Getting to Denmark* looks further away than ever (vs annexing Greenland)
February 17, 2025 11:59 PM   Subscribe

but the only way we're going to get there is to organize...
FINALLY: Jamie Raskin with MUST-SEE plan to DEFEAT Trump & Elon is filing amicus briefs, which may seem underwhelming? [link-heavy FPP]
In the Silicon Valley network of right-wing billionaire libertarians turned authoritarians, they are very open about the fact that they think that democracy is obsolete, that we're living in a post-constitutional America: The Constitution no longer fits, and they are trying to get everybody ready for a techno-monarchy. In their writings about it they suggest that seizure of the control of technology and computers and financial payments is the essence to moving from one form of government to another.

So we're really talking about people who would like to abolish American constitutional institutions and representative democracy and the rights and freedom of the people. Their guy Yarvin[1,2,3] who's you know their big intellectual hero has said people have got to overcome their fear of the word dictator. He says a dictator is basically just like a corporate CEO. They're all dictators in their businesses and so we need a dictator that is the corporation that's the United States of America...

Donald Trump has taken the position that his scholars call the "unitary executive" position which is that anything that is under the executive branch of government writ broadly, including the independent boards and agencies are not really independent but are rather subordinate and vertically reporting to the president so the president can fire any of them for any reason -- for political reasons, for reasons of retaliation -- and Congress cannot stand in the way with a statute which says, "no this is a six-year term" or "this is a four-year term that has gone into your administration."

We learned last night -- this is really an historic and dreadful statement -- but the Department of Justice said they no longer will defend these statutes. So people are going to start to feel the consequences of this outrageous, monarchical and ideological assault on the laws of the people, the programs of the people, right?

That's what government is. In a democratic society, government is just us, and the people we pay relatively low wages to go and do our work. What's the job of the president? Is it to be a king? Is it to be a monarch? Is it to do whatever he wants with the workforce? Is it to run roughshod over the laws of Congress or impound the money Congress has allocated? No. The core job of the president in Article Two is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Take the laws that Congress has passed and implement them. That's the job of the president.

So why do we have a civil service with air traffic controllers at the FAA and food and drug safety experts at the FDA and research scientists at NIH and weather people at the National Weather Service? Why do we have it? To implement the laws, the programs that the Congress has adopted. And who's directing Congress? The people. The people elect the Congress, we write the laws and then the people that we hire into the civil service implement the laws and the president is supposed to help that process, to take care of that process, not destroy it.
maybe when you put it that way, and people can see what they're up against, the war over public opinion can shift:
  • Oligarchs Are Our Modern Day Kings[4,5] - Bernie Sanders: "As Nelson Mandela told us, everything is impossible until it is done."[6]
  • Jon Stewart & AOC - "They explore the Democratic Party's growing disconnect from its working-class roots, and strategies for advancing progressive policies within a resistant Congress."
  • Trump 2.0 - "John Oliver discusses the first four weeks of Donald Trump's second term as president, the strategy behind some of the choices his administration has made and why it is indeed fuck time. You heard us: It's fuck time."
-What We Can Learn From Octavia Butler in Times of Chaos
-What Octavia Butler saw on Feb. 1, 2025, three decades ago
-Octavia Butler imagined LA ravaged by fires. Her Altadena cemetery survived
-Octavia Butler: A Black science fiction writer who predicted today's dire headlines
-Octavia Butler Wanted to Prevent Disaster in Los Angeles. Instead, She Predicted It

The Problem With $TRUMP - "Musk is well on his way to controlling the world's communications infrastructure. This is not by accident. He swims in an intellectual universe, alongside his PayPal associates Peter Thiel (who funded J. D. Vance's Senate campaign) and David Sacks (now Trump's AI and crypto czar), whose writers advocate for replacing democratic leadership with a CEO-monarch, and argue that higher-IQ 'sovereign individuals' should rule over people with lower IQs."
Musk, Sacks, and Thiel all spent formative boyhood years in South Africa. As the historian Jill Lepore noted in The New Yorker, Musk’s grandfather took the family to South Africa for the sake of apartheid, having left Canada after being jailed for his leadership activities in the Technocracy movement, “whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule.” Thiel has made “freedom” his life’s pursuit. Since 2009, he has argued that freedom is incompatible with democracy, and that “the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

[…]

Who knows if the president intended this outcome, but leaders in the crypto space have long hoped for the replacement of nation-states with “network states” encompassing communities that come together on the blockchain. They are celebrating $TRUMP as the first crypto community to have gained control of a nation-state’s powers by capturing the president’s attention through control of his digital wallet. If what Trump has done is upheld as legal or becomes a norm, other global leaders have every incentive to do what he did, turning democratic governance into corporate governance.
Capitalism vs democracy - "Unquestioned enthusiasm for democracy was only a 20th century phenomenon - and one that seems to be on the wane in the 21st. We should therefore ask: what's so good about democracy?"
None of this is an argument against democracy. Churchill was right: it is "the worst form of government, except for all the others." Instead, it's an argument for rethinking how democratic ideals should be implemented. Henry Farrell is dead right: "what we need are better collective means of thinking."[7] We need more institutional brains, as we might acquire - for example - from forms of deliberative democracy.

Almost no mainstream politician or pundit is even asking how to do this. Why not?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that ideas are shaped in our formative years: as Napoleon said, “to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.” And in the formation of those of us over 50, western politicians saw democracy as a self-evidently good thing; it was contrasted to the "evil Empire" of the Soviet bloc. And so capitalism and democracy were conflated in the public mind.

But this was an unhappy alliance because, as Jean Batou says, there has always been a tension between the two. Yes, capitalism needs democracy because popular consent, even if partial and ill-informed, helps legitimate inequality. But on the other hand, the power of the rich - even when they are not drug-addled neo-nazis - undermines the virtues of democracy. And this is becoming obvious to voters: a survey by the Fairness Foundation found that 63% of Britons think that the very rich have too much influence.

For now, this opinion is latent and largely unarticulated except on the margins of political discourse. But it poses questions: can we build a better[8] democracy without challenging actually-existing capitalism? And if we cannot, which should give way?
Using & misusing markets - "One of their great benefits is that they give us product variety. The USSR put a man into space but struggled to give people nice shoes. That's the merit and demerit of central planning."
Who is likely to be the better probation officer: the one drawn to the profession by a desire to rehabilitate offenders; or one who will earn a little more for hitting a contractual target? Who is likely to better look after vulnerable children: someone attracted to work in childrens' homes by a love of children; or one working for a profit-maximizing private equity firm? If the cash nexus comes to dominate, other motives such as professional pride recede not just because people change but because those with strong professional ethics simply leave the job.

Which brings us to a problem. Markets are not merely a value-free technology, to be used or not depending upon the precise job in hand. They also have an ethical dimension. In Spheres of Justice Michael Walzer argues that there are some things which money should not be able to buy, because to do so would violate the very meaning of them: criminal justice; divine grace; political rights such as to vote and free speech; and so on. The Beatles were right: "money can't buy me love", even if it can get you some of its correlates. In this spirit, the buying of political influence via lobbyists and party donors is simply wrong; it denies what democracy is. Allocative efficiency is not the only value.

