Amen. I hope, if there's a national catastrophe, there will soon be some overarching rectification of the 'orders' of democracy, including rule-of-law grounded in precedents as well as current prerogatives and basic concepts of 'citizenship' that serve the rights of all 'other' citizens. I fear succeeding post-Trumpite regimes won't observe Post-War Germany's decades of institutional, national abasement and contrition. I fear the deep organizers of Trump's resurgence know this election cycle required excessive force and influence to combat an increasingly pluralistic polity. What was needed was a markedly more severe demonstration of what interests, what estates, and which people 'own' America. The aftermath of successive post-Trump administrations might effect an oblique, false contrition. ---If this cycle is just a more violent and corrosive exertion of the Southern strategy, then *New*-Republican party leaders and their allies want to free federal government to be more transactionally responsive to the aspirations of 'genuine' stakeholders. And they seek to demonstrate the overriding franchise of the 'real' Americans---albeit a slightly more pluralistic group of associative schemers and collaborators than has yet been allowed. The beneficiaries will resort to Southern states' interminable provisional arguments that there were no political "murders," no "lynchings," no massacres. Plus, current stakeholders don't recall any of 'those' circumstances.---People who still think Government should serve all the People will have to concede Sideshow Bob's reasoning : "Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king. That's why I did this: to protect you from yourselves." Of course, we the subjects of a renewed American mixed-monarchy won't need to be protected from 'ourselves'---each of us will know our "interests" too well. We'll need to be protected from historical evidence that supports charges that by collusion, distraction, and acquiescence we wrought disaster.
The question that concerns me here is whether there will in fact be an aftermath in which people will need to justify their choices. Plenty of people who backed Franco and Salazar lived out their lives (mostly happily enough, as long as they didn't step out of line) under the dictatorship, and died before it ended. I fear this will be true for Trump voters too.
People only get called to account in the immediate term when the trauma is short, sharp and ends in some cataclysm, yeah. There's a big scholarship on how people have had to try and work their way towards accountability in post-Franco Spain or post-Pinochet Chile, and it wouldn't satisfy anybody's vision of real justice. Nor do "truth and reconciliation commissions" work anywhere as well as optimistic outsiders think they do.
All of this is a pretty good argument for not having to settle accounts after backing a Franco or Pinochet, of course. Lives get ruined, and sinners live with the memories of what they allowed or overlooked for decades, with whatever erosion of inner peace that entails. If we can't learn that lesson eventually, nothing is ever going to get better anywhere.
PS. I just watched all of the 2000s “Battlestar Galactica” again. It hits differently this time around. I still have my “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Roslin” fridge magnet up in the kitchen, too. The whole set of eps around the corrupt election and the scouring of New Caprica are worth a re-watch.
Meanwhile, here we sit. We’re not fooled, but we may be overwhelmed by those who will later claim they were. All we can do is try to get out the vote and hope at this point, oh, and vote ourselves. I’m going to have a hard time forgiving the fools and the charlatans, Tim, if they prevail and take us all down to the worst place we could go. (And I don’t mean the Christian Hell.)
In a sense I look forward to the possibility of either withholding or offering forgiveness, since that could only take place in a new dispensation on the other side of some kind of hell. It is a strange kind of thing to identify as optimistic, but it is in its way.
I think the issue is that authoritarianism is, day to day, quite banal. Watching grainy black and white videos of the SS goose-stepping through Berlin or bodies being dug up in concentration camps paint a five alarm fire portrait of the world. And day to day, it just isn't that. Which is what makes the creeping so insidious. When Trump was elected, the economy didn't tank, the stock market didn't crash, and jack booted thugs didn't march through the streets of New York (just Charlottesville, six months later). A few people in power kept Trump from ordering the military into the streets to shoot at protesters. To the contrary, the economy was pretty much cyclically fine-- in fact, it was quite good through 2019.
Fox told people that January 6 wasn't all that bad (and besides, remember when those scary black and brown people rioted in the summer of 2020). And Trump couldn't be blamed for a pandemic, right (and he did, after all, push back rhetorically on those cities shutting down indoor dining and in person school)?
I suspect if Trump wins a second term, things will indeed be quite a bit worse, primarily because chief of staff John Kelly and economic adviser Gary Cohn will be replaced by chief of staff Stephen Miller and economic adviser Peter Navarro and the like. But even so, most people's day to day lives will generally look the same, and half the electorate will continue to believe that prices rose for some to-be-determined reason to be cooked up by Fox and not because large tariffs and mass deportations are inflationary, and that the people being deported en masse are dangerous criminals, and such.
