(11-10-2016, 05:42 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-10-2016, 02:13 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Protests are springing up, the "beginning of the anti-Trump resistance." For some of them, once he's in office, a penal term may be what they literally face.
Through the presidential campaign period, I've thought the Trump campaign was behind a racist and sexist spiral of rhetoric with some violence. Black Lives Matter had another such spiral going, for the most part unrelated. I hadn't been too worried about either spiral under my "It takes two to spiral" theory. Things are most apt to escalate if words or violence by one side inspires the other side to even more virulent words or violence in response. The spiral grows out of control when one side tries to establish firm dominance and intimidation over the other.
The "not my president" movement might become the other side of a spiral opposing Trump's southern strategy stuff. Thus far NMP is more marching and chanting, no riots. However, I would rate it as a notable development.
In Clinton 42's time, the Waco - Ruby Ridge - OKC spiral died out after new rules of engagement were given to federal law enforcement agencies. The FBI, BATF and others were to avoid use of force when dealing with right wing militia and religious groups. It is possible that Trump will not use the same approach. He gets angry at opposition and tends to lash out. If there is a denial of First Amendment rights to speech and protest, this could irk a lot of folk big time. The word 'fascist' has been thrown around lightly in my opinion, but suppressing protests might justify it, even in my eyes.
Just something to watch.
Our political system does not well respond to popular protests. We have long sessions of Congress, much unlike a parliamentary system in which governments get dissolved for votes of no confidence as well as in regular elections. We have only regular elections. If people vote in a Senator who becomes increasingly aloof and extreme, then we are stuck with that Senator for six years. We at most have impeachment... and Donald Trump would have to do a literal crime to be impeached. Republican majorities will not impeach him.
Our Presidency, Congress, and most state legislatures can make about 45% of the electorate irrelevant for at least two, and probably four years. Maybe if all we liberals have is street protests against despotic tendencies in the President and officials who simply obey their financial backers, then all that we can do is go to the street.
We are more likely to have a government that outlaws its opposition (in which case we have a blatantly-undemocratic system) than to compel change in that government. Don't expect a Carnation Revolution as in Portugal in the 1970s or a Velvet Revolution as in Czechoslovakia in 1989 to topple an out-of-touch, rigidly authoritarian regime.
Do we need a revolution? Not yet -- at least not with Obama as President.
Donald Trump will be one of the basest, vilest leaders in the world. He will be a right-wing version of Maduro in Venezuela or Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Just wait until Congress does the bidding of Big Business (don't fool yourself --- Donald Trump will sell out the working-class people who voted for him because he will not need their votes again until 2020) at the expense of everyone else and has.
A despotic President and a stooge Congress puts us in much the same position as Massachusetts in 1775, and different parts of the country (especially New England, New York, Virginia, and the West Coast) will be far better prepared, psychologically and intellectually, for demanding a responsible government.
We do not live in a democracy. Lobbyists are the real power in Congress, and they serve people who would be perfectly happy with a fascist order without unions, protests, liberal professors, and television journalists like Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow. (If those two run for their lives, then we are deep into a spiral of violence even if we got into it at breakneck speed). A government that waterboards foreign 'terrorists' can turn quickly to doing much the same to political dissidents. Beware also of the abuse of psychiatric hospitals for political dissidents as occurred in the old Soviet Union.
For me to like the Trump message I would need a lobotomy. If such becomes a prospect, then maybe I need to go to San Jose -- not California, but Costa Rica. Or maybe a more exotic location if I should be in fear of a peripatetic secret police that goes to obvious locations. India looks lie a climatic Hell, but that could never be as bad as some new gulag in the Dakotas.
Any attempt to overthrow the elected government of the United States is by definition treason... but what happens when the government becomes despotic?
We know what these words mean:
Quote:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
We may be approaching that situation, except that the President and the stooge Congress take the role of George III and the corrupt British Parliament. Our Founding Fathers distrusted a Parliament -- but the British eventually got the bugs out of it (especially the infamous "rotten boroughs" that the King stuffed with his parliamentary flunkies).
Welcome to the '70s. The 1770s, that is. We will not need a Constitutional struggle to determine a form of government. This one is a response to another catastrophic failure of democratic government. It closes many loopholes that experts saw even in our system. Considering what had gone on in that country between 1932 and 1945, nobody had any desire to preserve any loopholes for tyranny.
Translation should be straightforward.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.