Author: thekingsnecktie

Writing this blog for the past seven years (but who’s counting?) has been a profound experience for me, and kept me from losing my mind during the madness of the Trump era and beyond. Nota bene: That madness is far from over. In fact, we’re heading into one of the most fraught phases of this ongoing existential crisis for American democracy.

Case in point, this week Trump called for Russia to attack our NATO allies, which prompted  headlines reading: “Biden is old.”

To that end, the blog also led me to write a book contemplating the worst case scenario of a return to power by The Former Guy and/or the Republican Party, which are now one in the same—a kind of handbook for resistance as we face down the very real threat of American fascism. That book, RESISTING THE RIGHT, to be published by OR Books, is now available for pre-order (click link here), and will ship early next month.

RESISTING THE RIGHT does not resign itself to defeatism or the alleged inevitability of a right wing triumph. Far from it. Rather, it lays out the state of the current crisis, how we came to this pretty pass, and what we can do to prevent the arrival of the autocracy that Trump promises. As a matter of simple prudence, it then looks ahead, not only to how to survive and resist a second Trump regime, but how to overcome it and reclaim participatory democracy in the USA. In the process, it contemplates not just restoring the status quo ante Trump, but ways we can actually make this country better, and build a true democracy that thus far has been largely aspirational for many.

November 5, 2024 is just nine short months away. It’s not hyperbole to say that if things go badly, it may be the last free and fair election we ever see. It’s up to us to prevent that, and to gird ourselves for what comes after. Like the man says, work for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

Here’s an excerpt from RESISTING THE RIGHT’S first chapter.

HOW TO TELL WHEN YOUR HOUSE IS ON F–KING FIRE

Historians have it easy compared to fortune tellers. With the luxury of time and hindsight, it’s relatively simple to connect the dots of what is past; why do we even hand out academic degrees for the people who do that? It’s harder to grasp the contours of events while they are unfolding—the task of journalists—and even harder to predict what will happen next—the task of prophets. But sometimes one finds oneself in such a state of eyepopping emergency that only the somnolent or willfully blind, or the gleeful perpetrators of that very emergency, can deny it.

We Americans are in such a moment right now.

The two-party system under which the United States has operated since roughly 1854 has its shortcomings, but for almost 170 years it has at least provided political stability, if not the best possible public service to the full spectrum of our citizenry. Its most glaring flaw—and inherent danger—becomes apparent, however, when one of those two parties openly rejects representative democracy. Over the past 55 years, and rapidly accelerating in the last seven, the Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of belief in democracy, representative or otherwise, engaging instead in an overt assault on the fundamental principles of the American experiment.

This assault is unprecedented in this country by a major political party, and one aimed at permanent control of these United States. Not two years ago, the undisputed leader of the erstwhile Grand Old Party fomented a violent self-coup in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Far from repudiating that attack, the party has since embraced it, defending it as “legitimate political discourse,” lionizing its perpetrators, and alternately downplaying its violence or insisting it was a false flag operation—sometimes both at once.  More importantly, the party has also shielded the senior leaders of that autogolpe and used every available lever to thwart efforts at accountability, including aggressive manipulation of the courts and of Congress. When that has failed, it has turned to brazen defiance.

Even before Trump, the GOP was already engaged in a methodical, decades-long, and highly successful campaign to game the mechanisms of the electoral system to its advantage, through gerrymandering, voter suppression, obstructionist abuse of parliamentary procedure, and a flood of money, among other methods. But now that campaign has reached a chilling new level, as the party has successfully convinced a majority of its members, about 70%—about 30% of the electorate—that the last presidential election was stolen from its candidate. In the process, it has deliberately undermined public faith in the integrity of the election system, with terrifying implications for future votes.

To justify all this, the Republican Party has mounted a propaganda campaign that has swept up tens of millions of Americans who believe that all these measures are necessary, even heroic, in order to “take our country back.” Many of them have stated that they are unwilling to stop there, and would support violence to achieve their ends, if necessary.

