Day 143: America Chose This

 

I remember when, in one of my early poli-sci classes, we covered the rise of Hitlerian fascism in Germany. At the end of the lecture, the most common emotion was one of bewilderment. Why didn't the German people stop Hitler before he led them into the abyss? Why didn't they take Hitler's expressed ideas, as he recorded in detail in Mein Kampf, seriously and end his political career before it started? My professor's answer was brutal in its directness: because the German people wanted what he was selling. To be sure, some did oppose Hitler and even lost their lives due to their opposition, but the majority of the German people reveled in Hitler's vision for a Third Reich. They were on board for the madness, hence why there was never a popular uprising, even after the war turned against Germany. 

How does a once-rational nation fall into madness? The answer varies depending on the specific situation, of course, but one general principle, as espoused by Plato in The Republic, is that a people simply lose their political virtue. That is to say, the citizenry, for various reasons, stops caring about the principles that built their civilization. Instead, they pursue self-interest at the expense of civic virtue, or as Plato put it, they vote for whomever wishes the crowd well. Plato said that people can become so divorced from rational political thinking that they no longer even bother to inquire into the background of their leaders. their history and beliefs, but just about what goodies that person will deliver to them upon their election.

Is that starting to sound familiar? Sort of like how a convicted felon who campaigned on a racist and authoritarian platform, and got elected by promising to lower the cost of eggs?

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And so here we are, one hundred and forty-three days into what may well be America's twilight days as a republic.  This decline into the abyss greatly accelerated when Fuhrer Trump, in a desperate attempt to distract the American people from his spectacular failures on trade, domestic spending, and foreign policy, as well as stinging after his former co-president Elon "Prigozhin" Musk insinuated that Trump was involved with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein (a not unfounded accusation, mind you), decided to plunge the nation into a grave domestic crisis by using the military to crush dissent.  

Trump Administration More Than Doubles Federal Deployments to Los Angeles

“This is a provocation, not just an escalation,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said about the decision to send in the Marines, in an interview with The New York Times. “This is intended to sow more fear, more anger, and to further divide.”

Mr. Newsom said that not all of the first 2,000 National Guard troops Mr. Trump deployed had been put to work, suggesting the addition of Marines was more rooted in politics than in any concern about security in the streets. And the call-up of additional forces came after city officials said a rally Monday outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles had been peaceful.

This is not going to end well.

America was born in revolution, one where scrappy colonials, driven by a sense of injustice, decided to take on the might of the 18th Century's superpower, which is to say, King George's Great Britain, and against all odds, they won.  This proud historical fact suggests to me that if King Trump wants a fight, a fight he will get. But make no mistake: Trump is no King George. Even at his most manic, King George was a man of intellect. Trump is not. Worse, Trump has chosen to surround himself with D-list reality TV clowns cosplaying as government officials. In short, as we have seen with his failed (and shambolic) trade war, his failed diplomatic (and shambolic) effort to end the Russo-Ukrainian War, and his failed (and shambolic) DOGE-related spending reduction efforts, Trump is accomplished at only failing after picking ill-conceived fights. This will be no different. 

And that will make him desperate.

It is worth recalling that Trump 1.0 wanted to shoot BLM protestors:

"The president was enraged," Esper recalled. "He thought that the protests made the country look weak, made us look weak and 'us' meant him. And he wanted to do something about it.

"We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, 'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?' ... It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air."

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I am hopeful that the protestors remain peaceful. They MUST remember this equation: the government has institutional power but it is limited in resources. The protestors have limitless resources but limited institutional power. What does that mean?  

