People only vote against

The Republican Party figured out decades ago that people don't vote for things, they vote against them. What is conservatism but the commitment to hold back change? What is bigotry but the insistence that a particular group should be prevented from taking a full and equal place?

The opponents of this exclusionary point of view vote against it at every opportunity.

Voting for civil rights was voting against firehoses, and police dogs, and police with teargas, and lynch mobs. Look at how progress on civil rights slowed and has reversed when the tools of oppression became almost invisible except to the people on whom they were used.

Voting for environmental protection was voting against brown air, and rivers that catch fire, and polluted groundwater, and pesticides sickening and killing humans and wildlife alike. And so much more. The idea of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been a harder sell, because they are less obvious. Are we against an earlier spring when winter is so damn dreary? How bad is it really? Maybe we won't get devastating super storms this summer. And aren't the early crocuses a welcome sight?

The Democratic Party has been rightly inspired and energized by Cory Booker's historic marathon speech in the Senate on Monday and Tuesday, and with the resounding defeat of billionaire Elon Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin supreme court election. I have received a blizzard of fundraising emails and seen a barrage of social media exhortations to rally the faithful with the idea that "we can win elections!"

Here's the thing: Neither party can win an election with its base alone. The margin of victory always lies with the unfaithful. I can't speak for elections before I was born, or old enough to understand, but you could say that Franklin Roosevelt came to power because the voters were rejecting the Republican mismanagement that had wrecked the national economy. They continued to support him because they liked what he was doing -- so they voted for it, but by extension voted against letting the screwups who had wrecked things in the first place get control again. Then, through World War II, FDR remained at the helm because voters didn't want to disrupt leadership.

Truman won his election in 1948 basically on voter complacency. All the experts had stated pretty strongly that he was sure to lose. Come 1952, the voters voted against letting the Democrats continue their hold on the White House after 20 years in power.

Policies are important. Our economy has been mutilated and our elections sold out by the policies championed by Republicans. They have been largely unopposed by corporate Democrats, but corporate Democrats are a product of the corrupting influence of big money on elections. I apologize for my generation, but I think that a great many of the Baby Boomers believed that they (we) were not only going to enjoy the most protected childhoods any generation had received that far in history, but that we were also somehow miraculously going to become rich. It should have been obvious by the late 1980s at least that we were wrong, but faith is persistent. That's what makes it faith.

The bigotry just came along for the ride.

Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 because voters voted against Nixonian shenanigans, which slopped over onto Gerald Ford by association. Reagan won in 1980 because voters voted against what was seen as Carter's weakness in the face of global threats, and the faltering economy as the country as a whole was deciding what to do with itself after partying for most of the 1970s.

Bill Clinton won in 1992 because the Reagan recession had eroded faith in the Republican brand. You could say that we voted for youthful enthusiasm, but that also means that we voted against stodgy old men. But then in 2000, voters voted against Clinton's sexual escapades, which stuck to Al Gore like a suspicious, waist-high crust on the Oval Office drapery.

It seems like the thing that the uncommitted voters (and the Republican base) seem to like to vote against the most is their own interests. That's a tough one, because they're also voting against "socialism," "terrorism," "lawlessness" (particularly hilarious), "tyranny," "government overreach," "globalization," all of which need to be addressed with counteracting negatives. Because they're never going to vote for you.

Voters in Wisconsin voted against Elon Musk. They might have voted against what the MAGA candidate for the supreme court seat represented, but Elon really crystalized it for them. That jackass is so despised, people are setting fire to his cars even in other countries. He's living proof that you really can be too rich. It's encouraging that enough voters wanted to prove that democracy was not for sale on that day in that state in that race. Now let's see them bring that same energy to every other election in every other place.

As much as we all want to be positive and live in a supportive environment, we can never escape the essential negativity that goes into choosing our elected champions. As a representative -- rather than a direct -- democracy, we have to pick people who will defend our position up where the decisions finally get their legal weight. We the people do have the power, but that requires us to exert it every day, not just on election day or -- worse yet -- only on occasional election days. This ain't your church. You can't just show up on Christmas and Easter, have a slug of wine and a piece of bread and call yourself right with the Lord. The politicians need to hear and see what we are against, every day.

Negatives can be positive. I'm against bigotry, persecution, environmental destruction, sprawl, overpopulation, anthropogenic climate change, moto-centric transportation planning, and so on. That means I am for the policies that act against these things.

In the film Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey's character suddenly gets to receive the prayers of everyone in the world. It's an overwhelming flood of messages asking for benedictions or divine wrath. This is basically what an elected official faces. We owe deep gratitude to them and their long-suffering staff members who get buried in this avalanche. However, every contact shapes political decision making. They have to hear it everywhere they go. It doesn't have to be obnoxious direct confrontation, although sometimes that is warranted and makes highly entertaining video. It just has to surround them. While you live as you believe people should live, narrate it to no one and everyone. Make no secret of it. Drop them a note from time to time. Keep it short and courteous. Just try to remember to be there, in their inbox or voicemail or even an old fashioned paper letter.

Citizen government is hard. Benjamin Franklin didn't know the half of it when he said, "A republic...if you can keep it." We have way more to keep track of than he ever imagined. But it is more important than ever to pay attention. I know it's hard. We can't know everything. We have to trust office holders and civil servants to take care of the sensitive stuff in a way that will promote the general welfare and not reflect badly on our national image. We're certainly not getting that now.

The big challenge for a party interested in ultimately positive goals is to find the right negative approach to gather in the fearful and pissed off to support them for more than one lousy election cycle at a time.

The United States is an occupied country

We are under occupation by hostile forces, and have been for a while. Ordinary citizens are held hostage by a cruel minority that does not care who gets hurt by their abuse of power.

Our economy and the industrial system already held the people as economic hostages. The citizens of the United States have been the victims as well as the beneficiaries of its economy since the beginning of industrialization. The original investors in factory-style manufacturing took advantage of the prevailing modesty of most people's expectations, and the desperation of some of them, to keep wages low and hours long, while newly discovered pollutants poured into the environment.

Every problem turns into another industry that creates jobs addressing the problem and creating new problems. As the profits of the industrial system spread to the lower classes through determined and sometimes bloody insistence, consumers prospered and desired more things. The proliferation of automobiles led to the spread of junkyards. The time-honored practices of throwing our rubbish into a hole in the ground or shoving it down the nearest riverbank became serious public health issues.

Until 1980, American problems seemed to be American problems. We did not progress rapidly, but our society absorbed women and minorities into more complete participation as if it was inevitable and ultimately good. There was always an element of strong resistance to this, but those voices seemed to be fading as the 1970s ended. Inclusion was better than exclusion for the economy and national identity.

As the Reagan administration introduced the era of hard-core partisan conflict, the edge of the blade was lubricated with oil and honey. Conservative revulsion against anything outside of their concept of normal did not manage to snuff out a popular culture that continued to love bright colors and weirdness. However, that same culture began to rehabilitate the idea of militarism.

Through the 1990s, the partisan divide became a muddy field crisscrossed with barbed wire. Conservatives became increasingly truculent about working with liberals. Liberals became increasingly concerned about funding, leading to corporate alliances that undermined social progress.

Nothing is simple. The actual events of those decades are more complicated at ground level than this flyover summary relates. Bear with me. The Republican tactics of the Gingrich era began to identify the Democratic Party as not merely mistaken about policy but as actual enemies of the country. At first it was done just to put the party in power, where they planned to govern in the ways that had worked for decades. Foreign policy might shift slightly, but the overall tone was consistent enough to make the USA a trustworthy ally. Domestic policy was marching steadily toward oligarchy, but the oligarchs still thought that they needed American consumers to have some money. 

The attacks on 9-11-2001 split the country between the warlike and the thoughtful. The vengeful warriors who sought approval to unleash hellfire on the Muslim world said, "If you're not with us, you're against us." If you did not line up and cheer to support their every move, whether it limited civil liberties at home or scorched earth abroad, you were a coward, a traitor, a suspect.

