America the Failure, unless we act now

 You know how it sucks when a product you really like is still in production, but the great company that made it was bought out by some greedy corporation, so the product is a cheap copy of what once made it so desirable?

That conveys the feeling, but hardly the true threat we face since gullible voters reinstalled the worst president in our country's history at the controls of what had the makings of eventually becoming a great country.

The "sphere of influence" concept championed by greedhead Putin works by threatening neighboring countries and absorbing them into a totalitarian framework. You might decide to run your sphere differently, being generous and kind, but eventually you will have to face a militarized foe when the cruel empire decides to push its boundaries. 

Republican Saint Ronald called the USSR the evil empire. Now Republicans embrace Russia under the leadership of the current occupant of the Oval Office, who has been a Russian asset since the 1980s. Vain, greedy, and stupid, yet exalted by American media culture as a beacon for idiots, Trump was the most useful idiot the Russians had ever had. He's paying off big time now.

Proponents of the unitary executive -- an all-powerful presidency served by a subordinate Congress -- really pushed us off a cliff here. Several Supreme Court justices should be dragged off the bench and put to work cleaning latrines for that one. Dictatorship is tempting when you feel confident that your ideological position will always be on top. SCOTUS and the Heritage Foundation laid a lot of groundwork to build a system that will assure their control. Their opposition may be tempted to leave the machinery in place and use it to force a different set of reforms. That will fail because the natural human inclination is conservative: fear based and self protective.

Various fables use the device of shabby travelers seeking shelter, turned away by most, but taken in by a generous host at last. After the host provides food, shelter, and comfort, the shabby travelers reveal that they are gods and reward the hospitable mortals handsomely. This may be supposed to teach hospitality and generosity, because you never know who might be a god, but it starts from the basic human fear of strangers. Vampires can only come in if you invite them. Drifters and hobos might be serial killers. That hitchhiker might murder you. Or you might murder them.

On a very basic level, we don't trust each other. Of course we do trust each other constantly, but paranoia is never far away. It's easy to excite. It drives conservative thought. So if a self-styled progressive administration tried to strong-arm benevolence on people, it would set off the kind of quiet resistance that leads to stunning election losses and a return to institutionalized distrust. You want some assistance when you're down and out? How down and out are you really?

Trump rallies were not the norm, although the Tea Party rallies did foretell them. The norm was Republican victories just quietly grinding forward with their bold assurance that the party of killjoy fuddy-duddies knew better than those dippy kids thinking that we could have luxuries like universal health care, excellent public schools, and well-maintained infrastructure. Next they'll be saying that we should go back to taxing the wealthy! Ha ha ha, how cute. Now run along and bury yourselves in popular culture while the grownups run things.

Conservatives have been constantly pulling toward authoritarianism in the name of freedom while the other side was trying to find something for each side. The net result is that we kept getting dragged toward the situation we're in today. Freedom was always code for a very specific, vocal, violence-prone subset of the entire population. The rhetoric of the conservatives was as elastic as the founding documents themselves. It's as vague, contradictory, and modularly applicable as the Bible.

The changes in tax laws and election financing since 1980 have almost turned our elections into shareholder meetings where the wealthy actually get to outvote us. The upcoming midterms may be our last chance to assert the true power of the people by voting against the party most thoroughly responsible for empowering rich punks and gangsters.

Should the Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress, don't expect an instant miraculous recovery and get all snitty in 2028 when it hasn't happened. A depressing percentage of potential voters are persnickety and apathetic. They don't vote or vote third party, thus perpetuating the conditions that make them persnickety and apathetic.

Social media showcases cynicism and sinister conspiracy theories designed to convince you that you shouldn't waste your time trying to make anything better. These posts can appear right next to one about environmental protection, social justice, universal health care, or political action, posted by the exact same person who just told you that the medical establishment is just a money machine designed to keep you sick and paying, and that "both parties are the same." You can't exhort people to vote and then tell them that anyone who runs for office is guaranteed to be a con artist or worse. And don't get me started on the childish belief that term limits for elected officials will solve anything. Term limits is not the same thing as limited terms, as would be a good idea for supreme court justices. But in that instance, the length of a fixed term would give parties a set target to anticipate exactly when they get to appoint a successor. It would become another precise political calculation. Not a magic bullet.

What is a magic bullet is your vote. You get one shot per candidate or ballot measure. You will be part of a massed volley in one exchange of fire. At the end, we will have a winner. The bullets, fortunately, are metaphorical, but the result will affect lives for years to come. We're choosing once again what our brand and quality will be. What do we offer to each other and  the world? We failed in 2016. We barely came back in 2020. Lost our chance in 2022 and set up the epic faceplant of 2024. One more time: are we stupid and violent or are we thoughtful, brave, and faithful to the ideals of human rights?

Communism? I don't think so.

The Trump regime is trying to use the fear of communism to keep Republicans in power. It's just one of the venerable scare tactics that people in power have used to herd voters through the long history of the Land of the Free, but it raises a nice counterpoint.

The programs and policies offered by the so-called leftist elements of the Democratic Party represent not communism but communityism. That's not a real word, but it could be. The values of communityism take into account the needs of disparate individuals and subgroups that fall outside of a super conservative norm. Where the current attempt at dictatorship underway from the Republican Party and Donald Trump focuses strongly on white Christian nationalism and repressive control of anyone who defies the central authority of the federal government, the community focus of the better Democrats lays out a more inclusive and stronger social structure.

Corporate Democrats remain a powerful destructive force within that party. Putting the Democratic Party in control of the government would put some of those people back in power. I said they are a destructive force, but they are nowhere near as destructive a force as the current form of the Republicans, and certainly not as bad as the executive branch under Trump. They're mostly a product of a pragmatic decision by Democrats in the 1980s to get a piece of the greed money that was beginning to flourish under Reagan. It mutated rapidly into a more cynical embrace of wealth for its own sake, flavored with hints that they still cared about the common folk. For a while there, quite a few people believed in the fantasy of "wealth creation" and the idea that every new rich person was just one more win in the process of making everybody rich. It can be done! Trust your broker!

It was an exquisitely crafted Mauviel crock of shit. Some people got rich, Democrat and Republican alike, while most of the rest of us got poor. The Democrats who prospered under that system want to hold onto it despite the massive statistical and real world evidence that it was ultimately a bad thing. The rising tide did not lift all boats. It swamped a bunch of them.

Under communityism, freedom is limited the way freedom will always be limited in an actual civilization rather than a free-for-all of kill or be killed desperation. Freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose. Live free or die would become a daily mantra before going out to hope that today isn't the day that someone gets the drop on you. You want absolute liberty? Start everyone naked in an undeveloped landscape and turn them loose on each other. The problem is that you will have to reset the game board every few years to make all the starts equal. Oops! Control imposed from outside. It's really easier to learn to get along like good-natured adults who understand the responsibilities of living together as well as enjoying the freedom of a cooperative and tolerant society.

Tolerance isn't the greatest word, but it will do for the moment. It can be a step toward acceptance, or it can wear out and collapse into rage and hostility when it is exhausted. Tolerance enabled the emergence of civil rights, gay rights, feminism, and multiculturalism, but it also built up stresses in the more conservative elements of society until they finally snapped. As a result, we've tumbled backward onto a pile of jagged wreckage because we pushed fragile, fundamentally frightened people beyond their limited strength.

