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It is precisely fascism. It's ignoring the rule of law to achieve authoritarian aims. Why is it ok when you agree with the outcome and not ok when you don't? But way more importantly, once you do it you cannot go back. If Biden did this and Trump ended up winning - make no mistake Biden has no authority to remove candidates from ballots - then Trump would feel completely justified in jailing his opponents.
A. Because the premise of your choice is flawed. You do not know that breaking the law would stop him. You do not know -with certainty- that not breaking the law would result in that outcome. But we do know that being authoritarian to achieve aims we believe in is no better than people we disagree with doing the exact same. What would happen if Biden was successful in stopping Trump but then, because we wouldn't ever keep unfettered presidential power... right? RIGHT? We're the "good" guys... what would happen if MAGA Republicans won in 2028? I doubt we'd ever have another election again.
Uh, Trump feels completely justified in jailing his enemies already. Will it happen? I'm not excited to wait and find out.
True. But the one thing we've got going for us is that it is demonstrably wrong and we didn't fall into the trap of proving it was justified.
Edit: well at least two people think it's ok to use authoritarian political power to counter authoritarian political power. Do you really think that ever works out? Note that this is very distinct from something like civil war or overthrowing the government. It's doing the exact thing you don't want your opponent to do.
Tis a risky game, doing what's right.
"what’s right" is, sadly not an agreed-upon concept.
That may be true, but I happen to believe that truth does exist. All we can do is hold on to it.
The issue is that people confuse opinion with truth and in general are too lazy or uneducated to proactively make the distinction clear.
I try to hold to the idea that ultimately evil will fail, because you simply cannot hide from the light of the truth. Of course that does not mean the ride won't be wild on the way there.
If only we had an example of a President who needed to break the the Constitution in order to save the Republic...
Oh wait, we do. Abraham fucking Lincoln.
https://lithub.com/lincolns-dictatorship-how-the-president-broke-the-constitutional-compact-in-order-to-save-it/
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/constitution.htm
I commend you for just how far you had to dig for that false equivalency. Well done!
Yeah, ww2 was settled by a nice peaceful sit-in.
After Hitler came to power, invaded multiple countries and started murdering millions.
It's easy to look back and say, "well, if we had just taken Hitler out none of that would have happened" but at the time - before the war - that was less clear. Many in Germany enthusiastically supported him and it's helpful to be reminded of why: The Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI was highly punitive. The German people felt rather justified for WWI and reacted with anger to the treaty - it's widely acknowledged as a significant contributing factor in WWII in that it opened the door to the kind of grievance Hitler was selling. By the time more people understood his aims and means it was too late and there was no alternative to war.
Now you might say well then, that just means we should have removed the Trump threat by any means necessary. I'm very sympathetic to that idea but I have a hard time accepting that for one simple reason: the lessons of WWI and II show that grievance is central to the authoritarian narrative. Direct confrontation that feeds that grievance only inflames it. A better course of action for the Democrats would have been to acknowledge the pain of wealth disparity all Americans feel and acknowledge our common goals. Instead we lent credence to the grievance and opened the door for Trump to capitalize on it.
With Trump in office, and Project 2025 in the pipeline, I doubt we're ever going to have another election anyway.
I sometimes feel that way. But I still have some faith in people, particularly Gen Z. I believe after the shit hits the fan and keeps hitting it for 4 years, that we'll turn this around. And because we didn't agree to make presidents kings we can actually do that.
Are you really achieving authoritarian aims if the end goal is not authoritarian?
Ah, the benevolent dictator fallacy. Because no person or party would ever abuse power or fail to give it up once the "aim" is achieved. There certainly would be no expansion in what the "aim" is. And definitely the people we agree with are always good.
Joe Biden already stepped down once. Clearly he's not hungry for power.
It's not about Biden it's about setting a precedent that it's ok for any party to break the rules because they believe themselves to be "good" and "right" and "just".
