Open Thread - 04-04-25 - Has Democracy Failed?
Has democracy failed? More specifically has Western democracy failed?
I've written before about political pendulum swings and how, in the last several election cycles, the swings have become more extreme, especially the last two cycles. Are these wild swings back and forth organic or are they manufactured?
The hatred and the vitriol in today's political zeitgeist, on both sides, certainly seems to be an astro turf phenomenon, blown up by the media and the two political parties themselves, for the most part. But, the question is, to what end?
In my eyes, it's pretty obvious we're headed for a more authoritarian form of government, if not outright dictatorship, with the two parties seemingly to be in a race to that effect.
With the rhetoric in high gear and the onset of violence the concept of unity under the flag's fifty stars seems a distant past dream.
It can be argued that the pendulum swings started many cycles ago, but, in my humble opinion, the wild and extreme swings started with Donald Trump's first election in 2016. The electorate no longer votes for their own best interest, elections have become a team sport where, right or wrong, their votes are cast for the Party and not for the most qualified or most capable candidate. Our elections have become popularity contests with reality stars as aspirant leaders of the free world.
In light of current political posturing and a most likely even more extreme swing to the left if the Democrats regain power, I find it unlikely that the Republicans will want to concede the implied power that comes with the territory. And vice versa if the Democrats do some how gain power again. We are that far gone. And yes, I think that is by design.
The stakes couldn't be much higher as the two parties slug it out, with We The People stuck in the middle, voiceless and powerless, and ripe for the fleecing. As democracy withers on the vine.
Comments
Good morning Free Rangers...
the concept of the uniparty has not escaped me, and that, in the end, is probably what is driving this undemocratic trajectory the country is on. And with most of the West on the same trajectory it is not hard to imagine that humanity is being dragged kicking and screaming, against its free will, to that undemocratic conclusion.
I'll be very busy today but I'll find time to answer any comments, sooner or later.
My wife
just sent me this, and it seems pretty accurate...
Janis said it best: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose..."
Has democracy failed? Well, hard to say- perhaps we should try it and see, since what we have is only a pale, cynical representation of "demockracy".
If and when the dems manage to wrest power back, the inevitable pendulum swing into all-wedge-issues-all-the-time tribalism will be very painful to watch, for any thinking person. Meanwhile, the actual concrete underlying financial, social, and policy issues that face us will be ignored, once again, in favor of performative window-dressing. Sad, innit?
Meanwhile, some friends are helping organize the local "Hands Off" protest this weekend, and are encouraging us to attend with them. I'm conflicted about that for a number of reasons...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Yes...
very sad:
And what I find saddest of all is the attacks on the First Amendment. Take away our right to free speech, and with the threat of of consequences for speaking your mind, will have the effect of loss our idea of individualism and free will in lieu of thought control and state sponsored political think.
There was a reason that free speech was given the hallowed position as the First Amendment. Without that, there is no democracy, no matter how much we are cajoled to think otherwise.
Spot on.
Now, we just get to see what the markets do today. I'm in meetings this morning to figure out how to cope with 54% tariffs on the components we need from Chinese vendors. That is going to hit us very hard indeed. The outlook is not at all sunny.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
My son...
is a manager in a large auto parts outlet, he's in the same boat.
Exactly
There is no democracy without free speech. Period. TPTB know that, and always have. And so, they are trying to take it away, and succeeding in some cases
If you're poor now, my friend, then you'll stay poor.
These days, only the rich get given more. -- Martial book 5:81, c. AD 100 or so
Nothing ever changes -- Sima, c. AD 2020 or so
Good morning UFS; great comment.
Be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
What democracy?
We have been on the extinction watch list
for many moons now. Dems did their damnedest
to create internecine warfare. Repubs require corporate
blitzkrieg efforts to remove social solutions. A sad state
of affairs.
Thanks for the OT!
Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.
-- August Hare
Indeed...
the Founding Fathers opted for a representative republic rather than a direct democracy, which to some would lead to rule by the mob. Instead of rule by the mob we're now faced with rule of the select few.
A sad state of affairs indeed.
As others have long-since observed...
...that choice may have been mainly logistical; how COULD you have coordinated a direct democracy over as wide an area as the Eastern Seaboard in the 18th Century?
Could they have even fathomed the possibility contemporary technology, things might've been quite different.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Good morning, Johnny, et. al. UFS beat me to the punch.
