RESTORE COMMONS 2
biden dems build back better?
RESTORE OR AT LEAST BALANCE RW ECHO
TRUMPISTAS UNIRONICALLY ENJOYING NATIONAL PARKS
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AN 12 25
An alternative to the GOP is exploding among young people
:{Thom Hartmann December 24, 2025
The media is freaking out over a new Rasmussen poll that found:
“A majority of voters under 40 want a democratic socialist to win the White House in the next presidential election.“… 51 percent of Likely U.S. Voters ages 18 to 39 would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election. Thirty-six percent (36 percent) don’t want a democratic socialist to win in 2028, while 17 percent are not sure…
“Among the youngest cohort (ages 18-24) of voters, 57 percent want a democratic socialist to win the next presidential election…
“Among those who voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, 78 percent would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election…” (emphasis added).
I was on Ali Velshi’s MSNOW show discussing this, along with Michael Green who recently wrote a thought-provoking article about how the official poverty line in America is completely out-of-date and out of touch with the needs of most Americans. I shared a few statistics from my recent book The Hidden History of the American Dream: the Demise of the Middle Class and How to Rescue Our Future:
When, in 1957, my dad bought the house I grew up in, the average cost of a single-family home in America was about 2.2 times the average annual wage. Today it’s more than ten times the average wage.
When my Boomer generation was the same age as today’s Millennials, we owned a bit over 22 percent of the nation’s wealth; Millennials today control only about 4 percent of the country’s wealth (and it’s the same for Zoomers).
From the 1930s right up until the Reagan Revolution, it was possible for seniors to live comfortably on Social Security alone; Reagan undid that with his “reforms” so today that’s nearly impossible.
When I ran my first seriously successful business in the early 1970s, it cost me around $35/month for comprehensive health insurance for each of my 18 employees; at that time hospitals and health insurance companies were required by Michigan law (where I lived; most other states were identical) to be run as non-profits. Today, health insurance can be as much as one-fifth of a company’s payroll expense.
When Reagan came into office in 1981, a single wage earner could support a family with a middle-class lifestyle, and fully 65 percent of us were in the middle class (up from around 20 percent in the 1930s). Today, after 44 years of Reaganomics, it takes two full-time people to achieve the same status, which triggers huge childcare expenses, which is part of why only 43 percent of us are middle class .
FDR’s great — and successful — Democratic Socialist experiment following the Republican Great Depression was to drive the economy from the bottom up, reversing the “Horse and Sparrow” trickle-down economics and deregulation of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations that provoked the Great Crash.
He did that by:
Expanding the notion of the commons — the stuff we all collectively own and is administered or funded and regulated by government — to include free public education nationwide (and cheap college), old-age retirement (Social Security), and public power and transportation systems (Tennessee Valley Authority, federal support for local transit, roads and highways).
Legalizing unions, an effort that was so successful that when Reagan came into office fully a third of us had good union jobs and, because they set the local wage floors, two-thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a union wage and benefit package.
Establishing a minimum wage on which a single worker could raise a family of three and still stay above the federal poverty level (today’s federal minimum wage is $7.25: adjusted with the Consumer Price Index, that $1.60 minimum wage in 1968 is equivalent to about $14.90 an hour in 2025 dollars).
In the years since, we’ve continued to expand the commons by establishing national single-payer healthcare systems for low-income people (Medicaid) and retired people (Medicare), both of which came out of LBJ’s Democratic Socialist program that he called The Great Society.
Meanwhile, Republicans and a few neoliberal Democrats have pushed back against these Democratic Socialist programs that made the American middle class the first in the history of the world to exceed more than half the population.
Reagan’s war on unions has cut our union membership down to well under 10 percent in the private sector.
His gutting federal funding for education has exploded college costs to the point where three generations are saddled with over $2 trillion in debt that can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.
Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich (from 74 percent down to 27 percent) and corporations tripled the national debt (from $800 billion to $2.4 trillion) just in his eight years; since then the four GW Bush and Trump tax cuts have, when combined with Reagan’s, produced a $38 trillion national debt so big that we now spend more on servicing their debt than we do on our defense budget or would on administering a national healthcare system.
Back in the 1940s, after the incredible success of the New Deal, President Roosevelt wanted to further expand the commons by expanding the scope of his Democratic Socialist programs. Just before he died, he proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” that included:
“The right to a useful and remunerative job in the nation’s industries, shops, farms, or mines. (Unionization and an above-poverty-level minimum wage.)
“The right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation. (Ditto and government as the employer of last resort.)
“The right of every farmer to raise and sell products at a return that gives his family a decent living. (Don’t manipulate farm prices with stupid tariff wars, etc., and make the government the purchaser of last resort.)
“The right of every businessperson, large and small, to trade free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies. (Break up the giant corporations and encourage average people to start small businesses, including with loan supports.)
“The right of every family to a decent home. (Today this would mean no more corporations, hedge funds, and foreign billionaires owning single-family homes to squeeze us dry by jacking up rents.)
“The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health. (FDR favored a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All.)
“The right to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment (i.e., robust Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance).
“The right to a good education.” (Free or inexpensive college, quality public schools in every community.)
Much to the chagrin of my Republican-activist father, my grandfather (a 1917 Norwegian immigrant) frequently and proudly described himself as a socialist. When I asked him what he meant, he always pointed me to FDR, the New Deal, and his proposed Second Bill of Rights.
And here we are again.
My grandfather’s generation saw up-close and firsthand the tax-cutting and deregulation binge of the Roaring 20s (which were only “roaring” for the morbidly rich), and then had the lived experience of watching FDR put the country back together and create the world’s first widespread middle class.