The government can bring tremendous resources to a fight - police, surveillance, even actual firepower, but they cannot do so indefinitely, particularly at the state and local levels. Every policed protest drains finite resources - personnel, overtime pay, and equipment.   On the other hand, the protestors have unlimited resources, i.e., assuming a large enough movement, they can endlessly cycle fresh bodies into the protest at almost no cost, but they lack the hard resources (training, equipment, monetary resources, etc.) available to a government organ. While the state has the upper hand with a short protest movement, the protestors have the upper hand in a protracted protest movement because, eventually, those who seek to crush dissent begin to be stretched too thin as dissent persists week after week. Fatigue sets in, overtime drains budgets, and equipment is expended.  In short, the tremendous overhead involved in keeping a state force in the streets becomes a liability. The protestors, being agile and decentralized, have no such anchor around their necks.  The protestors can show up anywhere, at any time, for pennies on the dollar. The state lacks anything comparable. This is why Trump's anti-protest rhetoric is becoming so desperate - he understands time is not on his side. 

This is also why the protestors now have the advantage if they are smart, which is to say:

BE PEACEFUL

BE EVERYWHERE

VIDEO/LIVE STREAM EVERY INTERACTION WITH THE STATE

BE HAPPY WARRIORS (crucial in a media age!)

AND DON'T LET UP

Victory in a popular protest does not come with a knock-out punch, but by delivering a thousand small cuts to the state. Every peaceful protest is yet another cut. Time is on the side of the protestors, as I stated above, doubly so as the Trump dictatorship is the gang that couldn't shoot straight. They will make mistakes. Be ready to capitalize on those mistakes!

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Breaking News

Senator Violently Arrested by the Trump Administration

As the New Zork Times writes: 

A U.S. senator from California was forced to the floor, handcuffed and removed by federal agents after interrupting a news conference by the homeland security secretary on Thursday in Los Angeles. It was the latest sign of rising political tensions as the authorities across the country geared up for more demonstrations and California and the Trump administration faced off in a hearing in federal court.

Before the electrons were even dried on this blog post, this increasingly desperate administration has made a mistake. What is more, they know they have made a mistake because the story has shifted at least twice so far, from claiming not to know who Padilla was until a video was released showing him identifying himself, to the most recent claim that they thought he was an attacker (again, ridiculous in light of the video).  

Again, time is not on the side of this idiocracy.

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Kevin D. Williamson wrote back in April that: 

"This isn’t what Americans voted for.”

Everybody says this when Donald Trump does something stupid or awful. My friend Jonah Goldberg says it from time to time. John Bolton said it on a recent edition of the Dispatch Podcast. 

With all due respect to my friends and colleagues and for their desire to take a charitable view of their fellow citizens, and with equally due contempt for Rolling Stone et al.: 

Baloney.

...

 It is time—well past time—to stop making excuses for Americans: for Americans’ cruelty, for Americans’ selfishness, for Americans’ childish insistence on being led by their resentment and by their lowest instincts. 

 ...

Americans are not children. Americans are not mentally disabled. Americans are whole and complete human beings, and, as voters, they are morally culpable for the decisions they make—especially when they make that decision twice. 

And as Americans look out into the world—or look inward with honest eyes—we may begin to appreciate that the fundamental problem isn’t that our country is reviled under the current administration—the problem is that it deserves to be.

I post this to tie back into my factual observation that Hitler, too, was chosen by voters.  America has now plumbed the same depths.

But here's the thing:

While it is true that 49.8% of the American people chose fascism, it is also true that 50.2% of the people rejected it with a vote for someone else. For all intents and purposes, that means that there are just as many people opposed to Trump 2.0 as there are for him. In fact, the odds might even favor the opposition as many Trump voters, being part of the so-called "couch potato" voting bloc (i.e., low-information voters easily swayed by the antics of a reality TV candidate), are now telling pollsters that they now regret their votes as the destruction of Trumpian policies begins to hit home, as seen in this graph:

Yes, America chose a clownish dictator for the most asinine of reasons but it must always be remembered that an even larger voting bloc, one that now includes some former Trump voters, is rejecting this fascist regime and its policies, even on migrant policy, the xenophobic beating heart of MAGA. In short, the good guys are winning and Trump's Reich is crumbling.

Keep up the fight.  We can win this.

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