State Terror, American Style
paulkrugman.substack.com
paulkrugman.substack.com
I do think the Bush years were the first major destabilization of rule of law domestically that helped create conditions for today, along with Obama's "look forward, not backward" enshrinement of it as bipartisan consensus. Bush also normalized a kind of partisan unresponsiveness to mass democratic uprisings that people used to believe were capable of influencing the government.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
I think the more complete view is that the current generation of fascists learned from the Bush admin's mistakes (or, I suppose you could say, they feel unshackled by Bush era "restraint").
Combined with a cult of personality frontman to distract, aided by a captured media ecosystem and a radicalized judiciary, they are empowered to build on the shoulders of giants.
It was not self evident in the 00's that we would end up with Miller/Vought running the show - the actual form could have been something completely different. Indeed, Rove himself recently popped back up to chastise them!
The people who were shouting their worries and concerns were told they were being political. Politics is just life now a days, I don't know how you can actually excise that.
I was very early Elementasry for 9/11, Middle school for the GFC. I was early 20's focusing on college in 2016, which would have been the 2nd nationals I could vote in. Then I was only a few years into my career when COVID hit.
The Obama era gave me hopes, but I didn't realize how easily it could be relinquished in the name of corporate interest. I just figured all the checks and balances would keep things from really going backwards. Obviously Trump winning was the first huge red flag, but things seemed fine. But the real red flag I (personally) saw was Ruth Bader Ginsburg not stepping down and instead dying during the Trump administration. Having 3 judges appointed by Trump (plus 3 from W. Bush beforehand) was a death knell for decades to come, even if Trump never got elected.
It was so bad that it's unbelievable that subsequent administrations managed to make matters even more astronomically worse.
Yeah, he tried, but anyone with working brain cells could tell you that ACA was just going to end up in a bigger payout to the healthcare industry. It was a status quo pro-corporate bill just like the rest of his centrist policies.
The actual solution has and always will be to reduce costs, which means people losing jobs and hospital admins not owning 3 vacation homes.
This has been happening long before W, and the Democrats are complicit too:
Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either party will always look out for the moneyed interests, anything else they might champion for is just there to give a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's the foundation of American democracy, donations, aggressive lobbying, business-first mentality, the votes are there just to decide which side of the coin will move these interests forward, not to decide what platform is best for the citizenry in general.
Consider, as a revealing example, the Patriot Act of 2001. There was more resisitance to it from Democrats than from Republicans, yet there was still not nearly enough resistance. In the Senate, the vote was 98-1, with only Democrat Russ Feingold against. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act?#Legislative_histo...
In my "free speech zone" link above, the Democrats were the first to use that blatant violation of free speech, at their national convention.
Republicans take advantage of the precedents set by both parties.
They could. These are not people struggling to pay rent, they do not live paycheck to paycheck. Heck, the median age of congress is 58 so a good portion of them are free to retire and never work another day in their lives.
But they in general choose not to escape it. The money, the networks, the power. I guess the sad thing is that the populace aren't aware enough to properly primary anyone who does turn their backs on them.
Democratic politicans are not a fixed group of people: anyone can run for office. The issue is not so much that money is corrupting otherwise good people. Rather, the issue is that political campaigns are self-financed, and wealthy donors put their money behind candidates who they know to be friendly to their interests. The wealthy do not fund candidates who are unfriendly to their interests and indeed may throw their money behind an opponent, or just directly fund "interest groups" that malign candidates whom the wealthy dislike.
> I guess the sad thing is that the populace aren't aware enough to properly primary anyone who does turn their backs on them.
The fundamental problem is that primary campaigns require money, just like general election campaigns. The situation may be even worse for primary campaigns, because the news media provides much less free coverage for primary campaigns than for general elections campaigns. And the news media tends to distribute coverage based on "electability," which is invariably a euphemism for the ability to raise campaign funds.
That's part of the thing that irks me. In the age of the internet, I just don't get how and why money needs to correlate with outreach. As the most extreme examole: is 1 billion in funding really getting your name out there more than 2 billion? And is 1 billion really doing a better Job than 50m that's hyper focused on engaging the right audiences smartly? That's a big part of how you "disrupt an industry" here in tech. Get modest funds and focus efforts on what the core. Not all the bells and whistles.
