It's about money

 A Twitter (X) thread highlighted the book The MAGA Diaries, by Tina Nguyen, about her experiences early in her career, embedded in the right wing media machine. She has emerged from that now, more concerned with truth than ideology. So that's good.

The poster highlighted the handicap that the Democrats have compared to the Republicans in spreading a coordinated and continuous message to voters. One point stuck out more than any other: The poster referred to Republicans as having "the professional right," well-funded indoctrination programs to attract and train young talent to continue to push the aims of old plutocrats to keep their power intact. She complained that there is no "professional left," despite right wing claims that Democrats wield such an apparatus.

The left is represented by hundreds of small, underfunded groups, broadcasting what seems important to them, but with little reach. The poster calls for a coordinated program funded to the tune of billions of dollars. The goal is to construct a left-wing echo chamber that is equal to or greater than the one on the right.

Two problems with that right away: First, most of the billionaires are Republicans or Libertarians. And rich Libertarians don't really believe in liberty for all, they just believe in avoiding taxes and using their own freedom to protect their wealth. Second, the left revolts at the notion of moving in lockstep. The downfall of diversity is that it's hard to organize, even to protect that diversity.

When the United States finally entered World War II, it was not to protect diversity. The military only integrated to the extent absolutely necessary. We were protecting "freedom," but without defining it so precisely that the white majority would start to wonder if the battle was worth their blood.

The right wing echo chamber is full of tough talk, religious fervor, combat metaphors, and justifications for bigotry. The left has no comparable package of literal bullet points. How do you make acceptance of diversity sound badass? The right pushes oversimplification. How can you distill the positions of the left into attractive oversimplified packets?

I hear that we should de-emphasize the culture war issues, but the right will continue to use them as a weapon. Also, a "normal person's" culture war irrelevancy is a trans or other marginalized person's life and death threat. So when we try to focus on purely economic or environmental progress that will be good for everyone below the top 1 percent, the minions of the 1 percent will insist on sacrificing the marginalized people as the cost of enlisting right wing support for those programs. We can't leave anything or anyone out.

The left's message is disjointed and complicated because it is made of all of the chunks that the machine of plutocracy has jettisoned to make their fighting force the envy of political organizers everywhere. Gavin Newsom recently groveled at the feet of Charlie Kirk with his admiration of right wing effectiveness at spewing their narrow-minded crap. If the left put together such a machine, would we have given up everything we were supposed to be working for in order to "win?"

The answer to human survival lies in marketing. The left does need to identify where the general population stands, and how to get in front of them with counterpoints to right wing infomercials. The answer lies not so much in indoctrinating a generation of young leaders and communicators to reinforce old ideas, the way the right does. The left has to find young people who already communicate through currently fashionable channels, fund and support them. Their diversity can't be corporatized. It should not be. Corporatization is what made our current mess.

Money is a problem. If an economy is doing well, it will generate a certain amount of value. Right now, the right wing believes that a handful of super wealthy people are the best stewards of that value. A full-on socialist in the formal sense believes that the state is the best steward of it. Neither of those viewpoints has much use for empowered workers. Is our goal as a society and a species quality of life for everyone or some nebulous concept of "productivity" dependent on serious income inequality and grinding toil by a permanent underclass? What are we producing for?

Figure that out and the messaging will fall into place.

Legitimate government

The idea that a government is only legitimate if the people consent to its decisions sounds great. In practice, however, it leads to the kind of fragmentation we have today.

A certain business in Wolfeboro, NH, displays a shrine to the Trump administration and a banner saying "Wolfeboro is taxation without representation." The banner is because the individuals involved keep failing to get elected to town government positions. The voters reject them. The majority makes its choice. They feel unrepresented. Therefore, the government of Wolfeboro is illegitimate in their eyes.

 The right wing malcontents who like to carry guns and hoist intimidating flags view any government action that they don't like as illegitimate. They did not consent, therefore the policy in question should not apply to them. They like to agitate supporters over "free speech" issues that don't exist, but also oppose real mechanisms to prevent discrimination in practical matters like hiring, real estate, lending, and education. The fake war on Christmas, the idea that they are forbidden to say the n-word, and the fact that they can get in legal trouble for slapping their waitress on the ass, are used to create public support against a tyranny that was never official. 

In the representative democracy that is the United States, individual voters elect representatives and senators to go to Congress and make decisions based on positions the voters liked in the election. These elected officials have the actual power to enact legislation and approve government expenditures, and set tax rates to secure the funding for government operations. This is the republic beloved of people who like to shout "we're a republic, not a democracy" whenever someone complains about the loss of American democracy. By their reckoning, they consented to the government even if it fails to satisfy their every wish.

