Plan A and Plan B and a lot of other plans for dealing with the horror of a Trump administration have crashed and burned. So, we're onto Plan I. This stands for Plan Implosion.
What is it?
1. Trump's management of the federal government and the actions taken by Elon Musk as shadow President are so bad, that his administration is on a path to implode in public opinion and political support, now that his honeymoon period is coming to an end.
The New York Times has listed 22 major illegal actions his administration has taken so far, of which courts have already halted seven of them. He may win some of those battles, but he won't win all of them.
His nominees are consistently mendacious, incompetent, and have profoundly flawed character.
And, as his actions are starting to be implemented, a lot of his supporters, who didn't read Project 2025, or didn't take his rhetoric seriously, are starting to realize how bad his policies are for them, and had bad both his policies and the chaos and uncertainty that his approach to implementing them has created are for the economy. Pretty much every major economic indicator has gone south since he has taken office, and sometimes in a seriously concerning way. Polls show that both most of his policies and many of his approaches to implementing them are seriously unpopular. And, his initial favorability rating is lower than any other President in the history of modern polling.
2. If Trump's administration implodes badly enough, he may see major defections in his own caucus in Congress, which is just a three representative majority in the House and a three Senator majority in the Senate, and we may see long shot Democrats win races for Congress in 2026 as the nation decides that maybe putting the Republicans in charge was a bad idea. The current Republican caucus in Congress is not known for its unity and cohesiveness, even though some of these internal conflicts are just simmering beneath the surface.
3. The U.S. Supreme Court has carried a lot of water for Trump so far, and has an uber-conservative agenda that it would like to advance. But Trump's complete disregard for the rule of law, and the mess of constitutional crises he is creating, can't sit well with all of them. I'm sure that even many of the conservative justices are shocked at how far Trump has gone to ignore the law. And, ultimately, their power derives from government officials obeying the law including their dictates.
This court's rulings have shown a marked tendency to ignore legal analysis in favor of what they see as practical and expedient. And, if the chaos reaches the point that it is approaching, where the whole Congressionally and constitutionally established framework of the federal government and legislative process starts to fall apart, the economy is crashing, and popular support for his administration is crumbling, they may finally see the error of their ways in appearing to give Trump everything and put on the brakes.
4. Trump's abandonment of all of the traditional enemies of the U.S. and embrace of our former enemies as friends, greatly weakens the U.S. internationally and weakens Trump's political support from even conservatives, at home. There aren't a lot of single issue foreign policy voters on the right or the left. But the people who do care deeply about foreign policy tend to be powerful.
We're going to have to hope that the rest of Western Europe steps up to support Ukraine, now that the U.S. has turned on all of its NATO allies and is trying to throw Ukraine under the bus.
We're going to have to hope that Israel with the U.K.'s help, and the involvement of the international community, can handle the Middle East's woes in the face of Trump's whacky destabilizing proposals.
Could this just be wishful thinking?
Sure it could be. But, right now, this seems to be the best trajectory to aim for at the moment until a better plan comes along. The opposition doesn't exactly have a lot of options right now.
The picture tells the entire story.
A 2022 Chinese land purchase in the U.S. . . . raised concerns. That spring, a food producer called Fufeng Group bought 370 acres for corn milling near an Air Force base in North Dakota. This prompted the Biden administration to propose a new rule: any foreign company or individual who wants to buy land within 100 miles of certain U.S. military bases (the North Dakota base included) needs government approval.
The news last week that the U.S. government is pursuing a Mach-5-capable bomber rippled across the globe at hypersonic speed. The Next Generation Responsive Strike (NextRS) program, a combination bomber and spy plane, will be the U.S. Air Force’s next project after its effort to build a sixth-generation fighter jet.A hypersonic bomber would by far be the most technologically advanced aircraft project ever attempted—but is speed without stealth still relevant today? . . .
