Dying on a Hill

The pro-democracy movement only needs to embrace border security, gun rights, and stop promoting trans rights and they will sweep all the elections. It is simple. Those three things and democracy is secured. Those three issues are how the autocrats are going to take power, just like they are doing across the world. If democracy dies it will be on that hill, defending people who are not citizens, a cause of death that is less than automobile fatalities or drug overdoses, and a tiny minority.

Republicans

I noticed many years ago on Fox News that whenever they began using the word freedom it had to do with cutting taxes or regulating industries. I found that the word greed could be substituted in these Fox scripts and it worked just fine. That is what they really mean….greed. Anything that taxes the rich or regulates their activities in pursuit of profit is not “freedom.”

It is Orwellian that the billionaire class pays for the fake identity of the Republican party because the only thing that matters to them is evading taxes and regulation. The prime functions of government are the enemy of the rich. That is why they do anything they can to divide and generate chaos, to distract the citizenry from their pursuit of absolute power.

The Republic

It all reduces to the rich evading taxes, which is redistribution of wealth, and regulation, which enables control of the rich, who crave control of everything by way of their wealth. I do not understand why this clear and simple message is not repeated constantly.

One way to argue against their talking point is to say that a republic is the term for a representative democracy…that is, we elect our policy makers and if we do not like their policies, we vote them out of office. Instead of a direct democracy with a mob deciding all issues and easily swayed by demagoguery and ignorance, we enable selected highly intelligent people with critical thinking skills to devote their lives to the greatest good for the greatest number. That is a republic.

Heather on Republicans

A democracy will always vote to redistribute wealth in some way and that is why the right will always in some way try to end democracy. The left (the have nots) seeks to redistribute while the right (the haves) seeks to concentrate. It follows that regulation, that is, the rule of law, especially election law, is also the enemy of the right because it is the prerequisite to redistribution. This is the basic truth of political systems. The right characterizes any redistribution as theft and any regulation as always resulting in totalitarianism, while the left characterizes the right not being taxed or regulated in any way as aways resulting in being ruled by the rich (oligarchy) and virtual enslavement of the poor. If America is exceptional for any reason, it is because of the idea of a mix and finely tuned balance between the left and right with this being the best possible Republic.

Albert was always right

Einstein wrote an essay titled “Why Socialism?” for the first issue of the independent socialist magazine “Monthly Review.” Published in May 1949, the piece included the following paragraph that said (sentences bolded for emphasis):

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

Snopes

The bolded quotes in the paragraph above do amount to the same thing as the various paraphrases we found on social media — that it would be difficult for people to make informed, objective decisions because sources of information would be controlled by private capitalists.

Crucially, however, Einstein was not writing about something that would happen in the future, but what was happening in 1949. That’s a key detail the various paraphrases were wrong about.