The Spring
It was the More Stable Family’s Spring Break, and we took a car trip across Florida: Orlando, Key Largo, Key West, Marco Island, St. Augustine, and then home via Charleston SC and Chapel Hill NC. It was a wonderful trip, though I’m really glad we took it before the Governor decided to let any jackass—any jackass— wander the streets with a firearm without even a permit. This is a very unpopular move in Florida and nationally, but nowhere near as unpopular as Florida’s six-week abortion ban is going to be—no wonder Ron DeSantis signed that in the dead of night . It’s hard to see how they think this will help them in national politics. But then, this is just further evidence that the GOP isn’t planning on winning a free, fair, and democratic election.
But it’s not just Florida: fascistic GOP power grabs are happening all over the country, led by gerrymandered legislatures, unaccountable courts, or violence. To rattle off just a few examples:
· Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neal Gorsuch and Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk delegitimized the Federal Judiciary through contempt for the rule of law so brazen it’s obvious they intended to flaunt their impunity;
· The ongoing wave of state laws being passed targeting the transgendered community with measures that rise to the legal definition of genocide.
If I were to summarize the events of the spring in one word, it would be “distillation.” Only instead of a delicious scotch or such, this month we’ve witnessed the distillation of the Republican Party down to its purest, MAGA essence. In fact, I’m now making the editorial decision to refer to the Republican Party henceforth as the Maga Party, just as I would refer to the National Socialist German Workers Party as the Nazi Party—including the use of lower-case lettering.
Given I’ve been tracking the increasing fascism of the former-GOP for over two years, why am I making this change now? A number of events this spring show that the lesson from the former-GOP’s 2022 embarrassment was just to double down further behind Trump and Trumpism.
Donald Trump’s indictment is no shock, nor even particularly extraordinary (every other kind of American politician has been indicted before, why not an ex-president?), but the universal choice to rally to his defense, even by people running against him, shows the Magas are unassailable as the party’s core. I’m going to call it now: Trump will win the Maga nomination. When the opening position of every Maga rival will have to be that Trump is innocent and the true winner of the 2020 election, there isn’t any reason to vote for any of them when the “innocent real winner” is still an option. You can’t peel people away when this is what the New York Young Republicans had to say after Trump’s indictment:
This language is indistinguishable from the Fuhrerprinzip (“Leader Principle”) that guided the Nazi Party. It’s One People, One Country, One Leader—and surprise, we aren’t counted in that definition of “People.” By the way, does it seem weird to you that the Young Republicans would come off as this nuts? No, the Magas are a Boomer-led party, but the few young people they do attract grow more and more radical as they get increasingly alienated from their generational peers who are overwhelmingly more diverse and inclusive. Again, distillation.
Almost lost in the indictment fracas was Trump’s Maga rally in Waco, Texas just a few weeks earlier. The ominousness of the location and its weighty timing are obvious enough, but the tenor of the speech is among the most violent Trump has yet deployed . This was a call to executions, not elections, and followed up by further promises to deploy the military in American streets, round up undesirables, and purge the civil service. On top of all this is what the Magas are doing in a wide variety of state houses to try to ensure they can win the election without a free and fair vote—I’ll get into more of that in “Welcome to the Party, Pal.”
But I’m honestly more worried about the chatter forming around the very shadowy “No Labels” group and their talk of nominating a “centrist” candidate if they’re unhappy at the choices the Democrats and the Magas offer. They seem to be drawing together some combination of fans of Joe Lieberman, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema to try to run a third party. What’s most infuriating is that they contrast Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, not the actual Democratic Leader Joe Biden who certainly can’t be considered the left’s equivalent of Trump! I don’t know whether these mooks are more sanctimonious or corrupt, but either way I hold them in greater contempt than actual Magas, because I don’t think there’s an ounce of sincerity to them, whereas I do take the rank-and-file Maga hat-wearers at their word.
“No Labels” absolutely could throw the election to Trump, because there’s always always always some group of preening, sanctimonious, smarmy self-promoters (cf. above) who are so privileged and comfortable they honestly see themselves as above the fray and like to see themselves as part of some reasonable middle—like Switzerland in WWII. They’re also well-off enough to be insulated from the worst consequences of their own actions. Fuck these guys, and please, please do not give them oxygen.
