Ik denk dat het een achterliggend probleem is dat kennis om een democratie te ontmantelen via draaiboeken, methodes, etc via allerlei wegen inmiddels behoorlijk robuust is in zulke kringen, maar het herkennen van dit soort processen en het methodieken om dit proces om te keren juist niet, zeker niet in de VS.
Bijkomende probleem is dat als men uitgaat van pure uitoefening van macht en als gevolgen hiervan men zich door niets hoeft te laten beperken, alles is geoorloofd. Wil je dat bestrijden, dan zul je op het zelfde manier middelen moeten inzetten.
The alt-right playbook had daar wel een goed stuk over:
The Alt-Right Playbook: You Go High, We Go LowSo building a coalition on the Left is a lot of work, and, faced with this challenge, there is a liberal tendency to turn away from policy and focus instead on process; generally uncontroversial things like bipartisanship, compromise, decorum. And, fair enough, the absence of these things in Washington over the years is certainly something everyone Left-of-Center is sick of, but they’re not things Democrats can make happen all by themselves, and, more to the point, none of them are results. They’re means.
Like, a willingness to compromise is not a position. And when you overfocus on how you should go about things and not what things you should go about, it fosters a certain philosophy about government that is both highly flawed and highly exploitable: The valuing of means at the expense of ends.
Most people would say that “the ends justify the means” is a crap moral philosophy. Democrats would agree. But liberals often overcorrect to the point where thinking about the ends at all is thought of as - in a vague, reflexive kind of way - innately immoral. There’s a very Enlightenment way of thinking that implies that, with the right means, the ends take care of themselves, and immoral behavior becomes functionally impossible.
We can call this Values-Neutral Governance, and you can see why it would appeal when you’re trying to sum all the demands placed on a politician. Under this thinking, you don’t need to engage with the needs and desires of your constituency, your donors, or even your opposition, because, if democracy is working, everyone deserving will get what they need as a matter of course. That’s what democracy is for: To divine what is right out of a cacophony of different voices. It’s okay for people - even people with power - to have bad ideas because bad ideas will always be outnumbered by good ideas. Checks and balances. Hell, you can have bad ideas and it won’t make a difference! Provided you commit to obeying a just set of rules, only justice will ever be produced by them.
It feels it shouldn’t need to be said that this ideal has never existed at any time in history. At the very beginning, who got to own land, who got to vote, and who was or wasn’t property were enshrined in our government, and none of them were The Democracy Machine spitting out justice. They were value judgments made by people convinced that them profiting the most off the system was proof it was behaving rationally. Anyone who thinks democracy is impartial is going to get played.
"When I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles"- Frank Herbert