Like "Western Civilization", "Western Democracy", or indeed any democarcy, would very probably be a good idea, at least worth giving it a try sometime. The US was never intended to be a democracy, nor did it ever evolve into one. How could it?
Representative Democracy is inherently not a valid concept. Consider for a population of 1,000;
Democracy? Not remotely. OK, so instead, we have 4 deciders, each "representing" 250 of you. Is that really any better? Does it really matter how those 4 are picked. The right to choose one's ruler(s) doesn't eliminate rulers, slaves, or the relationship between. If there is no mechanism to force the representatives to actually determine and then implement the will of those they purportedly represent then it is nothing but an oligarchy.
In the US model, from day one, there were limitations upon who could be an elector, and thus the representatives need only represent said electors. That is still the case. Beyond that the process invites corruption, so grievously so that the rare candidate for office who is truly an honest and ethical person of good will will almost certainly succumb to temptation
Changes could be implemented to make it more representative but the Reagan-Clinton administration and each successor, along with each sitting Congress corresponding thereto has striven mightily to make oligarchy ever more complete and dominant and to make any semblance of democracy less and less likely.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Well stated...
well reasoned, and right on.
The only thing I would add is the oligarchy more likely than not will morph into a technocracy, although still an oligarchy but with a digital key to the prison door.
Don't have much to add
We read and watch and hear how our government operates domestically and in the world. This pundit, that journalist, a video clip. So much is comprehensive, in a narrow view. If we were to read about a milky eyeball, see a video showing decomposing flesh, hear thousands of flies we might guess we were looking at a corpse. Democracy is a corpse. That's where we are today. I'm not sure people vote against their interests. Both sides make big visionary promises and when elected cast aside those promises like used toilet paper. We've been reduced to showing up one one day for an election, voting for a selected A or B, and then being forgotten about until the next "election".
The dems have had enough examples of how to fight from their rivals, but for some reason don't, except for the theatrics. Neither party will address the needs of us 99% because....? My guess is it would upset the people who pay them.
Thing is, Trump 1 demolished the tried and true, my turn hacks like Rubio and Christie. Will we ever have anyone like that? I would have hoped it was Bernie, but he's not a dem, and I'm sure they let him know that, every day in every way. Call him a sheepdog, but he's in a minority party of one, and when he leaves will there be anyone to take his place?
Theatrics indeed
Cory Booker just did a 25 hour filibuster except he wasn’t actually filibustering a damn thing. He just stood there for 25 hours and talked about fighting fascism, but then he voted to send Israel more weapons so they could murder more children and women.
He couldn’t bother to filibuster the silly budget bill that Schumer helped republicans pass. And now he’s sending out emails asking to be paid for not doing anything. But boy did he get lots of kudos from shitlibs.
“Rising odds that the asteroid that briefly threatened Earth will hit moon”
Is it too late to knock it back on course?
The two corporate parties are quite different, though.
And different things happen under their watch, though they contribute to the same drab result.
The Democrats are quite open about the world as a scam perpetrated by the weapons corporations for their benefit. They are also the flagship party of the alphabet agencies, and old folks who were once targeted by said agencies are now openly endorsing them because they now come with the sacred (D) next to their names. They occasionally appeal to people who, vaguely, want something for their tax dollars -- though this desire has been kept purposefully vague to the point where if the Democrats spend five cents on disaster relief for the Pacific Palisades or if their candidate makes some promise about "opposing" price-gouging on groceries, the nice folks of San Marino, Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, Mill Valley, northern Virginia, Bellevue, and so on can throw cocaine parties in celebration.
The Republicans, on the other hand, are open advocates of class warfare, with a PR operation openly promoting nostalgia for an era before anti-trust legislation. But there is one great "welfare" agency they do support. The poor 80% down below are dirty, you see, and so to clean America up we must spend top dollar to send them all to a death camp somewhere in El Salvador. High-profile kidnappings will give the stenographers of power something to do.
