What Happens Next - Sometimes Even Sea Monsters Need Security Blankets

I am typing this right now with my son's security blanket on my lap (he has two others, don't worry) because the anxiety is really getting to me. I've tried everything else, so this seemed worth a shot. The trauma of reliving the insanity of 2016 is crushing. I could really use some reassurance right about now. The gloating after Comey/Russia/GOP voter suppression/media complicity in sinking Hillary's campaign over fucking emails was unbearable. All the Jill Stein voters and other spoilers either slinking away without apologizing or proudly proclaiming they would fuck us all over again given a chance because "something, something, Hillary is worse" still echoes in my ears. 

And eight trillion dollars of new national debt, thousands of laws broken, tens of thousands of lies told, three stolen supreme court seats, millions without health care or jobs, closing in on a quarter of million dead from a virus that could have been controlled later they are still silent. Maybe some of the Holier-than-thou leftists have learned their lesson, maybe a new generation of young people have been become politically aware and progressive, maybe a large number of white suburban women finally figured out that mindlessly voting as their husbands told them to is actually harming them. 

It could all continue. I have dwelled on this Tweet for what feels like a month now:

the election is openly being discussed like a point spread in sports betting, like Biden doesn’t really win unless he wins by at least ___ otherwise the courts or whoever will just rule that he actually lost. It’s healthy to have separate thresholds for victory for the parties!

— Mass for Shut-ins (is a podcast) (@edburmila) October 29, 2020

And then the pre-gloating from people like Robert Cahaly of a partisan hack polling group called Trafalgar gets a platform in Politico to claim that people are lying en masse to pollsters, inventing a new "silent majority" level object of fascination called "shy" trump supporters. In essence, this guy tries to make money by guessing how people lie and making up a story to support his agenda. 

I believe [shy voters] was prevalent. In 2016, the worst being said about Trump voters is that they were “deplorable.” 2020 is a whole different ballgame. It is worse this time—significantly worse. This year had more things where you can get punished for expressing an opinion outside the mainstream than almost any year I can think of in modern history.

I’m finding that people are very hesitant [to share their preference for Trump], because now it’s not just being called “deplorable.” It’s people getting beat up for wearing the wrong hat, people getting harassed for having a sticker on their car. People just do not want to say anything.

Where are these awful things happening Cahaly? Meanwhile republican CoD cosplayers walk around brandishing guns at political events all the time. I believe he just got lucky, there were so many variables in 2016 that had everything to do with fragmentation on the left and the racist, sexist lather republicans had worked themselves into. How many shy Democrats in red communities are there Cahaly? Do they get any weight? In the red, red town I used to live in republicans would drop threatening, anonymous notes in your mailbox if they suspected you of being a Democrat. That's a bit different than "the one guy I know who hates trump squints his eyes at the other trump voting houses". Lots of people commented how Trafalgar is setting this up to make it look like doughfacedonny is ahead in battleground states so that the republicans can challenge any results they don't like and get their hand-picked partisan judges to rule in their favor. But God, I don't even want to voice an opinion lest I jinx us all. But it is horrid to contemplate that we have to play everything exactly perfect and if we make one mistake BAM the cell door of authoritarianism can close on us. 

I want to throw out a couple thoughts on the electorate. The holier-than-thou leftist tendency has to be diminished now that Hillary isn't around to kick anymore. NBC News reports that third party spoilers are probably a rounding error this year. What have been the demographic changes in the electorate since 2016? More republican seniors have probably died than have been sprouted, boomer republicans have been dying off in droves to "diseases of despair" and the young people becoming politically active have got to be several magnitudes more Democratic than republican. That doesn't even factor in COVID. 

