I'm saying they didn't violently overthrow their governments. Mussolini became prime minister at the invitation of Victor Emmanuel III. Hitler was made Chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg. In other words, they seem to be the exact opposite of revolutionaries.
Well, in the latter case there was also the earlier Beer Hall Putsch and the use of Freikorps by various actors on the right, though perhaps this was historically contingent (a demographic bulge and the presence of large numbers of WWI veterans without a huge stake in society).
There was a period in 1933, when the Nazis in effect, smashed the state. After the elections in March, they had a small majority, but passed the Enabling Act, which made the Reichstag redundant. The Social Democratic Party was banned, and the Communists had already been banned. There followed a series of Gleichschaltung laws, which basically nazified various areas of German life, and removed opposition.
Well, this represented the overthrow of the Weimar constitution, but at the same time, Hitler maintained a fig-leaf of legality, as Lenin did in the soviets.
There was a period in 1933, when the Nazis in effect, smashed the state. After the elections in March, they had a small majority, but passed the Enabling Act, which made the Reichstag redundant. The Social Democratic Party was banned, and the Communists had already been banned. There followed a series of Gleichschaltung laws, which basically nazified various areas of German life, and removed opposition.
Well, this represented the overthrow of the Weimar constitution, but at the same time, Hitler maintained a fig-leaf of legality, as Lenin did in the soviets.
True enough, except for the claim that the Nazis had a small majority. They were actually a plurality government, if I remember correctly. At any rate, using the legitimately acquired powers of the state to vandalize or subvert existing government structures is very different than the violent revolution you claim is a definitional characteristic of fascism. As @chrisstilespoints out the Nazis weren't opposed to the idea of acquiring power through a violent revolution, but they didn't regard it as absolutely necessary either.
As @chrisstilespoints out the Nazis weren't opposed to the idea of acquiring power through a violent revolution, but they didn't regard it as absolutely necessary either.
Well, ISTM the key seems to be Hitler's apparent change of heart regarding tactics after the failure of the Putsch and his trial.
That said; I don't see that its either useful or profitable to argue along these lines. As I alluded to above, it's possible that the break into violence was somewhat historically contingent, and we shouldn't expect that overt mass violence be the one marker of fascism or fascist tendencies.
Earlier movements made a lot of use of violence as a spectacle - and perhaps mass violence isn't required in the same way in an era of rolling news? Perhaps the occasional Charlottesville suffices - at least for now?
Besides, if you could REDMAP and suppress your way to power why wouldn't you use that instead?
To expand on above; we don't have to all agree that X is in every way correspondent to Y before we act on X.
ISTM that at least part of the drive to prove that the two things are the same is the assumption that if only people realise <some fact> then they'd act differently - but I suspect sudden public changes of heart are in short supply and they shouldn't be expected.
If you're an educated person, with reasonable employment and income, you have a stake in things being stable.
The problem as I see it is not "if only people realise <some fact> then they'd act differently" but that they see the facts as pertains to themselves, i.e., income and employment is unstable, the future being potentially worse than the present. A guy comes along and offers something more. He's crass, boorish and rude, a brawling pervert, but he said he'd drain the swamp, and he's doing by golly. Not everything he does is what we support, but there's a good lot of it that there is. And even if he has many personal attributes we don't like, he's getting the job done. No-one is perfect etc.
My father left Berlin and Germany in 1937/8. We have pictures of him and his family with his swastika armband-wearing cousins. Why did they support the Nazis and Hitler? I have tried to discuss this with his one surviving cousin: my second cousins, their children are more informative than his denial: Hitler was good for the economy and for employment. People did generally better in terms of their personal standard of living under Hitler. I think if there'd been elections later in Germany his vote and number of seats would have increased because of it.
My father left Berlin and Germany in 1937/8. We have pictures of him and his family with his swastika armband-wearing cousins. Why did they support the Nazis and Hitler? I have tried to discuss this with his one surviving cousin: my second cousins, their children are more informative than his denial: Hitler was good for the economy and for employment. People did generally better in terms of their personal standard of living under Hitler. I think if there'd been elections later in Germany his vote and number of seats would have increased because of it.
Of all the scary things I've been reading / hearing lately, this is one of the scariest; that's happening here for many people.
