Why “republican” man?
Editorials like this piss me off. Just say “Man from Florida”. Why bring party politics into an article that isn’t about party lines?
I was gonna try to pull up the data to prove you wrong, but then the data disagreed with me, what the heck! what do I do now! ad hominem, I guess: uhhh your penis looks dry!
If there was regular prejudice between 76 vs 77 yr olds, then yes. It’s similar to saying “white/black man”. It adds no value beyond sparking a prejudicial emotional response.
It’s CNN/Fox news style sensationalist entertainment writing rather than news/journalism.
The developments of political parties’ positions are themselves newsworthy, as well as the ways in which writers attempt to frame them. You’re right to notice it.
Most of the people very against Flock are more left wing and I feel like another left wing protest about it isn't particularly engaging. I'm sure putting Republican there gets way more interest as Republicans turning against them is necessary to have anything actually happen.
If it helps, I have been in a work group on this issue locally for the last 8 months or so.
Most of the folks in that work group are to the left of Democrats, and most of the pro-flock folks here, locally, are Democrats and law-and-order GOP folks.
So to me, the (locally a-typical) political orientation of the person committing the politically-charged crime seems relevant.
Better to say the current US government is run by authoritarians, doing everything they can to convert the US government into an authoritarian one. And they've gotten way farther than they should.
We're a backsliding democracy, and risk backsliding into fully consolidated autocracy, unless we mount effective resistance.
But this isn’t new. Government overreach has been a long recurring pattern throughout US history literally since we were born as a country. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, et al, exercised powers and authoritarian tactics that shocked their contemporaries just as much as Trump is doing today. Not using history as an excuse, just to point out that this is a feature of US politics not a bug. We have managed to remain a free society for 250 years despite all the horrible, anti democratic sometimes barbaric things our leaders did, because 1) every generation got organized to defend civil liberties and 2) our “system” was cynically and explicitly engineered with competing centers of power, among other things, under the assumption that every single leader would eventually try to grab power.
Eh, I think there's a kind of survivorship bias in this POV: "We've survived authoritarians in the past, so the system working as intended, everything is fine".
I don't think things are working as intended, even if they've sort of worked by accident so far.
I think it's better to look at more contemporary backsliding democracies and fascist regimes from the 20th century onward to really understand our trajectory. Russia (Putin), Hungary (Orban), India (Modi), Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), Spain (Franco), etc.
The American Right has trying to Orbanify the country by explicitly copying his model. Hungary was able to eventually oust him, dealing a blow to that whole project, but time will tell whether they will be able to keep him and his allies out for good. Our wanna-be Orbans are still there.
The corruption we're seeing in the Trump admin has no precedent in American history, and is the kind of large scale open corruption only seen in autocratic regimes or failed states.
The founders envisioned that branches would jealously guard their power, but congress right now is essentially a duma. The judiciary is still mostly standing, but the Trump admin is defying court orders at an alarming rate, and the longer these guys hold power, the more they will be able to work on the courts.