Millennials and Zoomers today are seeing the same thing, between the Bush Housing Crash of 2008, the botched Covid Crash of 2020, and the GOP’s relentless program to drive the wealth of the nation into the money bins of the billionaires who own that party.
They see the example of most European countries, where the commons includes college (many will actually pay you a stipend to attend), healthcare, and daycare/preschool, and union density is often well above 80%. Housing is subsidized or heavily regulated, leading several to have essentially ended homelessness. Giant corporate monopolies are prohibited and local small businesses are encouraged.
Europeans call these programs Democratic Socialism or social democracy, and young Americans clearly are enthusiastic about bringing the “European Dream” to this country.
My sense is that — much like in the 1930s — a significant majority of Americans are sick of the neoliberal “let the rich run things because they know best” b------- that Republicans, “Tech Bros,” and a shrinking minority of on-the-take Democratic politicians embrace.
Meanwhile, nobody’s sure why the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is refusing to release the autopsy they did of the 2024 election, producing speculation it may have uncovered examples of Russian and Republican manipulation of both voters and the vote, but I’m guessing the real reason is that the neoliberals who largely run the DNC saw feedback that reflected the Rasmussen poll I opened this article with.
The exploding popularity of progressive politicians from Zohran Mamdani to Bernie Sanders, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t an anomaly; they’re a signpost to both electoral and governing success for the next generation of genuinely progressive Democratic politicians.
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yt chris murf thinker doer restore commons
WATCH: How to king-proof America, now and forever
1,144 views Oct 29, 2025
Senator Chris Murphy on fighting the authoritarian takeover, remaking the Democratic Party, and how you, today, can cure the disease that led to Trumpismhttps://the.ink/p/watch-how-to-king-p...
Transcript
...Um you were talking about the lack of stock taking. I'm curious for you. You're someone who's a I think unusually
7:13
in our era, you're like a a doer thinker. I mean, you you you have this pretty uh demanding day job, but you
7:20
take some time to do these research projects. You write books that are not just like here's why I'd be a great
7:26
re-election candidate books, but like real books, um history of violence, other topics. So,...
10:08
Run for Something. Yeah. And obviously she you know on one level
10:13
works in a very narrow way to do a very specific thing which is to get people to run for office. But as we were talking
10:19
about this and she was kind of helping share with with people watching what they can do, so many of her ideas were
10:27
what you would not call political in kind of narrow terms. She was saying like host people at your house more
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often, right? And and and you could imagine people saying like what the hell does it like Trump's doing this, Trump's
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doing that, like what's that going to do? And I was I was listening to her say all these different things and share her
10:44
own experiences and it you know it struck me that like she was talking about Toqueville, right?
10:50
She was talking about a habit of association that we lost in becoming
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consumers instead of people who associate with each other. And your congressman is not the only thing you
11:01
can do, right? Rebuilding a thicket of connection of all kinds, non-political,
11:07
right? if it's if if you're only asking people to do political things, it's like it's a little bit too late in the
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conversation, right? Um how do you but is there how do we get there? How do we
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we can talk about it? But are there policy levers to rebuild that habit of association?
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Yeah, it's a great it's it's it's a great question, right? And you know, you and I are both students of De Toqueville and it's just so amazing, right? How he
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sort of becomes more and more relevant, right? He worries so deeply about this country not being able to hold together
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because of our differences, but also because of our fierce, rugged in individualism. Of course, he thinks that
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it's it's the common project of democracy and religion, right, that are that are two of the things that will
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sort of stitch us together. And we're at the first point in American history where less than 50% of Americans, you
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know, consider themselves part of an organized religion. And politics, of course, has now become a forum to highlight our differences rather than to
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resolve them. Yes, I do think that um government has a role, a limited role,
but a role to play in setting the preconditions for individuals to make
better decisions about creating communion. Um, regulating technology is one of them, right? I mean, we these
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these devices are literally built to destroy us. They are built to to try to cycle us into withdrawal from people.
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And so if we just said, you know, we're going to we're going to make it harder for these devices to occupy so much of
our time, that time might be just naturally turned in to to communion, right? To
time with other with other people. I don't think that's what we were doing right before them. Yeah. Right. And I and I don't think
there's also any shame in saying, okay, we're going to be a little bit more purposeful in helping community institutions be healthier. Obviously,
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that's fraught if you're talking about government support for churches and religious institutions, but you know, we
could have a pretty comprehensive suite of of of assistance to try to just make
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it a lot easier for a union or a civic group or a neighborhood organization or a mosque or a synagogue to be healthy
and have more programming and open its doors. Um, again, that doesn't address some of the underlying problems of um,
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you know, the illegitimacy of institutions in people's minds, but man, it's better than nothing, which is kind
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of what we're doing today to try to help people find each other. Well, I think it's also very empowering
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for people to know that, you know, if you live in a town with one of these, as
[ufw hall empty 10 yrs]
... and have more programming and open its doors. Um, again, that doesn't address some of the underlying problems of um,
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you know, the illegitimacy of institutions in people's minds, but man, it's better than nothing, which is kind
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of what we're doing today to try to help people find each other. Well, I think it's also very empowering
13:36
for people to know that, you know, if you live in a town with one of these, as
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I've seen all over this country, like empty VFW halls or Rotary Club hall, you
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know, where no one has walked in in 10 years, reviving that, reinventing that is a pol act --> shtdn
11 24 ink
heather mcg
...You need to actually embrace the real needs of working-class people, really try to deliver against all odds on those promises, and you need to be able to sell it.}:
But we're in the wilderness, right? Democrats are in the wilderness. So we're not going to be able to govern and deliver in most places. Certainly not at the federal level. But we can really recognize the monumental task of the information ecosystem problem for what it is and start rebuilding there.