So is it all doom-and-gloom? Certainly not! The Magas celebrated Confederate History Month (yes, that’s a thing) in April in classic Confederate fashion: by being bigoted, outnumbered, and stupid. The key to their strategy is not anything they do, it’s assuming we will all sit back and let them do it. That bet paid off on 2016, and we can debate why, but it failed in 2018, 2020, and now 2022. It only succeeds in 2024 if we snooze through it. They’re demonizing the word “woke” because they want you to be the opposite. Listen to Maarva Andor:
And that brings me to…
The Big Idea
Obviously, if I took my family to Florida, we went to Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge! I highly encourage it: two excellent rides and a surprisingly immersive environment that really feels pretty, well, Star Wars-ish! I particularly enjoyed the cast members playing First Order officers and Stormtroopers; in a profession where hospitality and friendliness is the norm, it must be fun to have a job that actively demands you be rude to visitors!
It wasn’t just fun, it was so, so encouraging. National politics play out very differently when you’re sitting in an outdoor cantina on Batuu eating ronto wraps and drinking a Trandoshan ale, watching your kids trying to clandestinely surveil Stormtroopers as the Resistance has recruited them to. You realize the absolute madness of the Maga project: as an Imperial officer says in Andor while berating subordinates:
“It took the combined ingredients of idiocy, ineptitude, and total disengagement for this farce to have reached the full apex of incredulous disaster.”
I almost wish someone I knew would screw something up badly enough for me to deploy this line.
The Magas have gone to war against Disney, the very standard-bearer of America’s self-professed values. Not the Framers or the Greatest Generation, but Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and even Captain America. Even if you’re not a fan of Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, their principles and values are as deeply engrained in our public life as Homer was for the ancient Greeks, or the Roman Republic for our Framers. As parents, we’re never proud to park our kids in front of the TV, but we all do it sometimes, and we do it with Star Wars or the MCU on because we know they’ll at least learn right from wrong in relatable ways. Everyone in America under 50 grew up steeped in the woke values that Ron DeSantis is now trying to attack, far too late to matter.
I’m not saying Disney is a wonderful corporation. It hosts pride events because they attract thousands of well-paying attendees and because they don’t care what talented employees do in their bedrooms as long as they produce great content. But there is a symbiosis: we pay to be exposed to these values because they attract us. Our kids want the toy lightsabers and Lego starships because they want to play the heroes they see. It’s not a coincidence Princess Leia figures on protest posters, or that Mark Hamill inspires Ukrainians by fundraising for drones and contributing his voice to an air raid early-warning app.
These values inspire real people to real battle for real freedom. Young people without education in political science can understand intuitively what the young Rebel Nemik writes in his manifesto in Andor:
Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction…. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.
They also can understand Andor’s simpler resolve: “I’d rather die fighting them than die giving them what they want.”
Conservatives have said for decades that culture shaped politics, and they fought the culture wars because they thought their politics couldn’t survive in a hostile culture. They were right, and they lost anyway. At this point the only way Magas could turn this around would be to build a time machine and go back 50 years to kill George Lucas before American Graffiti gives him the stature in Hollywood to sell a truly crazy movie idea he’s been working on. Actually, you’d have to go back and kill Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1940, before they could publish this wild Antifa propaganda:
By the way, when Captain America first launched with this cover in 1940, Simon and Kirby did get death threats.
I don’t want to minimize the fear, pain, and suffering the Magas are causing. It’s real and tragic. But we can’t permit ourselves the defeatism that would cause us to bend to their will. If we see our situation from the position of our cultural high ground, we can see Maga actions are far closer to the Nazis’ V-bombs, jet fighters, and Ardennes offensive of 1944-45 than to the devastating Blitzkrieg of 1940. It’s not 1940, any more than it’s still 2016.
This isn’t to say victory is inevitable and we can just sit back and relax. The U.S. First Army could have folded in the Ardennes; British morale could have folded under V-bombs after six years of exhausting war; the American people could have packed it in after FDR died. The people who fought in 1945 had to fight just as hard as those who’d had to fight in 1942, and had to be ready to fight the Cold War after that, because history doesn’t stop and there always will be people who will use violence to get what they want.
