Nonviolence versus Violence

 A racist twat in Rochester, Minn., recently dropped repeated n-bombs on a Black child she suspected of filching something from her bag in a city park. The boy is five years old and reportedly has special needs.

A bystander took video and confronted her. I won't link any of it because you can find it easily, and I don't want to give her any more publicity. I also omit her name, because she has raised a reported $500,000.00 so far, based on the claim that she has been doxed and fears for her safety.

First off, she has a right to say anything she wants, including racist epithets against a child, as long as she doesn't slide into criminal threatening. Representatives of the child might sue her for slander regarding the allegations of theft, but the First Amendment gives her plenty of latitude to spew ignorant garbage. This should never have become a cause celebre.

Our zeal for public shaming has begun to backfire spectacularly. A video meant to embarrass this loser instead gave her prominence to attract her fellow racists to protect a poor waif beset by threatening Black people and their terrorist white allies.

The racists and other far right adherents constantly shift between presenting themselves as badasses that you should just surrender to outright, and poor, noble victims of a legal system perverted by miscegenated Communists. They might walk around with firearms draped all over them, and talk about how they ask and grant no quarter, only to whine piteously when someone publishes their home address. What part of "no quarter" don't you get, tough guy? Total war is total war. Are you advocating for it or not?

America is basically a nation of shit-talkers. In the course of a day, how many thousands of death threats are flung back and forth in the heat of a moment and never go anywhere? In that mix, some may be credible. Most are not. In angry discourse, it's more common to oversell and under-deliver than vice versa.

Racism won't go away if you ignore it. But individual incidents of it won't turn into fundraising opportunities if you give it less air. Racists are not ashamed. Why do you think that a particular club is called Proud Boys? Putting a racist in a viral video is no longer a good strategy.

Along with hardcore racists come fashionable racists and the business interests that simply follow the money. Those business interests were into diversity when diversity seemed to be winning. Now that racism seems to be on top, business interests are okay with it. Corporations have no morals. They try to appeal to buyers with whatever seems to be attracting them at a given time. Some business interests will hold onto their support for diversity because they know that a solid percentage of consumers will choose them on that basis. Rather than compete in the more crowded arena of racist businesses, the "good guys" can depend on a loyal customer base to tide them over until things swing back to favor diversity overall. It is morally right, but also safe business.

I headlined this piece Nonviolence versus Violence because of reactions I'm reading from the anti-racist community as the story about the Rochester bitch plays out. Certain Black activists call out their white supporters for a lack of resolve. Supposed supporters take down their Black Lives Matter signs and flags of support for marginalized groups. This may in fact indicate a weak will among some of those allies, but it also acknowledges a sad and frightening reality: the right wing likes to use violence and vandalism more than the left does.

The right wing cites the left's lack of violent propensities as a sign of cowardice and weakness. Paradoxically, they also accuse the left of perpetrating violence or of threatening it as an excuse for their own armament. Back in the Cold War, we did wonder whether the Soviets would outright invade us. Long before that, in the rise of Marxism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Communists did engage in violence. They also didn't act very communistic wherever they gained power, but that's a tangent for another day.

Nonviolent protest emerged as a powerful tool in the 20th Century. However, it was only one tool. Outbreaks of actual violence in support of civil rights, for instance, showed the government that the costs of maintaining the racist status quo were higher than the costs of expanding the rights of full citizenship under the full protection of federal law. Gay rights got their big kick forward from the Stonewall riots in New York City.

Riots are battlefield actions. The combatants form ranks under their banners on a piece of ground that's publicly accessible, often completely public: streets, parks, business districts. There have been spectacularly bloody exceptions in which mobs descended on residential areas. This has most often been white forces attacking minorities individually or collectively. A handy list is provided here.

