It’s not just that the people downvoting you are too comfortable to fight back, it’s that by the virtue of being born in positions of extreme privilege (by worldwide and historical standards) they literally cannot conceive of a world where rights are acquired and retained through illegal or violent means, although every civil rights movement had an illegal and most often violent component to it.
There’s a reason we’re seeing pictures of Black Panthers patrolling the streets. They remember and understand that rights aren’t handed out by benevolent elites, they are acquired through violence - either direct acts thereof, or the explicit threat of it.
I honestly don’t know what to do about any of that. The task of educating Americans on the history of effectively protesting against authoritarianism seems impossible. For all that some aspects of their society are hyper-violent, the vast majority of the anti-MAGA crowd is astonishingly uninformed on the importance of unauthorized resistance, and all the major newspapers and social media platforms are actively suppressing attempts to correct those misconceptions.
It’s fascinating. Trump is following in Hitler’s footsteps closer than anyone could have predicted, but one area where the present differs from the past is that in the years before Hitler became chancellor, Germany was rocked by frequent acts of deadly violence between Brownshirts and Communists. However I cannot think of a single analogue for the 21st century. Some people on here are talking of Civil War - clearly out of their ass, but I’m not sure that there is a line that Trump or Vance could yet cross that would trigger acts of blue-on-red violence more notable than an average British football match.
It’s not just that the people downvoting you are too comfortable to fight back, it’s that by the virtue of being born in positions of extreme privilege (by worldwide and historical standards) they literally cannot conceive of a world where rights are acquired and retained through illegal or violent means, although every civil rights movement had an illegal and most often violent component to it.
There’s a reason we’re seeing pictures of Black Panthers patrolling the streets. They remember and understand that rights aren’t handed out by benevolent elites, they are acquired through violence - either direct acts thereof, or the explicit threat of it.
I honestly don’t know what to do about any of that. The task of educating Americans on the history of effectively protesting against authoritarianism seems impossible. For all that some aspects of their society are hyper-violent, the vast majority of the anti-MAGA crowd is astonishingly uninformed on the importance of unauthorized resistance, and all the major newspapers and social media platforms are actively suppressing attempts to correct those misconceptions.
It’s fascinating. Trump is following in Hitler’s footsteps closer than anyone could have predicted, but one area where the present differs from the past is that in the years before Hitler became chancellor, Germany was rocked by frequent acts of deadly violence between Brownshirts and Communists. However I cannot think of a single analogue for the 21st century. Some people on here are talking of Civil War - clearly out of their ass, but I’m not sure that there is a line that Trump or Vance could yet cross that would trigger acts of blue-on-red violence more notable than an average British football match.