Another argument for limiting markets comes from those with environmental or aesthetic motives, or those wanting to restrict the domain in which capitalism operates. Patrick Grant urges us to buy less disposable clothing from companies like Shein and fewer but better items. Jason Hickel proposes measures to reduce advertising and planned obsolescence. And in everyday activities such as allotments, repair cafes or early retirement people are reducing the realm of market activity. Colin Leys, echoing Marx, has shown how capitalism tries to expand markets in order to raise profits - but there is a backlash to this...

On the other hand, though, the government seems keen on markets where it shouldn't be. It's showing little enthusiasm for ending the subcontracting of public services, or for stopping the sale of political influence. It is permitting a sham market in water, which is merely a front for theft. It is sympathetic to financial deregulation and cryptocurrencies, whilst doing nothing to promote useful financial innovations such as in GDP-linked securities. And in permitting lobbyists and rich donors to buy political influence it is enabling a market which undermines the value and meaning of democracy.

What's more, it is doing nothing to promote decommodification. It has dropped the Corbynite interest in universal basic services (pdf), for example, and its desire to expand Heathrow and cajole the unwell into work is a sign of a desire to simply expand economic activity at all costs. This, however, is one of the drawbacks of social democracy: the need for tax revenue and to retain the cooperation of capitalists conflicts with the need to reverse commodification, be it on grounds of environmentalism, efficiency or ethics.
What the left can learn from Richard II - "I've a feeling we're not in The West Wing any more. Educated technocrats have been in retreat against the likes of Trump and Meloni. And even where the anti-technocrat right are out of power, they have disproportionate influence over the agenda: culture war issues and immigration are more widely discussed than economic democracy, rentierism or the poor quality of management."
What matters is the building of groups of supporters, and the weakening of potential rivals. And once one has a growing band of supporters, there'll be a bandwagon effect as others jump onto the winning side: Shakespeare's Duke of York joining Bolingbroke's cause prefigured American newspaper bosses aligning with Trump…

Marx - a great reader of Shakespeare - thought that emergent trends within capitalism would, from a socialist point of view, do the gardener's job. A decline in the numbers of petit bourgeois, he thought, would "wound the bark" by weakening a class hostile to socialism, whilst a growing working class would strengthen the "bearing boughs" that support socialism.

He was too optimistic. Coalitions of interests don't just emerge. They must be created. It's in this context that policy matters. It is not merely a matter of technocratic fixes or hawking product like market traders, but a way of creating or weakening alliances...

Here, we see another failure of the Democrats, pointed out by Dani Rodrik. Bidenomics, he says "paid too little attention to the changing structure of the economy and the nature of the new working class". In not doing enough to offer service sector workers good jobs, it did not sufficiently cultivate the "bearing boughs" that could be a wide working class base…

Unless he can offer better public services, more affordable housing and better jobs, the answer might well be: not enough. Labour needs to achieve these not merely out of intellectual considerations of morality or economic efficiency, but because of the brute power politics of needing a client base beyond the media and a few rich donors.
Hugh Howey:
  • Socialism = Fire departments[9,10]
  • THREAD on why people are crazy and we all can't just get along: Tribes grow beyond a particular number, the tribe goes to war, half the tribe is ejected, and now you have two tribes instead of one... To a large degree, our collective logic overcomes the tribal urges that want us to make copies rather than be cohesive and grow larger. We are beating nature at her big con when we collect tribes into states, states into nations, nations into pacts. Rather than rely on nature's algorithm of 'make lots of copies and let many die off as the environment changes' we have gone with: let's kill each other less and try to adapt our ideas and philosophies to changes in our environment and shared cultures. Hence less war. Less murder. Longer lives. More prosperity for more people. Our solution is better than nature's solution, and she would be proud of us for moving to the next stage of development, but ... the con is deep. It's still in us."
  • "Any institution or movement that spends its time looking backwards rather than forwards is bunk. Think about how Republicans spend their time idolizing slave-owning founders and trying to roll back regulations rather than coming up with new ideas to help the most number of people... Conservatism is less about wanting to move slowly and more about wanting to move in reverse, to go back to a time when the privileged had absolute power, rather than today's imbalanced power. The conversations we should be having today are: How do we make sure that all humans live healthier, longer lives full of more opportunity, less meaningless toil, more education and artistic expression, while expanding spheres of empathy."[11,12,13,14]
  • "Competition has served a vital role in determining prices, demand, levels of service, etc. for a long time. It's been so useful in so many ways that it has become entrenched as an Objectively Good Thing. But it's not. Competition is a stopgap until better tools emerge. The end of competition will be better data... The adoration of competition points to a wider problem in general: our belief that great tools can't be improved upon. Capitalism and democracy are other examples."[15,16,17]
The death of the hope of progress and the fear of being left behind - "At some indeterminate point in the fairly recent past, citizens and leaders of most liberal democracies probably looked forward to a condition to be realized in the imaginable future that we can, for the sake of a convenient label, call Universal Scandinavia."
The basic features ought to be obvious: employment and decent housing for all, lots of leisure time and paid holidays, universal healthcare generous maternity provision, inclusion for people with disabilities, free education and universal childcare, freedom to form a relationship and maybe a family with the person of your choice (straight or gay), a woman’s right to choose, tolerance of everyone regardless of faith or race, political freedom and democratic elections under fair conditions, concern for the natural environment and so on. A vision of prosperity for all, even if some degree of inequality might be tolerated to provide incentives and so forth. This wasn’t particularly an ideal limited to the left (in fact parts of the left would have rejected it for something more robustly socialist) but could have been embraced, in its rough outlines, by everyone from the centre-left to people on the centre right...

Nobody currently thinks our future looks like Universal Scandinavia – and even in places where social democratic parties are in power, such as the UK – nobody thinks that they will advance even the tiniest step towards it. Rather, the likelihood is that even they will retreat. "Nice idea, but unaffordable."

Meanwhile, we are being treated to endless homilies from the pundits about how Europe is being "left behind" by a dynamic United States. We are sclerotic, hidebound, unproductive and lazy. There is hardly a column by Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times that doesn’t rehearse such points, but there are official reports too, such as a recent one by Mario Draghi about the need to boost Europe’s competitiveness. Draghi is writing about the EU, of course, but what he says should be taken to apply, mutatis mutandis to all the other places that might once have aspired to Universal Scandinavia.

The rhetoric of being "left behind", though, the tacit appeal to progress and to a direction of travel, raises the quest of where that travel is to, particularly in the context of a United States that is abandoning democratic norms, where the judiciary is politicized, where women are being deprived of the right to choose, where migrants are being deported en masse, where fascist mobs are pardoned by the President, where opponents are threatened with state persecution, and where a new oligarchy has both acquiesced to and encouraged a fresh authoritarianism. And of course this comes on top of much longer-standing horrors in the US such as crippling health care costs, tyranny on the workplace, miniscule leisure and vacation time, a racist carceral system, frequent mass killings with guns, chlorine-washed chicken, corn-syrup in everything, widespread nostalgia for white supremacy, to begin a long list. Make your own, I don’t have space here.

