Our real work
Oligarchs are “offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us.”
All posts tagged: Authoritarianism
Defining our democracy
“The good things in our nation did not come about by chance, and they will not be preserved by indifference.” The Rev. Dr. Deborah Meister I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Keeping a democracy takes work. Disuse of democracy by a careless majority is cause enough for worry in a world of constant struggle between tyranny and freedom. But when that indifference is coupled with a deliberate effort by a wealthy minority to undermine the public good for private gain, we find ourselves at a point where Americans are in danger of having government by the people smothered by an oligarchy focused on the enrichment of the few and the repression of those who disagree with them. America as an idea is a work in progress, with an eye on the prospects for the future. At our best, we are always growing, always becoming, as we move toward that more perfect union. But we are not always at our best. The history that really happened, as opposed to the history we’ve told …
Keeping a democracy takes work
Author, educator, and lawyer Teri Kanefield writes very smart posts about the law, books, and politics on her Teri Kanefield blog.* This morning she posted thoughts on why those who believe in democracy need to educate themselves on what it takes to keep that system of government. To use one of my favorite baseball metaphors, she hits it out of the park. I’m working on a post that looks at different aspects of our history, but that makes essentially the same point as Kanefield: “Many liberals and Trump critics have the idea that the United States has always been a liberal democracy — and then along came Trump, pulling the wool over his followers’ eyes and battering our democratic institutions. In fact, America didn’t start to move toward a true liberal democracy until Brown v. Board, the 1954 Supreme Court case that declared racial segregation unconstitutional. Brown sparked the modern Civil Rights Movement, which in turn gave rise to the women’s rights movement. Liberals cheered these changes. Many did not. Trump is riding the backlash from those changes. For …
MORE TO COME... 