Put aside for a moment what trump does or signs or doesn’t do we talk about daily.
There’s a bigger issue here.
For the one reader who hasn’t seen the quote, Louis Brandeis said:
We can have democracy, or we can have great wealth concentrated in few hands, but not both.
Politics is about the distribution of wealth and power.
Dictatorships — the normal societal structure — concentrate it. We used to have this radocal idea of spreading it out among the people.
That’s the real battle. Those will billions want as much as they can get and to get it they HAVE to keep the 99% from having much wealth or power. It’s one or the other.
And while they haven’t defeated democracy, they’re pretty happy to have a faux democracy, where you can vote for whichever the candidates they approve of and fund you want.
But I digress. My point is that they have been very successul at what they need to do: turning the American people against the democratic form of government.
Spread the propaganda: government is bad, private is good. Hate taxes. Reagan was their spokesperson.
‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ Ha, ha! Ha, ha! Oh, ya, and we’re ending government programs.
For decades they’ve been transferring wealth from the people to the top, increasing inequality.
The point I’m slowly building to is this.
The danger the title refers to is making the people hate and not respect the very idea of a democratic government. If we could elect trump, how good can it be?
It makes people forget what government is supposed to be, what it can do, and turns everyone into a libertarian where anti-trump means anti-government.
Enough people to swell their ranks, anyway, building support for their real passion, reducing public support for government, playing into their hands.
We can go back to the good old Bill Clinton days where ‘low taxes’ and ‘small government’ are the winning messages from both parties.
This is why trump’s incompetence doesn’t bother them — they understand that the people hating trump helps their agenda. Cynicism is their ally.
So, it’s not enough to hate trump or Republicans. It’s about remembering a positive agenda for democratic government.
And that’s a war itself, as right-wing revisionists would like to teach children a new history where government has always hurt the country, e.g., FDR made the Great Depression worse.
In rightly attacking trump, let’s not forget what the right alternative is — good government.