Wishcasting and Hopium Won't Save Us - No One Is Riding to the Rescue (But Us)

Four years ago today, everyone saw a brutal crisis of democracy, failed and complicit leadership, and an ideology based on white supremacy and gang violence. Now, the brutal harvest is here.

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1.

Throw a frog onto a hot frying pan and the frog will jump out. But place that same frog on a lukewarm pan and gradually raise the heat, et voila you’re cooking up some cuisses de grenouille. My worry today is that the frying pan is public life in America as we know it.

And Democrats (and those of us who believe in liberal democracy) are the frogs.

The gradual changes are killing us, and will eventually become much faster and impossible to ignore. This relentless glacier of malevolence is possible, ironically, because of the success of the Biden Administration and allies throughout civil society in restoring a sense of competence and normalcy to the country since the violent extremist insurrection four years ago. But the slow erosion is also possible because of a deeply corrupted, hollowed out and unethical news media and frankly, our own cultural addiction to normalcy itself - “the norms” we obsessively genuflect before - and our human desire to see everything as basically fine, our lives and ambitions and careers and hobbies and travel and music and reading and families no longer interrupted by national emergency.

Four years ago today, everyone saw a brutal crisis of democracy, failed and complicit leadership, and an ideology based on white supremacy and gang violence. Public voices across the political spectrum were unanimous in their condemnation. Yet here we are, two weeks from inaugurating the convicted felon who instigated the siege. And empowering his gang of thugs, dangerous kooks, and the truly traitorous - and worse, the unhinged richest human on earth personally directing the levers of power - all in what will no doubt be a decorous ceremony no doubt graced by media applause for any thin sign of “bi-partisan norms.”

Friends, that is a path I choose not to travel.

In a testy exchange with White House journalists (who seem to be openly salivating over the return of Trump) over the weekend, Biden reiterated that he believes Trump and MAGA are an ongoing threat to democracy. “I think what he did was a genuine threat to democracy, and I’m hopeful that we’re beyond it,” said the President. I would note: the first part absolutely yes, the second part most definitely not.

There’s an awful lot of wishcasting and “hopium” out there among Democrats and other Trump opponents. I hear it from friends, see it in the liberal groups I’m part of, read about it online. Trump will be constrained by our system of government, a weak Republican majority in the House, the Senate filibuster, his own awful management and clownish demeanor, the incompetence of his cabinet, the international order and so on. And some of that may be true. But by far the most effective tool we have in slowing down the evident movement toward authoritarianism is a strong and cohesive opposition.

2.

Much of the wishcasting is needlessly heedless of what is actually happening in this country right now; part of that is because the feckless political media - from the Times and the Washington Post on down - instinctively softens the very worst of MAGA.

Let’s take the case of Trump supporter Matthew Livelsberger, who apparently took his own life as he blew up a rented Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump hotel in Vegas. As Josh Marshall pointed out, Livelsberger’s manifesto/suicide note was extreme and explicit - his last words “denounce Democrats and demand they be ‘culled’ from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.”

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.

Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.

Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.

Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

Consider this last sunset of ‘24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.

This is a call to political violence that the media first treated as possible terrorism - shadowed by Trump’s disgusting lie about immigrants - and then as a personal tragedy of a veteran’s PTSD. I’m pretty sure that on January 6th, we can see what it’s really about. And as we face Senate confirmation hearings in the next few weeks, can anyone doubt the extremism of those Trump nominees - and their close relationship to how millions of MAGA red hats like Matthew Livelsberger now think? Matt Yglesias conjured a relatively easy-to-believe scenario about Trump’s FBI nominee that frankly, a year from now, may seem like an unshocking chapter in the first year of the Trump second term:

Suppose Kash Patel shows up at FBI headquarters and says he wants to identify the most hardcore MAGA special agents and recruit them to a small elite team. What’s their job? To do illegal wiretaps against Trump’s political enemies in order to blackmail them. Someone on the team says, “Director that’s illegal! I’m all for egregious abuses of power, but I also don’t want to get in trouble.” And he says,” don’t worry, POTUS has you covered with pardons.”