There is no good reason for a private citizen to have billions of dollars. There is no good reason for the resources of the world to feed a few immense fortunes. There is no good reason even to be gouging so desperately at the world's resources at the expense of the future generations we keep creating. Smart kids in those generations are demanding more and more that we take a collective look at our priorities.

Humans have a long tradition of listening to the elders for wisdom. As an elder myself, I don't recommend junking the concept entirely, but I know from my own experience as a youngster that the world each generation emerges into is significantly different from the one that their parents found. Much of the change is driven by technology, but it's also influenced heavily by sheer population numbers and remaining available resources. Also, our sense of purpose has changed somewhat, and needs to change more drastically from the old "conquer nature and your neighbors" approach that drove us from prehistory through the end of the twentieth century.

My own advice as an old fart is to look at some of the abandoned technology that was better than it looked, and return to a standard of durability rather than continuing the conveyor belt of manufacturing and discarding flashy trash that performs impressively for a brief time before becoming useless. The useless items don't vanish or magically revert to their raw materials for re-use. And we have to keep buying, buying, buying, not for status but simply to be equipped for society's latest version of normal functioning. Beyond this boring assertion, I have nothing to say about how to conduct your sex life or present the body you  were born into in a way that satisfies the mind that lives within it. I don't give a shit what color you are. I read a person's affect as threatening or not, regardless of hue.

We need to care about racial matters now, because we have delayed reckoning with them for so long. Face it and get it over with. We can't pretend to be a colorblind society without acknowledging fully the injustices that framed everyday life and built the foundations of our precious republic. And we will never be able to pull apart the country that was made with so many disparate elements to make it into some white Anglo Saxon ninny's idea of America perfected.

Winner can't take all. The struggle to win it all will leave nothing worth having. You either believe in community or you are working toward global murder suicide. The time line for that might be long...or not. But the conclusion is inevitable. The current model of consumption is destroying the environment. Ethnic cleansing and warfare kill people and destroy places. Deportation just sends people out around the block until they eventually end up back again, if they haven't been killed somewhere enroute. Big, militarized countries controlling their spheres of influence have to repress their own people to keep order and deliver violence to the lesser countries to keep them in line. The time to choose the way forward is now. Community or hostility?

Thanks a lot, Osama bin Laden

 When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday, his speech demonstrated just how far the United States has fallen since the attacks on September 11, 2001, tipped us over the brink of fear and paranoia.

The forces behind Trump include more than just voraciously greedy billionaires. The likes of Stephen Miller care much less for riches than they do for the perceived safety of a monoculture hiding in a fortress, surrounded by a huge buffer zone of vassal states that will keep the bad brown people from hurting them.

September 11 was an act of terror, and it worked. It's been a slow-acting poison. Some consequences manifested themselves immediately, like the Patriot Act and our involvement in Afghanistan. The Iraq war was another highlight. But even without those, the internal divisions stressed by the terror attack turned into fractures that have weakened the structure of the United States almost to collapse. All of this is the result of the jelly-kneed fear of people like Stephen Miller.

The bigots posture and talk tough, but it is motivated by the desire to obliterate threats in a way that can never be possible without the complete annihilation of humanity. Fearful people invoke the use of force.

Trump, the man voted back into office by fearful people, stood before the international body formed in the aftermath of World War II to promote peace, diplomacy, and respect for human rights, and mused about obliterating Iran, bragged about kidnapping the president of Venezuela, threatened Cuba, and openly championed the concept that large, powerful, heavily militarized nations have the right to stomp on the smaller nations around them. It was a disgusting repudiation of the high principles that our country has claimed to stand for. We used to at least pretend to be the good guys.

Greed drove the plantation economy of the South. Greed drove the Native American genocide of western expansion. The elites of the South fostered racism to control their labor costs. Years later, Nazi Germany studied the treatment of Black people in the American South to inform their own white supremacy. Next thing you know, we had to go over there and help kill the monster our own policies had helped to create.

Healthy fear is sensible. It makes you alert and cautious. But fear is a continuum. Your healthy caution can mutate into paranoia. The terror and rage that swept over the United States when our bubble of invulnerability was pierced by four hijacked jetliners has led to a man who absolutely personifies greed and fear standing before the UN General Assembly and dragging our country down to the level of loudmouth dictators that everyone hates.

The Republican Party is driven more by greed than fear as they support this man. Maybe they fear him as a political influence, though that influence is waning, but in the meantime the money is good. The party had prepared itself well for his rise. Now they can't seem to pull him down. Or maybe it's just that they won't. They put party over country decades ago. I hope they show proper appreciation to Osama bin Laden for really pushing their cause. Without him, their struggle would have taken decades longer and perhaps failed completely. 

On the other side, the Democrats needed an infection like Trump to demonstrate just how bad a bargain they made when they cozied up to corporate money. I understand that they had to play the game as the game was being played in order to score at all, but instead of biting the hand that fed them in a quick and decisive way, they wavered and let the hand get a firm grip on their leash.

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.

Sorry, can't help you until just the right person is killed

 The street execution of Alex Pretti has galvanized resistance to the regime's overreach from both the right and the left. This surge has added to the criticism from right and left against the regime from its first swings of the wrecking ball in Jan. 20, 2025, and merged them into calls for actual removal of at least some of the malicious, incompetent toadies placed at the head of every cabinet department.

Is it a general human thing or just an American thing that an untenable situation can persist and grow, causing harm and death until it reaches a tipping point that triggers a wave of repudiation? It takes a certain level of infection to activate a society's immune system. Just the right people have to die.

It's hard to care about people you don't know. It's even hard to care about people you do know, when acknowledging them puts you in danger. How well do you know them?

Human sacrifices pile up, each one perhaps bringing a few more recruits to whatever cause is in play. The crisis we face now is no game. And it clearly goes way beyond brown people. Some of you may recall that some of us were saying that, back while there was still time to vote against the thunderous asshole now devastating the United States from its highest office. Ah well, water under the bridge...with the corpses of the fallen floating on it.

Comfortable people won't surrender comfort. People in precarious circumstances don't want to drop into a worse predicament. People in power do their best to keep the masses divided, distracted, and weak. But eventually, the right person is killed to break the tenuous stability of the oppressor.

In the current crisis, it has taken something like the death of Alex Pretti to alert masses of complacent white men that their oppressor isn't just DEI policies and quota hires, or women with the audacity to want to live as fully free and equal citizens. Sure, from their point of view it is all of those things, but now it's also a government trying to limit the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. Surprise! It wasn't the Democrats after all.

Don't be fooled that the complaints from the right indicate any softening of their traditional prejudices. Much of the objection to the regime from the right focused on how the regime hadn't been as odious as they promised to be. Hard right candidates are being primaried from even farther right. The problem will remain long after the visible pustule in the White House has been lanced and drained. In the meantime, however, the enemy of my enemy is temporarily convenient. A classic case of "right answer for the wrong reason," but the right answer nonetheless. We just have to be mindful that the next candidate the right puts forward will be trying to advance a lot of the same agenda without the conspicuous, proud offensiveness of the current reality TV cast.

