The Minnesota governor said that the path to tyranny “is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was testifying before Congress about his state’s handling of immigration when he learned Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., was forcibly removed from a Department of Homeland Security news conference Thursday.
The irony, he told the attendees of the Center for American Progress’ “Listening to Lead” event Friday, was in lawmakers grilling him and his colleagues, Govs. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y. and JB Pritzker, D-Ill., over the “incredible crime of treating people like human beings” as FBI agents tackled a sitting senator to the ground and handcuffed him in Los Angeles.
“I am not prone to hyperbole. I am prone to, like, popping off a little bit. I know that,” Walz said, prefacing his argument that Americans are living in a “dangerous” time. “I believed all along we were marching towards authoritarianism, and people were telling me in December, ‘You know, you’re overreacting.’ And I said, “The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting.”
You have a myopia that makes you incapable of looking past a single election. It is that myopia that has gotten us to this point here. Cycle after cycle of blind, zero-thought “blue no matter who” has made the democratic power-brokers completely disconnected from the base. You’re going to vote for them no matter what, so your opinions, thoughts, and desires are absolutely irrelevant. You do not matter to the political process at all.
I’m not American (but we do get a lot of US Pol foisted on us), so forgive me if I’m missing something… I thought the US democratic party was basically everyone more left wing than Joe Manchin. There are ‘third parties’, but in general the broad church argument applies… Anyway aren’t USians able to actually pick the candidates that stand for those parties? So wouldn’t you use the generals to vote ‘against’ Republicans, but then use the primaries process to vote for the shape of D you wanted? Here that’s not an option, the party puts up candidates. But you have the ability to pressure the candidates even after they are elected. Might be a long shot, but is inherently less fatalistic than just giving up, or even (as seems disturbingly popular these days) calling for some form of civil war.