Political conversation since 2001 has only gotten worse.

The demonization of the Democratic Party is so complete in at least 25% of the population that they will never ever trust a Democratic official, elected or otherwise. It's completely protected as their religious belief. They have every right to vote their conscience, no matter how poorly educated their thought process may be.

It has always been popular to say that all politicians are completely full of crap and are basically interchangeable and disposable, but it's not true. People are imperfect. People who seek power probably have at least some ulterior motives. But others who accept power do so out of a sense of responsibility. Governing is largely thankless work, especially in a country that allows unlimited dissent. Anybody with a gripe can sound off, sending nasty messages by whatever means they have. The Internet has made this extremely easy to do in large volumes. Your average comment thread is never a reasonable exchange of well thought out ideas discussing the pros and cons of a particular policy position.

With the election of 2024, the United States came fully under occupation by a hostile force bent on its destruction. They landed initially in 2016. They were pried out of office in 2020 and contained only until 2022, when the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives. The mechanisms intended to prevent a coup like theirs moved too slowly to bring them to justice. We were not liberated. 

Every occupied country has had resistance movements and collaborators. The collaborators in our occupation are the voters who remain loyal to the hostile force, the functionaries of the hostile force, and the uncommitted voters who will not declare themselves part of the resistance. We are not quite at the point where the occupying force will seize "normal" (i.e. white) people for expressing dissent. This makes it overwhelmingly important for those "normal" people to declare that the occupying government is wrong, and to refuse to comply with its demands. And, when the next election comes, vote against every member of the party that supports the occupation. We told you that 2024 was the last chance, and it may well have been. 2026 is definitely the last chance to install a Congress that will reclaim its Constitutional authority and slam the brakes on the destruction of our citizen government and the devastation of our once-respected position in the world.

Yes, our foreign policy depended on our military might. We did export predatory capitalism mislabeled as democracy, and topple foreign governments to suit the desires of corporate leadership. It was bad, and needed to be reformed, but now our actions are nakedly and anachronistically imperialistic. Russia is not an evolved nation. Their -- really Vladimir Putin's -- obsession with claiming actual territory is so 19th Century. Why should we play an old, discredited game, while China and the other adults move forward with soft power? Soft power is much better for business. We're supposed to be pro business, aren't we? Instead, we are held hostage by a madman and his followers.

As hostages, we're all just trying to stay alive until we escape or are rescued. This means staying housed, fed, and employed, if possible. Retirees depend on their pensions. Workers depend on their jobs. Low level workers -- the working poor -- depend on the programs funded by taxpayers to make up for what their employers have refused to pay them. On top of this we're asked to go out in public to join protests, and to dig into our meager coffers to support the independent media who report the news, the candidates who promise to represent us rather than corporate donors, and the nonprofit organizations that protect the environment and other interests deemed unimportant by corporate leadership.

In any conflict, the poor do most of the dying. It takes a long time to get the rich to the guillotine. Sure, the sons of the privileged have also died in the cause of liberty, but as the conflicts became more focused, on labor rights, or Black rights, or women's rights, or indigenous people's rights, the ones with "less to lose" economically are pushed forward with what they do have: their lives. Even now, when we all have a lot to lose, too many don't recognize that we are in a real crisis, because they can still get gas and groceries, and no one has kicked down their door yet. Action now will definitely save bloodshed later. The longer we wait, the less we commit, the greater the cost.

But what does commitment look like? Stickers on your car? Flags on your house? Signs waved by the roadside whenever you can fit it into your schedule? I do not mock the schedule. We're all coordinating variables. We're told that we must sacrifice. The nature and timing of that sacrifice depend on your individual ability to let things go. That which is sacrificed is gone. Are we to the point where a terminally ill person needs to volunteer to quit being treated, or a seriously ill person with long odds needs to give up their chance and just get out of the way? Are we on such a war footing that anyone with a modest income needs to go on subsistence rations and siphon off every other spare dollar to fund the war effort?

How bad is it going to get? And can we do anything to keep it from getting much worse than it is now? You can find a lot of conflicting opinions, ranging from guardedly optimistic to flat out hopeless.

I can tell you this: if it is hopeless, do not expect anyone to rise up and fight back. Why should we? We're doomed anyway. Party like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't. Indulge yourself to the limit if your budget. Become lawless, because you really have nothing to lose. Go on a murder spree, or see if you can find enough partners to fuck yourself to death. Finally start trying to learn to play a musical instrument and torture your neighbors with it, or take up painting, not because it will do you any good, but because it doesn't matter anyway.

Except for the murder spree, that might actually be the best form of resistance: if we all become terminally lazy and utterly useless, who will carry out the dirty work for the overlords? The problem is that the forces of oppression are following their bliss just as much as the hippie dropouts are. We are under the heel of the percentage of people who like to hurt others. So far, their efforts scorn the law, but stop short of opening fire on dissenters. The pain is inflicted by pulling back the helping hand, not by swinging a clenched fist. Slap the bowl from the begging child's hand, but don't slap the child yet.

Far right groups march, but have not indulged in vandalism or violence. Will they, or have they fallen to the level of cosplay? They imply that they look forward to direct conflict, but have not initiated it. 

The thing is, the real destructive forces do not need their amateur bully boys to bust heads. ICE acts as the Gestapo, snatching undesirables off the streets and sending them to detention camps and foreign prisons. DOGE demolishes every department of the federal government without regard to its usefulness or popularity. The mad king raves about tariffs, churning the economy whether he ever actually enacts them or not. We'll know tomorrow (Wednesday, April 2, as I write this). Will they be on or off?

The current regime could do much worse things than they're doing now, but what they've done so far has caused plenty of permanent damage to our standing in the world. The voters who put the regime in power bear the responsibility for its misbehavior. This government represents them. Some have recanted, but they have not given up the beliefs that made them susceptible to it in the first place. So the rest of the world is right not to trust us in our degenerated state.

Why cruelty always wins

 A piece I read recently lamented that when the Democratic Party is in power, they don't exert it to enact the full agenda that their base looks forward to, and when they're out of power, they don't use what leverage they have to restrain the merciless policies of conservative administrations.

The secret, as always, lies with uncommitted voters. Mostly white, mostly conservative, they're often assumed to be moderate. But some of these uncommitted voters might withhold their allegiance from the Republican Party because that party isn't heartless enough. If they swing to a Democratic candidate, it is a temporary protest vote to punish the Republican for some perceived inadequacy. The swinging voter doesn't support the Democratic position. It's strictly a temporary, punitive measure to slap some sense into the more conservative party. The moderate ones swing to the Democrat only if the Democrat promises not to act like a Democrat.

While there are plenty of conservative racists, the underlying principle that unites all conservatives of any color is contempt for the poor. Conservative voters who happen to be on public assistance can formulate some exemption in their minds to excuse their own temporary need. Or maybe they vote against their own interests out of self loathing, or a mistaken belief that if they destroy the support system their own fortunes will miraculously improve in the energized economy now no longer burdened with the dead weight of lazy scumbags who don't want to work.

A person I observed for a time was one of these conservatives temporarily receiving public assistance. She would go to the office to collect her dole. While there, she would point out and disparage other supplicants who were obviously dirtbag losers sucking on the public teat for as long as it will be offered. They could not possibly have mitigating circumstances of their own, because the system itself creates them. It's like poor people didn't exist in any significant numbers until a program was created to feed them. They're like raccoons in your garbage cans. Secure your garbage cans and the raccoons have to go fend for themselves.

I doubt if that particular conservative would ever vote across party lines, even to punish an erring official. But her analysis of her fellow poor people sums up the conservative dehumanization of anyone falling below the poverty line. It has to be their own fault in the vast majority of cases.

I get it. We're all a bit reluctant to get sucked into the sob stories of the disadvantaged. There are bullshitters and chronic losers out there. Is it better to yank the lifeline back from the ones who might deserve it in order to cut off the parasites dangling on the same line? Most uncommitted voters seem to think so. And that's why we can't have nice things.

