My thinking on what must happen to save democracy has evolved.
Fact: The United States has been a backsliding democracy for some time.
Fact: We are in an information disruption.
Because democracy requires facts and an educated population, the question is whether enough people will develop the media literacy needed in this new age of information quickly enough.
1/
How much time we have depends on what happens in the next election.
If the Democrats win again with small margins, the backsliding can be stalled.
If the Democrats win big, the we will buy more time. There were not big enough majorities in the Senate in 2020 to do much, and then the Democrats lost the house.
I am putting together a long reading list for my blog.
Even countries that slide into authoritarianism can (and have) gotten out without war.
2/
FDR demonstrated what can happen with a landslide election.
Looking back, he brought about rapid changes that entirely changed the face of the nation.
At the time, the progress felt painfully slow. For the first few years, the Supreme Court was nixing his legislation.
Even a big win will create lots of rage in people who don't understand how slowly a large and complex system moves and this is by design: It also slows down autocratic power grabs.
3/
Voting Rights Act first!!!
I think if we were able to nix the filibuster, that would go a long way toward fixing some things.
Provided we have the votes, I would go with:
1. Voting Rights Act
2. Codifying Reproductive Rights
What should come next?
"FDR demonstrated what can happen with a landslide election."
So did Reagan. There is a straight line between Reagan and Trump. It was decades in the making, but the causal connection is plain to see
@davidbraze @Teri_Kanefield started with his campaign for governor:
Ronald Reagan on the unrest on college campuses, 1967 | | In his 1966 campaign for California governor, Republican Ronald Reagan promised to "to clean up the mess at Berkeley." Reagan was referring to the unrest prevalent not just at the University of California, Berkeley, but on college campuses throughout state. Students and faculty alike were engaged in protests, demonstrations, and strikes related to issues such as the draft, civil rights, discrimination, and women’s liberation. In one 1966 campaign speech, Reagan declared that many leftist campus movements had transcended legitimate protest, with the actions of "beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates" having become more to do "with rioting, with anarchy" than "academic freedom." He blamed university administrators and faculty, who "press their particular value judgments" on students, for "a leadership gap and a morality and decency gap" on campus, and suggested a code of conduct be imposed on faculty to "force them to serve as examples of good behavior and decency."[1] Six months after Reagan took office in 1967, he wrote this letter to Glenn Dumke, the chancellor of San Francisco State College, one of California’s largest public institutions. Dumke served as the public face of the state college system, and he was a staunch opponent of radical student and faculty demonstrations. In his letter to Dumke, Reagan criticizes liberal activism on campuses. He condemns "these people & this trash" on campuses as well as "the excuse of academic freedom & freedom of expression" in allowing protests and demonstrations to go on. "We wouldn’t tolerate this kind of language in front of our families," Reagan writes of campus protesters. He urges Dumke to "lay down some rules of conduct," promising that "you’d have all the backing I could give you." TRANSCRIPT Dear Glenn How far do we go in tolerating these people & this trash under the excuse of academic freedom & freedom of expression? Please understand, that question isn’t made in any tone of accusation. I mean myself too in that use of the term ‘we.’ We wouldn’t let a LeRoi Jones in our livingroom and we wouldn’t tolerate this kind of language in front of our families. Hasn’t the time come to take on those neurotics in our faculty group and lay down some rules of conduct for the students comparable to what we’d expect in our own families? If we do and the ‘we’ this time means you’d have all the backing I could give you, I believe the people of Calif. would take the state college system to their hearts. [illegible] Ron [1] Ronald Reagan, "The Morality Gap at Berkeley," speech at Cow Palace, May 12, 1966, in The Creative Society, 125–129.
@Teri_Kanefield If we can't get the uninterested to engage via our efforts of messaging and outrage (which seems to be the case), we need guidance to What Works. Do you know less-inflammatory titles than Alinsky's*? If not, it may be past time for someone to write them.
(($; -)}™
—
*I can't determine the efficacy of Alinsky's "rules," but results seem mixed, at best. However, if we're the "smart" and "honest" side, we ought to manage positive results. E.g., FDR, as you just cited.
@Teri_Kanefield
Today's polls are showing another coin-flip election for November. But I think the social conditions have changed to produce a big win for the D's.
I am preparing a six-article series on this change. First part is here:
@Teri_Kanefield: It seems like the changes move slowly for a time, then accelerate rapidly at a certain point. FDR certainly caused some rapid changes that built the middle class. There was always a push against the changes he made, but the civil rights gains in the 50s and 60s sparked the stronger backlash that accelerated from Reagan to Trump.
Now we're at a point where it could go either way as you point out. Small margins will slow things down. Big margins will cause an acceleration of changes.
While a country descending into fascism/authoritarianism can sometimes eventually reverse it without war, the damage done before that happens is always severe, and it's most severe for the most vulnerable and oppressed in that society. It's far preferable to avoid that slide if at all possible. That's the key right now - to make people truly understand what is at stake.
Those who are content with the slowness of change in our system are privileged not to understand what it is to be unable to survive that long. On both the right and the left, the number of people who won't survive that slowness is growing. None of them can afford to wait for the Democrats to stop fucking around and get an actual sense of purpose along with a candidate we don't have to hold our noses to vote for.
Increasing media literacy will not stop homelessness fueled by corporate greed and the complacency of the privileged, nor will it stop the growing despair, at least not before all who are currently suffering have been sacrificed on the altar of continuing democracy. Perhaps we should consider this before bemoaning their willingness to let the society that has abandoned them burn.
@gmsizemore
"America has no functioning democracy at this moment”
(2013:Der Spiegel)
“just an oligarchy.”
(2015:Thom Hartmann )
“I would say that we've become kind of more of an oligarchy than we have a democracy, now.“ (2018:Carter Center)
-Former president Jimmy Carter.
We are Wiley Coyote looking at Democracy’s cliff edge well behind us.
cc: @Teri_Kanefield
@Teri_Kanefield You are spot on. People are not willing to learn why the government is not working for them. Instead they buy into "all politicians are evil" and keep flip flopping between the parties.
Even if Dems are able to bring big legislative changes, it will be uphill with the stacked Supreme Court. Every little thing will be challenged, dragged out. Will people realize we need patience to enact change?
#India had a brief period between 1975-1977 when #IndiraGandhi imposed #TheEmergency to rule by decree, allowed elections to be cancelled, and civil liberties to be suspended ➡️ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_(India)
India is now the largest #democracy in the world.
Unfortunately, it is once again teetering on the brink of #authoritarianism, just like most other countries in the world under #reactionary #FarRight #conservative governments
@Teri_Kanefield I'm deeply afraid that the Dems' support of the genocide in Gaza will de facto destroy the US. If the narratives I'm hearing on social media is accurate, it sounds like the Dems have already lost a good chunk of the youth vote.
It would seem that for a lot of people, the point when we reached 'a bridge too far' when it comes to voting for harm reduction is this point.
Teri Kanefield
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