"Let's walk down and get 'em all."

 The headline of this entry is the punchline to a joke you may already know. In it, a young bull says to an older bull, "Look at all those cows down there in the pasture! Let's run down and each get us one!" The older bull answers, "Let's walk down and get 'em all."

Ha ha, right? It's about getting laid. It's also not so subtly predatory in its depiction of male-female relations, but that's not today's focus. Today we look at its aspect of low-key patience.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said that the current regime in the White House needs to, "recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure they get back to get what they wanted to begin with -- and that is to remove people from the country."

It's a chillingly broad statement. Stephen Miller wants to remove more than half -- way more than half -- of the total population to get to the sparsely settled white homeland he has been pushing the regime to build for him. Steve Bannon regularly promotes the "great replacement theory" that views the immigration of non-white people into Europe and North America as a planned long game to outnumber and eventually overcome the white variant of human coloration. Abbott did not specify the number of people to remove. He merely suggested that a more methodical approach without the theatrics of military strikes on apartment buildings and street executions by short-tempered federal employees would yield a better result and not threaten Republican electoral chances as much.

The Republican campaign to purge people of a darker hue began with shock and awe demonstrations like the abduction of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others, to get a lot of immigrants, illegal and otherwise, to pack up and leave on their own, saving the regime money and enhancing their prestige as irresistible power. They have stuck with it, escalated, and poured money into it, long past the time when it was obviously generating resistance more than surrender.

A methodical, quiet campaign might seem to take longer than running in with flash-bangs, tear gas, pepper spray, and the occasional head shot, but it's their only chance. And the goal of sending 100 million people away is just ridiculous. However, they probably hope that a high aspiration will pull their actual results higher than if they truly concentrated on the worst of the worst and sifted only for violent criminals and non-white fraudsters. The shock and awe campaign gave a quick shot of deportations -- many of them completely improper and indefensible -- but it's losing traction now. A quieter approach below the threshold of public notice might have sent fewer people away initially, but could keep on disappearing individuals without arousing the massive public backlash that the atrocities in Minnesota have finally inspired.

There was pushback from the start, but the street executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti pushed it over the top. Particularly the murder of Pretti highlighted that the regime has no use for either of the first two amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. They'd already taken a big steaming dump on the fourth and fifth. They could snarkily claim that a federal agent making a snap decision to shoot someone dead in the street constitutes a very speedy and public trial as promised in the sixth, but a whole lot of other due process elements are missing. When the goons disarmed a legally permitted gun owner and then shot him, they kicked the biggest hornet's nest in American society.

It may be too late to spin this shit tornado down to a mere swirl of dust in a vacant lot. The damage is done. The current regime aspires to absolute tyranny. The stupid Supreme Court and their stupid "unitary executive theory" guaranteed that any president could become a dictator. They knew that the candidate under their banner had said that he wanted to be a dictator. No one should have been surprised when he immediately set out to be one. Forget "day one."

Even as allies of the dictator fall away, take note that they don't fall far. They used the current occupant of the Oval Office to get their brand of authoritarianism into power. They still want to rule rather than represent, because they know better than you do. Freedom does not come from God or any natural order. Freedom comes from them as they see fit to dole it out to you.

Any libertarian or outright anarchist will chime in at this point to say that the same principle applies to any rules or laws from a government with the power to field law enforcement agencies. Don't tell me I can't dump my waste oil right on the ground. The soil is sandy and soaks it right up! No problem! We have to walk a careful balance between letting people make their own decisions on the basis of their intelligence and morals, and limiting the damage caused by the multitude who have neither one. All are equal before the law, but that doesn't mean that the law should be powerless. Violators should be prosecuted.

Our elected legislators make the laws. We have to pay close attention to how those laws are worded and applied. Citizen government makes us all part of it. Big government? I'll say. Even if you demolish the formal structure, we are all governing each other in the aftermath, without a referee. Government is inescapable. Small government is far more dangerous than a full-size, every-adult-included representative democracy.

We'd all love to set it and forget it and devote ourselves to daily gratification of our impulses, but that is -- sadly -- completely impossible. It's like putting your SUV on cruise control and then hopping into the middle row seats to watch a video.

Guns are like sex

Republicans in New Hampshire have generally been producing the kind of legislation they produce everywhere else, encroaching on women's rights, gutting public education, chatting about returning to segregated schools, playing games with the tax laws to create the illusion that they're lowering property taxes when they're just shifting the burden to a different column in the ledger... the usual crap. However, they have introduced a bill that favors a controversial position of my own: firearms education.

We live in a country where there are already more guns than people. They're here. We have a whole amendment to the Constitution dedicated to preserving the right of ownership for ordinary citizens. It's been stretched way out of shape to help the firearms industry move vast amounts of merchandise, but the principle unfortunately continues to make sense in our primitive species. Any person should have the right to be armed.

Many of us, myself included, have not prioritized personal weaponry. I mean, I have a couple of firearms, and I've gone to the range as few times, but I can think of a lot of reasons not to be armed. Plus it's expensive and time consuming to become competent and remain in practice. You might think it's as simple as pulling the little lever thingy and whatever you're aiming at troubles you no more, but the device itself requires attentive care and maintenance. Your skills require regular range time. Ammunition itself isn't cheap. If you want more advanced tactical skills, that's another whole layer of training. That's also beyond the scope of what the Republicans and I propose is a good idea.

Here's the thing: guns are a part of the fabric of our society. Refusing to teach young people how they work and how to handle them is the same as insisting on abstinence-only sex education. You can be comprehensively educated about sex and decide to abstain. There are a lot of good reasons to abstain. There are also reasons to participate over a wide range of styles. Deciding from a place of ignorance is never a good idea. So is just learning it on the street.

Educating everyone robs the knowledge of its insider power for the people who had already sought it out. Giving everyone a functional base of exposure to the technology and terminology means that arguments against use have more strength. The aficionados can't sneer at your lack of technical vocabulary. Sure, there will always be higher levels of immersion, and changing slang to try to evade the outer circles. But no one will be completely outside the circle.

Obviously, the teachers have to be well screened, but that's true anyway. And the curriculum has to be scrupulously neutral. So the text of the bill may allow for or even nudge toward a pro-gun bias, and that's not good. But the basic idea is sound.

Guns are widely available. They will remain pretty accessible in this country unless there are some drastic -- and probably undesirable -- changes in government. Sure, we need to tighten up access quite a bit, but it's decades too late to make them all go away.

Even now, Second Amendment folks on the "left" are coming out in response to ICE atrocities, to indicate that the stakes for the front line agents might be higher than the happy hooligans anticipated. It's not a great development, but it does demonstrate that the Bill of Rights cuts both ways.

Levels of training on both sides probably span a range from utter noobs to ex-military or law enforcement. If actual fighting broke out, it would be a mess. That's true of fighting in general. The mess gets worse as the use of weapons increases. But one thing that could cut through the gunslinger fantasies would be actual education. It gives everyone a basic informed vocabulary. It sets a baseline standard for what everyone knows about the uses, dangers, rights, and responsibilities inherent in having and using a gun.