The Trump administration is a teenage fantasy of a presidency

 The mental age of the Trump administration is about 14.

All that they know about government appears to come from shallow observations based on movies and television. They don't have the attention span to read a comic book, let alone a real one with no pictures.

When confronted with a crime or a mistake, they lie, make excuses, and pout. They clearly don't understand the complexity of governing an enormous world power. They screw things up because they're going through the motions of how they think it works. 

They're using the US military like characters in a game. They're using apps to circumvent parental authority. They're experimenting with juvenile delinquency, as if deciding whether they will grow up to be criminal masterminds. Only they're all adults, clearly criminal and demonstrably not masterminds.

They're in charge.

The Supreme Court gave the president unlimited power to commit crimes as long as it could be tied in some flimsy way to "official acts." The president can't be accused of anything worse than poor judgment, no matter how many people get killed and what gets destroyed.

Legal scholars debate whether the protection extends in any way to the functionaries carrying out the orders. The Nuremberg trials did not accept the "only following orders" defense from Nazis facing the consequences of their heinous acts, but that was a simpler time. Who knew that in the United States we would raise a generation that actually longed to look out over fields of corpses such as the liberators of the death camps found?

Fascination with the Nazis is another teenage phase. The sharp uniforms, the cool-looking ships, planes, tanks. The unflinching cruelty. What does it mean to be a man? Not every boy goes through it. I thought that most grew out of it, but clearly I was wrong.

Everything they do is a caricature. 

Look around your area to see who still has flags and signs out, supporting the idiot in the Oval Office. We have representative government. These are the voters that this government represents. The House of Representatives is supposed to represent the common people most directly. The GOP House members support the regime. We'll find out in 2026 whether they still represent the voters who put them in office, but in 2024 they did. Disillusioned Republican voters have confronted their elected representatives so forcefully that the representatives won't face them in public anymore. But where it counts, in Congress, where they could impeach the President and send him to trial in the Senate, they do nothing. No one wants a government-paid trip to El Salvador, I guess. They're afraid they'll lose. It's a national version of the rape victim who won't testify, or the organized crime witness who knows that they will die even if the mob boss goes to prison.

This is the difference between actual teenage fantasy and the nightmare we're in now. Voters who can't tell the difference put this regime in office. Now they're finding out. They voted for corrupt, greedy, cruel, lying, emotionally immature people to be in charge of every single department of the federal government.

Elon Musk has brought in actual sociopathic teenagers to help with the destruction. Why not? They fit right in.

We're rapidly approaching the "or die" part

 As the current regime sprints toward totalitarian control, its agents have seized and detained legal permanent residents as well as immigrants and visitors either with visa issues or simply suspected of them. Plane loads of people have been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. Citizens of other countries have been held in ICE facilities and US prisons without explanation, or with flimsy ones.

The wrecking crew of DOGE continues to demolish the professional portions of government agencies, while executive orders illegally halt funding to entities that the regime considers a threat to their authority. In other words, the Bill of Rights is being canceled. As long as white supremacists can say ignorant things, and no one comes for the guns (yet), the mainstream media and the loudest voices on the Internet insist that everything is fine. Freedom of speech and the right to bear arms are the only things that matter to people who specialize in hurtful speech and violence.

Major corporations and even law firms roll over for the advancing dictatorship.

The connect the dots diagram of the Turd Reich takes ever more obvious shape while legal remedies bog down in the courts. Protests gather. The regime ignores both. Once a person has been disappeared, they're hard to bring back. Gone is gone. So the regime can continue to sweep up people while the opposition fumbles for a response.

When situations like this in the past finally led to war, the "bad guys" always scored early victories. The Confederacy won all of the early battles of the Civil War. Germany and its allies entrenched themselves across Europe in World War I. Most dramatically, in World War II, the Axis powers took control of Europe, and the Japanese took control of most of the the Pacific, and required years of bloodshed to dislodge.

War has changed since the Second World War. It's unlikely that the major nuclear armed powers would unleash the full murder-suicide firestorm of a full exchange. But there could be limited strikes, and plenty of drones and conventional munitions that can kill lots of small, squishy humans thoroughly enough.

Meanwhile, on North America, the budding fascist regime in Washington envisions the empire that the enslavers imagined when they launched the Civil War: white supremacy from Cape Horn in Chile to Nunavut, Canada. Maybe they haven't thought it through that far, but I'll bet that someone at the Heritage Foundation has.

The problems with that come down to personnel. There simply aren't enough white people to dominate all of the non-white people that stand in the way of that fever dream. Enthusiastic breeders are doing their best, but it's not going to be enough.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a "national divorce" in 2023. She suggested that the country divide up by red and blue states. Various ideologically fractured maps of the United States have circulated for years. Because the United States itself was formed by carving out territory and choosing an ideology for it, the idea seems feasible. However it ignores factors that made the American experiment possible in its day. Everything took longer. Distance mattered more. And the abundant resources of the land area funded the independent existence of the country in a way that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. This is especially true if those resources are divided up among hostile smaller countries carved out of the corpse of the once-great nation.

The opposition to the Lands of the Free -- formerly the singular Land of the Free -- are unified groups under Russian and Chinese control. Both of those countries and their client states make no pretense of valuing the individual lives of their citizens or offering them much in the way of freedom. And their citizens are accustomed to this. Guided by fatalism, they go along, get along. Large numbers may be expended in military and industrial actions that their governments choose. They may not like it, but they can't imagine life any other way. With the United States gone, the last beacon of hope goes out.

If the United States holds together as a fascist state for the sake of the survival of its brand name without any of the signature freedom and democracy that had made it attractive to free thinkers the world over, it might hold its place in the uneasy triangle of hostile posturing that would shape reality for the generations born into it. If the country breaks up into little countries, each defining freedom in their own way, all of those countries will face diplomatic pressures from Russia and China. Each one will have to fund and equip its defenses and manage its economy. Each in turn will be easily picked off by the unified forces of the larger powers, no matter how unhappy the citizens of those powers might be. The self-proclaimed "free" will most likely be the ones doing the bulk of the dying.

Efforts to oppose the regime now might succeed. Some opponents of the current fascist coup will probably die. Some in custody probably already have. That death toll is nothing compared to what will happen if the situation here festers into actual revolution. And breaking into smaller nations will inevitably lead to either the end of freedom in them or their eradication.

Freedom for all ultimately comes down to mutual consent. We decide that we want that, as a species. Anything short of that sets the stage for endless war and the ultimate defeat of freedom as a concept at all. It ends either with the victors marching in lockstep to whatever goals their leaders assign, or everyone gone. As long as we're willing to kill each other, killers will always win. Maybe they're the "good killers." Maybe they're the "bad killers." In either case, the dead are still dead. The murderer always gets away with the crime, because the victim is still dead even if the perpetrator stands trial.

Trump Administration tries to turn the United States into New Hampshire

 The ridiculous trade war started by the Trump administration appears to be a federalized version of the contortions that New Hampshire goes through all the time in its efforts to fund government functions while raising revenue from anything but an income or sales tax.

While I love the simplicity of paying the ticketed price for an item with no mental calculation of the additional tax amount, and enjoy a slightly simpler tax season because I don't have to compile a state return on top of a federal one, I also have to put up with the absurdly high property tax rates. 

Tax rates vary from town to town based on what the real estate is worth, with poor towns often paying disproportionately higher mil rates because the property itself is not as desirable as in a more posh town. Because all funding -- more or less -- comes from property taxes, state aid to education, for instance, still comes out of your own local tax bill.

Education in particular is chronically underfunded. Federal money is welcomed to help smooth out the shortfalls in multiple areas of state funding. But hey: "live free or die," we don't have broad-based taxes. It's a bit like a rich kid sponging off of their parents while bragging about their wildly successful independent lifestyle.

