I don’t mean to come at you in particular, but when I hear a phrase like “a tiny bit of democracy left”, I can’t help but think about the fact that there is so much unexercised democratic power available to citizens in the US, and the primary tool for disenfranchisement is just demoralizing and inactivating people.

Let’s just set aside all the people who just do not pay attention to politics and focus on folks in this thread. Within a thread of people who follow and react to international news, how many know who their county representative is? How many people vote in the primaries that determine who gets to run for their city council?

I’m not blaming anyone. It’s a ton of work. Until recently I didn’t know these things. But if we’re looking for a revival of democracy, we should all be working together to solidify power among the people who control our local cops and school boards and have authority over our state national guards and our state-level medical records, and regulate labor rights in our states and counties, and so on. This is really a key point at which we can either push fascism back to the fringes or let it actually end democracy.

I feel like that term is ambiguous.

Are you saying that gender ideology is crazy as in ‘It’s crazy that all these gender abolitionists are trying to force a complex ideology of new gender norms’ or that it’s crazy as in ‘it’s nuts that all these people think that any change in gender norms is part of a New World Order conspiracy to indoctrinate their kids and dissolve male authority in order to collapse civlization and turn everyone into livestock for the J*ws’ ?

It’s not clear where in that fog you’re pointing.

I’m sorry, but I chafe at the notion that America was a democracy within the recent past and has ceased to be particularly in the last month.

America was a weak democracy throughout its entire history; it has become weaker in the last generation, but still affords more democratic power – even under a fascist leader in the process of attempting to further dismantle it – than most citizens in the world enjoy today. A lot of people literally risk their lives for the political power that we often take for granted.

We should absolutely be disturbed and angry about the loss of civic power. We should also avoid defeatism or doomerism, as there is still a lot of room for this to get better or worse depending on what each of us do. And, we should absolutely reject any framing that suggests that the oligarchy we had last year and every year of our lifetimes before that was some sacred ideal.

America neither was a true democracy previously, nor has it ceased to be one at all. Ergo: democracy has not died.