Slavery in the United States was not ended by peaceful protest. It was ended by a bloody and wasteful war between factions that conveniently lined up with geographical boundaries, allowing the South to secede and pretend to be their own country for four years. They spent those years proving that their economic system couldn't support a long-term military conflict against an industrialized power. They were not only morally wrong, they were economically inferior in an era when business competition was evolving rapidly. But they were so in love with their hateful ideology that they let thousands of their men get killed and their land was laid waste by Union forces. And afterward they merely shifted their tactics  -- still to their own detriment -- in order to maintain racial hierarchy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country received both Black residents and racist ideologies. Exposure to both has led somewhat to acceptance of Black and brown people as a part of normal society, but also to the persistent cancer of racism. If the Civil War happened today, battles would break out all over the country. You would also find out in a hurry who really had the stomach for it.

When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he thought that he would trigger a revolution against the tyrannical United States government. Instead, he set the militia movement back ten years as people recoiled at the horror of his act. We had those dopes walking around our town in their little Confederate hats, and then poof! they all ditched the regalia and shut the fuck up for a while. It was nice. They probably still met in private. You can tell by the signs and flags around town today that a good chunk of them suck up conspiracy theories and far right propaganda. And the few years of relative peace were bought at the price of innocent people killed and maimed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

My point is that large scale violence is the best advertising against itself. Too bad that it does not inoculate against small scale violence.

Bad actors on the right in this area have engaged in vandalism against targets that they could identify as holding opposing views: roofing nails in driveways, political signs cut down with a chainsaw, slashed tires, broken windows, occasional arson. During one dispute in the tiny town where I live, people were advised to put a padlock on their well cover (if they hadn't already just for general prudence) so that someone on the other side of the dispute didn't drop something unpleasant in there.

Whether to display symbols of a political position calls for a cost-benefit analysis. How many people will be swayed toward your point of view compared to the odds that some destructive, hateful chud will damage or destroy something you depend on, like your car or your house or an outbuilding containing tools you use?

The same Black activist noted that racism always attracts more funding than anti racism does. Anti-racist endeavors depend on mostly small donors. As a small donor myself, I can tell you that I view the many problems that our species faces as interlocked. Racists and destroyers have the benefit of their simple minds to help them focus their contributions on the narrow front pushed hard by their narrow minds. Saving things is much more complicated and delicate than destroying them. Because I tried to be content with a frighteningly modest income, I don't have the money to toss monthly donations totaling a couple of hundred dollars once I have paid my routine expenses and set aside some for non-routine expenses. Before I put a target on myself, I ask what my sacrifice will do to advance the greater good.

Once violence breaks out, it shapes reality to itself. The conflict becomes more important than the stakes in it. Combatants fight for their lives. We talk of the sacrifice of heroes who fall in battle, but that's a very different act from the human sacrifice celebrated by Christian churches, in which their pure messiah was executed just for being too darn good.

In either case, the gruesome deaths don't have a lasting good effect. One dead on a cross in 33 CE and millions dead by 1945, and yet here we are. Thousands obliterated in the 1860s just so some racist twat can raise a half a million dollars on the n-word and speculation that she might receive pizzas she didn't order on a few nights in 2025. I don't know what -- if anything -- will smarten up the racist dipshits. It's reached the point of unreasoning hatred, so no reasoned discourse will sway them. The death toll of racists is in the millions just since the 1860s, and yet there are still millions of them, so you won't "kill the problem out," as violent right wingers like to say.

Should the racists manage to rule the world, they will discover that they cannot make it into their utopia any more than we progressive dreamers could. Maybe the technofascists will achieve their fantasy of entirely automated labor serving a handful of actual humans living in luxury. In that case, the vast majority of people will have died out. It seems like a long term goal at best, except for the part where most humans die out. That part is too easy to achieve.

I can see it: Jesus comes back in about 2075.

"Hey, I'm back! Hey! Where did everybody go?" And then some AI planetary defense system vaporizes him.

In the meantime, we're alive now. How nice or not nice we make it is up to us. One more war or era of bloody skirmishes won't fix a goddamned thing.