My father left Berlin and Germany in 1937/8. We have pictures of him and his family with his swastika armband-wearing cousins. Why did they support the Nazis and Hitler? I have tried to discuss this with his one surviving cousin: my second cousins, their children are more informative than his denial: Hitler was good for the economy and for employment. People did generally better in terms of their personal standard of living under Hitler. I think if there'd been elections later in Germany his vote and number of seats would have increased because of it.
Of all the scary things I've been reading / hearing lately, this is one of the scariest; that's happening here for many people.
The dismantling of the progressive income tax structure, the ability of large corporations to pay no or very little tax. Then the resulting gutting of public services, utilities, and the welfare state. Selling off of government services. It's happened everywhere, but I have the sense that the USA and UK have had more of it. I blame the defective Ronald Reagan who as leader of the country with the largest economy, led the charge that started the destruction, our Brian Mulroney famous;y sang along with him, Thatcher for the UK. We've fabulously wealthy countries and we can't provide reliable public services and social safety nets, but can jail people for being mentally ill, poor, brown. Crazy that a populist who is actually a post boy for the policies which harmed the working middle class can actually offer himself as a solution. Maybe the populist on the other end of the spectrum can offer a better alternative? That people would vote for?
Thatcher kicked things off, but only just I think. May 1979 according to google. The British were better at protest songs in the 80's in any event.
I'm not sure about Hitler, but my feeling is that opposition in Germany was small, for the economic reasons mentioned by @NOprophet_NØprofit . My recollection is that during Argentina's Dirty War, political repression was freelance. Armed civilians, as distinct from soldiers or police, simply murdered people on the street or dragged them off to be tortured and killed later. The targets, as always, were leftists and if you were a member of an elite group (not a businessman you understand), you were deemed to be a leftist. When people call for a civil war in the USA, that's the sort of conflict that comes to my mind. Freelance terror, all going from the right to the centre and left.
Hitler's shattering of the Weimar Republic's "system of governance" was not violent. Maintenance is not shattering something; maintenance is maintaining something already existing. You appear to be confused here as to what "maintenance" means.
Hitler's shattering of the Weimar Republic's "system of governance" was not violent. Maintenance is not shattering something; maintenance is maintaining something already existing. You appear to be confused here as to what "maintenance" means.
Hitler came to power constitutionally, as I understand things, but violence was his constant companion in thought, word and deed. But I don't think you mean that Hitler didn't use violence to gain power. I'm sure you've seen the same black and white films as me.
Meanwhile fully half the planet has been drug up out of abject poverty since the end of the cold war, and the same year that she pulled out of Paris the US lead the world in reduction of greenhouse gases. Weird innit?
Meanwhile fully half the planet has been drug up out of abject poverty since the end of the cold war, and the same year that she pulled out of Paris the US lead the world in reduction of greenhouse gases. Weird innit?
Mate, I am not one to trash the postwar legacy of the USA, or to ignore the fact that we live and prosper in the shadow of the Bald Eagle's wings. I like it so much that I don't want it to stop. I fear that Trump does, and his Presidency has laid bare a nasty streak of isolationism on the right that had previously been the preserve of America's most deluded advocates of peace. My great fear is that if America withdraws itself, China will grow in power. China's leadership is awful on the scale of Pol Pot and Stalin. Trump is only relatively awful compared to just about every single other American politician you care to name.
One thing about Trump though, he is the only American President who has caused me to think about comparing the USA to Argentina. That's because I really do believe that he doesn't give a shit about the USA, no matter how many flags he creepily cuddles.
Oh, and I couldn't give a flying fuck about climate change. Other people can get het up about it if they want. I won't stand in their way. I've got the here and now on my mind, and the rights and liberties of actual people.
Meanwhile fully half the planet has been drug up out of abject poverty since the end of the cold war, and the same year that she pulled out of Paris the US lead the world in reduction of greenhouse gases. Weird innit?
Mate, I am not one to trash the postwar legacy of the USA, or to ignore the fact that we live and prosper in the shadow of the Bald Eagle's wings. I like it so much that I don't want it to stop. I fear that Trump does, and his Presidency has laid bare a nasty streak of isolationism on the right that had previously been the preserve of America's most deluded advocates of peace. My great fear is that if America withdraws itself, China will grow in power. China's leadership is awful on the scale of Pol Pot and Stalin. Trump is only relatively awful compared to just about every single other American politician you care to name.
