the imbroglio 2.0

George Clooney was on Colbert’s “The Late Show” and when asked how the most recent election went for him he said:

“What am I supposed to do?” Clooney replied. “Storm the fucking Capitol? It didn’t work out. That’s what happens. It’s part of democracy. And there’s people who agree and people who disagree, and most of us still like each other. We’re all going to get through it.” 

Who cares what a celebrity says? Except that this response is one of the things that is crippling any real, effective resistance to the autogolpe currently happening in the U.S. The left has spent the last 4 years decrying the Magat’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021 when they stormed the capital, battered police officers, and threatened to kill elected leaders. We talk about it like it’s the worst thing they have done, and until now perhaps it was. But what that means is that we have trouble envisioning direct resistance that would be acceptable or even possible for us. They did it and it was very wrong, so we can’t do the same thing, right? 

That’s true as far as it goes, but there are massive differences between what the Magats did on January 6 and what we should be doing now, or what we probably will have to do before this is over. We should be storming the fucking Capitol, but not for the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and false reasons like those motivating the attempted coup of January 6, and not with the violence that they demonstrated. 

Direct resistance, marching in the streets, occupying offices and buildings — all nonviolently! — are tried and true means to express political opposition and to stop the machine and demand change, and nothing is needed more at this moment than to stop this machine that is dismantling our democracy right before our eyes and to demand that Congress do it’s damned job as a check on the executive! We may be past the point where our checks and balances are going to be able to stop the destruction of the United States of America as a “shining beacon” of democracy or anything good, but it seems like we owe it to the generations before us that fought for this country and the ideals it stood for, and to generations to come, to at least stand up and…. try? to stop this fucking madness. 

Bottom line: It’s one thing for violent insurrectionists to storm the Capitol to attempt to overthrow the lawfully elected government. It’s another thing for concerned citiziens to nonviolently occupy the streets (and perhaps any government buildings they can) to nonviolently stop the machine and demand their lawfully elected representative stop violating the law and the Constitution and start doing their damned jobs. 

Bully Donny and the Magats. That’s our government now. Musk, for all the talk of him being the real president, remains, for now at least, just a Magat. Sadly, a very rich and effective one. A super-Magat, if you will. I won’t attempt to list all of the laws they’re breaking and how because it’s too much to keep up with, but their goals are clear: They are destroying the United States Government from the inside out, using illegal, quasi-legal, and legal means to remove all possible opposition to anything they might want to do so they will be free to do whatever they want.

Timothy Snyder says of course it’s a coup. Alex Norris, in a really great pice at Lithub, says it’s a self-coup, or autogolpe, and whether it succeeds only time will tell. 

I don’t need to wait. It seems clear that right now the coup is succeeding and it so far it doesn’t look like anything is going to stop it. Yes, the courts are hitting the brakes here and there, but the damage is still being done. So how far will it go and what will be left in the end? 

Writing in Foreign Affairs (behind soft paywall), Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way argue (link via TPM) that what will be left after all of this destruction will be something called “competitive authoritarianism”:

U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.

The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.

But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.

Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.

The whole thing is certainly worth your time. It’s a plausible argument, though it hinges almost entirely on whether it turns out to be true that Bully Donny “will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform.” Right now, something like competitive authoritarianism is looking like a best case scenario. At least it promises “competitive” elections in 2028 where the Magats could lose and, maybe, people who care at least a little bit about the country and its citizens could try to stop and begin the long, decades-long, job of repairing the damage. It seems almost too much to hope for, but hope we must. 

McSweeny’s nails it:

America will soon be the Cybertruck of countries—uglier than you could have imagined, built for rich chuds, borderline inoperable, and on fire. 

Josh Marshall had a great piece this week about what the Resistance to the Magats so badly needs right now: Leadership that will send a clear message like Churchill did when he became British Prime Minister in 1940. 

Churchill had a clear message: 1) We’re never going to give up. Literally, never. 2) We’re going to battle back with these tools. And 3) Finally, we’re going to win.

Yes! A thousand times, YES. Where are the Democrats? WTactualF are they doing? It seems like nothing. Literally nothing. 

Sure, we’re all demoralized. That is one of the goals of the “shock and awe” attack on our country happening from inside our country. But that is just the starting point. We can feel that, and then we can stand up and get started doing something to stop and change the things that are demoralizing us, right? And we need to never give up. Literally, never. 

