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Fay's avatar

There is a power struggle taking place. Do as you are told you resistant trouble makers.

Those in power will never have full support as there is always different points of view.

If three people agree with you, there will be three that don’t agree with you. It is a world

of dualism – always contrasts between two concepts.

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Stegiel's avatar

Diversity of views is undesirable and unanimity welcome. Hence the phrase "The Loyal Opposition.". Disagree but only within acceptable parameters.. Since the Mexican War the Federal government has insisted opposition to war is illegal. And today the Federal state is at war with any opposition to it's illegality.. Of course under Woodrow Wilson and FDR this was also true.

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Fay's avatar

I have read that the phrase The Loyal Opposition was originally coined in jest.

Life is full of compromises.

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Stegiel's avatar

So you prompted me to check. History News Network states-

The phrase “the loyal opposition” was coined by John Hobhouse in a debate in the English Parliament in 1826. Less than a hundred years later, A. Lawrence Lowell, a political scientist (and later president of Harvard University) proclaimed the loyal opposition “the greatest contribution of the nineteenth century to the art of government.”

Designed to make space for the political party out of power to dissent and hold the majority party accountable without facing accusations of treason, the concept of a loyal opposition depends on the deference of non-governing parties to the authority of democratic institutions and the normative framework in which they operate.

The saving assumption of the loyal opposition, Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and President of the Central European University, has written, is that “in the house of democracy, there are no enemies.” When politicians treat each other as enemies, “legislatures replace relevance with pure partisanship. Party discipline reigns supreme… negotiation and compromise are rarely practiced, and debate within the chamber becomes as venomously personal as it is politically meaningless.

xxx

The Yale Law Journal goes into the concept a bit deeper https://www.yalelawjournal.org/essay/the-loyal-opposition

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Tarn - mutual eye-rolling's avatar

We have *the sycophantic opposition*.

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Stegiel's avatar

Due evidently to the failure of democratic institutions. This failure is the "normative" framework creating sycophantic hair splitting.

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Richard Seager's avatar

I am sure that the current dystopia was imagined here. Maybe even here in Dunedin.

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Tarn - mutual eye-rolling's avatar

Well, I am certainly not blaming anyone else.

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Tarn - mutual eye-rolling's avatar

Their lies are their weapon for control.

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