Government will always fail to satisfy your every wish. Even the oligarchs, currently ascendant, don't always get exactly what they want the instant they want it. They're streamlining the system to improve response times, but it's still not quite there. As for the rest of us, there's a lot of conflicting dissatisfaction.

In the USA, we hate cheaters, except when they're cheating on their taxes. No one likes paying taxes. Some of us want the rich to pay more. Some of us openly or secretly admire those rascals for getting away with what all of us wish we could. Even if you expect to get most or all of your withheld taxes refunded, you have to fill out a tax return to get your refund. If you're super wealthy, the return is long and complicated. You have to pay one or more accountants to avoid paying any taxes. It's an annual pain in the ass.

In every other category, we want people to play by the rules. Whether it's from a genuine sense of fairness or because you've figured out how to manipulate the rules to beat out the drones who still play by them, Americans get really mad at anything they perceive as cheating. You see it in road rage incidents, college admission scandals, outrage over the proper inflation of footballs, the idea that trans women athletes are really men... stuff like that.

We argue over the rules because they might interfere with behaviors that went for generations unchallenged, like sexual assault. As soon as something is declared outright illegal, we have to put it in the category of cheating.

Powerful people get a pass on all of this. Enforcement is selective on the lower classes. The mere suggestion of improper sexual attraction was enough to get Black men brutally slain, often without a pretense of arrest and trial. But decades after a pedophile ring on a Caribbean island was broken up, we have yet to learn the names of the prominent people on the client list.

While both legal and illegal immigrants who toil in factories, fields, and construction sites are being hunted down by the Department of Homeland Security, one-time illegal immigrant Elon Musk gets to buy the government and install himself as dictator because he arrived rich and made himself richer. Much of that wealth was from government contracts -- the tax dollars of working class Americans -- for services that this oligarch can threaten to terminate, or for dubious endeavors like a space program that produces more expensive fireworks displays than successful missions to Mars.

In the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, fortunes were made on dubious endeavors that defied the authority of the British government. Cheating is part of our national identity. Magnificent in its way as unconventional warfare, its legacy haunts us today in our quest to be a nation of laws with outlaw roots. That's not to say that the American colonists should have submitted meekly to British policies that bound their economy to permanent servitude. Back in the mid 18th Century it made more sense to go our own way and prove our concept by establishing a nation where it could be acted out. For a couple of hundred years, it worked out, more or less. But we've had to survive not only our Civil War, but other bloody upheavals to extend the full benefits of citizenship to more categories of the people who were living here anyway.

The founders tried to establish in the US Constitution a framework of laws that citizens would not feel the need to cheat on. The hand of government was meant to be as light as possible. Setting aside that the electorate consisted only of white make property owners, the basis for the plan was naively optimistic about human nature. It has evolved over time to try to address its limitations. Human cussedness is tireless. We still use the concept of laws as the basis of our arguments about what should be allowed. It's cumbersome, frustrating, slow, and still the best way to structure a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

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.

Arrest Elon Musk. Shut down DOGE.

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.

I have no doubt that many families would welcome the legalization and promotion of euthanasia for elderly or disabled family members who are costing them thousands of dollars to support right now. First they'll come for the easily discarded. It will even seem like a relief.

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 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 problem isn't politicians, it's elections

The Constitution established different term lengths and election cycles for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President. The president serves for four. Senators serve for six, and the terms are offset so that they don't all turn over every six years. Poor congressional representatives have to reapply for their jobs every two years. This should mean that senators and the President can work on actually governing more than campaigning to retain their positions. In a perfect world perhaps...

Partisan conflict became increasingly toxic from 1980 onward. It really went back to the Nixon years, at least in its most recent iteration, but in the 1970s and early 1980s you might actually find a Republican who supported things that were good for planetary survival and the ordinary taxpayers of this country. Think of Nixon and the EPA.

Regardless of how we got here, we're here now. At the national level, everything runs to the frantic hamster heartbeat of the House of Representatives and their two-year terms. This means that at any level a party in power has perhaps a scant year to show results that they can sell to voters who are fired up and opinionated regardless of whether they really understand any of what they've been primed to be angry about. Between the representatives competing to be the most appealing to their districts -- whatever that might mean in each case -- and the senators who happen to be up for renewal, every two years brings a bunch of people kicking the table on which delicate things have been piled.

Shakeups appeal to citizens who don't look deeply at the challenges of governing. "Throw the bums out!" That'll teach 'em! Perversely, voters will also choose to retain someone who has consistently been very bad for them and the nation as a whole -- think Mitch McConnell -- because of good advertising paid for with large amounts of shady funding.

