“Four more years and it will be fixed” Redux
A better articulation of the problem.
To follow up on my post yesterday, I would recommend Brian Klaas at The Atlantic, Trump Says Americans ‘Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ If He Wins (gift link).
Klaas better articulates what I was trying to say yesterday. Klaas noted the same two interpretations of Trump’s statement (i.e., either no future elections or meaningless ones) but I wanted to highlight his description of the second one, as I think it really gets to the heart of what I was trying to say yesterday:
A second and slightly more charitable interpretation of his remarks is that Trump believes his presidency will entrench so many pro-Christian policies into the United States government that no future election could realistically undo his transformation of the country. Both interpretations lead to the same conclusion: that Trump is telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight, hoping to sever the link between voters and government policy.
Emphasis mine.
As Klaas notes earlies in the piece, “rarely if ever has a major party’s presidential candidate directly stated his aim to make elections meaningless, a notorious hallmark of autocracy.”
The whole piece is a good rundown of Trump’s authoritarian rhetorica and behavior.
Thanks for clarifying, but this was exactly what I took from yesterday’s post.
I wish you were wrong. I really really do.
Le sigh.
ETA
What I really wish was that half the population of voters (+/-) weren’t so determined to try to make this country something it was never intended to be.
Or that so many (claim to be) Christians actually were interested in following the words of their God.
My only consolation is that I’m not likely to be here to see the conclusion.
Sadly, the gift link doesn’t work for me.
@CSK:
It doesn’t work for me either, but here are some excerpts:
snip (stuff familiar to us all)
These people are like Stalinists in 1970 insisting that ‘liquidation’ of groups meant increasing their social mobility and access to transportation.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
It ain’t half the population (+/-). It’s somewhere closer to 40%, plus a bunch of lemmings, plus a lot of powerful people willing to use the lemmings to hold power.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
A functioning, multiracial democracy with equal rights for all?
@Gustopher:
Weeeellllll, that’s what I thought the ‘shining city on the hill’ was supposed to be. Even as a child, I knew we weren’t there, but silly me …
@charontwo:
From Brian Klaas:
That’s the entire project right there in two sentences.
@Gustopher: No, he’s thinking about the other half.
@Scott F.: You’re doing the “not half only a little less than 45%” dodge here. Not buying it. Still dysfunctionally high.
@charontwo:
Thanks!
Repeating what I said yesterday, you, and Klaas, are misrepresenting Trump … by accurately quoting him, with context and video. Trump has deliberately cultivated an obscurantist speaking style designed to let his supporters hear what they want without actually saying anything he can be held to. I see no reason I, the MSM, or anyone else, should give him any benefit of the doubt in interpreting what he says. He meant for his faithful to hear he’d create an authoritarian theocracy. So be it.
@just nutha:
More than 10% is “dysfunctionally high.” I’m not arguing for complacency or acceptance, rather against defeatism. I’m arguing that, in a democracy, the majority doesn’t cede power to the minority if it wants to stay a democracy.
This is a message to Dr. Taylor, everyone else can disregard:
Dr. Taylor;
I tested your link again, it’s still not working. My thoughts:
You would think, when you do copy link to put a gift link on the clipboard, you simply do cntrl-V to paste it wherever you like, but maybe it is not that simple. I have several Chrome profiles on my computer, most of them use the same gmail address as identity as the Atlantic knows me by, the address my former charon handle used. It appear that when I try to paste Atlantic gift links within any of those profiles, the results are erratic, sometimes truncated.
My workaround is to paste into a different profile, picking one that does not know I subscribe to the Atlantic – then the full link seems to paste OK. (E.g., open OTB in a non-Atlantic-subscribed profile).
@charontwo: Well, I am the culprit.
I have been away from the computer, so I have not had a chance to see what I did.
I understand you are trying to help, but I would suggest an alternative theory: I successfully cut and paste 1000s of links in the course of a year, but sometimes I make a mistake!
@charontwo: I think I see what you mean about The Atlantic. Even my second attempt took me more than once.
Ah well, it is fixed now!!
One of the Hot Air stable wrote this (my emphasis):
Why religious liberty and freedom of speech need “fixing” is baffling, unless he means he expects Trump to limit them so they privilege Christians, but the inclusion of abortion is revealing. Clearly the MAGA people don’t accept the stats quo, and expect a re-elected Trump to organise a national ban.
@Ken_L: All I can say is that if your guy is advocating that voting won’t matter in the future, that person is not advocating for democracy.
Frankly, I think what was in Trump’s head was that he wasn’t going to be on the ballot in 2028, so that he doesn’t care at all. But he knows that that will come across as too self-centered, so he adds that he will have fixed everything.
I mean, that’s like “I’ll bring back coal”, right?
When I came up in the protestant church (I described myself as evangelical, but the meaning of that has changed since those times) there was definitely a sense of Christian = democracy = capitalism. Because that was the opposite of the Soviet Union, I guess.
These days, however, it seems different. The white evangelicals are losing demographically, and this means they are losing significant political battles: over same-sex marriage, abortion, and trans acceptance, for instance, but other things, too. Things they hold as “morally wrong” and not subject to a vote. So yeah, they appeal to authoritarianism. I mean, God is the ultimate authority, right?
@Jay L Gischer: The idea Trump expects to go into retirement obscurity after a second presidency strikes me as thoroughly implausible. No matter who might be the front man in the Oval Office, I suspect he intends to be the leader of the Republican Party and de facto head of government as long as he lives, and his family after him.
@Steven L. Taylor: Of course not. The Hot Air writers are republic-not-democracy MAGA faithful. I expect they subscribe to the Christian Nationalist idea that the state is subordinate to the church.