11-03-2021, 12:19 PM
Republicans can offer nostalgia without having the means of achieving it, but they can muck things up badly in an effort to achieve the dream. We may be stuck with lower wages and higher rents whoever is in charge, and Republicans stand for those who can profiteer off mass suffering. Solutions always begin avant-garde, and Democrats get stuck with those. They may be all that can work, but the Republicans can always create some scary phantom like "death panels", "critical race theory", or "defund the police" and compel Democrats to defend or downplay those.
I look at the sort of life that the Hard Right offers us and I see little more than "suffer but be sure to smile". To be non-rich in such a life one needs be a masochist.
I look at the sort of life that the Hard Right offers us and I see little more than "suffer but be sure to smile". To be non-rich in such a life one needs be a masochist.
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.