I wish I had $100 for every time I heard some uneducated Trump supporter tell me this.
A democracy is a system where governmental power is derived directly from the will of the majority. A constitutional republic is a specific type of representative democracy where the people elect officials to govern, but those officials are strictly limited by a supreme, written constitution designed to protect minority rights from majority rule.
I remember a conservative friend who lived in Hawaii who complained that the native people objected to a project directed from Washington to build something at the top of one of their volcanoes, on the basis that this was their holy land. My friend asked, “Doesn’t the majority rule?”
“Not necessarily.” Trying to make my point in the simplest way possible, I explained, “People have rights. My neighbors like me, but imagine that they didn’t, and 20 of them, a 20:1 majority, wanted to come in here and beat me to death. I have a right not to murdered. When you think about it, we’re lucky not to live in a country where ‘the majority rules.’”
“Oh. I guess you’re right,” my friend said.
Trump appeals to two groups of constituents: a) a small group of billionaires who lavish him with campaign contributions in exchange for huge financial favors, and b) a large number of poorly educated white people who call themselves Christians–the so-called MAGA base.
Trump has little if any appeal to everybody else: honest, fairly well-educated people of a variety of ethnicities and religious affiliations.
For Trump, staying in power means making sure that there is a minimum of leakage away from the MAGA base. That requires barraging these people with messaging to the effect that the president is the only thing standing in the way of communism/socialism, open borders, the invasion of Muslims, godlessness, teaching our little children about LGBTQs, critical race theory, choking environmental regulation, and whatever else may be on the radical left’s agenda.
Maintain this chasm means not letting up on the propaganda for a single minute. No nuance, no critical thinking, no considering what we’ve learned from history–just constant bombardment.
The mural here reminds us of what Tom Joad famously tells his mother at the end of in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, in response to her asking Tom where he’s going:
Wherever people are fighting for their rights, where kids are hungry and crying, and where folks are struggling to be free. Everywhere in the dark, wherever there is a fight so hungry people can eat or a cop beating up a guy.
What the late Frank Zappa said here about atheism is what I began predicting when I was in my teens, but I’m not so optimistic today.
In fact, there seems to be a trend towards the rejection of science, fear, brutality, and tribalism–each one a pillar of religion and the fanaticism that so often surrounds it.
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