Terrorizing a nation is expensive

 Terrorism depends on emotional impact. The 9-11 attacks killed a tiny fraction of the total population of the United States, but drove a precision chisel into divides in the country, starting the fractures that led us to two costly wars and the election disasters of 2016 and 2024.

With an authoritarian government in place in the United States, we now have government forces terrorizing US citizens under the pretext of terrorizing "illegal immigrant criminals." They're on a rampage in Minnesota, focused mainly on the Twin Cities area, after a summer that included a shock raid in Chicago that could have come from a movie script. Remember that Donald Trump comes from reality television, and Steve Bannon made his money in the movie business. It's all show biz to them. Coincidentally, terrorism is all show biz, too.

Terrorism is performance art. It's guerrilla theater. It's improv in the wild, only it's not improvised by its writers. It's only improvised by the unwitting characters in the general public or target population who have the situation sprung on them.

Despite having an enormous budget and now asking for more money, and hiring anyone from 18 to 80 who is willing to buy their own tactical kit and pepper spray old ladies and school kids, ICE can't put big touring companies in more than one or two cities at a time. The expense goes beyond money to personnel. A goon squad needs goons. While humanity seems to produce an endless supply of people who like to be mean to other people, they're still a small enough percentage that the Department of Homeland Security will soon have to hire people who have to get their parents to drop them off at work.

All of this malicious incompetence comes at a cost to taxpayers. You, the average citizen, are paying all of the budget for ICE to commit acts of brutality without fear of penalty or pushback. Their funding was specifically secured in the One Big Bucket of Bullshit reconciliation bill the Republicans managed to shoehorn through last summer.

The Republican members of congress aren't spineless, they're complicit. Republican voters: is this really what you voted for? In some cases, I'm sure it is. But the rest of you: even if you long to live as the privileged class under apartheid, don't you realize that the strategies of xenophobia and isolation are demolishing your precious American exceptionalism? Even without the Toddler-in-Chief stomping his feet because he didn't get a Nobel Prize, the rest of the administration has the foreign policy plans of a 12-year-old. At best they're led by Stephen Miller, who hasn't evolved spiritually and intellectually since high school. He was a nasty piece of work then, and now he has years of experience. They have not mellowed him.

Stephen Miller is another chickenhawk playing toy soldier with other people's lives. Never served a day, but he's all about "might makes right" when it comes to sending other people's kids to pick fights on behalf of white nationalism.

At Davos this week, where America once held considerable influence, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out a plan in which the United States is left to devour itself with petty squabbles while the rest of the world moves on to outgrow the era of superpowers. The US was described as the last superpower in the 1990s, even as a "hyperpower" because it was the apparently victorious survivor of the Cold War. Drunk with power, the country has lurched through the decades since, believing its own hype to the point that ignorant voters were convinced to hollow out and undermine the bipartisan structure created after World War II to facilitate peace and prosperity through diplomacy and global trade.

And now the neo-Nazis who can't get over their side losing the second world war have merged with the white supremacists who couldn't get over losing the American Civil War to throw us back into the hostile and destructive worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries. They'll squander as much of your money as they can to lift up the worst elements of racist government and suppression of labor. Labor is most of us. The myth of upward mobility is that there's always room at the top. The myth of meritocracy is that the best people always rise. The truth is that there's only so much room for middle management. The bulk of us will always be down in the massive pile of the lower part of the pyramid, carrying the load of all of the pretensions of the few rich and powerful manipulators acting out their disparate fantasies of how the world should be to suit themselves

Norms vs Effectiveness

In a recent piece on Democracy Docket, Marc Elias wrote about how the Biden administration failed to secure free and fair elections because officials below the president and vice president were fixated on preserving norms. Attorney General Merrick Garland was particularly strict about not wanting to appear partisan. In Elias's words, he "brought norms to a Trump fight."

The problem comes down, as always, to the conflict between electoral politics and operational politics. You might even say between electoral politics and actual government.

I read the complaints of Democratic supporters who say that they want their party to fight with the fervor and effectiveness of Republicans. But the Republicans win by trampling the rules and trashing the systems that made the country functional. They win by creating instability, promoting suffering, and profiting from the stress that they create. Maybe the price of gasoline drops a little bit for a while. This allows Republican propagandists to crow about the great economy while they continue to undermine the future prospects of entire generations.

If Democrats use Republican-style tactics to force policy changes, the right wing message machine will scream about it nonstop. Yes, the Republican Party is hell bent on destroying the country as we knew and loved it, but gosh darn it you don't want to look partisan by pushing the efforts of the other party, that wants to halt and reverse the destruction.

