A Quote by Masha Gessen
Americans voted for Trump. A lot of people in this country feel the system of representative democracy hasn't worked for them for a long, long time. And those are the issues that this election gives us an unfortunate opportunity to engage with. And engaging instead with the Russia conspiracy takes up that bandwidth.
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A lot of people want to donate a kidney, but they're not in a position to because they have health issues of their own, and a lot of people need them. That's why the list is long and it takes a long time.
The Democrats are still not being honest with themselves about what happened to them. You know, a lot of people voted for Donald Trump knowing full well what the baggage was. They didn't care. The Trump election was, in fact, about issues. It was dead-set on issues, and this is what the media refuses to understand. They know it; they just don't want to believe it, and they don't want to acknowledge it. They think that it was an election about Hillary Clinton being a rotten candidate.
Democracy is just a word. You have to give it meaning. The US is not a democracy. Most Americans do not vote. We haven't had a real choice for a long, long time now. Wealth rules. Corporations rule. The US is a plutocracy - government by wealthy people. Certain people control multinational corporations. You couldn't get elected in the US without lots of money.
When candidate Donald Trump ran for the highest office in the land, he promised to fight for forgotten Americans. In the presidential election of 2016, the forgotten Americans of the Upper Midwest and the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, many of them life-long Democrats, delivered a decisive win for this first-time Republican candidate.
The 'Russia collusion' narrative caused untold damage to the Trump administration and its policy goals. It sparked a years-long special counsel probe that pursued scores of Trump associates but found none who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
I've got a really long record around progressive politics, especially when it comes to the economy. Voted against the Bush tax cuts. Voted against the Trump tax cuts. Believe in investment into lifting people up, closing the opportunity gaps that exist in our society.
Representative democracy is a remarkably blunt instrument. Hundreds of issues are bundled together at every election, yet the vote tends to swing on just one or two of them.
I think some people have blind faith in American institutions without knowing a whole lot about them and think they will stand up to Donald Trump and are indestructible. I actually think democracy is not a definable and achievable state. Any country is either becoming more democratic or less democratic. I think the United States hasn't tended to its journey toward democracy in a long time. It's been becoming less democratic, and right now it's in danger of becoming drastically less democratic.
I mean, it's not just one day you get up, bang, and you got Osama bin Laden. It's the kind of thing where an awful lot of people over a long period of time - thousands have worked this case and these issues and followed on the leads and captured bad guys and interrogated them and so-forth.
It was mainstream Americans that signed up and voted for Donald Trump. Mainstream Americans all over the country. There aren't enough of these ragtag wackos to elect anybody president. The Alt-Right, nobody ever heard of, by the way, until Trump came along.
Anyone will acknowledge that there's a lot of people other than those who are elected who run the government, and who are in permanent positions, and long-term positions, appointed positions - not voted in by anybody. That kind of gnaws away, I think, at the idea of democracy. The two-party system, again, is an issue. What we see is no desire on behalf of anyone to begin to address these problems.
I think it's very important for everyone in America to realize right now the state of our country, not just on this issue but on a lot of issues, that it is time to get active again. People have just sat back and just sort of said, oh, let somebody else do it for a long time, and we're seeing what's happening to the country, even freedom of speech. It's not going well. So I think this is a real opportunity for people to see, yes, if you do get out and you do get active, there are other people there. You just have to seek them out.
How long has it taken the democratic process to develop in the United States? Since it was founded. So, do you think that as regards democracy everything is settled now in America? If this were so, there would be no Ferguson issue, right? There would be no other issues of similar kind, there would be no police abuse. Our goal is to see all these issues and respond to them timely and properly. The same applies to Russia. We also have a lot of problems.
I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.
The Republicans had their shot not long ago to address the real needs and concerns of everyday Americans, and they blew it. I think that's mitigated by the fact that we had a terrorist incident, there is a war, and there was a lot of proper focus on those issues, but over the time that they were there and had the leadership opportunity, they blew it. We got fired for a reason.
We think about democracy, and that's the word that Americans love to use, 'democracy,' and that's how we characterize our system. But if democracy just means going to vote, it's pretty meaningless. Russia has democracy in that sense. Most authoritarian regimes have democracy in that sense.
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