So remember Lando Calrissian: “There’s more of us.”
Read a local perspective on how Shasta County, California went from conservative to fascist.
I’m sure glad I don’t work at Democracy Docket considering how fast and furious the Maga legislative attacks are coming, but this one in Texas is a doozie: a law letting the governor-appointed secretary of state take over elections in “any county of over one million people.” That is exactly one county in Texas, Harris County, which is, of course, reliably blue.
I really don’t even know what to say about legislators who would boost their own per diem while voting against free lunches for schoolchildren . Hey, what’s the point of feeding the brats if they’re just gonna get shot in school anyways?
Montana Magas want to change their laws temporarily and only to apply to the Senate election just to make it harder to get John Tester reelected. This isn’t an approach you can negotiate with.
So Mississippi elects judges, but this new law lets the state government appoint judges just for the area of majority-black Jackson surrounding the state capitol, letting them create courts for their territory separate from Jackson’s courts. Okay, they’re separate, but I’m sure they’ll also be equal, so it’s fine, right?
Tennessee is such a typical red state in that it’s hugely red on a map, but when you think of it, you think of Memphis and Nashville, and those cities are as blue as Massachusetts or San Francisco. Bolts has a great review of the various things Tennessee’s state legislature has done to disenfranchise its state’s economic and cultural homes.
I actually totally support the Texas legislature’s move to teach trauma medicine to kids, because it’s never too early to learn first aid. I got my first aid merit badge at 12, and that’s a start. But it’s pretty ironic to pair it up with laws barring teachers from having kids write letters to their legislators, or try to visit them in their offices. That’s just core civic education, and I have nothing but contempt for an elected official who sees a student visit as somehow subversive rather than a great photo op. What the fuck are they afraid of?
One consequence of the Big Lie? Fewer people willing to serve as election officials.
Some Georgia activists are facing up to 20 years in prison for “intimidation of an official” for leafleting a neighborhood. Their leaflets identified a Georgia police officer involved in the killing of an anti-Cop City activist (see the last edition). The identification of the officer came from public records. They’re facing prison for disseminating publicly-available information. Now look, in Afghanistan one of the best tools in the Taliban’s toolkit was “night letters:” notes dropped off at individuals’ homes at night saying “we know you’re working with the Americans—stop it.” But there’s a big difference between “intimidation” as death threats and “intimidation” as community opprobrium. Think also of the precedent this sets for journalism.
Security Sector Reform
People in rural red areas terrified of gun deaths aren’t mistaken about the increase in gun deaths; they just don’t realize it’s happening around them, not in big cities. What’s the issue? Suicides. Columbia’s School of Public Health has the data.
I’ve mentioned the concept of conscription and “Total Defense” before, but Antti Ruokonen gives you a good sense of what that experience looks like. He captures a lot of the benefits of a long-term conscription system, but I think living with Finnish social services makes him miss what I find most attractive to Total Defense for America: a country where everyone 18-60 must be fit to serve is a country that must provide, as Finland does, top-quality lifetime healthcare and education.
Brynn Tannehill says eloquently what you’ve heard me say too: the battle for gun control is a lost cause. You can continue to fight it, but if you perceive yourself to be part of any endangered social group, I suggest you forego unilateral disarmament. Against my own selfish interest, I also suggest following Tannehill on social media for trenchant foreign and domestic policy analysis. There aren’t many transgender ex-naval aviator defense analysts out there.
Ever since Bill Clinton, moderate Dems have bought into the idea that voters demand a “tough on crime” approach. GQR Insights has the evidence that voters can walk and chew gum, seeing that “preventing crime” and “giving police a blank check” are not the same thing.
The head of the Chicago police union is a warlord, straight-out telling people the police will stop doing their jobs if people don’t elect his preferred candidate. If he didn’t have a blue uniform, this would be racketeering. No, fuck that, it’s still racketeering no one will prosecute. Look, I’m pro-unions, but as a public sector employee, I’m telling you public sector unions are problematic. Your civil servants of any stripe have no right to tell you they’ll do their work differently if you don’t vote their way. Bring me more private sector unions, or sectoral bargaining!
