We're rapidly approaching the "or die" part

 As the current regime sprints toward totalitarian control, its agents have seized and detained legal permanent residents as well as immigrants and visitors either with visa issues or simply suspected of them. Plane loads of people have been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. Citizens of other countries have been held in ICE facilities and US prisons without explanation, or with flimsy ones.

The wrecking crew of DOGE continues to demolish the professional portions of government agencies, while executive orders illegally halt funding to entities that the regime considers a threat to their authority. In other words, the Bill of Rights is being canceled. As long as white supremacists can say ignorant things, and no one comes for the guns (yet), the mainstream media and the loudest voices on the Internet insist that everything is fine. Freedom of speech and the right to bear arms are the only things that matter to people who specialize in hurtful speech and violence.

Major corporations and even law firms roll over for the advancing dictatorship.

The connect the dots diagram of the Turd Reich takes ever more obvious shape while legal remedies bog down in the courts. Protests gather. The regime ignores both. Once a person has been disappeared, they're hard to bring back. Gone is gone. So the regime can continue to sweep up people while the opposition fumbles for a response.

When situations like this in the past finally led to war, the "bad guys" always scored early victories. The Confederacy won all of the early battles of the Civil War. Germany and its allies entrenched themselves across Europe in World War I. Most dramatically, in World War II, the Axis powers took control of Europe, and the Japanese took control of most of the the Pacific, and required years of bloodshed to dislodge.

War has changed since the Second World War. It's unlikely that the major nuclear armed powers would unleash the full murder-suicide firestorm of a full exchange. But there could be limited strikes, and plenty of drones and conventional munitions that can kill lots of small, squishy humans thoroughly enough.

Meanwhile, on North America, the budding fascist regime in Washington envisions the empire that the enslavers imagined when they launched the Civil War: white supremacy from Cape Horn in Chile to Nunavut, Canada. Maybe they haven't thought it through that far, but I'll bet that someone at the Heritage Foundation has.

The problems with that come down to personnel. There simply aren't enough white people to dominate all of the non-white people that stand in the way of that fever dream. Enthusiastic breeders are doing their best, but it's not going to be enough.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a "national divorce" in 2023. She suggested that the country divide up by red and blue states. Various ideologically fractured maps of the United States have circulated for years. Because the United States itself was formed by carving out territory and choosing an ideology for it, the idea seems feasible. However it ignores factors that made the American experiment possible in its day. Everything took longer. Distance mattered more. And the abundant resources of the land area funded the independent existence of the country in a way that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. This is especially true if those resources are divided up among hostile smaller countries carved out of the corpse of the once-great nation.

The opposition to the Lands of the Free -- formerly the singular Land of the Free -- are unified groups under Russian and Chinese control. Both of those countries and their client states make no pretense of valuing the individual lives of their citizens or offering them much in the way of freedom. And their citizens are accustomed to this. Guided by fatalism, they go along, get along. Large numbers may be expended in military and industrial actions that their governments choose. They may not like it, but they can't imagine life any other way. With the United States gone, the last beacon of hope goes out.

If the United States holds together as a fascist state for the sake of the survival of its brand name without any of the signature freedom and democracy that had made it attractive to free thinkers the world over, it might hold its place in the uneasy triangle of hostile posturing that would shape reality for the generations born into it. If the country breaks up into little countries, each defining freedom in their own way, all of those countries will face diplomatic pressures from Russia and China. Each one will have to fund and equip its defenses and manage its economy. Each in turn will be easily picked off by the unified forces of the larger powers, no matter how unhappy the citizens of those powers might be. The self-proclaimed "free" will most likely be the ones doing the bulk of the dying.

Efforts to oppose the regime now might succeed. Some opponents of the current fascist coup will probably die. Some in custody probably already have. That death toll is nothing compared to what will happen if the situation here festers into actual revolution. And breaking into smaller nations will inevitably lead to either the end of freedom in them or their eradication.

Freedom for all ultimately comes down to mutual consent. We decide that we want that, as a species. Anything short of that sets the stage for endless war and the ultimate defeat of freedom as a concept at all. It ends either with the victors marching in lockstep to whatever goals their leaders assign, or everyone gone. As long as we're willing to kill each other, killers will always win. Maybe they're the "good killers." Maybe they're the "bad killers." In either case, the dead are still dead. The murderer always gets away with the crime, because the victim is still dead even if the perpetrator stands trial.

The House of Representatives is exactly that

 QUIT FIXATING ON THE TEN DEMOCRATS! 

Condemnation surged across social media for the ten Democratic representatives who voted to censure Al Green of Texas for his display at the current occupant of the Oval Office's address to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.

The Democrats have never felt bound by Ronald Reagan's commandment not to speak ill of another member of their party. They don't make a habit of tearing each other down, but they don't fall into line the way conservatives do. In competitive districts, Democrats have to figure out how to remain Democrats while still attracting enough uncommitted voters to win the election. The overt binary choice between Democrat or Republican masks the adaptations that individual candidates have to make in order to promote most of the values of the party they choose to represent.