Maybe among older audiences who rely on traditional media, but the internet doesn't scale that well with throwing money to compete (we can look at Google+, Mixer, and many gaming storefronts as examples). I feel there's gonna be a shift in this thinking as legacy media dies out and there's too many internet newscasters to pay off and weave a narrative.
I would say that, if taken literally, resolving the situation today is not possible. We're currently living in a deep hole that was a very long time in the making (one might even say hundreds of years in the making), and it would likely take a very long time to climb our way out of it. There's no magical, immediate solution.
The US political system has always been corrupted by money, but modern technology has enabled a vast increase in the scale and efficiency of such corruption. It used to be said, "all politics is local," but now it might be said that all politics is international.
We (many people) voted for Biden in 2020, and that was supposed to be at least part of the solution. What happened? He appointed an AG who he knew would drag his feet and not hold Trump accountable. He continued Trump's illegal asylum policies and even kept building Trump's border wall. They played chicken with Republicans to see who could shovel more money into ICE, and spent 4 years repeating Republican anti-immigrant fear mongering but then saying "we shouldn't go that far on policy". They did almost nothing about Roe V. Wade being overturned, despite having an unprecedented leak that gave them months of notice before the decision.
And what was done to fundamentally restrain the power of the presidency in preparation for the possibility of a Trump win? Well, we had a lot of talk about "norms" and finger wagging. I'm sure glad that finger and those norms are here to protect people I care about now. If only there were something more they could have done.
But sure, in the ideal world:
1. Call every bluff Trump makes. Do not capitulate to anything. Drown him in lawsuits. He's lost at least a 3rd of the DOJ so they cannot handle suing every company, college, and state at once.
2. Anyone in a red and especially purple states, make it a habit to call your represenatives every day. emails can (and probably will be) ignored. Don't let their lines be anything but people telling these congressmen to knock it off and actually do their jobs. Collorary: anyone in a blue state calls in and makes sure their congressmen know they need to also resist, fight back, and not capitulate.
3. If you can, townhalls are even better than calling. If you see the local townhalls you know this scares the GOP congressmen stiff.
4. if you see federal agents in the wild, always be recording. The truth is the beth antidote to corruption. Make sure you livestream as well so they can't just seize your phone. The more live feed out there the harder it is to spin.
5. heck, if we're really dreaming big we plan some general strike. Shut down the country for a day and you'll have everyone reeling to try and backpedal.
Varying levels of realism there, but the theme is clear: resist and make sure others resist. They can't ignore us all if we work together. But that "working together" in such a hyper-individualistic society is the hard part. It may just be more realistic to wait until someone dies or midterms happen.
Not even the liberal democracy that one of the parties want is properly a liberal democracy, it is to the limits where it infringes into business needs, and moneyed interests. They can't fight the system that enables them to exist.
There are the token attempts to make it look less than that, to appear more altruistic: ACA, better paths for immigrants to be legally integrated into society, etc. but overall the majority of Democrats are also entirely bound to the powers that fuel their campaigns, money is the only real power in the end.
The issue with the other party increasingly becoming more authoritarian and extreme over time is a side-effect from grievances caused exactly by the issue of the people not having actual any power to course-correct policies, there aren't many policy choices, it's business and money or business and money and fascism. Normal people were led to believe they can just become one of the moneyed elites if they just work hard enough, and government stays out of their way, so they vote against their interests as what they are: common people.
I wish the USA would learn that a two-party system eventually will breakdown, that it will eventually cause the fracture to be too great, and that some members of the politician class would use this wedge as a weapon to achieve power, just like what happened with the GOP. You simply cannot have only 2 parties to determine the political will of 300+ million people, it's impossible that either of them represent the variety of wants and needs of the whole population but you are stuck with that.
Continuing democracy as it was before also doesn't seem to be a good solution, it was exactly the system that brought into power the current tyrants. Too many norms, protocols, and procedures relying on tradition and decorum rather than codified, it was bound to be abused at some point, and it's quite incredible it has lasted this long.
Every time the Republican party gains power, they turn up the burner.
When the Democratic party gains power, they don't turn the burner up any further, but the most we can give them credit for is they may occasionally toss an ice cube in the water.
They do not turn the burner down.
They do not remove the pot from the stove.
They do not take the frog out of the water.
The Democratic party isn't as bad as the Republican party, but they're still ultimately boiling the frog.