One thing about Trump though, he is the only American President who has caused me to think about comparing the USA to Argentina. That's because I really do believe that he doesn't give a shit about the USA, no matter how many flags he creepily cuddles.
Oh, and I couldn't give a flying fuck about climate change. Other people can get het up about it if they want. I won't stand in their way. I've got the here and now on my mind, and the rights and liberties of actual people.
Funny thing about those pathologically opposed to Trump, they either give him no credit at all or they give him all of it.
Meanwhile fully half the planet has been drug up out of abject poverty since the end of the cold war, and the same year that she pulled out of Paris the US lead the world in reduction of greenhouse gases. Weird innit?
Mate, I am not one to trash the postwar legacy of the USA, or to ignore the fact that we live and prosper in the shadow of the Bald Eagle's wings. I like it so much that I don't want it to stop. I fear that Trump does, and his Presidency has laid bare a nasty streak of isolationism on the right that had previously been the preserve of America's most deluded advocates of peace. My great fear is that if America withdraws itself, China will grow in power. China's leadership is awful on the scale of Pol Pot and Stalin. Trump is only relatively awful compared to just about every single other American politician you care to name.
One thing about Trump though, he is the only American President who has caused me to think about comparing the USA to Argentina. That's because I really do believe that he doesn't give a shit about the USA, no matter how many flags he creepily cuddles.
Oh, and I couldn't give a flying fuck about climate change. Other people can get het up about it if they want. I won't stand in their way. I've got the here and now on my mind, and the rights and liberties of actual people.
Funny thing about those pathologically opposed to Trump, they either give him no credit at all or they give him all of it.
oh you misread my post if you think that I give Trump all the credit for bad shit. His Presidency bought the bad shit to the surface. I remember the Illinois Nazis
Meanwhile fully half the planet has been drug up out of abject poverty since the end of the cold war, and the same year that she pulled out of Paris the US lead the world in reduction of greenhouse gases. Weird innit?
Re reduction in greenhouse gasses: only true if you cherry pick the timeframe. Year to year it may go up or may go down. The trend is upward. The influences on downward are not going to be maintained if trumpy coal gets a-burning, and we're not seeing the going down rapidly enough.
You're not going to find world hunger statistics to support your other contention re poverty. You will find about the same number of hungry people each day as those of receive the communion wafer of capitalism, the Big Mac and its iterations in the various denominations of fast food (about 1 in 6 of people on Earth are also obese).
The general sense is that you're certainly happy with the current state of things in the world. Most of us seem to think there's quite a bit wrong and that the political trends of populism where the problem becomes the solution are more than quite a bit wrong, particularly when they specifically target vulnerable people.
I just sort of assumed Romanlion was likely to be using bullshit stats. Mind you on poverty I thought he might be right because of the rise of China. That would make the reduction in poverty a Chinese achievement. Nasty for both Romanlion's narrative and mine, although I rely on the Burnistoun Cry (end of clip).
Meanwhile fully half the planet has been drug up out of abject poverty since the end of the cold war, and the same year that she pulled out of Paris the US lead the world in reduction of greenhouse gases. Weird innit?
Re reduction in greenhouse gasses: only true if you cherry pick the timeframe. Year to year it may go up or may go down. The trend is upward. The influences on downward are not going to be maintained if trumpy coal gets a-burning, and we're not seeing the going down rapidly enough.
Coal is not coming back. It has increased some since Trump came into office, but coal plants in the US are continuing to be shut down. Renewable energy is increasing substantially Story of the Withering of the Coal Industry here.
It is very sobering to read the distress of Americans here. While I don't "know" you, I feel I do through your posts here, and the latest batch on comparisons to dictators are tough to read.
Sorry if this sounds pathetic, or worse, offensive, but I hope there are bright spots for you -- and they can somehow pierce the gloom.