So what does that look like?
I think that looks like taking very seriously the rebuilding of the local news infrastructure. There are major capital plays that our donors could be doing, right? Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? How much would it cost for unions and groups of medium investors and some class-betraying billionaires or millionaires on our side to map the news ecosystem and really aggressively try to take it back over? To build up our influencer network to really make a play for the world of video games. We just need to take it seriously, and understand that it's not enough to be an elite party.
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Akaya Windwood facilitates transformation. She advises, trains, and consults on how change happens individually, organizationally, and societally. She is on faculty for the Just Economy Institute, is founder of the New Universal, which centers human wisdom in the wisdom of brown womxn, and is Lead Advisor at Third Act. Akaya was President of Rockwood Leadership Institute for many years, and directs the Thriving Roots Fund, which supports young womxn’s finance and philanthropic learning and leadership based in generosity and interconnectedness. Sam Draisen
Sam is an organizer based in Boston, Massachusetts and Washington, DC. In the three years Sam has been organizing, he has established himself as an innovative problem solver with a passion for bringing young voices to the forefront.
Born in Boston and raised by two politically active parents, Sam developed a passion for politics at a young age. As he entered highschool, Sam became active himself and worked with several organizations focusing specifically on Climate Action. He worked both in team member capacities as well as leadership roles for different organizations. A goal of Sam’s is to engage in different types of organizing work in order to build a strong foundation of skills....After graduating from Boston Public Schools, Sam went to Washington, DC to attend George Washington University. While there, his passion for activism has continued to grow. He is currently working on founding a political non-profit specializing in building community power.
tax dodge -->amplifying feedback inequality /polarization --> instability --> crisis; violent crime spike b/c covid disruption, social isolation [robbery not up?] BBB redicing inequality and gives us ability to invest in ourselves ...>Whenever progressive Democrats talk about billionaires, it’s in the soft tones of fairness. Men like Warren Buffet and Elon Musk, we are told, should pay proportionally what normal non-billionaire people pay. The debate is steeped in the inoffensive language of “their fair share.”
The debate is backwards.
Instead of starting with “their fair share,” we should start with a question fundamental to every democracy that’s existed, to wit:
Should billionaires exist?
Should their influence be legal?
Billionaires are not just very obscenely rich. With their wealth comes planetary power.Their decisions affect billions and billions of people, who in turn have no say on whether those decisions should be made.
Why should a democratic republic such as America, which claims to hold power to account – which must hold power to account to survive as a democratic republic – tolerate the existence of billionaires.
We should ask.
We should also awaken to the truth.
We are accountable to them.
Billionaires tolerate the American people and their belief that they are the ultimate sovereigns. It serves their interests for the American people to believe they are more powerful than they actually are.
Are we accountable to them?
Yes.
The American tax code has long been designed to ensure that unaccountable planetary power wins when it’s heads, wins when it’s tails. A democratic republic allowing the existence of such a powerful parasitic class is a democratic republic surviving rather than thriving.
That’s why the debate is backwards.
A debate among progressive Democrats over the question of whether the very obscenely rich should pay their fair share has been settled before it started. It’s a debate the very obscenely rich already win.
We should instead recognize the very real danger billionaires pose to our republic. We should assess how much risk we’re willing to tolerate. How much should be legal, how much illegal? Only then should “their fair share” come into play. It’s fairness as a hedge against systemic risk.
It’s fairness so the people may be free.
To learn more about our tax code, and how upside down, backwards and prolapsed it is, I talked to Amy Hanauer. She’s the director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. She said that, “We do not have to accept a false message of scarcity. Billionaires and big corporations grew much more profitable even in a pandemic.
“We can pay for a better country.”
What is it that normal people should understand about the United States tax code that most normal people do not?
Taxes are essential to providing us with things we need, as families, as communities and as a planet. We can use the tax code to make sure everyone has good schools, to make sure working-class kids can afford college, to have resources to construct affordable housing.
But we can also use the tax code to have the resources necessary for the transition to a clean energy economy, to address racial and economic inequity and to make sure public employees are well-paid.
There are ways to raise revenue that raise resources from rich people and corporations. But unfortunately, the US does far too little to make sure that wealthy people and corporations pay their fair share.
My colleagues at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy did a report last year. It found that 55 profitable Fortune 500 corporations paid absolutely nothing in federal corporate income tax in 2020.
Zero.
A whole bunch of other big profitable corporations paid more than zero but less than half the corporate rate (21 percent).
The big economic legislation that passed the House last year, the Build Back Better Act, addressed this by putting in place a 15 percent minimum corporate tax for the very largest and most profitable corporations. Unfortunately, that bill is stalled in the Senate.
Letting corporations or the very wealthy pay less than their fair share is a choice. It's not a choice that most people agree with. It's also not a choice that most other wealthy democracies make.
In 2019, the most recent year for which data are available, the US collected revenue equal to 25 percent of its gross domestic product(25 percent of its total economic output). Most OECD countries collect more than 34 percent. Only a handful of OECD countries collect less revenue as a share of their economies than the United States. They are all small: Costa Rica, Turkey, Ireland, Chile, Columbia and Mexico.
What can the Treasury do about tax avoidance on its own?
First, to address the enormous problems with our tax code, we need legislation. Things the administration can do without Congress are not a substitute for passing tax reform, which Senator Manchin has said he wants to pass, which Senator Schumer wants to pass, which the House has passed, and which President Biden wants to pass. And not incidentally, which is incredibly popular with the American people.