The progress we are in danger of missing out on if we don’t pull up our socks is supposed to be towards growth and prosperity. If we don’t abandon the few anticipatory relics of Universal Scandinavia that remain, we will fall further behind. We need to do this for the money and for the relative position of our states in some global race. Except that, as in the case of the United States itself, the people being asked to tighten their belts now, to accept longer hours, shorter holidays, worse health care, reduced food and environmental standards, are not, on the whole, the ones who will get to see the money. GDP per capita might rise, but since that’s an average measure it is entirely compatible with all the benefits being harvested by the diminishing numbers of the highly advantaged, Meanwhile the professional middle class becomes proletarianized, even as its members are mocked as the "elites".

What of those other aspects of Universal Scandinavia: the possibility of political community, the availability of art and culture, education and literacy, access to nature, opportunities to travel and the ending of artificial barriers between people, and the rights people enjoy as humans or as citizens? In fact all the goods that aren’t easily assimilable to an increase in per capita wealth and income.

One thing that has happened is that systems and institutions that are key components of a functioning social system have ceased to be considered as such. Either they have been reconfigured on the model of for-profit enterprises and expected to survive by generating their own revenue (e.g. universities) or they have been starved of funding in the interests of "efficiency" with short-term cost-reduction being very much in the minds of policy-makers but the cost of the long-term consequences — probably falling on someone else’s budget — not so much. The human beings who run most public services have often compensated for fiscal neglect by working harder and self-exploiting out of a sense of professional committment. But that has diminished over time as people feel like suckers, especially when treated as punchbags by politicians and derided by right-wing pundits. And while the state can often count on the professional dedication of people who were recruited and trained when there was a proper service they were serving, those people are ageing, retiring, quitting. Attracting smart and competent new people to work in education, criminal justice, social work and so forth is a different matter.

As for the rights our societies used to value for human being or for citizens well, many of those have been thrown away in Europe’s attempt to seal itself off from outsiders. (Universal human rights are inconvenient when the population has come to be hostile to people who might invoke them.) But relatedly, I think there’s also a sense in which the key values that define the non-economic aspects of Universal Scandinavia have been hived off by politicians into the accountability sink of human rights law... There’s similarly a vast difference between certifying that a building meets official safety standards and working to ensure a building is actually safe.

My point here isn’t the argue for the full attainability of Universal Scandinavia. Indeed, I’m not unaware of the material, demographic, environmental and other constraints that we face, nor of the extent to which historic European prosperity rests upon the exploitation of others, past and present. It is rather that the very meaning of "progress" has been stripped of its, er, "progressive" content and reduced to growth in national wealth, income and power. British and European leaders are increasingly abandoning any positive vision of a functioning social system to which they aspire and which realizes human values and secures vital rights and freedoms. Even as the US regresses into barbarism and abandons all pretence at liberal ideals, it is rhetorically saluted as the future that risks leaving "us" behind.
@interfluidity@zirk.us: "Guys, really. Our apparently brisk GDP growth is down largely to rentierism, attaching ever more, ever larger tolls to everything. It's not meaningful prosperity. We are miserable. Don't emulate us. Stick with Universal Scandinavia."

How To Get to the End of History - “At the heart of this remarkable book is the idea of 'getting to Denmark.' By this, Fukuyama means creating stable, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and honest societies (like Denmark). As in his 'End of History' essay, Fukuyama treats this as the logical endpoint of social development, and suggests that Denmarkness requires three things: functioning states, rule of law, and accountable government.'"

Bernie Sanders, über-feminist: Making America more Scandinavian would mark a gender equality breakthrough - "He wants to lead a 'political revolution' and make the United States more like Sweden or Denmark when it comes to healthcare, education and the social safety net."
“In those [Scandinavian] countries, health care is the right of all people,” Sanders said... “College education and graduate school is free. Retirement benefits [and] child care are stronger than the United States of America. In those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people and the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.”
What do American liberals get wrong about Denmark? - "'Getting to Denmark' entails more attention to the quality of public services and not just their existence or funding level: How did Denmark get to be so awesome? Taxes. Denmark does it with really high taxes... The flip side is that if you actually live in Denmark, then things like child care, college tuition, and health care are all much cheaper than they are in the United States. In total, Danes and Americans consume a similar quantity of taxes and services. But because of high levels of taxation and spending, the nature of the consumption is quite different. People enjoy more social and personal care services, and fewer cars and other consumer goods. The upper middle class has less, and the poor and the working class have more. But on the whole, Denmark's high taxes have not prevented it from being a wealthy, happy society."[18,19,20]

I didn't make up the problems. All I did was look around at the problems we're neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.
--Octavia Butler

---
*previously![21,22] :P
posted by kliuless (57 comments total) 99 users marked this as a favorite
 
I dimly remember when in the late 90s several years of gridlock of a divided government resulted in the first budget surplus since the late 60s . . . but 25 years of tax cuts without cutting spending, and raising spending without raising taxes has pushed the nation's fisc into up shit creek territory.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DMVY

red is total federal spending ($7T), blue is federal receipts ($5T), and green is annual interest expense ($1T) (all inflation-adjusted to 2024 dollars).

Since 1990 Democrats have kept adding that top 39.6% marginal tax rate and the GOP has been removing it, but ISTM we need to go back to the 70% top marginal rate of LBJ - Carter.

But this is not the level the GOP is operating at now, they're going much more primal now.

But they are in the same fiscal straitjacket I think. The "bond vigilantes" exist and aren't going to meekly accept negative real returns so the inflation conundrum is still present.

The GOP has sole control of the process now so it's going to be their budget as we head into the midterm election year.

They are free to cut as much as they want, let's see if they can walk their talk. The Democrats, at any rate, should not offer one deal on anything. The electorate wanted the GOP in power, let them have it, unmitigated.
posted by torokunai2 at 1:19 AM on February 18 [9 favorites]


Since 1990 Democrats have kept adding that top 39.6% marginal tax rate and the GOP has been removing it, but ISTM we need to go back to the 70% top marginal rate of LBJ - Carter.

And for all four of those decades, concentration of wealth - a measure not of what somebody's income is, but of how much stuff they own - has been sitting there in the background doing the exponential increase thing that any kind of compounding accumulator always does. Wealth concentration also got a literally unimaginable boost once all the COVID handouts had trickled down through the economy to their inevitable destination in the sump of stagnant wealth where the biggest bottom-feeders dwell.

Those three rather dry, techical-sounding words - concentration of wealth - mean something. What they mean is that there now exists a very, very small group of people who own almost everything in the world. That, in turn, means that all the people and governments who used to own those things no longer do. Which means that when we need to use those things, we pay some kind of fee or rent for that. This makes everything more expensive for everybody - ordinary people and our governments - with the sole exception of this tiny coterie that owns all of those things we're now paying them to let us use.

There is more concentrated wealth now than there has ever been at any time in human history. The concentration is now so extreme that no income tax increase policy that the general public would find even vaguely acceptable will ever begin to undo it. The only public policy capable of digging us out of this increasingly deep social hole is a yearly tax on assets according to their assessed value as opposed to any capital gains that result from their sale. The behaviour we want our taxation policy to discourage is the hoarding of assets and a progressive taxation rate that increases as the hoard size does is the sensible way to do that.

