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Suppose They Threw a Cage Match Between Fascism and Democracy and Nobody Cared (slate.com)

submitted 1 year ago by spaceghoti@lemmy.one to c/politics@lemmy.world

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

What if the media is actually covering the spectacle precisely because the stakes—casual brutality, violence, callousness, lawlessness, and the descent into anarchy—are perfectly visible, legible, and clear? It’s hard to read any other way the current threats by sitting senators who promise to beat up committee witnesses, or former speakers of the House who elbow their political opponents, or congresspeople who say they will impeach everyone who makes them mad while dabbling in the recreational threat to shut down the government. What if the problem isn’t that consumers of media fail to understand the actual stakes of losing democracy? What if the problem is really that watching this MMA smackdown between fascism and representative democracy is, in fact, the 2023 version of good, clean fun? As Bouie puts it in his New York Times piece on the subject this week, “The mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen. And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.”

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[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 year ago

What American Democracy? The one where half the presidents in my lifetime lost the Democratic vote? Where the legislature is controlled by gerrymandering? Where journalists like Julian Assange are persecuted by the government? Where we give unlimited support to the Zionist genocide?

[-] AlwaysNowNeverNotMe@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago

Yep the one where reforms with 93% of the populations support never go to the floor because someone paid a genuinely laughably pathetically small bribe to a couple of octogenarians.

[-] K1nsey6@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Democracy in the US is a fantasy, like the American dream

[-] jayrhacker@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

You have to be asleep to believe it…

[-] Psychodelic@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Idk, we legalized cannabis and cops stopped harassing us in CA/OR. It seems like if people literally just tried we could accomplish so much. I mean, I literally don't know one person even half interested in politics as much as I am. I know tons of people that think there's no hope in doing anything worthwhile (besides having kids).

[-] GardenVarietyAnxiety@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

It was created with votes and votes can still change it. For now.

Get involved.

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml -5 points 1 year ago

They threw out my vote in the 2020 Iowa caucus, did you forget?

[-] lemmyman@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I don't really get the point of this type of comment. Used in bad faith, it clearly is meant to detail the conversation and sideline the point of the article that was posted. In good faith, maybe venting? What am I missing?

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml -3 points 1 year ago

It's meant to mock the idea that there's a "cage match" between democracy and fascism.

There isn't.

It's a cage match between Pinochet and Hitler.

this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023

125 points (97.7% liked)

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