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For all their crowing about how bad Republican policy is, how often do you really see them repealing bad laws passed by Republicans - especially the disastrous tax cuts and sabotage of government agencies? Biden couldn't even be bothered to replace all of Trump's appointees.
The last few decades have demonstrated that at the very least, we need a number of constitutional amendments to fix the cracks and gaping holes in our current governmental structure that allowed us to get here, and it'll probably take burning down both major political parties and starting with new ones to make that happen.
how often do you see a D majority in the House AND the Senate with a D president?
It may feel skewed in favor of Republican majorities across the executive and legislative branches due to GWB having it for 6 years, but the fact is, every president in the last 30 years has had a majority in both branches at the start of their first terms.
Two (2) years.
> more solid majority in the first half of Obama's first term.
Two (2) years and one (1) month out of Obama's Eight (8) years. Okay.
> It may feel skewed in favor of Republican majorities across the executive and legislative branches due to GWB having it for 6 years
Four (4) years, One (1) month total majority TOTAL in the past Twenty-Four (24) years.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
Your problem is the people. The call is coming from inside the house.
Biden is given 4 years to grow a tree, Trump is given 8 years to cut down as many trees as he can. The government is also intrinsically hard to change (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc).
This implies a (bipartisan) conspiracy to agitprop the nation into violent division as pretext.
Chicago was 77% Democrat in the last election.
These behaviours won't stop if there's no blowback from the MAGA base.
In any case, visibly arresting illegal immigrants is a core political demand of the MAGA base, and they eagerly want to see more raids like this one. The fact that prominent figures from Democratic-party aligned institutions like prestige news media and academia (which certainly describes Paul Krugman) strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.
Every day MTG’s “national divorce” sounds like the only real solution. These people live in entirely different realities and despise each other. Insane to believe you can manage a functional country that way.
Too bad it’s a political and logistical pipe dream.
I worry that as bad as things are, at least the blue state resistance (pathetic as it is) provides SOME restraint on the red states/MAGA's worst instincts.
Even if there was a way to divide the country evenly without dealing with the urban/rural divide, I have to imagine the first thing the new separate Red America do is start invading it's neighbours, if not outright nuking parts of the world.
There is no way that a breakup of the most powerful empire in the history of the world, with military bases around the entire planet, can happen without severe consequences for the rest of us.
As of right now, it's pure agitation. They're pointing the guns into protest zones (not "blue states" really, though that's obviously where they concentrate) hoping things get out of control. At that stage, it becomes easier to paint political enemies as military ones. And you'll start seeing the use of state power against sitting legislators and judges, etc...
You can't dismantle democracy all at once. The military[1] won't follow those orders[2]. But if you create a culture where "antifa" or whoever is actually shooting stuff and blowing things up, the moral calculus becomes an easier sell. They aren't "doing a coup" by ejecting the governor of Washington State (or whatever), they're just defending America.
[1] At the end of the day, remember that authoritarianism is always executed by the military. The figurehead may come from somewhere else originally (like New York real estate development in this case), but when the regime is based on the use of force it is always run, ultimately, by the users of force.
[2] Because the military aren't MAGA, not yet. They're career officers who built careers in an existing bureaucracy and, all other things being equal, see value in that bureaucracy and don't want to tear it down.
With liberals, deploying the military to their cities is about instigating actual violence, so they can imprison and kill them.
There's a movement all about making things go faster so the 'rebuilding' part can then happen sooner:
So yeah, it's all about creating a violent confrontation to assuage a galactic, battered ego.
The thing that really terrifies me is the people who attach themselves to him, thinking they can use his mandate to push their agendas through. Because there seems to be plenty of skill and determination, paired with objectives I find repulsive. I suspect it is those people who really push, or at least permit this process.
Why aren't senators stopping this? Why aren't judges? I suspect they all think they can use Trump to achieve their own means.
I suspect that in the end Trump will destroy anyone he thinks is getting in his way or using his name to get ahead, but the whole process will cause tons of chaos and pain the US and beyond.
There are a lot of people who really want the objectives you find repulsive, and they want the elected officials they support to smash through the opposition of the elected officials (and judges) that you support. In a democracy, it will often happen that different elected officials supported by rival factions of citizens bitterly fight each other for control of what policies the state actually carries out.
I am a little queasy of throwing the fascism word around willy nilly, but the story of "internal enemies" could not have been more formulaic.
“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth said. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”
It's not exactly subtle. The message is "we're going to commit war crimes more" and "we plan to use the military against people inside the US".
This should be repeated far and wide in the media for, as you have specified, what it really means.
I mean, Secretary Pete Hegseth, in his prior role as a Fox News mouthpiece, he defended the actions of a convicted war criminal[0][1], so he has form in displaying a total lack of ethics.
[0]: https://time.com/7176342/pete-hegseth-donald-trump-pardon-wa...
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/turning-a-blind-eye...
We all have an understanding of the power of the US military and its foreign agencies
But it’s tough to square this quote with that - what is going to change ?
What does a nuclear superpower need to be untied ? Mass world surveillance, bombing foreign countries?
All of that has happened - what more is needed and why ?
Who they are threatening:
1) Latin American people and countries
2) Canada + Greenland
3) US Liberal cities.
The American war machine has come home to the Western hemisphere. This is a declaration of war against us.
As for the why... again listen to them. Trump said it: "I am your retribution". This is all about settling petty vindictive scores.
Although this statement might be seen as a new era of honesty, I'm not looking forward to the next stage. If Hegseth thinks the US war machine is too restrained now, imagine what things won't even be surprising in a few years.
It will either be 1) war, 2) martial law, or 3) declaring an insurrection.
1 is dicey. It will require, first, a declared war, not just Trump saying so, and second, the courts agreeing (against all precedent) that we can't hold elections in wartime. This isn't Ukraine; our constitution doesn't have a provision for elections not happening during war. So, while Trump has sounded like he likes the idea, this one is unlikely to work.
2 or 3 seem more workable. At the moment at least some members of the administration seem to be leaning toward 3 (see, for example, Miller stating that a judge ruling against Trump sending troops to Portland was "a judicial insurrection").
Note that when I say "Trump is on the path to", that does not mean that he will inevitably do so. We will see whether he will restrain himself, or whether others around him can restrain him. And if they don't, then we will see whether the courts can.
And if they can't, then we'll see if there's ever a point where the military will decide that his orders are illegal, and their oath is to the constitution.
There's so many possibilities of what happens if elections are halted that you no one can truly predict anything. It never happened for nationals and it very very rarely happens in state elections. Having a hostile takeover of the ballot box will truly throw things into chaos. In what way and against who, it's hard to tell.
And yes. Of all things I think having a civil war as Russia is teetering on attacking Europe and China is at the peak of its power is a great way to reverse 80 years of progress. Or of course, erase eons of civilization all at once.
You could -
close Congress
ignore Congress
declare a sufficient number of Democrats "antifa" and arrest/disappear
require a special passport for traveling to DC (magically, some democrats are denied)
Whatever happens, the midterms is a ticking clok.
Enforcement is key. Who would enforce congressional impeachment? The hope is the military. The same military that is being sent out to "democrat strongholds" already.
Would the Secret Service?
Would the federal bureaucracy?
Even the Supreme Court says he has immunity for what he does while in office. If he's impeached, he's no longer in office.
So yeah, if he's impeached, it's over.
There's a 0% chance that this will happen. Self-restraint has never been in his nature. That said, Trump isn't the real danger. He's the Useful Idiot for the ones who are.
Unfortunately homelessness is something that can't be solved by one city or even one state. Feeding, housing, and getting them treatment is expensive and not something even the wealthier cities have the budget to do on their own. And the first major city that tries will have to deal with other places dropping more homeless people on their doorstep - that's one thing that both red and blue cities have been guilty of as you can read about at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Seems a contradiction.
They're usually harmless, just troubled. You're not in much danger walking down the street; you're actually in much more danger driving down it.
There is a big difference between feeling uncomfortable and being in a genuinely unsafe situation, and the less you are used to seeing the homeless, the more out of touch with reality your gut feelings are.
They aren't hitting gangs or any actually dangerous people, they are looking for weak targets. They aren't trying to clean up the streets, they are geting their rocks off playing GTA IRL.
Doubly doubtful for the following reason: these people need the problems to exist, so that they can write their narrative around them, and offer their "solutions" for them. Same as how cults target vulnerable people.
Sounds like a job for the Texas National Guard
/s