed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/17/minnesota-lawmaker-killings-misinformation-rightwing
Shit isn't even 6 months old.
Meanwhile, the Confederates are targeting anyone that they say celebrated Kirk's death. Some people have already lost their jobs, the Confederates may be planning even darker things.
https://www.wired.com/story/right-wing-activists-are-targeting-people-for-allegedly-celebrating-charlie-kirks-death/
Yeah, go after those that he opposed, instead of the rot on the inside that is eating away at MAGA. Good plan.
I've said it from the beginning - ultimately, MAGA will be brought down by their own virtuosic incompetence.
Yeah, while I agree with the sentiment, the fact that he didn't call out that Republicans are explicitly calling for political violence extremely loudly and not condemning Republican leadership for not tamping that shit down right now is disappointing.
I get the frustration, but he managed to get a bunch of right wingers to share and endorse his message. He got right wing people to commend a message that included calling out January 6th.
The outcome did more for getting right wing people to work toward tamping that down than focusing on calling them out ever would. Call them out when they are their most scared and they get defensive and escalate. Recognize their troubles right alongside their sins and you get a more productive response.
This is why I'd be a bad politician. I couldn't stomach pretending that the party leadership cares about democracy or fair play
Dude's always been too weak to call out evil when he sees it. He's still peddling that "Israel has a right to defend itself" bullshit when no it never has and never will.
But we do, and we must insist upon democratic ideals until the very last. Even when our boots hit the streets and the lines are drawn. If we sink to their level, we'll lose. They've been there a long time, they are seasoned pros. The problem is they use that against us, so we need to play a smarter game. Not dumb ourselves down to their level.
The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance.
Yes, I agree with this. That doesn't say take away democracy to preserve it though. That's talking about tolerance and censorship, which I agree with. If we believe in democracy, we must put our faith into it. I'm not suggesting we ignore great evils, but I am suggesting we don't become evil to fight evil, because becoming the thing you hate just to fight it means you end up fighting yourself. You've lost. You've proven your ideal is no ideal at all.
What you're saying is shit we're fed by comic books and Hollywood. In the real world when you're dealing with real psychopaths and where they have overwhelmingly taken control of government via decscdes of surpression lies and propaganda, the comic book logic doesn't work.
In the movies, the bad guy always pays for his transgressions.
In the real world a child rapists, treasonus piece of shit has been re-elected. Twice....
You get the country you fight for. People drive policy. It was allowed to get this bad because people were too busy and distracted to care about what was happening "over there". Now it's all come home to roost. Movies, comic books and plain old books teach us these things because they are what humans do, not in fantasy, but in reality. They tell us truths we don't want to see, and the blue prints for how to fight this kind of injustice are there too, even in your own goddamn history books. Organized protest and civil unrest are your main options. Hit them where it hurts, in their pocket books. "They" are nothing without "us".