Dueling Insurrections

 In the 250th year of our existence as a declared independent nation, we are fighting the final phase of the war that launched us.

The Declaration of Independence set us against the British government. The new nation was born in insurrection. The signers were united in their agreement that the new country would govern itself on the stated principles of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Publicly the document was all inclusive. Privately it was understood that slaves remained slaves and women remained inferior. The "all men" who really mattered would be free of the British yoke, to chart their destinies and that of the great new country. We would show the world how it's done.

Capitalism gets a bad rap, and rightly so, since its corporate form does seem to love slavery. But in the initial concept of the United States, inventive (white, male) people would be allowed to come up with new ideas and perfect existing ones, and maybe earn a pile of money in return for creating things that benefit society as a whole. The proof would be in the sales figures.

We all know how that falls apart. Slave plantations were a corporate business model with a captive labor force that also served to suppress wages among the poor non-slaves trying to work in the same region. It was a three-tiered society, but the lower two sat far below the ruling class. Racism was used to bind the "white trash" to the agenda of the self-proclaimed aristocracy. Outside of slave country, a start-up might be subject to pressure from investors. If you couldn't bootstrap your startup, you would need to attract venture capital. At the least, you had employees if your idea was big enough to need more than just one dreamer working his ass off.

The rise of the United States further depended on the established parameters of success recognized throughout the rest of the world: money and power. Could we generate, from our own soil, native-born fortunes to rival those of Europe? Worth as a human being in this country became even more tied to money than it was in the nations from which we had broken away, because no free person had an excuse for falling short other than their own poor character, or perhaps bad luck. Some were already more equal than others, but that was obscured behind the generality that nothing in the law was designed to hold you back.

At the time of the bicentennial celebration in 1976, the country was moving toward greater social equality, under programs established in the 1930s and reinforced thereafter, that supported a strong middle class. The wealthy have always thought on the plantation model. They have no need for a strong middle class. So they looked for leverage to divide the prosperous middle and aspiring lower levels from each other, to drive wealth and power to themselves. They chose insurrection.

The symbols of the American war of independence and the later war between the states roused unthinking enthusiasm in these later generations who had no direct experience of either conflict. Especially in a nation still dominated by one race, the fighting prowess of the South could be admired and celebrated by the North if you didn't really give a shit about the failure of Reconstruction. Hell, by 1976, anyone regardless of color could get served at a lunch counter or sit anywhere on a bus, right? We're good, we're fine, we're moving forward.

Clearly not. We did for a while, but the self-appointed aristocracy will never be satisfied.

The people holding power and jackhammering away at the constitutional rights of individuals still manage to style themselves as insurrectionists, heirs to the founders and their revolutionary principles. This power group even admits to the embrace of slavery and sexism, but insist that those are understood in the poorly-worded founding documents and the social norms of the 18th century. They hold that we should model ourselves on that period while conveniently blending it with the norms and values of the robber baron period of capitalist excess. 

Those of us on the other side also claim the mantle of insurrectionists, revolutionaries, fighting the good fight on behalf of individual rights, as written in the constitution. Fight the power! Outvote the suits! Refuse to cooperate. Take to the streets!

It's all very inspiring. Both sides are warriors for justice as they see it. But the ownership class still insists on global domination by wealth alone, while the more collective side looks at the planet as an island in space, precious for its lifegiving conditions, and shared among us all. We can't both be the righteous rebels. And arguing over who deserves the title gets us nowhere. We need to be discussing policies as they relate not only to survival but quality of life. What can we realistically enjoy without robbing later generations of their chance to have a good time, too? It very much comes down to the definition of a good time and a clinical assessment of available resources.

In a free society, compliance has to be voluntary. That basic truth may doom us, as too many people want to have their cake and future generations' cake as well. How can they be forbidden their theft without having too repressive a government? Where do freedom and sustainability intersect? Can that line be fortified and electrified without creating genuine tyranny by accident?

Lack of ambition is good for human survival. Modest goals don't chew up as much real estate as grandiose empire building does.

To pick one example, where better to shop quickly than Amazon? Jeff Bezos didn't start Amazon to make people's lives better. He did it to get rich off of people's natural taste for convenience. He doesn't need enough money to rent the city of Venice or have his own space program. But he might as well, since he's not pissing it away on taxes and payroll. Convenient shopping is nice. The evil is just a side effect. 

