04-16-2021, 06:02 AM
(03-15-2021, 08:12 PM)TML Wrote: Americans used to ridicule the Chinese for being too weak to resist tyranny, but now Americans have found out that they are cowards, too.
Black Lives Matter would seem to negate your assumption that a vast majority of Americans are cowards.
It is Big Business, which depends upon a rat race or brutal management to enforce its ways, that makes Big Government a necessity, whether to mitigate the effects of monopolization and and the ability to make everyone economically expendable or to clamp down on dissent. Small government has become a utopian ideal and more nostalgia than a practical objective.
As for the Chinese... they are at the stage of economic development at which democracy typically works well. Consider Japan in the 1950's. The problem is the Chinese Communist Party which liberalized the economy but not the political system.
Yes, America has its cowards, especially its bigots and its romantic reactionaries. The Michigan plot and the January Putsch show that there are people who do not merit general trust in their observance of the basic decencies that make America a democracy. One of those basic decencies is the acceptance of political defeat, and one of those people is Donald Trump. I could also name some elected officials, too.
Democracy does not mean that one gets what one gets; it decides for the time who gets what they want. Does it always work well? No -- but the benevolent dictator who really does good for the People and the Philosopher King are far rarer than their desirability might suggest. Heck, I would like to be rich, but our economic system has seemed to act as if poverty were a necessary norm for keeping people under control on behalf of rapacious and irresponsible elites who think that everyone else is responsible to them before themselves and their families.
Absurdity leads to failure, as people with a certain level of learning (they took high-school geometry, which teaches this as a means of proving truth indirectly, and such is the divide between those who can succeed in college and those who cannot) well know and cannot avoid. That may even be the divide between those who believe Donald Trump and those who reject him -- even more than the usual divide between conservatives and liberals.
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.