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In the end, the MAGA plan to steal the 2024 election was wholly unnecessary — or so it seems. Trump won handily, even managing to win the popular vote, which is an infrequent thing for a Republican candidate for President. I’m not yet ready to talk about how the left might respond to this in terms of community defense, and I might never post about that, but I can talk about what went wrong.

1. The Democratic Party does not understand unaffiliated voters.

Online, there’s already a lot of blame being pointed at “the left” and the way it is framed is really interesting. It is very clear that Democrats (as in voters who identify as Democrats) still do not understand the very simple concept that not everyone who votes for a Democrat for President identifies as a Democrat. It’s the same on the Republican side — not everyone who votes for the Republican for President identifies as a Republican. The American electoral system makes it so that only 2 parties are viable, so people who do not like those two parties must either vote for someone they don’t like, or effectively negate their vote (by either voting for an nonviable candidate or not voting). Voting for Kamala Harris does not necessarily mean you were a Harris supporter.

The typical challenge for the 2 viable parties is to appeal to these unaffiliated voters enough to win a majority of the votes. Yes, some of those unaffiliated voters have a coherent political worldview (like, for example, some kind of leftism or, alternatively, libertarianism), but most of them hold views that are disorganized and eclectic. The important thing, though, is that just because someone votes for a Democrat for President once doesn’t mean they are a Democrat and it doesn’t mean you can count on them to vote for a Democrat next time. Similarly, just because someone votes for a Republican once doesn’t mean they are a Republican. If you understand that the two major parties are highly offensive to most people, then this should be easy to understand, but self-described Democrats do not seem to understand this. They do not get that their party is disgusting.

In fact, Democrats seem to believe that if an unaffiliated person votes for the Republican then they are a Republican, and then if that person later votes for a Democrat, they have become a Democrat. Furthermore, it seems like the Democratic imagination is not able to muster enough empathy to accept the fact that other economic and political realities are possible. They can’t imagine past the current organization of this one country and their own attitudes toward it. Perhaps it is that lack of imagination that makes anything other that “Republican” or “Democrat” seem like a terrifying void to them.

This lack of imagination is probably the biggest part of why the Democrats lost. They imagine everyone who doesn’t like Trump as being a Democrat, and owing the Democratic party their vote, even though the Democrats have made it abundantly clear that they owe unaffiliated people nothing — because they clearly believe that they are perfect. I don’t believe that there will be a valid Presidential election in 2028, but if it happens, we will see the Democrats make the same mistake regarding unaffiliated voters that they made this time. They have learned nothing.

Part of the problem is that Democrats and Republicans both imagine a flat line that represents every possibly political position, with Democrats being on the left and Republicans being on the right. In fact, they imagine the far left edge of that line being the same as the far left edge of the Democratic party. Similarly, they imagine the far right edge of that line being the same as the far right edge of the Republican party. This is not true at all. In reality, Democrats represent a position within an ideology called “liberalism” (which is pro-capitalism), and Republicans represent a position within an ideology called “Christian Nationalism” (which is not necessarily pro-capitalism). (I’m not actually sure what to call the Republican worldview, but I thought that was close enough.) Both parties are right-wing (e.g., in favor of genocide, imperialism, and human suffering), but their narratives about values and reality are wildly different.

What do you do if you reject capitalism, genocide, imperialism, and human suffering as legitimate sociopolitical positions? You either don’t vote or you vote against the viable party that you hate the most.

2. The Democrats have limits placed on them by the donor class that prevent them from appealing to working class people.

A big part of why the Democrats are incapable of appealing to these unaffiliated voters is because they’ve had limits placed upon them by their biggest donors. Numerous Democratic party politicians have admitted as much, saying that big election donations are crucial to winning and thus require them to suck up to big donors, and those big donors have a clear agenda — primarily, to remain big, so to speak. Why are those big donations crucial to winning? That question leads to my next point.

3. American voters are awash in pro-capitalist propaganda and distractions and are resistant to education.

American voters are catastrophically ignorant of politics and economics. On the surface, you would think that the United States would have a fantastic educational system simply because it is the center of an empire and all the world’s resources flow toward it. However, Americans are awash in right-wing, pro-capitalist propaganda from capitalist corporations, right-wing think tanks, and even from the government itself (specifically, but not limited to, the CIA; see Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders). Individual Americans who seem to be a bit more savvy are typically just more saturated with that propaganda and thus more familiar with the details of its narratives.

In fact, propaganda must be at its most ubiquitous within the imperial core because the purpose of the core is to provide the most safety and stability for those at the top of the imperial hierarchy — they physically live in the core. The rich can just drop bombs on Iraq if the Iraqis act up, but they can’t do that in New York City because they live there. While most of that propaganda is not meant to promote the Republican (Christian Nationalist) worldview, it does create a situation where people who are unsatisfied with the current system (i.e., most working class people) don’t really have anywhere else to turn. Sure, they could turn to the authentic left, but the information they typically have available to them (all produced by pro-capitalist propagandists) does not allow for that option to make sense.

