Click the link I am providing to find out about "MAGA’s Plan to Take Over America." Oops! Whether you will actually be able to access this discussion may well depend on whether or not you subscribe to The New York Times. It's just another one of those "paywall" things!
The link I have provided in the paragraph above references a column by Jennifer Szalai. In essence, Szalai's column is a book review, and the book being reviewed is Finish What We Started, by the journalist Isaac Arnsdorf.
Arnsdorf documents what MAGA (the movement) has been doing since January 6, 2021. There is, it seems, an actual "plan" to take over the government, and it's all based on a "bottoms up" approach. Here is one of Arnsdorf's observations:
Bannon’s extravagant bluffing — “We’re two-thirds of the nation!” he bragged at CPAC — can’t hide the fact that MAGA extremism is still terribly unpopular. An NBC News poll last year put the share of Americans with a favorable view of the MAGA movement at a meager 24 percent. But consolidating power whenever possible can allow the faithful to “feel some wins,” Arnsdorf writes. Bannon, by constantly telling his listeners that they’re the culmination of democracy instead of its death knell, is feeding them a useful and invigorating delusion. The precinct strategy has become another way of energizing the base.
And the base turns out to have infinite patience for the nitty-gritty of local politics, as long as the ultimate goal is not governance but domination. “Now they understand how important the rules are,” a merry Bannon tells Arnsdorf. “We’re having a civics lesson here. We’re exploding, and the reason we’re exploding? We’re really getting into the granular, and people can’t get enough of it.”
My suggestion, if you don't want to wait around to see if MAGA will be successful in its march towards "domination," is to get engaged in local government yourself - right where you are living right now.
I am extolling the benefits of such local political involvements NOT, let me say, as a good way to take over the nation, but as a way to prevent the nation from being taken over by someone else, including that magnificent MAGA bunch.
The "genius" of self-government in the United States is the ability of ordinary men and women, at the local, state, and ultimately national level, to establish a "representative" government that actually does "represent" the people, and works to achieve what the people want. When and where "self-government" is strong, no group, striving for national "domination" will ever be able to succeed. Read On Revolution by Hannah Arendt, if you want to have this all fleshed out in political theory.
Tyranny is stymied, Arendt tells us, when there are lots of independent "powers," locally based, that cannot be cowed or compelled into the kind of totalitarian government that she watched emerge in Germany prior to World War II.
So, let's not watch MAGA march by, on its way to "domination." Let's just take over our government ourselves, starting at the local level, and working our way up.
Image Credits:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment!