Mutatis Mutandis.

I'm a fan of Corey Robin. In "Democracy is Norm Erosion" he discusses the current polarised state of American politics and how people might react to it. It's fascinating and all, but that's not why I mention it here.

Against my self-imposed rule, I'll allow myself to include this extensive quote from Robin's article:

The authors [Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zilblatt, of a NYTimes oped], want to posit the 1850s as a moment that “undermined America’s democratic norms,” strongly suggesting that prior to the 1850s, there was a robust enjoyment of democratic norms in America. Most of us would argue that when one portion of the people enslaves another, denying them their humanity (and the vote), there’s no real democratic norm in play. (Not to mention that one-half of the population, white and black, didn’t have the suffrage at all.) And while it would have been awfully nice if the southern slaveholders had agreed to vacate the stage of history peacefully, most of us realize that was never in the offing. Outside the South, wrote C. Vann Woodward, the end of slavery was “the liquidation of an investment.” Inside, it was “the death of a society.”

If American slavery were going to be eliminated, someone had to call the question. That’s what the abolitionists (and the Republican Party) did. They polarized society. (For a representative example of how polarizing their discourse could be, read this.) And the result—however awful the Civil War was (and make no mistake, it was more awful than you can imagine)—was not the destruction of democracy and its norms but the creation of democracy —a “new birth of freedom,” Lincoln called it—which then got undone after Reconstruction, which was also a politics of norm-shattering.

Whether socialists and Marxists -- in the US or abroad -- agree with him or not, I think they should give that serious thought.

UPDATE:
Whatever the Very Stable Genius (hey, he's a billionaire, therefore he's got to be, like, very smart) might say, in Greenland, it seems, people have little doubt about the truth of climate change: over there, they have already reached a temperature increase of 1.5°C and in some places 2.0°C.

In fact, so far, they are mostly happy with that:

(right-click to see a larger screen capture or go there see the story

Let's see how long that lasts.