Next, institute my plan for driver education that requires anyone getting a license for the first time to have to use a bicycle for transportation for a full year, whether it's 12 continuous months (impractical with our winters) or just a total of 12 months collected over no more than a three-year period.

Norms vs Effectiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The warrior kings of capitalism

The petty kings of corporate empires swagger through their lives as if they had led armies to conquest. None of them did. The real warrior kings kicked ass on their own behalf. In more modern times, your stereotypical gangster has racked up at least a murder or two themselves before rising to upper management. The present kings of corporate states, on the other hand, have not fought any of their own battles. If armed force was needed, they hired it from the countries in which they are nominally headquartered, or perhaps from the murder-for-hire mercenary contractor industry.

A historical warrior king would need personal security: bodyguards, a palace regiment, things like that. Our modern corporate potentates need that personal protection now, as well, because they've pissed off so many people. A warrior king in or shortly past his prime might be able to serve as his own last line of defense. How many of the current crop of corporate tyrants could do the same? They have to hire everything. They need poor people they can trust, when poor people in general cannot trust them.

The right wing has a conflicted relationship with poor people. On the one hand, they need us to do the dirty work. On the other hand, our poor character is what makes us poor: we're lazy moochers who breed like hamsters. And a lot of poor people are not Caucasian. They have to meet a more stringent standard to be acceptable. Maybe they rise to the level of a Clarence Thomas in their service to white wealth and patriarchy. Maybe serving as a social media influencer is enough to preserve their illusion that they will be okay when power completely solidifies in a few hands.

From the top down, ruthlessness is the guiding principle. Survival of the most useful. It's presented as meritocracy, but who determines merit? The people writing the checks. They might as well rule by divine decree, because they judge from a high throne, controlling the lives of the masses with their manipulation of the economy.

The philosophy is seductively hard-core. Down among the workers, we divide ourselves on the basis of world view. The right talks about rugged individualism and ascribes all success to personal virtues of courage, strength, industriousness, and intelligence. In grayed-out text, barely readable, are the words "and race." That text is emerging more and more boldly, but they still maintain a little plausible deniability to allow space for their non-white allies to be used now and discarded later.

The left speaks of collectivism, which divides into many branches. Those range from benign social support programs to totalitarian control of all industry and business. From right or left, totalitarian control is undesirable. But is it avoidable? The world grows more and more crowded. Technology gives the controlling class more and more powerful tools with which to exert that control.

By breeding a chronic inferiority complex among the workers, the ruling class perpetuates the system by which the lower orders keep each other in line. Your value is directly proportional to how much of your life you sell to other people. If you are lucky enough to work at something that fulfills you creatively, the sale of your hours goes to produce the work by which you define yourself. For instance, the young man who recently built us a small deck and a fence takes great pride in his craftsmanship. He asks for referrals from anyone who has hired him, to line up more and more jobs. But there are only so many hours in a day, and there's only one of him. Like every contractor I've ever known, he has to juggle simultaneous jobs among clients who all want their job done yesterday. We may try to be patient, but inevitably chafe at delays. Still, he can rate his success on the work he gets and how well he does it.

Most of the rest of us look for "work-life balance" because our jobs were a compromise between what we really wanted to do and what we ended up doing, just so we could have shelter and food.

Can you have work-life balance when your job is to take a bullet for the rich bastard if necessary?

Marc Elias has written about billionaire capitulation to the Trump regime, but it isn't capitulation. It's the open acknowledgement that government and the top echelon of the private sector have completely merged. There is absolutely nothing adversarial in that relationship. The corporatocracy has claimed the power.

The last vestiges of the electoral system mean that we still have the power to catapult them out of there. While the party of big business works feverishly to cripple the power of voters before the next election, they also realize that voters are conditioned to apathy. Mass psychology favors the status quo, and the status quo gave us the shitshow that we're in now. Massive turnout of voters opposed to any or all of what the regime is doing now and its successors plan for later would stop them dead. What are the odds? It would either beat them back or force them to drop all pretense and try to suppress us by force.

The threat of force from our ruthless overlords is scary, but what's the choice? Let them rule and they will soon resort to strong-arm tactics even more widespread than they are now. So: vote against them now and maybe there's a scuffle, or roll over for them and hope that the jackboot never lands on your particular neck.

The Democratic Party's accidental 4-D chess

 The Democratic Party has been a consistent disappointment at least since Lyndon Johnson buried us balls-deep in the Vietnam War. I mean, they've had their moments, but even after Watergate the party couldn't get the White House back for more than one term between 1972 and 1992. The Democrats did control Congress until the mid 1990s, but that power crumbled as well.

The Vietnam War was very much a bipartisan endeavor, from all the way back when it was our French allies getting forced out of their colony in Indochina. But it became the Republican Party's problem when the Nixon administration viewed it as not a burden but a joy when they took over from the departing Johnson administration. They became the party of war, of the military-industrial complex, of heavy handed reactions to protest under leaders like California governor Ronald Reagan.

The Democratic Party pivoted to an anti-war stance, or at least a portion of it did. It had already stressed itself by passing civil rights legislation. Now it dallied with being "soft on Communism." This was the era when you could buy bumper stickers that had a picture of a peace sign with the caption "footprint of the American chicken." Yep, even then, masculine virtue was linked to fighting in any war assigned to you, to prove that your physical courage -- or the insecure need to project its image -- far outweighed your moral courage.

Regardless of the party in power, our country made social progress on multiple fronts, as well as enacting environmental protections that addressed some of the more obvious pollution and degradation effectively enough to make industry organize politically and economically against government. As elections became more and more just sales campaigns, and society grew more noisy and complicated, voters were easier and easier to distract and divert while powerful financial interests focused on taking control.

A philosophical basis isn't really a detailed plan, but generation after generation of Republican politicians advanced the idea that the rich should be allowed to become richer. Because every American liked the idea of being rich, having seen the freedom, luxury, and leisure that the top tier enjoyed, even on the hippie side of the aisle no one seemed averse to making a pile if they could. During the dark age when a Democrat couldn't get within sniffing distance of the presidency, this embrace of a prosperity gospel seeped in to saturate them. The neoliberal was born.

Mind you, I witnessed most of this as a dipshit kid, and later as a dipshit adult. I always had this vision of a country and a world where everyone had enough, no one had too much, and we were all fine with it. I mean, how stupid is that? It seemed to me then, and still does, that it requires the least wasted effort on cruelty and the artificial suffering of war, for the most return on the true simple pleasures of life. As far as I could tell, I was nearly alone in this belief. There was absolutely no political machinery devoted to something so benign. But if anyone was going to pay it lip service it was probably Democrats. It was a thread in the successful campaign of Bill Clinton to finally unseat the Republican fuddy-duddies who acted like grandparents and made our government smell like mothballs and cordite.

Of course the Democrats couldn't break the Republican hold on the Oval Office without the leverage of corporate money. Someone has to pay for the media saturation. So lip service was all we got, along with incremental tidbits.

