We are under occupation by hostile forces, and have been for a while. Ordinary citizens are held hostage by a cruel minority that does not care who gets hurt by their abuse of power.
Our economy and the industrial system already held the people as economic hostages. The citizens of the United States have been the victims as well as the beneficiaries of its economy since the beginning of industrialization. The original investors in factory-style manufacturing took advantage of the prevailing modesty of most people's expectations, and the desperation of some of them, to keep wages low and hours long, while newly discovered pollutants poured into the environment.
Every problem turns into another industry that creates jobs addressing the problem and creating new problems. As the profits of the industrial system spread to the lower classes through determined and sometimes bloody insistence, consumers prospered and desired more things. The proliferation of automobiles led to the spread of junkyards. The time-honored practices of throwing our rubbish into a hole in the ground or shoving it down the nearest riverbank became serious public health issues.
Until 1980, American problems seemed to be American problems. We did not progress rapidly, but our society absorbed women and minorities into more complete participation as if it was inevitable and ultimately good. There was always an element of strong resistance to this, but those voices seemed to be fading as the 1970s ended. Inclusion was better than exclusion for the economy and national identity.
As the Reagan administration introduced the era of hard-core partisan conflict, the edge of the blade was lubricated with oil and honey. Conservative revulsion against anything outside of their concept of normal did not manage to snuff out a popular culture that continued to love bright colors and weirdness. However, that same culture began to rehabilitate the idea of militarism.
Through the 1990s, the partisan divide became a muddy field crisscrossed with barbed wire. Conservatives became increasingly truculent about working with liberals. Liberals became increasingly concerned about funding, leading to corporate alliances that undermined social progress.
Nothing is simple. The actual events of those decades are more complicated at ground level than this flyover summary relates. Bear with me. The Republican tactics of the Gingrich era began to identify the Democratic Party as not merely mistaken about policy but as actual enemies of the country. At first it was done just to put the party in power, where they planned to govern in the ways that had worked for decades. Foreign policy might shift slightly, but the overall tone was consistent enough to make the USA a trustworthy ally. Domestic policy was marching steadily toward oligarchy, but the oligarchs still thought that they needed American consumers to have some money.
The attacks on 9-11-2001 split the country between the warlike and the thoughtful. The vengeful warriors who sought approval to unleash hellfire on the Muslim world said, "If you're not with us, you're against us." If you did not line up and cheer to support their every move, whether it limited civil liberties at home or scorched earth abroad, you were a coward, a traitor, a suspect.
Political conversation since 2001 has only gotten worse.
The demonization of the Democratic Party is so complete in at least 25% of the population that they will never ever trust a Democratic official, elected or otherwise. It's completely protected as their religious belief. They have every right to vote their conscience, no matter how poorly educated their thought process may be.
It has always been popular to say that all politicians are completely full of crap and are basically interchangeable and disposable, but it's not true. People are imperfect. People who seek power probably have at least some ulterior motives. But others who accept power do so out of a sense of responsibility. Governing is largely thankless work, especially in a country that allows unlimited dissent. Anybody with a gripe can sound off, sending nasty messages by whatever means they have. The Internet has made this extremely easy to do in large volumes. Your average comment thread is never a reasonable exchange of well thought out ideas discussing the pros and cons of a particular policy position.
With the election of 2024, the United States came fully under occupation by a hostile force bent on its destruction. They landed initially in 2016. They were pried out of office in 2020 and contained only until 2022, when the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives. The mechanisms intended to prevent a coup like theirs moved too slowly to bring them to justice. We were not liberated.
Every occupied country has had resistance movements and collaborators. The collaborators in our occupation are the voters who remain loyal to the hostile force, the functionaries of the hostile force, and the uncommitted voters who will not declare themselves part of the resistance. We are not quite at the point where the occupying force will seize "normal" (i.e. white) people for expressing dissent. This makes it overwhelmingly important for those "normal" people to declare that the occupying government is wrong, and to refuse to comply with its demands. And, when the next election comes, vote against every member of the party that supports the occupation. We told you that 2024 was the last chance, and it may well have been. 2026 is definitely the last chance to install a Congress that will reclaim its Constitutional authority and slam the brakes on the destruction of our citizen government and the devastation of our once-respected position in the world.
