"Say, for the sake of argument...."
January 27, 2025 2:41 PM   Subscribe

The South Bank of the Rubicon is the latest episode of The Alt-Right Playbook by Innuendo Studios previously

Lyrics to When the Chips are Down from the musical Hadestown
posted by otherchaz (39 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Gone, I'm Gone
posted by otherchaz at 2:59 PM on January 27


I felt my stomach drop when I was watching this.
posted by evilangela at 3:31 PM on January 27 [1 favorite]


Saw the word "alt-right" and decided not to click in a public area. Can you nutshell this for those of us not in the know?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 3:46 PM on January 27 [3 favorites]


I felt the same way, but it's more like they are a playbook for breaking down the tactics of the alt-right. It's a brief and worthwhile video.
posted by supermedusa at 4:08 PM on January 27 [2 favorites]


nutshell: when Caesar crossed the Rubicon rivulet in NE Italy, he was leading "his" 13th Legion to Rome to forcibly establish martial law and his dictatorship, irreversibly transforming what was the remnants of the centuries-old Republican order to the autocratic Empire.

This essayist asks the listener to identify what action the incoming administration would amount to the 2025 version of the Rubicon here and now; what red line do you have that would be crossed to tell you the current constitutional order had failed.

[For me, that would have been if the Trump admin had been installed by GOP chicanery in the House or Senate, but it (fortunately?) did not come to that . . . if Calfornia's EVs aren't constitutionally counted, the constitution would become null and void in my book]
posted by torokunai2 at 4:10 PM on January 27 [5 favorites]


And there's definitely a moment to encourage re-evaluating what's already happened. Does the fact that we want things to not already be too far gone actually match up to how things actually are?
posted by evilangela at 4:13 PM on January 27 [7 favorites]


For me, that would have been if the Trump admin had been installed by GOP chicanery in the House or Senate

For me it was when Garland sandbagged the investigation and prosecution. Trump passed the South Bank of the Rubicon years ago, and he's set to burning down Rome now.

What red line is yet to be crossed? It doesn't matter now. The constitutional order has already failed.
posted by tclark at 4:28 PM on January 27 [32 favorites]


Augustus probably thought to himself, I'll just erase the symbolic nature of the border and incorporate Gaul into the empire and justify an illegal act thus solidifying more power and normalizing it.

here, a Rubicon. the United States is modeled partly upon the Roman republic. It is divided into States, If someone's going to cross a line it would be someone who is attacking the government. As for the government crossing a Rubicon, I would think sending regular military troops into a state under the guise of a National emergency would probably be it.

I'd give it 4 to 6 days before maryland, virginia, massachusetts, and Pennsylvania March into Washington.
posted by clavdivs at 4:38 PM on January 27 [3 favorites]


"Think on your personal red lines" seems far too individualist. Guess its ok for people with their heads in the sand, first step is seeing the problem and all.

> what red line do you have that would be crossed to tell you the current constitutional order had failed
When the supreme court overturned the 2000 election and installed GW. Even more so when the "opposition" said stand down, no strikes, don't fight, do what they say. Proved there are no real rules on government, no real limits on the GOPs actions, and no way that Dems would ever fight for us.
posted by anti social order at 4:55 PM on January 27 [18 favorites]


This essayist asks the listener to identify what action the incoming administration

That's easy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 5:06 PM on January 27 [17 favorites]


Ian Danskin is a national treasure. ALL of his videos are insightful, but his "Always a Bigger Fish" (previously) is what I show everyone when I want to break down the difference between liberals and conservatives.

TL;DR: democracy is one person, one vote while capitalism is one dollar, one vote. Liberals tilt towards democracy and egalitarianism, while conservatives tilt towards capitalism and hierarchy. But there's so much more than that, and for all the people who complain about overly long video essays, his is as good of a summary as you can get in under 22 minutes.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:15 PM on January 27 [5 favorites]


Those choosing historical events are telling the rest of us you haven’t watched the video, which specifically addresses what you are doing.

