(12-25-2016, 05:58 PM)TnT Wrote: One of my concerns is that the Republican Party could, based on their groundwork over the last 15-20 years, simply take control of the voting processes at the state level, such as is happening in North Carolina right now. It could become feasible in the next two years to make it impossible for the Democratic Party to win at all, much less "big."
Once that takes place, the federal level becomes theirs as well. They have a majority of the states now anyway. They may simply not give a shit what the population at large thinks any more. What are "we" going to do, anyway, break out our nickel-dime AR-15's?
Dark days ahead.
The Republican Party has the power over the next four years to decide whether America will be democratic or despotic. It might get to the position of controlling the nominal-but-permanently-ineffective opposition if not outlawing or crushing it. Should that happen, then all the ugly demons of the American past -- the militarism, the racism, the anti-intellectualism, the elite greed, and the inequality -- come to the fore. Survival for anyone not in the elite will depend upon pliability, and happiness will be possible only for the stupid. To think independently within an authoritarian or totalitarian order is sedition if not treason.
We may still have images of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR on our currency, but they will be irrelevant to how America does politics.
Oh, yes, the leaders will care what people think -- and those who think too far outside the prescribed orthodoxy will need to stifle that urge or emigrate to some country in which such is still possible, or die. If there is any clear lesson of twentieth-century tyrannies from the Congo nightmare of Leopold II to Iraq under Satan Hussein, there really are fates worse than death. Humanity is far more adept at creating Hell than at creating Heaven. One can no more say "This is America, and such things are impossible" any more today than the Germans could say in 1932 that a system that could rival the Mongols in murder could never appear in their country. Tyranny is tyranny, and it can fit any culture.
We are not exempt from torture chambers and murder camps just because we are Americans. The Germans proved shocked at what Hitler wrought upon America. We resist such from the first day of the trump Presidency or we risk losing everything that we have ever held precious in American life.
Qui tacet consentit.
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.