I feel like I should have kept my stupid Argentina comparison to myself. I'm very sorry to have put it in shipmates mind if that's what happened. The bastard of it is that I can't shake the feeling that if things were to go nightmare, its a more likely scenario than the German parallel. I do not think things will go nightmare. That is not a statement of faith. Its a reasoned decision based upon the proven resilience of the American system, its fragmented and multiple centers of power and the level-headed national temperament, always at its best in a crisis.
From my perspective you have nothing to apologise for. I thought it an interesting comparison, and one I had not considered. Not dared to consider. It is too easy for me, perhaps, to think of the US as too strong for anything to affect it. I need to be jolted out of that. Not to despair, but to informed knowledge.
There are some who consider Donald Trump to be completely self-absorbed, but then he does something like this:
Adam Rupar
A tired-sounding Trump says he's not planning to cancel his campaign rally in Pennsylvania tonight despite the storm because "there are thousands of people already lined up... we have thousands of people going tonight, and many are there already... it's sorta unfair to them."
So thoughtful! And it's not like there's anything else happening today that could demand the president*'s attention.
Hurricane Michael made landfall as a catastrophic, unprecedented Category 4 storm on the Florida Panhandle with a life-threatening storm surge and over 100 mph winds possible not just near the coast, but also inland that could leave some areas without power for over a week.
Donald J. Trump
Yesterday Obama campaigned with JayZ & Springsteen while Hurricane Sandy victims across NY & NJ are still decimated by Sandy. Wrong!
12:01 PM - 6 Nov 2012
Note that the above tweet was sent out about a week after Sandy made landfall in New Jersey and referred to a rally that took place the day before the 2012 presidential election. That's a lot different than going to a political rally while the storm makes landfall when it's 755 days until the next presidential election.
I love people who dig up such Tweets, from any side of politics. Much like an article from 15 years ago that sheds not a very pretty picture on a politician's current stance.
Good write-up. From what I've seen of this trash I am both not remotely worried about the film and very deeply concerned about it.
As Vox said, it will not change many minds and probably has very little reach at all. It seems to be a bad (as in, not very effective) piece of propaganda.
However, I do think it an accurate reflection of Christian Nationalism, of all that is wrong with the Religious Right.
FYI: Melania T. is supposed to be interviewed on American TV Friday night (tonight). It will be on "20/20", on our ABC network. The promo said that M put *no* limits on questions. Whether or not that will get us anything useful, I don't know.
The Trump Prophecy thing. It's targeted at evangelical waverers. It will work on some.
What made me laugh was the open Bible. Who doesn't know that scripture (2 Chronicles 7:14) off by heart? Self declared Trump-supporting evangelicals who don't know their own Book. I guess there must be lots of them.
So let's predict how the White House Clean Up Squad will spin that comment. I bet it will be "He was just acknowledging that sometimes presidents die in office. Abraham Lincoln was president for life; John F. Kennedy was president for life. Typical liberal press taking President Trump's truthful and accurate comments as something evil. It's disgusting...etc. etc."
Watch the midterms; see if the Repugs suppress enough of the vote to hang on to both Congressional chambers; I've already predicted no elections in 2020.
I don't understand how messing about with people's right to vote can be legal in a country that calls itself a democracy. Surely once you've reached the legal voting age, your right to vote should remain as long as you live in the country?
Something similar seems to be happening in Georgia. It seems very wrong to me that people can be struck off the electoral roll at the behest of a politician who doesn't like the way he thinks they'll vote.
What will it take for parts of the the US (ie California) to reach the conclusion that their future would be better OUTSIDE the US than inside? If (say) abortion and same-sex marriage were made illegal, would California (and possibly other places) decide "enough is enough"? Is is all conceivable that the US could splinter?
Not really. Politically it's a fringe idea. Look at how difficult it is to negotiate Britain's exit from the EU and multiply that by 100 to get the difficulty of negotiating a large state's exit from the US. Lots of things are regulated by state governments, but the states are still very tightly tied together and we rely on the federal government to take care of a fair amount of things for us. We are first Americans by birth or naturalization, and citizens of whatever state we live in just by moving there. It would be easier and faster to turn the Republicans out of office than to figure out how to separate California from the US.
As frustrating as the current situation is, I don't want California to leave the US. It would make my family members in Massachusetts foreigners, and it would put us in California on the sharp and pointy end of America's fucked-up foreign policy.