The beauty of assets as an object to be taxed is that they're fixed in place. Threaten to tax a billionaire's income and they just rearrange their affairs such that that income arrives from some other country, or they move themselves and their business somewhere else; this is the threat of "capital flight" that leaves governments scared to get serious about tax rates at the top end and has them all convinced that going after the money where it actually is will always be a bit of a pipe dream.

But tax a billionaire's portfolio of supermarkets, apartment blocks, hospitals, superyachts, football clubs, company shares, government bonds and massive residential compounds, though, and what can they do about it? They can't move the buildings offshore. They also can't enforce demands for interest payments or dividends on in-country financial instruments they're not willing to disclose that they own. We don't actually care if the billionaire goes offshore, we're taxing assets that we can see regardless of which entitled prick's name is on them.

Plus, given that most people are never going to own enough assets to attract any tax under a properly designed progressive scheme - given that concentrated wealth is what we're going after - the absolute number of assets upon which taxes need to be calculated is always going to be way way lower than the number of income streams that already get assessed for income tax purposes. The extra administrative burden of a new assets tax policy would be relatively tiny, especially if income taxes at the poverty end phase out as assets taxes at the billionaire end phase in.

The only defence that a billionaire has against a progressive assessed-value assets tax is breaking up their hoard into smaller pieces and using complicated ownership structures to hide the fact that those pieces ultimately have the same owner. But again, this is a practice that's already completely routine when it comes to evading or avoiding progressive income taxes; services like the IRS are already well practised at tracking that stuff down, and because the total number of assets is always going to be lower than the total number of income streams derivable from those assets, the more government revenue we get from assets taxes the easier it will become to detect evasion and avoidance schemes.

DEMAND PROGRESSIVE ASSETS TAXES. Demand them loudly, demand them often, demand them in company, get this idea on the table. Because for as long as it stays off the table, entitled assholes will continue to get away with blaming immigrants for everything and keeping the general population at each other's throats with bullshit culture wars, and governments will stay too poor to be able to fund services properly, and the general standard of living will keep on going backwards until we're all living in slums around the walls of our local Neom.
posted by flabdablet at 2:33 AM on February 18 [56 favorites]


In the Silicon Valley network of right-wing billionaire libertarians turned authoritarians, they are very open about the fact that they think that democracy is obsolete, that we're living in a post-constitutional America

The Plot Against America
posted by chavenet at 2:56 AM on February 18 [4 favorites]


ISTM we need to go back to the 70% top marginal rate of LBJ - Carter.

In a nutshell. In a bigger nutshell, DEMAND PROGRESSIVE ASSETS TAXES.

The number one problem is a culture one - the "right" has convinced a hefty slice of the populace that for cultural reasons, they are the only party that "cares about America" while quietly robbing them blind. Until that cultural camouflage is stripped away getting to a rational consensual solution (involving a realistic tax code) is gonna be damn near impossible and by design.

It's a bummer but if anyone can fuck up the status quo, DJT can! He's failed at most every thing else he's actually tried to do! Don't give up hope!
posted by From Bklyn at 3:05 AM on February 18 [11 favorites]


Their guy Yarvin[1,2,3] who's you know their big intellectual hero has said people have got to overcome their fear of the word dictator.

Given that he wakes up every day in a puddle of semen from dreaming of being one, he would say that.

He says a dictator is basically just like a corporate CEO. They're all dictators in their businesses

This is pretty much the only thing he says that actually makes any sense.

and so we need a dictator that is the corporation that's the United States of America

which is the conclusion to a circular argument that only a complete fuckwit could possibly get behind.

Dictatorships Are Good Actually? Yeah, nah. They suck for everybody, eventually even the dictators. See also: fall of the Assad regime.
posted by flabdablet at 3:10 AM on February 18 [11 favorites]


Also, it looks like there's no link here to the recent Curtis Yarvin interview in the New York Times; talk about mask off revealing punchable face, while the paper of record normalizes "the end of American Democracy"
posted by chavenet at 3:16 AM on February 18 [6 favorites]


Funny thing about Yarvin compared to all the other worthless fucks I'm kept alive by a burning desire to outlive (Murdoch is currently at the head of that queue, Kissinger having finally made his way through the turnstile into hell) is that I wish him a long, long, long life exactly because of that punchable face.

Watching Yarvin get wrinklier, saggier, lumpier, tireder and more disappointed with himself year on year on year is just so inexpressibly satisfying. Long may he continue to sink into the tarpit of his own out-of-control ego's inescapable contradictions.

Also, if there is one person in the world I will celebrate riotously when TFG inevitably fucks him over as is his way with sycophants, it's Yarvin. Watching that face go all Shocked Pikachu is just going to be sublime.
posted by flabdablet at 3:30 AM on February 18 [14 favorites]


This is where I get to explain a couple of things about Denmark that are often overlooked.

First: Denmark has one of the lowest rates of corruption in the world, we will pay high taxes because we know no-one is stealing our money.
This was established already during the 18th century under absolute monarchy. The famous Danish trust is not about homogeneity (the Danish Kingdom was not homogenous at the time), but about unwavering commitment to the rule of law, which somehow survived the introduction of democracy in 1849, the rise of industrial tycoons during the late 19th century, an attempted coup in 1920, and of course the threat of totalitarianism during the 1930s.

Which brings me to the foundation of the welfare state in January 1933. Because of the global economic situation, there was a lot of political unrest in Denmark, with both left and right activists threatening the social order. Under impression of the situation in Germany, our neighbor, the Social Democratic prime minister Stauning invited all the mainstream parties to a negotiation in his private apartment in Kanslergade, Copenhagen, and even though the actual Nazi-curious conservatives dropped out, the rest opted in. Hence the Kanslergade Agreement is an agreement across the aisle, which is very different from the original welfare models in Sweden, Norway and Germany. As a consequence, it was given from the outset that the welfare had to be for everyone. People are often confused at how rich people in Denmark can benefit from the public education, healthcare and pensions along with everyone else. But that is the whole point of the system.
Our current PM, Mette Frederiksen, is clearly modeling herself and her coalition government on Stauning and the Kanslergade coalition. Which is funny because she doesn't look a bit like Stauning. But what both Stauning and Frederiksen realized was that a solid centrist coalition will leave the radicals squealing on the fringes, unable to mobilize a dangerous amount of followers.

But to get back to the beginning. I don't think strong anti-corruption policies are a guarantee for democracy, but I do think they are a prerequisite for a functioning democracy, and the Citizens United decision tilted the US in the wrong direction. As a result, the US population has an extremely low rate of trust in government. Before you tax anyone, rich or poor, you have to build trust in government. I think.

