Post#96 » by pancakes3 » Thu Feb 13, 2025 8:53 pm
the thing about democracy is that sometimes members of the voting public subscribe to nazi beliefs.
you can play a chicken/egg game on whether the fascist leaders are the ones brainwashing the populous or whether the fascist leaders are simply a manifestation of its nazi citizenry, but the point remains that the leaders and citizens who are not nazis both have a civic duty to oppose the nazi faction through whatever means possible. it's not productive to call them deplorables, nazis, etc., however cathartic it may be. i'm not lecturing, i'm guilty of this myself. I just find myself thinking through these issues, and while we can blame the nazis, it's more effective to blame ourselves and our leadership so we can move towards a productive solution. R's do both - they blame libs and call us communists and soy boys and call our leaders islamic sleeper agents and pedophiles, but they also do the work - gerrymandering, project 2025, etc. Dems are missing that part where we actually do the work.
And to AFM's point about whether this country alternates between good and evil with every administration change? yeah, kinda. I know you said it tongue in cheek, but yes. Obama didn't win 100% of the vote and Trump didn't win 100% of the vote. The margin of victory is the difference-maker, and whenever there's a change, it shows that evil is winning more hearts and minds than good is. That's an oversimplification, but not by much. Some people became less evil between 2004 and 2008, and then some people became more evil between 2012 and 2016. Sidenote, the fact that we had long stretches of double-term presidents throughout the post-war Golden Age of the 1900''s-early 2000's, only to slide into three straight single-term presidencies shows that the people, specifically that voting margin (white middle class suburbanites spread across 5-6 states) are deeply unhappy and unsatisfied with their leadership, and are desperate to cling to any promise that life will get better somehow. Maybe that means taking a sip from the evil cup. Better people than them have been tempted with less.
And we might have different definitions of evil. It's evil to know what you're doing is wrong, and do it anyway. I would argue that it's evil when you *should* know what you're doing is wrong, even if you don't, and do the evil thing. I think many voters (and some true believer leaders) believe they're doing the right thing in promoting racist, vindictive, policies. White people ARE superior, immigrants ARE criminals, DEI IS infantalizing minorities, etc. They're wrong, and should know better, but they don't. But until their hearts and minds are changed, through messaging, education, dialogue, they'll continue to be evil.
Elon and Trump are loathesome though, and I don't really care to do the psycho-analysis of whether they know they're evil, or they are misguided true believers.
And that doesn't even get to the part where dem leadership and dem voters have evil tendencies themselves, not to mention absolute incompetency when it comes to governance.
Bullets -> Wizards
