So, we've already more or less established that Trump is a fundamental threat to democracy given his January 6th crap. But now Florida is considering a bill that would ban the democratic party from the state. I admit, this isn't Ron acting directly as he's the executive and some crazy in the legislature was the one who made this, but it is a concern. This is literal Nazi 1933 crap right here. I mean, I get that they framed it as banning a party associated with slavery, and the dems were the party of slavery...several party realignments ago in the 1860s, but as most educated people know, the parties have changed since then and the democrats are now the party of wokeness and identity politics, completely opposed to their original ideals.
It's unclear if this would allow them to reregister under another name. Apparently the name has to be different, and I'm not sure if they'd seriously allow another party if they can just ban this one. We know that they banned ranked choice voting last year, so it doesnt seem they're friendly to third parties either. This is some crazy crap. These guys are just full on anti democratic and going on some insane power grab here. I might have issues with the democratic party not being democratic enough, and being anti third party, but a two party system is better than a one party system.
This kind of makes me have to consider my third party stance. Keep in mind, when I made my original third party votes, I did so in an era where the democrats were fear mongering and drumming up a threat that didn't really exist yet. They literally were the boy who cried wolf on this. But now there is an actual wolf. Trump has literally incited an insurrection and now the state his main opponent is from is making crazy authoritarian power grabs. If this is the future of the GOP, then we should be afraid, very afraid.
Keep in mind my original idea, I would willingly deal with a horridly incompetent and even evil administration if it meant that afterwards we could get closer to our goals. But...it seems like the GOP has gotten so radical and authoritarian that we can no longer really sit back and just sit from the sidelines. So yes, I might feel like I have to "vote blue no matter who" in 2024. I wish it didn't come to this. I really think that 2016 was a "finish him" or "cast it into the fire" moment for the democrats to finish off the GOP for good (in their current form, the party would come back after about 10-20 years of systematically getting destroyed election after election and be forced to the center as the dems run to the left), but in rejecting bernie and embracing hillary, they put us on a very dangerous course. And yes, I blame the dems there, not the voters. They had a potential coalition they could have embraced and they failed to. And this is the result.
Don't think I'm letting the democrats off the hook here. The democrats are very anti democratic themselves. We've discussed at length how they systematically control their primary and media presence to frame the entire election in their favor, putting the thumb on the scale to get their preferred outcome. And let's not forget how they've made it so difficult in blue states for third parties to get ballot access, or the fact that they worked to get the greens off the ballot in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2020.
So yeah, dems are scummy, let's never forget. And they're not owed votes. But...if the GOP is literally going to bring the end of whatever pretense of democracy we got left, we might have to play defensively to stop that. Better to make a tactical retreat and live to fight another day than to own the dems only for the GOP to be 10x worse than they are anyway. Again, I'd put a republican in charge if it meant it imploded so badly the GOP would get destroyed at the ballot box ever since, but I'm not going to play that game if the GOP is trying to power grab themselves and turn us into a fascist post democratic country. First we gotta send a message to the GOP that democracy is not on the table, and once that threat is passed, THEN we can bring the fight to the democrats again. My worst fear is that because of 2016 being a realigning year we're gonna be stuck in this cycle until the 2050s or 2060s. That would be scary to me. Hopefully we can reverse course by 2028 or the 2030s.
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