From the standpoint of democracy that wouldn't be ideal, but why is republicans having 2(4) years of unchecked power better? They don't give a shit and gonna do a lot more damage to it.
Because the side coming to power wants to gleefully deport, repress and kill people, and the other one much less so. The good guys are "good" not because they respect the rules, but because they believe in humane values, in ending their fists when the others' faces begins and all that good stuff. The fascists are bad not because they break the law, but because they believe and want to do fascism.
If the rules are unjust then breaking them is an ethical imperative. And Trump not being in jail is frankly a crime against lady liberty.
This thinking is precisely why Jan 6 happened and will happen again if we validate that thinking by doing it ourselves.
This is true. But if you want fascists to do fascism more and with more righteous enthusiasm, then adopt their tactics. Grievance is part of the ethos there. Many MAGAts truly believe that the Biden administration was "going after" them and that we liberals are an existential threat that justified any means at their disposal. This is the problem with violence and authoritarian approaches in general - the more you do it the more the other side feels the must do it.
Yes... and it's an insult, unjust and highlights the double standard for the wealthy and politically powerful. But strictly speaking it's not a crime.
You know what is a humane value? Respecting other people even when you vehemently disagree with them. Acknowledging that they are human beings and have a right to their thoughts and ideas even when you feel they are wrong. Because if you do not you are tacitly agreeing to their thinking that YOU are wrong. You are giving that perspective credence and the harder you push back the more you are allowing them to justify suppression of YOUR ideas.
I happen to think MAGA zealots are absolutely misguided and ignorant. But I can see how they got that way - racism, bigotry and misogyny borne of christo-fascist white supremacy. And what that means ultimately is that the people themselves are not the enemy, the ideas are. You can shape ideas through education and by being open and accepting of people. You can't do it by rejecting people.
What do you mean validate they don't give a crap. The alt right isn't going to become less relevant because we refuse to use their tactics against them. The choice is do things by the book, keep our precious moral high ground and most likely lose or get dirty and have a fighting chance.
What's humane in respecting someone calling for genocide? Sure we should try to change their minds, I am not agitating for their liquidation, but for clawing out the political and cultural power back from their sweaty hands to try to turn away from the f-ing iceberg.
Metaphorical iceberg, because all the real ones will melt after trump dissolves the EPA.
Actually they do give a crap. It often doesn't look that way because many of the most visible and vocal MAGA cult "leaders" want to push their members to enable their authoritarianism. But that's the top-level power grab. If we do that ourselves we further enable it and allow those leaders to say "Look! See! They are doing it so we HAVE to do it!"
Talk to MAGA cult members and you will find that if you strip away all the hyperbolic rhetoric and bring it down to the nuts and bolts level they pretty much want the same things we want - fair wages, affordable cost of living, decent affordable healthcare, bodily autonomy, etc etc. A recent Wapo article highlighted this - that if you present Harris' policies to Trump supporters absent the party they came from, those policies are very popular.
You don't have to respect their ideas or behavior, but if you do not respect them as people how can you expect them to respect you? When a child steals a toy from another child, do you beat them senseless or do you use educational tactics to ensure they understand and absorb the central lessons of sharing.
I also think it's important to recognize the limits of this "grand philosophy". The average MAGA cult member doesn't really have one. They want a gallon of milk to cost $2 and a be able to get a 30 pack of Miller Lite every week without going bankrupt. Because they are poorly educated and too damned tired to care they want a silver bullet (see what I did there) to solve their problems, which this week means crowing a king. They don't think beyond that, so why would you make the same mistake?
And how do we accomplish that? It's not a single line of effort but a combination of tactics: 1. Work harder to win at the ballot box which partly means: 2. Hold our mainstream party leaders to account and push them toward policies that will win elections. I happen to be aligned with Sanders on this and believe that to be policies that are progressive in nature but not in name; 3. Educate and inform. You can't pull people away from MAGA thinking by shouting at them. f
I believe the best framework for approaching this is to acknowledge the MAGA "movement" as a cult. It's members are often less educated and have not developed critical thinking skills nor the mental resilience to resist the brainwashing. This is only sometimes a question of intelligence - I do believe that processed food and exposure to pollutants has lowered average intelligence in particularly unjust ways, but I don't think that's the central issue here. Mainly it's a question of education and the only way to successfully educate people is to meet them where they are and to open minds, not close them.
