Imagining Some of the Worst: Domestic Edition markstoneman.com
@markstoneman That seems like the best possible, rose colored description of what's coming. Perhaps I'm going too dark but I'm expecting far worse. I have no faith that previous norms or institutions will withstand anything for long.
The stage is set for worst case scenarios.
@markstoneman i think things could get darker than that even, and what you describe is dark enough... i also think there is reason to hope that some lines can be held... much of what the MAGA people want to do is not very popular, even with Republicans... as it is enacted, will the people who voted for him stick with him... setting up a possible midterm shift, unless we loose right to vote that quickly... i also think resistance is at state and local level now... those of us in liberal states need to work hard to defend them... everyone everywhere needs to work at shifting their local politics...
@Denny I've been looking at a lot of this through the lens of Anne Applenaum's Autocracy, Inc. and Peter Pomerantsev's This Is Not Propaganda. (The two also did an excellent podcast this year, Autocracy in America.) The tools they describe make state capture possible without throwing out things like elections and going through the motions with the rule of law.
Dictatorship is hard. It's easier to get things done if your supporters stay on side. Even Putin is sensitive to public opinion on the fraught issue of mass conscription for his army because that was a sore spot in the USSR's war in Afghanistan. There's a reason why his information operations there are so important to him.
The GOP also has so many contradictory goals. And they've done so much to weaken government and faith in government. They're not going to be able to simply instute a Big Beautiful Trump Dictatorship. Besides, they're very bad at governance, and their ringleader has all the worst people.
@markstoneman @mbkriegh Yes, focus on the local and state---that's what I've got to do. In DC, local politics was often national politics because this territory of some 700,000 people lacks statehood and it's protections for autonomous decision making. Up here in NH, things are different, and I've yet to really understand them. Our state went for Harris and is sending two Democrats to the House, but our state will again have a Republican governor, a Republican senate, and a Republican executive council. The campaign literature that filled our mailbox rarely, if ever, highlighted party. Our town had bigger margins for Harris than the state did, so there is a lot of good happening. I just need to find ways to contribute myself.
And yes, a majority of Americans is not on board with GOP plans for health care and Social Security. A majority probably won't be happy about Silicon Valley's increasingly unregulated extraction and destruction. But a lot will come down to what the Russians call information war---that and maybe people experiencing the ramifications of their choice, assuming they can put two and two together.
@markstoneman I'd listened to and wrote a blog post about their podcast a couple weeks ago though I was somewhat critical of it. If I'm being honest, I believe the US needs a kind of revolution. Call it evolution, call it deep reform, but we need to confront the neoliberal order that deepens our climate crisis and social inequalities. We need to reckon with a foundation built on genocide and slavery that continues to hold sway in our culture as white supremacy.
We are a deeply broken nation. Whatever comes, we need to work through to something new that embraces democracy in a more open, participatory process. What we've got now needs to be fixed with more than band-aids.
@Denny Historical memory is definitely one of the battlegrounds. it shapes who we think we are, what our values are, and so on. Historical reality can challenge memory, or be denied by it. I remember one worrying example from Russia: They started rehabilitating Stalin in a history textbook in 2007, for example. Memory is one target of their information wars. In this country, there is an excellent blog called Civil War Memory by Kevin Levin. Now on Substack, his archive reaches back to 2005.