As I write these words, the GOP is bluntly announcing that it will not accept the results of future elections unless it wins. Having failed at overturning an election in 2020, it has set about taking control of the electoral process upstream so that no such drama will be necessary in the future, a kind of pre-emptive putsch of an even more insidious order, enabling it to deliver victories to its candidates regardless of the will of the people. Under the Orwellian pretext of preserving “electoral integrity,” it is instituting restrictive new rules for voting, and intimidating election officials in order to replace them with Republican loyalists empowered to reject ballots, turn away voters, and otherwise skew the results. It is full of officials at all levels who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden is the rightful president and who refuse to commit in advance to respecting the results of their own elections. To that end, the party is very deliberately focusing on offices that control the vote itself—governors and secretaries of state in particular—as well as members of Congress who might have the final say in any disputes, and the judges who would adjudicate those disputes, including a Supreme Court where it already holds a 6-3 supermajority.

The Republican willingness to go to such extremes is driven by its own existential dilemma, which is a kind of terminal diagnosis. Even as the number of our fellow Americans who are comfortable with right wing radicalism remains alarming, demographics are trending heavily against them. The researcher David Atkins, who runs the qualitative research firm The Pollux Group, reports that “the country is becoming more diverse and more urban every day. Americans under 40 are overwhelmingly progressive. This is the present and future of America.” Unable to win the popular vote in a presidential election (Republicans have done so only once in the last eight elections), and with these trends moving inexorably against them, the GOP has only two options:

1) Change its platform to attract more voters, or

2) Cheat.

No one who has observed the GOP’s wanton lack of principle over the past decades ought to be surprised that it has chosen Door Number 2.

In a free society, reasonable people can disagree and advocate for their positions in the marketplace of ideas using legitimate political discourse that does not involve bear spray. But once free elections have been compromised, and the citizenry no longer has recourse to the vote in a credible way, that society is in a state of dire emergency. “A democracy can survive intense policy disagreements over taxes, government benefits, abortion, affirmative action and more, “ as The New York Times’s David Leonhardt writes. “But if the true winner of a major election is prevented from taking office, a country is not really a democracy anymore.”

BULLET-DODGING AS A WAY OF LIFE

Is it really that bad, you ask? After all, the 2022 midterms were widely seen as a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism, an announcement that Americans were tired of the circus, tired of the politics of grievance and divisiveness and incivility, tired of waking up every morning asking “What fresh hell?”

It is true that the electorate turned back Big Lie candidates up and down the ballot in almost every major race. Even Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist, told Fox News that “The MyPillow-ization of the GOP has been a disaster.” One might think such a result might even spur self-reflection within the Republican Party itself. But it did not.

Did anyone really believe that the epic thumping that the GOP took would cause it to come to its senses? As Tom Hall of the political blog The Back Row Manifesto asked, would Republicans really be “chastened into good governance and policies and tack to the center”? On the contrary: even as it was made abundantly clear that the American public by and large does not want Trumpist candidates, the seditionist faction of the GOP will exert even more power going forward, because the so-called “normie” branch of the party made a Faustian bargain with them from which it cannot extricate itself.

In a nation that clearly yearns for small “d’ democratic rule, a party that has thrown its lot in with the global autocratic movement represents a clear and present danger. Electoral defeats render such a party more dangerous, not less, because it knows it will continue to be defeated at the polls and must pursue an alternative strategy.

The much-welcome victory of democracy in the midterms, therefore, is far from the end of this threat. All those election deniers, White nationalists, and would-be theocrats are all still out there, along with a great many kindred spirits. Next time, they may not leave their fate to the will of the American people. The Republicans are like a gang of bank robbers who have brazenly boasted of their plans to knock over the local savings and loan. It does us no good to relax because they have not done it yet.

Even if they are somehow prevented from cheating or from gaming the system, the Republicans will almost certainly regain power sooner or later by simple law of averages.

David Atkins has written of what he calls “thermostatic behavior,” meaning the reliable urge among the American electorate to “throw the bums out.” In an elegant December 2021 piece for Washington Monthly, Atkins laid out in clinical prose how, in “layman’s terms, the electorate grows cranky and dissatisfied for reasons often out of government’s direct control (gas prices, a pandemic, economic fluctuations, and so on), and the party out of power gains an advantage accordingly. Voters of the dominant party become complacent even as the opposition grows angrier and more determined.”

In short, even in a fair system, history suggests that one way or another the Party of the Big Lie will eventually win sufficient power to take control of American governance—if not in 2024, then in 2028, or 2032. That they are willing to rig the system in order to do so, or even openly defy it, only increases their odds of success. What makes that eventuality so terrifying is that the Republican Party has made it clear that, if it does succeed in regaining power, it does not intend to surrender it ever again.