It is well established that fear of death or danger causes a breakdown of higher, enlightened brain function and causes people to activate their "fight or flight" response. In other words, fear makes people more authoritarian. But how is that affecting their attitudes towards the authoritarian this time when he is the cause of so many people suffering and dying? I for one have always had a rather healthy level of fear that republicans could, through malice or incompetence, really hurt my life personally. How many others have now awakened to that reality? A missing piece for the "dormant and low-propensity voters" that Cahaly seems to think [wrongly] are a hidden army of trump voters, has been that "AHA" moment when they realize that government is not some remote, magic thing way over there and not any part of my life. Education may not be the silver bullet many neoliberals believe it to be, but for almost a quarter of a century now fox news has been programming those gullible non-voters into machines that would crawl over broken glass to vote against their interests out of fear. The only dormant voters out there have avoided becoming fox news zombies thus far, are they suddenly going to spring into action for a reality teevee star with a now four year solid record of bullying, wonton cruelty, easily provable lying and inaction while people all around them are losing jobs and healthcare in the middle of a pandemic. 

This is a long-winded way of saying: sixty two million and change republicans turned out to vote for doughfacedonny four years ago, the probability that that number has increased is very low. And yet, here we are; here I am, on the edge of my seat that the horrid possibility that he could somehow win again. Is there anything that could calm my nerves?

Thank goodness for this blanket... and beer. Halloween is tomorrow but the scariest days are yet to come. 

 

We Finally Get to Play the Game

Mrs. Kraken and I watched SNL last night VOD from the NBC network app with Adele hosting. I don't know if they are losing their nerve or what but Alec Baldwin and Jim Carrey played trump and Biden during the debate for the cold open lacked any power or energy. It just seemed kind of flat, like as we are all feeling, exhausted by the endless firehose and anxiety that has reality while being ruled by the most incompetent, lazy, cruel, and corrupt assholes in our history. 

What really got me though was the prerecorded skit from the "trump addicts of America" where a bunch of normal Americans fret that life will become boring without the zest of trump constantly threatening their well-being. It reminded me of a book I reviewed recently for a gig called Why Soldiers Miss War, the author gets an "E" for effort in trying to define the relationship between trauma and euphoria when one is constantly in danger and then that danger is removed. Nothing is exciting anymore, food doesn't taste as good, and things that scare civilians are shrugged off as not rising to the thrill of combat. Personally, I like boring, I like not having to maintain that hypervigilance you have to keep up in dangerous situations. I have never experienced that Raymond K. Hessel moment of being so thankful for being alive that everything is awesome. And I would really like the domestic enemies of the United States that I swore to defend the republic against to be out of the government of that republic. 

Of course it was a joke, SNL usually does a good job of mixing just enough reality into the humor to make it seem identifiable for average viewers. Not bad for a cast and crew that embodies New York City, where most Americans still really do not fully understand, but they understand us enough to entertain a decent-sized audience. Here's where it gets serious though, if by some miracle doughfacedonny (or donnyCOVIDseed as I've seen on Twitter) is thwarted in stealing the election. If the polls are to be believed and republicans lose power and seats across the country, what then? Just as some find the aftermath of war to be boring, the aftermath of a domestic reign of terror will probably cause a lot of people to tune out. Do schools teach much about Germany or Japan after WWII? Maybe those cases aren't relevant for our discussion but Reconstruction after the US Civil War certainly will be.

But to the title of this post. After seeing the SNL skit I got to thinking about an episode of South Park where the kids are playing a World of Warcraft type online game and there's the proverbial 300 lb basement-dwelling loser who has a super-powerful character who, for no explained reason, goes around killing other players and preventing anyone from having any fun. Eventually the kids train hard enough to barely defeat this tyrant and one of them asks "what do we do now?" Cartman replies, "what do you mean, now we finally get to play the game." I'm not a big South Park fan anymore, never really was but that really gets to the heart of what happens next if republican tyranny is finally cut down to size in January. Still, not to put the cart before the horse but there just hasn't been enough bandwidth to think about anything other than getting these monsters out of positions of power. If they are gone, we liberals go back to the same old struggle. Certainly, we all deserve a break after living through this trauma but probably 60 million republicans are still going to vote for doughfacedonny. They cannot be allowed to skirt away this time without consequences only to form a new tea party under the leadership of never trumpers and the Lincoln Project.