Desperately seeking to offset the disastrous consequences of his handout to the rich in the form of existing and proposed tax cuts, Trump is engaged in the same withdrawal of services to ordinary citizens while seeking alternative funding. It's appropriate that in so doing he will withdraw some of the federal funding that New Hampshire has used to make its policies look successful for decades, but that's no comfort. By devastating our country's trade relationships and raising costs to consumers and producers alike, Trump is going to screw up the economy bigly, like no one else has ever screwed it up before. Tariffs are paid by consumers. 

We the people are the power in the economy and in politics. Most of us are too numb to realize it and take part. I count myself in the numb category for many years. My excuse is that I was gaining life experience and observations in order to decide where I wanted to put my support. I was too numb to figure out that I needed to be supporting the lesser of two evils -- usually clearly identifiable -- to slow the progress of the forces that were bent on eroding democracy as far back as 1980. Their camouflage was much better back then. And their marketing has been powerful all along. I was deeply afraid of turning out to support the wrong side. What if the party that I had a visceral repulsion from turned out to be right?

Decades later it's obvious how wrong they were. But their propaganda machine has gone from effective to ubiquitous. They get considerable help from semi-smart people who roam the Internet, most of them too young to have lived through the process of degeneration. Their sense of the good old days was already a lot worse than my base line from decades earlier. I got to see it unfold. Younger people have to get it from history. That history comes with the storyteller's bias.

The current regime seeks to make the very rich even richer, while going through motions that it hopes will convince its base that the regime is making calculated, good faith efforts to control the deficit. Those tariffs are going to bring back American manufacturing, by golly. A lot of poor and elderly people are going to die miserable deaths as a result of the destruction of social services, but no one needs those losers. It's a much deadlier analog to New Hampshire starving its public schools as it turns to vouchers, tuition systems, and homeschooling. Doll it up as "choice" and "liberty."

Recession as a tool of oppression

 In an economic downturn, rich people lose a little value. Poor people lose their homes. When was the last time a solidly wealthy person was ruined by an economic collapse? 1929?

The safeguards put in place as a result of the Great Depression have been an enormous blessing to the middle and working class, whose savings evaporated as a result of irresponsible investing by bankers in the late 1920s. Never again, said the government. So we got safety nets.

The nets protect your savings if you have any. This is an important detail. If you're too poor even to have savings, the FDIC means little to you.

The nets also protect the trapeze-swinging investment adventurers, partly because they were coupled with regulations to beef up the trapezes themselves and limit the ambition of the stunts, but also by allowing the aerialists to plunge, bounce, pull a stylish backflip and land on the solid earth with a flourish before clambering up to try again. This has ultimately led to such things as a US President who has come back from six bankruptcies with a reputation as a keen businessman, and a financial sector that fucks around constantly and never seems to find out for more than a brief interlude of minor shame. It's still better than when the trapeze accidents would pull down the whole goddam tent, but it has made recession into another tool, rather than an unquestionable mistake.

I'm not the only one to have pointed out that savvy investors exploit economic fluctuations by buying the dip. If they have the funds -- and they have powerful incentive to dig them up -- they can buy low. Later, they can sell high.

It's risky business to push the whole economy down on purpose. The plutocrats probably haven't been so bold as to try to pull it off. Then again, recessions serve their power in more ways than setting up a quick little killing on whatever market has dropped.

Grass roots organizing has been a considerable annoyance to the entities who believe that the wealthy really are much better than the rest of us and deserve to rule without question. The best way to control grass roots organizing is to kill the grass. The right wing machine is lavishly funded by plutocrats flooding every information channel with their version of why life is so tough for the numerous regular folks who do the initial voting in this country. We vote -- or should -- to elect our representatives who will be our champions in this government of the people, by the people. Controlling that decision is crucial to the wealthy maintaining their image as the best of us.

It helps the rich when times are tough because they can direct the fear and anger of the voters at targets the wealthy choose, who are anyone other than themselves.

Organizations opposing that corporate consolidation of power depend on small donations. Anyone with an email account and a scrap of conscience and empathy receives dozens of fundraising appeals a day, sometimes dozens an hour in times of crisis. And we've been in crisis for almost ten years now. The grass is thin and dry, on packed, trampled soil.

Voices on the progressive side have been saying for months that anyone who opposes the authoritarian rule of the party currently in power needs to drop everything and devote all attention to protesting, organizing, and witnessing to their neighbors about the dangers of the current crisis and the dire need to get out and vote in massive numbers to oust them in 2026 and 2028. Go door to door! Talk to people on the street!

Yeah, about that: raise your hand if you, too, will shut off all the lights and lie on the floor so that a religious proselytizer on your doorstep will think that no one is home and go away. Canvassers swear that it's effective, but it takes a special kind of person, which I am not. Raise your other hand if you've ever crossed a street to avoid someone handing out leaflets.

Many of us on the progressive side are further hampered by the fact that we're not interested in wealth for its own sake. I started asking years ago, "Who is enslaved on my behalf? What person or country's poverty is indispensable to our prosperity?"

The poor aren't a uniformly virtuous, big-eyed bunch of noble souls. There are dirtbags and screwups, and failed start-up villains who didn't manage to crack the code to become commercially viable. But people of conscience are on average going to be much less wealthy in money than the people who set few or no limits on how much they will take, and from what sources. Being a shit is way more lucrative than being a decent person.

Take this opportunity to point out your favorite example of someone who sort of accidentally became super rich. Should this happen to you, know that there are simple, immediate steps you can take to start redirecting those funds to a wide array of worthy recipients. Back before JK Rowling revealed her hysterical aversion to trans women, she was a fantastic example of the accidental billionaire taking immediate steps to deflect the bulk of it into helpful endeavors. And she made a point of not bitching about her taxes. It was a beautiful, brief time.

I understand the temptation to settle in on easy street, especially if you hadn't had an exceptionally easy life beforehand. In 1996 I became an unexpected thousandaire after the death of my grandparents. The bequest was in the form of stocks, which I was tempted to liquidate immediately, but didn't. I thought I would try the supposed smart thing to do, and remain invested. Every year I would get the ballots for corporate meetings. After a couple of rounds I noticed that the altruistic shareholder proposals to make the companies more socially responsible always failed, and that the statement from the board of directors was always the same boilerplate about remaining competitive in the business environment as it exists, not hobbling the company in a way that would surely cut off those dividends to shareholders. I divested gradually for a while, as crises in my poor people life called for infusions of funds, and liquidated the last of it in 2011 to invest in a music school. Support the arts if it kills you!

On a much larger scale, a retired professor in the Bronx made a big splash when she donated a billion dollars to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, to subsidize tuition for all future students there. A billion dollars is a lot of money, and quite admirable. However, she still has seventy-five percent of the fortune she inherited from her late husband, who racked it up in the financial sector. Not to put too fine a point on it, but financial sector fortunes are all blood money. Money made on money and money changing hands has nothing to do with productivity and the general quality of life for the majority of people. Again, I totally understand the temptation to keep the big chunk. The idea that the rich don't sleep well is complete bullshit. Their bedrooms are cushioned and soundproofed with bales of cash that most of us never see. The only thing the rich lose sleep over is the fact that they aren't doing better at getting even more wealth. That and the fear that the poor will finally rise up in sufficient numbers to overwhelm their private security forces and drag them out into the street. But we're actually too nice to do that, and too many of us can imagine how nice it would be to have that kind of wealth ourselves. We'd be one of the cool ones.

Billionaires are a sign of a sick economy. Multibillionaires are a massive symptom of a sick economy. They're a natural consequence of unregulated capitalism. Your free market proponents say that they're self limiting because they could lose it all on a bad gamble, but that assumes that a large percentage of them will make these bad gambles, and that the fragments of their fortunes will scatter out to the rest of us rather than being sucked up by the remaining billionaires. Guess what really happens. All you have to do is look at who owns the whole federal government right now: a whole bunch of rich people who suck.

It's about money

 A Twitter (X) thread highlighted the book The MAGA Diaries, by Tina Nguyen, about her experiences early in her career, embedded in the right wing media machine. She has emerged from that now, more concerned with truth than ideology. So that's good.

