The paranoid electorate

 Your vote matters. It is still the first step by which officials gain their positions of responsibility and power. That's why it's worth billons of dollars to dark money groups seeking to install corporate tools.

Cynicism has eroded participation in elections, but so has anxiety based in paranoia. No one wants to vote for someone who turns out to be bad. Not just controversial. Outright bad.

As we see now, a certain core of voters will try to redefine badness as goodness through various filters. Others will just go quiet, still content to see how it plays out in their favor. But elections are not decided on the faithful. They're decided on the undecided.

Some people don't vote because they think it's pointless. Some of the ones who say that actually don't vote because they don't understand the issues, but believe that appearing cynical is cooler than appearing ignorant. I guess that's true, but either way you have handed off your fate to the people who do pick a side.

I didn't vote for a long time after I was old enough, because I wasn't intelligent and focused enough to study the candidates and the issues. In my family, we talked about policies and principles, but I seldom heard one of my parents tie the policies to a party. Because my father was a Coast Guard officer, he took his responsibility to present as nonpartisan very seriously. He took all of his responsibilities very seriously.

Observing the Republican Party from Nixon to Reagan, I had a strong inclination to favor Democrats, but I wasn't sure enough to place a bet. Then when I finally did, on Bill Clinton, he dropped the universal health care promise when corporate money growled, and then acted like a horny teenager in his second term, seriously handicapping Al Gore's stature going into the 2000 election. Thanks, Bill. His presidency was a net good, but not by as much as it could have been if he had had more courage and zipper control.

Bush 43 did nothing to shake my observation that the Democrats presented the less worse option, with strong potential actually to do good eventually. And the Republican Party since then has simply spiraled downward into a criminal syndicate in league with white supremacists and the Russian mob. However, the price of gas and groceries, blah blah blah, and boys who would be girls, oh my. Not to mention the undercurrent of racism in the depressing percentage of people who wouldn't actually initiate a lynching, but wouldn't do anything to stop one, either.

Political violence has always been with us, particularly in matters of race and labor relations. Domestic violence becomes political in its expression that women need to stay in their place and let their men do the talking. And violence scares most people. It scares more people than will admit to it. It keeps people from joining public protests. It keeps bystanders from interfering when they see it happening to someone else. Law enforcement uses the threat of it to intimidate witnesses. Criminals do the same thing. These forces aligned to do violence to each other live in that world. They express themselves only in that language. It's their medium of exchange. It's one more thing to fear: the violence of uncontrolled society versus the violence of over-controlling law enforcement.

Into this time of high-stakes decision making steps the paranoid voter, wondering if they'll have to answer for the spectacular failure of their champion. In walks the persnickety voter who doesn't want to listen to a woman's voice or annoying laugh for four years, who falls back on sexist tropes to justify voting for an obvious unrepentant criminal traitor to the nation, backed by religious bigots. Who makes a bad choice and digs in his heels -- or her heels, to please her man. We're tired of being embarrassed and let down. We want to believe that we could amass enough candidates to vote in a government that will change laws to control the bribery and violent coercion that have dug in and fortified themselves over a couple of centuries with only brief interruptions. Those interruptions were the template for actual improvements, but those lights need to be tended and defended against the powers of greed and class structure that seek to perpetuate the power of wealth as privilege without responsibility.

To get there, we need a bunch of paranoid people to take a risk. It's a lot to ask, and we have a very short time to figure out how to present the request.

Calling them "critters" erodes democracy

 I love Heather Cox Richardson, and I'm extremely grateful for her work, but she uses a term that weakens the position of all of us trying to restore some level of respect to elective office and the citizen government established for us by the constitution that everyone seems so eager to wield in their own interest.

Back when government was all men, the term "congressman" served to describe the role in a neutral way. When women joined the ranks, "congresswoman" joined the lexicon. It doesn't flow as smoothly in speech, and now faces additional problems for gender oversimplification. So I understand the need for a gender-neutral, generic term for a member of congress. "Congressional representative" is bland, boring, pedantic, and takes too long to say. "Congrasshole" is not emotionally neutral or supportive of the institution. But "critter" makes them seem harmless, cute, and ineffectual. Either that or like vermin that you call an exterminator to eliminate because they're destroying your stuff.