The point is to choose a future event that signals when you must take action to defend yourself and your loved ones.
posted by FallibleHuman at 5:46 PM on January 27 [4 favorites]


(A great followup to "Always a Bigger Fish" is his video where he explains his research, which just steam rolls over his lazy detractors.)
posted by AlSweigart at 5:52 PM on January 27 [2 favorites]


for me it'll be if the courts let the blatantly unconstitutional gender executive order stand (or rule against trans folks in the ongoing challenges to anti-trans laws). right now, we're right there with immigrants in the "first they came for..."
posted by kokaku at 5:59 PM on January 27 [7 favorites]


Those choosing historical events are telling the rest of us you haven’t watched the video, which specifically addresses what you are doing.

The point is to choose a future event that signals when you must take action to defend yourself and your loved ones.


We have taken action, and when the landscape shifts, depending on its nature, we are prepared to take further action. Not in the abstract, but specific responses to specific circumstances, some of which are inevitable and some will never come but if you know better than I which is which, I'd like to sign up for your newsletter. Not all such actions are obvious or overt, but that doesn't mean we've done nothing at all.
posted by tclark at 6:46 PM on January 27 [4 favorites]


I'm not exactly sure where the Rubicon lies for me (in the sense that this presentation asks), nor what to do about it if it gets crossed. I guess I'll just have to keep thinking about it as time passes and events occur.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 7:00 PM on January 27


To expand on my last comment: As an extreme but obvious example, if Donald Trump is somehow the President of the United States after noon on January 20, 2029, then I would positively state that the Rubicon has been crossed. But I don't know what I would or should do, were that to come to pass.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 7:03 PM on January 27


personal rubicon would make a great band name.

you must take action
in a future event from the current administration.

if I were rich, I might diverse my stocks at the current moment from current circumstances due to current failure to see current events concurrently.
posted by clavdivs at 7:37 PM on January 27


The most direct rubicon analogy is regular military troops deployed domestically. Trump has said he’s willing to do it, but the fact that ICE and the cops are basically his blackshirts and brownshirts means it’s less likely he’ll need to.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:05 PM on January 27 [5 favorites]


Individuality here is a problem.

As an individual, if you really wanted to Fix The Problem, there's not much you can do, right? You're looking at violence or terrorism directed at the tyrant and/or other key enablers. And pretty much all of it would be the sort of thing that would end or drastically upset your life, even if you fail, and could certainly harm your friends and family greatly too.

But with enough people working together, even small individual actions can create massive effects - if everyone said "OK as long as Trump is president, then every Monday we are all going to march through downtown" or "general strike" or whatever. These things would upset your life a little bit, but not nearly as much. And if you couldn't go march or strike, you could provide water, food, shelter, or aid to those who do, again, to much less personal cost.

In 2016, at the start of Trump's first term, we saw a lot more organic movements spring up to resist, and there were perhaps somewhat more uh, inherent legitimizing factors to that resistance - the narrow margin of victory, the popular vote, the shocking 180 from Obama's idealism to Trump's blatant corruption and instant betrayal of the country. Maybe other scandals as well - Cambridge Analytica, "Fake News", the Muller investigation - I'm sure there's more.

But the huge problem is that the Democratic Party is the largest organizing unit that could oppose Trump and fascism. But they consider every other such organizing unit except the Republican Party to be rivals for that power, and they spend considerable energy and resources just keeping those groups down. Having become the party of the status quo, they are not well equipped to re-invigorate themselves with any new animating principles.

The outgoing administration is tarnished. Biden himself, not in any state to take up the mantle of Leader of the Resistance, if he couldn't stand for reelection. Kamala, defeated. The cabinet and senior elected democrats - old, and either successfully hoodwinked by Biden, or complicit in the coverup before he was forced to step down. Inflation, Gaza, the Biden Coverup, everything else - there's not a lot of top Dems who could catalyze organizing for effective resistance.

Having written this, I feel like I am coming around to the idea that the focus on individual and drastic action has a sort of connection to the thread we had about cynicism and doomerism. Rather than focusing on like, what will make you willing to finally resort to violence, maybe we should be thinking about the small things we could do to connect with others and support each other, to start to build a real movement capable of action that could check the rise of fascism without requiring massive personal sacrifice?
posted by rustcrumb at 8:30 PM on January 27 [17 favorites]


I'd give it 4 to 6 days before maryland, virginia, massachusetts, and Pennsylvania March into Washington.