The poster highlighted the handicap that the Democrats have compared to the Republicans in spreading a coordinated and continuous message to voters. One point stuck out more than any other: The poster referred to Republicans as having "the professional right," well-funded indoctrination programs to attract and train young talent to continue to push the aims of old plutocrats to keep their power intact. She complained that there is no "professional left," despite right wing claims that Democrats wield such an apparatus.

The left is represented by hundreds of small, underfunded groups, broadcasting what seems important to them, but with little reach. The poster calls for a coordinated program funded to the tune of billions of dollars. The goal is to construct a left-wing echo chamber that is equal to or greater than the one on the right.

Two problems with that right away: First, most of the billionaires are Republicans or Libertarians. And rich Libertarians don't really believe in liberty for all, they just believe in avoiding taxes and using their own freedom to protect their wealth. Second, the left revolts at the notion of moving in lockstep. The downfall of diversity is that it's hard to organize, even to protect that diversity.

When the United States finally entered World War II, it was not to protect diversity. The military only integrated to the extent absolutely necessary. We were protecting "freedom," but without defining it so precisely that the white majority would start to wonder if the battle was worth their blood.

The right wing echo chamber is full of tough talk, religious fervor, combat metaphors, and justifications for bigotry. The left has no comparable package of literal bullet points. How do you make acceptance of diversity sound badass? The right pushes oversimplification. How can you distill the positions of the left into attractive oversimplified packets?

I hear that we should de-emphasize the culture war issues, but the right will continue to use them as a weapon. Also, a "normal person's" culture war irrelevancy is a trans or other marginalized person's life and death threat. So when we try to focus on purely economic or environmental progress that will be good for everyone below the top 1 percent, the minions of the 1 percent will insist on sacrificing the marginalized people as the cost of enlisting right wing support for those programs. We can't leave anything or anyone out.

The left's message is disjointed and complicated because it is made of all of the chunks that the machine of plutocracy has jettisoned to make their fighting force the envy of political organizers everywhere. Gavin Newsom recently groveled at the feet of Charlie Kirk with his admiration of right wing effectiveness at spewing their narrow-minded crap. If the left put together such a machine, would we have given up everything we were supposed to be working for in order to "win?"

The answer to human survival lies in marketing. The left does need to identify where the general population stands, and how to get in front of them with counterpoints to right wing infomercials. The answer lies not so much in indoctrinating a generation of young leaders and communicators to reinforce old ideas, the way the right does. The left has to find young people who already communicate through currently fashionable channels, fund and support them. Their diversity can't be corporatized. It should not be. Corporatization is what made our current mess.

Money is a problem. If an economy is doing well, it will generate a certain amount of value. Right now, the right wing believes that a handful of super wealthy people are the best stewards of that value. A full-on socialist in the formal sense believes that the state is the best steward of it. Neither of those viewpoints has much use for empowered workers. Is our goal as a society and a species quality of life for everyone or some nebulous concept of "productivity" dependent on serious income inequality and grinding toil by a permanent underclass? What are we producing for?

Figure that out and the messaging will fall into place.

Legitimate government

The idea that a government is only legitimate if the people consent to its decisions sounds great. In practice, however, it leads to the kind of fragmentation we have today.

A certain business in Wolfeboro, NH, displays a shrine to the Trump administration and a banner saying "Wolfeboro is taxation without representation." The banner is because the individuals involved keep failing to get elected to town government positions. The voters reject them. The majority makes its choice. They feel unrepresented. Therefore, the government of Wolfeboro is illegitimate in their eyes.

 The right wing malcontents who like to carry guns and hoist intimidating flags view any government action that they don't like as illegitimate. They did not consent, therefore the policy in question should not apply to them. They like to agitate supporters over "free speech" issues that don't exist, but also oppose real mechanisms to prevent discrimination in practical matters like hiring, real estate, lending, and education. The fake war on Christmas, the idea that they are forbidden to say the n-word, and the fact that they can get in legal trouble for slapping their waitress on the ass, are used to create public support against a tyranny that was never official. 

In the representative democracy that is the United States, individual voters elect representatives and senators to go to Congress and make decisions based on positions the voters liked in the election. These elected officials have the actual power to enact legislation and approve government expenditures, and set tax rates to secure the funding for government operations. This is the republic beloved of people who like to shout "we're a republic, not a democracy" whenever someone complains about the loss of American democracy. By their reckoning, they consented to the government even if it fails to satisfy their every wish.

Government will always fail to satisfy your every wish. Even the oligarchs, currently ascendant, don't always get exactly what they want the instant they want it. They're streamlining the system to improve response times, but it's still not quite there. As for the rest of us, there's a lot of conflicting dissatisfaction.

In the USA, we hate cheaters, except when they're cheating on their taxes. No one likes paying taxes. Some of us want the rich to pay more. Some of us openly or secretly admire those rascals for getting away with what all of us wish we could. Even if you expect to get most or all of your withheld taxes refunded, you have to fill out a tax return to get your refund. If you're super wealthy, the return is long and complicated. You have to pay one or more accountants to avoid paying any taxes. It's an annual pain in the ass.

In every other category, we want people to play by the rules. Whether it's from a genuine sense of fairness or because you've figured out how to manipulate the rules to beat out the drones who still play by them, Americans get really mad at anything they perceive as cheating. You see it in road rage incidents, college admission scandals, outrage over the proper inflation of footballs, the idea that trans women athletes are really men... stuff like that.

We argue over the rules because they might interfere with behaviors that went for generations unchallenged, like sexual assault. As soon as something is declared outright illegal, we have to put it in the category of cheating.

Powerful people get a pass on all of this. Enforcement is selective on the lower classes. The mere suggestion of improper sexual attraction was enough to get Black men brutally slain, often without a pretense of arrest and trial. But decades after a pedophile ring on a Caribbean island was broken up, we have yet to learn the names of the prominent people on the client list.

While both legal and illegal immigrants who toil in factories, fields, and construction sites are being hunted down by the Department of Homeland Security, one-time illegal immigrant Elon Musk gets to buy the government and install himself as dictator because he arrived rich and made himself richer. Much of that wealth was from government contracts -- the tax dollars of working class Americans -- for services that this oligarch can threaten to terminate, or for dubious endeavors like a space program that produces more expensive fireworks displays than successful missions to Mars.

In the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, fortunes were made on dubious endeavors that defied the authority of the British government. Cheating is part of our national identity. Magnificent in its way as unconventional warfare, its legacy haunts us today in our quest to be a nation of laws with outlaw roots. That's not to say that the American colonists should have submitted meekly to British policies that bound their economy to permanent servitude. Back in the mid 18th Century it made more sense to go our own way and prove our concept by establishing a nation where it could be acted out. For a couple of hundred years, it worked out, more or less. But we've had to survive not only our Civil War, but other bloody upheavals to extend the full benefits of citizenship to more categories of the people who were living here anyway.

The founders tried to establish in the US Constitution a framework of laws that citizens would not feel the need to cheat on. The hand of government was meant to be as light as possible. Setting aside that the electorate consisted only of white make property owners, the basis for the plan was naively optimistic about human nature. It has evolved over time to try to address its limitations. Human cussedness is tireless. We still use the concept of laws as the basis of our arguments about what should be allowed. It's cumbersome, frustrating, slow, and still the best way to structure a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

The Constitution fails when one side bails

 Democrats should definitely continue their token resistance through the traditional methods of debate and deal-making. Republicans will honor it about the way that Russia honors arms limitation treaties, but it's important to maintain the structure of the system that should be in effect, in case we get back to it at some point.

We could be very close to the point at which the current regime could just start having rivals poisoned, pushed out of windows, or killed in bathtub and stairwell falls, and there would be no meaningful penalty. This is not because law enforcement is completely owned by the dictator and his organized crime syndicate, but because enough police and judges are compromised to slow things down by sheer internal friction and purposeful inefficiency.

