I have what some people might call a strange orientation. I believe respect is foundational. Not optional. Not conditional. And not something you earn only if you behave or think the “right” way.
The President of the United States and the government, work for US, we do not work for them. That seems to get lost a lot anymore.
In a functioning democracy, citizens owe one another basic respect simply by virtue of shared citizenship. That obligation is mutual. It runs horizontally between neighbors and vertically between the public and the state. When that respect breaks down, everything downstream degrades with it.
This is not a soft or sentimental idea. It is structural. Systemic. So when it goes wrong, bad things happen. As we're seeing today under Donald Trump and under his Republicans, all who seem to think we're theirs, but they are not ours.
Let's take a quick look at global trust.
Citizenship Requires Mutual Respect
Citizens must respect one another if a democratic society is going to hold. That doesn’t mean agreement. It doesn’t mean approval. It doesn’t mean silence in the face of harm. It means recognizing the humanity, agency, and dignity of the person on the other side of a disagreement.
People aligned with MaGA politics are not stupid. Mostly.
Reducing millions of people to that caricature is lazy and counterproductive. It is the first step of fascistic dehumanization, toward totalitarian power. What is true is that MaGA thinking often operates within a narrow scope — simplified narratives, grievance framing, and a tendency to collapse complex systems into enemies and slogans.
Limited scope, however, is not a moral failing. Disrespect is.
And disrespect has become a defining feature of MaGA political culture — not disagreement, not conservatism, not populism, but contempt. Contempt for fellow citizens. Contempt for institutions. Contempt for expertise. Contempt for the idea that other Americans might be acting in good faith.
That contempt did not arise in a vacuum, but it cannot be excused by grievance either.
We have, through ever poorer funding starved education, through allowing a festering subculture addicted to victimhood to bloom, to be weaponized by an autocratic career criminal, and blossom into overtaking and controlling a major political party.
Government’s Obligation Is Even Higher
If mutual respect is the baseline among citizens, then government actors carry an even greater obligation. Law enforcement, civil servants, judges, corrections officers — all exercise power on behalf of the public. That power must be restrained by respect, or it becomes abuse.
This is where the Constitution matters, not as an abstraction, but as a moral boundary.
The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Yet in practice, American punishment is often cruel and entirely usual. Our prison system is designed less around rehabilitation than degradation. When people are caged, neglected, psychologically damaged, and then released back into society, we act surprised when recidivism follows.
That surprise is dishonest. You reproduce what you model.
Once the state deprives a person of liberty — citizen or not — it assumes responsibility for that person’s physical safety, mental health, and basic dignity. Anything less is not justice; it is abandonment disguised as punishment.
Profit and Punishment Do Not Belong Together
For-profit prisons are a moral contradiction. When incarceration becomes a business model, abuse is no longer an accident — it is an incentive. The same logic applies more broadly to essential public institutions.
Some functions exist precisely because profit should not be the motive. The USPS is one example. Education is another. A society that forces its citizens into lifelong debt to participate in mandatory systems is not acting in its own long-term interest.
Remember Trump’s own statement: “I love the uneducated.” On the surface, it can sound almost wholesome, even inclusive. But just beneath that surface, it is a revealing and deeply troubling admission.
Education correlates with resistance to manipulation. Educated populations are more likely to question claims, recognize contradictions, understand institutional guardrails, and demand evidence. Ignorance, by contrast, is easier to flatter, inflame, and mobilize through grievance and fear. How hard IS it to take a victimhood addicted subculture and enflame into a grievance driven political party.
Not that hard apparently. as we've seen, if you hit all the right stress points. Even by such a fool as Donald Trump. But, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease," just to shut the "baby" up. But that is the most wrong orientation possibly, as it emboldens and empowers the worst behaviors possible.
The strategy is not simply to manipulate the uneducated. It's to use that manipulation as leverage. Once you can mobilize a sufficiently large, uncritical base, you can intimidate or neutralize the checks and balances of government. And once those guardrails weaken, even educated people, professionals, institutions, and powerful actors, as we've seen...become vulnerable to pressure.
As we're seeing today. Some educational institutions have bent the knee, rather than resist. Corporations have accommodated themselves to autocratic behavior. Legal, financial, and media institutions have shown a willingness to comply, hedge, or remain silent in the face of a rogue presidency and a criminal administration.
CONGRESS, Republicans... to be sure, have not just bent the knee, but are apparently down there, living on their knees under Trump, showing their "soft under bellies" to him in supplication.
This is how democratic erosion works. You do not need to convince everyone. You only need to disable resistance early enough that compliance becomes the safer option later.
In that light, “I love the uneducated” is not a compliment. It is a tactical confession. When government offloads its core responsibilities to profit-driven entities, it isn’t shrinking government. It's evading responsibility.
How Disrespect Scales Into Authoritarianism
When respect erodes at the citizen level, and responsibility erodes at the government level, something has to fill that gap. What fills it is simplistic thinking, grievance politics, and the appeal of strongmen who promise order without accountability. Perfect for social media today. Shallow thinking, and a lot of it. Low information levels used to make judgements.
The advent of the Stupid Society.
Authoritarian figures thrive in environments where civic understanding is weak and contempt is normalized. When politics becomes about dominance rather than coexistence, rather than decency and community, democracy becomes unintelligible to large portions of the public.
This is not an accident. It's the logical outcome of a culture that replaces respect with punishment, complexity with slogans, and responsibility with blame.
Respect Is Not Weakness
Treating people with dignity does not excuse bad behavior. It does not mean tolerating harm. It means understanding that a society built on humiliation and contempt cannot stabilize itself.
Respect is not a reward for compliance. It is the minimum requirement for coexistence.
If we want less violence, less extremism, less recidivism, and less attraction to autocrats, we have to stop pretending that disrespect is strength. It isn’t. It’s corrosion.
A democracy that forgets this does not collapse all at once.
It decays — slowly, visibly, and then suddenly, all at once, it collapses and whoever is in power at that time, as total power over all.
I wish us the very best. And we can have it. IF we just pay attention. See what we are doing and not doing, and NEVER shut up about it.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
No comments:
Post a Comment