04-09-2020, 10:09 AM
(04-08-2020, 05:18 PM)Camz Wrote:
How has no one posted this yet? Oh right... we're all in complete disbelief.. and disappointment. We will have to face the truth at some point, but for now, I'm gonna be praying for the future of our nation.
This is the basic truth: however much I may like much of Bernie Sanders' agenda I see an even greater need in ensuring that Donald Trump be a one-term President. It is not so that conservatism can be defeated once and for all; if anything, I see hope for the rise of a conservatism that repudiates the demagoguery, fanaticism, cruelty, negligence, dishonesty, incompetence, polarization, and corruption of Donald Trump. We are far better off when the political contest is between bland liberalism and bland conservatism than when it is between liberalism and fascism -- or between Marxism and conservatism. In most times incremental change over time does more good than does radical, abrupt change that inspires radical, abrupt repudiation when that change goes too far.
Don't fool yourself: free markets do much well. COVID-19 has done more to suspend a free market in America than any radical agenda (whether the Klan or the Commies), wartime necessity, or radical reform. This said, capitalism is a means and not an end, and in the aftermath of forty years of economic tendencies that culminated in Donald Trump, the only viable capitalism that we can afford is capitalism with a human face. The only contribution that Donald Trump can do to the achievement of that viable manifestation of capitalism is to show us what not to do.
If we Americans are to have any dignity as a people, then Trump must go. He must be defeated in the general election of 2020, which in view of the willingness of many to thwart such, must be so clear that nobody can say that he lost because some Governor cheated. Trump will not face electoral defeat as Al Gore did if it is close, and neither will his supporters. It will be far easier to shut people up about imaginary votes in Detroit if Trump should also lose Texas. But we must do this with an election, and not a coup or revolution. We also get political change through a process that does not include the dictate of a despot.
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.