Some alarmists warn that the regime is just looking for an excuse to impose martial law. I say that they don't need to, nor do they want to. Trump might be so vain and stupid, but the right underling or puppeteer might be able to explain to him how that makes his life more complicated and could interfere with golf. As it stands now, the regime could open fire on protesters anyway, on some trumped-up excuse. The faithful would back him. The opposition would explode into arguments among themselves about exactly why what he did was wrong, while coordinating exactly zero effective response. Suits would be filed. Charges would be suggested, but probably never brought.

The "armed patriots" who have insisted for decades that they were gathering their forces and arsenals to fight just this sort of tyranny will do nothing, because the tyranny will be acting out their own wishes. They've only ever wanted the freedom to be dicks to whoever they dislike. The regime represents the pinnacle of that. Those assholes stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to keep that bigotry firmly in power. They rejoice at its return.

I wish I could say that there is a concrete course of action, a road map to reclaim democracy. Maybe we get there through the 2026 midterms, if the regime hasn't assassinated all viable Democratic candidates.

Will mass protests turn the trick? They suggest that the country could rise in even greater unrest, but what happens to most of those crowds when a hail of lead tears through one or more of those gatherings? We may find out. On the other hand, the Democrats suck so badly at coordinated public messaging that Gavin Newsom is now laughing it up with Charlie Kirk while Chuck Schumer embarrasses the party almost daily with attempts to be cool. And that's hardly the full scope of silly antics and betrayals. The Democrats all seem to agree on the single fact that the current regime is a threat to ordinary citizens, particularly the ones who don't fit into the narrow columns in which the right wing puts their "free people." The prospect is so legitimately monstrous that the diverse segments of the Democratic coalition are panicking a little bit. Someone needs to do something, and do it fast... okay, let's hear it.

The sad fact is, a better country has always depended on lots and lots of people making the same choice without coercion, to accept each other's benign weirdness and focus on the real problems brought about by the lust for power and wealth that has defined success for far too many generations.

We must resist all of the efforts underway now to homogenize the country and turn it toward global authoritarianism. The same "armed patriots" who grumble about government overreach only care about what impacts them directly. They cheer for Hungary's Orban and Russia's Putin. They're even warming up to Kim Jong-Un. They like what's happening here too much to do anything substantial to stop it now or undo the damage and beef up firewalls against it if democracy comes back to win this round.

Among the majority of voters less inclined to revel in violence, too many still succumb to distractions like transphobia, fetuses, or specific favorite aspects of law and order and playing by the rules. Examples include immigrants who want to get tough on immigrants, and people with student loans who don't want to see anyone else's financial prospects improve because theirs never did. For many generations, each generation did see average gains, even if every individual didn't experience those gains. Since the 1980s, we've increasingly emphasized resentment, jealousy of the advantages that younger generations enjoy, rather than a sense of accomplishment at having contributed to them.

I understand: the little shits don't seem to appreciate how good they've got it. They waste their advantages in ways that we never would. Little bastards...grumble grumble. Also, a lot of the gains in the industrialized, consumerist world came at the expense of future generations who are here now to rebuke us. Dammit! That future was supposed to be comfortably far away, along with the worst consequences of our environmental devastation. We weren't supposed to experience those directly! We were just supposed to cash in on our Exxon Mobil stocks to finance our luxurious retirements.

The  Republicans gain and consolidate power by narrowing options and making life seem simple. They rate success on the basis of whom they make unhappy. The Democrats fail because the disparate groups they gather from the many who reject the right wing focus on favorite parts of the tangle of interconnected problems. They add or withhold their support based on those specifics to the detriment of overall progress on a broad, though irregular, front. The Democrats need to make more people happy for more of the time, just to tread water, let alone to gain. Figure out how to do that. When you do, let us all know.

Arrest Elon Musk. Shut down DOGE.

Of the coalition of enemies of democracy now tearing away at government by the people, Elon Musk represents the greatest threat. The religious right is too mired in medieval beliefs to do more than drone on about putting women in their place and publicly hating gays, while pimping for Judgment Day. The merely greedy oligarchs are fixated on their money game. They are just useful idiots for the tech billionaires bent on running the world according to their own fantasies, in which We the People are just wasting oxygen.

The Republicans are operating on the belief that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It's never true. You might forge an alliance, as the Allied forces did with the Soviet Union in World War II, but remember that Communist Russia was seen as a threat prior to World War II, and was treated as one again immediately after it. The Republicans have handed all power to the tech crowd, content to let them demolish the support for citizen government. The tech crew, for their part, are eager to weed out the undesirables in society.

I have no doubt that many families would welcome the legalization and promotion of euthanasia for elderly or disabled family members who are costing them thousands of dollars to support right now. First they'll come for the easily discarded. It will even seem like a relief.

All Democrats should be talking about right now is arresting Elon Musk and unplugging DOGE immediately. That will still leave plenty of destructive plans in motion, but unless someone asserts the Constitutional power of elected government right now the next step will be bloody, with an uncertain outcome. It will definitely involve drones and armed robot dogs.

Because none of this will happen tomorrow, or next week, or even by summer, lots of MAGA cultists will be happy at the prospect of DOGE's destructiveness. Undecided voters will waver. Vocal opponents will appear hysterical. I'd love to be overreacting. I'd love to look hysterical in retrospect, from a place of renewed hope and progress, because the opposition to this coup was successful in some unspectacular but conclusive way. That just doesn't seem likely right now.

The House of Representatives is exactly that

 QUIT FIXATING ON THE TEN DEMOCRATS! 

Condemnation surged across social media for the ten Democratic representatives who voted to censure Al Green of Texas for his display at the current occupant of the Oval Office's address to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.

The Democrats have never felt bound by Ronald Reagan's commandment not to speak ill of another member of their party. They don't make a habit of tearing each other down, but they don't fall into line the way conservatives do. In competitive districts, Democrats have to figure out how to remain Democrats while still attracting enough uncommitted voters to win the election. The overt binary choice between Democrat or Republican masks the adaptations that individual candidates have to make in order to promote most of the values of the party they choose to represent.

Some Democrats are so watered down that you begin to wonder whether they picked their party affiliation by flipping a coin. It wouldn't matter except that when the numbers are all added up in Washington, one party or the other technically controls the House or Senate. Or both. A tiny majority is still a majority, and can lay waste to the hopes and dreams of millions of people, as we are seeing now.

The ten Democrats might have felt that they needed to engage in this piece of political theater for their voters at home. If they piss off the Democratic component of their electorate enough to attract a primary challenger, that challenger has to be confident that they can corral enough of the undecided voters in their district to deliver the goods in the next general election. Otherwise, the Democrats lose the seat entirely. Who knows, in the context  of the national results, whether that's a fatal loss or a mere blip in a more general pendulum swing that brings the Democrats strongly back to Congressional power.

Remember: these days, even a resounding victory has no more than two years to live, unless things go really, really well.

I see people on social media calling out for Democrats to fight, to get nasty, to take the gloves off. When has that ever worked for the Democrats? While the exchange of barbs might feel good, it has never really changed anyone's mind on either side. It just makes the already committed voters cheer for their team.

As for the really dirty fighting that the Republicans are doing right now, it's just flat out illegal. They're only getting away with it because of their tiny majorities and complete willingness to surrender to greed, corruption, and Russia. The Democrats have limited options for playing hardball. At the same time, they have to try to woo the voters they lost in 2024 and the voters who felt like they could just stay home, in order to get that technical majority and force the dictatorship in the White House into a direct confrontation. Congress has always had the power to yank Trump's chain and shut the whole thing down. The Republican majority simply refuses to use it.

The Democrats have been on the back foot since 1968. Jimmy Carter won in 1976 because Republicans were under the last shadow of Nixon. Clinton and Obama won their respective elections by being to the right of Eisenhower. Obama was helped by the incompetence of George W. Bush. The party fared better in Congress, but after the mid 1990s the Republicans had started really focusing on their state machinery. At the same time, right wing media ramped up, pushing what had been fringe positions into more and more impressionable minds.