Beyond passing laws to keep republicans from cheating their way back to power, the big questions will return to real discussions. We finally get to play the game of "what are the optimal progressive tax rates for this country?" "What can be done to effectively limit corporate power and bring truth back to news media?" "How can we organize labor and bring balance back to the economy?" You know, the questions that could have been discussed during Hillary's term. We could finally play the game of working on the extreme backlog of reforms necessary in an age of climate change, cyberwarfare, beating back fascist and authoritarian regimes around the world (through diplomacy and economic warfare of course, bombs only seem to make the problems worse). It is time to rethink the first amendment because we cannot go back to simply accepting propaganda as legitimate or that monsters like Alex Jones or Qanon have any place in a representative democracy. 

While it will definitely take a far lurch to the left to address these issues, the end of reclaiming a vital center where democracy, compromise, and the defense of education will be worth radical action in the short term to destroy fascism in this country. I had an idea yesterday towards that end that would be easy and eminently doable, before you can comment on or share a news item or thinkpiece you should have to take a civics quiz. Then the button will be active, if you don't answer them all correct you will have to take a history or political science lesson before you can try again. The problem is that boomers and others who simply decided they never needed to learn anything about being a responsible citizen in a republic or had no need to maintain that knowledge because "how do you make any money off of that?" can voice their ridiculous, uninformed opinions with the same weight that an informed, responsible citizen can. There should be obstacles in the way of spreading propaganda or trolling good people. 

But that would be the kind of discussion we could have if we don't have to constantly worry that trump's three stolen Supreme Court seats will undermine the will of the people with impunity or that a madman has the nuclear button and command of the Armed Forces. 

Will any of this actually happen? Not if we don't dedicate ourselves anew to the project. In my lifetime there have been three consistent cycles of republicans stealing the White House, wrecking everything, skating away with no consequences, the Democrats put in office to clean up the mess disillusion the enthusiastic voters who put him there, liberals stay home and allow republicans to sneak in again to wreck things anew. Carter's poor performance allowed Reagan to sneak in by at least borderline treason with the Iran hostage crisis (which was shown to be effective when Nixon stalled peace talks in Vietnam to win). Twelve years of relentless tax cutting and hacking away at social and regulatory spending by the Reagan and Bush administrations gutted this country until Clinton won with a plurality (who knows if even that would have been possible without Perot spoiling) in 1992. Two years later and enough good people stayed home to let Newt Gingrich and his carefully trained asshole republicans to take the House of Representatives, hobbling any good that might have come out of the rest of Clinton's administration. And enough propaganda allowed a rather prosperous and happy America to sit back and watch Dubya steal the election. See where I'm going with this? The 24/7 fear-mongering and war hysteria reversed what could have been a correction in Congress during the mid-terms. Do liberals my age and older even remember being called traitors and terrorist-lovers during those years? It doesn't seem like it. Then there was the great "shellacking" of 2010 because "Obama doesn't inspire me" or the Glenn Greenwald acolytes sucking the oxygen out of any relief at Bush being gone. THIS CYCLE CANNOT CONTINUE!

The election of 2016 was supposed to be the first time republican fascism was really repudiated by a Democratic succession. I cannot believe that after four years of tyranny there are more than a handful of idiots still willing to vote for this disgrace of a man, but they are never going away until they are put away. So, we need to stay on that wall, stay frosty and alert, and most importantly not lose sight of how it can all go back to republican rule. No matter how the holier-than-thou left wails that Democrats don't inspire them or memories of this reign of terror fade and we go back to "both sides are equally bad and corrupt" because the next wannabe dictator won't be as stupid or lazy as doughfacedonny.

