Quotable: Election edition

 

Part of an interview on The Gray Area podcast (link to the article in the comments):
"I think the biggest point — and I’m afraid the ship has already sailed — is that violence should never be a part of politics. Once it’s there, it is very hard to make it go away without even more violence that ultimately neutralizes the people willing to do it. Violence has no part in a representative political system.
But I think the other thing that is really important for us to understand is that you cannot wait or hope that a single individual is going to fix the problems in a society or fix the problems in a political system. If you have a political system that has functioned reasonably well and has been adaptable over the course of decades or centuries, that’s a very valuable thing. It creates rules, it creates assumptions, it creates a state of play where everybody more or less knows when you do X, this is how the system is going to respond. If you destroy that, you have nothing. And if you destroy that because of an individual, you just have that individual.
Very occasionally, you will get an individual who creates something that maybe isn’t even better but is at least something. Most of the time the person who destroys does not have the capacity to create. And so you’re going to replace something that has governed just about every aspect of your civic and personal lives for your entire existence, and probably, in the United States, for the existence of 10 generations of your ancestors potentially. If you throw that away for an individual, you’re making a really significant bet. And if that individual is somebody that you don’t 100 percent trust is capable of creating something different, you are throwing away an incredibly valuable thing for nothing."

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