That said, there are things that the Biden administration will have to do whether the Congress passes something or not.
The Trump administration expanded tax breaks for corporations far beyond what the 2017 law allowed. These regulatory excesses gave corporations and the rich even larger tax breaks than the law did.
Many corporations have admitted they used the expansive interpretation from the Trump Treasury to get bigger breaks.
A second big thing is that when corporations publish their financial disclosures, they are required to list tax breaks they think the IRS is likely to deny. But we found that big companies keep billions in breaks that they had admitted would not withstand scrutiny, simply since the clock runs out before the underfunded IRS has time to investigate.
The IRS should direct more resources to dealing with that.
Another important option is that we don't always know exactly how corporations are avoiding taxes. The IRS could require companies to disclose that. This would help us identify how to make the law better able to address tax avoidance.
So much of the tax code burdens people who work. Shouldn't the tax code burden the people who own and collect rents?
Yes.
One of the big problems with our tax code is that we have a special,lower rate on income from capital gains (which you get when you sell an expensive asset, like stocks or a house, at a higher price than what you paid for it.)
It doesn't make sense to tax earnings from wealth at a lower rate than earnings from work.
But even worse is that the wealthiest people can accumulate wealth without selling their assets, and then can pass that wealth onto their heirs at the new value without anyone ever paying taxes on it.
This is called "stepped-up basis.”
The Biden administration included a fix to that in the BBB plan.But after a heavy lobbying effort led by moneyed interests, the provision was removed before the House committee sent the bill to the floor.
The reforms that did pass the House would raise a lot of revenue and raise them from the wealthiest people and corporations. But long term, we should also go back and revisit these good ideas.
Can you talk about the alleged link between low tax and high growth? That was a very potent argument in the past. Now?
The United States had its strongest decades of economic growth at a time when our tax rates were much higher than today.And that's not surprising. Things that led to high growth required public spending.
In the middle of the 20th century, we put a lot of national resources into helping people become much more educated.
Rates of high school and college completion rose in part because of more spending on K-12 schools, of Pell grants that help regular people pay for college and of state funding to public universities.
We also put resources into improving our national infrastructure, like the interstate. That helped companies get products out to market.
Both of these investments made us much more productive.
Today, we have different imperatives to make our economy more productive but we have nevertheless been underinvesting.
We need to put resources into greening our economy, which would reduce the pace of climate change but also make us more resilient in the face of climate disasters, which are going to be with us.
And we have let inequality – both economic and racial – skyrocket. The result is that many working-class people of all races are left behind.
Addressing both of those things will take public resources but will make us much more economically competitive in the long term.
Did all that growth cause inflation in the 1970s?
Inflation is complicated.
But a lot of rising costs as a result of current inflation could be managed by passing BBB, which would reduce the cost of childcare and health care, two of the biggest costs families face.
Explain please.
For most people, housing, childcare and healthcare are among their biggest costs. BBB has spending that would address all of those, making them more affordable. If we could hold down costs for those items, that would do a lot to keep inflation in check.
We are a very wealthy country.
We do not have to accept a false message of scarcity. Billionaires and big corporations grew much more profitable even in a pandemic.
We can pay for a better country. We have the resources.
We can afford to make college affordable. We can invest in our little kids so their parents can work. And we can and must invest to take on climate chaos. None of us will be protected from it if we don't.
no lnx
Defeating fascism's 'loneliness and alienation' has a simple solution: author
John Stoehr March 14, 2022
The former president held another of his tiresome rallies last night. I say “tiresome” because it was more of the same spleen and bile.
But he did say something useful to my purposes, which is talking about John Dewey in a world gripped by tyranny. Below is a long interview with Nathan Crick. He wrote Dewey and the New Age of Fascism.
Amid Donald Trump’s laundry list of grievances, including reiterations of the Big Lie, he said: “Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival.”
“We have no choice,” he said:
The fate of any nation depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down – and they must do this – lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.
That’s boilerplate fascism.
Just ask Jason Stanley. In 2018, he told Vox:
The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.
Per usual, the crowd was so rapt with attention, so immersed in the grume and gall, you wonder if it’s possible to reason with fascists.
Yes and no.
“You can’t argue a person out of a cult by walking into it,” Nathan told me. “There is hope only when they step outside of that experience.”
One does not ‘reason’ with fascists. It is more that you get outside the fascist vocabulary and talk about something different. The hope is by connecting with ordinary experience, perhaps they find life is more valuable than Donald Trump’s talking points.
What would that “outside life” look like? For Dewey, it meant more than protecting and advancing democracy. It meant protecting and advancing the capacity all humans have to be more fully human.
But first, get them out and back into ordinary experience.
As Nathan said:
Propaganda is totalitarian when it encircles a person. It creates an entire identity for them that tolerates no gods before it. It is a lifestyle and gives you an identity that you can share with other like-minded people.
Dewey used to be central to our discourse, but his appeal has faded. What brought you to thinking he'd be worthy of a new book?
Dewey lived through two world wars. As a young man, he absorbed the spirit of the early 20th-century progressive movement. He believed in the upward ascent of society toward its ultimate end in democracy.
What he saw instead were fascism and global catastrophe.
I believed his life would be instructive for our time to prevent catastrophe from happening again. I believe there is something called wisdom about human beings we can learn. He had that wisdom.
Let's break down some of that "progressive spirit."
The foundation of Dewey’s thought was the possibility of experience to be educative. Everything he wrote revolved around that basic idea.