BTW, during the aughts, we had a mini version of a trumpian dismantling of government with the Anders Fogh Rasmussen administrations. He could do this because he allied himself with the far right Dansk Folkeparti breaking the Danish firewall against racism, just like it is being proposed by J.D. Vance for Germany to do now.
Obviously, it couldn't be as bad as anything in the US and to some extent we were saved by the EU, but it was bad, and some of the damage done is irreparable. Our tax system has not yet recovered although 15 years have passed.
posted by mumimor at 3:54 AM on February 18 [58 favorites]


I love you all, and I plan on reading so much of this thread a little later when I'm done working in the vats, but just a quick question...which of these billionaires gets to be the philosopher-king? Because the whole thing about monarchy is that first part, the mono-bit. We only get one at a time. Is it going to be Musk (who has all the money)? Trump (who has all the guns)? Bezos (who has the logistics)? Zuck (who has that sweet kingly gold chain)?
posted by mittens at 5:37 AM on February 18 [4 favorites]


Thugs with guns usually manage to subdue people with money.
posted by Lemkin at 6:06 AM on February 18 [4 favorites]


This is an amazing post. Thanks, kliuless.
posted by NotLost at 6:17 AM on February 18 [8 favorites]


FINALLY: Jamie Raskin with MUST-SEE plan to DEFEAT Trump & Elon

This is an aside, but I think that video sums up a lot of problems I have with Democrats' messaging. The host is too much of a smug twerp. He goes through so much exposition before finally arriving at his questions and Raskin answers first by pointing out logical inconsistencies between Republicans stated goals and their actions (If they wanted to reduce waste and corruption they wouldn't have fired the watchdogs because their purpose is to reduce waste and corruption! HA CHCECKMATE!). The whole conversation feels divorced from the moment and feels very wonkish and politics-as-a-game.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:38 AM on February 18 [28 favorites]


RonButNotStupid - I hear you loud and clear. Dem messaging is a deeply worn groove of "if I can just explain to them how they're hurting themselves...."

It was stale a few years ago and feels more hopeless and desperate now without some actual
action.

**also good post, thanks!
posted by djseafood at 7:11 AM on February 18 [11 favorites]


Thugs with guns usually manage to subdue people with money.

This is how you know these fools have no understanding of history. What happened to Hitler's street brawlers as soon as he secured control of the military? Any potential power base outside of himself was killed off. You don't even have to look at history, current events are enough to understand this! Why do you think Russian oligarchs and successful generals have such a problem with windows?

If it wasn't our planet hanging in the balance their stupidity would be hilarious.
posted by being_quiet at 7:46 AM on February 18 [12 favorites]


The host is too much of a smug twerp

It's Brian Tyler Cohen. He's been that way since his first appearance on YouTube.

Cohen is basically the answer to every question about what would happen if Democrats were to adopt Republican-style bad-faith cherrypicking and confected outrage in an attempt to be "hard-hitting". He's all about the ultimately disappointing clickbait video title and thumbnail.

If you want somebody to lob a senior Democrat a Dorothy Dixer, BTC is your man.

For what it's worth, I distrusted him instinctively on first exposure. Excessively careful grooming has always raised red flags for me.
posted by flabdablet at 7:46 AM on February 18 [8 favorites]


Not telling tales out of school but Yarvin has been a piece of shit for his entire life, based on reports from an acquaintance who is certainly now deeply regretful that she didn't strangle him in his sleep decades ago.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:50 AM on February 18 [14 favorites]


Well, yeah. It would have to have taken a lot of time and sustained application to build a face that punchable.
posted by flabdablet at 7:53 AM on February 18 [3 favorites]


The central problem with the Dem messaging is that there is no consensus alternative to fascism. So much of our political issues since the turn of the century (or really, since the 1994 midterms) can be summed up in this.

The right has a clear consensus on what they want: patriarchal dictatorship. The rest of us, even though we outnumber them two to one even on a bad day, have nothing like that. Ardent Progressives have a real point in that what the mainstream Dems propose is way too hierarchical/corporate and conservative for most of the rest of us, and that the mainstream Dems know this, but won't/can't do anything about it because they're too beholden to rich donors because they believe they cannot win elections without that money. (edit: and that they would way rather fight the Ardent Progressives than actually do anything about our problems)

Ardent Progressives are absolutely blind to the fact that most of the rest of us don't want to go all the way even to Universal Scandinavia, let alone Universal Basic Income, or that while with the right spokespeople/candidates they might be able to persuade a working majority of us that Universal Scandinavia could be a consensus choice, they almost absolutely without fail choose the worst possible spokespeople/candidates and try to lecture the rest of us that we're stupid or evil for not wanting their weird utopia, when in fact most of what we really object to is the spokespeople/candidates.

It's a real problem. It's theoretically possible to come up with Universal Scandinavia Sort of Lite, create a pretty clear version of what that is, and come up with a bumper-sticker way of expressing it. But the mainstream Dems are frankly worthless and the only people they're willing to fight to the death are the Ardent Progressives, while the Ardent Progressives are only willing to fight the people immediately to their right. The same kind of internet polarization that splits communities apart because extremists get more clicks happens within the resistance to fascism, as well. It also doesn't help that both groups epically suck at marketing/messaging, while the fascists are somehow really good at it.

Nothing here is likely a revelation to most of the people reading it; I'm mostly just working out a thought that's been bouncing around my head for a couple of days. Insofar as something useful can come out of it, maybe it's to get people opposed to fascism thinking about what the consensus alternative can be, instead of just "no we don't want this", which may be true, but is also less than effective.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:00 AM on February 18 [16 favorites]


Tiresome though that progressives continue to not understand WHY fascist messaging is so powerful. The core message is always, "daddy will fix it," which any two year-old understands, and is more effective as conditions deteriorate and complicate. The appeal of fascism isn't logic, it's faith, belief that the big man can fix the boo boos that make life hurt.

The only effective counter is messaging that will similarly appeal to toddlers: that those very rich people who aren't suffering at all are bad people because they don't want to share; and that the big man is a bully and is neither your daddy nor your friend, in fact he's a scary man who will hurt you, see how he's hurt all these other people; and that we can all work together to make the greedy people share with everyone.

Your platform has to be understandable to a toddler or it will not work
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:24 AM on February 18 [30 favorites]


The central problem with the Dem messaging is that there is no consensus alternative to fascism.

To go even further, when your central tenet is that all viewpoints have some validity, it's difficult, nay impossible, to arrive at a consensus for almost anything. It's a small miracle we've ever had a Dem as president.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:30 AM on February 18 [5 favorites]


As an Ardent Progressive, it's always disappointing watching those to my right exercise more time and skill on articulating how much they loathe all the Ardent Progressive positions they've made up in their own heads than on engaging in any meaningful way with the progressive assets tax proposals we've all actually been espousing for years and years and years.

But also as an Ardent Progressive, I'm also completely accustomed to that particular kind of disappointment. It's just so totally par for the course. As is the way that all such furious denunciations are immediately followed by a bemoaning of the lack of workable non-fascist messaging.

Ardent Progressives are absolutely blind to the fact that most of the rest of us don't want to go all the way even to Universal Scandinavia, let alone Universal Basic Income

What truly baffles me is the wall of chaff that anybody with a burning need not to identify as an Ardent Progressive will instantly put up against the obvious appeal of a taxation regime with the potential to fully fund a wide range of essential public services in the context of a workable representative democracy while taxing the overwhelming majority of the populace nothing at all.

Your platform has to be understandable to a toddler or it will not work

ELI5: Do you own less than ten million bucks worth of stuff? OK, how would you feel about being allowed to earn as much as you like and pay no tax whatsoever?

Anybody who refuses to see far enough past their own blind hatred of Ardent Progressives to acknowledge the attractiveness of that message probably is either evil or stupid.
posted by flabdablet at 8:33 AM on February 18 [19 favorites]


What truly baffles me is the wall of chaff that anybody with a burning need not to identify as an Ardent Progressive will instantly put up against the obvious appeal of a taxation regime...

