01-22-2017, 02:11 AM
(01-21-2017, 06:51 PM)flbones too Wrote: What is the point of these protests? Trump is already president. It's going to accomplish nothing.
Much the same was said of the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Media other than FoX News pooh-poohed the relevance of the movement, but the movement hit some nerves. Democrats lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2016 -- and all but some state and local politics in 2016. With a despotic leader like Trump and a monolithic Party dominating Congress, the USA is close to being a single-Party system like China in which a nominal, but ineffective opposition exists in federal politics. All that is missing for the sort of system that Freedom House considers "Not Free" is a police-state apparatus, and you can be sure that the Trump Administration is working on that.
Much the same was also said of the American South in the early 1960s as the Civil Rights movement sought representation and a meaningful vote for southern blacks who then had about as much freedom as citizens of a Commie state. Opponents of the Trump regime at least do not face the likes of Bull Connor this time. I can imagine some Governors (Scott Walker, Fascist-Wisconsin) trying to establish secret police forces analogous to the infamous Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission
Protests like these led to the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos, Moammar Qaddafi, and (in 1989) some Communist-dominated states.
We are in a full-blown Crisis that we were not in so recently as three months ago. Every institution in America is on the brink of transformed into something very difference in purpose, composition, and responsibility. We have a President who acts more despotically than any of his predecessors. America stands to become much more dangerous, whether from political violence, secession movements, or from the imposition of dictatorial rule. 230 years since the establishment of the Constitution that we now know we could have its meaning transformed into a rationale for a dictatorship that any of the Founding Fathers would have found odious. Donald Trump, a corrupt, vain, deceitful, despotic, and incompetent Head of State is the sort of leader who is vulnerable to a military coup under almost any system other than ours.
Suggested reading for you: It Can't Happen Here. If Donald Trump doesn't remind you of the fictional Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, then you just don't get what I write here.
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.