Maybe at some point, this all hits the fan at once, we look back at the much less grainy videos of the 2010s and 2020s, compare them to the 1930s and 1940s, and recognize that they're pretty similar. But it seems like "wow, this was really really bad" is usually a hindsight exercise for people, in the same way it was for Germans in the 1940s.
I've written over the long haul about a "bet" we are involuntarily placing that competence actually matters as much as we think it does. I think 2016-2020 proved that in exactly the space I would have hoped (bad, but not end-of-the-world bad) and yet that didn't move the needle much. Which is part of my confidence that some people are quite happy to see Trump blow up normal governance just because they think that is for everybody else's benefit and not theirs. But I would take another bet that Trump Round 2 will not even be remotely similar in the scale of its catastrophes.
One thing I'd point to is actually the Iraq War, where Bush's pro-invasion people aggressively pushed out anybody who knew anything about Iraq, who spoke Arabic, etc. and the results were in military and strategic terms a disaster and in humanitarian terms obscene. So try to imagine that particular boot of incompetence stomping on every face it can reach and you have something like what 2026 or so will very likely feel like, in my view.
I think that's quite likely. John Kelly isn't what you'd call a "good guy," but he's also in the range of normal where his reaction to an inquiry about firing on protesters is to distract Trump. A Stephen Miller won't have those instincts.
I think the Iraq comparison, though, is a bit unlikely. Hussein's Iraq, after all, had been a one-party state for decades. The state couldn't run itself without the bureaucracy that de-Ba'athification dismantled. And, for all the talk about de-Ba'athification that JD Vance does (in the most ahistorical and boneheaded way possible), I think that really requires the full-scale collapse of all existing institutions that still seems quite unlikely. The more likely parallel, to me, is something akin to Francoist Spain or Pinochet's Chile-- terrible repression for certain disfavored groups-- non-white immigrants, transgender people, etc.-- but more like a morose steady state otherwise.
Amen. I hope, if there's a national catastrophe, there will soon be some overarching rectification of the 'orders' of democracy, including rule-of-law grounded in precedents as well as current prerogatives and basic concepts of 'citizenship' that serve the rights of all 'other' citizens. I fear succeeding post-Trumpite regimes won't observe Post-War Germany's decades of institutional, national abasement and contrition. I fear the deep organizers of Trump's resurgence know this election cycle required excessive force and influence to combat an increasingly pluralistic polity. What was needed was a markedly more severe demonstration of what interests, what estates, and which people 'own' America. The aftermath of successive post-Trump administrations might effect an oblique, false contrition. ---If this cycle is just a more violent and corrosive exertion of the Southern strategy, then *New*-Republican party leaders and their allies want to free federal government to be more transactionally responsive to the aspirations of 'genuine' stakeholders. And they seek to demonstrate the overriding franchise of the 'real' Americans---albeit a slightly more pluralistic group of associative schemers and collaborators than has yet been allowed. The beneficiaries will resort to Southern states' interminable provisional arguments that there were no political "murders," no "lynchings," no massacres. Plus, current stakeholders don't recall any of 'those' circumstances.---People who still think Government should serve all the People will have to concede Sideshow Bob's reasoning : "Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king. That's why I did this: to protect you from yourselves." Of course, we the subjects of a renewed American mixed-monarchy won't need to be protected from 'ourselves'---each of us will know our "interests" too well. We'll need to be protected from historical evidence that supports charges that by collusion, distraction, and acquiescence we wrought disaster.
The question that concerns me here is whether there will in fact be an aftermath in which people will need to justify their choices. Plenty of people who backed Franco and Salazar lived out their lives (mostly happily enough, as long as they didn't step out of line) under the dictatorship, and died before it ended. I fear this will be true for Trump voters too.
People only get called to account in the immediate term when the trauma is short, sharp and ends in some cataclysm, yeah. There's a big scholarship on how people have had to try and work their way towards accountability in post-Franco Spain or post-Pinochet Chile, and it wouldn't satisfy anybody's vision of real justice. Nor do "truth and reconciliation commissions" work anywhere as well as optimistic outsiders think they do.
