Terrible Takes on Twitter
Jun. 8th, 2020 02:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitTonight's round of terrible takes I found on Twitter (this sort of thing is why I spent most of the day not touching my social media): "Riots are changing things! This is a wake up call for the 'if you don't support Biden how are you going to change things' people!"
And this represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of how any of this works. Because yes, the protests are causing local governments to do things. They may yet cause some *state* governments to do things. Those run on fairly slim margins, and they're close to the ground. They really need to be responsive to their people, when their people are this upset-- and in the case of some of the changes, particularly in Minneapolis, I gather that the politicians have wanted to be making those changes for years and what the protests doing is giving them is cover more than anything.
But the Republicans don't actually care about public opinion at this point, and any protest that's sufficiently violent that it brings down the *federal* government is going to be an actual civil war. They're banking on voter suppression, disinformation, and racism to win again, and to ensure they have another four years to rewrite the government so they can do away with elections altogether and just be dictators. Not voting for Biden still gets another four years of Trump (or, apparently, possibly Tom Cotton, who probably won't be dealing with Russia but is still... the person who wrote that op-ed and also it seems really late in the process to be putting your name forward), and with it the strong possibility that there will be no more elections ever in this country. If anything, I'd say the protests and unrest make it *more* important to vote for Biden, because Biden's not going to send death squads to kill the protestors later and a Biden administration's Justice Department would probably at least consider evidence that local police departments are disappearing protestors. (I have not done actual research into whether that is a thing that's happening. There are a *lot* of people who seem to think that a suspicious number of Ferguson organizers are dead and were probably assassinated by cops and while I haven't done a ton of research into that, that one... might be real, y'all.)
But then, I suspect the people sharing takes like that *want* to completely overturn our governmental system and set up something new, and are ignoring the example set by the French Revolution.
And this represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of how any of this works. Because yes, the protests are causing local governments to do things. They may yet cause some *state* governments to do things. Those run on fairly slim margins, and they're close to the ground. They really need to be responsive to their people, when their people are this upset-- and in the case of some of the changes, particularly in Minneapolis, I gather that the politicians have wanted to be making those changes for years and what the protests doing is giving them is cover more than anything.
But the Republicans don't actually care about public opinion at this point, and any protest that's sufficiently violent that it brings down the *federal* government is going to be an actual civil war. They're banking on voter suppression, disinformation, and racism to win again, and to ensure they have another four years to rewrite the government so they can do away with elections altogether and just be dictators. Not voting for Biden still gets another four years of Trump (or, apparently, possibly Tom Cotton, who probably won't be dealing with Russia but is still... the person who wrote that op-ed and also it seems really late in the process to be putting your name forward), and with it the strong possibility that there will be no more elections ever in this country. If anything, I'd say the protests and unrest make it *more* important to vote for Biden, because Biden's not going to send death squads to kill the protestors later and a Biden administration's Justice Department would probably at least consider evidence that local police departments are disappearing protestors. (I have not done actual research into whether that is a thing that's happening. There are a *lot* of people who seem to think that a suspicious number of Ferguson organizers are dead and were probably assassinated by cops and while I haven't done a ton of research into that, that one... might be real, y'all.)
But then, I suspect the people sharing takes like that *want* to completely overturn our governmental system and set up something new, and are ignoring the example set by the French Revolution.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-08 10:31 am (UTC)You are not alone.