Advice from Instapundit on the election outcome:
You don’t have to love the “other guy.” You don’t have to hold back on fighting against policies you don’t like. You don’t have to pull punches. But once someone is duly and legally elected president, you do owe some respect to the office and the Constitution. And to your fellow Americans.
I’m not an Obama fan, particularly, but a lot of people I like and respect are. To treat Obama as something evil or subhuman would not only be disrespectful toward Obama, but toward them. Instead, I hope that if Obama is elected, their assessment of his strengths will turn out to be right, and mine will turn out to be wrong. Likewise, those who don’t like John McCain or Sarah Palin might reflect that by treating Palin and McCain as obviously evil and stupid, they’re disrespecting tens of millions of their fellow Americans who feel otherwise. And treating a presidency held by a guy you don’t like as presumptively illegitimate suggests that presidents rule not by election, but by divine right, so that whenever the “other guy” wins, he’s automatically a usurper.
I concur. I have made no secret of my belief that Barack Obama is a fascist. But unlike most people, I don’t believe that fascists are intrinsically evil. I just think that they’re deeply misguided. If he wins, I expect to be fighting most of his initiatives, probably unsuccessfully, given the likely new composition of the Congress, but he will be, as every president has been before, my president, for good or ill. In four years, we’ll have an opportunity to replace him. It’s conceivable that in four years, I won’t want to, but it seems extremely unlikely. And the world will go on.
OK, but at what point do you fight? I agree, Obama being elected is not that point – but what about if they pass legislation enacting confiscatory taxes? At what point is the minority that is being made into a slave morally entitled to start a war?
Things will not get better without one, presumably – why would the left vote against taxing the “rich” when they are not taxed?
It seems that the previous 2 civil wars in the US were about the same thing – freedom from taxes imposed by the majority (the majority was in England, and we fought it), and the freedom from slavery (which is simply a 100% tax rate) in opposition to the majority of voters.
I am now a 60% slave. Logically, I should spend 60% of my time figuring out how to free myself… and that seems unlikely to happen without violence.
that seems unlikely to happen without violence.
Oh nonsense. You know what they say about the first refuge of the incompetent.
First, vote. If that doesn’t work, vote with your feet: move to a low-tax fast-growing state, earn more money through lower state and local taxes, at least, and have more children. This is already happening, you know. After the next census the electoral votes of all the deep blue states come down, and those of the red states go up. Accelerate the trend. Not even a majority can ignore success. If Texas and Tennessee are prospering while New York and California sink into misery, people are bound to start asking why.
Keep in mind it wasn’t military might or superior propaganda that brought down the Soviet Union so much as the example of wealth and success in Western Europe. East Germans would look over the wall at the happier, wealthier, healthier West Germans and say WTF? My parents knew their parents, why is this happening? What do they know that I don’t?
Third, burrow into the system. If President Obama imposes the One True Utopian State, then brush up your CV and apply for a job as People’s Truth Squad Commissar. The state will always need practically competent people — why shouldn’t that include you? You can fake the mumbo jumbo about diversity, just like in the job interview when they ask for your biggest fault you modestly admit you may work too hard.
Come on, there’s probably a few slackers you won’t mind escorting to the re-education camps, right? Keep in mind a socialist utopia is even more cynical about the primacy of raw power over justice than a capitalist one. So you can enjoy being part of the elite even more than you do now. Or, to put it another way, in the New Regime, you can exploit the proles without guilt, because they asked for it at the ballot box.