I've harped on this concept before, but it bears repeating until everyone gets it: It's heartwarming when a billionaire does nice things with their money, like endowing some educational institution with no strings attached, or buying millions of acres of rainforest to preserve some fraction of the forest cover needed to produce a breathable atmosphere on this one and only place that supports life as we know it. And maybe it's the best we can do, given the vast amount of cultivated ignorance and stupidity that holds us back from collectively choosing to govern ourselves as better people. I hate to believe it, but we are stalled at the moment by just such a blockage. 

Choose your insurrection carefully. The government as written is not your enemy, but the government operated as a corporate subsidiary certainly is. The answer is to take control of the machinery of government away from the representatives of wealth, not to disable that government. Use the system of laws to redistribute the GDP to serve the overwhelming majority of citizens, not to secure and build the fortunes of the greedy few. 

Stupid Slogan of the Day, 1-14-2026

 Just caught a post on Blue Sky that said, "A reasonable and moderate opposition party will never ever ever ever ever ever permanently defeat and displace an extremist ruling party."

I posted in response, "Thus assuring that we never have reasonable government."

While the opposition party in this moment has to act with strategy, strength, and resolve, the power of any party derives from the voters. Say what you will about the influence of big money, big money exerts its influence by brainwashing little voters in large numbers. By scorning moderation and reason, you lock yourself into an endless cycle of lashing back and forth between extremes. That will never ever ever ever ever make the United States trusted and respected globally. It will weaken our country permanently -- if it hasn't been so weakened already by the fact that voters chose to install the most destructive and unstable executive branch in history in our last election.

The damage of that executive branch is compounded by the anti-democratic Supreme Court majority, and the authoritarian Republican Party in general.

We need to get to reasonable government and work to stay there. Extreme rhetoric and actions from the far ends of the political spectrum serve no one but their insane disciples.

That being said, I acknowledge that the current threat to our very existence calls for powerful action. But don't expect miracles from the minority party. Every citizen needs to engage in the endless process of persuasion to get voters in large numbers to vote for the policies that will get us to a government that takes care of its people instead of its corporations. The power comes from the people and the responsibility rests there to keep pressing. If that's too much trouble, kick back and hope that you get lucky with the next dictator and the one after that and so on. Or commit to generation after generation of bloodshed in extremist confrontations.

Extremism in defense of liberty is a vice, because extremism can't help but curtail liberty. The extremist personality is fundamentally self righteous. That's not a trait you want in power.

Commitment is not extremism. Staunch opposition to the unreasonability of extreme authoritarianism is not counter-extremism. Truly effective government calls for thoughtful, deliberate action. Inclusivity is always more complicated than exclusion. Extremism narrows its view and resorts to coercion. You might claim that extreme actions are just for now, but in the aftermath you discover how many war crimes your own side has committed. You find yourself as a besieged revolutionary government crushing dissent to defend itself.

Extremism is dumb. Theirs is narrow minded and nasty, and ours would be, too.

ICE is living the American Dream

 Who among us has not secretly fantasized about shooting some smartass in the face for defying our authority? Seriously, what's the point of having guns if you can't use them to enforce your will?

The freedom-loving patriots of the right wing never cared about freedom for everyone, only freedom for themselves to exert force on all of the types of people they deem inferior. If you judge human value solely by the ability to dominate by physical force, they are correct. It's all about the hierarchy. You're either dishing it out or taking it. They have always only wanted the freedom to dish it out with no consequences except at the hands of someone better at dishing it out. Let every dispute be solved by combat or the threat thereof.

How many people who deplored Kristi Noem shooting her puppy for being unruly celebrate her goon shooting a lesbian in the face for being mouthy? You have to realize that a solid percentage of the voting public still thinks that gunning down people they view as deviants is a step in the right direction for this country. It's nowhere near a majority, but it's not a tiny number, either. They feel fully safe from that kind of street justice, because they are the good people, the righteous people, the true Americans. And they don't care who they have to kill to secure their dominance.

There is no shared humanity with people who don't consider you human.

Their American dream may not be your American dream, but it is as American as slavery and genocide. As such, it does not invalidate every other, more welcoming American dream, but it traces its roots back before the Mayflower. Our only power against it is the vote. Outnumber the bastards, and show up every time. We can also educate, and hope to prevail gradually in the contest for hearts and minds, but well short of that we just have to keep working the system on which we base our rights.

