Last week, the first part of this essay addressed the rapidly unfolding democratic emergency in the United States and the appalling non-response of the majority of the American people and institutions.

I regret to inform you, dear readers, that it has not gotten better since we last met. Worse, in fact.

In that interval, the administration cut off billions of dollars in federal biomedical funding from the National Institutes of Health—a catastrophe for public health and medical research that has zero logic to recommend it, even under the canard of cutting alleged waste, only cruelty and self-destructive nihilism. Trump called for 60 Minutes to be “terminated,” and fired the head of the National Archives, whom he blames in his stolen classified documents scandal. He also fired the whole board of trustees of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and said that henceforth he personally would decide what American artists deserve recognition (I look forward to Kid Rock’s Kennedy Center Honors), conjuring the image of Nazi attacks on “degenerate art” in the process. His Secretary of Homeland Security and spokesperson for People for the Ethical Shooting of Dogs Kristi Noem announced that she would recommend abolishing FEMA, because emergencies don’t happen much anymore I guess. Oh yeah, and there was yet another plane crash, the third in eight days. (There were zero fatal airline disasters in the preceding 16 years, before Trump forced out the head of the FAA at the urging of Elon Musk, disbanded a crucial aviation subcommittee and threatened the already understaffed air traffic controllers with layoffs. But I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.)

How long before Derek Chauvin is pardoned?

But these are not even central to the autocratic takeover, only ancillary. The main event continues to be Elon Musk’s Orwellian-named Department of Government Efficiency and its extralegal assault and digital dismemberment of key aspects of the federal government.  

As Timothy Snyder writes, if a bunch of armed men rolled up to the Treasury Department in Tesla cybertrucks and seized the building by force, we would understand that a coup was in progress. This post-modern version—conducted out of sight, quite quietly, by twentysomething coders, with the Republican president’s blessing—is a no less illegal usurping of power. Yet most of the country seems unbothered by it. In his new Substack, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman uses the explosive term “dictatorship” to describe what is being put in place. He also immediately anticipating the sputtering response:

“If my use of the word ‘dictatorship’ disturbs you,” he writes, “if your first reaction is to say ‘Isn’t that a bit shrill?’,  you’re part of the problem. The constitutional crisis isn’t something that might hypothetically happen; it’s fully underway as you read this.”

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS IS HERE, PART 47

Is Musk breaking various laws in what he’s doing? Likely, but with no oversight, it’s hard to tell….and as Jonathan Chait points out in a recent piece in The Atlantic, Elon may not care in any event, since Trump has made it clear with his pardons of January 6 insurrectionists that he will protect anyone else who breaks the law on his behalf. Besides, in our current Bizarro World, there is an inversion of who the criminals are, in keeping with page one of the fascist handbook: “Accuse your enemies of your own crimes.”

Chait:

Musk has adopted Trump’s habit of deeming opposition to his actions inherently criminal. He has called the United States Agency for International Development, a decades-old program with support in both parties, a “criminal organization.” After an X user posted the names of the young engineers working with Musk, previously reported by Wired, he responded, “You have committed a crime.”

Edward R. Martin Jr., a Big Lie advocate who is now US Attorney for the District of Columbia, echoed that threat in a post on Twitter. (If Trump’s gonna try to rename the Gulf of Mexico, I’m gonna keep calling it Twitter, thankyouverymuch). I’m not a US Attorney, but just to be clear, as Chait reminds us: “Reporting on the identities of powerful public officials is, in fact, not a crime—even, or especially, if those officials have assumed public powers without going through formal channels.

One of the teenaged Red Guards that Musk turned loose to destroy the federal government was briefly forced out because of the revelation of racist and pro-eugenics posts he had made in his social media feed. I was surprised he was not promoted. But sure enough, within days he was reinstated, with Musk calling for the Wall Street Journal reporter who dug up his past to be fired. J.D. Vance said something about youthful mistakes not being cause for permanent cancellation, which will come as news to the Black teenagers doing decades-long bids in prison for minor offenses. As Ibram X. Kendi noted, that’s how white supremacy works: it treats white adults like children and Black children like adults.

Lawbreaking is almost beside the point, however, since the anti-democratic intent of the whole endeavor is the real issue. Why do so few of our countrymen, from Congress all the way down to the man and woman on the street, seem upset about that?