We have this misconception that young minds are the breeding ground for hippie notions and that conservative viewpoints come with age. Instead, young minds are receptive to whatever sounds plausible and seems cool. The circumstances that created peace and love culture in the 1960s were unique to the 1960s. Young people were divided even then. Now it's worse, because right wing concepts have been honed by decades of information warfare.

Of the coalition of enemies of democracy now tearing away at government by the people, Elon Musk represents the greatest threat. The religious right is too mired in medieval beliefs to do more than drone on about putting women in their place and publicly hating gays, while pimping for Judgment Day. The merely greedy oligarchs are fixated on their money game. They are just useful idiots for the tech billionaires bent on running the world according to their own fantasies, in which We the People are just wasting oxygen.

The Republicans are operating on the belief that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It's never true. You might forge an alliance, as the Allied forces did with the Soviet Union in World War II, but remember that Communist Russia was seen as a threat prior to World War II, and was treated as one again immediately after it. The Republicans have handed all power to the tech crowd, content to let them demolish the support for citizen government. The tech crew, for their part, are eager to weed out the undesirables in society.

All Democrats should be talking about right now is arresting Elon Musk and unplugging DOGE immediately. That will still leave plenty of destructive plans in motion, but unless someone asserts the Constitutional power of elected government right now the next step will be bloody, with an uncertain outcome. It will definitely involve drones and armed robot dogs.

Because none of this will happen tomorrow, or next week, or even by summer, lots of MAGA cultists will be happy at the prospect of DOGE's destructiveness. Undecided voters will waver. Vocal opponents will appear hysterical. I'd love to be overreacting. I'd love to look hysterical in retrospect, from a place of renewed hope and progress, because the opposition to this coup was successful in some unspectacular but conclusive way. That just doesn't seem likely right now.

The problem isn't politicians, it's elections

The Constitution established different term lengths and election cycles for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President. The president serves for four. Senators serve for six, and the terms are offset so that they don't all turn over every six years. Poor congressional representatives have to reapply for their jobs every two years. This should mean that senators and the President can work on actually governing more than campaigning to retain their positions. In a perfect world perhaps...

Partisan conflict became increasingly toxic from 1980 onward. It really went back to the Nixon years, at least in its most recent iteration, but in the 1970s and early 1980s you might actually find a Republican who supported things that were good for planetary survival and the ordinary taxpayers of this country. Think of Nixon and the EPA.

Regardless of how we got here, we're here now. At the national level, everything runs to the frantic hamster heartbeat of the House of Representatives and their two-year terms. This means that at any level a party in power has perhaps a scant year to show results that they can sell to voters who are fired up and opinionated regardless of whether they really understand any of what they've been primed to be angry about. Between the representatives competing to be the most appealing to their districts -- whatever that might mean in each case -- and the senators who happen to be up for renewal, every two years brings a bunch of people kicking the table on which delicate things have been piled.

Shakeups appeal to citizens who don't look deeply at the challenges of governing. "Throw the bums out!" That'll teach 'em! Perversely, voters will also choose to retain someone who has consistently been very bad for them and the nation as a whole -- think Mitch McConnell -- because of good advertising paid for with large amounts of shady funding.

It's hard for an ordinary working person to keep track of all of the card tricks and shell games being played to manipulate elections. The internet has made lots of information available, along with reams of expert analysis to help you out. That's only made it more confusing. The tangle makes quick, destructive solutions even more appealing than they already were. Or voters check out and don't bother to take part at all. 

Election reform is going to be tricky. While corporations are not people, money is speech. This can't help giving rich people more leverage unless campaign advertising is pinched down to a strict minimum, but even then, can the government forbid a private citizen from buying an ad to express an opinion? Not only would that invite a trip to the Supreme Court, any law to close all the potential loopholes would be too long for anyone to read and too dense to enforce effectively.

Even limiting the length of campaigns is hard. If someone wants to use their free speech to talk about an issue or a political candidate they like, can they be censored if they happen to talk about it outside of an official 6-week campaign span?

See how liberty undermines itself? Because the fledgling United States had to measure itself against the yardsticks already established in European civilization, this country had to come up with a way for its luminaries to look good compared to the kind of authoritarian figures they had defied in the war of independence. A so-called meritocracy is still an -ocracy. It's still a hierarchy that creates powerful winners who can boss around the more numerous losers. Those winners can establish generational advantages on top of the social advantages conferred by being a free white male.

Civics was just another class when I was a kid. It was not presented as the most crucial aspect of being an adult. The most crucial aspect of being an adult was earning a living. Academic success could help your standing in the search for employment after you finished school, whether it was the high school diploma that was presented as the basic working class credential or various levels of college education to move you forward in white collar and technical fields. Civic involvement was elective. You might have to serve a hitch when there was still a military draft, or show up for jury duty if you had the bad luck to get that summons. It was considered a duty to vote if it wasn't too inconvenient.

Certainly you can't participate in citizen government if you're a destitute drifter. So of course you wanted to find whatever education or training suited your temperament, to secure an income. At the same time, throughout my lifetime, and the era of the Baby Boomers in general, health care was improving, and leisure options just kept expanding. Life was good, and provided plenty of distractions from the grind of routine government functions.

There have always been political observers and analysts keeping an eye on the inevitable percentage of people attracted to government. There has always been that percentage of people attracted to government, for reasons both noble and base. We counted on the observers to report, to help us guide our choices for when we could be bothered to vote. Big targets are easier to see, so reporting can be much sparser on candidates below the state level. Also, the more likely you are to actually know a person and deal with them on a daily basis, the harder they might be to confront over a political issue. Think about tensions at family dinners when people attending have conflicting political opinions. It's just as weird when maybe its a longtime customer in your bike shop, or a guy who lives down the road from you.

Because elected officials make decisions affecting hundreds, or thousands of lives, including future generations, maybe you can't agree to disagree and remain friends.

The stakes keep getting higher because each election builds on the pile of kicked cans from the ones before. Voters are angry, anxious, and confused. No wonder that a solid percentage of them is ready to hand off to a dictator. They've been trained out of thinking for themselves over generations. The hierarchy of needs goes from survival needs to sensual gratifications. Civic responsibility isn't even a category. It can get lumped in with social connection, but you can find plenty of social connections that demand less of you and feed you mental and emotional comfort.

Campaigning has already begun for 2026. Fundraising never ends. Governing takes a back seat to public image building. Elections have become a constant distraction from actually running the country.

The USA has left the free world

 The Trump administration and their manipulators behind the scenes have succeeded in their long cherished dream of separating the United States from its alliances. The stated goal was to save money and concentrate our power at home, but the real effect will be instability and weakness.

By supporting the bullies, the Trump administration hopes to increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and expand economic opportunity for predatory capitalism and destructive strip-mining of resources. Look at how they supported the bully Netanyahu, pushing to ethnically-cleanse Gaza to make way for luxury real estate development, and now ally with Russia to trample Ukraine and steal their mineral resources.

The idiots in power and the idiots who supported them took American power and privilege for granted. They believed that they couldn't hurt it, they could only turn it to their advantage. They're too ignorant to understand that diplomacy functions on many levels and in seemingly unrelated ways. The same goes for demonstrations of power. They're obsessed with big explosions. They have no respect for, or even awareness of, the intricate balance of international relations. It's all about short term transactions with them.

You wanted representative government and you got it. Most average citizens don't understand any of that shit either. Thing is, you can admit that you don't understand it and still respect the people who do and the skill they exert to keep this ponderous mess of a country lurching generally in the right direction without bumping into anyone hard enough to start a massive conflagration.

We may not survive this. We certainly will come out in worse shape than we were in before this asinine experiment in greedy betrayal of our own citizens and our allies abroad by a regime of traitors. May their memory be hated forever.

Staying elected

 I'm getting emails telling me to press my Democratic senators and congressional representative to hold the line against the Trump administration and demand guardrails against the blatantly unconstitutional devastation and pillage of DOGE and cabinet members purposely selected to destroy their agencies or use them as tools of Trump's personal vengeance. These are worthy and necessary goals, but they're running up against the endlessly grinding wheel of the election cycle.