It is too easy for me, perhaps, to think of the US as too strong for anything to affect it. I need to be jolted out of that. Not to despair, but to informed knowledge.
I thought the US was too strong for anything to affect us until 9/11 - and I hadn't even realized I thought that until I felt the loss of that sense of safety.
Legal, right, and possible don't always have anything to do with each other.
There's also an ongoing issue of whether convicted felons who've done their time should have their voting rights restored. (Evidently, they lose the right when convicted.) I'm not sure whether they lose their rights in every state.
I'm not sure, myself, what should be done. But if voting rights are totally taken away from convicted felons, that should definitely include people who purposely and knowingly corrupt elections, voting, and government.
We might consider instituting the punishment from the story-poem and film "The Man Without A Country", based on a true incident. The upshot is that a man standing before a court said "God damn the United States! May I never hear the name of the United States again!" He got his wish: he spent the rest of his life on sailing ships, where no one was allowed to mention the US to him, and where any newspapers given to him had the name of the US cut out. He never stepped on American soil again.
What, me? Upset with the way the country is going? Nahhhhhh.
man, GK. I hear you. I'm in a 'let's be reasonable' phase this particular post, but my mood swings wildly. I'm gearing up to spend thanksgiving with my Republican fictive-family down in Monterey (well, up), so along with lots of present buying (young kids - love buying presents for young kids) I'm sort of beginning to try and get into a space where I don't twitch at the name of Trump. The risk for me is the off-the-cuff comments like, 'Businessman? What sort of businessman can't make money off a casino?' and 'You idiots have elected a bloke who is connected to organised crime.' and 'I blame the Republican party, and their moronic voters.' Often when I'm at the Supermarket, I find myself mumbling these sorts of things to nobody in particular.
In reality I don't expect a problem, mostly because I'm planning to drink almost no booze at all (my usual plan these days, as it happens). Also, we all know how to deal with these issues like civilised people: change the subject.
Something similar seems to be happening in Georgia. It seems very wrong to me that people can be struck off the electoral roll at the behest of a politician who doesn't like the way he thinks they'll vote.
Kemp sort of gave the game away when he referred to complaints about his exact match policy as "outside agitators". This Yahoo News article explains the freighted significance of that phrase in Southern politics.
This seems unlikely to me. Regular elections in even-numbered years is too ingrained in the American idea of politics to be eliminated so quickly. A more likely (though by no means certain) outcome would be maintaining the forms of democracy (like regular elections) but eliminating its substance (the elections are set up in such a way that the outcome is pre-determined, either through jiggering the voter rolls or controlling which issues and candidates appear on the ballot). This is a system that would be familiar to the segregation-era South, or modern Iran.
Croesos, the nightmare scenario I have is that the 2020 elections are cancelled due to "national security" reasons. When they restart, they are jiggered the way you say. Trump remains president after some phony national referendum. Constitution? What Constitution? he's already violated it, and talks about violating it more.
Exactly. This is a president* who's made a career of manufacturing crises he can then "fix" them. Some crisis could be manufactured to merely "postpone" the 2020 elections. When the press demands info about re-scheduling, the answer will be "We'll see." How many times have we already heard those words from this president's* lips?
Comments
Well, in the latter case there was also the earlier Beer Hall Putsch and the use of Freikorps by various actors on the right, though perhaps this was historically contingent (a demographic bulge and the presence of large numbers of WWI veterans without a huge stake in society).
Well, this represented the overthrow of the Weimar constitution, but at the same time, Hitler maintained a fig-leaf of legality, as Lenin did in the soviets.
True enough, except for the claim that the Nazis had a small majority. They were actually a plurality government, if I remember correctly. At any rate, using the legitimately acquired powers of the state to vandalize or subvert existing government structures is very different than the violent revolution you claim is a definitional characteristic of fascism. As @chrisstiles points out the Nazis weren't opposed to the idea of acquiring power through a violent revolution, but they didn't regard it as absolutely necessary either.
Well, ISTM the key seems to be Hitler's apparent change of heart regarding tactics after the failure of the Putsch and his trial.
That said; I don't see that its either useful or profitable to argue along these lines. As I alluded to above, it's possible that the break into violence was somewhat historically contingent, and we shouldn't expect that overt mass violence be the one marker of fascism or fascist tendencies.
