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David A. Bell
8,890 posts
David A. Bell
@DavidAvromBell
Historian, writer, teacher, author of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution.
- In case you needed any reason to support the Red Sox this year.
- Thread: It is scary, but also weirdly fascinating, how a coherent anti-democratic ideology is taking hold on the American right today. It has three distinct parts. /1
- “I have never downplayed the seriousness of it. I have never downplayed the severity of it.” Rush Limbaugh, 6/29. “It’s the common cold, folks.” Rush Limbaugh, 2/24. washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02… rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/06/…
- Replying to @KevinMKruse and @Mike_PenceSolimeini was plotting with Saddam Hussein too, perhaps?
- Replying to @DavidAvromBellIts practical significance is that it allows the right to dismiss the importance of the popular vote, and to defend all the non-democratic and anti-democratic mechanisms that give the aging white non-urban minority such disproportional power in this country... /3
- Replying to @DavidAvromBellnamely unequal Senate representation, the electoral college, the filibuster, gerrymandering, voter suppression—and ultimately, perhaps, the right of state legislatures to overturn their own states’ popular votes. /4
- Replying to @DavidAvromBellFirst, there is the idea that the United States is not a democracy, but a republic. This idea has a long pedigree, of course, going back to the founding, even if most subsequent American political history contradicts it. /2 theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
- From my Facebook feed, the definitive argument for the Oxford comma.
- Replying to @DavidAvromBellPut these 3 elements together, and a simple message emerges. The Democrats are using illegal methods to “destroy the country,” and in response, the right is justified in using all the “republican" methods at its disposal to put a traditionalist, Orbán-like figure into power. /9
- Replying to @DavidAvromBellWill it end up being a set of fringe ideas that cannot, in the end, compete with long-standing American political tradition? Or will it end up being something considerably more dangerous? I have no idea. But I do think it is worth taking seriously. /end
- Replying to @DavidAvromBellFinally, there is the explicit praise for authoritarian leaders abroad, past and present, who claim to be acting in defense of “Western values”: Portugal’s 20th-c. dictator Salazar, Vladimir Putin, and most prominently of late, Viktor Orbán of Hungary. /7
- The people of New York City erasing history, July 9, 1776 (statue of George III on Bowling Green being torn down after the reading of the Declaration of Independence).
- Replying to @DavidAvromBellin order to “replace” the existing population with foreigners who do not have the same commitment to our “values.” This allows them to present the “crisis at the border” as an existential threat to the country’s existence, and not just as a source of scary Mexican criminality. /6