We were born to learn and grow. Although Dewey was a Christian in his early writings, he came to look skeptically at organized religion and adopted a more naturalistic perspective toward human experience.
He believed human beings are born to live on earth like all other organisms. We are gifted with certain powers that other organisms do not possess. It is our gift to use those powers for our own growth and the growth of our community, not for any transcendent idea or aim beyond this world. This world is our home.
So by “progressive," he meant we could always learn to grow.
I love that, but how can this view face the fascism of his day? One wants to grow. The other to destroy. They seem irreconcilable.
It’s important to see the world from the perspective of fascist anti-humanism. Fascists also wanted to grow in the 20th century. They just wanted to grow in one direction toward a fixed aim.
The anti-humanism of the fascist is not anti-growth.
It is anti-experimental.
The fascist has one idea of what it means to be human and excludes all others. Fascism’s destructive power is the annihilation of alternative visions, of difference, of diversity of views and practice, of anything that, from the fascist view, obstructs the one way vision toward utopia.
So the idea of “growth” might need to be modified. Fascists want to grow in the sense of feeling a fixed mold, like pouring water into a jug.
For Dewey, humanism meant seeing the human being as a source of potential power, diversity and creativity. Nothing inherent in us meant we’re going in one direction. This was his resistance to religious fundamentalism. He saw power as very general. It is through individual practices and cultures that we develop these powers in different ways.
So there is certainly a conflict here.
Unfortunately, there is no ultimate reconciliation of these forces.
I think trying to reconcile them at a philosophical level is somewhat futile. I think it comes down to creating the conditions of diversity to continually get in the way of a singular totalitarian mindset.
Unfortunately, technology creates the conditions for that totalitarian view by combining like-minded people into a single vision that prohibits alternative realities. When those unities become strong enough and resourced enough, one ends up in contests of force.
Dewey recognized that, although he wished it to be otherwise.
Please explain the three parts of fascist antihumanism that you talk about in your book. 1. “Ragged” individualism. 2. Animist nationalism 3. Totalitarian propaganda. Can you walk us through each?
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From my reading of Dewey, I looked through every single moment he talked about fascism and authoritarianism in the 20th century.
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I tried to reduce these characteristics to their absolute foundations. I found there were three conditions that make fascism possible: ragged individualism, animist nationalism, and totalitarian propaganda.
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Each foundation was built on top of the other, but all of them were grounded on the modern destruction of the self and community.
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By “ragged individualism,” Dewey was playing on the utopian notion of “rugged individualism.” This was the idea connected to the cowboy of the American West and the self-made man of the industrial US city.
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The rugged individual was someone who found strength in being different from other people, in being separate from and even contemptuous of society, and who through trial and error would intuitively discover the virtues and the methods for success.
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Dewey saw the opposite.
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Rugged individualism tended to celebrate primarily industrial capitalism that came about not through individual creativity but the harnessing of capital and the exploitation of weaker populations.
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Meanwhile, ragged individualism created an ethic of contempt for community. It saw thatif you needed help, you were weak.
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Rugged individualism was “ragged” because it didn’t exist.
In a modern society, individuals were dependent on machines and techniques, not just for industrial production but through social organization. From birth to death, we are dependent on organized technology and automated systems to regulate mass society.
Human beings simply cannot get on in the world without being connected, in one way or another, to some kind of system. The idea that a person should “make it on their own” is virtually absurd.
That does not mean human effort is unimportant. Dewey simply says we cannot pretend, if we truly want to be individuals, that we can do all of these things on our own. We are intrinsically connected to each other. To pretend you are not is to leave you helpless and alone.
I am loving this so far. Keep going!
Worse ragged individualism creates conditions for animist nationalism.
I use the word “animist” to distinguish it from more traditional political nationalism which simply refers to any geographically organized citizenry that feels connected to a state and a common history.
Animism is when you invest a non-living entity with animal spirits. The state is that spirit. Animist nationalism speaks of the nation but it ignores the citizen and our common bond with each other.
Instead, it talks about the national spirit and the origin and destiny of the nation as if it was a kind of creature. What you get in fascist states is the mythology of, say, the “Aryan” as a complete fabrication.
But that’s a natural outcome of rugged individualism.
The more we are set apart from one another, alienated from our community and our families, organized by technology and machines in a way that loses any sort of personal relationship, the more we seek a relationship with something that is simply non-living.
We try to justify our lives by connecting to something deep inside of us and outside of us. This force of the living spirit that we can tap into that is superpersonal, somehow above and beyond everyone.
Once you get into this position, there is no more responsibility either to oneself or to other human beings. You get tied up into a vision of history totally detached from the experiences of ordinary people.
The fascist state or movement is the result.
It’s pathetic because it’s driven by a genuine desire for belonging.
Totalitarian propaganda organizes animist nationalism. I say “totalitarian” to note total absorption into a propaganda message.
Propaganda isn’t necessarily totalitarian. I teach propaganda frequently, as a college course. It can be simply a collection of methods for persuading on a larger scale than rhetorical argumentation can. We see propaganda all the time in social movements we find very noble.
Propaganda is totalitarian when it encircles a person. It creates an entire identity for them that tolerates no gods before it. It is a lifestyle and gives you an identity that you can share with other people.
Totalitarian propaganda is not specific to fascism by any means.
It can happen in any cult-like situation and is not subject matter dependent. Any idea whatsoever can be exploited by propaganda.
The key difference is totality, a vocabulary and a worldview so dependent on media the individual no longer experiences the world.
Thus, we come full circle.
