While I agree with Ed Kilgore’s assessment of the risks in the present situation in his piece in New York Magazine, I’m not sure I agree with him about its sources:
I’d argue we are at another big inflection point. It’s more likely the country will turn left or right than achieve major compromises. That today’s conservatives are frantically trying to suppress popular majorities by exploiting anti-democratic features of our system or, worse yet, by denying such majorities exist is a pretty clear sign of which way the wind is blowing. If the authoritarian strain in Republican politics exemplified by Trump morphs into the kind of reactionary movements that crushed parliamentary democracy entirely in Europe nearly a century ago, perhaps we will long even more for the phony solidarity of an imagined bipartisan past, when backs were slapped and deals were cut in Congress and justice and progress were denied.
More likely, we are destined in the very near future to acknowledge and resolve our differences by choosing sides and having it out. That’s far healthier than denying those differences or blowing up the whole system to avoid defeat.
As Kevin Drum documented in the post to which I linked last week, the aggressors in the struggle are progressives. How else do you explain the situation in Portland? Who are the “oppressors” there and how are they conservatives?
I also wonder what he means by “having it out”? If he means each side whatever they may be trying to impose their views on the other by force, how is that justified under anything resembling a liberal order?
At least Kilgore has the subtlety to write that Trump himself was not a fascist despot, just the one preparing the way by making the paths straight.
“If the authoritarian strain in Republican politics exemplified by Trump morphs into the kind of reactionary movements that crushed parliamentary democracy………”
Some things are just to dumb to waste time commenting on. I don’t know who this clown is, and I’m not inspired by this to find out.
@Drew,
Kilgore is a Democratic Strategist, at least that’s the name of his blog. The blog’s subtitle is “Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority.” You’re probably not his audience.
Permanent one party rule does not sound liberal. It sounds like something that “crushed parliamentary democracy entirely in Europe nearly a century ago.” 🙂
The US is going to become a totalitarian socialist dictatorship. There is no other possible future. Three generations of brainwashed Americans guarantees it.
There will, of course, be an economic, cultural, and military collapse. Russia and China (and Iran and Venezuela and North Korea and …) have won. I hope to die before the Stasi come to my door.
I don’t believe in inevitabilities when talking about human action. I do believe in likelihoods.
While your inevitable future is one possibility I don’t believe it represents the greatest likelihood. IMO the greatest likelihood is something more like Portland.