New Hampshire identifies as Republican even though the entire Congressional delegation is Democratic. Those Democrats manage to piece together enough factors to appeal to a majority of voters. But it could flip at any time. The majority in the state legislature are Republicans, and mostly hard right. The countryside is studded with Trump flags and signs even now.

Without a Congressional majority, Democrats can't do anything that will stop Trump completely. Even if they could, Democrats in swing states would have to impress enough right-leaning independents to retain their seats so that they could continue the fight. If they lose, a senate seat goes out of reach for six years. A Representative goes out for two. If that provides or perpetuates a Republican majority, their program continues, perhaps with new energy.

It's not just about staying in power. It's about continuing work in progress. The Republicans have the power now because they have no work in progress in the government. They can sub in any yokel who can get elected to swing a sledgehammer or a pickaxe. The painstaking work on their side has been done in places like the Heritage Foundation and right wing media. All of that has just been a setup to get their wrecking crew in place. They could literally just jump up and down and throw feces at this point.

You might think that Democrats would then be free to field a variety of candidates, but for some perverse reason the Republican shit show still draws significant support. It manages to attract a small percentage of self-identified "thoughtful" voters who believe that they are supporting some kind of coherent policy. Once they realize that they've wasted their vote it's too late. Maybe they reject the candidate they picked the first time, but their conservative leaning means that they're ripe to believe the marketing they hear and see about the replacement goon put up next by the Republicans.

The Democrats aren't a pure force for good by any means. In states where they are the entrenched power, human nature dictates that they succumb to corruption at the same rates as their right-wing counterparts. Maybe the goals of it are different in some cases, but the methods are still questionable or illegal. It's significant that the Trump administration has reached across the aisle to pardon corrupt Democrats like Eric Adams and Rod Blagojevich. It proves that criminality is the unifying principle, not any of the political, economic, and social philosophies they claimed as talking points in the campaign. Rod Blagojevich?! Who even remembered who that was? His name was fun to say, though.

I can tell an elected official what I wish would happen. I can advise. But I know that they know things that I don't. They're dealing with the situation in person, and coordinating information from their state and districts. They have to run the calculation constantly to find the balance between what a portion of their constituency says it wants and what will actually fly. I'm as disgusted and disappointed by John Fetterman as anyone, but I also know that he's balancing the input from his diverse state, attempting to represent them fairly and stay in place to advance better values when the opportunity arises. He seems like a duplicitous asshole to some of us right now, but maybe he's not a complete Manchin or Sinema.

At least he's no Tulsi.

Is it ideal? Of course not. But the strength of democracy is also its weakness. At every election, the candidates have to persuade a majority of eligible voters to pick them. The process never ends. Every action is scrutinized and analyzed, packaged and presented by all interested parties to guide the choice for or against.

The revolution will not be comfortable

 Listening to an analysis of right wing media coverage of the Super Bowl halftime show, I could hear the anxiety masked as dismissiveness in the voice of the mostly white commentators.

Racism is only one aspect of the authoritarian power play, but it's fundamental. From the 17th Century onward, slave owners and their neighbors feared slave uprisings. Later, in the 19th Century, the first super-wealthy industrial capitalists feared labor uprisings. In both cases, the power class used deadly force to attempt to break the will of the oppressed.

Frederick Douglass is quoted as saying that "power never concedes anything without a demand." Power is never willingly surrendered. Sometimes this calls for armed conflict. Much of the time, however, social and political change succeed because the holders of power succumb to some other kind of pressure, whether it's conscience, or economics, or they simply extend themselves too far and fall flat.

In the case of women's suffrage, holders of power became allies and willingly elevated the political status of women. The people who could vote had to be convinced to surrender their undiluted power. In the case of Black civil rights, holders of power in the white supremacist system had to become allies and vote for the change. Sure, there was violence associated with both movements, but it was only one factor in convincing the holders of power to give up some of it. The whole organism of resistance and change combined many elements. The same goes for the progress that labor made, before the ownership class started exploiting philosophical wedges to pit workers against each other over cultural issues. Power was conceded.

This time around, the conflict is not between a single oppressed category and a relatively homogeneous majority. The argument started back around 1980: are we a country that takes care of everyone, or one that lavishly rewards ruthless scrambling for personal wealth? Are we a united nation that recognizes the value of all contributors, all the way down the economic continuum, or one that values humans purely monetarily? Right now, a lot of people who could quiet down and make the best of it are still talking a good game about resistance and change. How long will they last when they figure out what change really means?

Make no mistake, the regime in power now is very very bad for the country and the world. But the antidote to them is for people who might be rather comfortable right now to be permanently, willingly less comfortable as part of the rebalancing of social opportunity and respect. These people are mostly white or think of themselves as white. They're well off under the current economic system, when the current economic system is largely responsible for the rise of the movement that is destroying the country. They were winners because they pleased their masters or entrepreneurially exploited the inequalities to enrich themselves, even if they faithfully voted Democratic.

Change is coming no matter what. It could be the widespread death and misery that will follow full implementation of right wing social engineering, or it could be the reordering of the economy to improve circumstances at the bottom very much to the detriment of the top and a chunk of the middle. There is no third option. The status quo is dead. We can't get back to it and we shouldn't want to. This can be done without rewriting our Constitution, although we will need an amendment or two. The fundamentals are sound as long as the full scope of We the People isn't limited to the originalist concept of We the White, Male Property Owners.

The good news is that the system that improves life at the bottom also frees up everyone along the entire spectrum to have more of their own time to spend as they wish. A well-ordered economy using the lavish talent pool available if we quit being obsessively competitive could easily have shorter work days and weeks and still get everything done that needs to be done. It will require examining our goals and the costs associated with them. It will mean the death of go-go, unrestrained consumerist capitalism. And good riddance.

The US is no longer a great power

 Isolationists have succeeded in taking the United States from being a global power and a force for good and converting us into a global threat and an untrustworthy ally, possibly forever.

The politicians who cultivated a base of voters who live in anger and fear thought that those voters were stupid and apathetic enough to remain controllable. But somewhere along the line they started believing their own shit. We have a whole regime devoted to destroying our strengths both domestically and internationally.

We could have been great. Sure, we made mistakes, usually propelled by the same greedy impulses that have now led to this complete undoing of all progress. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. The same is true of corporations. But in the case of nations those interests can align with what's kind, moral, and just, as well. Everything does come down to philosophy eventually.

Kindness, morality, and justice, have gone in the shitter with this regime. It's all about the money and power.

It is much easier to impose a regime of cruelty than one of kindness. A free society always contains the seeds of its own destruction. The people who hate the freedom of anyone who is not like them will take advantage of the freedom to speak and assemble, to spread their anger and fear to anyone susceptible, and organize their militias and pressure groups. 

The fact that the regime's budget proposal rips away large sections of the social safety net for chronically underpaid "essential workers," the elderly poor, and children proves that they hate spending money on much more than foreign aid. They're demonstrating if not admitting that they consider anyone below a certain financial threshold to be a useful idiot at best and vermin at worst. And you could be in both categories.

The oligarchs believe that they do represent American values. They represent you, because you would certainly do what they are doing if you had the chance. This is depressingly true in a lot of cases. Now it's our nation's global posture. Turning inward has never worked out well for us in the past. We always get blown out of our complacency by world events and have to play catch up because we had let our global awareness and capability deteriorate.  This time around, our rivals will fill in behind us, and then sweep over us. The current regime is the most ignorant, inept, and corrupt in the history of the United States. Their lust for power will end up leaving them with none, and the rest of us with the ruins of what had been a promising young nation.

We could dust off the Constitution and start applying it in the more inclusive way that those soft-headed liberals had been suggesting before we decided to go ahead with the right wing's experiment in unbridled greed and cruelty. It will be too late for US standing as a global leader. We might even be a vassal state of China by then, in which case our Constitution is just a historical curiosity for underground scholars to remember wistfully. Same goes if the victor is Russia, but I don't think that Russian leadership is capable of global dominance the way the Chinese are.