As Atkins writes: “Democrats would need to win every single election from here to prevent the destruction of democracy, while Republicans only need to win one. And the American system is set up so that Republicans will win sooner or later, whether fairly or by cheating . . . Blue America needs to start thinking about and planning for what ‘Break glass in case of emergency’ measures look like—because it’s more likely a matter of when, not if. It not only can happen here; it probably will happen here.”

In 2024, we may well see the GOP regain control of the White House and both houses of Congress. It already has control of the House, and appreciable command of the judiciary at all levels, including the US Supreme Court, with its supermajority of archconservative justices and their lifetime appointments—three of whom are only in their fifties. It also already controls a majority of governorships and state legislatures (including 23 “trifectas,” or full control of both chambers and the governorship), and in many cases, the crucial position of secretary of state as well.  Even as it is losing the demographic battle, its structural advantages in the electoral system allow it to maintain this edge and give it a real possibility of extending it. Perhaps that will occur legitimately, through the thermostatic effect and general American dumbfuckery, or perhaps through electoral suppression, chicanery, or sheer brute force. But when it does, barring internal reforms for which not even the most starry-eyed optimist could hold out hope, the GOP will do its damnedest to install permanent, unvarnished, White nationalist, Christian supremacist authoritarianism in America.

THE DEVIL—YOU KNOW

Should he win in 2024, Trump has made no secret of his plans to institute what can, without exaggeration, be called a dictatorship, and to rule in an unconstrained, vindictive manner that will make his first term look like a garden party. In fact he is campaigning on it, playing to the deep-seated right wing attraction to the so-called strongman, for whom such plans are a feature not a bug. Should he lose, he is sure to insist the election was fraudulent, further inflame his followers, and do still more damage to our democratic system.

The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb reminds us that Trump was no more the creator of the rancid stew of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, kleptomania, and general sadism that animates the contemporary GOP than he was the developer of the real estate properties, frozen steaks, Chinese-made neckties, and vodka on which he slapped his name as a private businessman. All were rife within American conservatism long before his arrival, and as Cobb writes, “there is no reason to believe that his absence would cause them to evaporate.”

When Trump launched his political career, he latched onto that toxic strain in American culture and it embraced him in return: not just a pre-existing menagerie of right wing radicals who have long been at war with the US government—Second Amendment nuts, sovereign citizen adherents, and neo-Nazis among them—but also garden variety suburban reactionaries who moved comfortably in polite society. Trump “promised to return his constituents to an imaginary past in which their jobs and daughters were safe from brown-skinned immigrants,” Masha Gessen has written, one “in which the threat of what Trump called ‘radical Islamic extremism’ was vanquished or had never existed, in which white people did not have to treat African Americans as equals, women didn’t meddle in politics, gay people didn’t advertise their sexual orientation, and transgender people didn’t exist.“

That promise was a fantasy and a lie, of course. As Cobb observes, “it has always been apparent that everything Trump offered the public came slathered in snake oil,” but “fixating on the salesman misses the point. The problem is, and always has been, the size of the audience rushing to buy what he’s been selling.”

Trump, as has been noted ad nauseam, was never the cause of the Republican descent into madness, only a symptom and accelerant. Did Donald Trump make us worse as a nation? Undoubtedly. But then again, he was never sui generis: we are the soil from which he sprang, and the ones who hoisted him to the heights which he attained. His racism, misogyny, apathy, sloth, and hubris reflected the worst of a country that liked to see only its best. A nation that put this man in power was not a nation that could remotely claim to be in good health. One that is considering putting him in that position again is even more unwell.

Trumpism has undeniably conquered the GOP and that sickness will carry on with or without him. Ten percent of Americans in favor of right wing autocracy is not heartwarming, but it is manageable. Thirty percent, which is roughly where we currently stand, is considerably more worrying.

The threat to the very heart of representative democracy in America could hardly be more dire. We are in the political equivalent of a housefire, and there can be no ignoring the flames licking up the walls and beams and rafters all around us. Perhaps we will get lucky and the fire will die out, but the laws of physics tell us that that is not likely…. particularly when there are enthusiastic arsonists pouring gasoline on the blaze.

SLEEPER CELL

Over our nearly 250 years as a sovereign state, Americans have come to take long-term political stability in this country for granted. We are lucky in that regard, and spoiled.

But autocratic elements have been in play in the US since the very founding of this country, varying from region to region and in prevalence and measure, largely aimed at vulnerable minority populations and women (not a minority), usually defined by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, political belief, and place of origin.