Let me stop you right there, boss. Your rhetoric embodies the stereotype. You're being both blind to the fact that not everyone on Team Not Fascism MMkay? would agree with your proposal even if fully informed of it, and you're also clearly implying that anyone who doesn't agree with what is honestly a total fucking fringe idea in today's political culture is either a fool or a knave, because you are so fully persuaded of your own righteousness that you cannot even fathom that someone might agree with your proposal but have practical objections to it.

But you do it all in 44 words, which is frankly impressive.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:44 AM on February 18


Anybody who refuses to see far enough past their own blind hatred of Ardent Progressives to acknowledge the attractiveness of that message probably is either evil or stupid.

Gotta love the supreme irony of this whole comment.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 8:48 AM on February 18 [4 favorites]


But the mainstream Dems are frankly worthless and the only people they're willing to fight to the death are the Ardent Progressives

You hit the nail on the head right there.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:01 AM on February 18 [10 favorites]


(digs a trench, plugs the popcorn popper into a portable solar panel, and pulls out a periscope to watch the circular firing squad)
posted by Reverend John at 9:11 AM on February 18 [4 favorites]


the mainstream Dems are frankly worthless and the only people they're willing to fight to the death are the Ardent Progressives

That's false, and essentially gaslighting. The Dems have a loud progressive wing and co-operate with progressive platforms on a regular basis. The last administration was the most progressive in recent history.

What issues do you feel they are fighting progressives on?
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:26 AM on February 18 [3 favorites]


(0) full court obstruction of the coup happening right now
(1) genocide in Gaza
(2) Trans rights
(3) Immigrants rights
(4) Not criminalizing homelessness
(5) Inclusionary zoning
(6) Municipal broadband
(7) Medicare for all
(8) Increasing the minimum wage
(9) Progressive taxation
(10) Prison reform

The Dems have failed, it's not gaslighting.
posted by constraint at 10:32 AM on February 18 [6 favorites]


Focus, people. The technofascists want to turn the USA into a dictatorship.
posted by subdee at 10:43 AM on February 18 [10 favorites]


Your platform has to be understandable to a toddler or it will not work

To be clear, that's not looking down on other people like a Platonic master manipulator. I need to give myself a simple message to backstop whatever complicated analysis I make. It's the only way to keep my emotions in the game, to stay motivated.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:50 AM on February 18 [2 favorites]


pulls out a periscope to watch the circular firing squad

The firing isn't circular, it's leftward. As usual. And no, a bit of friendly ribbing on an obscure discussion forum doesn't count as firing.

What does count is the kind of organizing that seeks primarily to marginalize, suppress and exclude all dissent. Look no further than the Harris campaign's attitude toward pro-Palestinian voices for the clearest recent example.

Meanwhile, we Ardent Progressives will continue to argue for sensible policy goals that are in fact what is required to slow and ultimately reverse the present worldwide slough of despond. We will keep doing this as and when we are able, even as all of those to our right remain united in their efforts to suppress any remnant of democracy that might help us spread these ideas more effectively.

Somebody has to keep injecting better ideas than fascism into circulation and god knows the centrists will never do it. Well, not until they find themselves in a position to demand endless plaudits for having suddenly ceased to dismiss all such ideas as "utopian" and "impractical". Way too busy putting up fences between themselves and the Ardent Progressives, apparently. Which makes sense; after all, what else could they be expected to sit on?

The fascists are winning at present because Blame The Immigrants reads as plausible to people without much political engagement. Seems to me that Make Elon Pay Again could end up every bit as appealing to the very same cohort if only the folks who love their leftward firing squads would just get off the fucking fence and start pushing it properly.
posted by flabdablet at 10:56 AM on February 18 [17 favorites]


So, just for the sake of discussion, what are a few ideas that can be expressed in simple, pithy terms that would appeal to the broadest audience of disaffected Americans? There seems to be widespread agreement that shit isn’t working for most people but how can that be named aim a way that points toward change (not the kind we have at the moment)?
posted by zenzenobia at 11:14 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]


(ducks and munches)
posted by Reverend John at 11:20 AM on February 18 [1 favorite]


Yeah, it's a mess. Consider a thought experiment:

Who is the most responsible for the current dire situation in American politics?

A. The ultra wealthy ultra right (eg. Koch Bros/Mercers/Federalist Soc/Heritage Foundation)
B. Donald Trump, himself, personally, plus Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller
C. Right wing tech billionaires (eg. Theil, Zuckerberg, Musk)
D. The Roberts Court
E. The mainstream media writ large (eg. New York Times, CNN, NBC News)
F. Democratic leadership (eg. Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Harris)
G. Bernie Sanders, AOC and the very online left (eg. Jacobin)

The first issue here is that literally A-E are all variously responsible and working in cooperation, to the effect that even without 1 or 2 of them, we would probably still be in this mess. But the only people that the F. Democratic leadership is willing to go hard against are the people with less power than them: G. Bernie, AOC and the very online left.

The second issue is that there is no other concentration of political power in this country that is well positioned to contest the A-E juggernaut. The lack of effective rhetoric with which a political movement might undertake opposition is entirely downstream from the lack of an organized polity that could develop and take up that rhetoric to use as a basis for political opposition. The reason for that lack of organized political power is the establishment Democratic leadership's complete and total abdication of their responsibility to act as a focus and forum for developing that power, or to conversely get out of the way for someone who will do so.

Conclusion: The question of who bears the most responsibility for how we got here has no clear resolution because of the complicating factor of the abdication of the opposition. The road out of this jeopardy will similarly have to be found outside of the usual halls of power. The fact that the ownership of the primary means of organizing employed by younger generations is literally owned and operated by one of the antagonists in question raises serious concerns about the bounds of the possible in that arena.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:31 AM on February 18 [13 favorites]


So, just for the sake of discussion, what are a few ideas that can be expressed in simple, pithy terms that would appeal to the broadest audience of disaffected Americans?

"Health insurance companies are evil, bloodsucking leeches" is a pretty simple message that sure seemed to resonate with a very broad audience of disaffected Americans a couple months back.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:34 AM on February 18 [13 favorites]


what are a few ideas that can be expressed in simple, pithy terms that would appeal to the broadest audience of disaffected Americans?

Tax assets, not incomes. Funds for public services shouldn't be coming from ordinary working stiffs like you and me, they should be taken off the ultra wealthy bludgers who get paid millions of dollars for just waking up and breathing.
posted by flabdablet at 11:37 AM on February 18 [9 favorites]


So, just for the sake of discussion, what are a few ideas that can be expressed in simple, pithy terms that would appeal to the broadest audience of disaffected Americans? There seems to be widespread agreement that shit isn’t working for most people but how can that be named aim a way that points toward change (not the kind we have at the moment)?

The one I saw most recently was something along the lines of:
The battle right now isn't side (right) to side (left) but bottom (us) to top (CEO's , oligarchs, billionaires).
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:39 AM on February 18 [3 favorites]


"Health insurance companies are evil, bloodsucking leeches" is a pretty simple message that sure seemed to resonate with a very broad audience of disaffected Americans a couple months back.