It's really fucking not. It's extraordinary, unprecedented circumstances. You don't just hand it over to this guy, especially after telling us his cabinet. They're ALL national security threats! Tulsi fucking Gabbard in charge of every intelligence agency? Do people not see how inherently dangerous that is??
"The end justifies the means" is the standard excuse of dictators everywhere. And once you go down that road you don't really come back.
There is an excellent interview on this topic with Laurence Tribe that is really worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z06TJAMY-bo
I fully acknowledge just how much this sucks and how dangerous the situation is. I'm trans and live in a MAGA-infested area. That's only one dimension of the danger but it definitely opens one's eyes.
But throwing up our hands and grasping at bad options that make things worse is not the answer. We have far far more power than people realize. I don't entirely share Tribe's faith in our constitution and laws but to just say "oh it didn't work lets throw it away" is not going to make things better. It would literally be throwing away what power and ability to effect change we still have. It would destroy our country and you can bet it won't be remade as some progressive paradise.
What makes a society good is being inclusive of everyone regardless of how they were born and working through cooperation to achieve goals and look out for each other. A society where people are intentionally neglected for another group's economic gain is not a desirable society unless you're a fascist. However, ideologies are not people and ideologies that promote an unequal society do not need to be tolerated, and people who pose a danger due to their actions to the people around them in a society that would otherwise be more fair do not need to be tolerated either.
Neither authoritarianism nor ignoring the rule of law are inherently bad. In reality, law isn't words written on a piece of paper - it's people with political motives that hold authority over law enforcement and the criminal justice system. The words themselves hold no authority, and they depend on the people to actually follow them, so the people can collectively choose to ignore them or change their meaning and now suddenly the law is different even though the words didn't change one bit. The political motives the people who decide the law have generally favor a society that supports corruption and inequality, so there is nothing inherently wrong with breaking the law, especially if it makes everyone's lives better.
Fascism is a specific type of authoritarianism that basically does the opposite to a society of what it should look like. Utilizing authority to make society better for basically everyone is not fascism. Utilizing authority to dehumanize a subset of people for the economic gain of a "superior race" is fascism.
I appreciate your thoughtful comment.
Look, I understand the point you are trying to make. Roughly that being authoritarian to achieve "good" ends is ok. The wrinkle that you overlook is that there are many wildly varying viewpoints about what is "good". Being "inclusive of everyone" for example, is something that most Christo-fascists would abhor, their bible notwithstanding. Neglecting people for economic gain is practically a religion in itself for some people.
What all that boils down to is this: if one group ignores the rule of law because they are "right" then the other group feels fully justified in doing the same. And because we have a democracy and that democracy doesn't enshrine progressive ideas into law, we can't ensure groups with ideas we find abhorrent don't use our precedent to impose those ideas on us.
Not according to fascists. Do you see the problem? You just said that fascist authoritarianism is ok - from their perspective.
Hitler firmly believed he was making "society better for basically everyone". The Christian Nationalists and White Supremacists firmly believe their getting into power via a Trump administration will make "society better for basically everyone".
I know many of us would love to believe that there is an objective truth and that our beliefs about a good, just and equitable society are universal and objectively correct at a human level. I believe in the "arc of the moral universe" that is so but there is no way that I can use the mechanisms of oppression that I detest to enforce that belief on others and have that enforcement be successful.
Have you ever tried to negotiate or educate someone when you are angry? Like say your neighbor keeps playing loud music and you really want them to stop. If you come out yelling at them and are visibly angry you -might- get them to stop, but you have made an enemy. If you approach them in an open-minded way that acknowledges their rights and autonomy you have a much better chance of a constructive dialog that gets you what you want.