Chait argues that Republican Congressmen don’t see their power being abrogated by Trump/Musk, as one might imagine, because they either share the same goals, or have at least been cowed into supporting them, and because the success of this self-coup permanently resets the game in the GOP’s favor. “A world in which the president could cut spending without exposing Congress to accountability would hand small-government conservatives the opportunity to carry out policies they’ve long desired but been too afraid to vote for.”

But it’s a radical, anti-democratic, and indeed “revolutionary” maneuver to say the very least, and I mean that in the very specific political definition of the word. Chait:

Not even the most committed small-government-conservative lawmaker would design a process like the one now occurring: a handful of political novices, many of them drinking deep from the fetid waters of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, tearing through the federal budget, making haphazard decisions about what to scrap. And indeed, no elected body has designed this process. Trump and Musk have arrogated the power to themselves. The true urgent cause is to return that power to the legislature before the damage becomes irreversible.

Former US Attorney Joyce Vance calls Trump an “anti-president,” noting that “there is no telling where it will end.”

Once disobedience to the law is on the table, even adherence to absolutes—like the two term limit on holding the office of the presidency—fall into question. As James Romoser, Politico’s legal editor wrote yesterday, “when rulers consolidate power through a cult of personality, they do not tend to surrender it willingly, even in the face of constitutional limits.

And Trump, of course, already has a track record of trying to remain in office beyond his lawful tenure.” Romoser concludes, as did I earlier in the week, that the possibility Trump will seek and secure a third term shouldn’t be dismissed with a hand wave, as some commentators have.

Again, and despite the title of this piece, I do not mean to suggest that there has be zero pushback. There have been protests. Some elected Democrats know what time it is and others do not, and for the latter, Congressional phone lines have been overwhelmed with angry constituents demanding that their representatives do their jobs and defend democracy. The judiciary has stood up in some cases (although the administration has had some wins in court as well) and that is the result of aggressive action by state AGs like Letitia James and others. We should take heed of these actions and gather encouragement and momentum from them.

Still, the bulk the American people seem largely unbothered. (We can leave out of this discussion those maniacs who love what Trump is doing. “NRA Accidentally Forgets to Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government,” quipped The Shovel, an Onion-like satirical website from Australia. Ironically, the post comes from way back in 2020.)

The situation reminds me of the dark days of the Iraq war. In the three decades after the end of active US combat in Vietnam, the political-military-industrial complex successfully re-engineered the mechanisms of power projection such that Washington could prosecute foreign misadventures unhindered by the need for consensus and support from the mass of the American people—things like a draft, and a robust press corps free from government censorship—thanks in part to an overreliance on the reserve components, and the outsourcing of operations to private military contractors. As a result, even as American soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen were in vicious combat in places like Fallujah, one could look out the window in Anytown USA and never know that the United States was at war. It was a relatively small sliver of American families that felt the pain—to say nothing of Iraqi ones—over and over, by means of multiple deployments, and separation from loved ones, and horrific brain injuries and amputations, and aluminum coffins coming home to Dover AFB.

The difference is, with Iraq, our leaders were hiding it from us. This time they are not, and yet we are willfully acting like nothing’s wrong.

My friend Daniel Sibo argues that part of the problem is that the damage is not yet visible, unlike 9/11 or 1/6 or the pandemic, for example. “Deleting a database or electronic records just doesn’t mean anything to them,” as Daniel writes. That may change when the results of this slash-and-burn campaign are truly felt, but by then it will certainly be too late. The Washington Post, for example, reports that US farmers—who voted overwhelmingly for Trump—are now furious that millions of dollars in subsidies that they were promised by the US Agriculture Department have disappeared, “despite promises from the Trump administration that a federal funding freeze would not apply to projects directly benefiting individuals.”

Gee, I’m beginning to think you can’t trust the guy.

Still, some, on both the right and to a lesser extent the left, have even expressed enthusiasm for this “burn it all down” approach. I get where they’re coming from, and the frustration with a dysfunctional government. But I hasten to note that, for decades, now the Republican Party has deliberately worked to make government as dysfunctional as possible in order to create that very frustration, and to prepare the ground for the venal and self-serving destruction of the republic that it is currently conducting. And I would humbly suggest that the pro-arson crowd has no idea what “burning it all down” will truly entail. If and when that comes and they feel the pain, we’ll see how fire-friendly they really are.

