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Notes -
Which, due to the way power works, is something you must do.
The thing democracy (and by extension the "middle class") confuses is that actors are unable to acknowledge -> calibrate the political power they need to exert at any given time. US citizens are best at doing this, and their law is set up so that they can, but that doesn't solve the problem that the populace needs to realize they have it, and needs to realize they need to use it, before they can show up and do that. Strict majoritarianism being the only political system human beings instinctively understand complicates things (you're not born with an instinct for run-off or ranked-choice voting, but you do instinctively understand that the size of your army is its strength, which is a trait smaller technologically advanced forces abuse to destroy larger ones).
2A discourse is kind of the easiest way to see that- Covid drove a bunch of people to start buying political power dispensers (or "handguns and modern sporting rifles", for short, re: Canada's panic over that exact thing immediately after Ottawa was occupied by angry Westerners in 2022) because they [suddenly] realized they might need to shoot people, and protests themselves are military exercises in the "if you don't do anything, witness how we are organized enough to bring military force here at the time of our choosing" sense.
Which is also why the people who are taxed the most, and the people who have the most to gain from lower taxes, are by definition the same people. And that's also why anyone exercising political power can't believe in things that don't exist, like fairness.
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