Some Democrats are so watered down that you begin to wonder whether they picked their party affiliation by flipping a coin. It wouldn't matter except that when the numbers are all added up in Washington, one party or the other technically controls the House or Senate. Or both. A tiny majority is still a majority, and can lay waste to the hopes and dreams of millions of people, as we are seeing now.

The ten Democrats might have felt that they needed to engage in this piece of political theater for their voters at home. If they piss off the Democratic component of their electorate enough to attract a primary challenger, that challenger has to be confident that they can corral enough of the undecided voters in their district to deliver the goods in the next general election. Otherwise, the Democrats lose the seat entirely. Who knows, in the context  of the national results, whether that's a fatal loss or a mere blip in a more general pendulum swing that brings the Democrats strongly back to Congressional power.

Remember: these days, even a resounding victory has no more than two years to live, unless things go really, really well.

I see people on social media calling out for Democrats to fight, to get nasty, to take the gloves off. When has that ever worked for the Democrats? While the exchange of barbs might feel good, it has never really changed anyone's mind on either side. It just makes the already committed voters cheer for their team.

As for the really dirty fighting that the Republicans are doing right now, it's just flat out illegal. They're only getting away with it because of their tiny majorities and complete willingness to surrender to greed, corruption, and Russia. The Democrats have limited options for playing hardball. At the same time, they have to try to woo the voters they lost in 2024 and the voters who felt like they could just stay home, in order to get that technical majority and force the dictatorship in the White House into a direct confrontation. Congress has always had the power to yank Trump's chain and shut the whole thing down. The Republican majority simply refuses to use it.

The Democrats have been on the back foot since 1968. Jimmy Carter won in 1976 because Republicans were under the last shadow of Nixon. Clinton and Obama won their respective elections by being to the right of Eisenhower. Obama was helped by the incompetence of George W. Bush. The party fared better in Congress, but after the mid 1990s the Republicans had started really focusing on their state machinery. At the same time, right wing media ramped up, pushing what had been fringe positions into more and more impressionable minds.

We have this misconception that young minds are the breeding ground for hippie notions and that conservative viewpoints come with age. Instead, young minds are receptive to whatever sounds plausible and seems cool. The circumstances that created peace and love culture in the 1960s were unique to the 1960s. Young people were divided even then. Now it's worse, because right wing concepts have been honed by decades of information warfare.

Of the coalition of enemies of democracy now tearing away at government by the people, Elon Musk represents the greatest threat. The religious right is too mired in medieval beliefs to do more than drone on about putting women in their place and publicly hating gays, while pimping for Judgment Day. The merely greedy oligarchs are fixated on their money game. They are just useful idiots for the tech billionaires bent on running the world according to their own fantasies, in which We the People are just wasting oxygen.

The Republicans are operating on the belief that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It's never true. You might forge an alliance, as the Allied forces did with the Soviet Union in World War II, but remember that Communist Russia was seen as a threat prior to World War II, and was treated as one again immediately after it. The Republicans have handed all power to the tech crowd, content to let them demolish the support for citizen government. The tech crew, for their part, are eager to weed out the undesirables in society.

All Democrats should be talking about right now is arresting Elon Musk and unplugging DOGE immediately. That will still leave plenty of destructive plans in motion, but unless someone asserts the Constitutional power of elected government right now the next step will be bloody, with an uncertain outcome. It will definitely involve drones and armed robot dogs.

Because none of this will happen tomorrow, or next week, or even by summer, lots of MAGA cultists will be happy at the prospect of DOGE's destructiveness. Undecided voters will waver. Vocal opponents will appear hysterical. I'd love to be overreacting. I'd love to look hysterical in retrospect, from a place of renewed hope and progress, because the opposition to this coup was successful in some unspectacular but conclusive way. That just doesn't seem likely right now.

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.

War is expensive

 The current regime courted voters by claiming that they would bring down prices for ordinary citizens who felt overly burdened by price and availability problems with some items. They also characterized the party they ran against as warmongers likely to plunge us into World war III.

We've been on the verge of World War III for my entire life. The sense of doom hung over us before I was born and persists today. It takes its place beside the fear of Hell and the fear of public embarrassment as leverage that social leaders use on the masses. It's a good one, too.

The regime started a trade war immediately, billing it as a good economic move. It's not, of course. Tariff costs are passed directly to the consumers, whether the company they're dealing with is directly affected or not. Prices rising anywhere is an invitation to prices rising everywhere. Also, everything really is connected, so what seems unaffected can't really remain untouched. This is especially true with the new tariffs announced on aluminum and steel. These basic structural metals are in everything, more or less.

As costs rise here, civilians are paying the costs of leadership's insistence on hostilities. Meanwhile, civilians in targeted foreign countries are paying the costs of their leadership's retaliatory tariffs. It's always the common people who pay the highest price for any form of war. And if your politics are based in anger, you will have war.