It's hard for an ordinary working person to keep track of all of the card tricks and shell games being played to manipulate elections. The internet has made lots of information available, along with reams of expert analysis to help you out. That's only made it more confusing. The tangle makes quick, destructive solutions even more appealing than they already were. Or voters check out and don't bother to take part at all. 

Election reform is going to be tricky. While corporations are not people, money is speech. This can't help giving rich people more leverage unless campaign advertising is pinched down to a strict minimum, but even then, can the government forbid a private citizen from buying an ad to express an opinion? Not only would that invite a trip to the Supreme Court, any law to close all the potential loopholes would be too long for anyone to read and too dense to enforce effectively.

Even limiting the length of campaigns is hard. If someone wants to use their free speech to talk about an issue or a political candidate they like, can they be censored if they happen to talk about it outside of an official 6-week campaign span?

See how liberty undermines itself? Because the fledgling United States had to measure itself against the yardsticks already established in European civilization, this country had to come up with a way for its luminaries to look good compared to the kind of authoritarian figures they had defied in the war of independence. A so-called meritocracy is still an -ocracy. It's still a hierarchy that creates powerful winners who can boss around the more numerous losers. Those winners can establish generational advantages on top of the social advantages conferred by being a free white male.

Civics was just another class when I was a kid. It was not presented as the most crucial aspect of being an adult. The most crucial aspect of being an adult was earning a living. Academic success could help your standing in the search for employment after you finished school, whether it was the high school diploma that was presented as the basic working class credential or various levels of college education to move you forward in white collar and technical fields. Civic involvement was elective. You might have to serve a hitch when there was still a military draft, or show up for jury duty if you had the bad luck to get that summons. It was considered a duty to vote if it wasn't too inconvenient.

Certainly you can't participate in citizen government if you're a destitute drifter. So of course you wanted to find whatever education or training suited your temperament, to secure an income. At the same time, throughout my lifetime, and the era of the Baby Boomers in general, health care was improving, and leisure options just kept expanding. Life was good, and provided plenty of distractions from the grind of routine government functions.

There have always been political observers and analysts keeping an eye on the inevitable percentage of people attracted to government. There has always been that percentage of people attracted to government, for reasons both noble and base. We counted on the observers to report, to help us guide our choices for when we could be bothered to vote. Big targets are easier to see, so reporting can be much sparser on candidates below the state level. Also, the more likely you are to actually know a person and deal with them on a daily basis, the harder they might be to confront over a political issue. Think about tensions at family dinners when people attending have conflicting political opinions. It's just as weird when maybe its a longtime customer in your bike shop, or a guy who lives down the road from you.

Because elected officials make decisions affecting hundreds, or thousands of lives, including future generations, maybe you can't agree to disagree and remain friends.

The stakes keep getting higher because each election builds on the pile of kicked cans from the ones before. Voters are angry, anxious, and confused. No wonder that a solid percentage of them is ready to hand off to a dictator. They've been trained out of thinking for themselves over generations. The hierarchy of needs goes from survival needs to sensual gratifications. Civic responsibility isn't even a category. It can get lumped in with social connection, but you can find plenty of social connections that demand less of you and feed you mental and emotional comfort.

Campaigning has already begun for 2026. Fundraising never ends. Governing takes a back seat to public image building. Elections have become a constant distraction from actually running the country.

The USA has left the free world

 The Trump administration and their manipulators behind the scenes have succeeded in their long cherished dream of separating the United States from its alliances. The stated goal was to save money and concentrate our power at home, but the real effect will be instability and weakness.

By supporting the bullies, the Trump administration hopes to increase the wealth of the already wealthy, and expand economic opportunity for predatory capitalism and destructive strip-mining of resources. Look at how they supported the bully Netanyahu, pushing to ethnically-cleanse Gaza to make way for luxury real estate development, and now ally with Russia to trample Ukraine and steal their mineral resources.

The idiots in power and the idiots who supported them took American power and privilege for granted. They believed that they couldn't hurt it, they could only turn it to their advantage. They're too ignorant to understand that diplomacy functions on many levels and in seemingly unrelated ways. The same goes for demonstrations of power. They're obsessed with big explosions. They have no respect for, or even awareness of, the intricate balance of international relations. It's all about short term transactions with them.

You wanted representative government and you got it. Most average citizens don't understand any of that shit either. Thing is, you can admit that you don't understand it and still respect the people who do and the skill they exert to keep this ponderous mess of a country lurching generally in the right direction without bumping into anyone hard enough to start a massive conflagration.

We may not survive this. We certainly will come out in worse shape than we were in before this asinine experiment in greedy betrayal of our own citizens and our allies abroad by a regime of traitors. May their memory be hated forever.