Maybe it helps to understand, as David Frum explains, why this is very different than it was in 2017 for four main reasons:

1. Trump is not alone this time. He brought a gang of idealogues wth him who are getting straight to work.
2. We, the opposition, feel beaten in a way we didn’t in 2016. 
3. Democratic mistakes have given Trump early successes — Democratic policies have veered left of mainstream. (Not sure how much I agree w/this, but…)
4. The new “information space” is perfect for chaos monkeys — no one pays attention to the “mainstream media” and that media isn’t doing a good job of covering what’s happening, anyway. 

I won’t go into my quibbles with Frum’s analysis; suffice to say I agree that fighting the Magats is going to be far harder this time around, for the reasons he cites and more. But the fact that it’s harder  only makes the work of fighting back more important. It’s do or die time, much like it was for Churchill and Britain. Please, democratic leadership, let’s learn from history. It’s time to stand up and freaking fight!

Online, Jason Kottke announced that he’s going to continue covering the ongoing coup almost exclusively (I hope not 100% exclusively?), and I am one of many who are glad. I’ve found his links helpful and I agree that anyone with a megaphone right now needs to be shouting from the rooftops about what’s happening so that we can all understand and try to do something about it. Kottke perfectly described this moment: 

Witnessing the events of this past weekend, I felt very much like I did back in March 2020, before things shut down here in the US — you could see this huge tidal wave coming and everyone was still out on the beach sunbathing because the media and our elected officials weren’t meeting the moment. I believe that if this coup is allowed to continue and succeed, it will completely alter the course of American history — so I feel like I have no choice but to talk about it.

Sunbathing time is over. 

If you aren’t familiar with Timothy Snyder, now is the time to get to know him. He is a history professor at Yale but  probably most famous as the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and On Freedom (which astoundingly, does not seem to have a Wikipedia entry!?).  The first of the 20 lessons in On Tyranny is “Do not obey in advance,” which we can see the oligarchs and  companies are already violating by giving millions to the Trump “inauguration” fund. As John Gruber noted on Daring Fireball, most of these companies either gave much less or nothing at all to Biden’s inauguration 4 years ago.

Back to Snyder, who is one of (if not the) most brilliant and incisive of the public intellectuals in the “resistance” we are going to need if the U.S. is going to make it through the next four years. For evidence, look no further than his recent proposal that the Democrats form an official “shadow cabinet” to stand in public and ongoing opposition to all of the madness that’s about to descend upon us. I won’t try to explain what he means by this; you should read it yourself, as well as his followup post digging a little deeper into how the “shadow” or “people’s” cabinet might work. It’s not just a brilliant idea, it may be the best idea I’ve heard since the election on how the opposition should move forward. 

I’ve cut way back on my news and politics consumption since the election in November and I’m far happier not to be following every development second-by-second as I was before then. Again, Gruber has explained this better than I ever could:

 My take on Trump post-election has been to stop paying attention, as best I can, to anything he says. I’m only paying attention to what he does. With any other national leader, there’s a correlation between their words and their eventual actions that makes paying attention to what they say worthwhile. With Trump, there’s almost no correlation, and his endless stream of outrageous proclamations amounts to nothing but a distraction.

For me, this applies not just to Trump, but to all of the Trump-related sycophants and psychos filling just about every media channel with lies and fantasies, or “flooding the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon so famously put it.  My wife says this is what Rachel Maddow has been saying for a long time, too — ignore what they say; pay attention to what they do. It may not be an original or surprising idea, but it’s one that has been helping me stay sane, nonetheless. 

Still, Timothy Snyder is someone who cuts through the bullshit and to whom it’s always worth paying attention. His analysis of Trump’s cabinet picks as basically a decaptitation strike on the U.S. government seems terrifyingly correct, and his arguments that what we’re facing is a Musk-Trump, or Mump, regime also seems spot on.  

Snyder writes on Substack and I would recommend you follow him, except Substack sucks and I don’t think anyone should give it a penny. It’s really a shame that Snyder puts his work there because Substack is the sort of enshittified coporate platform that is the antithesis of what he otherwise writes about — open, democratic systems where all voices are welcome acknowledged, safe, and equal. As to why Substack sucks, you could start with “Don’t call it a Substack” by Anil Dash, as well as one of the general critiques of its apparent support for nazis.

Nobody’s perfect and I understand how Substack provides a busy person with little or no technical expertise — someone like Snyder, maybe — a push-button way to start a blog/newsletter and reach an audience. Still, there are plenty of alternatives and I bet if Snyder asked, he would immediately have hundreds of highly qualified readers ready to help him move to one of them for free. (I’m certianly not qualified, sorry.) 

Instead of subscribing to Snyder’s blog via Substack, just subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader. I like Reeder Classic, but there are many others.