The Air Force has previously bet the farm on stealthy strike aircraft, so it’s reasonable to ask why it is suddenly having a change of heart. In April 2024, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine, the Air Force said it did not want more than 100 B-21 Raider bombers.Instead, it said, a new aircraft might come along by the time the initial order was fulfilled that would supplement the Raider fleet. That new aircraft is almost certainly NextRS.NextRS won’t be a stealthy aircraft. A hypersonic bomber would need to prioritize aerodynamic efficiency over a low radar cross-section to maximize range and manage the blistering temperatures generated by high surface friction that would melt ordinary aircraft.It would also generate a huge infrared signature that could be picked up by space-based sensors, giving an adversary a heads-up that a hypersonic aircraft or missile is on the way.This raises two possibilities. One is that NextRS is not a bomber in the strict sense of the term, dropping unpowered, precision-guided munitions directly overhead a target. One of the aircraft’s design goals is the release of munitions at hypersonic speeds.Hypersonic weapons could be fired outside the S-400’s 250-mile intercept radius, leaving it up to the missile to penetrate enemy air defenses. Another possibility is that the aircraft will be substantially faster than Mach 5—fast enough that the Air Force is confident it won’t face interception.Unless it were launched directly underneath its target, a Mach-12 interceptor missile would be unable to overtake a Mach 12 NextRS traveling at 100,000 feet. The faster the aircraft can fly, the stronger the case to field it.
From here.
If China's claims that it can detect U.S. stealth aircraft from more than 1200 miles away, using the heat emitted from their engines rather than radar, is accurate, the U.S. might be well-advised to stop putting all of its eggs in the stealth bomber/fighter basket, and have a speed based back up plan in place as well.
The Navy currently has six unmanned surface vessel prototypes: the so-called “Overlord” ships Nomad, Mariner, Ranger, Vanguard and the smaller Sea Hunter and Seahawk, all members of the Navy’s “ghost fleet” of unmanned vessels. Nomad was put up for sale last year and her status remains unknown.
The unmanned ship Ranger successfully launched an SM-6 missile in 2021, and a smaller unmanned vessel launched that weapon in 2023,. The service has expressed support for building a single type of unmanned ship, closer in size to the Overlord ships that can each carry four, 40-foot container payloads.The Navy wants these ships to be up to 300 feet long with a displacement of up to 2,000 tons. For comparison, the Navy’s frontline manned ship, the Arleigh Burke class destroyer, is about 509 feet long and displaces about 9,900 tons in its current variant. . . .
The data and experiences gleaned from the deployment to the Red Sea would allow the Navy to make smart decisions about how best to use the unmanned ships. For example, one proposal is to use the larger, Overlord-type unmanned ships as escorts and supplements to manned combatant ships. Just as the battleship seldom put to sea without an escort of destroyers to defend it from surface and undersea torpedo craft, today’s surface warships need their own escorts to aid in air, missiles and drone defense, as well as conduct antisubmarine and scouting missions.In theory, the larger unmanned ships might carry a dozen or more missiles of their own, accessible as additional magazines for the manned warships with which they sail.The advantage of the unmanned ships is that they could be built in vast numbers quickly and in shipyards around the United States to include those on the Great Lakes and Western Rivers. If these unmanned ships work as combat augmentation for manned ships, then the Navy might embark on a vast building program with the goal of every manned ship being a “flotilla” leader of unmanned combatants. The Dutch Navy is already planning this for their guided missile frigates.
The real stealth surface combatants of the future are less likely to be high tech purpose built warships with designs that reduce their radar profile, like the experimental prototype shown above, and more likely to be like the ones in this Star War video excerpt that look like ordinary cargo ships, but are actually outfitted with military grade anti-ship missiles hidden away in structures that are indistinguishable from those found on ordinary cargo ships, manned by military personnel.
These secretly armed cargo ships can come quite close range with opposition warships, because they don't look like a threat, and blend in with normal merchant ship traffic, before striking opposition warships. This close range engagement can reduce the target warships' ability to employ defenses to the attack in the short moments after they realize what is going on, just as effectively as a far more sophisticated hypersonic missile attack from a much greater range fired from a conventional warship.
A recent incident where a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean sea near the entrance of the Suez Canal was struck by a 53,000 ton cargo ship with a history of prior collision incidents, illustrates how unsuspiciously the U.S. Navy currently responds to ships of this kind, even though that ship was unarmed and the collision was apparently a matter of mutual negligence rather than malice. The captain of the aircraft carrier was relieved of his command after that collision (which did significant but not disabling damage).