Jumping off a cliff won't hurt you

 It's the landing.

Experts and concerned citizens have been warning us for years about the threats presented by the right wing elements currently in complete control of the federal government and many states. They described the dire consequences well in advance, attempting to sway voters after the 2020 election to keep up the pressure to hold back the MAGA faction and their allies and backers. They have failed at every step. Voters gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans in 2022 and the whole shootin' match to them in 2024.

Now that the Trump regime is energetically demolishing many decades of progress, we're starting to feel some consequences, but nothing like the devastation we were told to prepare for.

No one wants to see store shelves bare and businesses closing. No one wants to be part of massive layoffs. Not everyone wants a white ethno-state. Nor does everyone want to see women relegated to dependent, subservient status. I will venture that a minority of people want to see more dangerous workplaces, rising pollution, loss of cropland, privatization of national parks and other pubic lands, and unregulated drilling, mining, and transportation of resources through communities that happen to be in the way. But none of that has happened yet. Or not much. If you happen to live where lots of federal workers haven't suddenly lost their jobs, or where farmers have suddenly lost contracts they were counting on, maybe life seems pretty normal.

We're in midair right now. Feeling weightless, enjoying the view...

It's over in seconds.

What "Made in America" means

 Goods made in the foreign countries selected by Corporate America when they shipped the jobs off to maximize their profits are produced by low-paid labor, often in unsafe conditions. Sort of like the way factory workers were treated in this country in the Gilded Age, before unionization and health and environmental concerns delivered a one-two punch to corporate corner cutting.

Low priced consumer goods depend on exploited labor. In the countries where the factories are, the labor might feel well compensated for now, but if they get a taste of better and better living conditions they might upset the equation. In the meantime, anyone operating an industrial facility in the United States has to pay more for personnel, even if they don't pay particularly well by US standards. 

It's easy to say that you would gladly pay more for a US made item instead of one from China, until you start doing all the math and figure out how little you could afford. And it won't necessarily be made with better materials and workmanship. So you'll be paying more to get something that is only as good as you were getting from overseas. Meanwhile, the workers will face constant pressure from management to produce more for less. At the same time management will be fighting with regulators to ease up on pollution and safety standards.

Look at automobiles: You shell out five figures for even a dinky one, and with the best of care it starts letting you down within 3-5 years. We're talking about cars made in America. Consumer goods manufacturing is designed to make you buy things. It doesn't matter where the factory is. The calculation is the same.

We're awash in consumer goods: Televisions, computers, mobile phones, kitchen and household appliances, clothing... some stuff is produced here. Most is not. If companies tried to move the volume of production here that feeds our level of consumption, it would not only drive the prices of everything way up to cover the costs of establishing that infrastructure, it would require more land area than industry previously occupied at the height of domestic productivity. There are many more consumers now.

On the plus side, consumers now have less money to blow than in the latter part of the 20th Century, so they have less ability to gorge on the output of consumer goods manufacturing.

Economy is tricky. For all of the bullshit about "wealth creation," we're working with a finite planet. In nature, good times for any species are generally followed by a population collapse. The exception might be cockroaches. They seem to be able to thrive no matter what. When times are good, they eat the best garbage. When times are tough, they eat their own dead, and cast-off exoskeletons. As humans, we're more like the predators whose numbers boom when their prey proliferates. Those predators die off after they have eaten their prey population down to its low point. In the case of humans, we're preying not only on animals that we eat, but on each other, metaphorically, in economic competition.

Big companies don't really care where the factories are, as long as the numbers work in their favor. Since we have exalted obscene wealth as the ultimate marker of success, corporate leadership is only concerned with paying as little as possible to achieve whatever their business model calls productivity. Productivity only means how much money gets sucked in and funneled to the top.

What's wrong with these judges?

 The right wing beef with judges makes perfect sense. It's interwoven with their misogyny and the myth of the rugged individual. It reflects their presumed virtue.