Americans get nostalgic for World War II because all of the major destruction took place somewhere else. This country was the ultimate home front. Popular music continued to evolve and advance. Sure, there was rationing, and people lost loved ones, but the economy hummed along with war production. Everyone had a sense of shared purpose. They could ignore peripheral costs to the planet and the future, like the prodigious amounts of petroleum dumped into the oceans as warring forces sank ships full of oil, and chemical fires raged in bombed industrial and urban centers in Europe. Gotta get through this awful war. The citizens went without things. Their freedom of movement was restricted at least by fuel rationing, if not by little inconveniences like being thrown into an internment camp for the duration.

By the end of the war, the dawning Atomic Age pointed a charred, bony finger toward the threat of what a future conflict would bring. The Atomic Age melted into the Nuclear Age within a few years, raising the temperature of the fireball even higher. You want this? Do you? Bitch about the Boomers all you want, but that generation was raised with unprecedented levels of indulgence alongside the assurance that the grownups were going to start something any day to incinerate it.

Here we are today, in a trade war that shows no signs of slackening. Inflation is climbing when we were assured that it would snap off like a light switch. At the same time, the executive branch is yanking us out of alliances that were forged in that glorious shared struggle of World War II and its aftermath, and declaring its intention to destabilize the Middle East, annex the territory of allies, and do it all with a military force composed exclusively of white, straight men, apparently. 

It would take a lot to get nations chucking nukes at each other, but maybe not as much as you think. People with their finger on the trigger came close to making the mistake numerous times during the Cold War. Would the US have dropped its cute little atomic bombs on Japan if any belligerent country had the potential to retaliate? However, a hostile stance leads to skirmishes that can lead to battles that can lead to ground wars that can be used to pit Oceania against Eurasia or Eastasia in a perpetual struggle that might not even really exist except for the poor conscripted idiots sent off to provide the verification of their mutilated or dead bodies.

Cynics would say that we have had that for years. If true in any way, it has only been in its infant stages. The desire to control territory and expand regional influence is real. In the full 1984 version, the wars are more of an endless stalemate welcomed by the authorities controlling each entity. Maybe one day a single power might prevail, but in the meantime the stalemate served the top tier quite well.

If you finished the book, though, the spokesperson for the top tier of Oceania, O'Brien, admits that even the top tier has to live with less than the best that a person could have, for the sake of loyalty to The Party that keeps them on top. Orwell doesn't go into a lot about tax policy, but the diminished returns that the leaders of the party accept is a tax of sorts.

Anyway, here, today, we're closer to that than ever, but still not doomed. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been so completely intoxicated by fringe legal theories and completely unconstitutional fantasies of a better government run by crazy rich people that their congressional delegation is doing absolutely nothing to exert their powers to check the executive branch. Between the ones who see benefit to themselves and the ones who never understood their constitutional responsibilities in the first place, power is in the hands of a slim but potent majority utterly unqualified to hold it.

That's the thing about representative democracy: if one party wanted to put up a sewer rat as a candidate and could convince enough voters to put that rat in office, we would have a sewer rat in office. The founders of this country anticipated incompetents and scoundrels, but never in such overwhelming force. So now we have to convince the party that grew its power by appealing to greed, lack of civic education, paranoia, and exclusionary religiosity to "do the right thing" and save the constitution from this onslaught.

The judicial branch is trying, only to provoke public statements from high ranking Republicans challenging their authority to do so. It's in that constitution that you people like to put on stickers in the back window of your enormous pickup trucks. The judicial branch can rule, but it can't enforce. Congress has to agree and refuse to cooperate further with the destruction.

Most Americans don't really understand what they could lose. American to them means white American, and white Americans have never lost anything. Sure, the South suffered a little reorganization in the Civil War, but they bounced back. Aggrieved citizens of a paler hue can claim that they were passed over for plum jobs because of various quotas, but in general we're used to having things our way. Almost none of us have put it together that the reason things aren't going as well as they might for us emanates from corporate boardrooms and the financial sector. The corruption of the government is just a byproduct of that abandonment of the middle class by the private sector. The top tier of wealth has reasoned -- rightly or wrongly -- that they don't need a thriving middle class and upward mobility in this country. They're sick of paying for it. They quit chipping in a while ago. They've had us fighting each other for decades.

There's a slim chance that the voters who put Republicans into congressional seats can bury them in phone calls, emails, letters, and social media posts to convince them that their political future lies not in cooperating with this regime but in asserting their power to stop it. There's a slimmer chance that mass public protests will do much more than cost their participants the money and time it took to participate. Those costs could be pretty steep in some cases. Remember the phrase "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" as you choose your side and take action. No one gives a shit about honor anymore, but lives and fortunes carry plenty of weight. It's our lives and piddly fortunes versus theirs. They have massively greater fortunes, but only a few lives.

Doesn't just voting seem a lot easier than plunging into the physical conflict or submission to dictatorship that will proceed unchecked? Support the government employees who are resisting DOGE. Pressure congress to support the judges who are supporting the Constitution. Refuse to comply.