01-13-2022, 06:04 PM
(01-12-2022, 04:19 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Any opinions here on the Green Party or any other 3rd party in the US? Are they outside the scope of this thread?
Never let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good. The Rotten win when we insist upon perfection when political vileness is better organized and lavishly funded. We have powerful elites who want an aristocratic order in all but name, one in which elites of ownership and management get complete dominion over politics and economics, condemning anyone not like them to grinding poverty and subjection. Those elites have at their core the belief that the rest of Humanity owes everything to them and that those elites owe nothing but bare sustenance as is necessary for keeping people alive to toil for them. If given the chance, they would arrange everything for themselves, and we would all achieve the sort of equality with what American blacks used to endure in "Kukluxistan" and South African blacks endured under Apartheid while the economic elites wallow in unconstrained power and indulgence.
Just look at the political figures on the Right. Most endorse the most despotic President in American history and fault him, if at all, for not being despotic enough -- or failing to crush liberalism before beginning the internal purge of the GOP.
On the other hand I would love to see the Right splinter between the fascists and the libertarians.
As a People we must put liberty above ethnic and religious identity... and even economic gain and security. The Hard Right has won some elections on promises of economic miracles that never pan out for any but the elites. The rest of us get to work longer and harder for less and pay more due to the monopolization and other corruption in necessities from housing to food to fuel to medicine. Those already rich wax even fatter while strangling freedom of those not them.
The Capitol Putsch gives us cause to recognize how precarious liberty and democracy are. Forged papers "offering" slates of electors contrary to the popular vote of those states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) have been exposed in recent days. A second term of Trump would have initiated a dictatorship in which those who won the last election choose the results of every subsequent election. That's how things were done behind the Iron Curtain, if for a different agenda. One Big Happy Plantation may be the economic antithesis of Marxist-Leninist economics, but the techniques are much the same.
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.