07-26-2020, 10:34 AM
(07-26-2020, 07:34 AM)lwko Wrote: America 'staring down the barrel of martial law', Oregon senator warns
https://news.yahoo.com/america-staring-d...48069.html
Martial law is possible two ways now. One is the self-coup that destroys the authority of any State or city that opposes the President's philosophy and agenda. Another is something unimaginable until recently; a military coup that overthrows an irresponsible President on the brink of dictatorship.
We are close to having a dictatorship. From Washington to Obama, US Presidents have recognized that they have no powers not enumerated in the Constitution that Congress does not really delegate to them. Trump has taken such powers without asking on matters never recognized by Congress. Presidents ordinarily get the powers that Congress delegates, and those are far more extensive in an economic meltdown (Obama for a short time, FDR for longer) or a major war (Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Truman). A President who has failed to take the powers that Congress might have granted him for meeting a danger as severe as the Plague of 2020 has sought dictatorial powers for squelching political expressions that have full sanction in the First Amendment without seeking Congressional support.
A secret police that enforces ideology or personal authority of the Leadership is typical of despotism or dictatorship. Donald Trump has tried to transform America into a personal dictatorship on behalf of something less than even a plurality. If the rest of us fail to go along, then we will be broken. One culture, that of a melding of two regional and homogeneous cultures allegedly free from cosmopolitan rootlessness (and less cosmopolitan than the others) because it less identifies with immigrant roots. (This includes people compelled to remember that their ancestors had no choice in arriving into the nightmare of slavery). Even the old colonial elite of New England are more aware of their ancestral immigration than people that have little idea of their origins.
Most of us must decide on our own what it means to be an American. If someone claims to be an American, then he likely is. Some people may be uneasy about the way in which they became Americans -- cast-offs by other nations, illegal immigrants as ancestors, survivors of decimated tribes that once roamed the plains or forests freely, and odd and unlikely mixtures... but here we are.
So what isn't American? Association with ideologies that would destroy the connection of people, however shaky their ancestral connections are to this nation, to America. Thus Marxism-Leninism and fascism in all forms (including Ku Kluxism). Despotism of the sort that our Founding Fathers waged a war against for the achievement of independence, whether that despotism was by George III or Donald Trump.
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.