The partisan divide is the reason so many voters identify as unaffiliated. Shallow observers identify this as "the middle," where the wishy washy majority loll in contemptible political apathy, but it's more than that. It's a diverse ecosystem of assorted malcontents. We are all afflicted by the same foul forces from above. And here's where the accidental 4-D chess comes in.

There's some chess involved in governing, but what is chess anyway? It's a game with known pieces on a finite board. Seriously, after all these years with so many documented games, why doesn't every game between Grand Masters end in a draw? Any top level player knows where the pieces go and has gamed out every possibility. But in real life, a player blinks, forgets, or is successfully distracted for just long enough. Politics and government take place on an almost infinite board with many more pieces, none of them reliably under direct control. Philosophies that stress obedience to authority have an advantage keeping their pieces moving where the plan requires, so authoritarianism has come to dominate. But the combination of Republican centralized authority and Democratic structural instability may finally have pissed off enough of that reachable rabble of independent minds to get them to mutiny and take control of the one party still up for grabs and publicly devoted to the general welfare. The brilliant, accidental move by establishment Democrats has been finally to demolish themselves and let the next wave climb the rubble to plant a flag and build something better.

Some of us have been waiting a long time for a politically viable number of people to catch up. Maybe they finally have. The party label only matters because branding still matters. The Democrats were the party of slavery in the 1850s and the party of civil rights in the 1960s. The Republicans were the party of abolition in the 1860s and the party of cronyism and corruption in the Gilded Age. But we're comfortable with the names. I don't care what you call it. Just get busy proving that life really will be better when the lowest are lifted and the highest are hauled down a few notches.

It's never going to happen like the flip of a switch. Progressive activists today hiss angrily that the Democrats never really intended to fix anything, because they so seldom succeed. This narrow-minded perpetuation of the blame game betrays a youthful naivete about human nature and the political headwinds that nominal members of the same party face in their highly varied home regions. Democrats have been the less popular party for so long that they are always more worried that a backlash will whisk them out of office or that a "blue wave" will roll back leaving them flopping helplessly on parched sand before they can spawn a new generation. 

Ignorance and malice always move with great confidence. We are by far a country of bystanders when it comes to elected office. Snappy put-downs resonate with us as an audience, because most of us have never had to try to bring together disparate factions to enact large-scale policies against well-funded resistance. The oversimplification gives these darts a sharp point and a sticking barb. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom.

Cynics are disappointed optimists. Don't let the bitterness fool you.

As always, success comes down to gathering the votes. Candidates and their organizations have thousands and millions of cats to herd to get everyone to go to the polls at all and then to make the desired choice. Then the actual legislating starts, with more votes to wrangle from officials gathered together from all across the sprawling country. Each one comes with their own set of leashes and tripwires installed by everyone who had a hand in getting them there. Some of the strings are clearly visible, some are not. Even the ones not obviously owned by some power bloc are answerable to the voters back home, some of them placid, others highly volatile.

It's scriptural to them...

On the subject of elder care costs today, the shop owner shared that the cost of his father's residence in the veteran's home had surged to more than $10,000 a month since the death of his mother. He was talking to a family friend who currently works as a plumber after selling his family's heating oil business a few years ago. The plumber griped that the government cuts funding for veterans and spends the money on "illegals." He blurted that out without the slightest hesitation. It's as true as God's word.

Therein lies a big problem. Our whole political system runs on public opinion. It's how we, the people, decide who gets our vote. The GOP has managed to make "illegals" the catch-all for the nation's ills. By extension, the Democrats  -- who try to enact humane policies and easier pathways to citizenship -- are evil because they don't vigorously persecute immigrants in general and undocumented ones in particular.

Hard-working people like simple answers. "Democrats spend too much money helping illegals, so our own people get short-changed" places blame instantly for the nation's problems. The solutions is simple: get rid of the illegals. To do that, get rid of Democrats.

Since the vast majority of people right around here are white, and most of them work in practical trades where they identify problems and fix them through straightforward direct action, they gravitate to the idea that you just have to get yourself a good, honest job and work hard at it to extract a decent living from the rich people who own the money supply and kindly share it with us.

Inheriting a well-established family business doesn't hurt, either. The plumber is no billionaire, and he's done more than his share of mucking around in nasty basements and crawl spaces installing and servicing systems, but he also never had to apply for work, especially far from his birthplace and home town.

The willing labor of these unconscious beneficiaries of privilege genuinely entitles them to more than just flippant dismissal. In a very white state like New Hampshire, nearly every role is filled by a white person, including "impoverished dirtbag." Contempt for the poor is not linked to race here. Interestingly, this does nothing to blunt the racism with which bigots view the problems of those other places where the gangs are awful and the migrants swarm in to rape the women, force drugs on unwilling clients, eat the pets, freeload on the welfare system and still take a lot of good jobs from good Americans.

The great Puritan work ethic can be summed up thusly: misery loves company. The virtuous toilers who have done fine for themselves can't imagine life any other way. Around there, they serve the wealthy with a smile, but they don't become friends. I really don't know if they envy the fortunes of the leisure class, while voting reliably to make sure that the leisure class remains in control. You work in that system and don't complain. If you try to change things, it's because you are lazy and you're looking for a way to slack off at others' expense.

New Hampshire is isolated from the major conflict zones in the United States right now, but it is not isolated from broadcast and internet media. As the former first in the nation presidential primary state, New Hampshire has bred into its population the idea that they are politically astute. The congressional delegation at this time is all Democrats, but the state legislature and many local offices are dominated by Republicans. At the local level, conservative attitudes dominate, shaped by the national information machinery that keeps the right wing unified by the same oversimplifications and distortions.

Tariffs are the key to happy taxpayers

 No one loves to pay their taxes, but the right wing is particularly responsive to the lure of tax cuts. For the rich, this gratifies their lust to be richer and richer and richer. The majority of tax cuts go to them. In return, they fund the election campaigns that recruit the small fry who will get a token markdown from time to time.

For the small fry, hatred of income taxes stems largely from their dislike of doing math. Underfunding education serves a key function in this. Not only does it appease the cheapskates to cut a major cost like schools, it also creates generation after generation of voters who will leap at a promise of tax cuts because they never learned how the system works.

No one likes sales taxes, either. You see a price, you go to check out, and blammo: you have to pay more. This is where tariffs are the ingenious solution to all of that.

Do away with income and sales taxes. People get to take home all of their pay. Maybe retain the deduction for Social Security and Medicare for a while... but for the most part, what you see is what you get, and the ticketed price on any item is what you pay. However, the price of any item has been jacked up by the tariff amount. It's an invisible tax. A loaf of bread might be $25. A car might cost a hundred grand. But the price is the price, and you never have to do extra math. Everything will cost a lot more. People won't really be better off financially. Probably worse, in fact, especially because tariffs and sales taxes always hit lower income people harder than they hit the rich. But it won't matter, because "other countries are paying."

Republican mouthpieces are already crowing on social media about the billions that the current regime has raked in from tariffs. As long as they can keep a significant percentage of people believing that tariffs bring in money from outside the country, and that the resulting inflation is somehow the fault of the opposing political party, they can rule over a happy populace in their "tax free" paradise.