Meanwhile our fortunes go to paying for high gas prices, our rail networks remain undeveloped, the actual military infrastructure remains gold-plated crap, our President threatens nuclear war with Iran, and our future lies in the hands of a guy whose real name is Mileikowsky. I have written a song in honor of our two-party system, to the tune of God Bless America:
God bless Zionist billionaires
Money that I love
Stand beside it, and guide it
To the police forces down below
From the slush funds, to the censors,
To the fires burning everything down
God bless Zionist billionaires
my overlords
Apologies to the corpse of Irving Berlin
"To watch the leader of the most powerful nation on earth endorse and finance a genocide prompts not a passing kind of disgust or anger, but a severance." -- Omar el Akkad
No, people failed. Is there an eastern Democracy? Stupid
question. Stupid is as stupid does.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Sam has decided that since she spends
.
most of the day sitting outside she needs to have her toys outside with her. I just looked out and there are 11 toys in the backyard. She must have taken them out last night because she only had one out there yesterday. There are also 2 empty toilet paper rolls. She found the one I put in the bathroom sink for her yesterday.
I think she got fed up with me bitching about the news all day. Or it’s because it’s warming up…
“Rising odds that the asteroid that briefly threatened Earth will hit moon”
Is it too late to knock it back on course?
Upon further reflection,
I'm tempted to lay the majority of the increased drama in the political-zeitgeist swings at the feet of the dems.
The repubs are still the same old rock-ribbed reactionaries that they have always been, by and large. But after the success of electing a black president, the dems very deliberately overplayed their hand, going all-in on IDPol, "aided " (read: egged-on) by a lot of very-highly-motivated people who saw opportunities to grab everything possible for their personal-favorite repressed affinity groups, while the grabbing was good.
I think that it really went wrong with the very-highly-publicized DEI efforts, which the repubs uniformly despise. Attempting to normalize e.g. nonbinary pronouns, and the bathrooms and places on all the forms that go along with them, really pushed the reactionaries over the edge. They already hated liberals, women, and people of color on principle, but pushing the LGBTQ issues to the forefront, and keeping them there to the seeming exclusion of all other normal business, really drove many repubs absolutely apeshit-wildman-bugfuck insane.
This headline-teaser from Zerohedge really sums it up:
We ignore this at our own peril. In retrospect, a lot of DEI really was a major overreach, despite the fact that those groups truly do need our support. A large fraction of the country simply was not ready for it (and may never be). And the inevitable backlash from the reactionaries has been, dare I say, biblical in scope. The repubs who previously wanted to shoot all liberals, and women, and blacks, now *really* want to shoot all the LGBTQIALMNOP people, once again "on principle", just because they had the temerity to call attention to themselves.
This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but IMNSHO it is one important reason that the pendulum has swung as far as it has. And, should the fortunes change to allow a swing back from *this* brink, I hope that saner minds will win the day and keep from trying to take it even further, setting up the real potential of a political death spiral in reaction to the reaction to the reaction... I do not think that such a swing will be survivable for many folks, including myself. Going for the whole DEI enchilada in one huge virtue-signaling swell foop was clearly a failure.
Like it or not, sometimes incrementalism is necessary- especially when attempting to address deep-seated (and largely irrational) hatreds of this nature. So that, I think, is a major contributor to the mess we have now. But your mileage may vary...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Kevin Kelly, for one, welcomes our new A.I. technocrat overlords
https://kk.org/
A founding editor of Wired magazine, Kelly preaches an optimistic futurism that seems simply to ignore the day-to-day political and economic melee as irrelevant to the Big Picture and the Grand Arc of Human Evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_%28editor%29
I have never lived to see a healthy democracy...
...HOWEVER, I get the sense that in one, realignments are as normal as the circulation of air.
Contrast that with the state of things since (approx.) the election of Bill Clinton: Lockstep, binary partisanship wherein the notion of deviating from a top-down partisan orthodoxy has become foreign, even abhorrent, and the first major realignment I was old enough to appreciate for what it's been has come as a shock to everyone!
Remember also, the Clintons are well-known for valuing loyalty - whereas I concluded from my studying the Nuremberg Trials that the concept of loyalty is actively BAD!
What's more, that was the same administration under which Alan Greenspan took the field of economics, something everyone ought to be able to understand, and turned it into an opaque church, like a Protestant Reformation in reverse, so there's a bit of a pattern there. Perhaps it was the '90s when democracy truly died.
To suture my point together here, I think polarization was CAUSED by an artificial top-down attempt to FREEZE politics and prevent realignment - Chaos isn't the problem, people are just in withdrawal from Order-addiction after having forgotten what ought to be normal.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!