Just a Theory

Trans rights are human rights

Posts about Democracy

Every Day Is Jan 6 Now

The New York Times Editorial Board in an unusually direct piece last week:

It is regular citizens [who threaten election officials] and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.

See also this Vox piece. Great to see these outlets sound the alarm about the dangers to American democracy. The threats are very real, and clear-eyed discussions should ver much be dominating the public sphere.

More of this, please.

Democracy Over Civility

Michelle Goldberg in a bracing piece for The New York Times:

Millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.

The demand for civility in the face of deplorable lies and inhumane policies enables those lies and policies. Angry voices on the left will return to civility once violent rhetoric has ceased and civil rights have been restored.

(Via @jonfavs)