In an October 2022 piece for The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that “for most of this country’s history, America’s democratic institutions and procedures and ideals existed alongside forms of exclusion, domination and authoritarianism.” Dating back to the 1890s, “close to three generations of American elites lived with and largely accepted the existence of a political system that made a mockery of American ideals of self-government and the rule of law.” Black Americans who suffered under slavery and under Jim Crow, and then under various other forms of bigotry, discrimination, and oppression—including horrifically violent terrorism perpetrated both by state and non-state actors—have been waging a resistance movement in this nation for more than four centuries. Women, who got the right to vote barely a hundred years ago, were long barred from full participation in the work force, in the military, in athletics, and in numerous other aspects of American life. To this day, they earn only se venty cents on average for every dollar that men do. Gay people, trans people, Jews, Muslims, adherents of other faiths, atheists, immigrants . . . the list of marginalized and openly oppressed communities goes on.

In short, the American promise of “liberty and justice for all” has long been only aspirational….or less charitably, a hoax perpetrated by the privileged classes who had access to those things and did not much care that others did not. What is new in our current moment is the expansion of that autocracy to the broader culture, and to populations that heretofore have escaped its impact.

But the corollary to the long history of autocracy within the American experiment is that resistance to it is not a wheel in need of reinvention. We can draw on the experience and efforts of generations of brave and determined Americans who have fought oppression and injustice throughout our country’s history, and similar movements across the globe.

This is not to say that we should give up on trying to prevent an autocratic takeover; not by any means. But while we are working to stop that outcome, it would be foolhardy not to prepare contingency plans for the worst case scenario. Even if the United States manages to avoid the ascent of autocracy in the near term, we will almost certainly have to confront it sooner or later, so long as the Republican Party remains committed to its autocratic experiment, and a fanatical minority of tens of millions of Americans support it.

But let us be clear and precise in our terms.

In the Trump years, “the resistance” became a commonplace rubric for everyone opposed to that administration, from inveterate left-wingers to anti-Trump Republicans who, for decades prior, had been part of the GOP mainstream. But in September 2018, during the dark heart of the Trump era, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, published a landmark New York Times opinion piece called “We Are Not the Resistance” in which she argued that resistance is a “reactive state of mind,” one that can cause us to “set our sights too low and to restrict our field of vision to the next election cycle,” rather than keeping focused on the broader goal. “(T)he mind-set of ‘the resistance’ is slippery and dangerous,” she wrote. “There’s a reason marchers in the black freedom struggle sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ rather than chanting ‘We Shall Resist’.”

More broadly, then, Alexander argues that the entire view of the pro-democracy movement as “resistance” is backward. Her argument is for a much more far-reaching and sweeping kind of change, rather than the mere eviction of Trump and the reversion to a status quo ante that, while preferable, remains deeply flawed and similarly susceptible to the rise of similar threats in the future.

“A new nation is struggling to be born,” Alexander writes of the United States in the present moment, “a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters.” The fight against autocracy, therefore, is not a defensive one, but a pro-active one, to create a better world for all, and in it we have the numbers and human nature on our side, no matter how much our foes would like to convince us otherwise. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in December 2021, quoting Alexander (who was herself using the civil rights hero Vincent Harding’s metaphor), we are not the resistance at all, but rather, “the mighty river they are trying to dam.”

This handbook will examine the state of the current crisis, the events that brought us to this precarious point, the likely scenarios we can expect, and what can be done to forestall such a grim turn of events. It will contemplate possible permutations of Republican autocracy, and offer a range of contingencies in response across a broad spectrum of arenas: protest and civil disobedience, economics, the media, education, organized religion, medicine and public health, governmental institutions, the arts, and interpersonal relations. It will also consider the systemic long-term measures that can be taken to reclaim the republic and inoculate it against autocratic assault in the future.

We are a nation that, perhaps to a fault, prides itself on its fortitude. Now is the time to prove it. Most American—White ones, anyway—”have long had the luxury of relying on the mechanisms of official power to protect us from the sinister forces that would do us harm and undermine our free and open society. That is not the norm in most of the world, nor for large chunks of our less fortunate countrymen. As a nation, we now find ourselves in that harsher, more bare-knuckles realm.

We better begin acting like it.

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Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, published by OR Books, is available now for pre-order, shipping in early March.