Who guards the common ground?
The Two-Party Trap: The Disregard for Ordinary Americans in the Political Sphere.
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by framersqool:
A curious ideological conundrum is developing or has been revealed as a longstanding one in the coverage of the school shooting in Nashville the other day.
All the early information I found about the tragedy came from various local-TV news channels, which had posted items on Youtube from their broadcasts; I began to notice that a story that first broke, about 'apparently a teenaged girl' being the shooter, quickly turned into one about 'apparently a transgender woman,' twenty-eight years old and a former student of the school, whose LinkedIn profile indicates preferred pronouns of 'they-them.'
And here we go again.
On the left, of course, the predictable calls for the same 'assault weapons ban' that gets run up the flagpole every time this happens come ringing out, along with various vague posturing about how outrageous it is that a person with 'mental issues' was able to buy not one but seven weapons legally, most of these not falling under the catchall nomenclature of 'assault weapons.'
And, of course, from the right come the usual incantations of 'it's not the guns that are the problem but the shooter,' along with the implicit concession to the 'mental issues' spin that yes, indeed, people who don't even know what sex they are certainly might not be the ones who ought to be allowed to assemble an arsenal.
What the left doesn't need to spell out is that since the innocent victims had been, after all, students and staff at a Christian school, this was not the real tragedy: the real tragedy is that the 'woke' media managed to misgender the killer by calling a natural-born female a 'transgender woman,' which is of course in itself an act of violence that has all five dozen 'members of the trans community' more terrified than ever, and posting all sorts of urgent appeals on social media to the effect that, somehow, a society which refuses to keep up with the ever-changing rules of 'gender designation' is to blame for the slaughter in Nashville (or something.)
What the right dares not articulate openly, beyond its safe confines of far-right choir-preaching venues, is its unspoken fantasy of 'the armed populace,' like Switzerland, where apparently actual automatic weapons are not just allowed but required in every home so that the world's money-launderers last refuge can protect itself from the world's money-launderers, or the Russian Federation where next year's kindergarten curriculum required by the Kremlin will include training on how to assemble a Kalashnikov. If anybody could gun down anybody else on a moment's notice, so the extreme-2A crowd reasons, then (maybe) nobody would ever gun down anybody at all (or something.)
What I am left wondering is, how many everyday ordinary Americans, just going about their business, actually believe that 'gender is a social construct,' or alternatively, that Jesus will be coming back to Jerusalem any day now, and so until then we just have to be armed to the teeth to protect ourselves from liberals?
All I'm getting at here is, though now and then over the years, I have heard the term 'representative democracy' used to describe how our political system is somehow the greatest form of government ever devised, who exactly is being represented, by not one but two super-factions which continually foment deeper and less negotiable versions of fantasist partisan fanaticism in their constituencies with each passing day? How democratic is a political system owned and operated by two criminal cartels, working in some kind of bizarre mutual determination to divide us all ever more bitterly against each other, with the use of rhetorical weapons intended to make reasoned and respectful dialogue all but impossible to conduct?
What if most of us want to live in peace and coexist among ourselves on our own terms, and what if neither of these dangerous gangs represents anyone but themselves and their own lust for power at any price?
Who guards the most precious space of all, the common ground?
And what is left of the potential for civilized conduct among neighbors when there no longer is any?
If you want to know why I believe that the most dangerous threat to America is the very legitimizing of political parties being allowed to exist at all, it comes down to two words from history: Molotov-Ribbentrop.
Two militant factions of heavily-armed thugs got together one day in 1939. They decided, for purely expedient reasons, to set aside the fact that their respective ideologies had quite openly been mutually hostile and calling for each others' complete destruction for years and instead pitch in and help each other carve up a continent between themselves.
The danger today is that neither these left-wing fanatics nor these right-wing fanatics believe a goddamn word of their preferred bullshit. All of it is merely affected posturing, intended to seduce and delude their own throngs of adherents to their own factional advantage purely for the sake of power.
If Nazis and Bolsheviks could form an alliance and launch a world war by mutual consent, what might these 'Republicans' and these 'Democrats' up and decide to carry out together if it suited their goals?
Witness, if you dare, how suddenly Democrats have discovered (thanks to the war in Ukraine) the Stars and Stripes as a convenient garb to drape themselves in as they re-brand the fascist machinery of superpower imperialism into a defense of 'liberal democracy.' Witness how Republicans have appropriated the tactics of staging 'peaceful protests,' intended all along to be converted into violent and lethal showdowns, as a means of 'raising awareness....'
Snyder again:
There is no world in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did not invade Poland together in 1939... there is no world without double collaborators, people who worked for both Nazi and Soviet power. If we imagine them away to keep our own concepts tidy, we are wishing ourselves away from the world as it is, and preventing ourselves from understanding people as they are. Double collaborators were major perpetrators of the Holocaust. Is it better not to know this?
[from 'Bloodlands,' by Timothy Snyder, c. 2010; excerpt (p. 419) from Afterword to the Paperback Edition, c. 2022]
The most crucial thing about this fiction of 'representative democracy' is that it is a consumer product and not a political system at all. Both parties exist to shore up a permanent and separatist caste of political professionals and career functionaries, all of whom regard ordinary Americans as the enemy and the herd of clueless cattle to draw their useful idiots from and steer them toward the voting booth.