Yes, our foreign policy depended on our military might. We did export predatory capitalism mislabeled as democracy, and topple foreign governments to suit the desires of corporate leadership. It was bad, and needed to be reformed, but now our actions are nakedly and anachronistically imperialistic. Russia is not an evolved nation. Their -- really Vladimir Putin's -- obsession with claiming actual territory is so 19th Century. Why should we play an old, discredited game, while China and the other adults move forward with soft power? Soft power is much better for business. We're supposed to be pro business, aren't we? Instead, we are held hostage by a madman and his followers.
As hostages, we're all just trying to stay alive until we escape or are rescued. This means staying housed, fed, and employed, if possible. Retirees depend on their pensions. Workers depend on their jobs. Low level workers -- the working poor -- depend on the programs funded by taxpayers to make up for what their employers have refused to pay them. On top of this we're asked to go out in public to join protests, and to dig into our meager coffers to support the independent media who report the news, the candidates who promise to represent us rather than corporate donors, and the nonprofit organizations that protect the environment and other interests deemed unimportant by corporate leadership.
In any conflict, the poor do most of the dying. It takes a long time to get the rich to the guillotine. Sure, the sons of the privileged have also died in the cause of liberty, but as the conflicts became more focused, on labor rights, or Black rights, or women's rights, or indigenous people's rights, the ones with "less to lose" economically are pushed forward with what they do have: their lives. Even now, when we all have a lot to lose, too many don't recognize that we are in a real crisis, because they can still get gas and groceries, and no one has kicked down their door yet. Action now will definitely save bloodshed later. The longer we wait, the less we commit, the greater the cost.
But what does commitment look like? Stickers on your car? Flags on your house? Signs waved by the roadside whenever you can fit it into your schedule? I do not mock the schedule. We're all coordinating variables. We're told that we must sacrifice. The nature and timing of that sacrifice depend on your individual ability to let things go. That which is sacrificed is gone. Are we to the point where a terminally ill person needs to volunteer to quit being treated, or a seriously ill person with long odds needs to give up their chance and just get out of the way? Are we on such a war footing that anyone with a modest income needs to go on subsistence rations and siphon off every other spare dollar to fund the war effort?
How bad is it going to get? And can we do anything to keep it from getting much worse than it is now? You can find a lot of conflicting opinions, ranging from guardedly optimistic to flat out hopeless.
I can tell you this: if it is hopeless, do not expect anyone to rise up and fight back. Why should we? We're doomed anyway. Party like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't. Indulge yourself to the limit if your budget. Become lawless, because you really have nothing to lose. Go on a murder spree, or see if you can find enough partners to fuck yourself to death. Finally start trying to learn to play a musical instrument and torture your neighbors with it, or take up painting, not because it will do you any good, but because it doesn't matter anyway.
Except for the murder spree, that might actually be the best form of resistance: if we all become terminally lazy and utterly useless, who will carry out the dirty work for the overlords? The problem is that the forces of oppression are following their bliss just as much as the hippie dropouts are. We are under the heel of the percentage of people who like to hurt others. So far, their efforts scorn the law, but stop short of opening fire on dissenters. The pain is inflicted by pulling back the helping hand, not by swinging a clenched fist. Slap the bowl from the begging child's hand, but don't slap the child yet.
Far right groups march, but have not indulged in vandalism or violence. Will they, or have they fallen to the level of cosplay? They imply that they look forward to direct conflict, but have not initiated it.
The thing is, the real destructive forces do not need their amateur bully boys to bust heads. ICE acts as the Gestapo, snatching undesirables off the streets and sending them to detention camps and foreign prisons. DOGE demolishes every department of the federal government without regard to its usefulness or popularity. The mad king raves about tariffs, churning the economy whether he ever actually enacts them or not. We'll know tomorrow (Wednesday, April 2, as I write this). Will they be on or off?
The current regime could do much worse things than they're doing now, but what they've done so far has caused plenty of permanent damage to our standing in the world. The voters who put the regime in power bear the responsibility for its misbehavior. This government represents them. Some have recanted, but they have not given up the beliefs that made them susceptible to it in the first place. So the rest of the world is right not to trust us in our degenerated state.
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