All the way up to the US Supreme Court, the only judges they like are the ones who act as servants to the ideology that has been building steadily to the current crisis. Since that ideology promotes centralized rule by a few, the judiciary is expected to be subordinate rather than equal.

The power players sell it to their base by tapping into how many of their voters -- mostly men -- have had bad experiences on the wrong side of a court judgment, whether it's domestic violence restraining orders, divorce settlements, or criminal activity of some sort. When your brand centers violence as an expression of strength, you're going to attract people who have a record of it.

All the way back to Dirty Harry and to popular written fiction for decades before that, audiences have liked characters who express their lawfulness with direct action, cutting out the cumbersome, and often disappointing, legal process of prosecution and sentencing. In fiction, the writer can establish certainty in the reader or viewer, that the bad person is a bad person, and that the good guy is fully justified. We're free to enjoy the plot as the game plays out between these adversaries. When the bad guy gets it, the audience feels jubilant.

The hero can be a deeply flawed and unhappy character. That only makes them more sympathetic. As long as they represent the frustration that we all feel when bad guys get away with their crimes and the system seems to let them slip away, we'll forgive their rough edges. They might even have marital problems or other relatable qualities that make their extrajudicial activities more satisfying as they operate outside of the suffocating constraints of red tape and procedure.

At the elite level, where billionaires buy the government that feeds their wealth at the expense of the majority of the rest of us, they're happy to undercut the power of courts. White collar criminals are still criminals. Most of them never see the inside of a cell, but pesky fines and liability settlements drain money that could be spent on bigger yachts, private space programs, and a stunning mansion on top of El Capitan, once Yosemite is privatized and sold off for development.

As frustrating as the judicial system can be, the basis of it is sound. No human system can be made immune to human frailties. Those have to be addressed by general philosophical arguments that guide our thinking overall. We’ve been at it for thousands of years. We could have consensus any day now. In the meantime, we need to shore up the structure that we have.

The task of our government is to reconcile the desires of the majority of the electorate with the rights and needs of individuals and an expertly advised assessment of the public good. Piece of cake!

America, the Petri dish

 Freedom's just another word for evolution unchained.

I believe that the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the U.S. Constitution believed that they were establishing a rational government model based on logic, to be operated by thoughtful people. Don't all people yearn to be free to learn and grow to the fullest extent of their potential? 

As it happens, no. While the letter of the law allows a person to read whatever they want, and public schools are widely available, nothing compels you to get any more out of this than to remain in some kind of tenuous contact with it up to your late teens. You can go to the schools in your district or you can homeschool. No matter what, you have the right to remain as much of a dumbass as you can get away with.

I say this as a career dumbass. I try to be a reformed dumbass, but I wasted lots of educational opportunities back when it would have done some good, just so you know I'm not kicking down. If I had a time machine, I would spend countless trips going back to smack my stupid self upside the head.

As the United States cuts itself off from the rest of the world, we become a Petri dish of uncontrolled conflict between governing ideas. These range from pure libertarian anarchy to hard-core right wing authoritarianism. There's a hard core left wing as well. It has the least traction, but it does exist. True commies are rare in this country, despite the accusations that fly around social media. Most humans are too selfish for true communism. Anything less than true communism, if you lean that way, tuns into Animal Farm pretty quickly. Witness the Soviet Union, et al.

The United States always was the Petri dish of governmental experimentation. We had our Articles of Confederation, then our Constitution, then our amendments to that document through the years. Between 1776 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, settlers messed around with all kinds of variations in the lands that they entered on the way to a coast to coast nation. Enclaves remain today in places like Amish country and other religious communities, or even whole states heavily identified with a particular religious sect. Pretty much just Utah. Aside from religion there are lots of places ranging from quaintly eccentric to probably evil.

