Brian, I take your point. We live in a corrupt republic where corporate-financial-security interests have an enormous and undemocratic influence over the federal government,and where access to one's constitutional rights are distributed very, very unequally in practice between whites and blacks, haves and have-nots. But you can't actually think that things would be no different if the military directly controlled the country and we no longer had any recourse to appeal constitutional rights, legal process, freedom of speech and assembly, elections, etc. If you actually can't imagine how much worse than this things would be if we lived in a military dictatorship, it is just a sign of how lucky you and I have been lucky enough never actually lived through the horrors of a military dictatorship. We live in a country much like the European parliamentary democracies of the 1920s and 1930s: decadent, corrupt, unequal, ineffective, capitalist, dominated by the upper-classes. But there is a huge difference between that a fascist Italy or Spain, Nazi Germany, or the USSR. (For one thing, my activist friends aren't all in jail, in concentration camps, or dead).
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In other words, we actually do have a lot to lose: this matters
Brian, I take your point. We live in a corrupt republic where corporate-financial-security interests have an enormous and undemocratic influence over the federal government,and where access to one's constitutional rights are distributed very, very unequally in practice between whites and blacks, haves and have-nots. But you can't actually think that things would be no different if the military directly controlled the country and we no longer had any recourse to appeal constitutional rights, legal process, freedom of speech and assembly, elections, etc. If you actually can't imagine how much worse than this things would be if we lived in a military dictatorship, it is just a sign of how lucky you and I have been lucky enough never actually lived through the horrors of a military dictatorship. We live in a country much like the European parliamentary democracies of the 1920s and 1930s: decadent, corrupt, unequal, ineffective, capitalist, dominated by the upper-classes. But there is a huge difference between that a fascist Italy or Spain, Nazi Germany, or the USSR. (For one thing, my activist friends aren't all in jail, in concentration camps, or dead).