by guest blogger Adam-Troy Castro
Trump plans to challenge the 2022 elections.
So this is what we have now. Cries of “fake” and “conspiracy”, and violent invasions of government buildings, are now the default, the things we can expect to happen.
Folks,
I keep hearing people say that this election coming up is our last chance to hold on to our democracy.
I have to tell you, I think the democracy is gone; the body just hasn’t stopped twitching yet.
Democracy depends, at bare minimum, on the understanding by all participants that the results matter, that we grimace when somebody we despise wins and then accept the results. This is something that, among others, John McCain understood. When he spoke to his followers on election night — the same night Sarah Palin wanted to go on campaigning — they booed the name of Barack Obama, and he stopped them. He said, “No,” and John McCain was not always a towering beacon of character, but in this, he did the bare minimum, and today that looks like greatness, because we have fallen so far.
To have democracy, we need the uniform agreement on the part of everybody that elections matter.
Today the Republican default is that when you lose you start yelling, you start marching with your guns, you threaten violence and you turn the volume up to eleven and you hope that the other side backs down. It doesn’t matter if you’re one percent behind and it doesn’t matter if you’re five percent behind. You lay the groundwork for your own victory being the only possible legitimate result and then you stop at nothing.
You openly do this before the election and you count on nobody stopping you.
This is the new normal and it is here for the duration.
You know, once before, one side refused to accept the results of the election. (Twice before, if you include the Business plot against FDR.) It happens to have been the same side. (Yeah, I know Abraham Lincoln was a “Republican” and the side he opposed, essentially Democrats — but back when Abraham Lincoln was elected those words meant different things, and we had yet to experience over a century of half of shifting alliances and demographic shifts. Lincoln was, among other things, a liberal socialist.)
It was the same side, and this continent ran red with blood.
I am telling you that the situation is WORSE now, but the factions are not as neatly defined by regions.
Half the country does not believe in Democracy, rejects the very word in an inane belief that the very word favors the Democrats. You cannot have Democracy if half the country rejects the principle, if a quarter consider their guy infallible and inviolate.
Worse is coming. Far worse.
Democracy is still twitching. But it is bleeding out, and I do not see a return to sanity any time soon.
This is from a Facebook post and is reprinted with permission. Adam-Troy Castro has written 26 books to date including among others four Spider-Man novels, 3 novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and 6 middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of that very strange but very heroic young boy Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). You can also read a recent story of his in my latest anthology, Three Time Travelers Walk Into…
The 20th century was the time of Democracy as more and more countries threw off kings, dictators and tyrants to embrace elections and democracy.
The 21st century, so far, appears to be a retreat based on the fascist and dictatorship leanings of Russia, Italy, Turkey, and other countries (and now the US)… and the sad thing is, just like Hitler in Germany, this is being accomplished through democracy — with the end result being the death of democracy.
The GOP has made it clear that if they don’t like the results of democracy, they have every intention of ignoring and overturning the results, either through violence or other means. I’m not kidding when I say that there are Republican politicians out there who want their states to certify the Republican as winning the election even when they lose.
How can they do this?
Well, when it comes to the President at least, the Constitution says that the states are responsible for appointing the electors to choose the President. That’s one of the provisions of the Electoral College which has given us two Presidents in recent history who lost the popular vote. The Constitution does not say how these electors are chosen. Technically, the party in power in that state could choose the biggest donors to be electors if they wanted to.
And that’s what some Republicans plan to do. It’s why this upcoming election is so important and why you should vote for Democrats. It may be your last chance to vote, after all.
But wait, you scream. The Supreme Court won’t allow that. “Seriously?” I reply. “Have you seen this Court?” Have you noticed that a majority of the members of that court were appointed by those same Presidents who lost the popular vote? If you think for a minute that these people are big supporters of democracy, you may want to, you know, read some of their decisions concerning, for instance, the Voting Rights Act.
We are on a threshold here in America, where our brave experiment is nearing an end. But an overwhelming turnout of Americans — who do not support these fascists — can make a difference.
