askchapo

Good liberals believe they must establish a legitimate mandate before doing anything fundamentally transformative. Fair enough. There are also a lot of liberals who understand that the system is rigged in various ways to prevent that mandate from ever materializing. It is not uncommon to see Liberals grumbling about gerrymandering, various forms of voter suppression, the electoral college, the filibuster, the limitless deluge of opaque corporate campaign financing, and a number of other issues with our electoral system. They will be stuck in this Limbo forever unless deep reforms can be made to these institutions. You'd think issues like this would be paramount if they ever hoped to achieve any other socially beneficial goals, but at an institutional level, the leadership is absolutely allergic to organizing around any of these issues. The only people who talk about things like campaign finance reform, Citizens United v. FEC, or the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact are individuals who are (unwittingly) deliberately locked out of the system. Sympathetic figures. People who would like to see the system work the way it purports to. People who do believe in democracy as a goal. The leadership doesn't give a fuck about them and doesn't even pretend to care about this stuff though. They talk breathlessly about "saving democracy," but there is absolutely no agenda or slate of reforms to back it up. They are straight up mercenaries who do whatever they are paid to do. This is part of the reason they are evaporating as a political force.

There is also a deeply inculcated "fear of the other." We have been propagandized our entire lives to see the United States as a "shining city on the hill." This is the ONLY perspective allowed in any institutional media organization. As bad as the US may be, we make lamentable mistakes, while our "enemies" commit deliberate atrocities. As bad as the US may be, at least we have "freedom of speech," unlike China or "North Korea." We are strongly conditioned to believe that the barbarians are always at the gate, democracy is hanging on by a thread (that thread being the continuity of the US Republic), and that if the US were to collapse, it would not only be a calamity domestically, but for the world. That all the "evil" "regimes" out there are champing at the bit to do who knows what (but evil) and this shambolic country is the only thing preventing them (rather than arming and keeping many of them in power). It is this particular strain of propaganda which produces the non-bourgeois counter-revolutionary Liberal dead-enders. Just "harm reduction" grafted onto geopolitics. I think a lot more of them would be able to swallow the pill of domestic turmoil if they properly understood how intensely the US inhibits democracy globally. This is also why "whatab*utism" is such a readily deployed rhetorical canard. This type of criticism needs to be killed in the crib. It is the most dangerous. For people to realize all the mythology about freedom, democracy, civil rights, and rule of law has always been horseshit.

Part of me also thinks there's that moment of a revolution between systems that scares a lot of people.

This is the one thing which seems universally true. Whether you are a Communist, a Liberal, or a Fascist, it is terrifying. "The time of monsters"