Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Defenders of Democracy ™ who were Nothing of the Kind
Anyone with a good background in junior high civics and a modicum of sense knew that all the slogan-shrieking, table-pounding, stentorian “defenders of democracy,” who so seriously, often times melodramatically decried the horrors awaiting us, should Trump and the Republicans win in November was nonsense. Slogans like: “It will be our last election!,” “Democracy is on the line!,” and similar hysterically hyperbolic fear-mongering were the order of the day for months.
A democracy is supposed to admit, allow, even encourgage the formation of different political parties, though. At least, any democracy worth the name would be required to grant competing parties the chance to acquit themselves or fail in the arena of public opinion. Right?
Why, those epitomes of Democratic virtue, those tireless protectors of political pluralism must have done everything in their power to make sure that other voices were heard! That parties other than their own could also participate in the great contest of free peoples that is democracy at work.
No. Not at all. Quite the opposite, as Matt Taibbi reports here:
https://www.racket.news/p/the-democrats-dirty-tricks-playbook
My favorite quote:
Openly talking about “deterring” other candidacies on principle, or stopping a third party from “successfully signature gathering” (as they did in a different memo), is striking given the Democrats’ stance on other voting access issues.
Read the whole article. As much as you may hate the Democrat Party and its leadership, you do not detest them enough.
Published in Election 2024
That is the Democrats stated stance. All of their “voting access issues” make it easier for key Democratic constituencies to vote: the undocumented, the fictitious, and the dead.
I had wondered what happened to them. Seeing the Lincoln project tweeting out that prodemocracy forces won by keeping them off the ballot is just unbelievable. But that has been the Dems MO all along: we have to kill Democracy to save it. But the thing that still shocks me the most is that when I bring up these types of Soviet-style tactics to my Dem friends, they either do not believe them or they do not care because Trump… The bubble walls are 10 feet thick at this point.
I wish it were possible for those people to continue living under the circumstances they claim to want. But instead, they get to benefit from Trump et al like the rest of us.
“. . . you do not detest them enough.”
You are asking me to stretch like I never have before.
Ben Stein wrote almost fifty years ago about the attitudes in Hollywood (now more widely spread) in which the entire interior of the USA (except for a few urban oases) is a seething mass of mutant troglidytes just waiting for the appearance of their Fuhrer and the order to arise.
“Our Democracy” is the collection of processes and authorities that keep them in check.
Paying people to report on a candidate’s or nominee’s real or fabricated sexual past is an old trick, too. That they use that tactic is no surprise, that people still fall for it is a surprise.
Tbe Democrats have had a rapidly declining commitment to democracy, for examples:
2016 – Hillary Clinton was declared the nominee on a day nobody voted.
2020 – Joe Biden, the 5th place candidate in the primaries, won the nomination by the synchronized surrender of the rest of the field.
2024 – Kamala Harris, who didnt run for president, who received no votes in any primary ever, became the candidate for president by acclamation.
Democrats now worry their may not be a mid term election – I think they should really worry that they may not have a primary election.
This past year just look at the beyond dubious Democrat Primary system for president. If you can do that in the Party’s own primary system, then it opens the mind as to what can be done outside the Party.
The Democratic Party has gone full-tilt machine politics.
Maybe just pointing out the insufficient cynicism 🤔