It's hard to think like this right now, I fully understand. We are all angry and frustrated as hell. Maybe it helps to be reminded that we still have a lot of power, especially at the local level... and that we are playing the long game.
Well for Hitler and White Supremacists they clearly weren't making "society better for basically everyone" and all it takes to understand this is basic logic that they support one superior race and commit genocides against other races. We can argue that our thinking may be flawed and biased all we want, but that doesn't change the objective reality that Hitler's genocide is very well documented and that it clearly caused massive amounts of harm and suffering.
Christian Nationalism is more nuanced having been a Christian myself previously, and deconversion fucking sucks. But if they want to make a convincing argument that Christian Nationalism is a good thing, they need to prove that God actually exists and there's enough things in the belief system that contradict scientific observation that they have no real argument supporting this. The various other pieces of bullshit they brainwashed me for 18 years with does not help their argument either (like my science teacher who was trying to convince us that dragons and dinosaurs exist right now but very few people have discovered them). Science has more ground in objective reality than religion does, and the amount of innovations science has helped us with that religion hasn't shows us that one clearly works better than the other when it comes to progressing.
So because other people's definition of "good" is targeting people for how they were born, nobody should do anything to protect them? Why do you think these ideologies are worth defending? They're a danger to myself and my friends. If you want to convince me that genocides are good for humanity, you're going to need to be a lot more convincing than that.
Guess what? While good people are arguing about whether it is right to do things that aren't normal or expected to progress their agenda, horrible people are going to take the initiative and do them and then it's too late. Life isn't a democracy, it's a battle between rulers that are engaging in genocides and doing other extreme human rights abuses versus everyone else. There's a reason why aggressive people consistently end up at the top. If we want any sort of chance whatsoever of dethroning the genociders and abusers, being aggressive is the only way that even has a chance at happening. Same reason leftists and even liberals now are buying up guns. The law has a history of being weaponized to keep people marginalized, we cannot rely on law to save humanity when that law comes from the same people that are humanity's biggest threat.
And on top of that the very reason the Democrats lost to Trump is because Trump is an actually interesting candidate promising to make radical changes, aligning with the interests and identities of many Americans, and building a shared vision and hope for the future. While meanwhile the Democrats fuck around doing basically nothing, they flip-flop on their stances whenever its convenient for them, they make vague statements that do nothing to give people any sort of inspiration, and they act like they're out of touch with the population. If we want to stop Trump while the Democrats continue to not due shit, our best bet is a sort-of left-wing "Trump" that has the same sort of enthusiasm, energy, and vision that can inspire people to unify and fight for the social good.
Approaching capitalists in an open-minded way rarely works. They operate on a system of optimizing to what benefits them the most economically, and if it benefits them economically for you to not have rights no conversation is going to change that. It's more likely to work for people who are socially conservative or lower-class economic conservative, but capitalists are generally a lost cause.
Well funny enough in my very local area the protestors who bent laws and got arrested for it have had a bigger impact on political discussion than any single other event that has happened here. And other cities within my state have made it illegal to feed homeless people, yet activists did it anyways and even sued the government and ended up on national news for it. It seems like the most interesting people here have no problem with ignoring the rule of law, and I respect them for that.
"Well for Hitler and White Supremacists they clearly weren’t making “society better for basically everyone” and all it takes to understand this is basic logic that they support one superior race and commit genocides against other races."
You missed my point. THEY thought they were making society better. That "everyone" meant exclusively aryans to them I thought was obvious and fundamental to the point I'm try to make - that from their perspective their actions were perfectly reasonable and justified. There's uncomfortably little daylight between that and MAGA beliefs.
"...if they want to make a convincing argument that Christian Nationalism is a good thing"
I'm disappointed that you missed this too and launched into a segue that has little to do with the topic I brought up. I don't think you really read my comment.
