False Equivalency

I despise the false equivalencies of political culture in our country. Democrats confront Republican obstructionism and the media, perhaps best represented by NPR, reports that "neither side could come to agreement." Biden shows what respected clinical psychiatrists describe as normal signs of ageing, whereas Trump displays cascading and accelerating phonemic aphasia, in a syndrome which can only be caused by neurological cognitive dementia that will certainly... and pretty rapidly... get worse over time, and the media reports that the public has a choice between two old guys who sometimes slur their words. Democrats mostly, and to a fault, play by the institutional rules, whereas the MAGA movement, which has now completely taken over the Republican party, is, as a matter of objective fact, embarked on a program to completly undermine the checks and balances of representative government outlined in our Constitution, in a brazen attempt to destroy that system and replace it with the kind of authoritarianism that marked most of human history. Turning the clock back. We used to say to "before  the New Deal" but it's now to "before the 18th century Enlightenment." And what does the media report? The horserace, as if the two parties were facets of an essentially unified whole, as they perhaps were for a time during the 20th century. 

I'm not having it. Wake up, folks. We are in an existential fight for the survival of democratic governance. It has never lived up to its ideals, of course. But if we lose, and it is gone, gone, gone, we will rue the day. Believe me. I am not exaggerating, even a little. 

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COMMIT TO PRESERVING DEMOCRACY 

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The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.

—Henry George