But it isn't clear that there has been any deeper tactical doctrine adjustment by the U.S. Navy even though the technique I describe was used with devastating effect in a U.S. Navy war game in the year 2002 whose outcome is now declassified.
* While the connection between political leanings and geographic are generally very stable, they aren't immune to change on a time scale of multiple election cycles and decades.
In my lifetime, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia have all swung significantly left. But Florida and Ohio have swung decisively to the right. In between Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia have swung moderately to the right, while Arizona has swung moderately to the left. In most of these cases, swings to the left have been associated with healthy economies not driven mostly by fossil fuels leading to migration in and prosperity, while swings to the right have mostly been driven by sustained outmigration of promising young people, the ongoing effects of deindustrialization, and the decline of rural economies not driven by tourism.
Probably the most puzzling of these has been Florida, which has seen population growth and was never a big fossil fuel economy or a manufacturing economy. Arizona has perhaps swung less left that it would have otherwise, and Florida has perhaps swung far right, due to migration of snowbirds to these places.
* Political coalitions can change, although again, this can take multiple election cycles.
The first wave of change, when I was younger, was the end stages of realignment that started in the 1960s, with the Democratic party going from being the Southern party that defended slavery to a liberal northern-urban-nonwhite-nonChristian-union-working class party, and the Republican party going from affluent urban moderates party of the north to a conservative, Southern-rural-white-Christian party. Moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats disappeared with the parties becomes much more strictly a liberal leaning Democratic party and a strictly conservative, and almost white Christian nationalist party.
The second wave, associated mostly with Trump and MAGA, has been the shift of the white working class to the GOP and the college educated upper middle class to the Democratic Party. In 2020, and even more in 2024, however, Trumpism has started to win over significant minorities of Hispanic working class and black working class voters, notwithstanding the movements rather extreme xenophobia and widespread racism.
* There are two, mostly disjoint, groups we perceive themselves to be in dire straits that call for major political change.
On one hand is the white nominally Christian or Evangelical, Gen X and older, non-college educated population, especially working class men and petite bourgeois men who aren't particularly educated but have gained wealth from small and medium sized non-professional business like car dealerships, construction contractors, farmers, ranchers, and skilled tradesmen. They have seen their status, in relative terms decline, their cultural norms marginalized, and their economic prospects and health stagnate and decline. They tend to live in suburbs or rural areas or a handful of conservative leaning cities.
On the other hand there are secular leaning, demographically diverse Millennial and Gen Z members who are have at least some college and often have college degrees and even post-graduate degrees or certifications, who are professional and administrative profession leaning, mostly white collar or pink collar, who making decent enough money oftentimes, but face high higher education costs, student loans, unaffordable housing costs, high health care costs, and high child care costs that impede their ability to accumulate wealth and attain the American dream.
Trump has ordered the DOD leadership to come up with 8% budget cuts, for each of the next five years (about $68 billion per year) from the DOD budget while preserving 17 priorities. Those priorities are:
1. The usual medical drama features a brilliant but somehow personally flawed or anti-social physician. It would be interesting to imagine one that is, instead, about an admittedly mediocre or dull physician, just barely qualified medically to do their job, and perhaps a little corrupt as well, so not truly righteous, who nonetheless basically moral and makes a positive difference by falling back on the medical basics and by recognizing and addressing the non-medical concerns of this physician's patients.
2. If one wanted to do a "hard science" story about aliens, how could one do it without faster-than-light travel? Suppose that somehow someone in our solar system with an advanced space based radio telescope intercepted transmissions from another advanced civilization without faster-than-light travel many light years away. Suppose further that these transmissions were sufficiently rich to figure out their language(s) and to follow the story playing out amongst the aliens. This would leave the author free reign to develop a very different (and yet in some essentials, similar) culture and world. The aliens' stories, in turn would impact the solar system based observers despite the fact that it doesn't directly impact them and they can't really meaningfully interact with the aliens. Perhaps, for example, our solar system observers might witness transmissions from the fall of their civilization and gain insights from it that would guide them in trying to prevent humans from making the same mistakes. The solar system observers might also glean technological advances that could be utilized by us.