And if we don’t turn out and they win instead then I guess we get what we deserve.
Right now, most polls are saying that Democrats will hold the Senate but lose the House. All the polls and predictions are based on past turn-out and what the predictors expect given historical trends. (The party in power almost always loses in the mid-terms.)
So if lots and lots of Democrats vote in the midterms — which is not what usually happens — it will be a massive change from what they predict.
And especially if lots of women vote, because that would be grand. The woman vote could really make the difference and that would force all politicians to pay attention, afraid that they might lose their next election if they don’t listen.
We’ve already seen some of the power of people actually coming out to vote. The anti-abortion measure in Kansas lost by a huge margin; special elections in a few places showed a much greater Democratic response than predicted; and it is certainly possible that this could happen again in November.
But only if we don’t act like we always act.
There’s more of us than them, but when we sit things out like we normally do in midterms, we lose. Republicans know that, which is why they spend so much time doing everything they can to make it harder to vote. They can’t win based on the issues so they have to rely on cheating.
We have to overwhelm them. To get their attention, we have to hit them over the head with a million-pound shithammer (as Hunter Thompson used to say).
So if you’re not registered to vote, do it now! And then show up. Let’s prove the predictors wrong.
What exactly do conservatives want to conserve? Clearly, they want to conserve what they consider to be the “good old days” where straight white rich men controlled everything and the rest of us were basically pawns for them to use in their goal to get richer and more powerful.
Let’s look at what they seriously are proposing this election season:
I could go on, but you know the pattern. Every one of these things is opposed by a majority of Americans, but they don’t care. They’re used to the minority of rich, white men running everything, and they see nothing wrong with it.
It is predicted that the GOP will win the House in November, which means you can expect that we’ll never see anything of value accomplished. Instead, there will be investigation after investigation of made-up conspiracy theories, along with numerous attempts to impeach Biden for stupid reasons.
Our only hope is that people (and especially women people) are mad enough to vote in numbers never seen before for a mid-term election. The signs are encouraging so far, but the other side knows it, too, and you can expect them to turn out in big numbers. Remember that Trump cultists are often underrepresented in public opinion polls, because they don’t want to come out and admit that they support treason and racism.
Imagine you approached a bunch of American citizens down on their luck and promised them that if they came with you, you’d take them somewhere they could get jobs and assistance. You then shove them on a plane and send them off without making any plans whatsoever as to what happens to them when they get there. Oh, and you also lie to them about where they are going.
To reiterate: You committed a fraud by lying to these people, and you committed the crime of “unlawful restraint” by transporting people against their will (since they only agreed based on your lies).
Now if you say, “that’s different, these people that DeSantis sent to Martha’s Vineyard were immigrants,” then you clearly don’t know your Constitution. (I mean, no one has ever accused DeSantis of having the slightest bit of knowledge of the Constitution, of course.)
If you’re in America, you have rights. The 14th Amendment guarantees these rights to “people,” not just citizens. Even tourists get these rights. Hell, even illegal immigrants get these rights.
And these people were here legally. They are refugees, most of whom are escaping from a terrible regime in Venezuela. You know — Venezuela. That place Republicans incorrectly use as an example of socialism gone mad (when it’s really because of a dictator gone mad). You’d think conservatives would at least be consistent in that regard, and welcome them.
Refugees are allowed to come here, and once here, they have certain rights. Among those rights are not to be lied to and treated like cattle, and then shipped hundreds of miles away from the place where technically they are supposed to report to in order to take care of all their paperwork for entry.
The evil conservatives who cite the Bible while ignoring 90% of what it preaches just assumed Massachusetts residents would treat these refugees as terrible as they had, but of course, the exact opposite happened. The locals embraced the refugees, fed them, found shelter for them, and are working to help them get the assistance they need. You know, all the things Jesus said to do with immigrants.
You’ll never hear about that on right-wing talk shows, however. After all, if there is one thing modern conservatives are known for, it’s simply ignoring facts when they contradict their already-held viewpoint.
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