I would bet, maybe not thousands, but an egregious amount of money that 0 democrats nationwide at any level from mayor to governor have tried to figure out how many officers in or under their jurisdiction would be loyal if Trump marched in brownshirts. Or who those people might be.
posted by Slackermagee at 8:36 PM on January 27 [9 favorites]


A question and a proposition.

1) what do folks have for good 'tracking' of current events. ie, what are people refreshing to see if they need to buy tickets to the azores or whatever. What is the log of the the impacts?

2) isn't the 'what' of the 'when we cross' just maslow's hierarchy? ie, don't you just think about protecting the most basic stuff?
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 10:31 PM on January 27 [4 favorites]


I have a vague memory of a quote along the lines of "Any stable society is three hot meals away from revolution" (ie, if they don't get them.) But couldn't tell you if it was Pratchett or some Serious Guy.
posted by quinndexter at 11:01 PM on January 27 [2 favorites]


quinndexter: To quote Pratchett: "It doesn't say it anywhere, it says it everywhere."
posted by BiggerJ at 11:32 PM on January 27 [4 favorites]


What red line is yet to be crossed? It doesn't matter now.

Everything matters. Every life matters, every day matters. Everything counts in large amounts.

Relevant Ada Palmer recently:

The tale of resistance told by the Mannelli Tower isn’t one of revolution, it’s one of slowing down the shifting baseline. The baseline did keep shifting, less liberty for all and more power for the conquerors, but it shifted * slowly*, and many lives and rights sheltered behind that line. If we define victory as preserving the republic, there’s no happy ending, the Medici won. But if their conquest started in 1430 and they still didn’t dare pierce a symbolic tower 130 years later, that is a lot of slowing the baseline compared to what Florence’s conquered neighbors endured.
...
We don’t like resistance stories without a cathartic revolution, they don’t feel like blowing up the Death Star. They feel like loss. They’re not. We need to revisit these worst case scenarios to see that, even when resistance didn’t *win* it did *work*. It saved lives & livelihoods.

posted by away for regrooving at 11:39 PM on January 27 [13 favorites]


Bush v Gore was an ominous sign of what was to come, and, living abroad at the time, I leveraged my modest privilege to ensure I could remain so. That court decision was a Rubicon of sorts, though I hadn't framed it in exactly those terms until I saw this video. But my actions were personal and individual, and now I feel a tinge of survivor's guilt along with a sorrow for the loss of my country and the suffering those close to me will need to endure.
posted by St. Oops at 12:17 AM on January 28 [5 favorites]


That's easy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

Hard agree. We are where we are now because Republican Supreme Court judges intervened to choose the man who would appoint their successors. So many bad things would follow.
posted by Gelatin at 4:12 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


I just finished Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, and so see framing things in terms of a future Rubicon isn't helpful. A fascist regime is in power right now and needs to be resisted right now, if in no other way then by not obeying in advance.

The Republican agenda is not popular and the Trump regime knows it has a limited time to install itself as a perpetual oligarchy. In particular, the Republican House majority is a special election or two from flipping back to the Democrats. Every lawsuit, every act of disobedience, and every public declaration that these people are weird and abnormal and do not speak for us weakens them, and needs to happen now, not later.

It's been remarked elsewhere, but we're already in Martin Niemöller's poem. They are coming for the immigrants, and they are coming for trans people right now. We can't stop them, but we can speak up and we can throw sand in the gears. They are bullies and as likely to back down when challenged as to escalate.
posted by Gelatin at 4:30 AM on January 28 [10 favorites]


The more expensive we make it for them to carry out their agenda, the less they’ll get done
posted by Jon_Evil at 4:46 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


Completely stupid at the level of organizing metaphor. The essential point of the Senate's demand Caesar not cross the Rubicon, and his doing it anyway, was that the Rubicon was a specifically defined line with specified consequences for crossing it. If you have to speculate whether a place is a Rubicon, or whether you crossed it, it wasn't one.
posted by MattD at 5:53 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


And to contemplate whether some future event is a Rubicon implies the Rubicon hasn't been crossed already.
posted by Gelatin at 6:17 AM on January 28 [1 favorite]


Several problems here.