IF IT QUACKS

So it is not hyperbole to say that the United States is hurtling towards dictatorship. The question is, which dictator are you talking about?

Just prior to his inauguration, I wrote a blog suggesting the Trump might be a lame duck on day one. That has not proved so in terms of the speed and aggressiveness of his executive actions. But it has been so very much in terms of who is running the US government.

For eight years now, we have been correctly focused on the manchild from Queens as the heart of a unique threat against the American experiment, even if he was only an empty vessel for centuries of John Birch-y proto-authoritarianism bubbling up in the American DNA. But it seems clear that the threat has morphed, as Trump has allowed Elon Musk into the house like a naïve teenager in a horror movie opening the front door to a blood-stained dude holding a chainsaw and wearing an old school Jacques Plante-style hockey mask.

Trump has been content to pursue his crusade of persecution against the people who tried to hold him to account under the law, to issue retrograde executive orders designed to thrill his white nationalist base, and to move forward with using the power of the presidency to line his own pockets and those of his plutocratic friends. But he has left it to Elon Musk to lead the dismemberment of the federal government. And dismember he has.

You may ask: don’t Trump’s allies, like Musk (though likely not Trump himself) realize that their actions are going to destroy the republic as we know it and result in massive damage that will eventually blow back on them? The answer to part one of that question is yes, they absolutely understand that. The answer to part two is that they don’t care. Or, more accurately, they’re delighted by it.

In his blog Notes from the Circus, Mike Brock writes:

(A) quiet revolution is unfolding within the US government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn’t a spontaneous coup—it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.”

“DOGE is not about efficiency,” Brock writes. “It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.”

He goes on to offer a masterful survey of ideas that began to gain traction in fringe circles following the 2008 global economic meltdown. That survey deserves a whole blog of its own, which will be forthcoming. For now, the crucial point to understand is that Musk is carrying out a crusade that intends to do far more than just root out “waste” and inefficiency” in the federal government. In fact, as Brock notes, it does not intend to do that at all, except in the most euphemistic way. What it intends to do is completely obliterate American democracy as we know it—in that obnoxious way that Silicon Valley tech bros consider themselves “disruptors”—in favor of a right wing autocracy papered over with their favored form of flimsy ideological self-justification known as “techno-libertarianism.”Bottom of Form

It is now very clear why Musk was willing to invest a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected (and perhaps actions that go even beyond that): because it enabled him to get inside the executive branch and carry out this techno-libertarian coup, which in effect, will make him the de facto dictator of the United States, with Trump as mere figurehead. Brock writes:

This is not about Trump. This is about what comes after him. Actuarial realities do not favor an aging leader with a declining grasp on policy. But they favor the thirty- and forty-somethings laying the foundation for the post-democratic order. The men who have spent the past decade engineering an exit from democracy are no longer whispering in the dark corners of the internet. They are in power, with money, AI, and a plan. And democracy, in its current form, has never been closer to the brink.

Don’t believe it? Tune in next time for a detailed explanation.

OPPOSE³

Whether one views the current state of play as Musk doing Trump’s dirty work or as Trump providing Musk cover for his techno-libertarian revolution (or both at once), the result is the same. So let’s get back to how to stop the motherfuckers.

Paul Krugman—whose recent, angry departure from The New York Times speaks to the collapse of the MSM and its abdication of its public responsibilities—offers “three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general”:

(O)ppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail.

Krugman obliterates the myth that Trump has a mandate, or that opposing him will hurt Democrats, noting that “in 2008 Barack Obama won the popular vote by 7.2 percentage points, yet Republicans opposed his agenda every step of the way,” while “Joe Biden won by 4.5 percent in 2020, yet received no Republican support for anything he did.” Did voters hold that obstructionism against the GOP? Nope—on the contrary, they rewarded the Republicans with big wins in the 2010 midterms and a trifecta (both houses of Congress and the White House) this past November. “So Democrats are supposed to show deference to Donald Trump, who won by 1.5 percent and didn’t even win a majority of the overall vote?”

So Democrats and MAGA opponents shouldn’t hold their tongues and try to make nice with Trump in the belief that he represents the will of the people. Americans are just starting to find out that they guy they elected and his policies aren’t at all what they thought they were voting for. And we should do everything we can to accelerate their awful journey of discovery.

