Yes, everybody's got an opinion, and my opinion is that decent, thoughtful Americans have, broadly speaking, three options: (1) leave; (2) prepare to fight a civil war; or (3) get steamrolled. There's no fourth alternative. Politics as usual - voting, protesting, and otherwise campaigning - won't prevail against the ascendant fascism.
No doubt most nice, liberal Americans would dismiss that opinion as hysterical hyperbole. It isn't. I grew up among American reactionaries. I know their general and typical characters very well. I've seen the current debacle coming for decades. It's been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The ultimate destination has never been in doubt.
More particularly, that most Americans oppose repressive developments such as the outlawing of abortion has very little bearing on whether they happen. The American government is dominated by deliberately antidemocratic institutions such as the senate, which reactionaries have exploited relentlessly. More broadly, fascists don't care whether mass public opinion is with them. To some extent, they refuse to admit it isn't, as in the case of the millions of Americans who refuse to admit Donald Trump lost in 2020. To some extent, they refuse to admit it matters, because God or Real America or some such delusion is on their side. Either way, they consider themselves entitled to rule, and if democracy gets in the way, then so much the worse for democracy.
Understandably, there is a lot of speculation going around about why this draft was leaked and by whom. Here is an additional theory: One of the things we’ve sadly learned from years of Donald Trump is that he openly admits things early on in order to cause the actual news, when it breaks, somehow to be deflated or even “normalized”. If the Supreme Court were now to issue a final opinion in which they “merely” upheld Mississippi’s law shortening the time period in which abortion is available to 15 weeks, would too many people breathe a sigh of relief? Would the political fire storm abate? Might that have been the rationale for a leak?
Yes, everybody's got an opinion, and my opinion is that decent, thoughtful Americans have, broadly speaking, three options: (1) leave; (2) prepare to fight a civil war; or (3) get steamrolled. There's no fourth alternative. Politics as usual - voting, protesting, and otherwise campaigning - won't prevail against the ascendant fascism.
No doubt most nice, liberal Americans would dismiss that opinion as hysterical hyperbole. It isn't. I grew up among American reactionaries. I know their general and typical characters very well. I've seen the current debacle coming for decades. It's been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The ultimate destination has never been in doubt.
More particularly, that most Americans oppose repressive developments such as the outlawing of abortion has very little bearing on whether they happen. The American government is dominated by deliberately antidemocratic institutions such as the senate, which reactionaries have exploited relentlessly. More broadly, fascists don't care whether mass public opinion is with them. To some extent, they refuse to admit it isn't, as in the case of the millions of Americans who refuse to admit Donald Trump lost in 2020. To some extent, they refuse to admit it matters, because God or Real America or some such delusion is on their side. Either way, they consider themselves entitled to rule, and if democracy gets in the way, then so much the worse for democracy.
Understandably, there is a lot of speculation going around about why this draft was leaked and by whom. Here is an additional theory: One of the things we’ve sadly learned from years of Donald Trump is that he openly admits things early on in order to cause the actual news, when it breaks, somehow to be deflated or even “normalized”. If the Supreme Court were now to issue a final opinion in which they “merely” upheld Mississippi’s law shortening the time period in which abortion is available to 15 weeks, would too many people breathe a sigh of relief? Would the political fire storm abate? Might that have been the rationale for a leak?