Fascism is the destruction of the individual in the name of some higher ideal of personality.
What were Dewey's counterpoints? This is important, because I think most people still believe fascists can be reasoned with.
I think Dewey’s response is never about persuading fascists. You have to confront power with power. And I don’t mean force or violence.
I mean the capacity to act in concert for a common end against resistance. This is where rhetoric and communication become so valuable. One has to fight fascism by establishing a community.
By creating conditions that allow people to experience what they wish to recover. It is loneliness and alienation that sets the possibility for fascism. The way to battle that is by fighting for a community that allows self-expression and love and connection and creativity.
There is really no other option.
aha: doh press suppression (and presumably all the OFFENSIVE suppressions) damage quality and quantity of info flow, thus impedes democracy (vs corruption and fascism) ~ MODERATION THUS REQUIRED IN RESTORING THE COMMONS
aha: wapo and NYT are papers of record, nat'l institutional memory? ~ memory hole revisionist alt fact Earth2?
apparently not Joe and Greta's fault?!:
no lnx twt
These 5 ‘deeply malevolent’ things that Trump did to hurt Ukraine must not be forgotten: journalist
Alex Henderson March 01, 2022
With Ukraine now being invaded by Russian troops on orders from President Vladimir Putin, MAGA messaging on the crisis has ranged from praising Putin to blaming President Joe Biden for the crisis. One of the most ludicrous MAGA talking points is that Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Trump were still president.But liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, in a scathing column/listicle published on March 1, stresses that the things Trump did to hurt Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky when he was president must not be forgotten.
“With the Russian invasion of Ukraine getting more horrific,” Sargent writes, “Donald Trump and his allies are frantically erasing the truth about Trump’s relations with Ukraine. Trump absurdly claims that as president, he stood strong behind Ukraine and NATO, even as his spinners comically downplay his corrupt and deeply malevolent betrayal of our ally.”
Sargent continues, “The obvious rejoinder to this spin is that Trump got impeached for withholding military aid to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into manufacturing propaganda to help Trump’s reelection. This came even as Zelensky pleaded for help against Russian aggression, which the world is now witnessing unfold in all its horror.”
The columnist notes that when Trump was president, he repeatedly “aligned our interests with those of Russian President Vladimir Putin and against those of Ukraine, NATO and the West.” And Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman agrees. Vindman, who testified during House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry against Trump in November 2019, told Sargent, “Trump acted against U.S. interests with the consequence of aiding Russian interests.”
Sargent goes on to list and describe five examples of Trump doing things to hurt Ukraine. Trump, Sargent recalls: (1) “spread propaganda about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election,” (2) “ousted the well-regarded U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,” Marie Yovanovitch, (3) “froze military assistance to Ukraine,” (4) “withheld a White House meeting from Zelensky,” and (5) “turned Ukraine policy over to (Rudy) Giuliani.”
“All this has important forward-looking implications, now that Trump may run for president again,” Sargent explains. “As president in 2025, he’d be stewarding relations with Russia, Ukraine and NATO, but after this war has unfolded. Right now, we’re seeing extraordinary unity among the United States and its allies as it imposes harsh sanctions on Russia and otherwise tries to dissuade Putin’s invasion. Trump would almost surely rupture that.”
Vindman, during his interview with Sargent, warned that it will be great for Putin if Trump becomes president again.
“With Trump as president in 2025,” Vindman told Sargent, “we’re quite likely looking at a world in which Russia may have achieved its objectives and folded Ukraine back into its sphere of influence.”
see civil virtue/ responsibility
aha2 bowling alone (globalization/ outsourcing, corporatization walmarting of rural rust belt] led to kids leaving, all sorts of other problems, rw talk radio proposed enemy/scapegoat solution ol time religion --> echo/escalator polarization that just made problems worse which called for trump i lone can fix it --> nazis on florida overpass /cda truckers....
aha: echo is isolation from Earth1, legit press info (ie ideas/info you do not want b/c does not fit your POV) and escalator= AMPLIFY/ BOOST/ PROPAGATE TO MORE PPL AND MORE INFLUENTIAL/INFECTIOUS PPL/ SOURCES; boost is boosted by algorithm and hype hate anger fear is monetized which is both an incentive and an extra further boost --> runaway mode
an 2 22 edit bd
On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.
On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”
Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.
His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.
“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.
Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.
Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”
Then there is this part:
Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.
“Yes, that's absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett.
Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.
He's trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a "consensual dictatorship" -- which is a pretty good description.
Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?
His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He's reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:
- They become isolated(or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and
- They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a "grander" purpose (in the Nazi mindset).
A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded -- Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn't agree with it.
What you're describing is collectivism, no?
The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the "Fuhrer.” That's a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the "true" will of "the people."
But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.
Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it's a moral failing, wouldn't a defense be private and public morality?
Ideally, yes.
Bonhoeffer's essay is an exploration of why that didn't happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.
The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he's pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.
That didn't happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.
That's why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that "only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity."
The trucker above says he's seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?
One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we're also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.
In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers' protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).
I've studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.
For Bonhoeffer personally -- he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith -- that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.
I'm reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:
Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success,you’re going to sacrifice things along the way.There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.
A society focused on "success" (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won't do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.
He's making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual's ethics and sense of responsibility.
I've been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population -- children under the age of 6 -- can't yet be vaccinated).
But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we've dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.
A society is measured in part by what we are willing to live with and by whether we are willing to change to make life better. Bonhoeffer, in his text, addresses this when he writes about the responsibility we are willing to take upon ourselves for the sake of a different future.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to be doing what Bonhoeffer wished more Germans had done. He called out conservatives in the Parliament for standing with the Swastika and the Confederate flag.
