Zach Beecham

People don't care about it.

It's too abstract.

And the voters are going to tune out.

And so you get this postmortem of Kamala Harris's 2024 bid where it's like, well, the problem is that she stopped talking about affordability and started talking about democracy.

Yeah.

I just think that's completely wrong.

Just completely wrong.

And so there are a few examples, right?

Brazil is one of them.

Another similar case is South Korea in 2024.

There, the president declared martial law in December.

And like within hours, like probably minutes, really, there had been a mass of protesters in Seoul who were blocking security services that had been deployed outside Congress.

Now, that action, according to some Korean scholarship I've read, might actually have been decisive in saving democracy.

The reason being the security services were ordered to arrest leaders of the legislature, right?

And they were physically obstructed by protesters, right?

And that allowed – you've probably seen this famous video of a Korean legislator jumping over the fence in order to cast a vote ending the declaration of martial law.

Well, part of the reason that the legislators could sneak in and get around is because the protesters were there obstructing what happened.

And why did the protesters show up?

Because a declaration of martial law is so obvious as a threat to democracy that you know what you need to do.

The first thing I would say is don't listen to people who tell you to stop talking about democracy.