3. There are several places in the solar system: the atmosphere of Venus, and the gas clouds of Jupiter and Saturn, for example, where the most habitable regions would be for life that was perpetually aloft rather than on the surface of some rocky or icy planet. A hard science fiction story of first contact with an intelligent species that is part of a larger aeolian ecosystem in one or more of these places could be promising.
4. There have been a number of science fiction stories about human scientists deliberately nudging other species along to become sentient species on a par with our own. One of the most promising, but least explored, of these possibilities, is the possibility of sentient octopi, who are already quite intelligent and have the physical traits necessary to be tool users but whose intelligence is as different from our own as almost any other on Earth. The main problem that prevents them from realizing this potential is that they have a great many young who receive no parental care once they are born and are eaten in large quantities by all manner of other creatures in the sea. A story taking place near the end of this process as we begin to share the world with another fully sentient species that we helped to create could be fascinating.
5. A hard science fiction story exploring the consequences in the not so distant future, of widespread biohacking and genetic engineering for longevity and other traits.
6. A hard scientific Jurassic Park style de-extinction drama, but involving mostly Pleistocene mammal species (which are much more feasible), rather than dinosaurs, and a less tragic ending.
7. A story exploring the co-existing of various archaic hominins and modern humans that we know happened several times in human history, perhaps a "Clan of the Cave Bear" type story, but with Denisovans and hobbits making first contact with modern humans.
8. A century or two in the future, climate change driven by fossil fuels will have run its course, fossil fuels themselves will have ceased to play a significant economic role even if it persists in some niches, Africa will have undergone economic development and experienced the demographic transition seen everyplace else that has experienced economic development, the global population will have fallen significantly from a peak of perhaps 9-10 billion people, Islam will have transformed from a current state that is a bit like Victorian Christian civilization to something more like modern Christianity, Christianity will have become a minority religion in most places outside of Africa in the face of secularization, and science will have advanced to the point where we know the laws of physics at the most fundamental levels without the various unsolved problems and open questions we have today. All this plausibly prophecy for the future needs is the right kind of story to unveil this world, and to identify the new central conflicts that have emerged in it, perhaps a heroes journey, or a journey of exploration, or a flight from some peril.
9. What would the world look like in the future if the so called "Axis of Evil" ends up winning, perhaps with the complicity of a MAGA America? What would the regression of global civilization look like in that new dark age? I would expect a future in that scenario that is dystopian but not apocalyptic, in which some small resistance or movement tries to get return humanity to a path of progress, and our hero joins that movement.
10. We know that there was once a farming civilization, thousands of years ago at a suitable moment in climate history, in what is now the Amazon jungle. At some point, the climate changes, the civilization collapsed, and the jungle came to be in its current state. Imagine a story, or perhaps a series of stories or short stories, all set in this civilization trying to imagine it as fully and accurately as possible.
11. The Younger Dryas climate event profoundly impacted much of the world about three thousand years before farming and herding was invented, at a moment when the Clovis culture was thriving in North America, and when proto-farming and megalithic ritual centers were starting to develop in Anatolia. In North America, this climate event tipped the balance provided by the ecological pressure of human hunters, to result in a mass megafauna extinction. In Anatolia, this climate event delayed the development of agriculture by about three thousand years. There would be plenty of room for the stories of people who lived just before, during, and after the Younger Dryas event.
12. The modern collection of military conflicts that I call the Sahel War in Africa is a climate driven conflict that is epic and primal, giving rise to genocidal wars between Muslims in the north, whose ancestors were traditionally herders, and Christians and animists in the south, whose ancestors were traditionally farmers, as the slowly expanding Sahara desert creeps southward, pushing herders into the farmers' territory as their own land become uninhabitable. There are many stories that could be written in the context of this ongoing conflict from both sides, or perhaps in the context of a young couple with a herder and farmer from opposite sides of the conflict.
