PAGE A12, KEIZERTIMES, OCTOBER 1, 2021
Political violence
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A trillion here, a trillion there
By LYNDON ZAITZ
A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars
there, soon it all adds up to real money.
The game of chicken being played out in
Washington over the debt ceiling and a
massive infrastructure bill will have to
come to an end somehow. Some say if the
debt ceiling is not raised the country is in
for major economic pain—a recession, lost
jobs and downgrading of the nation's credit
rating.
We elect leaders and representatives to
maintain the United States. The steps to
achieve our national goals is our politics.
Spend more? Spend less? Allocate more
resources for social needs? Who's vision
should be enacted? Progressives want to
spend trillions of dollars to make the coun-
try more equitable.
The national debt now stands at more
than $28 trillion dollars. In 2000 it was
$5.6 trillion dollars—that seems like such
a quaint amount now. Did America have a
choice? The attacks of Sept. 11 and subse-
quent homeland security expenses coupled
with the Great Recession of 2008 and the
COVID pandemic caused the federal bud-
get to balloon, adding trillions of dollars a
year to the debt.
President Biden is working hard to get
his $3.5 trillion spending plan approved.
He is not only facing opposition from
Republicans. With razor thing margins in
both the U.S. House and the Senate, the
President cannot afford to lose one single
vote.
The president has met with two
Democratic senators who will not vote for
the $3.5 trillion plan. One can only imagine
on my
mind
conversations between those senators
and the President. What concessions are
demanded or offered to secure those neces-
sary votes?
We've been here before in negotiations
over the raising of the debt ceiling. Every
time, those who oppose it get something in
return for their support. It is always a game
of political chicken. This go-round, some
smell blood in the water, and feel they can
be victorious, get what they want and posi-
tion themselves to win big in the mid-term
elections next year.
A national debt of $5 trillion is man-
ageable and with fiscal responsibility pay-
ments on the debt can be slowly paid down.
A $30 trillion debt is different and we are at
a point where we could all suffer economic
pain.
Spending $3.5 trillion the government
doesn't have will not endear the President
or Congress to the people. Only maintain-
ing the country and safeguarding our econ-
omy will do that. Can't we get by with $1.5
trillion? A trillion here, a trillion there adds
up to real money. Stop playing political
chicken and don't mortgage the future of
our grandchildren and their children for a
short-term gain.
(Lyndon Zaitz is publisher of the
Keizertimes.)
Democracy vs. autocracy
By GENE H. McINTYRE
Born in Astoria, Oreg., my forebear-
ers preceded me there from Finland and
Scotland. All my adult life I’ve viewed
myself fortunate because I have enjoyed the
freedoms and privileges of an American cit-
izen. Meanwhile, I have lived long enough
to retire into a life that would have been
admired by family members who perished
before my arrival.
Further, I owe a debt of gratitude to my
solid citizen, hard-working parents who
established and maintained a safe and
healthy home for my sisters and me. Then,
too, is the gratitude due those generations
of Americans who founded our country
and kept it going, affording the people here
with all that made the U.S. great while most
toiled away at the experiment in democracy
that has survived, sometimes just barely,
through the nation’s 245 years of history.
It would seem by daily news that there
are an ever-enlarging number of Americans,
some born here like me, others immigrants,
who desire a change away from our way of
life to conditions and practices that sug-
gest those of an autocracy where one per-
son takes the reins of power and all citizens
under that person become his or her follow-
ers. So, what are some contrasting features
between the form of democracy we’ve prac-
ticed and an autocracy?
Autocracies typically concentrate the
power of government in one person where
virtually all decision-making is in the
Guest
COLUMN
hands of that one person with little to no
input from other members. In other words,
autocratic leaders make choices based on
their own ideas and judgments and avoid
advice from their followers. Followers are
not trusted, only controlled. Force, manip-
ulation and coercion achieve leader objec-
tives. An advantage of an autocracy is
that decisions can be made quickly and
efficiently with no waste of time consulting
with other people or reviewing proposed
actions. However, in this age of technolog-
ical and sociological complexities, one-per-
son rule can be dangerous by omissions as
it is highly difficult for one person to know
everything while all followers are in mute
mode.
There remains at present here in
America, time to debate this subject with
citizen involvement. Examples of other
nations gone autocratic, the switch has
often been explosive, violent and forced
with compliance ultimately demanded, not
duly accepted. Americans can tolerate and
allow a change or be driven to it, there’s still
opportunity for input here.
