Every once in a while you hear something that sticks with you. Something that you can’t stop thinking about for days or even weeks.
This happened to me not long ago, thanks to Tim Miller. Miller is an anti-Trump former Republican. But not just any ole’ nobody anti-Trump former Republican (he says looking at himself in the mirror). He is a former Republican Party strategist, a veteran of several Republican Presidential campaigns, and former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. He’s exactly the type of Republican that the Republican Autopsy from their 2012 presidential defeat said the party needed—a gay, millennial, city-dwelling, small government Republican.
And his stuff is FIRE. Read it. It’s some of the most entertaining commentary out there, and he is in a league of his own on snipe and wit.
Not long ago he was on a podcast with Charlie Sykes, another anti-Trump former Republican, when he made the comment that I cannot stop thinking about. (I cannot find a transcript, so I might get a word or two wrong)
“If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose between the United States being exactly like Sweden, or exactly like Turkey, I’d choose Sweden before you could even get the gun out of the holster.”
He went on the explain he this isn’t really even accurate, because Joe Biden has consistently beaten back and resisted the most Sweden-loving parts of the Democratic Party, but that starts to get beyond the point.
I normally hate “gun to your head” games because they force you to make a choice that would never need to actually be made. They force you into a world of black and white when reality is just an ugly mix of gray.
But this one stuck. Maybe because it’s far more plausible than most gun to your head games—if you force me to choose between the Yankees and the Astros winning the World Series, i’m just gonna choose to not watch baseball. The plausibility leads to the far more depressing reason it stuck: that many people in the United States would make the wrong choice.
I don’t often use words like “right” and “wrong” when framing opinions because of that ugly mix of gray. But democracy and self determination are the point of the American experiment, so choosing something actively hostile toward those has to be the wrong choice. Yet it is one that is being made.
Turkey may not be the most illustrative choice to make this point. Too few Americans, myself included, really know the details of how President Erdogan destroyed democracy in Turkey and made himself into a dictator unafraid to use the most brutal tactics to enforce his power—even on American soil.
So I’m going to give you a gun to your head game that is somewhat more realistic, and even more understandable. Since the Sweden wing of the Democratic Party is still an overwhelming minority, think about this:
If I put a gun to your head, and forced you to choose between Joe Biden being President of the United States, or Vladimir Putin, who do you pick?
The correct answer should be obvious. Anyone who values liberty or the Constitution should be able to pick Biden before the gun comes out of the holster.
But resident number one at the Moscow Mahal was all too happy to make the wrong choice.
I worry that there are millions of people in this country that would do the same.
So I can’t stop thinking about it.
Even if we did go full Sweden, and made the choice between Bernie or AOC and Putin, it should still be just as easy. On one side you have an ideology that values liberty and democracy, but maybe wants to use too much government in their vision of it. On the other side you have an ideology that only values its own power and existence, and still wants to use too much government to enforce their vision of it.
Maybe Bernie or AOC might manage to ban whatever they define as assault weapons, but you will have just as much freedom as you had from 1994-2004.
In Putin’s America you can’t buy Goodyear tires, an iPhone, watch CNN or baseball, drink Coke (which makes this video awkward),
fly on Delta, and you definitely cannot protest for freedom or democracy.
In Putin’s America there isn’t a growing threat from cancel culture; cancel is the culture. Standing against that culture gets you labeled a terrorist and poisoned.
I get why Trump would choose Putin—he’s a petty sore loser who never cared about anyone but himself for more than a combined total of 57 seconds in his entire life.
But why do so many Americans also seem ready to make this choice? Senator Mike Lee has an answer.
Putin loves to argue that Russia has more liberty, peace, and prospefity (yes, I’m giving y’all permission to make jokes at the expense of my many typos) than the United States. And that’s the problem with democracy not being the point. If democracy is a secondary concern then minority rule becomes more likely—even probable. If that minority falls to as few as one person, like it has in Russia or Turkey, then that one person defines what liberty, peace, and prosperity are.
If you don’t like their definition, you get poisoned.
But when you feel like you’ve been getting the short end of the stick for decades—and in many cases Trump’s America has, even if those beatings often came from their own leaders—any win feels huge. Fox News and conservative talk radio convinced Trump’s America that having a country which looks exactly the way they insist it should is more important than having a democracy.
Trump and many of his followers, would rather have a dictatorship that bans abortion, gay marriage, yoga pants, and Black Lives Matter; that destroys the EPA, the FDA, and the IRS; that praises Jesus in public, but murders people in private; and that keeps out people of color and builds walls than they would a democratically elected president who wants to raise taxes a bit on the wealthy, build infrastructure, and maybe have a few less guns.
After drawing the short straw for so long, the sentiment is somewhat understandable.
It’s also terribly short sighted.
Anyone who thinks that addressing your specific grievances will somehow reverse the status quo that the rich and powerful have built might want to have a talk with those awful black people that they wish would just protest peacefully. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act have been law since 1964 and 1965. Their specific grievances were addressed. But tell me, more than 50 years after Dr. King had a dream, are black people judged by the content of the their character?
Putin’s America might address your specific grievances, but doing this wouldn’t solve your problems. Then, when you decide you want a new president whom you think might solve your problems, it will be too late. President Putin will decide that your guns pose too big a risk for his rigged reelection plan, and he will take them by force. You will have gotten exactly the thing you chose a dictator over democracy to prevent.
When forced to choose between your grievances and their own power, a dictator will always choose power. A democratically elected president—even one with whom you disagree about everything—still has to consider your grievances to stay in power because they have to win legitimate elections.
That is the key distinction. The Tangerine Tyrant knows this, but he’s only concerned about his own power.
So you don’t have to put a gun to my head. I’ll choose democracy.
Every. Single. Time.
Even when my candidate loses.
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