All of this is a pretty good argument for not having to settle accounts after backing a Franco or Pinochet, of course. Lives get ruined, and sinners live with the memories of what they allowed or overlooked for decades, with whatever erosion of inner peace that entails. If we can't learn that lesson eventually, nothing is ever going to get better anywhere.
PS. I just watched all of the 2000s “Battlestar Galactica” again. It hits differently this time around. I still have my “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Roslin” fridge magnet up in the kitchen, too. The whole set of eps around the corrupt election and the scouring of New Caprica are worth a re-watch.
Yeah. A lot of things are viewing and scanning differently at the moment.
Meanwhile, here we sit. We’re not fooled, but we may be overwhelmed by those who will later claim they were. All we can do is try to get out the vote and hope at this point, oh, and vote ourselves. I’m going to have a hard time forgiving the fools and the charlatans, Tim, if they prevail and take us all down to the worst place we could go. (And I don’t mean the Christian Hell.)
In a sense I look forward to the possibility of either withholding or offering forgiveness, since that could only take place in a new dispensation on the other side of some kind of hell. It is a strange kind of thing to identify as optimistic, but it is in its way.
I think the issue is that authoritarianism is, day to day, quite banal. Watching grainy black and white videos of the SS goose-stepping through Berlin or bodies being dug up in concentration camps paint a five alarm fire portrait of the world. And day to day, it just isn't that. Which is what makes the creeping so insidious. When Trump was elected, the economy didn't tank, the stock market didn't crash, and jack booted thugs didn't march through the streets of New York (just Charlottesville, six months later). A few people in power kept Trump from ordering the military into the streets to shoot at protesters. To the contrary, the economy was pretty much cyclically fine-- in fact, it was quite good through 2019.
Fox told people that January 6 wasn't all that bad (and besides, remember when those scary black and brown people rioted in the summer of 2020). And Trump couldn't be blamed for a pandemic, right (and he did, after all, push back rhetorically on those cities shutting down indoor dining and in person school)?
I suspect if Trump wins a second term, things will indeed be quite a bit worse, primarily because chief of staff John Kelly and economic adviser Gary Cohn will be replaced by chief of staff Stephen Miller and economic adviser Peter Navarro and the like. But even so, most people's day to day lives will generally look the same, and half the electorate will continue to believe that prices rose for some to-be-determined reason to be cooked up by Fox and not because large tariffs and mass deportations are inflationary, and that the people being deported en masse are dangerous criminals, and such.
Maybe at some point, this all hits the fan at once, we look back at the much less grainy videos of the 2010s and 2020s, compare them to the 1930s and 1940s, and recognize that they're pretty similar. But it seems like "wow, this was really really bad" is usually a hindsight exercise for people, in the same way it was for Germans in the 1940s.
I've written over the long haul about a "bet" we are involuntarily placing that competence actually matters as much as we think it does. I think 2016-2020 proved that in exactly the space I would have hoped (bad, but not end-of-the-world bad) and yet that didn't move the needle much. Which is part of my confidence that some people are quite happy to see Trump blow up normal governance just because they think that is for everybody else's benefit and not theirs. But I would take another bet that Trump Round 2 will not even be remotely similar in the scale of its catastrophes.
One thing I'd point to is actually the Iraq War, where Bush's pro-invasion people aggressively pushed out anybody who knew anything about Iraq, who spoke Arabic, etc. and the results were in military and strategic terms a disaster and in humanitarian terms obscene. So try to imagine that particular boot of incompetence stomping on every face it can reach and you have something like what 2026 or so will very likely feel like, in my view.
I think that's quite likely. John Kelly isn't what you'd call a "good guy," but he's also in the range of normal where his reaction to an inquiry about firing on protesters is to distract Trump. A Stephen Miller won't have those instincts.
I think the Iraq comparison, though, is a bit unlikely. Hussein's Iraq, after all, had been a one-party state for decades. The state couldn't run itself without the bureaucracy that de-Ba'athification dismantled. And, for all the talk about de-Ba'athification that JD Vance does (in the most ahistorical and boneheaded way possible), I think that really requires the full-scale collapse of all existing institutions that still seems quite unlikely. The more likely parallel, to me, is something akin to Francoist Spain or Pinochet's Chile-- terrible repression for certain disfavored groups-- non-white immigrants, transgender people, etc.-- but more like a morose steady state otherwise.