(Gene H. McIntyre lives in Keizer.)
By MICHAEL GERSON
American politics—as some dissident
Republicans and state election officials
will tell you—is already conducted in the
shadow of violence.
The threat of violence was always a
subtext of Trumpism, usually involving
the encouragement of assault against
hostile protesters or the refusal to clearly
repudiate brutality by Trump supporters.
This could sometimes be dismissed as
barroom bravado. But we entered a new
phase when former president Donald
Trump explicitly sided with the political
violence of Jan. 6 and declared that our
current government is illegitimate.
The baseless claim of electoral fraud,
in particular, has acted as an acceler-
ant to anger. Trump consistently claims
that something—power, respect or social
dominance—has been stolen from his
supporters and that only “strength” will
reclaim it. The consequences of failure,
Trump declares, would be apocalyptic:
the loss of America itself. “If you don’t
fight like hell,” he said before the events
of Jan. 6, “you’re not going to have a
country anymore.” This is the cultivation
of desperation.
It is little wonder that about two-
fifths of Republicans (in a poll this
year) expressed an openness to political
violence under certain circumstances.
People in this group are not being stig-
matized. They have the effective endorse-
ment of a former president and likely
GOP presidential nominee in 2024.
This line of argument is dangerously
congruent with one view of the Second
Amendment on the right that long pre-
ceded Trump—a belief that the ownership
of guns is the last resort in the defense
of liberty. This acts as constitutional per-
mission for the use of force against fellow
citizens.
It’s difficult to game out what this
means for the future. Would some on the
hard left respond in kind, as a stigma-
tized few are already doing? This reac-
tion is not in any way equivalent to what
we’ve seen on the right, mainly because
the political party of the left remains
committed to liberal democracy. But I
suspect a marginally thicker slice of the
left would be inclined to “punch a Nazi”
during a second Trump term. And it
doesn’t require many bad actors to cause
a violent confrontation.
At the least, these trends threaten to
turn any national trauma or trial—a dis-
puted election, an unjust police shooting,
a resented judicial ruling, a bitter politi-
cal convention—into an occasion for vio-
lence. And a great many elections lost by
Republicans will be disputed, given the
GOP’s philosophic embrace of unconsti-
tutional bad-loserism.
I suspect that a second term for
Trump would accelerate all these trends.
In Trump’s first term, federal law enforce-
ment officers were given license to rough
other
VOICES
up peaceful protesters (as in Lafayette
Square). Trump used violent supporters
to threaten and intimidate members of
Congress (and his own vice president).
High-ranking military officials feared
Trump might try to use the armed forces
for unconstitutional purposes. Is there
any doubt that Trump, empowered by
reelection and accustomed to the use of
power, would use times of crisis—partic-
ularly civil disorder—as justifications for
broader violence?
The most important response to these
unnerving trends is political mobiliza-
tion to prevent Republicans from taking
control of the House, Senate and pres-
idency. But it is possible, in the natural
rhythms of politics, for an unfit party to
take control. So it is premature, but not
irrational, to ask: What might opposition
to an illiberal Trump regime look like?
A Democratic friend provides this
answer: “Only an organized and ongo-
ing mass nonviolent protest and resis-
tance movement would be the needed
counterweight.”
The advantages of this approach are
the same that the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. defined in Stride Toward Freedom, his
account of the Montgomery bus boycott.
King argued that nonviolence allows
people to fight evil without resorting to
violence; allows for opposition without
dehumanization; aims at understand-
ing an opponent rather than humiliat-
ing them; and prevents the resister from
being deformed by hate.
Nonviolence is sometimes criticized
on the left as passivity or compliance.
That strikes me as entirely inconsistent
with the civil rights movement in prac-
tice. King argued that an active but non-
violent resistance is not merely possible;
it is the only strategy that preserves the
possibility of future unity.
The more apt question would be: Who
has the cultural standing to lead and
train such a movement? It may be some-
one from the Black church -- or the White
church, for that matter. I doubt such lead-
ership will emerge from politics. In our
society it could come from anywhere:
sports, entertainment, literature, music.
We are left to hope that someone feels
the call.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that,” King said. “Hate
cannot drive out hate; only love can do
that. The beauty of nonviolence is that in
its own way and in its own time it seeks to
break the chain reaction of evil.”
(Washington Post)
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