10-05-2018, 05:22 PM
(10-05-2018, 10:08 AM)David Horn Wrote:(10-04-2018, 10:36 PM)berlin Wrote: Americans think that the US must be a police state now because the USA was always a police state, but Americans don't realize that the US used to have freedom and lost it.
As an American, I know that we've never been perfect as a country, but darker periods have always been overcome. That's the past, which, we are always warned, is not prologue. The 1950s were dark, in their way, but nothing like now. Other than the period just prior to the ACW, I can't think of a precedent. So we will either save our democracy or it will degrade into something more autocratic. It's up to us. No one is riding to the rescue.
For many, the 'rescue' might be unwelcome. Politics look much like those of the late 1850s, with Machiavellian power plays (including BK, and that does not mean Burger King) become the norm. If you think America polarized now, then think of what it will be like in the middle of November. We do not have a well-intentioned President (Buchanan) at his wits end trying to patch things together and failing. We have a President trying to establish a despotism or dictatorship that people might know only if they lived in such a place -- and not America. Trump could be worse than Buchanan in his effect upon the quality of politics.
An attempt to establish a tyranny, as by nullifying an election, would put an end to America and make America extremely unstable. Such could be the pretext for a military coup.
The best that I can hope for is that Americans tire of Trump and start showing such in elections. Maybe the Republican Party ends up going the way of the (Communist-dominated) Polish United Worker's Party (initials PZPR), losing its parliamentary seats in three stages in straddled elections. Maybe we find that farmers and ranchers who usually vote Republican out of concern for taxes will not be so concerned about taxes as their revenues plummet.
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.