Sadly, hundreds of the National Guard sent to the Capitol have tested positive for Covid.
In other news, MyPillow CEO booted from Twitter.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/twitter-permanently-bans-pillow-ceo-75483929?cid=clicksource_4380645_5_heads_hero_live_twopack_hed
Y’all, it’s cool! The riot at the Capitol Building was a false flag attack:
“The violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans; this provided the sham motivation to impeach President Trump in order to advance the Democratic goal of seizing total power,” the resolution says.
These people scare me to death. What in holy hell happened to them?
I loved the line that “grim-faced” women were accompanying Nancy. She can see expressions under a mask? She’s an idiot with x-ray vision!
According to the New York TImes, on the day of the insurrection, a California man sent threatening texts to the families of Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and ABC journalist George Stephanopolis, because Jeffries and Stephaopolis were continuing to spread “lies” about Biden having won the election.
I think this is the most important immediate step: every single one of these nutters – every last one – needs to be charged to the fullest extent that the law will allow. There can be no compromise. They can plea bargain with some to get some quick convictions on lesser cases where people merely trespassed and walked around with a confederate flag, but even that ought to result in a felony conviction of some sort that would, by law, require them to forfeit their guns.
But anyone - anyone - who was found to be engaged in violence and conspiring to attack federal officers of the law and any other government official ought to be doing some time in prison - no mercy. Every last face needs to be tracked down, prosecuted, and jailed.
And then we begin the task of sorting out the Trump administration. Prosecute them for all of the many crimes they’ve committed. As it is with the rioters, they need to throw the book at them. We might not be able to go after Trump but we could send the message that working for a mafia white house won’t pay. It’s critical - absolutely critical - to restore the balance of power between the criminal justice system and the political mafia and oligarchs who are increasingly leveraging their private power to corrupt public institutions. If we exit the Biden administration without that balance restored, we are fucked. We run the risk of turning into an authoritarian kleptocracy. We’re about 4-8 years away from that right now, but we can do something to prevent it.
This is something that’s been on my radar, particularly since January 6th. At the national level, the Republican party is trying to sort itself out, but not at the state level. State Republican parties are going through varying degrees of radicalization: they are engaging in increasingly anti-democratic and violent ideation.
This is not going away. There is a real possibility that state level party organizations begin to splinter off into varying degrees of militarization. Hypothetically, you could have a situation in which law enforcement organization in some counties work with party radicals and essentially work as a de facto militia, or green light militia activity. Sure, this would undoubtedly get on the DOJ’s radar, but it’s one thing for the government to follow a handful of extremists here and there; it’s quite another if there’s coordination in multiple states - God forbid 50 states - between political arms, law enforcement arms, and unofficial militias.
This is sorta what I’m referring to.
It’s the new “redemptionism”, to borrow a term from the backlash against anti-racist Reconstruction efforts after the Civil War. The rise of black national leaders and social progressivism and Obamacare and what-not are spurring paranoia among many rural and southern white people about the loss of their “way of life”.
And just as with the first Reconstruction, what they’re doing in response is rejecting the validity of the rule of law and equal rights, in favor of imposing their own will backed by violence. Exploiting public lands without paying fees, refusing to accept results of elections they don’t like, elevating cultlike groups and their “codes” above legal duties and regulations, terrorizing and murdering the oppressed (these days focusing more on undocumented immigrants than black people, though all minorities are seen as part of the “threat”)—they’re all aspects of this same Neo-Redemptionism phenomenon.
I think the analogy of Reconstruction is apt. Obviously the country has moved on from slavery and maybe it’s moved on from Jim Crow, but it hasn’t moved on from the idea that whites should be at the front of the line when it comes to having power and status, and living the American dream.
What concerns me about groups like the Oath Keepers - and I doubt they’re the only ones but just among the more visible ones - is that they are essentially using legitimate means to gain power, but when they do come to power they are advancing an alternative view of the Constitution. They are rejecting the idea that the federal government is the last word on how they govern their cities, counties, and states, and if they are successful that may very well challenge directly many of the civil rights reforms that were made in the 20th Century and into the early part of the this century. That’s why I have referred to such groups as neo-confederates because they are acting in the same spirit as the Southern Democrats did in the late 1800s.
Exactly. I posted this in another thread:
They trying to claw back all the gains we’ve made in the past 60 years. Maybe not at the national level (although they’ll try) but they’ll settle for whatever states they can get. We need to oppose them everywhere.
Here’s another scenario I’ve been thinking about. Every three or four generations throughout the country’s history, conservative America goes too far in its recalcitrance and progressive America puts a temporary stop to it, though not without a great deal of turmoil.
Eighty-five years after declaring independence, conservatives pushed us into a Civil War because of their insistence on enslaving their fellow citizens. Sixty-three years later, conservative deregulation, neglect and malfeasance pushed the country into its worst economic disaster ever and triggered the New Deal in backlash. In 1964, progressives had had enough of Jim Crow and sent troops into southern cities to stop conservative apartheid.
It seems to me that current conservative determination to impose minority rule on the nation could be the new rubber band about to break. A poorly representative election system is giving us an obstructionist government where the conservative minority will use every inch of the poor design to prevent a new surge of progress. They are taking a huge risk in doing so because new voters coming into the pipeline and the increased urbanization of the country at large are going to snap back at them in frustration.
Good posts, Pleonast and Kimstu.
Some of your thoughts mirror some of the thoughts I’ve had, RW.