Cynics will say that this term therefore accurately depicts members of Congress, because they are all those things. However, political commentators will also exhort us to go out and vote. Vote! It's your voice! Choose that candidate who will get in there and work hard to represent your interests! And magically transform into a critter as soon as confirmed in office, apparently. It makes the whole thing seem pointless and hopeless, which pleases both the oligarchs and the accelerationists who want to collapse civilization. Do you really want to live under the boot heel of robber barons or through the deadly chaos of civilization's collapse? If so, turn loose your last fingertip grasp of political control. Embrace the cynical resignation. Call your representatives critters and expect nothing more of them than you would of rats and roaches.

Oversimplification does not aid communication. Complex concepts are made up of simple parts, but they're made of lots of simple parts. Not everyone of voting age and eligibility has the patience to wade through all that. We're in the mess we're in right now because of decades trying to accommodate that on one side and exploit it on the other. The exploitive side has done all it can to undermine trust in experts. Education moves too slowly to keep up with the pace of events. That's why the brainiacs in the tech sector want to impose their own dominion over the common herd, because they're so much better than the rest of us. Can't boil an egg or change a tire, but they can design a surveillance system that knows how often you fart.

If we can't believe that we're able to find and vote for responsible people who will do their best for us in a tough job for what is actually fairly low pay, why show up at all?

Find a better term.

Trump hands the world to China and Russia

 The greed and corruption of the Trump regime was already well on the way to knocking the United States to at least the third spot in the world order, before his adventure in Iran sealed the deal.

Trump and Hegseth treated our weapon stockpile like a Hollywood six-shooter that always has enough bullets to outgun the bad guy. Their orgy of violence in Iran burned through a couple of wars' worth of expensive munitions that they can't just order on Amazon with overnight shipping.

In addition to the military depletion, our country has been reduced diplomatically to the foot-stomping and whining of a spoiled rich kid. This regime was put in power by pissed-off simpletons. As such, it is perfectly representative of its constituents. The rest of us just got dragged along.

The pissed-off simpletons include the ones who voted directly for the vile, bigoted, lying grifter and the ones who sat it out in a snit in 2024 because the Democratic candidate wasn't perfect enough.

Whether Trump is formally a foreign asset or not, he has acted perfectly on their behalf, with the full approval of most of the office holders in the party he captured in 2016. We can neither fight nor bargain our way out of the shit swamp that the entire passel of clowns have dumped us into.

The failure of Soviet communism wasn't communism per se. It was the power-mad, sadistic liars in control of the government. The same right wing people who continue to bleat about communism have no problem with the Russian heirs to the same power-mad, sadistic liars exerting control to this day. And now we have our own power-mad, sadistic liars in control of what remains of our democratic government.

We have one needle's eye left that we can squeeze through to oust the power-mad, sadistic liars and resume our zigzag march toward the inclusive and imaginative powerhouse that this country could be. It happens in November, 2026, when one imperfect party stands against a party monolithically devoted to stamping all that out and settling grumpily into their rightful place below a former communist empire and a current one. Because that's how it will be. Tough talk. Threats of global holocaust. No real leverage. But we can stay home and dominate our women and pick on minorities and paint the walls with our own shit, for all that the rest of the world will care.

5...4...3...2...weeks

 In a welcome but still annoying version of snatch-the-football, the Supreme Leader of the United States has agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran. He has progressed from promising things like a health care plan and an infrastructure plan in two weeks to promising to delay starting World War III for two weeks.

Two weeks. the magic time span. Anyway, we can all breathe a sigh of relief while acknowledging as usual that a madman remains in charge of the country, at the head of a cabinet of similar amoral maniacs, most critically the one in charge of military forces.

Bear in mind also that a ceasefire is only as good as the cooperation of the combatants  to maintain it. The regime in DC might decide that it would be clever to sucker punch the Iranians. Or they could be better businessmen about it. Actually obliterating the country would be a very bad move economically, even worse than all of the really bad economic moves the regime has already made. Maybe we have two weeks. Maybe we don't. Most likely nothing happens tonight, but even there it's a not a zero chance.

