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Notes -
I feel like there's a word game being played here, roughly, "Everyone's advocating a policy, so everyone's being equally political."
The limits of that claim get obvious if we talked about state-mandated religion. Three potential stances might be:
All 3 of those stances are, in some sense, political. They're political positions. However, I feel like there's a big difference between the first two things and the third; in the first two, my private life gets constrained. Maybe I don't mind if I'm going (/not going) to church already. But, in the first two cases, I'm clearly losing some freedom that I'd already have today.
When I read the NPR Article I'm seeing the title: "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy" and I find myself looking for a satisfying answer to what, precisely, does the the Nerd Reich wants to mandate / prohibit me from doing in my actual day-to-day life?.
The "Anti-Democratic" is true, I guess, in the sense that "Why is the government even involved in this?" is an anti-democracy stance, but not in the (much more relevant if we're throwing around words like "Fascism") sense of imposing rules on people that unpopular with the population and prevent people from doing (/not doing) things they'd otherwise want to do.
The word games continue:
In this case there's a double-meaning of "Oust and Purge." Is the proposal to "oust" democrats in the sense that Democratic Voters would be compelled to move outside of city limits and take up residence in Cupertino? If so, that's a bold and fresh proposal, but probably pretty hard to pull off.
Or is this a "Purge" in the sense of convincing a majority of the voting population to vote for someone other than the incumbents -- who'd still be allowed to live in the city, just without the authority to pass regulations? That's much less bold, and not especially "Anti-Democratic" except in-as-far as we call one party the "Democratic Party" and they'd no longer have power.
When we combine the two ideas: It's undemocratic to try to convince people to vote for Republicans (so the Democrats can't regulate you) AND it's undemocratic to try to create a new city somewhere else (so the Democrats can't regulate you) we're left with just "It's Democracy when my side wins; everything else is Fascism."
You are just assuming your position. You are throwing moral and metaphysical words such as "private life" or "freedom". What are they, how are they justified, why are they valuble, why should they be protected and elevated? I will give a steelman of somebody from either camp:
You just need to read the article, which basically boils down to the "our democracy" rhetoric of The New Left. The way their democracy is endangered is as follows:
The thing is that when the new left talks about democracy, they are not talking about some technicalities. They mean that true democracy is only achieved if their preferred policies are implemented. Therefore any pushback against their policy big and small are dangerous - be it political defeat of Democrats in San Francisco, dismantling of US AID up to dismantling the Federal bureaucracy. That is all.
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