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Bernie Sanders response...
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Do you expect to have a productive conversation when you frame things this way?
Anyway I'm sure if you vote hard enough the US Empire won't collapse as a fascist echo of itself. Make sure you put your back into it.
I'm not saying it's not an efficient way of dealing with your enemies. But you can't say "this person is a threat to the democracy we value so highly" and then say "voting won't help, we need to assassinate candidates we don't like". It sounds like you don't actually value democracy. You just value the candidate you like winning.
From a game theory perspective, democracy isn't fair. Someone has to lose in order for someone else to win. Particularly in a zero-sum game like the presidential election. You can change the rules of the game, but then you have to be aware that the rules are symmetric. If the new rule is "if the candidate is espousing particularly radical or offensive ideas, it's okay to kill them", then the other side gets to play by those rules too. If civil war and barbarism sound like fun to you then by all means go for it. Because once that seal is broken, there's no going back.
AFAIK the US has never had a presidential candidate get assassinated this close to the election. It would undoubtedly interfere with the fair execution of the democratic process.
Also, if you think Trumpism dies with Trump you haven't been paying attention. He's mostly just a useful idiot for the actual forces at work. He's just as senile as Biden, but he has better PR and more experience bullshitting people in order to hide his idiocy.
Also also, if you think the "American empire" isn't already a fascist echo of itself, you definitely haven't been paying attention for like the last two hundred years.
The only alternative to democracy is assassination and barbarism? What about consensus building and federation?
Once again you're making a straw man.
And yes, sometimes fascists need to be dealt with with violence, whether the figurehead alone or all of them. I'm not advocating for that to happen today but history teaches us this.
My mistake, I thought you were advocating political violence in your original comment (like many others in this thread are). Didn't mean to strawman you. Thought you were voicing agreement with all those other comments.
Thanks for the civil response. I can see how you came to that conclusion and to be clear I think violence can become necessary in order to defend a free and fair society but I don't believe that it should be common or expected by default.
Democracy has its problems and my critiques of it come from an egalitarian "left" perspective rather than the might-oriented perspective others espouse here.
The only point I meant to make is that American democracy isn't fair and even its ideal state leaves some people at the margins. In that system violence will always have a place.
Oh absolutely. I think there may come a point within the next decade where violence is inevitable. But IMO they aren't there yet.