All you people who like to yap about revolution and starting over, remember this: you lose everything in the process. Starting from scratch in this modern, interconnected world is a far more dicey prospect than it was in the 18th Century. You don't really want to render the entire country defenseless while you haggle over the perfect constitution you will use to replace the tattered and scribbled-on document from which we currently work. Your whole concept of what rights you should have comes from those 18th Century documents.

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.

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.

Revolutions are forced. Evolution happens.

We were taught in school that the American Revolution was a glorious stride in the direction of a better world. What it really did was put a rotating cast of rich white men in place of the British monarchy and its agents as the decision makers for this chunk of North America, without even firmly determined boundaries yet. The men in charge were all beneficiaries of the system of chattel slavery, whether they owned any or not. They continued the policy of displacing and eradicating the existing native population. Women could suggest, as Abigail Adams did, that they be included in this new government of the free, but that had to wait for a later century, and see some women actually killed in the pursuit of it.

"Do what I want or I will kill you," has been a compelling argument throughout our existence. It may be preceded by, "Do what I want or I will beat you up," but it always lies in the background, ready to be used, like a black rifle carried down a city street, or a militarized police force's surplus tank that they just got as a hand-me-down from the real armed forces.

People who deride hippies and other peaceniks in this country assure us that human nature is incorrigibly mean and nasty. One must always be ready to fight for peace. Any peace that you enjoy here is protected by a fortified perimeter keeping the evil forces of worse nations at bay. And within this great land of ours, you need to be able to defend yourself against individual attackers who will inevitably spring up.

This can be a real problem if they are wearing law enforcement uniforms, or you're a woman and he's your boss, or you're black and they're not, or the attackers are using their car as a weapon against you as you ride a bike. And that's just a few of the situations in which the myth of the armed citizen comes up against the realities of the legal system. And if you relax the standards for self defense you also create more cover stories for homicide.

Every so often, someone suggests that humans learn to put aside their animal promptings to force dominance, and instead develop more awareness of the fragility of life and the underlying sadness that we all share, whether we have ever noticed it in ourselves or not. But that sounds really boring, and it also makes you vulnerable to anyone who has not put down the weapons yet. In addition, because it requires that you take less in material wealth, and accept gratefully many amenities that we currently take for granted, it leaves more resources lying around for grabby people to grab. Which they definitely do.

Can humans guide their evolution by learning to do what is better for them, enacted in quiet revolutions of nonviolent change? Or will we be the victims of biological promptings expressed through advanced technology, becoming better and better destroyers until we succeed in destroying ourselves? Consumerism is far more destructive than war, because it uses pleasure instead of pain. There are those who lust for war. Not all of them are sideline profiteers. Some people enjoy the actual killing. There are people crazy enough to hope for a full-on exchange of nuclear missiles. But even if those people never get their way, we can live our peaceful little lives, "not hurting anybody," and burn it all down just as effectively. We've practically accomplished it already.

As the Democratic candidates compete for their party's nomination, polls show the policy positions of  Bernie Sanders seem extremely popular. His detractors on the left are marshaling their considerable resources to prevent him from being nominated. In this information -- and disinformation -- age, it's hard for a political lightweight to know for sure how much of the opposition research is true, but we've also learned that smears don't have to be true at all to do irreparable damage to Democratic candidates. Oddly, the same seems far less true of Republican candidates. But that's another topic entirely. The dirt on Bernie is probably quite verifiable. And, as someone pointed out somewhere on social media today, campaigns that spend all their time on damage control end up losing.

The proposals of the progressive wing of the Democrats trigger the conditioned reflexes of generations of Americans well trained to recoil from "socialism." Even though we've never really lived in a land of unlimited individual liberty, even for white men, the majority of us are conditioned to believe in an economic Utopia just over the horizon, or just behind us in a misty past, in which pure merit will be, or was, rewarded. Merit means hard work and good character. It rejects the controlling and coddling of Big Government in favor of rugged individualism. It is the land of the alpha male, and the underlings who know their place, because the meritocracy has weeded them, and they accept its judgment. It's one of the many things that sound good until you really think about them. But who has time for all that thinking? We have merit to accrue.

In the rest of the Democratic field, the same full-on socially connective and environmentally active positions put forward by Sanders appear in varying levels of dilution, all the way down to practically nothing. So then you have to wonder how much of anyone's formulation will survive actually being elected, and that's only if they manage to win. A couple of days ago, I found a chart that laid them all out nicely, but I didn't bookmark it, and now I can't find it again. Sorry about that. I'm sure you're closing in on a favorite on your own. Go make your mark! There's still a long process to sort it out further.