What do you think an existential threat to the republic would look like?
2. Snowden-ish conspiracies by unelected, unaccountable intelligence agencies.
3. Large-scale conflict with China.
4. High-fatality disease: SARS or similar (COVID but more deadly)
Terrorism, foreign or domestic, doesn't even scratch the list of "existential threats." Terrorist acts don't win heats and minds and unless aided by state actors (dirty bombs, etc) are tiny in the numbers game, even for sometime like 9/11.
If you took out the Senate and legislature, would that work? What if you could guaranteed their protection was understaffed when you attempted it?
That would have been a very bad situation that I wouldn't want to see how it played out.
> They are not essential for day to day governance.
Remember that states are not allowed to print their own money as the federal government is. States are now spending vast amounts of money to combat Covid. The federal government is funding these efforts by literally printing dollar bills. If the federal government fails to prop up states, you're looking at states unable to fund hospitals, police, teachers, utilities, etc. If the entire House is eliminated, there's no one to vote on federal budgets, and governors cannot just appoint Representatives as they can Senators -- Representatives must be elected in a special election in their districts according to the constitution. Meaning money from the federal government would just dry up without the House. Obviously the framers never anticipated this edge case.
B. I'm not saying there wasn't any wacko who fantasized about overthrowing the the Government and throning an Emperor.
But regime change through force is an impossible task. See: The last 50 years of American foreign policy.
However, the impetus has to come from within the country or else the new regime will be seen as a puppet state and face challenges it is unable or unwilling to handle.
Isn't that exactly how most coups are done? Take Iran in '79 as an example.
Nope, all of the states would appoint new representatives. There are processes for all of these scenarios.
The senate and house are not necessary for the day to day operation if the republic. They aren’t even there all of the time. Killing a bunch of politicians is not a threat to the republic.
In a scenario where a Trump incited mob executes Senators while the police and national guard do nothing is tantamount to a military coup. The replacements would have no reason to believe that their lives wouldn't also be in danger if they didn't certify Trump as the winner of the 2020 elections. At that point Trump has effectively side stepped the Constitution and usurped power through violence - which is literally the end of the republic.
But that’s not even close to what happened. The national guard doing nothing would require buy-in from the entire military chain of command, which has never been very supportive of Trump.
If the Sentors and/or the VP were taken as hostages, or worse killed, it would mean national guard was either complicit or incompetent. However, as we know, the Secret Service sadly had to act with deadly force and managed to secure the legislature.
It's not like these are some lunatics, they're obedient fans actively consuming what Trump is feeding them and violently acting on it.
Does he have the right to stand in a public park and spout his threats and lies? Absolutely.
Does he have the right to demand access to a private company platform to spout his threats and lies? No way.
Idiots get kicked out of bars for far less every day.
It's about Parler and its hundreds of thousands of users being deplatformed from AWS, not Twitter banning Trump.
AFAIK Trump doesn't even use Parler.
I guess the point I was making was that this violent language wouldn't be spreading on Parler if Trump hadn't have abused his Twitter account to drum up this kind of violent extremism with self-serving lies about a free and fair election.
Those hundreds of thousands of users flocked to Parler as a result of Twitter cracking down on this same type of violent speech. So is it really a surprise that AWS cracked down on them too for the same reasons? And Google? And Apple? And Shopify? And others? If you're repeatedly running into bans and suspensions, it could be a multi-company conspiracy to silence you, or it could just be you. I guess that's the debate.
The 1st amendment has limits like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater or coordinating to murder the VP of the US.
This isn't the same free speech debate as a professor refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns or someone publishing racist research or someone touting conspiracy theories or someone blowing off steam. This is about a small number of users using a platform to illegally threaten and coordinate violence on others in very explicit and direct terms and that platform standing by their right to do so. The only thing stopping them from following through is their low numbers.