Winning and losing and fighting dirty

 I've caught some chatter about Democrats pushing their elected representatives to fight more like Republicans. You know: dirty.

While Republicans are great at obstructionist politics, it's mostly because conservatism has really degenerated into nothing but obstructionism, combined with outright reversion to much uglier, less free, more violent past forms of our national and state governments. This is painted as some idealized, moral society of small town virtue and agricultural wholesomeness. It never existed, and its architects know that. They're just selling the fantasy of manly men and appreciative women to an audience hungry for a simpler moral landscape than reality ever provides. Conflict resolution goes from strong words to bare knuckles to six-guns. Might makes right.

Politicians lie. You have to filter for the percentage of lies, the persistence of the lies, and rhetorical goals of the lies. You have to vet the truth, too. It's hard, because a candidate for office, even if they're the incumbent, is asking you to believe that they will bring you what you want, when they haven't yet. And these better things have to be the result of a widespread cooperative effort among a majority of the elected officials. No single savior can do it, not even an imperial President.

The critical difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans only want their team to win, whereas Democrats want the whole country to win. The Republicans view their team as the only true Americans, while the Democrats have taken the position that the United States is a work in progress, evolving by absorbing a diverse population enjoying individual liberty responsibly in a cooperative endeavor to create a more perfect union.  

Each political party's vision of the future is quite different. Individual humans regardless of party affiliation are susceptible to human failings of greed, lust, and denial, but that doesn't mean that "both parties are the same." Horny Bill Clinton was not the same as horny Newt Gingrich when it came to governing philosophy.

Elections are sales campaigns. Politicians are service providers who carry out their jobs more or less constantly in the public eye. The House of Representatives is full of people you may never have heard of unless they do something stupendous or outrageous, but the voters of their districts mostly know who they are and what they do. Senators have higher profiles, because there are fewer of them. Thus we are all affected by the decisions of people we have no chance to vote for. We have no leverage except to appeal to their morality or intellect. And legislators among themselves have to negotiate constantly to make laws and otherwise fulfill their duties while remaining electable at home. When voters periodically heave a bunch of them out, the deal process has to start all over again.

Universal access to the same information, through broadcast media and the internet gives people in vastly different circumstances a deceptively uniform portrayal of the world outside their immediate surroundings. People collect in their echo chambers, but the chambers channel each other's messaging to stitch into the fabric of the tailored message to their followers. We argue in general about the same broad topics regardless of where we live. The issues might be real, but the life experience of the audience is not the same. Come election time, only the voters in each Congressional district get to vote for the politician who will carry their standard to DC to help make things better or worse for people who live in the myriad of other districts all over the country.

Democrats have an image problem that won't be solved by becoming more like Republicans. They tried that in the 1990s and ended up with more corporate influence as we got dragged further to the right. On the other hand, political power ultimately does originate in the voters. One could infer that the shift to the right reflected the overall character of the majority of voters. The key phrase there is "majority of voters." Especially in midterm elections, voter turnout represents less than half of registered voters in most states, sometimes much less than half. And that's only registered voters. Adults who are eligible to vote but don't register don't show up in statistics. But they do show up in the bitching and moaning.

Voting is a process of elimination. In an election where the winner has 52 percent and the loser has 48, 48 percent of the winning total just went to cancel out the loser's votes. The more people who actually show up and cast a ballot, the more accurately the results represent the beliefs of the adults in the district in question, whether it's local, state, congressional, senatorial, or presidential. The electoral college sucks, but it would matter a lot less if voters turned out en masse every time, and voted on more than a single issue or two. Voting can be discouraging when you don't see the improvements you were hoping for, or keep losing over and over because sports fan mentality has replaced critical thinking.

Meanwhile, elections have consequences. In Missouri, voters passed a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage and require sick leave. One and done, right? Wrong. The Republican legislature and governor decided that they rule over the mere voters, so they passed legislation reversing the decision. This is a pitfall of our representative democracy, when the elected officials decide that the disadvantaged minority they really answer to is rich donors. Voters install the officials, but the officials then have the power to implement the policies and laws under which ordinary citizens live. I would have said under which everyone lives, but we all see how the system goes lightly on prominent people. And legislators all too often exempt themselves as well.

Some Democrats are operating more aggressively, but it's a fine line between beating the other team at their own game and becoming as bad as they are. As Texas prepares to gerrymander their state even more aggressively to counter the losses Republicans expect in Congress as a result of their unpopular and destructive Big Steaming Pile of a Bill, California has floated the notion of redistricting to dilute republican power there, to counteract the expected shift in election results in the Lone Star State. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's only a battle tactic. The real winning strategy for the country as a whole would be a law requiring nonpartisan redistricting nationwide at all levels. Make politicians run on the issues, not on their party affiliation. Good luck getting that passed when so many members of Congress got there from gerrymandered districts, but we can dream.

In New York, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has run a thoughtful and energetic campaign to promote the ideas as well as the candidate, to put a human face on the bogeyman of a progressive Muslim vying to head the government of the most populous city in the United States. It's not fighting dirty at all. It's communicating intelligently. If the Democratic Party is going to turn the tide of authoritarianism being driven by the current degenerated state of the Republican Party, thoughtful communication will be at least as important as clever and hostile political maneuvers. Successful hostilities gratify party faithful, but they make genuine mutual understanding less and less possible. "They kill one of ours, we kill one of theirs..." This only creates two committed minorities, each incapable of winning a free and fair election on their own, fighting for the uncommitted voters increasingly turned off by both of them.

The Republicans were the good guys in the Civil War, but by the end of the 19th Century they had become the tools of plutocracy. Democrats notoriously presided over rigged towns like Chicago, and were the power behind Southern racist politics throughout most of the 19th Century, and well into the 2oth. General party characteristics of either side blend with local variations, so you have to pay attention to the details where you happen to be. Listen to what the candidates say. Pay attention to what they actually do when they get into office. Communicate often, in clear and constructive terms.

I hate talking to people, especially about politics and government. I would much rather take some time over a piece of writing than have to think fast on my feet, summoning up the examples I know someone will ask for. I greatly admire people who can do that and bring receipts. It's especially gratifying when those receipts will stand up to fact checking. Communicate in your preferred way.

The Americans who want to get us back on track to save the small-d democratic portion of our great republican government have no immediate choice but to back capital D Democrats in large numbers. We can sort the rest out later, but right now we're fighting the battle with the troops we have, and the weapons they bring. The system needs a reset to make Congress take its job seriously, make the courts independent again, and the President less of a quasi-monarch. We won't get there in one or two elections, but we won't ever get there if we don't take the first step. Vote for Democrats and then don't just release them into the wild. Stay on them and hold them accountable, as you would with anyone you hired to represent you. It's a nuisance and a pain in the ass, but it's the basis of the Constitution from which comes your beloved right to yap off and carry a gun. If they let you down, don't flip to the other party without checking out their plans thoroughly. Instead, vote in primaries, to refine the trajectory, not turn the gun on ourselves.

United States unleashes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

 Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The United States has become the harbinger of death, the agent of suffering and evil across the globe. Trump voters must be so proud.

