Author: theimbroglio

The rule of law has been replaced by the rule by law, and this is exactly how it is happening:

As [Ernst] Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime.

The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one.

This regime is so far keeping the lives of everyday Americans mostly unchanged, while opening up a  parellel black hole of cruelty, misery, and completely arbitrary lawlessness, hoping those of us living our lives in the “normative state” won’t care enough to put a stop to it. 

The Hands Off! protests last weekend were a good start to show that the regime is wrong. What’s next? 

Via Kottke, Jess Piper explains how the Magats are destroying good government from the inside out. She uses the plight of Medicare expansion in Missouri as an example: 

Missouri GOP lawmakers opposed Medicaid and Medicaid Expansion. While they couldn’t keep folks from obtaining health insurance by blocking the program outright, they could keep people from qualifying by not answering the phones. And, when people are able to stay on the phone for hours, and finally reach someone to help, that worker is so overwhelmed that application delays still go on for months.

It’s not a new tactic. Defund an agency. Claim the agency doesn’t work. Privatize the agency.

That is the plan with Social Security. And Medicaid. And Medicare. And the Department of Education. And the FAA. And so many more.

We knew this administration would do this and we fight it at the federal level like we’ve fought back at the state level.

It’s a crystal-clear distillation of what is happening. The Magats are gutting nearly every aspect of the federal government from the inside out so that all of the services it used to provide, the tasks it used to accomplish to keep our economy and society healthy and running smoothly, will stop working. No worries! A private company will take over and we will transfer billions of tax dollars into the hands of new and existing oligarchs! Yay!

Or: No worries! We don’t need the EPA (or forest service, or NOAA, or whatever) anymore. It was a failure anyway, and stood in the way of profit for private industry, so we’ll just kill it dead. No problem!

Piper suggests that Missourians understand how to fight this because they’ve already lived through it, but how has that fight at the state level worked out? Not that well when the Magats control all levers of power. The gist of her post is that armchair activism — phone calls, letters, posts on social media — aren’t going to work to stop this. The fight has to be in the streets. 

Why aren’t we out there?

Why don’t elected Democrats just read Josh Marshall and do what he says?

Half the articles I read now are about the Democrats’ horrible position and broken brand. Indeed, the loudest voices arguing something to the contrary of the above are saying that what the Democrats really need to be doing is taking stock of what happened in 2024 and/or repairing their brand. This is wrong, both as a matter of priorities and repair. There is only one issue today in American politics: President Trump’s hacksaw attack on the American Republic. Even if you describe it more favorably, no one questions that. The only available position is opposing it. Championing it is taken. If Democrats aren’t aggressively opposing it, they become irrelevant to the vast majority of voters who don’t actively support President Trump. The central part of a party’s “brand,” to the extent there is such a thing, is whether it is able to defend the people or priorities it champions. If it’s priorities are unpopular it loses doubly: it alienates supporters and it suffers loses since unpopular policies are inherently difficult to defend. DOGE’s spree is packed with 80/20 issues favoring Democrats. It’s open political territory and the only territory available. It may be an overstated critique that Democrats got off track by focusing on priorities that didn’t resonate for ordinary working Americans. But if that’s your theory the current moment is the one you would create in a lab to get back on that track.

 

More to the point I don’t think Democrats should be caring about the Democratic brand right now. Bloody MAGA’s nose, force turnovers and the brand will take care of itself. 

Emphasis added. 

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.