I can’t wait to find out what the Sheriff of Frederick County, MD thought he needed machineguns for.
This Washington Post deep-dive shows the contrast between armed rightists and armed leftists: one fetishizes their guns, the other sees them as a tool. I still maintain there’s a deeper irrationality: the rightists are just morons, but the leftists are in the woods training infantry combat scenarios that won’t apply to actual violence they might encounter when they describe their fears. If you’re going to buy guns—and some of you should—think very carefully about the scenarios you’re buying them for. Don’t just buy an AR or AK because they seem like “the gun everyone’s using,” and then drive a few hours from your home to run around in the woods like light infantry.
The head of a police union arrested for smuggling fentanyl. Move along, folks, nothing to see here…
It would be illegal for the police to hire a burglar to break into a place when they couldn’t obtain a lawful search warrant, but it turns out the DEA has been doing exactly that electronically for some time. Bipartisan kudos to Senators Wyden and Lummis for trying to stop this.
I just don’t know who would believe that a peer-reviewed paper might find that white gun owners become more open to gun control when they hear more about armed black people. It’s almost as if the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to everyone…
The Marshall Project has an outstanding report showing that in Chicago, efforts to crack down on gun violence really have led only to crackdowns on gun possession by black men. It’s not reducing gun violence at all, and it’s ruining the lives of thousands caught up in the criminal justice system. As groups like Cure Violence have shown, it’s not that hard to figure out who’s most likely to be a perpetrator or victim of local violence—small interventions with them will do much more to prevent violence than broad crackdowns.
Gun proliferation means that even the most ideal policing in America always will have an element of violence, but Berkeley’s Greater Good project shows how better training—years of better training—really could improve outcomes for police. I think of my favorite cop, Patrick Skinner, who was a member of my favorite military organization, the Coast Guard. Skinner tells junior cops, “approach the problem as if you didn’t have a gun.” The Coast Guard is a law enforcement and military agency with a hundred ways to kill you, but since the sea wants to kill everyone, they’re deeply infused with a lifesaving mindset most cops just don’t have. Training is a part of it, but organizational culture is more. The Coast Guard’s motto is, “You have to go out—you don’t have to come back.” That’s a lifesaver’s creed, not a cop’s “Better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.”
Good Reads
I want to write something in the near future on youth and the way conventional politicians underestimate them, but until then, these two great pieces from Resolute Square are worth your time. 2024 marks the first election that will have more Gen Z’s in the electorate than Boomers. Problem is, Boomers are highly likely to turn out, and youth don’t have that rep. There are smart ideas here on how to change that. Harvard’s John Della Volpe also has some great insights here.
Do not run from wokeness. Most Americans who get it, get it!
The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch shows how the kids are leading the way.
We’ve all got friends or family who are Trump supporters for whom we keep trying to find excuses other than white nationalist extremism. Lehigh University’s Anthony DiMaggio lays out the ugly truth: predictably, most extremists don’t think of themselves as extremists, but there’s no hiding from it.
Whether or not it’s moral to blow up a pipeline to try and halt climate change is irrelevant. What matters is that any really significant damage to fossil fuel infrastructure will create its own ecological damage and thereby hurt the movement’s case. A few weeks ago some climate activists squatted in the middle of a major DC highway and disrupted traffic for a few hours. All they did was piss of a bunch of commuters. An action is only worth doing if it will gain more supporters.
Every society has—and needs!—elites of some sort. If you don’t believe me, ask the Communist Milovan Djilas. Medicine and education are the best examples of classes of highly-skilled people society must promote and reward even as they don’t directly contribute to society’s wealth. But elites have to recognize their societal obligations—noblesse oblige—if society isn’t to descend into oligarchy as laid out here. These people aren’t elites, they’re oligarchs.
We see a lot about how Maga state governments repress local governance, but Will Norris of Washington Monthly shows there are ways the Biden Administration is fighting back. He also notes, as I have, how local devolution could defuse a lot of points of American political friction.
Democratic election lawyer-extraordinaire Marc Elias warns us that voter suppression works, and it’s not enough to think we can simply “out-organize” it. This also is really important because of continuing Maga efforts to target voter suppression against young people.
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