Earlier movements made a lot of use of violence as a spectacle - and perhaps mass violence isn't required in the same way in an era of rolling news? Perhaps the occasional Charlottesville suffices - at least for now?
Besides, if you could REDMAP and suppress your way to power why wouldn't you use that instead?
ISTM that at least part of the drive to prove that the two things are the same is the assumption that if only people realise <some fact> then they'd act differently - but I suspect sudden public changes of heart are in short supply and they shouldn't be expected.
The problem as I see it is not "if only people realise <some fact> then they'd act differently" but that they see the facts as pertains to themselves, i.e., income and employment is unstable, the future being potentially worse than the present. A guy comes along and offers something more. He's crass, boorish and rude, a brawling pervert, but he said he'd drain the swamp, and he's doing by golly. Not everything he does is what we support, but there's a good lot of it that there is. And even if he has many personal attributes we don't like, he's getting the job done. No-one is perfect etc.
My father left Berlin and Germany in 1937/8. We have pictures of him and his family with his swastika armband-wearing cousins. Why did they support the Nazis and Hitler? I have tried to discuss this with his one surviving cousin: my second cousins, their children are more informative than his denial: Hitler was good for the economy and for employment. People did generally better in terms of their personal standard of living under Hitler. I think if there'd been elections later in Germany his vote and number of seats would have increased because of it.
Of all the scary things I've been reading / hearing lately, this is one of the scariest; that's happening here for many people.
I'm not sure about Hitler, but my feeling is that opposition in Germany was small, for the economic reasons mentioned by @NOprophet_NØprofit . My recollection is that during Argentina's Dirty War, political repression was freelance. Armed civilians, as distinct from soldiers or police, simply murdered people on the street or dragged them off to be tortured and killed later. The targets, as always, were leftists and if you were a member of an elite group (not a businessman you understand), you were deemed to be a leftist. When people call for a civil war in the USA, that's the sort of conflict that comes to my mind. Freelance terror, all going from the right to the centre and left.
Oh, Nikki Haley has resigned.
Hitler came to power constitutionally, as I understand things, but violence was his constant companion in thought, word and deed. But I don't think you mean that Hitler didn't use violence to gain power. I'm sure you've seen the same black and white films as me.
Mate, I am not one to trash the postwar legacy of the USA, or to ignore the fact that we live and prosper in the shadow of the Bald Eagle's wings. I like it so much that I don't want it to stop. I fear that Trump does, and his Presidency has laid bare a nasty streak of isolationism on the right that had previously been the preserve of America's most deluded advocates of peace. My great fear is that if America withdraws itself, China will grow in power. China's leadership is awful on the scale of Pol Pot and Stalin. Trump is only relatively awful compared to just about every single other American politician you care to name.
One thing about Trump though, he is the only American President who has caused me to think about comparing the USA to Argentina. That's because I really do believe that he doesn't give a shit about the USA, no matter how many flags he creepily cuddles.
Oh, and I couldn't give a flying fuck about climate change. Other people can get het up about it if they want. I won't stand in their way. I've got the here and now on my mind, and the rights and liberties of actual people.
Funny thing about those pathologically opposed to Trump, they either give him no credit at all or they give him all of it.
oh you misread my post if you think that I give Trump all the credit for bad shit. His Presidency bought the bad shit to the surface. I remember the Illinois Nazis
Re reduction in greenhouse gasses: only true if you cherry pick the timeframe. Year to year it may go up or may go down. The trend is upward. The influences on downward are not going to be maintained if trumpy coal gets a-burning, and we're not seeing the going down rapidly enough.
You're not going to find world hunger statistics to support your other contention re poverty. You will find about the same number of hungry people each day as those of receive the communion wafer of capitalism, the Big Mac and its iterations in the various denominations of fast food (about 1 in 6 of people on Earth are also obese).
The general sense is that you're certainly happy with the current state of things in the world. Most of us seem to think there's quite a bit wrong and that the political trends of populism where the problem becomes the solution are more than quite a bit wrong, particularly when they specifically target vulnerable people.
Coal is not coming back. It has increased some since Trump came into office, but coal plants in the US are continuing to be shut down. Renewable energy is increasing substantially Story of the Withering of the Coal Industry here.
