I’m out here camping in the desert, and wrote a blog post. Actually, I recorded another video (that’s easier) and turned the content into a blog post. I’m here:
My husband took he first picture. I took the second. You can see he’s a serious photographer. I’m saying, “Where’s the button I’m supposed to push?”
Anyway, back to politics. In their book How Democracies Die, Harvard professors Levitsky and Ziblatt say that democracy is grinding work. It requires negotiation, compromise, and concessions. All those checks and balances slow things down. It can be frustrating. Setbacks are inevitable.
I agree with this. “My way or the high way,” is autocracy. “I’m am the authority. I know what’s best. If you question me, something is wrong with you,” is autocracy. Some people claim to like democracy actually don’t because they’re purist and they want things their way.
This raises a problem: While democracy requires compromise, how do you compromise with someone who is trying to destroy democracy? How do you meet such a person in the middle?
I’ve talked in the past about how lying and creating myths is a way to solidify power and undermine democracy. This makes sense because rule of law, the authority that underlies democracy requires truth. Autocracy is based on myth.
I have also talked about how the Republican Party has evolved into regressive, reactionary party that wants to dismantle the federal government, and take us back to a time when white [Christian] men had almost unlimited freedom and occupied the top of a well-structured hierarchy.
Again I’ll quote Harvard professors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, who say that ethnic majorities rarely give up their power and majority status without a fight. That’s where we are. The Republican Party is fighting tooth and nail to make a democratic government fail because the kind of fairness government put in place since the New Deal and Civil Rights movements gets in their way.
Take, for example, the voting debate going on right now. Republicans spent months spreading the lie that there was widespread voting fraud in the 2020 election. There wasn’t. Not a shred of evidence was presented in any of those dozens of court cases. People like Rudy Giuliani shamelessly said one thing in public and on social media and something else in court. All those court cases were a way to spread the lie that there was voter fraud. When they lost their court cases, they came up with lies to explain their losses.
After Republican leaders spent months spreading the lie that there was voting fraud, they conducted polls and found that lots of Republicans no longer had confidence in our current laws. (No kidding, right?) Then the Republican leadership argued that we need to tighten up voting requirements so that more people will have confidence in elections.
Of course, what really happened was that lots of Blacks in cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit came out and voted Democratic. Remember when I said lies point to what the liar consider an underlying truth? “Voter fraud” really means lots Blacks are voting, which threatens white male dominance. So now the Republicans are trying to pass laws making it harder to vote, particularly in places like Atlanta. The “reforms” they want will make the lines longer, and raise up hurdles. Basically they will make voting harder.
Democrats, in contrast, start with fact that Republicans keep trying to make it hard for people to vote. Democrats want to make it easier for all eligible voters to cast their ballots.
How can the two sides find common ground when one side is basing their argument on a lie? Any compromise gives credence to that lie. As one of my clever followers on Twitter wrote: if I say 2 plus 2 = four, and you say 2 plus 2 equals six, how do we compromise? By saying 2 plus 2 equal five? If we do that, the winner is the side that is trying to undermine truth and destroy democracy,
The kind of compromise you need in a democracy is when both sides operate from the same set of facts, but have different ideas for the best way forward or the best way to solve the problem. Then you can compromise.
If someone wants to stab me twice and I don’t want to be stabbed at all, there’s no compromise. What are you going to do? Stab me once? If the wielder of the knife says, “you’re not interested in compromise so you’re democratic” he is just using the norms of democracy to try to subvert democracy.
One way the Democrats are trying to compromise by writing a law that contains possibly more voter protection than we actually need for the next election, so that in compromise they can drop some and still protect fairness. The Republicans, however, want to compromise by adding restrictions. Adding any of their restrictions gives credence to the lie of voter fraud because the only rationale for the restrictions they want is a lie.
An interesting thing happened yesterday, sort of along these lines. Vladimir Putin challenged Biden to a debate. This happened after Biden called Putin a killer. It’s a fact that Putin is a killer. Journalists who he doesn’t like disappear. People just fall out of windows.
I don’t get many trolls in my twitter feed, but I got this one:
You can see how that works.
Challenging Biden to a debate was a clever way of implying that there is room to debate. “Debate” assumes a shared set of facts. Then you debate the implications of those facts.
Putin was using a tactic for elevating and giving credence to a falsehood. This tactic is extremely effective. What Russian propaganda networks do is claim to air “all sides.” They say they publish the truth, and they do, but they publish the truth as one of many possible equal theories, and then crowd the airwaves with so much “noise” that nobody can figure out what’s true and what isn’t.
The American right wing does this by talking about their free speech right to promulgate lies. They claim that universities prohibit free speech by not allowing ALL ideas to be presented. They want to put lies along side truth on the same stage. They want to put lies that Whites are superior along side the truth that Whites are not actually genetically superior.
You can’t compromise or debate with someone who is not acting in good faith. That’s why, for so many members of Congress, a starting point is: “Do you agree that Biden won the election free and fair?” If the person says anything except “yes” then you’re not dealing with someone you can work with or compromise with. You are working with someone trying to undermine democracy.
The only way to counter anti-democratic forces in our midst is to strengthen democracy and try to pull together a broad enough coalition to beat them at the ballot box.
This blog post is a video recording is here.
