tl;dr: Democrats now have too much power. Power is not limited just to what we think of as "the government". Regardless of how that power is used (i.e. policy differences), this concentration of power is extremely dangerous, and we are witnessing the results.
The title of this post is my thesis statement.
My reasoning is what I will term “meta-political”. In other words, in making the statements below, I try to the best of my ability to put aside the policy positions of both sides, step back and look at the big-picture meaning of a Biden victory.
Forget for just a moment what either side stands for. They are simply two sides vying for power. For the sake of this argument, I am not interested in the ends toward which they intend to put that power.
I am against concentrated power. That is my stand, coming from the classic saying “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. This forms the root of the separation of powers built into our constitution (itself remarkably now becoming a controversial document).
Trump didn’t actually have very much power. He never controlled the propaganda organs (a.k.a. large news organizations with global reach or the controllers of social media); he never controlled the universities; he never controlled the primary education system; he never controlled the bureaucracy. In fact he is loathed by all four. Even more importantly, he is loathed by leadership in the “intelligence community”, which is a group that has far too much real power, seemingly completely unchecked. Corporate leadership leans more against him than for him. As a result, Trump has always been fighting for existential political survival. He has faced multiple overt attempts to unseat him from all of those power sources, channeled through the House of Representatives. Most of his energy was devoted to fending off these attacks against him. For that reason, we had - to a first order approximation anyway - a great deal of gridlock for the past four years as his opponents wasted energy attacking him and he wasted energy defending himself from political annihilation. This is hardly the picture of the “dictator” portrayed. He's able to dictate very little. He has never had the real power to do so.
Significant portions of the attacks against him, meanwhile, were and are explicit lies. I like Glenn Greenwald’s summation that while Trump is certainly a liar, he is simultaneously the most lied-about president we have ever seen. Please note that Glenn Greenwald is far more left than right in his policy positions. When attacked, Trump was attacked for the wrong reasons. While there are lots and lots of legitimate attacks against Trump, rarely were those the avenues used. Instead, his followers were branded as “racists” and this was the painting of his character. The evidence against this one particular attack, however, is overwhelming, particularly in the most recent election, where he gained a much greater percentage of the minority vote than any Republican has for decades. It seems fewer people with black/brown skin think he hates them or find the positions he takes or the things he says “hateful” than they thought of other prior Republicans, none of whom was accused of being racist. Are there some racists who support Trump? I'm sure there are, but that is not what he is about, and it does not remotely explain the broad quality of his support among many many different regions and groups.
I am deeply concerned that, assuming Biden and the Democrats gain control, they are not nearly so constrained. They now wield the power of all institutions. They control the universities and primary school teachers, without a doubt, and the universities are the feeders of the bureaucracy which is where direct exercise of power over citizens occurs. The large-scale press has lied and obscured for Biden and the Democrats more times than I can count. Even Fox - owned by Murdoch - has turned and betrayed Trump. Corporate power senses which way the wind is blowing, and corporations are falling over themselves to be perceived as following the liberal agenda being birthed in the Democratic strategy sessions. International organizations and governments are explicitly anti-Trump.
Another fascinating group - demonstrating the almost-completion of the Democratic takeover - is the group who call themselves Republicans, but who view the establishment power - defended by the Democratic core constituency - as equally sacred as do the Democrats themselves. It's not clear to me what they think distinguishes their views from those of the prior Democratic administration when they are fighting so hard for the re-establishment of what that administration stood for in opposition to the majority of the constituents of "their" party.
The shrinking of “acceptable” worldview is palpable. Trump’s supporters are being fired from many positions. Being openly pro-Trump in a university these days is professional suicide. Children who wear gear supportive of Trump are considered “divisive” and disciplined. The same would never happen if a child expresses support for Democratic-approved candidates.
The more that the Democratic establishment talks about “unity” and “tolerance”, the less I see it.
The range of acceptable discourse is shrinking alarmingly fast. Trump supporters have many well-reasoned and intellectually-defensible positions for which they find themselves labeled as “racists” if they speak. They are not racists (in fact many of the subjects that interest them were never in the past considered even remotely “race-related”), but the Democratic establishment has decided this is their go-to term for all opposition.
Rarely are Trump supporters permitted to present their case and argue the merits of it in any venue with popular reach - as the explicit strategy of the Democratic party for the past two years has been censorship. Corporate censorship is censorship, especially when used with a particular political philosophy in mind, as this censorship most certainly is.
I have watched reasonable question after reasonable question be censored because it doesn’t fit the new orthodoxy. This is not political debate anymore; it's religious. Believe the new orthodoxy or be labeled a heretic. Trump supporters are considered “inherently evil” by Democrats just as heretics were considered under the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. The irrational and emotional quality of the rejection is identical.
I don’t have to support Trump to sympathize with his supporters. They are angry. Very angry. These are the people who have been left behind by the policies of decades which a mostly Democratic power structure has established. There have been many losers from the economic policies of the past 50 years, but now to express disagreement with those policies is to be accused of being “racist”, then banished.
A hegemony is forming, and hegemony is inherently dangerous and despicable. Democrats are no longer looking to win; they are looking to crush dissent. If you forget about Trump’s policies for a second and ask yourself simply “does this voice deserve to be heard?", what he says speaks to more than 70 million people. According to Democratic propaganda (explicitly so), those 70 million people are now defined as racists for rejecting Democratic orthodoxy in favor of the message he presents. As said above, however, either there is an explosion in 'self-hating' blacks / latinos / general 'minorities', or maybe, just maybe, there’s more going on in this disagreement.
How can disallowing genuine dissent lead anywhere good? There is already far too much power in the hands of people who are increasingly willing to use it to intimidate their opposition (Biden took a knee to an organization whose members - explicitly acknowledged in the clothing they wear and the slogans they chant - physically intimidate people based on the color of their skin). The concept of free speech itself is now considered anachronistic and needs to be “limited”.
This is a supremely dangerous direction to go, and it will now be the policy direction of all our institutions. There’s nobody left - institutionally speaking - to resist. 70 million people have no remaining institutions in which they are allowed to speak their mind.
I am 100% anti-hegemony. Trump never had it or even approached it. The Democratic party wants it and is getting alarmingly close to having it. This makes the Democrats far more dangerous than Trump has ever had the potential to be. If the roles were reversed, I would write precisely the opposite message. But the roles are what they are.
This is the evil I fear.
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