In addition to geographical areas prone to various belief systems, we have national and international belief systems allowed to grow out of control here because our Constitution does not restrict freedom of thought and expression. It's a laudable ideal and a perfect breeding ground for whackadoodlery. Whackadoodlery only begins to encompass how bad it can get when dumbassery combines with imagination and fragmentary knowledge unimpeded by critical thought. It's also a rewarding hunting ground for intellectual predators who might or might not believe their own shit. They'll use varying degrees of technical-sounding language and immense personal confidence to collect financial and social power that eventually leads to political leverage.

The educated men who wrote the founding documents for this country and critical commentary that went with or against it operated under the highest intellectual standards of their day. Time, collective experience, and study have revealed where they were wrong, but they acted under sincere belief at the time. The slave owners sincerely believed that the people they enslaved were on average completely inferior to the white people who owned them. Even some abolitionists held racist beliefs. They just thought that slavery was cruel and economically a bad idea. People used to believe in all kinds of dumb stuff like phrenology, and much more. Much of it served to validate their emotional prejudices, but it was based on observations and attempts to identify meaningful patterns in the world around them.

Other countries observed our evolution. Some were inspired. Some were contemptuous. Every nation works its angles in the world in times of peace and war. The United States managed to turn itself into a superpower by the end of the Second World War. We were a military powerhouse that rapidly established itself as a scientific powerhouse. We produced the largest generation of surviving children in human history, and gave them a country to play in that had the highest standard of living in the world. It helped that a lot of the rest of the world had been devastated by the recent war. The width of oceans had protected us from the direct effects of shelling and bombing one last time.

We have no such protection now. We had only our military might and enviable intellectual freedom to make the rest of the world hesitant to launch missiles at us. Now we have neither. We do have an arsenal and military forces, but they will degrade rapidly under the unqualified and insane leadership voted in by dumbasses.

Hitler had some top notch military minds working for his Reich. He was not one of them.  He had been a friggin' corporal. His delusions led to poor decisions that doomed his desire for conquest. Now, today, the United States has equally incompetent people in the presidency and every major cabinet post. There are no highly competent minds to run the country efficiently with a solid goal in mind. Instead we have a coalition of destructive interests at odds with each other as much as with the ideals of the American experiment. Each one pursues its narrow goal, whether it's Christian theocracy, technological dictatorship focused on strip mining the planet, or nihilistic greed focused on strip mining the planet in different ways for mere cash.

It's a literal confederacy of dunces. It was voted in by a bloc of ignorant and greedy people steeped in a cult of individualism brewed in a melting pot of the dregs of free thought. The stupidest ideas of the past century and a half, including a whole lot added since the middle of the 20th Century, are now the guiding principles of the occupying regime with its fists firmly clenched on the levers of power. They're cutting the brake lines and yanking out the control wires wherever they can. All the while they believe that they're making a formidable machine of war and commerce that will take American dominance from its already high level to a pinnacle of untouchability.

What a crock of utter bullshit. With their sledgehammers, torches, and software, they're destroying all of the prestige and power that the country already held, and digging a hole to drop the remains into. Some of them may know it, since culling the population (remember "death panels?" lol) is a major objective. Yes, they want to increase the birth rate of obedient white people who think that they're free, but they also want poor people, sick people, and old people to die. They want brown people to die. They have a truly impossible dream that they will somehow make the USA completely self sufficient and prosperous at the same time. It's the national version of the myth of the rugged individual. We all be rugged individuals, in a rugged individual country that can kick your ass. You can only come into our clubhouse if we invite you. We hate girls and queers and nigras. We're manly men and real women love us.

Most of the rest of the world is rightly appalled. They're pulling back, watching to see how it plays out. When the United States was just a young little country, European powers looked down on the yokels over here. We had to earn respect. With the current regime, all of that is being squandered. We'll soon be back to our image as a nation of buffoons and yokels, unless we can generate a new wave of self respect in our population.