Sorry if this sounds pathetic, or worse, offensive, but I hope there are bright spots for you -- and they can somehow pierce the gloom.
I feel like I should have kept my stupid Argentina comparison to myself. I'm very sorry to have put it in shipmates mind if that's what happened. The bastard of it is that I can't shake the feeling that if things were to go nightmare, its a more likely scenario than the German parallel. I do not think things will go nightmare. That is not a statement of faith. Its a reasoned decision based upon the proven resilience of the American system, its fragmented and multiple centers of power and the level-headed national temperament, always at its best in a crisis.
So thoughtful! And it's not like there's anything else happening today that could demand the president*'s attention.
Note that the above tweet was sent out about a week after Sandy made landfall in New Jersey and referred to a rally that took place the day before the 2012 presidential election. That's a lot different than going to a political rally while the storm makes landfall when it's 755 days until the next presidential election.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/10/supreme-court-makes-it-harder-for-tribal-north-dakotans-to-vote/
It made me laugh out loud 😂 😂
Good write-up. From what I've seen of this trash I am both not remotely worried about the film and very deeply concerned about it.
As Vox said, it will not change many minds and probably has very little reach at all. It seems to be a bad (as in, not very effective) piece of propaganda.
However, I do think it an accurate reflection of Christian Nationalism, of all that is wrong with the Religious Right.
AFZ
What made me laugh was the open Bible. Who doesn't know that scripture (2 Chronicles 7:14) off by heart? Self declared Trump-supporting evangelicals who don't know their own Book. I guess there must be lots of them.
Trump Says Maybe US Will Have a President for Life Someday
Something similar seems to be happening in Georgia. It seems very wrong to me that people can be struck off the electoral roll at the behest of a politician who doesn't like the way he thinks they'll vote.
Not really. Politically it's a fringe idea. Look at how difficult it is to negotiate Britain's exit from the EU and multiply that by 100 to get the difficulty of negotiating a large state's exit from the US. Lots of things are regulated by state governments, but the states are still very tightly tied together and we rely on the federal government to take care of a fair amount of things for us. We are first Americans by birth or naturalization, and citizens of whatever state we live in just by moving there. It would be easier and faster to turn the Republicans out of office than to figure out how to separate California from the US.
As frustrating as the current situation is, I don't want California to leave the US. It would make my family members in Massachusetts foreigners, and it would put us in California on the sharp and pointy end of America's fucked-up foreign policy.
I thought the US was too strong for anything to affect us until 9/11 - and I hadn't even realized I thought that until I felt the loss of that sense of safety.
Legal, right, and possible don't always have anything to do with each other.
There's also an ongoing issue of whether convicted felons who've done their time should have their voting rights restored. (Evidently, they lose the right when convicted.) I'm not sure whether they lose their rights in every state.
I'm not sure, myself, what should be done. But if voting rights are totally taken away from convicted felons, that should definitely include people who purposely and knowingly corrupt elections, voting, and government.
We might consider instituting the punishment from the story-poem and film "The Man Without A Country", based on a true incident. The upshot is that a man standing before a court said "God damn the United States! May I never hear the name of the United States again!" He got his wish: he spent the rest of his life on sailing ships, where no one was allowed to mention the US to him, and where any newspapers given to him had the name of the US cut out. He never stepped on American soil again.
What, me? Upset with the way the country is going? Nahhhhhh.
In reality I don't expect a problem, mostly because I'm planning to drink almost no booze at all (my usual plan these days, as it happens). Also, we all know how to deal with these issues like civilised people: change the subject.
Kemp sort of gave the game away when he referred to complaints about his exact match policy as "outside agitators". This Yahoo News article explains the freighted significance of that phrase in Southern politics.
This seems unlikely to me. Regular elections in even-numbered years is too ingrained in the American idea of politics to be eliminated so quickly. A more likely (though by no means certain) outcome would be maintaining the forms of democracy (like regular elections) but eliminating its substance (the elections are set up in such a way that the outcome is pre-determined, either through jiggering the voter rolls or controlling which issues and candidates appear on the ballot). This is a system that would be familiar to the segregation-era South, or modern Iran.
@Crœsos - thanks for the (not really comforting) explanations!