But winning the information war against Trump—which is central to any opposition—will require puncturing the formidable right wing propaganda balloon. “Democrats can’t just sit around waiting for Trump’s promises to fail,” Krugman writes. “They need to constantly challenge him.” Paul’s an economist, so he cites economics as a prime example:

One reason low-information voters may have believed Trump’s nonsense claims about being able to reduce prices is that some of them really thought he was the brilliant manager he played on TV. The reality, however, is that the Trump administration has made a complete shambles of its first 10 days….It would be political malpractice for Democrats not to make an issue of Trump’s raging incompetence.

On that front, the intrepid blogger Robert B. Hubbell, one of the sharpest voices calling attention to the coup, is surprisingly optimistic:

Trump failed the first time, and he will fail again—because he has underestimated the American people. We must steel ourselves because things will get worse before they get better—but they will get better. It is a fool’s bet to assume that the American people will sit idly by as their freedoms are stolen by a corrupt oligarch and a convicted felon destroying the government to promote their selfish interests.

Hubbell believes that Trump’s idiotic trade policies and the resulting damage “will provide fertile soil for massive action by Americans who are fed up with Trump and Musk acting like dictators.” (I would argue they ain’t just acting.)

Trump’s rolling coup is (mistakenly) predicated on his belief that the American people are sheep. He believes that we will sit still while he does whatever he wants. He is wrong. I believe in the strength and resiliency of the American people. It may take longer than some of us would like, but they will awaken.

I sure hope he’s right. At the moment, there is precious little sign of a critical mass on that front. Maybe when the pain of tariffs and a crashing stock market and a collapsing global economy hit, people will sit up and take notice. Pocketbook issues seem to be one of the few things that get Americans’ attention.

 Brock again:

However, these resistance efforts face an uphill battle against the immense resources and influence of those pushing for a post-democratic future. And if we do not act now, we may wake up one day to find that democracy was not overthrown in a dramatic coup—but simply deleted, line by line, from the code that governs our lives.

But Krugman is also on Team Glass Half-Full, arguing that even though we are in the middle of an attempted autogolpe, “the autogolpistas are having a harder time than they expected. America’s oligarchs may mostly have preemptively surrendered to the new regime, but many of the rest of us have not.”

A schism between Trump Musk—which is easy to envision, with these two megalomaniacs—could also be a potential point of weakness for us exploit. In The Atlantic, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer note that a recent poll by Quinnipiac University found that 53 percent of voters disapproved of Elon “playing a prominent role in the Trump administration, compared with 39 percent who approved.” (Even among Republican voters, one in five disapproved of Musk’s role.)

For now it is enough to recognize that we are smack in the middle of far and away the most alarming of the numerous constitutional crises we have endured over the past eight years. The surprising part is the Donald Trump may prove to be only a marginal figure in the rise of a democracy-devouring despot. But in the end, we must remember that people really don’t like dictatorships, except for the very few elites in a given society who benefit from them, and that includes the people who initially support the dictatorship until they realize what they’ve bought into and feel its boot on their neck. That irrefutable fact of politics should be our lodestar, even in the dark days in which we currently reside.

Let’s give Mr. Hubbell the last word, echoing what I wrote in Resisting the Right, which itself echoes the accumulated wisdom of the likes of Gene Sharp, Errol Harris, and Jonathan Schell, among others. Power flows from the consent of the governed, even in an autocracy, and we can withhold that consent, even if the price of that withholding is painful all around.

America is based on the consent of the governed, and its economic health requires the cooperation of the participants in the economy. If Americans withhold their political consent and economic cooperation, both the political and financial systems in America will grind to a halt.

What does withholding consent and cooperation look like? That is difficult to predict given the fluid situation, but the citizens of other nations that have grappled with similar challenges have used sustained and massive street protests, national work strikes, work slowdowns, taxpayer strikes, business boycotts, and transportation boycotts. To be clear, I am simply making an observation about how aspiring dictators in other countries have been brought to heel and held to account.

Soon, very soon, Americans will be called upon to leave the comfort of their homes and the anonymity of their computer screens to engage in massive, coordinated action to remind Trump and Musk that they are servants of the people, not vice-versa.

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Copy editing by the great Gina Patacca