" If you want to convince me that genocides are good for humanity, you’re going to need to be a lot more convincing than that."
Ok now we're getting ridiculous. I'm now convinced that you either didn't read what I wrote or just didn't understand it.
"Trump is an actually interesting candidate promising to make radical changes, aligning with the interests and identities of many Americans, and building a shared vision and hope for the future"
Untruthfully. You are missing that very important qualificaiion.
"While meanwhile the Democrats fuck around doing basically nothing, they flip-flop on their stances whenever its convenient for them"
A common error. "I didn't personally notice any change so therefore they did nothing." It's demonstrably NOT true.
"Approaching capitalists in an open-minded way rarely works."
That doesn't even make sense. Who said anything about "approaching capitalists in an open-minded way"? WTF are you talking about?
Dude, I started out reading your lengthy comment excited to have a substantive debate. I thought you might have some interesting points. But you are so all over the place and use a very large volume of words to say very little. I'm disappointed.
So what are you saying? That objectivity doesn't exist? That there is no way to run a society that objectively does a better job at making people as a whole feel comfortable? That it's ideal for people with opposing ideologies to exist (I used to think that when I was a libertarian but over time realized that having an ideology coexist with another ideology that wants the first ideology gone simply doesn't work well at all, so we need to find the ideology that works better and progress from the other one).
I would argue that there is no objective right or wrong, but also that people in general have certain shared interests and usually some sort of a common moral ground. Like basically nobody wants to be in a concentration camp. People don't like being endangered by others, so basic laws are agreed upon to minimize this, like don't murder or rape people. And people want to be free to do things they want to do, so if they don't cause significant problems to another person they should be allowed. There might not be an objective "right" but there is an objective "this is what this person wants" for every person which means that there is a way to balance these interests to come up with a set of principles that objectively makes a society that is comfortable for as many people as possible. So since I naturally want to be comfortable and I know other people naturally want to be comfortable and societies tend to be more efficient and comfortable when people cooperate, working toward these principles is how we successfully do that, and this is what I will use as my basis for right and wrong.
However, when one person's freedom infringes on the freedoms of another person, this is where major problems arise and compromises need to be made. With the goal being to have a society that is comfortable for as many people as possible, this means that there is an objectively best compromise that meets this goal, and what people need to do is figure out what that "objectively best" compromise is, which happens by understanding the context of every party involved in this conflict. So whether an action is "right" in terms of making a society that is comfortable for as many people as possible is dependent entirely on the context, not the action itself. Which means that while actions such as killing another person are normally "wrong" as it infringes on the freedom of another person, if killing that person helps society reach the goal of being as comfortable for as many people as possible (i.e. the person is actively oppressing people based on characteristics they cannot change and killing them would help stop that), then killing that person is "right" in terms of that moral context.
This is the basic idea that separates "fascism" from "antifascism" (and other similar ideas such as "racism" vs "antiracism"), in that they may use similar tactics but when you look at what those actions are objectively doing to people, one is promoting discrimination based on characteristics people cannot change leading to a more unequal society that deviates from this ideal, and the other is countering that, leading to a less overall unequal society and progressing toward that ideal.
The challenge is that this objectivity in terms of what actions are "right" and "wrong" is still being discovered and debated on, and putting those disagreements in light so they can be resolved is important for making social progress. But in the end, whether a person or a society is "fascist" is an objective measure and in my view there is nothing wrong with combating this through any means possible.
I think the fact that this is so unclear to you is both disappointing and disturbing. And you are going so so so far afield in an apparent effort to hear yourself talk more that I'm just not that keen on engaging.
Have a nice day.
Then clarify your statement. What even are you trying to convince me? You keep telling me that everyone thinks they are right and people should follow the law - but the law is made by the same people who think they're right so what makes the law so special? Why should I as a person with strong opinions on many topics ditch my own moral compass in favor of the law? I can't tell what point you're trying to make with this.