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Like, who thinks "that 'democracy' is their side having rights and the other side not having rights"?
Setting the concept of "democracy" aside, there is a strong impulse across the land to talk about interests as rights. Conservatives who disagree that, for example, gays and lesbians should have equal rights have created bogus religious rights to entitle themselves to discriminate. Progressives who want to change the culture around race and gender and other norms have advocated for rights to safe spaces. Obviously, the reason for this is that you can articulate your own interest as a right, you have a legal and political grievance that becomes more actionable. But it doesn't have anything to do with "democracy."
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I used rights where I should have used interests, but I think it's because I was leapfrogging to effect. The interests are manifesting themselves as rights, or preclusion of the rights of others.
The interest, the impulse, to use your term, becomes the basis to assert a right to do something, or a right to stop someone else from doing something. The right wing and the progressives each power over-- well... everyone. Sometimes
de jure, sometimes
de facto. Where they can't acquire the former, they use the latter. Boycotts, book banning, cancellation, soft censorship of antagonistic views as mis/dis/mal-information.
The right and left are authoritarians, and that is not false equivalence. They are engaged in a zero sum game and the impact of their authoritarian impulses is a preclusion of rights. Free speech? Sure, you have it. But not in Florida. And not if you want to keep your job at a corporation that has embraced the "correct politics" of the day.
The right is Orwell. The left is Huxley. They're both Trumpian. And they both want society to reflect what they think it ought to be. And they're pretty damn adamant about it.
It is deeply undemocratic behavior, so yes, I think MAGA and Wokeland are terrible threats to "democracy" in the broad sense it is described in the media.
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They need to do the politics to win people over.
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Can't sway cult members. Hopeless to try.
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Or, we could wait for Trump to die. I don't want to be overly optimistic about this, but I do think that a lot of his legitimacy is charismatic, and that it will be very hard to anyone else to replicate it. He's not going to live for ever. What happens after that? (Or if he loses another time?)
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Totally agree. This probably invites a hex of some sort, were I a believer in souls or afterlives, but Trump's death would be the best result of all possible ones at the moment.
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I really thought that the GOP would lose more people in the middle as it lurched to the crazy right, but there are a lot of Republicans who have just recalibrated and stayed the course.
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And there a ton more who left the GOP after
Dobbs and aren't coming back.