What Happens Next - Trump's Army edition

One of my favorite, and psychologically the one that has stayed with me the most, scenes in Jaws is when Quint is telling the story of going down with the USS Indianapolis. After surviving sharks, dehydration, and the cold he says that the moment he was most afraid was waiting for his turn to be pulled out of the ocean after the crew was located and being rescued. That moment when your hope is highest that the danger might finally be over but it could be dashed in an instant. That is how the inexorable march to election day feels, to have suffered so much and still be living in fear of what happens next. We shouldn't have to live this way. But remember, millions of republicans love this shit. They delight in bullying and terrorizing Americans.

A simple question is, how much work would it be for doughfacedonny to steal the election? It's well known that he is lazy as hell. Does he have the energy or intelligence to coordinate the subversion of democracy? Hope is really a thin reed to rest on. Does he even need to do anything? Or are the thousands of domestic terrorists calling themselves "militias" already in motion? This was called "working towards the fuhrer" authoritarian followers interpreting the leader's wishes and taking action without specific orders, often inserting one's own wishes into that interpretation. It is painfully obvious to all but the most conditioned both siderist that the 'wingers who show up in Call of Duty cosplay to political events have no idea what tyranny means, they just hate liberals and minorities. But just because they are awful doesn't mean they might not be dangerous. What will these vicious psychopaths do in service of the leader?

So now that RBG has been replaced with lightning speed by an utterly unqualified right wing ideologue and the minority republican party has cemented an unsurmountable supreme court advantage for fascism and corporate power, what's next? The trump campaign is certain to bring multiple cases to their pet court, godfuckingdamnit how can it be possible that the losers of the popular vote got to appoint 5 justices to do their bidding? And they are sure to take up any case and rule with haste that doughfacedonny is the winner, regardless of the facts. Sure, if somehow Joe and Kamala can team up with Chuck and Nancy they could bring impeachment charges against these illegitimate justices, or add 4 seats to the court. I have seen some relatively serious Twitter bluechecks say only 2 seats are needed. WTF? Or that OMG the optics! If Democrats expand the court, then republicans will expand it further the next time they win (steal) an election!

The point is to make it as difficult as possible for republicans to cheat, but that doesn't go nearly far enough. The last four years should make it equally obvious that republicans cannot be trusted with power at all, anyone who says otherwise just mark themselves as either fascists themselves or the kind of people who whistled as the cattle cars roared by on the way to Auschwitz. Either way, they are not worth listening to or even being treated as citizens of a republic. There can be no reconciliation, this has gone on for decades now and it keeps getting worse. What's next? This country was in a shambles when GWB shuffled off the stage and Barack Obama was immediately beset with republican sedition and sabotage. We can never take off an election like in 2010 again, or these bastards will sneak back into power. But this again, puts the cart before the horse.

Enter "trump's army". This should be the textbook example of stochastic terrorism after the nightmare is over. Thousands of vigilantes are organizing to be an armed nuisance at polling places across the country. Whether they actually materialize or not remains to be seen, certainly those 13 mouth-breathers who conspired to kidnap and execute the Governor of Michigan were real, but so far actual terrorist attacks like the cowardly cocksucker who set fire to a ballot dropbox in LA a little over a week ago have not been widespread. So many people have already voted, that maybe taking the cosplay out of the closet and in full view of law enforcement (not that that is a guarantee of anything) at polling places wouldn't have the intimidation effect these Boogaloo freaks are hoping for. Georgetown Law posted this helpful reminder last month with a great quote from the director of the Institute for Constitutional and Protection:

“Local officials, law enforcement, and voters need to know that groups of armed individuals have no legal authority under federal or state law to show up at voting locations claiming to protect or patrol the polls,” said Mary McCord, Legal Director of ICAP and a former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Department of Justice.  “Given the increasing self-deployment of private unlawful militias during protests against racial injustice across the country, intimidating peaceful protesters and heightening the risk of violence—sometimes with tragic results—communities must prepare for similar unlawful private militia activity and intimidation in connection with the election.”