Tax assets, not incomes. Funds for public services shouldn't be coming from ordinary working stiffs like you and me, they should be taken off the ultra wealthy bludgers who get paid millions of dollars for just waking up and breathing.

The one I saw most recently was something along the lines of:
The battle right now isn't side (right) to side (left) but bottom (us) to top (CEO's , oligarchs, billionaires).

And to the point, the establishment Democratic Party is completely allergic to any of this. They, at a fundamental level, refuse to work with anger in any form. They cede that ground entirely to the right. However, the people broadly speaking are frustrated and angry right now, and so they turn to those who give that voice.

The usefulness of a rhetoric of optimism and hope is as a bulwark within in a context of organizing and struggle. But hope alone does not win you any fights. Right now, we have a political class on the center left that refuses to fight at all, and certainly doesn't want to win any.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:58 AM on February 18 [20 favorites]


Someone put together a helpful Project 2025 Tracker website.

Also for those needing to catch up: Understanding the MAGA-Tech Authoritarian Alliance
posted by zaixfeep at 11:59 AM on February 18 [10 favorites]


keeping an eye on this pink slips idea — inspired by a movement that had a big effect in simpler times.
posted by changeling at 11:59 AM on February 18 [2 favorites]


I read most of Yarvin's "Gentle Introduction." This, I think, is the quote that best sums up the dreams and nightmares that drive him:
At the bottom of the stairs: anarchy, hell, Haiti, Mogadishu, Lagos. For you they are waiting! For you, for you, for you, these hells! For you! Stop on the stairs; listen quietly; hear Mogadishu, in the blackness below, reeking of piss, waiting for you; purring; licking her chops. She wants you. You! And your family! Anarchy is hungry, hungry, always hungry. Insatiable. Yet patient.

And at the top? Versailles. Louis XIV. Elizabeth I. The greatness of Britain. The greatness of Europe. The fire of yesterday, untarnished by time! The glory of princes! Cardinals, in their red hats! Black-robed Jesuits, terrible, intense! Against them, the burning martyrs of the Reformation! What a world! A gleaming, cloud-borne Olympia in the blue, far above our wet gray reality. Gentlemen, we have only our butts to turn around. Why not climb, and fast? Two steps in a jump? Three?
I assume that he heard all the "superpredator" propaganda in the '90s and bought fully into it. I don't know if he read about the massive migrant homeless populations or the massive witch hunts in the Europe of Elizabeth I and Louis XIV, but if he did he liked it because it was a society where those people could be killed for the sake of "order" and "security".

And, yes, you're not wrong to notice a racial cast to the two paragraphs I quoted. He is unapologetically racist. He believes slavery and Apartheid were both good, because of the race of people they were applied to.

And that's the leading "philosopher" of members of the current administration.
posted by clawsoon at 12:13 PM on February 18 [12 favorites]


I don’t think the establishment Democratic Party can do the job. I agree that however opposition happens, it has to channel anger and it has to lead toward something different, not just “save our democracy!” It isn’t worth saving if it isn’t working.

I think a message about getting money out of politics (and maybe making elections shorter - everybody hates the years’ long campaigns) might be useful. “We won’t let billionaires and corporations buy us.” Or “listen to the people, not the powerful” or whatever. Also, not responding to every message of support or frustration with a packaged pitch for donations. You couldn’t invent a better way to make people cynical about political involvement.
posted by zenzenobia at 12:27 PM on February 18 [6 favorites]


So, just for the sake of discussion, what are a few ideas that can be expressed in simple, pithy terms that would appeal to the broadest audience of disaffected Americans?

Vote for us and we'll assure you a good education, adequate healthcare, a living wage, a way to retire, and decent public infrastructure. The system is broken. We want to fix it. Anybody who disagrees wants to rob you.
posted by Omon Ra at 12:56 PM on February 18 [10 favorites]


Post flagged as fantastic.
posted by Gelatin at 1:21 PM on February 18 [4 favorites]


At the bottom of the stairs: anarchy, hell, Haiti, Mogadishu, Lagos.
I should add that Yarvin characterizes democracy as being a single step away from his nightmare of anarchy.

If you're in a democracy - you poor deceived American - you're teetering at the edge of total breakdown.

The steps on the staircase in the other direction, the direction that he wants to go, are oligarchy, then aristocracy, and finally his ideal of absolute monarchy. Each one is a step further away from anarchy, and therefore better.
posted by clawsoon at 1:23 PM on February 18 [4 favorites]


That example above highlighting A - G responsible parties is such a good representation of mostly US powers that have aligned together or are in opposition to bring us to this point. However...

We tend to think of this as a US problem (Europe is affected, obviously, but US politics). We cannot forget there are unfathomable oceans of money pouring into the US from foreign sources. And out as well - into private accounts tucked away into the balance sheets of massive global banks and small countries willing to take those assets, accounts that no doubt are being held by many of the people who are now acting against the interests of the US and democracies everywhere.

This is a global war. We constrain our thinking to the US at our peril. The next great world war has already begun, not just the proxy hot wars but a war of minds globally. There are reasons Russia is meddling in US politics and has clear marks who do their bidding gleefully on Fox News and the podcast-sphere. They're getting paid or are compromised, probably both. But Russia is spending.

Why are they so invested? Speaking of Russia alone, there are hard realities they need to face and deal with in the ensuing decades:
-Climate change legislation would kill their revenues from oil and mineral production, which has continued since 2003 to increase as a % against all other income streams as other industries fall further behind
-Warming temperatures open up alternative land masses in the Arctic they can claim for themselves with additional resources. More warming is good for Russia.
-Climate change - based on the best estimates - will introduce massive global food insecurity by the 2030s as temperature changes, drought, flooding, crop diseases and migrations affect global and regional food availability (hence the invasion of Ukraine, the source of so much wheat, sunflowers, barley and more). Control of this production will be a major source of soft power for Russia. Interesting USAID is killed immediately in the current ongoing coup, setting aside the Elon related theories about its role in ending apartheid or investigating Starlink. Russia wants the global community starving for food so they can provide.
-Population cliffs - They will need more people. New territories offer that for the evil minded, disgusting to consider
-Probably many more I am missing

I stepped away from the news after the election, resumed following at the inauguration. It's been hard not to despair. I've said it before but the future is dark - it is unknown, there are many moments in history when it seemed like the chips were down, fate was certain, the world would fall into the abyss, and against all odds, there was a turn away.

Find a little faith in the good where you can. It exists. We will all need it, and you may not only need it for yourself, but maybe it will need to be shared with those around you or strangers on a small community message board.
posted by glaucon at 1:29 PM on February 18 [7 favorites]


In a recent podcast with Chris Hayes, Steve Levitsky pointed out that while this kind of authoritarianism isn't unusual, it almost never involves transforming a mainstream party into a radical one. The Trump coalition pulled off an unusual chestburster move that killed off the old RINO Republican party and replaced it with the new MAGA Republican party. It doesn't change much about the situation, but it would have been really improbable for the same thing to happen to the Democratic party at the same time.
posted by netowl at 2:12 PM on February 18 [2 favorites]


The Trump coalition pulled off an unusual chestburster move that killed off the old RINO Republican party and replaced it with the new MAGA Republican party.