I interviewed a number of Germans back in the 1980s when I was working on my first book (a collection of oral histories from people who had been in the Confessing Church) and I recall Kurt Scharf (a very brave pastor, who would later became a bishop) saying thatif Germans had held mass demonstrations and marched in 1933 in solidarity with German Jews, they might have changed things.
Impossible to know in retrospect, that’s what’s important here (and for understanding Bonhoeffer as well) -- taking a public position not only draws a line for what can be tolerated, but it also serves as a model to others that it is possible to speak out. That's what he was writing about in the section on the lack of civil courage among Germans.
https://theconversation.com/biden-restores-protection-for-national-monuments-trump-shrank-5-essential-reads-169573
doh human health depends on enviro/planet health
1021 an comm dr
Just ahead of a major United Nations summits on biodiversity and the climate—and amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—a global consortium has launched a planetary health declaration in which they "raise an alarm that the ongoing degradation of our planet's natural systems is a clear and present danger to the health of all people everywhere" that must be countered with a fundamental paradigm shift transforming nearly every aspect of society.
"The planetary health science is clear," the São Paulo Declaration on Planetary Health, published Tuesday atThe Lancet, states. "We can no longer safeguard human health unless we change course."
Authored by the Planetary Health Alliance, a global coalition hosted within the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the declaration is endorsed by over 250 organizations representing 47 countries.
"The urgency of this moment is hard to overstate," said declaration lead author Sam Myers, director of the Planetary Health Alliance and research scientist at Harvard, in a statement ahead of the launch.
The document centers on what various stakeholders—from urban planners to governments to artists—must urgently do as part of the "Great Transition," what the declaration authors frame as the necessary "fundamental shift in how we live on Earth."
To the agricultural sector, the document recommends utilizing "all ways of knowing, including the latest science and millennia of traditional and Indigenous knowledges, to implement agricultural systems that meet demand and reduce pressure on natural systems."
Economists, meanwhile, are urged to reject a focus on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in favor of "metrics and investments that support preservation and regeneration of Nature, human well-being, equity, and happiness—the things we truly value."
Numerous recommendations are laid out for governments with "an urgent first step" being promoting "public access to health services as a human right." Covid-19 recovery plans must also focus on decarbonizing the energy sector and ensuring equity for the most disenfranchised and marginalized communities.
The general public is also called to action.
"We invite you to consider yourself a partner in planetary healing," states the declaration. "We all live together in an interconnected world and the actions of each of us inspire others. Therefore, together, we pledge to dedicate our lives to the service of humanity, and to the protection and restoration of the natural systems on which humans and all other species who share our home depend."
Put together, the document says its recommendations should serve as "a compass guiding us towards the most promising pathways to support a more just and resilient post-pandemic world."
Courtney Howard, an emergency physician in Canada and a contributor to the declaration, put the document in the context of global vaccine inequity.
"In the midst of Covid, disparities in vaccine accessibility must be part of the same conversation as addressing planetary emergencies," Howard said in a statement.
"On an interconnected planet, no one is safe until everyone is safe," she added. "We need vaccine equity, and in the long run, protecting nature will be the true vaccine against future pandemics and other planetary emergencies."
aha social media is synthetic community
https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/american-authoritarian-mind/
to understand the American authoritarian mind, look to evangelical Christianity
no lnx
John Stoehr July 21, 2021
Michelle Goldberg is a superlative Times columnist. To my way of thinking, she's a quintessential liberal. I mean that in ways positive and negative. Positive in that she's a warrior for liberty, morality and self-government. Negative in that Goldberg does not, and probably cannot, understand the authoritarian mind, nor its perennial threat to us. Liberals are right to have sympathy for the devil. But there's such a thing as too much.
In her newest column, Goldberg talked about her experience reading Michael Bender's book about the 2020 presidential election, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost. Bender, who's a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, recounts not only "White House disarray and Trump's terrifying impulses," Goldberg writes, but "the people who followed Trump from rally to rally like authoritarian Deadheads."
Bender's description of these Trump superfans, who called themselves the "front-row Joes," is sympathetic but not sentimental. Above all, he captures their pre-Trump loneliness. … There are many causes for the overlapping dysfunctions that make contemporary American life feel so dystopian, but loneliness is a big one.
Goldberg suggests strongly that loneliness might be the cause of the current drift in the United States toward authoritarianism. She quotes The Week's Damon Linker, who cites Hannah Arendt: "Lonely people are drawn to totalitarian ideologies." "'The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,' Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describing those who gave themselves over to all-encompassing mass movements."
I love Arendt, but she's wrong here. She has things in reverse. I don't know if the chief characteristic of the mass man is brutality and backwardness, but I do know that loneliness is the result of brutality and backwardness. In other words, authoritarianism causes alienation, not the other way around. Democracy does not, and cannot, constitute "normal social relationships" to the authoritarian way of thinking, because democracy, to the authoritarian way of thinking, is a moral perversion of the natural order of things, which is to say, "normal social relationships": God over Man, men over women, black over white, etc. Democracy always runs against the grain of "God's law." The authoritarian is always already alienated—from her nation but mostly from herself.
Goldberg cites the American Enterprise Institute's Daniel Cox, who found a link between loneliness and support for the disgraced former president. The "share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise," Cox said. "And these voters disproportionately support Trump." His survey found that "17 percent of Americans said they had not a single person in their 'core social network.'" He added that these "socially disconnected voters were far more likely to view Trump positively and support his re-election than those with more robust personal networks."