David Neiwert, whom I often cite as the authority on right-wing violence and eliminationist rhetoric, wrote in Daily Kos: 

According to a just-released study, the risk of interference in the coming election by far-right “Patriot” militiamen heavily aligned with Donald Trump is not only real, it’s growing intense in over half the states in the nation, with five states in particular likely to see disruptive behavior and perhaps violence: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

Compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), the study gathered and examined “the latest data on right-wing militia organizations across the country, identifying the most active groups and mapping the locations most likely to experience heightened militia activity before, during, and after the election.” What it found should send up warning flares to officials at all levels concerned about election security, as well as among law enforcement officers who seem to be currently preoccupied with election-related civic violence coming from the left.

I hate the term "militia" being used by official authorities, just like accepting the term "conservative" for fascists, it legitimizes the frame of these CoD cosplayers as somehow normal. Georgetown qualified their use of the term this way:

 the U.S. Constitution and state laws use the term “militia” to refer to all able-bodied residents between certain ages who may be called forth by the government when there is a specific need; but private individuals have no legal authority to activate themselves for militia duty outside the authority of the federal or state government.  The fact sheets also explain that the Second Amendment does not protect private militia activity, pointing to decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1886 and 2008 making clear that the Second Amendment “does not prevent the prohibition of private paramilitary organizations.”

All 50 states prohibit private, unauthorized groups from engaging in activities reserved for the state militia, including law enforcement activities.  The fact sheets include these state-specific laws.  They also include guidance for what individuals can do if they see what appear to be militia members near a polling place, and direct that they report their observations to the Election Protection helpline at 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683), with which ICAP is coordinating its efforts. (emphasis mine)

 Now, the last time republicans tried to station off-duty police in majority-minority polling precincts among other things in 1981, the courts (before being corrupted by right wing ideologues of course) issued a "consent decree" to the republican national committee that they needed "pre-clearance" before they could deploy another "national ballot security task force" to intimidate and suppress black and brown voters. This decree was weakened and watered down over the years before being effectively nullified in 2013, so it's open season on voters who might favor Democrats; consequences be damned. 

I don't know what happens next week, or these last days before election day and certainly couldn't predict anything that's coming but whatever it is we have to keep fighting. Remember, voter fraud is a myth cooked up by republicans to justify voter intimidation and suppression, which is very real and a good indicator that voting actually matters. And there is no both sides do it on this one, Democrats work to various degrees of success to help people vote, republicans do all they can to stop people from voting. There's no need to qualify any statements about it, no need to give republicans or "concerned independents" any benefit of the doubt. There's a good team and a bad team.

Court Un-Packing and other thoughts

Doughfacedonny is and remains the largest threat to democracy and all of our founding principles. We have to be present in the here and now. The election is proceeding apace, long lines are the norm for early voting even with the emphasis on mailing your ballot in which says to me that republican voter suppression tactics are even more brazen than last election and on and on. I remember vividly the frantic news reports in 2004 about long lines at voting places and what a great exhibition of democracy and voter enthusiasm it portended. Then we found out that those long lines were deliberately the result of republican official sabotage of voting. The resulting four years of continued republican reign of terror by Dubya and Dick C. ground more of our shattered institutions into dirt. The political press dutifully presents the long lines again this year as hoorah! evidence of voters' enthusiasm, they don't have a choice, to really get to the bottom of it would connect dots that mainstream media cannot allow to be connected. The news can present sanitized reports of republican voter suppression as long as they are compartmentalized as separate from the actual voting process. I hope a landslide blue wave is in the process of crashing the republican swamp and excising some of the right wing tumors that are strangling government at all levels.