The elements who managed to seize control of the government in 2024 are tightly focused on a divergent array of entirely bad policies for the average citizen. That divergence is all that saves us from the imposition of more complete totalitarianism, whether it's a technocracy craving some sci-fi dystopia with their billionaires on top, or a Christian nationalist theocracy. Christianity has been notoriously divided for centuries, so the theocrats can't even agree amongst themselves about the details of that dictatorship. Praise the Lord(s). The mess we have now is a result of letting all of the allied autocrats operate during the first weeks and months of the current regime, wrecking things in ways that make sense to each mastermind, but add up to a disorganized mess.

The statistical average citizen is politically apathetic and not extremely religious. Zealot factions gain power when a party figures out how to rope them in and uses them as a reliable percentage of support. They seem like the majority, because they get pushier and pushier as they feel validated by political rhetoric. The Democrats haven't really enjoyed a reliable bloc like that in years, as the "left" is actually more divided by splintering purity tests. This reflects a basic naivete among Democrats and left-leaning independents, that they feel they have the luxury of insisting on perfection.

Independent voters are the key to winning elections. It's a diverse population under one misleading heading. Political campaigns have to find the right balance between terror and Utopia to spook each element among them in the desired direction and convince them where safety and prosperity await them.

As the deteriorating situation makes it obvious that this specific regime needs to be replaced as soon as possible, the party that seeks to replace them needs to represent the rules-based order that used to protect everyone. Its imperfections annoyed many and stoked paranoia in some. Our country definitely got up to some reprehensible hijinks in the post-World War II world, and for all of the decades since, but we also provided a great deal of humanitarian support. That's been chiseled away steadily by selfishness in the general population and in the leaders they elected. Since the 1980s, dedicated selfishness in business has led to a massive shift in wealth toward a small percentage that now controls every major institution.

The party in power now is clearly dangerous both domestically and globally. They're prone to violence on a local and international level. Their hard-core supporters respect and admire violence. They will make the country much less safe for nearly everyone. The threat is obvious to groups targeted now, lulling the remainder into believing that the winners in power will always consider them teammates. Good luck cracking that loyalty. You may peel off a few. The remainder will keep pushing talking points that undermine confidence in the progress of any administration that displaces them.

Most people would rather be alive than dead, most of the time. None of us ask to be born, but life becomes a habit. We don't know whether heaven, hell, or oblivion wait for us when we die. We put off the discovery as long as possible. If tyranny becomes the norm, most people will try to go along, get along as best they can. That was the secret to the Big Brother regime in 1984. The proles were never going to rise up. Their drab existence was better than the high likelihood of not existing at all. Find what happiness you can.

We are approaching the last exit for a long time at which we can exert what's left of citizen power to make citizen interests a top priority again. Most people today don't know what "the liberal consensus" is or was. Conservatives were taught to loathe it, even though many rely on its programs, like Medicare and Social Security. The bustling, improving United States of the second half of the 20th Century depended on the idea that government exists to improve the lives of everyone, not to enhance the power of the already privileged and rely on them to distribute benefits to the general population as they see fit. Government, not private enterprise, sent us to the Moon. Government funds most basic research, which leads to new and better drugs, medical devices, environmental safeguards, and much more.

It's not all good. But the good parts are all that the Republicans are destroying right now. They're beefing up surveillance, unleashing a poorly trained and unaccountable police force that appears focused only on "undocumented immigrant criminals" but which has no restraining rules to keep it from turning the same tactics of kidnapping and imprisonment on anyone the regime considers a threat, or just an annoyance. The Navy operates like pirates (in the Caribbean, no less!). The current occupant of the Oval Office operates like a mob boss whose territory is at least the Western Hemisphere, if not the world.

Only the citizens themselves keep any nation from operating like a criminal syndicate. Authoritarian leaders have varying success repressing their populations, based on the traditions of a region and its people. The United States as a country was formed by people who moved here, creating it from intellectual principles. By the time of the American Revolution, there were multiple generations of the native-born, but still plenty of young adults from away who believed in the philosophical basis of the new nation and its charter. And immigrants have played a major role ever since. It is based not on thousands of years of ancestral possession but on an idea, handed from generation to generation, evolving steadily as our species learns more and more. Some should not be more equal than others once a very basic threshold is met.

Soft secession is concession

 As the Trump administration cripples the power of the federal government, some Democratically controlled states have floated the idea of "soft secession." They hope to take up the slack for the rescission of federal funds and the gutting of federal agencies that provide essential services to all Americans by instituting state programs and creating interstate compacts to achieve what they can of the abandoned beneficial goals.

