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Saturday, November 26, 2016

Breaking But Not Broken

Long time friend-of-blog "Esebian" posted another provocative comment in the Moot that deserved a post on this long grading day:
I'd be less concerned about the flavours of the imaginary reigns of this or that Democratic candidate and more with the very real possibility America is turned from a (however broken) democracy to a full-fledged autocracy. That's the difference that makes the difference, I believe. 
This feels to me like a rather philosophical formulation, "Esebian" -- tho' I'm prone to misreading things given how raw everything feels now.

Forgive a moment's pedantry, but US Presidents do not have reigns but administrations, and what gets done in them is far from imaginary, which you are the last person to deny I know. I do want to deny, tho', I think, that there really is such a thing as "the" difference that makes "the" difference politically, but insist instead, as usual, there are many differences that make differences. "The" over "a" rationalizes, I fear, too much self-righteous uselessness and unreliability. Is there a connection between these two quibbles I felt in reading your comment?

We usually agree on politics, and where we don't you offer up perspectives I read with benefit, and so don't take the registration of these worries in any kind of personal way if that is possible -- I guess I just don't know on the basis of what criteria you might distinguish presidential "flavors" that don't finally concern you as against the difference of a broken-democracy versus a fully-fledged autocracy?  How much and how many ways can democracy be broken (and mended) before autocracy is fully fledged and don't these degrees and ways of brokenness demand exposure and redress the better to resist the fuller-fledging of autocracy? And won't focusing on these differences that make a difference risk looking dismissably mucked in the weeds of "flavors" of "imaginary reigns" while one awaits the grand confrontation of *the* difference that makes *the* difference, democracy versus autocracy?

Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment -- maybe you just mean that re-litigating the primary isn't likely to be as useful as focusing on younger/better voices who care about equity-in-diversity occupying the Democratic Party and resisting Trumpism-in-action right about now. I certainly agree with that!

2 comments:

Esebian said...

It's about focussing your energies on the real enemy. My comment was in reply to someone who still played the blame game, rationalized Trump's... ascendancy as the result of political disenchantment.

If we want to win this fight, if we want to have a world still standing in a few years, we mustn't let this lies stand. This election is purely, absolutely ILLEGITIMATE. It was completely rigged from top to bottom, and as fair and open as Chilean elections for the "supreme chief of the nation" under Pinochet.

The widespread dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, voter suppression through ID laws, voter intimidation through mobs of Trumpshirts, the purposeful negligence towards electronic voting machine security, the disenfranchisement of color-biased mass incarceration...

2016 marks the year America became a banana republic, and a raping conman got installed as the Nation's Daddy. The cabal of white supremacists and theocrats controlling him will use the next four years to turn the US into a entrenched dictatorship.

We must never lose sight of the above facts.

Dale Carrico said...

All Yes. Emphatic agreement. Here's the exclamation point: !