The United States is being held hostage by violent extremists. About 37 percent of the population is still exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome, believing themselves to be allies and comrades of the kidnappers. The sadistic extremists enjoy demonstrating their power to inspire fear and anger in a populace they consider powerless to stop them. With just a phone and a social media account, the supreme leader can agitate the entire world. No one dares say for sure that he is full of shit, because he is still the commander-in-chief. He can order atrocities the way we regular people could order a pizza, back when we could afford it. If you don't believe it, let's meet in the East Wing of the White House and talk about it. About the only thing the regime is good at is destroying beauty and leaving a crater.

Massive war crimes in 5...4...3...2...

"A civilization dies tonight?" And the entire Republican Party is fine with that, or at least enough of them to present absolutely no check on the upcoming abomination?

Of course Trump does have the track record of blustering and then backing down, but he also authorized the already committed and ongoing war crimes of his elective bombing of Iran, so we know he likes to see things blow up and people suffer.

You'd think that the plutocrats who have kissed his ass for tax cuts would want to curtail his destruction of the global economy that makes them wealthy. Maybe their accountants have already figured out that they can absorb some losses now to cement their position at the tippy top of the economic pyramid after Trump has died and left the machinery they put in place to run more smoothly in the background.

The ultimate goal of progressives is a long-term prosperity in which everyone does modestly well indefinitely. The ultimate goal of uber-capitalist conservatives, white supremacists, and aspiring cyborgs in the tech sector is much crueler and more exclusionary, not to mention fragile and self-destructive.

No long-term goal of humanity is served by bombing anyone. Few productive short term goals are served by it, either. Good luck getting that across to the vindictive bastards who hug their emotional support munitions before raining them down on selected targets.

We're in the mess we're in because the entire Republican Party and significant factions on left and right have devoted themselves to various forms of ethnic cleansing and philosophical purification by fire. Right now, the Republican congress is complicit in war crimes and in the abuse of power domestically. They could stop the abuses of ICE and Border Patrol in this country and the mass murder of Iranians. They don't, because there's something in it for them, regardless of who gets hurt. When it blows back on them they will act surprised and try to rally the whole country the way they did after September 11th. Blame radical Islam! Blame anyone but them.

Millions of us should be in the streets right now, converging on DC and surrounding congressional representatives and senators wherever they are, to proclaim in a massed shout loud enough to be heard over bombs detonating that we do not endorse this murderous, lawless regime. We won't, of course. It's too hard to arrange. Americans are always leery of mass gatherings. For any congregation of true believers, whether at a Trump rally or No Kings, or Black Lives Matter, or Woodstock, there are many more regular folks who just wish people would simmer down. They're embarrassed by demonstrations and focused on their own day to day needs. Indeed, the need to demonstrate against authority's excesses is a gross imposition on the people that authority -- particularly the government -- is supposed to serve. 

The Secretary of Defense has already purged senior military leadership of the officers who would respectfully disagree and advise against committing atrocities in the name of Capitalism and Jesus and the god-king Trump, under the hijacked banner of the US flag. Don't expect the military to refuse to carry out the orders that will mark our nation forever as one of the worst in history.

The presidential legacy

 Lyndon Johnson inherited John F, Kennedy's barely-started Vietnam adventure. President Vance will be inheriting Donald Trump's far worse blunder in Iran.

President Johnson faced the global scourge of communism. It was an organized threat based in established nations, with clear ambitions for global expansion using conventional military forces or the threat thereof. Military might determined success. Small nations succumbed to Soviet expansion and growing Chinese influence. Something had to be done.

President Vance will be handed a much more nebulous proposition. Whether he buys into the biblical horseshit that Pete Hegseth foams at the mouth about remains to be seen. The powers behind the current regime have a couple or three overlaid apocalyptic visions, none of which are good for human survival. And they control the largest military force in the world.

No one with a shred of rationality would have started the mess in Iran, but clearly we are at the mercy of office holders who live in their own fantasy worlds. The tech bro contingent sees a humanless future of machine domination. The religious nutjobs like Hegseth see a chance to bring on the Second Coming through a glorious holy war.