We invite disease back into our own country through anti-vaccine bullshit. We facilitate its spread in the world by cutting funding for AIDS treatment and withdrawing funding from medical research.

We allow our Defense Department to strut and pose, and drop expensive bombs on regions already volatile, where the detonations will not quell the anger that dwells there. Tough guy rhetoric from the television host who was hired to portray the Secretary of Defense reinforces the bombast from the reality television character portraying the President.

The cruel tyrant, aided by greedy billionaires, cut foreign aid, throwing millions of people, including children, into deeper poverty and the certainty of famine.

This regime is centered on death. Its supporters pride themselves on their cruelty toward the people they deem inferior, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their god.  They detain and deport children with cancer, cutting them off from their treatment Everything they do is geared toward the destruction of millions, billions of people, so that the survivors can have lebensraum. They don't have allies. They have enemies and subordinates. They don't have a vision of shared humanity, they have a dream of monoculture enforced by conquest.

Would-be conquerors have had thousands of years to try to make it work. Their efforts have always ended in a tide line of dried blood where they crested and fell back, or simply dried up in place. The story of empire is ultimately one tragic failure after another. From the mid 20th Century, super power has only been held through the threat of murder suicide. It's a global abusive relationship.

The United States had a chance to be something different. There was a lot wrong in our past, but some of us were trying to make it right as best we could. Instead, the current party in power wants to return to the wrong and intensify it. Choose your world.

People only vote against

The Republican Party figured out decades ago that people don't vote for things, they vote against them. What is conservatism but the commitment to hold back change? What is bigotry but the insistence that a particular group should be prevented from taking a full and equal place?

The opponents of this exclusionary point of view vote against it at every opportunity.

Voting for civil rights was voting against firehoses, and police dogs, and police with teargas, and lynch mobs. Look at how progress on civil rights slowed and has reversed when the tools of oppression became almost invisible except to the people on whom they were used.

Voting for environmental protection was voting against brown air, and rivers that catch fire, and polluted groundwater, and pesticides sickening and killing humans and wildlife alike. And so much more. The idea of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been a harder sell, because they are less obvious. Are we against an earlier spring when winter is so damn dreary? How bad is it really? Maybe we won't get devastating super storms this summer. And aren't the early crocuses a welcome sight?

The Democratic Party has been rightly inspired and energized by Cory Booker's historic marathon speech in the Senate on Monday and Tuesday, and with the resounding defeat of billionaire Elon Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin supreme court election. I have received a blizzard of fundraising emails and seen a barrage of social media exhortations to rally the faithful with the idea that "we can win elections!"

Here's the thing: Neither party can win an election with its base alone. The margin of victory always lies with the unfaithful. I can't speak for elections before I was born, or old enough to understand, but you could say that Franklin Roosevelt came to power because the voters were rejecting the Republican mismanagement that had wrecked the national economy. They continued to support him because they liked what he was doing -- so they voted for it, but by extension voted against letting the screwups who had wrecked things in the first place get control again. Then, through World War II, FDR remained at the helm because voters didn't want to disrupt leadership.

Truman won his election in 1948 basically on voter complacency. All the experts had stated pretty strongly that he was sure to lose. Come 1952, the voters voted against letting the Democrats continue their hold on the White House after 20 years in power.

Policies are important. Our economy has been mutilated and our elections sold out by the policies championed by Republicans. They have been largely unopposed by corporate Democrats, but corporate Democrats are a product of the corrupting influence of big money on elections. I apologize for my generation, but I think that a great many of the Baby Boomers believed that they (we) were not only going to enjoy the most protected childhoods any generation had received that far in history, but that we were also somehow miraculously going to become rich. It should have been obvious by the late 1980s at least that we were wrong, but faith is persistent. That's what makes it faith.

The bigotry just came along for the ride.

Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 because voters voted against Nixonian shenanigans, which slopped over onto Gerald Ford by association. Reagan won in 1980 because voters voted against what was seen as Carter's weakness in the face of global threats, and the faltering economy as the country as a whole was deciding what to do with itself after partying for most of the 1970s.

Bill Clinton won in 1992 because the Reagan recession had eroded faith in the Republican brand. You could say that we voted for youthful enthusiasm, but that also means that we voted against stodgy old men. But then in 2000, voters voted against Clinton's sexual escapades, which stuck to Al Gore like a suspicious, waist-high crust on the Oval Office drapery.

It seems like the thing that the uncommitted voters (and the Republican base) seem to like to vote against the most is their own interests. That's a tough one, because they're also voting against "socialism," "terrorism," "lawlessness" (particularly hilarious), "tyranny," "government overreach," "globalization," all of which need to be addressed with counteracting negatives. Because they're never going to vote for you.

Voters in Wisconsin voted against Elon Musk. They might have voted against what the MAGA candidate for the supreme court seat represented, but Elon really crystalized it for them. That jackass is so despised, people are setting fire to his cars even in other countries. He's living proof that you really can be too rich. It's encouraging that enough voters wanted to prove that democracy was not for sale on that day in that state in that race. Now let's see them bring that same energy to every other election in every other place.

As much as we all want to be positive and live in a supportive environment, we can never escape the essential negativity that goes into choosing our elected champions. As a representative -- rather than a direct -- democracy, we have to pick people who will defend our position up where the decisions finally get their legal weight. We the people do have the power, but that requires us to exert it every day, not just on election day or -- worse yet -- only on occasional election days. This ain't your church. You can't just show up on Christmas and Easter, have a slug of wine and a piece of bread and call yourself right with the Lord. The politicians need to hear and see what we are against, every day.

Negatives can be positive. I'm against bigotry, persecution, environmental destruction, sprawl, overpopulation, anthropogenic climate change, moto-centric transportation planning, and so on. That means I am for the policies that act against these things.

In the film Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey's character suddenly gets to receive the prayers of everyone in the world. It's an overwhelming flood of messages asking for benedictions or divine wrath. This is basically what an elected official faces. We owe deep gratitude to them and their long-suffering staff members who get buried in this avalanche. However, every contact shapes political decision making. They have to hear it everywhere they go. It doesn't have to be obnoxious direct confrontation, although sometimes that is warranted and makes highly entertaining video. It just has to surround them. While you live as you believe people should live, narrate it to no one and everyone. Make no secret of it. Drop them a note from time to time. Keep it short and courteous. Just try to remember to be there, in their inbox or voicemail or even an old fashioned paper letter.

Citizen government is hard. Benjamin Franklin didn't know the half of it when he said, "A republic...if you can keep it." We have way more to keep track of than he ever imagined. But it is more important than ever to pay attention. I know it's hard. We can't know everything. We have to trust office holders and civil servants to take care of the sensitive stuff in a way that will promote the general welfare and not reflect badly on our national image. We're certainly not getting that now.

The big challenge for a party interested in ultimately positive goals is to find the right negative approach to gather in the fearful and pissed off to support them for more than one lousy election cycle at a time.

The Constitution fails when one side bails

 Democrats should definitely continue their token resistance through the traditional methods of debate and deal-making. Republicans will honor it about the way that Russia honors arms limitation treaties, but it's important to maintain the structure of the system that should be in effect, in case we get back to it at some point.