What do we want 2 years from now? Parler letting thousands of people threaten to murder Biden, Pelosi, AOC, Romney or every elected official that doesn't subscribe to their version of reality? No way. History tells us this doesn't end well. "Fall in line or we'll shun you" politics is abhorrent. "Fall in line or we'll harm you" politics is the absolute bottom of group behavior. We have laws against violent speech and conspiracy to commit murder for very valid reasons.
Kathy Griffen holding the President's bloody decapitated head?
Or "If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down"? https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330
Or are those not as dangerous? Or have we simply realized that mass censorship makes the situation even worse?
> Are the threats from the left a problem?
This is a "both sides" argument, that compares apples and oranges. Someone punches a person and someone drives a car into a crowd of innocent people. One is far worse than the other and they're not even in the same ballpark. But when the person who punched someone is "ANTIFA" and the person who drove the car into a crowd is "MAGA" then suddenly we have a debate where there wouldn't have been one if folks had a stronger moral compass than political identity.
Imagine this scenario: A Muslim group with dark skin and long beards, wearing hijabs, led by a billionaire Muslim who dodges condemning 9/11 and openly disparages white people, organizes a "march for Islam" on Marler (Parler for Mulsims) and tries to hunt down various white Christian conservative politicians in the capital building who advocated for the travel ban (killing a police officer in the process) with the stated objective of certifying their Muslim nominee for President who clearly lost the election, yet has been lying about winning and says he'll never concede. Would these same white Christian conservatives being hunted down by a relentless self-serving Muslim politican dust off their near death experience and immediately stand up for Marler and these "very fine" Muslism's right to continue to post their follow up plans for next week?
If modifying the roles in the scenario doesn't feel as comfortable, then this censorship debate might be more related to the social / political identity of those involved than it is about the principle of the debate.
> Or are those not as dangerous?
Kathy Griffen doesn't have the same power as the leader of the free world. Neither does Dr. Reza Aslan, whoever that is. Kathy Griffen's post was messed up and I think they did suspend her for that and made her delete it, right? "Burn the whole thing down" is a euphemism for "start over". Is it inflammatory? Sure. Is it a direct, actionable threat? I don't think so, but I would certainly see it differently if a mob of Aslan's followers showed up carrying torches. Would I have a problem with Twitter deleting the Tweet until he rephrased it to be clear that no violence was intended? No. The more civil our discourse, the more civil our society in my opinion.
I'm all for a very generous line on free speech to make room for very shocking or antagonizing points of views, but when your free speech encourages people to act towards violence and illegally overturning a court-upheld democratic election, I have a huge problem with that because that ultimately leads to more censorship, not less. You think AWS suspending your account and having to self-host is bad? Wait until the capitol mob destroys your business or threatens to kill you. That's true censorship, the kind that's so intimidating and so permanent that you don't dare speak up. That's the kind of censorship the capital mob was advocating for on Parler. Banning a digital account and making you create a new one somewhere else is literally the smallest, most insignificant form of censorship I can think of. And if literally no one will let you create a digital account with them, then maybe it's you and not everyone else. Violence, intimidation and death is the censorship I'm far more worried about. Just look at how brutally effective fascists or the mob can be in censoring entire communities or schools of thought.
> Or have we simply realized that mass censorship makes the situation even worse?
Let's look at Germany who banned Mein Kampf and have "mass censored" the Nazi party, it's symbols and it's ideas. It's not just shunned in Germany to be a Nazi or spread Nazi ideas, it's illegal. Why does Germany believe in "mass censorship"? Because freedom of speech is not all or nothing and censoring Nazis pales in comparison to the alternative of letting Nazi groups freely organize. So, it's not like this road of letting Parlor continue to allow violent political groups to coordinate an uprising leads to more freedom in the long run, it's quite the opposite. From Germany's experience: Want peace and freedom? Then censor those who don't.