13. The ancestors of the Chadic people of Africa made an epic journey from the place we now call Moldova to Lake Chad at the peak of the Green Sahara period. A story, perhaps a multi-generational one, of their journey and of the society they build upon arriving at Lake Chad, would be a worthy one.
14. Another epic, possibly multi-generational journey worth describing in fiction based upon pre-history would be that of the Austronesian mariners who settled Madagascar via East Africa, and also brought the banana to Africa.
15. Swahili civilization arose when Arabic speaking maritime traders entered into marriages with high status local women along their trade routes along the eastern coast of Africa. The ethnogenesis of this civilization could provide a great backdrop for all manner of stories.
16. It would be interesting to read stories set in the early days of the Islamic empire, concretely filling in the blanks with best available hunches, on what fueled its explosive expansion in a matter of decades and the experience of the first wave of people converting to Islam that made this attractive to them.
17. It would also be interesting to set a story in the medieval period at urban centers in the Islamic empire where an Islamic renaissance of intellectual progress and cultural flowering was underway. The story of how the lives of women who got divorced in this time period, which was something that happened and was not uncommon at the time (long before divorce was possible in Christendom), in a historically authentic way, could provide at least one important unifying thread to the overall narrative.
18. Some horrible regional war in the medium term future forces a large group of refugees into exile, and they settle in some near Arctic or Antarctic region that global warming has made marginally habitable, or in someplace like Texas that has become increasingly uninhabitable causing most people to move away, in a story of pioneering colonization on a last frontier on Earth.
19. A murder mystery, a few decades in the future, some sprawling megacity in the developing world or third-world city, perhaps in a more backward part of India developing on the late side, or Southeast Asia, or Africa.
20. Some political faction in a gridlocked political system, resorts to assassinations to achieve its political goals, authorities try to thwart them with mixed success.
21. A story recounting the rise of a new religion, along the lines of the 2010 series "Caprica" (a Battlestar galactic prequel), or the 2024 series "Dune Prophecy", that is a better fit in its metaphysics and in the social issues that it addresses, than the Abrahamic faiths that are predominant today.
22. A city killing sized asteroid is headed towards Earth and scientists have greatly narrowed down where it will strike, but political leaders and the rich have declined to mobilize a planetary defense effort. So, instead, the race is on to relocate as many people as possible from the predicted impact area far enough away that they can survive, before it strikes at the appointed time.
23. A retelling of the Bible narrative and some of its extra-canonical books from the perspective of Satan, an angel cast out of heaven because he bucked YHWH's tyrannical rule.
24. A very personal story of the author of some piece of a major work of legendary history and what drives this author to mix elements of historical fact with mythical fiction, perhaps the Iliad, perhaps the Bible, perhaps some other Bronze Age mythology.
25. The Second Amendment is repealed and slowly but surely the population of the United States is disarmed in a series of conflicts with reluctant gun nuts that ultimately end decisively against them. Tyranny does not follow.
26. Vice has been legalized, but only in designated areas that were formerly industrial or in the middle of nowhere. Our protagonist is a public official charged with helping people who have started to drown in this and need treatment, and identifying abuses that need to be ended.
27. A woman from a strict and wealthy Muslim family de-converts while she is a foreign student in the U.S. where she is chased by extended family members and the Islamic government of her home country, in an effort to subject her to a honor killing. With the help of allies she meets along the way, she tries to stay alive and make a life for herself.
28. A short story of a woman who is charged with sorcery in Saudi Arabia and ultimately executed for it, ideally based as much as possible on one or more true stories.
29. All of the women and a couple of the men in the senior class of a high school, with varied well developed individual characters, in an isolated rural hot springs resort town, inspired by a science fiction story that a few of them read, form a polyamorous pod and have and raise children in it.
30. Oil runs out or becomes worthless, in much the way that coal is starting to, or already has, in North America of Europe. The economies of oil states start to collapse. Our protagonist is a member of the Saudi Arabian royal family as the monarchy must choose a path to either constitutional monarchy or being replaced entirely in the face of dramatically declining economic prospects, particularly when it is discovered that the sovereign wealth fund of the country has been embezzled on a massive scale and invested in failed nepotism and politics driven investments.
