The roots are older than any of us. For the US, the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” has been a hypocritical fiction since the day Jefferson put pen to paper. When I was a kid I was taught that it was more of an ideal that we were slowly but inexorably marching toward, and I just don’t think “maybe, someday” is an acceptable timeframe for something as critical as equality under law.
I think Jeffs was on the right track, and that holding some variant of “all persons are equal under law” as axiomatic is necessary for democratic government, but in 250 years we have never satisfactorily held ourselves to the standard we claim to hold, and the consequences of that hypocrisy have waxed and waned over the decades as the Rupert Murdochs of the world have sought to exploit it to their own ends, but it’s never not been present in some fashion.
To extend the cancer metaphor, I don’t know that a cure can be trusted to stick, even if we can get the current wave into remission. Countries of a certain age need routine screenings and effective early-stage interventions, and the US has done neither consistently. I don’t really know what working versions of those would look like. I think the origins of fascism have a mutagenic quality that make any one treatment a mere stop-gap until some selfish one finds a way to circumvent it, so maybe it’s more a game of constant vigilance and treating outbreaks as they occur, decisively, than coming up with one all-encompassing solution.
The roots are older than any of us. For the US, the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” has been a hypocritical fiction since the day Jefferson put pen to paper. When I was a kid I was taught that it was more of an ideal that we were slowly but inexorably marching toward, and I just don’t think “maybe, someday” is an acceptable timeframe for something as critical as equality under law.
I think Jeffs was on the right track, and that holding some variant of “all persons are equal under law” as axiomatic is necessary for democratic government, but in 250 years we have never satisfactorily held ourselves to the standard we claim to hold, and the consequences of that hypocrisy have waxed and waned over the decades as the Rupert Murdochs of the world have sought to exploit it to their own ends, but it’s never not been present in some fashion.
To extend the cancer metaphor, I don’t know that a cure can be trusted to stick, even if we can get the current wave into remission. Countries of a certain age need routine screenings and effective early-stage interventions, and the US has done neither consistently. I don’t really know what working versions of those would look like. I think the origins of fascism have a mutagenic quality that make any one treatment a mere stop-gap until some selfish one finds a way to circumvent it, so maybe it’s more a game of constant vigilance and treating outbreaks as they occur, decisively, than coming up with one all-encompassing solution.