TikTok resurfaces video of Trump saying US shouldn't have a president with felony conviction Lauren Lane
  • Akasazh@feddit.nl
    12·
    7 months ago

    I think the reasoning is that otherwise opponents can block political candidates by using the justice system. The opposite of what’s happening now.

    The founding fathers haven’t theorized that this particular situation could happen.

    • octopus_inkEnglish
      11·
      7 months ago

      The founding fathers haven’t theorized that this particular situation could happen.

      Which you can’t even blame them for, honestly. Who in the 18th century would have thought a huge chunk of the country would want a known despot?

      • Akasazh@feddit.nl
        13·
        7 months ago

        Who in the 18th century would have thought a huge chunk of the country would want a known despot?

        Well there is the French 16 th century thinker Etienne de la Boétie who wrote a discourse on voluntary servitude in which he argued that men do tend to simp for tyrants over being free a lot of the time:

        The essay argues that any tyrant remains in power while his subjects grant him that, therefore delegitimizing every form of power. The original freedom of men would be indeed abandoned by society which, once corrupted by the habit, would have preferred the servitude of the courtier to the freedom of the free man, who refuses to be submissive and to obey.

        • swim@slrpnk.net
          2·
          7 months ago

          Spinoza asked “why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation?”

          Fear, and superstition; ideology. Under certain circumstances, the masses want fascism.

          When the left buys in to the game of fear, hatred, passivity, and superstition - a game turbocharged by social media - we become complicit.

          "Instead of politics, we engage in chatter. And it is a sad chatter, whose prevailing form is denunciation. The practice of denunciation debases the multitude. In the place of action, it accepts hatred, which merely externalizes the sadness of passivity; in the place of agency, it accepts fear, and pleads for security; in place of the collective democratic subject, it accepts the superstitious mob.

          Superstitious mobs can only serve tyrants, as Spinoza knew well. We now face a new theocracy of our own making, one which through the chatter of social media decomposes our powers and makes politics impossible."

          https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3844-why-do-people-fight-for-their-servitude-as-if-it-were-their-salvation

          • Akasazh@feddit.nl
            2·
            7 months ago

            Thanks. I love me some Spinoza. I just wished they put a citation as to where to find this quote.

            • swim@slrpnk.net
              2·
              7 months ago

              The Spinoza quote? As far as I understand it, it could actually be Deleuze paraphrasing Spinoza, perhaps Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, or maybe better said as “Deleuze’ translation of Spinoza.”