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Trump and the Trapped Country

j brown's body

"A Soros-backed animal"
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"For years, we debated whether Donald Trump would topple democracy. But the threat continues to come from the system itself."

"...a reality we’ve been facing for some time: not the concentration of power in the hands of one person, but the dispersal of power across the polity; not the conversion of popular preferences into partisan will, but the inability of parties to legislate those preferences; not the threat of a tyrannical white majority to the Constitution, but the way in which a minority of mostly white voters depends upon the Constitution to stop the multiracial majority.

...The current moment is less reminiscent of the last days of Weimar than of Britain in the years before the Reform Act of 1832. With a scheme of representation dating back to the twelfth century, Parliament was the playground of grandees from rural and sparsely populated regions of the South. Growing cities in the Midlands and the North had no representation at all. Standing atop this “aristocracy of mere locality,” in the words of the historian and Whig politician Thomas Macaulay, were the Tories. For six decades, virtually without interruption, they leveraged this Senate-like system of rotten boroughs to keep the Whigs out of power, enabling an increasingly isolated group of aristocrats and gentry to maintain their privileges. While “the natural growth of society went on” among the middle classes and in the cities, Macaulay said, “the artificial polity continued unchanged.”

...This is the situation we now find ourselves in. One party, representing the popular majority, remains on the outskirts of power, thanks to the Constitution. The other party, representing the minority, cannot wield power when it has it but finds its position protected nonetheless by the very same Constitution. We are not witnesses to Prometheus unbound. We are seeing the sufferings of Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock—immigration reform, new infrastructure, green jobs—up a hill. It’s no wonder everyone saw an authoritarian at the top of that hill. When no one can act, any performance of power, no matter how empty, can seem real."

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Fascinating observations here.

A Republican- controlled legislature was perfectly free to block Trump's legislative initiatives, and often did, without fear of punishment. But it bent over backwards to protect his corrupt power.

They utterly declined to push their own agenda, as much of it is terribly unpopular with the American people. They are willing to do anything to protect that power.

They are like an aristocracy, with all the power and privilege that comes with being a political leader but spend their careers affecting nothing except protecting that power.

They are aided and abetted by a Constituion that was created, not to sustain an aristocracy that functions for the only purpose of perpetuating and protect its own power, but as a plan to enable a government to carry out the will of its people.
 
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