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Current: Dictatorship or Democracy?

July 26, 2023 By Guy St. Clair

Dear friends,

Generally speaking, I am not usually writing about subjects like this. Yet. 

I’m not a political columnist and I’m certainly not active in our nation’s politics, but as a citizen, I try to read about what’s going on.

And I find myself becoming very nervous about the actions of some of our political leaders.

Read this, from columnist Heather Cox Richards (whose column I read).

It think this is probably the most frightening piece I’ve seen so far, on a topic I worry about a lot.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/july-17-2023?r=1gx4yv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

We’ve all talked about the former President’s seeming interest in something like this (creating a dictatorship), but this is the first time I’ve seen any serious action plan described. 

Scary. Yet a good friend reminded me last week that it probably can’t happen unless the presumptive dictator has military support. 

And the former President’s great hatred the military is well known (especially for military leadership, even if some of the troops are conservative). 

So that should provide us with some comfort, perhaps even have some effect on preventing a dictatorship, depending of course on what the voters do in November 2024. 

We can only hope. 

And speaking of which, in his great novel Proust wrote about the value (or the role) of hope in a nation when a nation is at war. His narrator was describing life in Paris when he returned for a brief visit in 1916, right in the middle of a very difficult time in the Great War], and he had this to say:

The real propaganda is what – if we are a living member of a nation – we told ourselves because we have hope, hope being a symbol of a nation’s instinct of self-preservation.

So yes. We can only hope. And vote. That’s self-preservation.

Thanks for reading.

I would be interested in knowing – as would other readers – what you think.

Respond in “Leave a Reply” below.

Guy

Filed Under: Current Events

Guy St. Clair is a writer and editor living in New York City. In his blog, Sharing Guy’s Journey, he  writes about any subject that crosses his mind (some friends refer to the blog as “Guy’s online journal”).  In his professional life, Guy is the Series Editor for Knowledge Services, from De Gruyter Saur in Munich and Berlin. 

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