<
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/opinion/democracy-america-authoritarianism-midterms.html>
"The move from democracy to autocracy isn’t a sudden shift. It is not a switch
that flips from light to dark with nothing in between. But it’s also not quite
right to call the path to authoritarianism a journey. To use a metaphor of
travel or distance is to suggest something external, removed, foreign.
It is better, in the U.S. context at least, to think of authoritarianism as
something like a contradiction nestled within the American democratic
tradition. It is part of the whole, a reflection of the fact that American
notions of freedom and liberty are deeply informed by both the experience of
slaveholding and the drive to seize land and expel its previous inhabitants.
As the historian Edmund Morgan once wrote of the Virginians who helped lead the
fight for Anglo-American independence, “The presence of men and women who were,
in law at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those
in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the
mercy of a tyrant.” Virginians, he continued, “may have had a special
appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day
what life without it could be like.”
Similarly, the legal scholar Aziz Rana observed that for many Anglo-Americans
in the 18th century, freedom was an “exclusivist ideal, accessible only to
Anglo-Saxons and select Europeans, whose heritage, land practices and religion
made them particularly suited to self-rule. Such exclusivism presupposed that
settler security, as well as more grandiose dreams of utopian peace, required
the subordination of internal and external enemies, who threatened Anglo social
and political supremacy.” Freedom and domination, he wrote, were “bound
together.”
This duality is present in our federal Constitution, which proclaims republican
liberty at the same time that it has enabled the brutal subjugation of entire
peoples within the United States. The Constitution both inspired the democratic
vistas of radical antislavery politicians and backstopped the antebellum dream
of a transcontinental slave empire."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