As Amanda Marcotte pointed out last week, the rank and file believe they are called to action all around the country - not just on the National Mall, as they were four years ago. She wrote about a letter circulating in Lincoln County, Oregon calling on MAGA locals to begin the round-ups themselves:

"Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate of brown folks," the letter instructed. "Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate."

The goal, the letter explains, is to gather information to help Trump's incoming appointments for Homeland Security in their quest to deport millions of non-white people, which will necessitate rounding them up in concentration camps. The letter ends with a promise of material rewards for people who participate. "When the brown folks are rounded up, their properties will be confiscated," the letter promises. "So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable."

This promise has strong echoes from history. When Jews were kidnapped for the Holocaust during WWII, it was common for their Christian neighbors to ransack their homes, stealing everything and enriching themselves. "They raided Jewish people’s homes, businesses, and offices in search of valuables," reads the Holocaust Museum's online exhibit, which includes pictures of people going through piles of stolen goods and selling off looted valuables. It's unclear if the letter writer knows this history and finds it inspiring, or if they are unconsciously recreating the Nazi past. Either way, the main takeaway is whoever is behind this letter doesn't want to sit back and let the Trump administration do their own dirty work. They believe the MAGA masses can be harnessed to help, in a vigilante fashion.

Once the green light goes off on January 20th, we simply don’t know how quickly American public life will descend. I suspect it will be episodic, scattered but widespread, and deeply threatening to those who believe in a liberal democracy.

3.

This is why the New Year’s Day column in the New York Times by Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi of Long Island was so disgraceful. Under the bouncy house happy headline “let’s try something different in how we deal with Trump,” Suozzi proposed what amounts to Democratic defection to MAGA.

As a Democratic member of Congress, I know my party will be tempted to hold fast against Mr. Trump at every turn: uniting against his bills, blocking his nominees and grinding the machinery of the House and the Senate to a halt.

That would be a mistake. Only by working together to find compromise on parts of the president-elect’s agenda can we make progress for Americans who are clearly demanding change in the economy, immigration, crime and other top issues.

That part in boldface is a white surrender flag for liberal democracy waved by an elected member of the only full-scale sworn opposition we have to Trump’s radicalism: Democrats in Congress. In his next line Suozzi declares “I’m no dupe.” It’s tempting to disagree - but I think the truth is worse: Suozzi is engaging in political calculus that screams from the incriminating diaries of Petain and Vichy.

As many of you know, I work as a consultant in the nonprofit sector, helping organizations to plan strategically, increase their revenue and resources, and sharpen their communications; I also teach in the Nonprofit Management masters program at Columbia. This week, I’m reminded in that context of a post-election essay by one of my philanthropy sector heroes, the great analyst Lucy Bernholz.

“Last week I was made aware of just how quickly people cave. People who would tell you they'd have acted differently in late 1930s Germany, or during other periods of generalized terror, fingerpointing, othering. People who think they're activists, who think of themselves as fighting for justice.”

The story Bernholz was referring to was the despicable targeting of Rep. Sarah McBride, the first out trans member of the House of Representatives by MAGA Republican Nancy Mace and her crew of bullying jackals over the use of Capitol Hill rest rooms. Read all of Lucy’s post, but the gist is this: no one stood up at a public meeting with Mace when a speaker carrying a trans pride flag was removed by security.

Standing up for what's right when it's easy is easy. Standing up for what's right when it's hard, and scary, and dangerous? That's what protecting democracy and fighting for our rights takes now.

That room failed. That's terrifying.

This scares me. Scarier than the rhetoric and threats of the incoming Administration is the thought that people I hope will have my back, won't. That 48.3 percent of the country will take the electoral loss and give up, or only focus on the next election, or decide some people, some issues can be sacrificed.

What would you have done? Really? I hope each of us will prepare to fight, safely and effectively, at big moments and small ones. This Administration has made it clear what it wants to do. We who it targets must take care of ourselves and stand with each other. Real allies will also stand.

Reading this post choked me up. And it also made me think that all of us - yes, you over there reading quietly in the corner - will be faced with similar challenges over these next months and years. Let’s think of them as opportunities to do the right thing. To stand up. Air out your voice, exercise your rights. Be the vocal opposition.

listen to this

For all the obvious reasons, this is in heavy rotation at world headquarters of The Liberal.