In Arnold's recent video (https://twitter.com/Schwarzenegger/status/134824948128487424...) he talks about his father's personal experience with slowly going along with Naziism. I've lived in Germany and Austria and seen the remnants of fascism and it's horrifying. What's even more horrifying is how easy it was for 1930's men and women to dismiss Hitler as "not that bad" or "yeah, he says some outrageous things, but he'd never do it" or "at least he's fighting for Germany" or "he went a little far there, but he won't do it again" or "at least Hitler's on my side" (until he isn't). Sure, people like me might sound alarmist and maybe the capital mob fades quietly into history with no further violence, but my Austrian professor who lived through WWII talked at great length about how seamless and natural the transition from the Weimar Republic to Naziism was and this action at the capital certainly reminded me of his stories, just like it reminded Arnold of his father's story. Giving Parler and the capital mob another shot is not the nail in the coffin for democracy, but it is another notch in violent political extremism's tightening belt. And no one knows which notch is the final one, but when it is, there's no room for anyone to breathe. So, instead of flirting with a violent fascist takeover we're asking Parler's users to please rephrase their beliefs in a non-violent way. Seems a pretty small ask.
Many dismiss the capital mob as lunatics, but Hitler was a 3rd rate fanatic and a recurring failure for years before he took power. In fact, the Weimar Republic wanted to work with him specifically because of how inept and easily manipulated they thought he was. Dismissing the gravity of the capital attack because it failed is a huge mistake in my opinion. Germany wasn't a country of evil citizens who loved Naziism, it was a country of really good people who slowly went along with a few really bad people bending the norms until they had normalized the ultimate censorship: death.
Here we know we have a few really bad people. We don't need to be the good people that go along with it and I'm glad that there are people in powerful positions who aren't.
In other words, what if the mob had gotten its hands on Pence, Pelosi, Grassley, or others? Don't you think that would have been a bigger deal than what transpired with Snowden?
Incidentally, there are reports that a number of Republican members of Congress voted in favor of the president on Wednesday because they feared for the safety of their families. It seems plausible that they might have been influenced by the rioters chanting "hang Mike Pence" as they entered the Capitol. Legislators voting against their judgement because of extortion seems a significant threat to the democratic order.
If there were a lot at once...yeah that could be bad.
But frankly there's just so little chance of that happening. If there was a chance in hell of that happening, Security Service/Capitol police would have actually done something about the protesters.
It was pure luck that the doors of the Senate were locked and barred just two minutes before the mob arrived. What do you think would have happened if the rioters had gotten there five minutes before they did, when the doors were still ajar? What do you think those men with flex cuffs were intending to do? It seems that one of them was a retired Air Force lt. colonel. What do you think his motivations were?
1. New leaders emerge. Industrialists, generals, university professors, even shipyard electricians. They obtain enormous influence through their personal charisma, leadership skills and the political platform they advocate for (think Martin Luther King).
2. Local municipal authorities stop recognizing the central government. They establish democratically-elected councils to temporarily run things in the power vacuum.
3. Security apparatus flips - police and military will stand by, do nothing and just wait to see how the situation develops. Each battalion and police station aims to maintain reasonable peace in their own district (in cooperation with local authorities) and ignores other orders.
4. Having lost all support and control, the central government collapses under its own weight. They may issue orders, but no-one's following them.
5. A grassroots, national assembly type institution with universal popular support emerges to prepare major legislative reforms such as a new constitution to formalize power transfer to new institutions (new government, new parliament). A referendum or general election seals the deal.
In contrast, a bunch of rednecks breaking in for a few hours, taking selfies and stealing minor items is nowhere near this. They have no real leaders, no platform, no support.
Also, I would argue that many of these things did take place. America is fortunate there was a competence problem, but I identify many of the items you listed here as having transpired.
A failed <thing> is still an attempted <thing>.
Well, considering that this is how domestic police and national guard already operate in the US—with police operating under municipal authority, or under the authority of the local elected sheriff, and with national guard operating under the authority of each state governor—I don't think observing this would give you any indication that the republic is under threat.
In fact, your points 1, 2 and 3 seem to describe the normal operation of American democracy for the past 200 years or so, with regards to most domestic affairs.