I'll never forgive myself for jumping ahead four years ago when I scoffed at the idea of doughfacedonny pulling out an electoral college win and making my wish to the incoming Clinton administration for a financial transactions tax on Wall Street broadly speaking. The list of broken parts in government right now is beyond belief but instituting a rake on the Wall Street casino has to be a fairly high priority. It is the one relatively easy reform that would make a big difference in the biggest underlying problem in America, the concentration of wealth and power in so few hands. Obviously I mean easy in a comparative sense, breaking up corporations or instituting direct wealth taxes would be even more difficult. But an even playing field of a 0.5% sales tax on buying stocks for everyone and every institution would slowly, imperceptibly drain the real swamp of speculative (i.e. unproductive) capital. Two goals in the short term could be achieved; providing the federal government with a new revenue stream and slow down the speed of transactions. The big financial corporations compete for whose computers can be closest to the actual trading server to get their orders in nanoseconds before their competitors, the algorithms they use to manipulate markets can erase billions in wealth before a human could even recognize something was wrong, or trigger a disastrous bubble in valuations. Having an actual cost to conducting millions of transactions would slow things down, hopefully to the point that Wall Street's greed can't sink the real economy as easily as they have in the past. So, I still believe in the idea but it has to be relegated to medical therapy in the medium term or longer because we have catastrophic wounds that need triage and immediate action.

Plenty of liberal commentators have put forth the idea of expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court. And if moscowmitch and the republicans succeed in putting the unqualified Amy on the court it will mean that a majority of justices were appointed by presidents who failed to in a majority of votes and confirmed by senators who represent 15 million fewer American citizens than the opposition. Adding seats to undermine this anti-democratic power play has the added benefit of being perfectly legal, but doesn't go nearly far enough to excise the corruption of the American judiciary. In addition to refusing to hold a hearing on Merrick Garland, moscowmitch also held open over 100 judgeships in lower courts. Placing unqualified right-winger ideologues in their 40s on the bench has been nearly the only vocation of the senate since 2017. All of trumps supreme court justices should be impeached of course, they have all lied under oath or committed other disqualifying acts. But that isn't enough.

I have learned my lesson about putting the cart before the horse. What a President Joe Biden, a Majority Leader Schumer, and Speaker Pelosi have the will to do with possible unified government is unknown. They will honestly probably spend their entire terms fighting off republican obstruction, sabotage, hostage taking, and God knows what else. What can actually be done to neuter the fascist right is far above my pay grade but I wanted to put forth an idea about combatting the right wing infestation of lower courts that as far as I can tell from initial research has not been suggested before. 

The Constitution empowers Congress to make whatever inferior federal courts it sees fit to sanction. Why not the reverse? Impeaching hundreds of republican justices all the way down would take years and be extremely difficult. Why not, in this extraordinary time of fascist danger, dissolve these courts where the worst right wing ideologues currently are subverting democracy and defending tyranny? I am no legal expert but the way it appears in the Constitution, all it would take is a simply majority vote to dissolve the various circuit courts and courts of appeals. Then another simple majority vote to create a new one, just in legal terms, it would be like the infected court committed suicide and the new court would take it's place in physical location, docket, and jurisdiction. This may sound extreme, but these are desperate times, the real extremists have forced this confrontation. The cycle must be broken, in a fair system we would not suffer from minority rule and all of the corruption and abuse that stems from it. Simply cleaning up the mess left by doughfacedonny won't be enough, not by a long shot. If the new administration does not take bold steps towards rooting out republican corruption and the undemocratic structures they have used to grab power for so long, the odds are strongly in favor of Democratic voters becoming disillusioned again and staying home in 2022 as they did in 2010.

We are all suffering from PTSD stemming from election night 2016 and the accompanying horrors right up to today. It is going to be painful to remain engaged but we left too many things for history or mainstream media to sort out in 2009. Minority republican rule is like letting the same group of thugs assault and rob you over and over again, we have to defend democracy in order to defend ourselves. Passing laws that presidential candidates must release their tax returns or giving force of law to the myriad norms broken by doughfacedonny and his crime syndicate isn't enough, if Democrats even have that much energy to make the obvious changes. We have to think bigger, our lives and our children's lives depend on defending ourselves from fascism. Dissolving courts corrupted by republicans and creating new ones with judges who will defend individual rights, our democracy, and the rule of law is just one component of the restoration of the republic.