Democracy is Sacred
Choose democracy
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Because Americans have no inoculation against information warfare, we’ve been easy to target. I will be haunted for a long time by the interview I did at the DC Jail with two people who believe they are patriots as they actively sabotage their own democracy.
So I am dashing this post off to you today so you can begin deploying the following mantra:
Democracy is sacred.
America has the oldest democracy in the world, and yes, it is wildly imperfect but if it survives this fall, we can make the necessary upgrades, beginning with SCOTUS.
Democracy is sacred.
The reason democracy is under attack is simple: Vladimir Putin can’t let the people of Russia know that democracies work. He can’t have a neighbor that embodies a functioning democracy. He must keep American’s fighting each other, so we are unaware that we are killing our own precious democracy.
Here are a handful of quotes to add to your political toolkits as you share with your networks.
Timothy Snyder, Author/Professor
I think in 100 years, historians will be writing about the war in Ukraine… A lot of the things that seem very important to us right now… are going to disappear into the mists of time. Whether Ukraine wins or loses, which is very much up to the United States, very much up to the Biden administration, is something that historians are going to be writing about in 100 years.
Putin doesn’t really believe that Ukraine has any kind of independent existence…
He thinks he knows everything; he doesn’t know anything.
The way to understand Putin, I think, is to follow the failure of his domestic policy.
Russians get a foreign policy of spectacle, so we the West are the enemy of choice for Putin.
The idea that elections could be real… is a threat.
Putin needs Russians to believe that elections are always a circus, a farce and a fake, because if Russians believed that British elections and German elections and American elections are also fake, they’re not going to mind that their own elections are fake.
On Democracy
We would be living in a more secure world if there were more democracies in it… Putin’s reaction to that.. is much more threatening when it comes from nearer neighbors like Ukraine, where Russia’s could actually see, ‘Aha, the system is actually working.’
The Putin regime was never about creating things. The Putin regime is about removing alternatives.
There’s no such thing as history on your side… And I think the whole arc of history bending towards justice, it’s a nice thing; one likes to believe things like that are true. But there’s no arc of history; it’s not bending in any particular direction. You can make democracies happen, but to make democracies happen, you have to first set a really good example yourself and, second, understand the countries that you’re dealing with.
Look, Trump was a bonanza for them… a feast for the Kremlin every day. Because what the Trump administration delivered every day in its outrageous rhetoric, in its disrespect for American institutions, and in the countless scandals was what Russian propaganda outlets dreamed of. They dream of this kind of raw material which proves that democracy is a joke.
Trump is there to tell you that democracy is a joke. He’s there to tell you that the rules don’t apply to everyone equally; they don’t apply to him. He’s there to tell you that might makes right. He’s there to tell you that you can lie every day, not just in Russia but in America, which—that’s what he did. He lied every day, all the time, just like Putin.
Trump gave them the basic thing that they wanted, which was an American administration which was an embarrassment for everyone who cared about democracy.
If there’s another Trump administration, I think we can probably say goodbye for quite a while to American-European cooperation.
More here:
Todd Helmus, Senior Behavioral Scientist, RAND - Ep28 RadPod
Russia, in 2016, 2018, 2020, they’re targeting both the left and the right. The interesting approach about what Russia does is they take people’s views and make them more extreme. They want conservatives to not just be conservatives - they want them to hate immigrants. They don’t want African Americans to just be suspicious in how the Western world engages with them, they want them to be isolationist and militaristic. They wanted to turn Hillary Clinton supporters into Bernie supporters. Whatever position they’re in, they want them further away. The whole goal of that - and they definitely supported Trump over Clinton, was clear - they want to make Americans hate each other.
More here:
Peter Pomerantsev, author/investigative reporter
I write nonfiction books about propaganda and people… But what is very obvious is that Russia is in the middle of it constantly. And it's kind of a pattern, a repeating pattern, whether it's obviously bringing genocide to the hearts of Europe, but also clearly deeply embedded in a network of deeply nefarious dictatorial regimes, which include North Korea, Iran — helping their proxies like Hezbollah for many years. So there's a recurring pattern in the kind of destruction of the so-called ‘rules based order’ and that pattern is Russia. It's a… network united by corruption, by financial gains, but also by a deep resentment towards democracy and democratic allies, their own interests then always coincide. I don't think Iran and Russia are happy allies… but they are a network, also terrorist networks, criminal networks, so they're more like, a criminal network, really.
So I think in America, we have a bigger crisis, which is American politics no longer represents American people, there is a huge divide between the grotesque polarization in American politics and the reality of America.
If there was a centrist party in America, it would be in peril all the time… the vast majority of Americans have the right instincts and the right ideas about Ukraine, the right instincts and the right priorities about Putin, we're just in a very weird place where five extremist politicians can hold the whole of the Republican Party hostage.
We have a tiny amount of extremist politicians playing to a very specific cohort of society, which is around 15%, who they need to stay in power in their states.
So we have a very messed up system. So please don't get confused with the American public opinion, which is vastly in favor of Ukraine, and vastly against Russia. For talking about the MAGA vote, it's around maybe half of Republicans. And again, they're not pro Russia.
The thing is, they really hate Biden, and they hate Biden more than they hate Putin. And they are anti-Ukraine, because they're anti-Biden, not because they're anti-Ukraine. Once you are anti-Biden, you will look for any evidence to be anti-Biden — ‘corruption, Nazis in Ukraine’, it doesn't matter.
But it's that motivation, which starts it. So if you want to appeal to this segment of society, which again, is around — it's half of Republican voters. So it's maybe 15 to 20% of Americans. You have to understand what they really care about. They don't care — and this sounds really hard — they don't care about Russia or Ukraine, they care about America, and they care about their version of America.
And here's the interesting thing about these people, that the research shows — they're the people who more than anybody else in America think America needs to be the strongest country in the world and show its strength.
So if you want to engage these people, you have to talk to them about American strength. You have to talk to them about how Russia is a force in the world that wants to undermine American strength, which it is. You have to talk to them how Russia works with countries like Iran, to hurt America and to humiliate America.
And you have to explain that to them and show them how Russia does it. When it's something that threatens the primacy of American strength, then it's something they can get very engaged with. So even to these audiences, there's a way to reach them, but you have to understand what motivates them.
Sadly, these are audiences where truth doesn't matter very much. You really got to get to their values and their emotional core.
More here:
When I met Roger and Sherri by the DC Jail, I deployed what I learned from Pomerantsev about how we are weakened on the world stage when we fight each other, and they agreed. It was a moment of unity and clarity.
Democracy is sacred.
It is much easier to course correct our imperfections than to try to get democracy back after we’ve handed it away. Millions of brains in America are being told daily that democracy is failing, shown images of cities where Reagan’s unhoused are being weaponized to polarize people, weaponized to make it look like democracy is failing.
Democracy is sacred.
We can fix democracy, we can upgrade democracy — under autocracy we can’t even have these conversations.
It’s our duty to become savvier in our political conversations moving forward. We know that billionaires know that global warming is real, despite the money used to interfere with scientific evidence. We see them trying to steal resources while we all fight each other.
We are being weakened intentionally by dictators who never diversified and who need the oil/war economy to continue.
But we here in the US still have a democracy, and we still have the power to choose our future.
Choose democracy.
Democracy is sacred.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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And Sis, did you know about this
https://www.nps.gov/vafo/learn/historyculture/africanpatriotsmonument.htm
=] 🌊🏄♂️🌅❤️ Democracy is Sacred =]