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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  1281 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just died

With regard to the question of whether anyone thinks an extremest 6-3 conservative majority is representative of the country's public opinion, the answer is that no one give s a fuck what the people think:

Henry Kissenger's attitude toward South America and Asia was that he had seen the Nazi's get elected, therefore the people are morons who should only be allowed to vote insofar as they were voting for something that was good. The minute democracies start to make the wrong choice, they can go to hell. The problem, of course, with that argument is that we can all retrospectively say, "Yeah, the Nazis were bad." But we can prospectively say, "A liberal Court will lead us into a Stalinist future." However, the reigning conservative intelligentsia does very much believe that. They are very aware of public opinion, but they think that acting against it is good for the country in this case, since otherwise, we're guaranteed to slump into decadence at best and Stalinism at worst. That's tough to argue against, because it requires arguing against one's imagination and not empirical facts. I had a conservative friend tell me the other day, "They want socialism." Since there's no counter factual that can be run, it's End of Discussion.

I haven't successfully convinced any of my Trump friends yet that they're the allies of their own gravediggers. Most don't read, as far as I'm aware.

Edit: I don't mean to imply that Trump is the Khmer Rouge...just linking for the quote, not the context.