This *IS* Democracy

This is democracy.

Every time I try to clearly frame the situation, that's what I come up with. While I hate every bit of it, this is democracy.

Everyone's treating these political shenanigans like some fresh hell, but it's all stuff we knew about. The extreme right has wanted to dismantle the federal system (and gut medicare and social security) for decades. It was a queasy background rallying cry even for moderate conservatives, who didn't really mean it. Reagan and the Bushes couldn't ever pull that trigger, though President Pat Buchanan would have done so in a hot minute. But this was queued up since forever.

As was reported as early as 1964, a pervasive slab of conspiracism, malice, and gut ignorance—even among highly educated people (MAGAS are mostly boomers, our best educated generation) has always been out there, and never as sparse as we've hoped. It's a ton of people.

So this is democracy. Democracy means everyone gets their shot. Democracy doesn't mean you win every time so it's just how you like.

And, anyway, the cancer is not exclusive to one side. The urge to stifle dissent while hollering about free speech is as unconstrained on the left as on the right. Same for the favoring of certain groups and the disfavoring of others. Truly, it's all fucked, but we're reacting by doubling down. It's a simple process: the left moves extra left and the right moves extra right because no one can stand a whiff of Those Assholes, so we all recoil into the opposing extremism rather than the sane center. And it's a vicious circle because extremists smell worst of all, ensuring the most extreme revulsion both ways.

Democracy doesn't mean you love and support the country only when your side governs. The MAGAs don't own "entitled hypocrisy". Democracy means sharing power and, again, we knew these people and these ideas were out there. We knew we were living in a democracy, yet now we're shocked—shocked!— that they came to power and are making it happen. The shock is because we assumed that the beauty of democracy was our perpetual control, and that's inherently anti-democratic! We're certainly not being pro-democratic by hating the people with whom we share the country and its governance! Think about it!

So now, yeah, the vicious cycle is such that those guys are, in fact, legit killing democracy (for them, it's merely their side controlling things). From my perspective, it's a terrible tragedy. But from the higher perspective, it's a huge slab of the country getting to do what it always wanted to do. It's like traveling by minivan and some want to stop for dinner at Burger King. Sometimes you have to tolerate stopping at Burger King. Even if you're a vegan. Tough sell, alas, for a society of entitled aristocrats far too entitled to happily share power. If you don't want the assholes to ever run things, don't do democracy!

Our notion that half the country must never be allowed to get their ugly, terrible, no-good way is not democracy. If we can ever re-acquire a clean view of what democracy actually is—and what tolerance really is (other people's tolerances are different and if you can't tolerate that, you're the intolerant one)—maybe this won't go all Jew/Palestinian. I'm stating the one and only hope. I know you blame the other guys. And I've been doing the same! I write this not as a sanctimonious preacher, but as a repentant sinner.


We can retain some sanity by reframing like this. But it compels the question: how to proceed? Easy! Play the democracy game! Fight and resist! I don't mean screeching on social media or keying your neighbor's Tesla. We might start with voting. 24-37% of voters in key battleground states did not vote in 2024. Way more than the margin of difference. So could we invest some slim fraction of our bounteous shaming energy on people who don't? Maybe allow an occasional "nigger" for "kike" to slip by unremarked upon while we concentrate our cleansing focus on not letting husbands/sons/daughters/friends/coworkers get away with not voting? Can we use some of our hounding/screeching prowess to bully every like-minded voter in our perimeter to vote every damned time, and to consider pulling only Democrat levers?

I am evidently no pure Democrat, so if I suggest that last part, you've got idealogical coverage. No decent Republicans remain, and in my opinion they must be voted out en masse. But this can't happen if we don't vote. We need to find new channels of resistance beyond keying Teslas and preening in our Resistance drag. Like voting, for starters.

It comes down to whether we're enjoying this—suffering and all—too much to look away from the shouty pizazz and turn up the glaring houselights for a few seconds? To stop dramatizing and actually do a thing? To flip a voting lever?

I had problems with absentee ballots last time, to my enormous shame and regret. But I'm on it for midterms.