After September 11, 2001, we were saturated with the message that radical Islam would stop at nothing to obliterate our free (and Christian) nation. The flip side is that radical Christians will stop at nothing to obliterate Islam, and the radical Christians running the United States military now have every horrific weapon at their disposal.

Donald Trump is a decrepit old pervert who likes golf, gold, and women who make themselves look like they have balloons stuffed in their shirt. He requires constant validation and praise for his achievements. He has no ideology. But the inheritors of his power do. Unfortunately, Trump's death is likely to rehabilitate the image of the Republican Party because his excesses have made him the personification of evil. The problem is that evil does not die when its personification does. The willing agents of destruction who make up his entire cabinet and nearly all of the Republican Congress represent decades of effort from well before Trump was a factor.

Religious fervor is a drug in itself. Look at Hegseth's tattoos, and his ponderous language when he utters his threats. In the name of the Prince of Peace, I nuke thee! We're constantly hearing about pastors who are high on their own supply, committing fleshly excesses against parishioners. They're not perfect, just forgiven.

The tearful apology is part of the cycle of abuse. Confess. Repent. Re-offend. Rinse and repeat.

As a nation post-Trump, we stand a high risk of being the global equivalent of a terrorist wearing a bomb vest. We're at risk of it now, because of the putative chief executive's complete detachment from reality and his lifelong need to look tough. The risk increases when President Vance is trying to control the Secretary of Defense while also choreographing the plunder of national resources and throttling voting rights, with his own eye on the goals of Peter Thiel.

Maybe the tech bro influence will tamp down the war fever. It's hard to set up your artificial intelligence apparatus to control all of humanity when an angry drunk with nukes is peeling the crust off of the planet. While that seems like a relief, as long as the tech bros are in power they will continue to enact their dystopian sci-fi on us. The strip mines of the twentieth century in rural America will be replaced by the data centers of the twenty-first. The folks round about will still live in trailers and work for the big outside money that tells them to be grateful for their jobs. And the data centers will employ far fewer of them than the strip mines and coal caves did.

As much as I would rejoice at the news of the Big Beautiful Obituary, Donald Trump dying is his final escape from any consequences for his many crimes. I've read articles that assert that his death will expose his underlings to the justice system, which will regenerate itself from the few surviving shoots in the scorched field where it once flourished, but we're in the grip of a regime that has no shame and no conscience. They still control the agencies that would bring them down, and the Congress, unless they are pushed out in the midterm elections.

My fear is that Trump will die before the midterms and a bunch of conservative voters will think that it's safe to vote Republican again. The party has been parasitized by the worst elements of greed and fundamentalist religion. My father was a lifelong Republican, but he died a registered Democrat. He also voted across party lines when a particular non-Republican candidate seemed like a better choice. It's completely possible to vote your conscience and your intelligence while registered for one party, and even donating to them. Ultimately, he couldn't stomach the degeneration of the party he had favored for his entire voting life.

It's hard to keep everything straight in your mind when you're busy being a good worker. Most of us pick up little morsels of information, or find a news source or an informed friend that we trust. It's more than just information silos. It's a world view. You have a vision of the world and you look for people who will advance it. Confirmation bias just comes along for the ride. Information that doesn't fit the visualization just becomes noise, or an irritant. All of that matters now because a lot of  voters will need to make difficult choices in November and in 2028. 

With no Trump, the evils of "Trumpism" will still exist. They aways existed. In classic Trump style, he just rebranded them with his name. With him gone, they will be harder to collect and stomp on without the bloated vulgarian himself as the big statue to topple. It will be much harder to get conservative undeclared voters to vote against the party that has always advanced their repressive social agenda against the freaks and weirdos and foreigners who are destroying the monoculture of this great nation. The propaganda falsehood that Republicans are better for the economy will see a rebirth when the candidates can throw Trump's body under the bus and lay all of the economic and global woes on him. They might get away with that, even though the party's office holders and judges always had the power to stop him, and refused to use it. Don't forget that, and don't let them forget it.

Not exactly a paper tiger, but...

 The Trump regime's ill-advised foray in Iran is a massive strategic blunder on all levels. I know, I know. Captain Obvious speaks. But aside from the clear and present problems it has created, it demonstrates in painful detail how the United States can't actually lock down control of a situation just by walking into the room.