First is the individual focus, as others have said.

Second, this video would have been more effective a year or two ago. The speaker is concerned that we aren't calling out fascism - did he miss the Harris campaign, where she and tons of leading Dems did exactly that? I was at her last rally in DC and she hit this point clear and hard.
(Now, I am curious about how many people aren't using the f-word after the election)

Third, I appreciate the nutshell comments on this thread. There's not enough on the post to justify clicking on a video (and one which could just as well have been a Medium post, since the video content was secondary at most).
posted by doctornemo at 7:00 AM on January 28


It’s already crossed for me. I don’t think the US recovers from this. I’m just waiting for an opportunity to channel my rage, whether it’s regular strikes or protests or what. If there’s not some meaningful mass action to sign on to, I’m worried that if I see a white van rounding up immigrants I might just “accidentally” lose control of my vehicle in the direction of the ICE agents. I’m not encouraging that or threatening it; I’m just saying that as a relatively privileged older white male the lid on the pot is bouncing around with built up pressure. I assume a lot of people feel that way.
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:37 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


I don’t believe “call out the fascists” is the kind of action the author is advocating for. As others have pointed out, we’re way past that already.

If communities you care about are already under threat, what specific actions will you personally take to protect them? Will you give them resources? Shelter? Help them escape? Are you willing to receive and re-mail packages which could help someone in another area have gender/reproductive/bodily autonomy?

I don’t have answers - these are the things I’m wrestling with myself.

I don’t read the video as a call for magic-wand solutions. I view it as a call to action for active planning and action towards harm reduction.
posted by FallibleHuman at 9:13 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


> choose the man who would appoint their successors

FWIW they did have the decency to wait until the next election to step down.

2000 was certainly close enough to steal, like 1960 I guess.

The core ongoing constitutional crisis is the GOP stands for vote suppression, like the Texas bullshit of allowing only one vote drop box per county.

This is “UnAmerican” on its face and they indeed crossed this red line a long time ago.

Perhaps the Brooks Brothers Riot was the true Rubicon; great that we have Kananaugh on the court now with his thumb on the scales
posted by torokunai2 at 9:16 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


I also believe the individual focus is a deliberate choice. An optimistic presentation of the underlying thought is the phrase “we keep us safe”. A pessimistic one is “no one is coming to save us”.

I cant stop the flood, but I will try to build a life raft.
posted by FallibleHuman at 9:17 AM on January 28 [2 favorites]


folks, if you're answering the authors question with any moment before now, then you may not be the target audience.

this is outreach to anyone else.
posted by butterstick at 9:48 AM on January 28 [3 favorites]


For those who haven't watched his previous stuff (and you should, it's great) this is the first that DOESN'T begin with the line "say, for the sake of argument, that" in a slightly perky voice, and which has no music.
posted by sotonohito at 12:09 PM on January 28 [1 favorite]



What red line is yet to be crossed? It doesn't matter now.

Everything matters. Every life matters, every day matters. Everything counts in large amounts.


To be clear, the 'It doesn't matter now' was intended to be specific to whether the constitutional order is functioning or has failed. There truly are no more red lines to be crossed -- the United States has experienced its first successful violent coup and installed a dictator who may or may not prove to be able to bring the entire government to heel before he and his cronies are stopped.

As far as the constitutional order, it is in tatters -- the unwillingness of Democrats in Congress to actually be in opposition to everything our new embryonic dictator does reveals this. That doesn't mean that the folks out there actively filing suits and actively resisting corruption aren't doing critical work, because they are. That doesn't change the situation we're in now. We've seen the flash, and there is no stopping the shockwave.

But as far as daily life, everything does matter for each of us, and we have to do everything we can to watch out for each other and care for ourselves, to stay as safe as possible, to keep our wits about us, and to disregard levers we cannot pull, but pull levers we can, whether that's care for those around us, active defiance, or passive resistance.
posted by tclark at 9:59 AM on January 29 [2 favorites]


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