Soft secession acquiesces to the concept of "states' rights." It also echoes state initiatives that formed the basis for the progressive reforms at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, but the concept of states' rights has been a rallying point for the political forces that have sought to demolish the federal government since the New Deal was enacted. Before that, of course, it was used to justify the spread of slavery in the expanding nation, leading to the Civil War.

Increasingly through the latter half of the 20th Century, and exponentially in the age of the Internet, states' rights has been used as cover for repressive laws enacted at the state level as federal oversight has been crippled. Voting rights,civil rights, women's rights, public health, infrastructure, energy modernization, and more have been demonized by well funded institutions pretending to be about personal freedom while exploiting bigotry and religious zealotry to advance a narrow view of what freedom is and who gets to exercise it.

Soft secession initiatives legitimize the idea that states' rights can be a viable method of organizing the country. The primacy of states' rights completely undermines the concept of the United States as a single nation. The Constitution was supposed to advance the concept of one nation with a set of undeniable universal rights of citizenship, replacing the unwieldy confederation that had been falling apart as the national government after the Revolutionary War. The confederation would have broken into a bunch of little nations, separately easy prey to the larger, powerful, established nations from which the colonies had broken philosophically.

We can hope that soft secession efforts succeed in the interim to navigate through the constant crises brought on us by the corruption and incompetence of the Trump regime, but we must be sure that they are temporary, lest they lead to the fragmentation that the misguided ideologues of the far right have longed for.

The federal government failed in many ways in the latter half of the 20th Century. This led to the distrust that the right wing has turned to its advantage after the liberals abandoned it once the Vietnam War was over. Between leftover lefties who don't trust The Man, and rebellious righties bent on unlimited individual liberty even if it kills us all, the clever institutions seeking control have plenty of handles with which to steer paranoid voters. But we have to look at when, why, and how the federal government failed. Those failures were a product of their era. They also reflect basic realities of the conduct of a nation dealing with other nations. All nations have common and competing interests. All nations present varying levels of threat and opportunity to the other nations.

Life is simple, but foreign policy is a tangled mess. There's no way to have absolute transparency, and you will never satisfy every citizen in a large population in a democratic republic. You'll be lucky to satisfy a majority with what you can say in public. It all factors into the biennial popularity contests that sweep the country with regularly scheduled, mostly bloodless revolutions.

More than foreign policy will require a degree of confidentiality. But most legitimate government secrets relate in some way to managing the relationship with other nations. There are things we don't want them to know in full detail. Make them at least conduct some espionage to find out. It creates jobs in the spy community.

Full and permanent secession -- a reversion to confederation -- would require each little nation-state and sub-confederation to supply its own military and intelligence capability, funded by whatever economic resources the state or confederacy controls. Who gets the former federal military assets in a given state when the breakup occurs?

When the Soviet Union broke up, the United States and NATO stood as a bastion of stability and arbiter of standards. The "free world" and rising Asian powers oversaw the distribution of hardware. Now that Russia seeks to reclaim its imperial glory with the help of a puppet government in the United States, our breakup would be supervised by a rival nation that has sought our downfall for 80 years. At the same time, an ever more powerful China watches and maneuvers to counter both the sabotaged and crumbling United States and the wily chess players of Russia on the global game board.

Nuclear war seems like the big nasty. It serves as the monster under the bed to frighten citizens in every country, while the real horror is that conventional warfare has never ceased. The lives of the general population are expended by governments controlled by rich egotists who feel no shame or horror at maiming and death of thousands. It's good business and great domestic policy to give people the blood sport of war on just the right scale.

Because nuclear weapons exist, the deterrent of mutually assured destruction will probably always be with us. In the name of avoiding it, we are encouraged to accept the heroic sacrifices of brave service members in conflicts below that threshold. We will need those for as long as humanity separates itself into territories and conflicting ideologies.

Small nations will always be vulnerable to the ambitions of the leaders of larger nations. Breaking up the United States does not serve any American well. It only serves the interests of the powers arrayed against what was once our steady march to better express our stated founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. We had much work still to do. Our worst enemies in that work live among us. Don't let their longstanding advocacy for states' rights carry out its true purpose of curtailing individual liberty and dismantling the United States. Your constitutional rights will mean nothing when there is no longer a federal government to act on your behalf.

Like gerrymandering, soft secession should only be considered as a drastic temporary measure to regain our footing as a unified, representative democracy. You can't claim to be a patriot while undermining the principle that our diverse nation draws its strength from the collection of individual citizens into a unified national entity.

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.