Self respect is not the same thing as self indulgence or self adulation. As a person or as a nation, you have to keep bringing the quality to maintain true respectability. You can't just coast on collective myths and stale achievements. The people who achieved those things are dead. A lot of the stories were made up crap to justify some reprehensible national policies. Learn history. Face the truth. Realize that our fundamental governing documents provide the framework to do better, now and henceforth. Self respect is not purely self serving. It's the basis by which you recognize that you depend on the society that you support and trade with.

A lot of the people who voted for the regime have job skills. They clearly had enough disposable income to take time off to be in truck convoys, and storm the Capitol, as well as buy tons of crappy merch from the Grifter-in-Chief. They have services and products that appeal to the economy. They're also sure that they're onto the sinister plans of whatever enemy has been presented to their cultivated paranoia. The United Nations, the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, the Deep State, the gay agenda, lazy Black folks, socialist hippies, those sneaky trans people, all skulk around them, just out of sight.

The Internet doesn't help. Snappy sayings that actually support bad conclusions have always been a problem for humans, but now they can flash around the world at the speed of light.  I saw one that said, "History is written by people who weren't there." Sounds like a sick burn, doesn't it? It even has a germ of truth in that you can find history books that simply rehash other history books. But you can also find history books based on primary sources -- people who were there -- that overturn long-held myths that generations of people believed were historical facts. This is particularly true of the history of slavery in this country, and of the accomplishments of marginalized people. People who were there chose to tell the story differently to make themselves look better. It took later historians to dig down through the layers to disclose what really happened.

Our view of history changes over time anyway. People with a vested interest in the previously accepted story will fight against changes. Our view of everything changes with further study and reflection. Every generation is born into an argument already in progress. Every faction in the dispute tries to recruit the new people. The young have no experience to help them sort through what's thrown at them. Some learn faster than others. This is a human condition, not just an American one. Eager to figure it out, new minds pick up the flotsam and debris as well as the more carefully researched information.

By equating all sources, our freedom of speech and expression puts all variables onto an equal footing in charting our national course. Everything gets voted on, including whether we will die of formerly treatable and preventable diseases, whether we will stop wasting money on food safety, whether we will destroy what's left of the natural environment, whether we will have a race war, and whether we want our entire government run by incompetent attention whores. The world is watching.

Easter thoughts

 I got an email from my local hardware store the other day, informing me that they would be closed this Sunday for Easter. The funny thought struck me then that the whole holiday is based on the idea that Jesus got up and went back to work that morning after a pretty rough weekend. Now get back in there and sell me some grass seed and deck stain!

Christian societies have had a conflicted relationship with the sabbath for a long time, especially in the United States, a country founded on commerce even before it was a country. Each colony was a profit-seeking venture. Communities of conscience just provided the recruits willing to undertake the danger and hardship of the perilous ocean voyage and carving out a foothold, for the sake of a place where they could have a dominant role in governance. Religious freedom indeed. But your backers expect more than thoughts and prayers.

I've been out of the church scene for decades, but the logic of Jesus as I understood it then was that we would all do better if we looked out for each other rather than doing the work of tyrants or aspiring in even a small way to be one. This does lead to a world without concentrated wealth, but also without poverty.

At its most extreme, sabbath observance restricts virtually everything that we've come to associate with weekends. Work, play, travel, commerce, toil of nearly any kind must halt. That would include your Easter egg hunt, and a whole lot of the food preparation for Easter dinner. You'd have to rely on the labor of unbelievers, exploiting that they are damned by their unbelief. "Sucks to be you! But this lamb is cooked to perfection!"

Fortunately, we in America have embraced Sabbath Lite. By the words of the Constitution, you are free to express whatever faith you have in whatever way suits you. Just once in a while will you run into an interruption of the seven-day retail and recreation week. The term "business day" refers to specific types of business. You face little stigma for doing whatever you want on weekends, because those days are your allotted little share of your precious life, ceded back to you by the lords of the economy.

Sabbath breaking feeds the economy. And it erodes righteousness no more than sitting on your hands for a day would have done. You get the same choices that you would have on any other day about how to treat the people you deal with.

