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Speranzoso's avatar

Zeynep, please write about specific actions any of us can take. I respect that Insight is meant to be a community for deep thought, not a political platform. But I'm asking for suggestions, anyway.

I absolutely agree with your messages about underlying dynamics (averting repetitions of this disaster starts with understanding that yes, this is a coup; and whatever limited damage this time can't be counted on in the future). Changing thought and perception precedes changing what we do. Each of us who agrees with this can try to effectively persuade those outside one's bubble to see things differently. (A big lift!)

But for those of us who are already in agreement with you, what actions can we take?

Agreed that minority rule encodes all of this. I see plausibly effective opposition via

(1) the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ which would, de facto, make POTUS elections dependent on the popular vote and

(2) Fair Vote https://www.fairvote.org/ which is currently focusing on Ranked Choice Voting.

What else? Those in agreement sit here, anguished. We must have a place to direct that energy.

Thanks to all who are at least trying to make sense of this.

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David Robertson's avatar

Thank you for this piece.

We face a communication challenge unlike any I have seen in my six decades.

One of the scariest aspects of the past five years has been the gradual erosion of meaning in the language used by those who should be responsible for keeping things clear. The White House (from POTUS on down) has used the flexibility within language to help create the alternate universe (with its own "facts") that all the mob used to express themselves. My son is a translator (German -English - German) and he wrote about the confusion at the heart of the "take Trump seriously, but not literally" problem (in reference to Ezra Klein's recent piece in the NYTimes).

He wrote: "Over time, you get good at reading all sorts of signs about what's literal and what's metaphor/symbol/rhetoric/humor/irony. You actually get so good at it that you don't realize you're doing it (which is why you need Lakoff/Johnson to write books about it). But partly because of the internet, partly because of ads/marketing, partly because of hipster appropriation of academic thought, there's an awful half-ness about what's literal (cf. "literally"). And so all the horrible memes, all the "lock her up", all the "we need the second amendment in case we don't like our government" is this weird plausible deniability vortex in which it's the modern definition of literal: both literal and metaphorical at the same time, depending on what's advantageous to the speaker at the time. No wonder there's almost no way to talk to people on that side."

Orwell would have been squirming to hear those lawmakers in the Capitol and those trying to storm it (including, in my reading, some GOP trying to storm it from inside, as it were) both using the term "our Constitution!", as though it somehow magically wrapped them in truth.

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