Good observation - I’d add that there have always been and likely always will be opposing forces within a democracy, including forces that are anti-democratic. In an open, capitalistic society, moneyed interests & wealth holders are the natural enemies of a state that spreads political power evenly, precisely because they fear that the masses will vote to take away their power, and ultimately some of their wealth, and that fear is well-founded, in fact. Such a reversal did happen in the 20th Century.
I’d argue that, on one hand, these perturbations have been partly the result of unresolved conflicts that ultimately come to a head. The Civil War, for instance, was the result of never reconciling the fact that one half of the country’s states were dependent on race-based slavery. The post-Civil War era was the same issue but with a twist: how to deal with a society that has inherited a brutal system of racial apartheid and created race-based castes. Over time, the answer was that these antiquated and inhumane institutions had to be dissolved. But we’re talking about a process that took place over the course of nearly three centuries (nearly 4 centuries if you include America’s colonial era).
Beyond that, technological change almost always creates instability. The ease with which money and information can move across borders is a major power shift which now gives smaller numbers of individuals enormous economic power and they’ve used this power to exert major influence over political systems. They’ve moved faster than the system that regulates and checks their power. They can move money around. They can fund top-down political movements that dress themselves up as ‘grassroots’ politics. They have platforms and megaphones to drown out neutral, fact-based information and they can create (have created) their own information bubbles and misinformation ecosystems. They have global and local influence. They’re not going to just voluntarily give up this power.
Think of the labor movement at the end of the 19th Century. From the first labor-related violence that occurred in the 1880s until about 1933, there were waves of clashes between labor and corporate power, the worst of which occurred in 1921 in what became known as the Coal Mine wars of West Virginia. It took about 50 years of bloodshed - in some cases- extreme bloodshed - before labor won the right to collectively bargain, and that only really came after a total economic collapse.
I only realized a while after I wrote my previous post how much it sounded like the Strauss-Howe Theory, or Steve Bannon’s “Fourth Turning.” Where Bannon and I probably differ is how we see the “High” cycle settling in; he probably believes in a return to the conservative Happy Days where white patriarchy dominates the political and cultural structures whereas I believe that progressive values will instead make historic strides forward.
I can’t stress enough how very different I see the electorate in, say, 2040 than it is now. And this belief colors every bit of my political thinking, rightly or wrongly.
And labor has been slowly but surely losing that right, without a shot being fired, for the last forty years.
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Best working years of my life were as a Union nurse.
Worse years have been after I moved to an unrepentant right to work state, which is really a right to be cheated, abused and fired at will state. In this Covid nursing shortage I would come out of retirement to work if I could as a union nurse but not without that protection, so Nebraska is out one nurse. They bring it on themselves. I don’t expect it will change in my lifetime.
Oh, I’d think some compromise would be okay if one of them could implicate some major ringleaders. If they give up a Lauren Boebert, shit, let 'em walk. You need to cut the head off the snake.
I look at this in terms of a group that has been culturally dominant since before the founding of this nation, having established so many of its legal, cultural, political, social, linguistic, religious, and economic norms, now confronted with the possibility of having to share even more of its inherited cultural capital and power.
To be fair and accurate, a great number of whites, particularly educated whites, are not fearful of sharing; they’re used to it. They embrace the diversity. They buy into urbanization, globalization, diversity, and liberal values, even understanding that they might find it inconvenient as compared to a majoritarian system in which they don’t have to compete as hard for status. But there are many who don’t see it that way, and they don’t want to give up their seat of power so easily.
One thing I’ve gradually realized myself is that this isn’t necessarily a bottom-up working class rebellion against the elites. Trumpism/MAGA…whatever we want to call it is in many ways a top-down movement in which elites are fighting with other elites and reaching out to disaffected masses to gain popular support in their rejection of liberal values. This is what many on the far right are doing, including many who are not necessarily poor but who nevertheless feel ‘power poor’ or ‘power displaced’ (not an academic term, I realize, but my way of describing it). This somewhat comports with what Peter Turchin describes in his analysis of conflict as a human ecological problem, with my only caveat to this analysis being that perhaps he frames it (as Strauss-Howe/Bannon) in ways that are perhaps a little bit too deterministic.
I do agree that there does seem to be a general pattern in which reforms - no matter how forward-thinking they might be - eventually suffer from stress and fatigue as a result of inevitable technological, social, economic, and political changes that occur between generations. It’s almost inevitable that within a generation or two even the most stable political systems - whether it’s Mao’s China or the Framer’s America - will be tested, and will require some troubleshooting and rewiring, without which, the machine will eventually catch up fire and burn itself.
Jim Crow is alive and well, we now call it “voter suppression”.
The match to the American tinder box will almost certainly be our poorly designed election systems. The lone national office can be elected by a minority of the voters. The 50 Democratic senators currently represent 41 million more voters than do the 50 Republicans and with the filibuster, senators representing maybe as little as 15-20% of the population can block any meaningful legislation. States like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are heavily gerrymandered to insure a GOP majority of its House delegation even while losing the overall state popular vote and are even now considering Nebraska/Maine type legislation to enhance GOP hopes in presidential elections.
A tie is a philosophical win for conservatives and the system currently favors obstruction to change. The question for our conservative friends is how much longer they intend to answer complaints with a dismissive point to the constitution and a “too bad, so sad.” And by doing so risk an extra-constitutional backlash by a majority electorate frustrated with its wishes unmet despite its consistent and substantial numerical superiority.