I hate to say it right now, but democracy depends on obedience. The question right now: Where does your obedience lie?
Just out in America Magazine: https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2025/01/08/democracy-trump-inauguration-249630
@ntnsndr interesting and compelling. Perhaps a bit of a stretch on the meaning of obedience. The important distinction that comes to mind is the “difference between kneeling down and bending over” (to borrow a quote from a Zappa lyric)
@ntnsndr Always eager to read a new piece of yours!
The On the Waterfront/Salt of the Earth contrast is not great. The collective struggle of ILA members against the mob, at great personal cost, was in no way anti-union. The "labor priests" who supported workers played a key, rebellious, role. And, as Bert Cochran detailed in his book Labor and Communism, the influence of Stalinism in unions like the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers was often harmful to democratic worker self-organization.
@Matt_Noyes That's fair. Though I think it's also important to read Waterfront through the particular context of Kazan's anti-communist testimony. There are some good papers on the comparison, eg: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07393180216562
@ntnsndr nice one, I thought squid games was an interesting metaphor for democratic capitalist society and the question of who democracy is for and what choice there really is.
It's probably been done before, but I wondered if people would take their democracy more seriously if they understood and internalized they were interchangeable units of consumption, obedience in this case is to consume without questioning.