We could be very close to the point at which the current regime could just start having rivals poisoned, pushed out of windows, or killed in bathtub and stairwell falls, and there would be no meaningful penalty. This is not because law enforcement is completely owned by the dictator and his organized crime syndicate, but because enough police and judges are compromised to slow things down by sheer internal friction and purposeful inefficiency.

Some alarmists warn that the regime is just looking for an excuse to impose martial law. I say that they don't need to, nor do they want to. Trump might be so vain and stupid, but the right underling or puppeteer might be able to explain to him how that makes his life more complicated and could interfere with golf. As it stands now, the regime could open fire on protesters anyway, on some trumped-up excuse. The faithful would back him. The opposition would explode into arguments among themselves about exactly why what he did was wrong, while coordinating exactly zero effective response. Suits would be filed. Charges would be suggested, but probably never brought.

The "armed patriots" who have insisted for decades that they were gathering their forces and arsenals to fight just this sort of tyranny will do nothing, because the tyranny will be acting out their own wishes. They've only ever wanted the freedom to be dicks to whoever they dislike. The regime represents the pinnacle of that. Those assholes stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to keep that bigotry firmly in power. They rejoice at its return.

I wish I could say that there is a concrete course of action, a road map to reclaim democracy. Maybe we get there through the 2026 midterms, if the regime hasn't assassinated all viable Democratic candidates.

Will mass protests turn the trick? They suggest that the country could rise in even greater unrest, but what happens to most of those crowds when a hail of lead tears through one or more of those gatherings? We may find out. On the other hand, the Democrats suck so badly at coordinated public messaging that Gavin Newsom is now laughing it up with Charlie Kirk while Chuck Schumer embarrasses the party almost daily with attempts to be cool. And that's hardly the full scope of silly antics and betrayals. The Democrats all seem to agree on the single fact that the current regime is a threat to ordinary citizens, particularly the ones who don't fit into the narrow columns in which the right wing puts their "free people." The prospect is so legitimately monstrous that the diverse segments of the Democratic coalition are panicking a little bit. Someone needs to do something, and do it fast... okay, let's hear it.

The sad fact is, a better country has always depended on lots and lots of people making the same choice without coercion, to accept each other's benign weirdness and focus on the real problems brought about by the lust for power and wealth that has defined success for far too many generations.

We must resist all of the efforts underway now to homogenize the country and turn it toward global authoritarianism. The same "armed patriots" who grumble about government overreach only care about what impacts them directly. They cheer for Hungary's Orban and Russia's Putin. They're even warming up to Kim Jong-Un. They like what's happening here too much to do anything substantial to stop it now or undo the damage and beef up firewalls against it if democracy comes back to win this round.

Among the majority of voters less inclined to revel in violence, too many still succumb to distractions like transphobia, fetuses, or specific favorite aspects of law and order and playing by the rules. Examples include immigrants who want to get tough on immigrants, and people with student loans who don't want to see anyone else's financial prospects improve because theirs never did. For many generations, each generation did see average gains, even if every individual didn't experience those gains. Since the 1980s, we've increasingly emphasized resentment, jealousy of the advantages that younger generations enjoy, rather than a sense of accomplishment at having contributed to them.

I understand: the little shits don't seem to appreciate how good they've got it. They waste their advantages in ways that we never would. Little bastards...grumble grumble. Also, a lot of the gains in the industrialized, consumerist world came at the expense of future generations who are here now to rebuke us. Dammit! That future was supposed to be comfortably far away, along with the worst consequences of our environmental devastation. We weren't supposed to experience those directly! We were just supposed to cash in on our Exxon Mobil stocks to finance our luxurious retirements.

The  Republicans gain and consolidate power by narrowing options and making life seem simple. They rate success on the basis of whom they make unhappy. The Democrats fail because the disparate groups they gather from the many who reject the right wing focus on favorite parts of the tangle of interconnected problems. They add or withhold their support based on those specifics to the detriment of overall progress on a broad, though irregular, front. The Democrats need to make more people happy for more of the time, just to tread water, let alone to gain. Figure out how to do that. When you do, let us all know.

Staying elected

 I'm getting emails telling me to press my Democratic senators and congressional representative to hold the line against the Trump administration and demand guardrails against the blatantly unconstitutional devastation and pillage of DOGE and cabinet members purposely selected to destroy their agencies or use them as tools of Trump's personal vengeance. These are worthy and necessary goals, but they're running up against the endlessly grinding wheel of the election cycle.

New Hampshire identifies as Republican even though the entire Congressional delegation is Democratic. Those Democrats manage to piece together enough factors to appeal to a majority of voters. But it could flip at any time. The majority in the state legislature are Republicans, and mostly hard right. The countryside is studded with Trump flags and signs even now.

Without a Congressional majority, Democrats can't do anything that will stop Trump completely. Even if they could, Democrats in swing states would have to impress enough right-leaning independents to retain their seats so that they could continue the fight. If they lose, a senate seat goes out of reach for six years. A Representative goes out for two. If that provides or perpetuates a Republican majority, their program continues, perhaps with new energy.

It's not just about staying in power. It's about continuing work in progress. The Republicans have the power now because they have no work in progress in the government. They can sub in any yokel who can get elected to swing a sledgehammer or a pickaxe. The painstaking work on their side has been done in places like the Heritage Foundation and right wing media. All of that has just been a setup to get their wrecking crew in place. They could literally just jump up and down and throw feces at this point.

You might think that Democrats would then be free to field a variety of candidates, but for some perverse reason the Republican shit show still draws significant support. It manages to attract a small percentage of self-identified "thoughtful" voters who believe that they are supporting some kind of coherent policy. Once they realize that they've wasted their vote it's too late. Maybe they reject the candidate they picked the first time, but their conservative leaning means that they're ripe to believe the marketing they hear and see about the replacement goon put up next by the Republicans.

The Democrats aren't a pure force for good by any means. In states where they are the entrenched power, human nature dictates that they succumb to corruption at the same rates as their right-wing counterparts. Maybe the goals of it are different in some cases, but the methods are still questionable or illegal. It's significant that the Trump administration has reached across the aisle to pardon corrupt Democrats like Eric Adams and Rod Blagojevich. It proves that criminality is the unifying principle, not any of the political, economic, and social philosophies they claimed as talking points in the campaign. Rod Blagojevich?! Who even remembered who that was? His name was fun to say, though.

I can tell an elected official what I wish would happen. I can advise. But I know that they know things that I don't. They're dealing with the situation in person, and coordinating information from their state and districts. They have to run the calculation constantly to find the balance between what a portion of their constituency says it wants and what will actually fly. I'm as disgusted and disappointed by John Fetterman as anyone, but I also know that he's balancing the input from his diverse state, attempting to represent them fairly and stay in place to advance better values when the opportunity arises. He seems like a duplicitous asshole to some of us right now, but maybe he's not a complete Manchin or Sinema.

At least he's no Tulsi.

Is it ideal? Of course not. But the strength of democracy is also its weakness. At every election, the candidates have to persuade a majority of eligible voters to pick them. The process never ends. Every action is scrutinized and analyzed, packaged and presented by all interested parties to guide the choice for or against.