31. A relict colony of archaic hominins are discovered deep in an Indonesian jungle and scientists make contact with them and study them. They find that they are more human than they expected them to be, while still clearly not being modern humans.
Note also that science fiction, and really all speculative fiction, really involves all other genres of fiction, but in disguise.
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This map of proposed state mergers, which is largely self-explanatory, is pie in the sky, "king for a day" stuff. It isn't politically viable as under the current U.S. Constitution, merging states lose power in the Senate and electoral college which they would almost surely not consent to losing.
But the suggested state mergers would largely end the imbalances in the current U.S. political system against urban blue states, in a pretty mild way that could make most of the U.S. functional. They also would merge states with similar cultures and political leanings. And, none of the combined states would have excessively large populations even post-merger (Texas and Oklahoma would be big but the two states have so much in common and the combined state would still be smaller than California in population.)
Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico would also be necessary for a just balance and representation of the people. The one majority black state-like jurisdiction, and the one Spanish speaking state-like jurisdiction, should not be denied representation in Congress and in the case of Puerto Rico, a say in Presidential elections. Even the GOP gives Puerto Rico a say in nominating its Presidential candidate.
The current U.S. Senate balance is 53R to 47D. This would remove twelve GOP leaning seats and the new states might add 2-4 Democratic seats and 0-2 GOP seats, resulting in 41-43 GOP seats and 49-51 Democratic seats. It would also reduce the number of U.S. states to 46 (adding two and removing six).
This exercise also illustrates how much overall results under our constitution depend upon what amount to gerrymandered state lines created historically, mostly in the 19th century.
America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse.Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we’re lucky, it won’t be violent. If we’re very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we’re less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen.
From a prescient article from October 8, 2015 entitled "American democracy is doomed" by pundit by Matthew Yglesias.
In a nutshell Yglesias argues that:
2. The U.S. has returned to a historical norm of strong partisan polarization driven by racial issues involving divisions over principles rather than spoils, money, and jobs, much like it was on the eve of the U.S. Civil War that reflects genuine partisan divisions at the grass roots.
The idea that America’s constitutional system might be fundamentally flawed cuts deeply against the grain of our political culture. But the reality is that despite its durability, it has rarely functioned well by the standards of a modern democracy. The party system of the Gilded Age operated through systematic corruption. The less polarized era that followed was built on the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans. The newer system of more ideological politics has solved those problems and seems in many ways more attractive. But over the past 25 years, it’s set America on a course of paralysis and crisis — government shutdowns, impeachment, debt ceiling crises, and constitutional hardball. Voters, understandably, are increasingly dissatisfied with the results and confidence in American institutions has been generally low and falling. But rather than leading to change, the dissatisfaction has tended to yield wild electoral swings that exacerbate the sense of permanent crisis. . . .As dysfunctional as American government may seem today, we’ve actually been lucky. No other presidential system has gone as long as ours without a major breakdown of the constitutional order. But the factors underlying that stability — first non-ideological parties and then non-disciplined ones — are gone. And it’s worth considering the possibility that with them, so too has gone the American exception to the rule of presidential breakdown. If we seem to be unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis, it’s because we are unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. The breakdown may not be next year or even in the next five years, but over the next 20 or 30 years, will we really be able to resolve every one of these high-stakes showdowns without making any major mistakes? Do you really trust Congress that much?
Trump has already run us through multiple constitutional crises, and there are surely more to come.
Scott Sumner's February 17, 2025 blog piece entitled "A simple model of authoritarian nationalism" references the earlier article by Yglesias and riffs further on it.
Authoritarianism has such a bad connotation that its supporters generally justify it as a necessary evil to fight a deeper form of authoritarianism, the stranglehold on power of the so-called deep state. Trump’s fans implicitly buy into a sort of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington framing. Ordinary democracy is a cesspool of corruption, and we need an honest outsider to come in and shake things up, someone like Elon Musk. Move fast and break things. But Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a myth, not reality. Washington cannot be fixed by sending authoritarian leaders there to shake things up, just as the French chaos of 1795 was not fixed by sending in Napoleon. The only way to fix Washington is to make our culture more rational, more honest, and less selfish.The common thread in most authoritarian nationalists is an unwillingness to be constrained by rules. Thus Trump refuses to adhere to international trade agreements such as Nafta. Of course a president has a legitimate right to renegotiate a trade agreement that he believes is not in the national interest. But even after negotiating a new version of Nafta, a version that he insisted was a great treaty, Trump still refuses to adhere to its provisions.To achieve the sort of lawless society envisioned by hardcore nationalists, you need to weaken your opponents, strengthen your supporters, and co-opt anyone who can be bribed or intimidated. . . .