The secret sauce is the fact that this is just the endpoint (?) of a transformation that began, depending on who you ask, as far back as the 1940s. Certainly the transformation of the Republican party into an illiberal party was already underway in the 1990s with the rise of Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News. The Republican old guard had to pander to the growing illiberal base, but they were still firmly in charge until the rise of the Tea Party in 2007 (although even the Tea Party was not nearly as illiberal as MAGA is now). Even then, the old guard still controlled the most important levers of power until 2016. The years from 2016 until 2023 or 2024 were the final power struggle, which the illiberal faction has now won completely. And, appropriately, the illiberal faction itself is quickly coming under the control of ideologically-driven plutocrats, the exact class people who began the transformation in the first place.
posted by heraplem at 2:36 PM on February 18 [13 favorites]


[link-heavy FPP]

Oh, thank God, you didn’t go crazy with the blockquotes...
posted by y2karl at 3:01 PM on February 18


Thugs with guns usually manage to subdue people with money.

Did you see, someone just launched an “uber for armed goons” app this week?
posted by funkaspuck at 4:26 PM on February 18 [2 favorites]


I think you could come up with the best, most concise, most resonating, pithiest message anybody's ever come up with, and it wouldn't matter a bit. Because the right has what the rest of us do not: a giant right-wing media apparatus that shapes the way a shit-ton of people understand not just the news, not just issues, but reality itself. Anybody to the left of these people just doesn't have the megaphone that FOX News et al have.

A big part of the reason I think this way is that I think plenty of political candidates do campaign on many of the messages we've come up with here, and it doesn't matter one bit. Their message gets drowned in the flood of bullshit coming from the other side.
posted by Rykey at 4:39 PM on February 18 [11 favorites]


heraplem, pretty sure the best start date for what you describe is the Powell Memo. Obviously, Louis Powell was working with a fertile ground, but what he did was dramatic, unprecedented, secret, and it galvanized the core of what became the modern reactionary "Conservative" movement. He paved the way for broad coordination of wealthy, powerful people against liberal democracy. If we're living through the chestburster moment, Louis Powell was the facehugger.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 5:57 PM on February 18 [4 favorites]


Because the right has what the rest of us do not: a giant right-wing media apparatus that shapes the way a shit-ton of people understand not just the news, not just issues, but reality itself.

American evangelism and prosperity gospel among them. I honestly think prosperity gospel is one of the huge setups for todays situation-from Trump must be great because he appears rich to Elon Musk etc. know what they’re doing. If God rewards the righteous with wealth, then God’s voting plan in this election was clear.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:35 PM on February 18 [9 favorites]


At the bottom of the stairs: anarchy, hell, Haiti, Mogadishu, Lagos. For you they are waiting! For you, for you, for you, these hells! For you! Stop on the stairs; listen quietly; hear Mogadishu, in the blackness below, reeking of piss, waiting for you; purring; licking her chops. She wants you. You! And your family! Anarchy is hungry, hungry, always hungry. Insatiable. Yet patient.
Purple prose much?

It's like these people permanently inhabit their own tiny Nuremberg rally.
posted by flabdablet at 4:56 AM on February 19 [3 favorites]


what are a few ideas that can be expressed in simple, pithy terms that would appeal to the broadest audience of disaffected Americans?

TUCKER THINKS
YOU'RE STUPID

Background image is any of the thousands featuring Carlson's characteristic pants-wetting bray. The fash have put so much work into discrediting mainstream media that it would be a a pity not to build on that and sow some seeds of doubt in theirs.

Give Elon's indiscriminate cuts a month or two to really start biting and we can move on to

I'M SORRY, DADDY
HIT ME AGAIN
I DESERVED IT

over that Blue Steel wannabe mugshot.
posted by flabdablet at 5:14 AM on February 19 [2 favorites]


how about? "join a union, it's as American as apple pie" right there in the name vs. the Godfather presidency: do something illegal in his name as a loyalty test and he'll make pardon you (with the supreme court's blessing)

or maybe appeal to folks' sense of fairplay that buying off the refs is unsportsmanlike? though if they feel like the game is already rigged, as kendrick lamar says, "When you fight, don't fight fair, 'cause you'll never win"

> If we're living through the chestburster moment, Louis Powell was the facehugger.

The Memo That Hijacked American Democracy — And How Democrats Can Take It Back - "A single memo launched a strategy to control media, courts, and public opinion, reshaping American democracy. To reclaim it, Democrats must build a powerful media and policy network."[*]

altho i guess academia and 'hollywood' writ large may function as institutional media gatekeepers, there isn't a functional equivalent on the scale of ALEC, say, for promoting progressive policies to turn leftist-liberals' utopian dreams into reality.
posted by kliuless at 7:28 AM on February 19 [3 favorites]


There is consistent avoidance across almost all media (and blogs etc) of the role of several (initially separate) strands of evangelicalism as the driver of all this - waves arm out window. Only the Texas Observer and the Mississippi Free Press seem to write on it.

Smedly, Butlerian jihadi
Who is the most responsible for the current dire situation in American politics?
A. The ultra wealthy ultra right .. Heritage Foundation)
B..

The Heritage Foundation should not be treated as another secular think tank, they are driven by the theology of The New Apostolic Reformation NAR - a global Dominionist movement dead set on taking the whole planet (for their image of) God.

The NAR were and are very heavily influenced by the the theology of John Rushdoony (1916-2001), his Institutes of Biblical Law 1973 (funny how US Christians are so offended by Sharia when you see this title), imagined Christian Dominion of all the Earth occurring naturally and gradually over centuries. The Institutes was the framework for Christian reconstructionism [Oxford Handbook Topics in Religion].

US political Christians of the early 1980's saw the Institutes as an opportunity to accelerate the future into the present. As part of this they deliberately set out to attract potential political leaders (and policy people) - and to convert those already in. The Seven Mountains Mandate is a later development of this (the Seven Mountains are family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. Note omission of science and environment/planet). This latter is probably due to their attitude to Earth: For God so loved His disposable planet.. my comment on another thread yesterday.

What the US political apparatus represents now is a group aligned around the idea of themselves taking the planet for God (after they have remade God in their own political image). There aim is something a lot worse than the harshest Sharia as at least under Sharia the leaders do not actively have 95+ percent of the population. Apparent secularists (and accelerationists) like Musk are simply fascists along for the ride and the spoils. If Vance gets real power (Vance is a horrifying being akin to Australia's Peter Dutton) Musk will swing from a light pole before long.

heraplen - as far back as the 1940s politically yes, but also religiously with the The New Order of the Latter Rain (Latter Rain is more common) movement starting ~1948 in Canada and then the US. This later led to evangelical alignment with Tofler's Future Shock and Third Wave ideas (an early linking of fundamentalist religion and tech/accelerationism - there's a lot of back and forth in Christian thought and writings through the 1970's and 80's on this).

For an increasingly essential look at what the NAR is see Baker's 2021 phd thesis From Peter Wagner to Bill Johnson: The History and Epistemology of the “New Apostolic Reformation". This is very useful to understand how the NAR connects with especially US politics.
posted by unearthed at 1:12 PM on February 19 [11 favorites]


jesus
posted by kliuless at 9:41 PM on February 20 [2 favorites]


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