What if the media is actually covering the spectacle precisely because the stakes—casual brutality, violence, callousness, lawlessness, and the descent into anarchy—are perfectly visible, legible, and clear? It’s hard to read any other way the current threats by sitting senators who promise to beat up committee witnesses, or former speakers of the House who elbow their political opponents, or congresspeople who say they will impeach everyone who makes them mad while dabbling in the recreational threat to shut down the government. What if the problem isn’t that consumers of media fail to understand the actual stakes of losing democracy? What if the problem is really that watching this MMA smackdown between fascism and representative democracy is, in fact, the 2023 version of good, clean fun? As Bouie puts it in his New York Times piece on the subject this week, “The mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen. And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.”
What American Democracy? The one where half the presidents in my lifetime lost the Democratic vote? Where the legislature is controlled by gerrymandering? Where journalists like Julian Assange are persecuted by the government? Where we give unlimited support to the Zionist genocide?
Yep the one where reforms with 93% of the populations support never go to the floor because someone paid a genuinely laughably pathetically small bribe to a couple of octogenarians.
Idk, we legalized cannabis and cops stopped harassing us in CA/OR. It seems like if people literally just tried we could accomplish so much. I mean, I literally don't know one person even half interested in politics as much as I am. I know tons of people that think there's no hope in doing anything worthwhile (besides having kids).
I don't really get the point of this type of comment. Used in bad faith, it clearly is meant to detail the conversation and sideline the point of the article that was posted. In good faith, maybe venting? What am I missing?
The problem isn't exactly apathy. The problem is that the system has failed everyone but the rich and powerful, and there are zero signs that it will improve. A lot of people don't see a difference between Trump and Biden, because their lives are hopeless either way. The American Empire is collapsing, and the politicians are doing nothing to stop it.
So you have a lot of complaints about everything, and your solution is to choose to do nothing? Thanks for removing yourself from the decision making process for the rest of us.
Apparently, yes. I've been pointing out anti-democratic tendencies in our politics for over a decade, only to be called 'alarmist', because obviously Roe won't be overruled and so what if they gerrymander in red states, right?
Perhaps counterintuitively, I'm a little less-alarmed today than I was 5 years ago, largely because instead of telling me I'm crazy, the people who told people like me to calm down are telling each other to take action