The shenanigans of Bush 43 did the same thing. His daddy just got lucky with the first Gulf War. Junior threw us into two quagmires with his administration's military responses to the crimes of 9-11-2001. But in both of those cases, the wrong thing to do at least had widespread popular support for the move into Afghanistan, and some degree of acceptance for the foolishness in Iraq. We enjoyed an illusion of progress in both cases, with casualty figures to US forces that fell far enough below Vietnam standards to quell widespread protest at home.

Never underestimate the soothing power of being safe from the danger that you support sending other people to face. If there had been a draft for either Afghanistan or Iraq, appropriate-age American citizens would have turned out in flash mobs.

In the current situation, with a regime run by 12-year-olds whose military experience mostly consists of war movies and fevered religious fantasies, the people in power lurched forward with all the restraint and forethought of an angry drunk who just heard something he didn't like. They happen to have one on staff.

The power of the United States from the 1950s onward depended on very careful image control. We faltered in Korea, and face-planted in Vietnam. Behind our adversaries in both cases stood powerful backers in the form of the USSR and communist China. The real powers in the world decided that it wasn't worth starting World War III over some turf battles in eastern Asia, but that it was okay to squander the lives of soldiers and luckless civilians in the vicinity just to feel each other out. Unlimited war would have destroyed the world. Limited war merely served to illuminate the limitations of the power of the United States. We saved face by remaining a fearsome engine of destruction on a global scale, for all that we couldn't defeat the military equivalent of swarms of gnats on the micro level.

So much of making the world a better place consists of holding off a devastating conflict while our species slowly matures and genuinely learns to play nicely with each other. Some people believe that we are so deeply flawed that it will never happen. Not with an attitude like that it won't. 

We face particular danger now because forces behind the current regime genuinely believe that World War III will bring Jesus Christ back to punish the wicked and reward the faithful. Nuclear holocaust isn't a deterrent. There's a strong suicidal element to religions based on the idea that things only get good after you're dead in this world and gloriously restored in the next one. "Gone on to a better place..." Get out the sack cloth and ashes. Start whipping yourself in penitence. Do any of them really believe that shit? Do any of the performatively pious disciples of prosperity gospel really want to plunge with us poors into the fiery hell of global war? I don't know. Highly insulated people who can fulfill their every material desire with a text or a phone call can get pretty crazy.

In summary: The power of the United States has depended in large part on flashy weapons and swagger. We do have some highly trained, deadly mofos on the payroll. However, once they're committed in one place, they aren't available to commit somewhere else. Our forces are designed to be able to fight conventional militaries on two fronts, but conventional warfare is on the way out. Threats are evolving rapidly in the form of numerous, low-cost weapons that can filter through defenses tailored to fewer, larger attackers. On one hand, you have to move with the times and update your defense capabilities. On the other, the constant pace of the arms race should make us question the idea of killing each other over control of our tiny little island in space. 

As a species, we're pissing away time and resources. How much petroleum has gone up in smoke in the past three weeks, when the regime came into office in part on the idea of increasing global supply? Set aside for the moment the fact that we should have been weaning off of petroleum for the past 50 years. We didn't, and we need it while we work on getting away from it now. But the boneheads in charge are blowing it up and simultaneously demolishing our stature worldwide in lasting ways. We will have far less say in global affairs going forward, because we have proven as a people that we lack the capacity for deep thought and mature action. We let these assholes have power.

Maybe we needed this to begin the many aspects of reckoning that we have been running away from since the 1860s. Hell, it's been longer than that. But the 1860s will do. Every issue remains valid. Progress has been rolled back. Illusory gains revealed as false. We're exposed from every angle. Bluster won't save us. We can't retreat to our former stances, because they have been undermined. We can only go forward, demonstrating through consistent action that we have learned better and will do better. So we're probably fucked. I don't want to believe that, but I have to throw it out there to see how it ages. I've wanted to be wrong about my view of the future for my entire adult life. I'm still waiting for an improvement substantial enough to make me regret not having kids. Things have definitely jumped in the wrong direction for that since 2015.