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Javier E

Opinion | Joe Biden Puts Donald Trump In His Place - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-biden-donald-trump-2024.html

biden trump democracy campaign

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • He also performed a service by keeping the preservation of American democracy central to his campaign. He has faced plenty of second-guessing for this choice. Democracy is a big, amorphous concept like climate change, the critics say. Regular people struggle to understand it as concretely as they do, say, crime or the economy.
  • But as Mr. Biden explained, “Without democracy, no progress is possible.” It’s all connected, he said.
  • “Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind, to be who you are, to be who you want to be,” he said. “Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy — democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes. But if democracy falls, we’ll lose that freedom.”
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  • The 2024 election will not be the usual battle between parties, platforms and policies. It is a battle between those who fundamentally respect and abide by the ground rules of democracy and those who do not.
  • To underline his case most forcefully, Mr. Biden didn’t need to use his own words. He could rely on the words of his opponent: revenge, retribution, fight like hell, terminate the Constitution, suckers and losers, vermin, poisoning the blood of our country, dictator on Day 1, American carnage. There is no subtext here; it’s all text. As Mr. Biden put it, “We all know who Donald Trump is.”
  • And yet, apparently, we need to keep reminding ourselves. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of normalization that Mr. Trump laid from the start.
  • Today he can call for the execution of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or tell the Biden administration to “rot in hell,” or promote a video claiming he is literally a gift from God, and it gets less attention in both mainstream and social media than Mr. Biden tripping over a sandbag.
  • How did we end up here? Mr. Biden offered one compelling explanation: complacency. “We’ve been blessed so long with a strong, stable democracy, it’s easy to forget why so many before us risked their lives and strengthened democracy,
  • In that sense, democracy is like vaccines. Few people today have firsthand memories of the horrors of diseases that were rampant before vaccines largely eradicated them, which makes it easier for vaccine hesitancy to take root
  • Similarly, when a country has no history of living under a dictatorship, it can be easier to lose sight of what it means to live in a representative democracy, and to be caught flat-footed when a real authoritarian comes knocking.
Javier E

Opinion | What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Power and Language Today - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ell-language-antisemitism.html

orwell language corruption debasement culture history

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • “The word Fascism,” he writes, “has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
  • He adds other exhausted words, including democracy, freedom and patriotic — convenient terms for establishing righteousness, easily melting into self-righteousness.
  • The writer is George Orwell, in his celebrated 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell contended that language had become corrupt and debased in his time, but the survival of his examples into the present contradicts him, suggesting that not only the problem but the very examples may be timeless.
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  • I showed that passage to an intelligent, well-educated person much younger than I am. He understood Orwell’s intention, but he confessed that he found the parody, with its colorless polysyllables, easier to understand — he might have said “more accessible” — than the plain words of the original. It felt better to him than the original.
  • Dilution of meaning is familiar in a way that can make us feel comfortable, or even worse, comfortably righteous
  • The reliably available terms of disapproval and approval, genocide and patriotism, antisemitism and democracy, convey large scale and importance, but sometimes while avoiding the heavy cost of paying actual attention.
  • The more important the word, the more its meaning may be a matter of degree, from not much to quite a lot. The attainment of meaning requires work. The more important the meaning, the harder the work.
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