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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Whatever you think about the Democrats, most of them would be extremely uncomfortable living in a dictatorship ruled by fear and tyranny.

I think that's definitely true. But I also think that if someone were to become dictator, they wouldn't exercise power against their enemies quite so nakedly. Any dictator worth his salt is going to harp on how the people he killed were exceptional threats to the Republic, who undermine the foundations of our democracy, etc. And I think people (of either side) would eat it right up, given the current political climate.

There's a limit to how many people you can brand as enemies of the Republic. If you don't get rid of every single Republican candidate in every single competitive state then your supporters are going to lose their re-election campaigns in the face of the backlash from your massively unpopular campaign of state-sanctioned murder. Either you kill too many and your supporters turn on you for going too far or you don't kill enough and your supporters turn on you for fucking over their re-election campaigns.

There's a reason that the standard practice is to abolish free elections and purge political opponents simultaneously. If you don't do both at the same time then you get kicked out in short order. And I don't think this one Supreme Court ruling all by itself is enough to overthrow the whole American democracy.

There's a limit to how many people you can brand as enemies of the Republic.

Indeed there is. Robespierre found that limit. Unfortunately, it's much higher than zero.

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