This post was easy to write—any rational person can see what’s going on. To his credit, Matt Yglesias predicted the coming authoritarianism way back in 2015, even before Trump appeared on the scene. His entire Vox article is worth reading, but this paragraph caught my eye:Those who like these actions on their merits comfort themselves with the thought that these uses of executive power are pretty clearly allowed by the terms of the existing laws. This is true as far as it goes. But it’s also the case that Obama (or some future president) could have his political opponents murdered on the streets of Washington and then issue pardons to the perpetrators. This would be considerably more legal than a Zelaya-style effort to use a plebiscite to circumvent congressional obstruction — just a lot more morally outrageous. In either case, however, the practical issue would be not so much what is legal, but what people, including the people with guns, would actually tolerate.Replace “political opponents murdered on the streets of Washington” with “send a violent mob to the Capitol to try to intimidate Congress into overturning a presidential election”, and you’ve described what happened 6 years after Yglesias used that seemingly “far-fetched” example, including the pardons. And I doubt that even Yglesias expected the assassination hypothetical to be discussed in the Supreme Court just a few years later.In the end, our Constitution won’t protect us, there are too many loopholes. What matters is how much authoritarian nationalism the public is willing to stomach. I’m an optimist by nature and still expect Trump’s project to fail. My bigger concern is that the trajectory that Yglesias so presciently described in 2015 is likely to continue for many more years. Future presidents will become even more authoritarian that Trump.To summarize, here’s how I think about the authoritarian nationalist’s credo:* We don’t need no stinking election monitors. We decide who won the election.* We don’t need no stinking trade rules. We set the rules.* We don’t need no stinking refugees, except Afrikaners who’d vote MAGA.* We don’t need no stinking international criminal court. We decide what’s torture.* We don’t need no stinking Nato.* We don’t need no stinking IRS audits of our supporters.* We don’t need no stinking press critics.* We don’t need no stinking United Nations* We don’t need no stinking federal court oversight* We don’t need no stinking European Union rules* We’ll do whatever the hell we want to, and who’s going to stop us?I hope it doesn’t take another global war for the world to come to its senses.
The state of the nation in the early days of the second Trump administration certainly send chills down my spine.
The Economist democracy index defines four degrees by which democracy may be present in a country:
- Full democracies are countries where civil liberties and fundamental political freedoms are not only respected but also reinforced by a political culture conducive to the thriving of democratic principles. These nations have a valid system of governmental checks and balances, an independent judiciary whose decisions are enforced, governments that function adequately, and diverse and independent media. These nations have only limited problems in democratic functioning.
- Flawed democracies are countries where elections are fair and free and basic civil liberties are honoured but may have issues (e.g. media freedom infringement and minor suppression of political opposition and critics). These countries can have significant faults in other democratic aspects, including underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.
- Hybrid regimes are countries with regular electoral frauds, preventing them from being fair and free democracies. These countries commonly have governments that apply pressure on political opposition, non-independent judiciaries, widespread corruption, harassment and pressure placed on the media, anaemic rule of law, and more pronounced faults than flawed democracies in the realms of underdeveloped political culture, low levels of participation in politics, and issues in the functioning of governance.
- Authoritarian regimes are countries where political pluralism is nonexistent or severely limited. These nations are often absolute monarchies or dictatorships, may have some conventional institutions of democracy but with meagre significance, infringements and abuses of civil liberties are commonplace, elections (if they take place) are not fair or free (including sham elections), the media is often state-owned or controlled by groups associated with the ruling regime, the judiciary is not independent, and censorship and suppression of governmental criticism are commonplace.