Like I said, Michelle Goldberg is a quintessential liberal. She's reading Cox's findings as loneliness causing authoritarianism. It's the reverse, though. How can I be so sure? If loneliness causes authoritarianism, what are potential solutions? Among them would be more social networks, more community, more human bonding, and so on, right?
Guess what? White evangelical Protestants are very social, very communal and very bonded by religion and conviction. God over Man, men over women, black over white, etc.—God's law is the basis for their "normal social relationships." White evangelical Protestants are, moreover, united by their collective authoritarian belief that they have been chosen by God to rule America in God's name for the purpose of hastening the End Times, so that anything is justified as long as it serves Him. Put more plainly, nothing matters but authority and power. There are plenty of lonely people in this world, but making them less lonely isn't going to make many of them less fascist.
How can the authoritarian be alienated from her nation but especially herself while at the same time appear to find connection in communities like white evangelical Protestants? That's a very good question! It gets to the heart of the real problem. The authoritarian mind is taught to never ever ever come to its own conclusions about the world. Truth is whatever Dear Leader says, not what your eyes and ears tell you. This "education" begins before birth and lasts a lifetime. As a consequence, there's no such thing as independent thinking. There's no such thing as freedom of choice. In the collective, there's no such thing as you. As a result, you will always be lonely. Big rallies might seem communal, but they're illusory. You're filling a hole that can't be filled.
Goldberg again cited Hannah Arendt who "described people shaken loose from any definite place in the world as being at once deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being: 'Self-centeredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation.'" Goldberg said the pandemic did that. It shook people loose from "any definite place in the world." No, it didn't. The covid, the lockdowns, the isolation—these did affect authoritarian minds like they did all other minds. The difference, however, is that the authoritarian mind was already shaken loose from its definite place. And their always already-present anxiety rose to ever more feverish pitches the more democracy prepared to overthrow their fuhrer. We should not ease this mind with sympathy. We should break it with more democracy.
Again, it's the reverse. Being "shaken loose from any definite place in the world" does not necessarily make you "deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being." Not if you're already there. If so, already being "deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being" is what shakes you loose "from any definite place in the world." Indeed, you aren't selfish so much as selfless in the most literal sense, as in there's no daylight between you and the collective. You have no sense of self-preservation because you never developed a self to preserve. This makes it very easy for authoritarian people to throw their lives away for the leader. And that's what Michael Bender's reporting shows.
"Toward the end of Bender's book, Saundra reappears," writes Goldberg, referring to a Trump supporter mentioned earlier. "She'd just been at the Capitol for the Jan. 6 insurrection and seemed ready for more. 'Tell us where we need to be, and we just drop everything and we go,' she says. 'Nobody cares about if they have to work. Nobody cares about anything.'1 If you give people's life meaning, they'll give you everything." I don't know why we should read this in any way that's not literal. Saundra says she doesn't care about anything, because she doesn't. Sympathy won't change that.
The thing about quintessential liberals like Michelle Goldberg is they don't imagine, probably because they can't imagine, human relationships completely devoid of the principle of political equality between and among individuals. They can't imagine being uncertain of who they are in the absence of authority. When you don't or can't imagine such a life, the authoritarian mind can seem so confounding that you search for some concrete reason for its suicidal behavior. To the liberal, loneliness seems to be rational cause for authoritarianism. The truth, however, is far uglier, scarier and more dangerous to democracy than most people, not just liberals, seem to know. Nothing causes authoritarianism. It has always been here. It always will be here.
big aha:
ppl need help b/c of globalization defund soc safety net, but are abandoned by neighbors? church? am indiv macho i only need a gun to protect what's mine from brn horde? nb weyrich wedge issue answer how to brk working class solidarity and vote ~ own interest (plus magical thinking entrepreneur [art brooks magic mantra]lotto dream)
aha fundamental/systemic: putnam bowl alone esp rural wht ppl marginalized by globalization, digital divide, outsourcing by corps,some hype fear historical trend to blame immigrant other coming to steaL YOur jobs, daughters (rapists) and culture/country, so fill in public swim pool and make it harder for THEM to vote [plus gerrymander so can minority rule anyway; inequality (tax dodge/brk subisdy for rich/coprs b/c buy election w/ dark money so defund public school, health care, pvtize everything which makes it harder and more expensive to be poor, then demonize govt RR /koch libtard GOP TP so not ask them for help/justice/equity GI Bill VA homes mort) but build that wall
sparked by chomsky 521
aha, 2 aspects, we need to fix pol sys to make right decision/investment/ story me vs we
#1:
// restore democracy/norms:
an 221 robt r
...1. In presidential elections, they'll continue to try to win enough swing states to dominate the Electoral College and win the presidency.
The answer is to make the Electoral College irrelevant by having states join the growing movement to pass laws giving all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.
- In the Senate, they'll continue to try to win enough seats in mostly white, sparsely populated rural states to outvote highly populated urban states.
The answer here is for Congress to grant statehood to Washington D.C., and to work with Puerto Rico, which recently voted in favor of statehood, on a concrete path to self-determination.
- They also aim to use the Senate filibuster to block the majority. The answer is to eliminate the filibuster, which Senate Democrats can do without a single Republican vote.
- Finally, the GOP will use its control over state governments to gerrymander congressional districts and gain disproportionate power in the House. And they will pass even more laws making it harder for Democrats to vote.
The answer is to prevent gerrymandering and voter suppression by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act – which Democrats can do with a simple majority of 51 votes once they eliminate the filibuster. The values of the Republican Party do not reflect the values of most Americans. It should not be allowed to silence the voices of the majority.
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