A scheduled sabbath gathering does create an opportunity for regular accountability to the community. Tying it to your specific religion limits that community, however, and might weaken the bonds overall to the larger secular community that provides the real engine of your economy and the legal framework that -- theoretically -- protects you.

"Might" weaken. Look at how the church is pitted against itself right now, between the "open and accepting" congregations and the Christian nationalist theocrats. Quick now: how many protestant denominations can you name in 30 seconds? And that's long after the split between eastern and western Catholicism. Christians have been arguing about the true nature and word of their headliner since about a week after he disappeared from every place in the mortal world except for the occasional miraculous piece of toast, or scam Shroud.

My own family embraced an easygoing philosophy toward other faiths: "One God, many names." It's an easy out if you want to go to a certain church but don't want to get sucked into a holy war. Other faiths of all sorts have their own adherents to the idea that we can all tie our values to a superior or supreme entity if that helps, praying in a familiar language. This attitude drives the fundamentalists cross-eyed with rage.

"One true faith! One true faith! One true faith!" There can be only one. The all-powerful deity needs propitiating, dammit. Now get in here and propitiate exactly as we taught you.

Hard core attitudes like that grow naturally from the exclusionary nature of source texts. If you saturate yourself with one brand of righteousness, it can't help but repel the concept that someone else might be okay too. Maybe you don't make direct war on them, but you know that you won't be seeing them in the Great Beyond. Go a little deeper and you can't associate with them at all. A little deeper yet and you can't even countenance their existence.

I can't tell you how to interpret Easter for yourself. Not even going to try. In most ways it is a day like any other. There is war, sickness, atrocity, suffering, privation, and injustice all unremedied. Nearly every problem is created by humans devaluing other humans. The will to stop it can never come from outside. It's a personal choice.

FAFO, Supreme Court edition

 Not much to say here, really.  With the Trump administration's defiance of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that the administration must return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador immediately, they have demonstrated that the ruling in Trump v. United States last July has made every other branch of government subordinate to the executive.

The Supreme Court made itself irrelevant that day. Everyone but them saw it. Well, the dissenters on the court saw it, but the right wing majority, drunk with power, planted the flag of the unitary executive and saluted. What they hell did they think would happen?

Maybe they thought that Trump wouldn't win the election. Maybe they just wanted to prepare the ground for a better right wing authoritarian to follow. They could be confident that a Democratic president wouldn't take advantage of the newly granted immunity.

The current composition of the Democratic Party doesn't favor strongman government. Their commitment to diversity is one of the things that makes their efforts so fragmented. They can't keep their coalition members playing nicely together long enough to win more than one election out of a dozen, it seems. Well, maybe a half-dozen. I don't have time at the moment to run the numbers. But you know what I mean. The party has attracted a few firebrands, but they strive against some well established wet blankets. And some of the firebrands, particularly before the 2024 election, seemed bent on burning down their own house over fine ideological points that would not be served by undermining efforts to prevent another Trump presidency.

It's up to the voters now. Voters have to choose solidarity with each other, democracy over dictatorship, in such overwhelming numbers that challenges will crumble under the obvious weight of the public's choice. So we're probably screwed, but I just want to put it out there. We do have the opportunity, early and often before the next election, and resoundingly in it, to make it obvious that the mass of us rejects the cruel efficiency of a government run like a business. That business turns out to be a meat packing plant processing us.

The Supreme Court may not be able to reclaim its power. But Congress can still impeach, the Senate can convict, and the president thus deposed can face criminal charges. At the very least he (or she in some theoretical future) can be barred from holding office in any capacity after that. And if they could overturn Roe v. Wade they can certainly overturn Trump v. United States once a case is brought to them.

Trump v. United States turns out to have been the most apt title ever. He is the foremost agent of the destruction of the United States, put in place by long term enemies both foreign and domestic.