This problem is manifested in the kinds of comments about the left that you typically see online and in traditional media:

• “Communism obviously doesn’t work.”
• “All the third party candidates seem like they’re on drugs.”
• “Communism failed.”
• “Anarchists want to burn everything down.”
• “That third party candidate is obviously working for Russia to elect Trump.”
• “People are inherently selfish, so the ideas of leftists are unworkable.”

To make matters worse, nonsense media saturates American culture, creating a huge amount of distraction that takes away from the cognitive resources people have available to attend to politics. There are plenty of people who can name all the Marvel movies but can’t tell you anything true about American politics. American news media presents a simplistic and sterilized view of the world, which ends up being just another distraction from reality with pro-capitalist, pro-colonial, and pro-war messaging embedded within. Even Heather Cox Richardson is ultimately a distraction and a purveyor of propaganda.

Under these conditions of near-total political ignorance and hard limits on what positions the Democratic party can take, successful political messaging comes down to saturating media with simplistic ideas. Any idea that cannot be transmitted simplistically or that does not fit within the accepted paradigm (as defined by all this right-wing propaganda) will not be successfully received by these simple voters. This year, even days before the election, there were a substantial number of voters who did not know who was running for President! (Google searches for “who is running for president” spiked dramatically during the 24 hours before the election.) Reaching all those ignorant, simple voters requires a huge amount of money.

Propaganda isn’t the only reason that Americans are so ignorant of politics and economics, though. The USA also has a culture of narcissism which prevents people from learning new things. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov explained this in his famous quote:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

Narcissists quite literally believe that their opinion is just as valid as a fact, no matter how legitimate the source of that fact; they call this “common sense”. When faced with a fact that they don’t like, or that doesn’t fit their (propaganda-formed) worldview, they will simply dismiss it and call it an opinion. In essence, for the average American, an opinion is any idea that they don’t like, and a fact is any idea that they do like. Under those circumstances, a person like Trump has an enormous advantage because he will literally say anything his audience wants to hear.

The problem is much deeper, though, because it prevents many Americans from succeeding in an educational environment. While I wouldn’t ever suggest that everything taught in American schools is true, it is more true and certainly more complex and nuanced than whatever students brought with them to school. However, when the teacher says something that doesn’t mesh easily with an American student’s preconceptions, they immediately reject it as unworthy of the mental effort required to integrate it into their worldview.

For example, I can say that although historical white people did horrible things (like slavery and colonialism), the actions of historical white people do not directly reflect on the moral standing of today’s white people as long as we come to a nuanced understanding of those historical actions, condemn those that were immoral, and refuse to repeat those mistakes… but that is really complicated, and it still indicates that historical white people are bad. Narcissists generate self-esteem primarily through group memberships rather than their actions, so white people will typically find this idea about historical white people to be completely unacceptable and reject it. They will not attempt to integrate it into their worldview. In a classroom, this manifests in students shutting down and failing to learn the material. It often also manifests in demands from angry parents to end “woke” schooling.

In contrast, the kinds of ideas that win elections are:

• I like you.
• I am on your side.
• I am tall.
• I will protect you.
• I will help you have material success.
• I will punish the bad people.
• I represent a group of people who are competent.
• I am physically fit.
• I represent your aspirations for yourself.

Instead, what we got from the Democrats regarding the economy (as one example) was something like, “Hi there, I’m a wealthy person compared to you, but I want you to know that the economy is getting better based on this line going up, which doesn’t affect you at all because you don’t have enough money to own stocks.” Regardless of how true their message was, it was just too complicated and made no sense in its more simplistic form. To be clear, it was not entirely true (because the Democrats always have to put the wealthy first), but the Republican message was a much bolder lie — a very simple lie that was more compatible with the average American’s worldview. Instead of disagreeing with their constituency by saying that everything is great, or things are getting better, Republicans agree with the complaint and deflect it toward immigrants, Democrats, Jews, etc. In fact, they offer multiple groups to blame so that the simple narcissist can accept the parts of the message that make sense and just ignore the rest.

Indeed, it appears as if poor messaging regarding the economy was the reason Harris lost.

4. Democrats do not understand immigrants, or any group of marginalized people.

From the Democratic perspective, the Republican position on immigration should be very repulsive to American citizens who are immigrants. However, immigrants don’t like to think of themselves as immigrants for a few reasons. First off, immigrants are not generally thought of positively. They want to be thought of as Americans, not immigrants. Third, the immigrant status of those individuals is not the thing about themselves that they most value; it does not speak to their aspirations or self-worth. They’d rather think of themselves as Catholics, or small business owners, or essential workers. Fourth, Americans who immigrated here from other countries have the same kinds of complaints that other Americans have — they don’t have any complaint relative to immigration because that is in the past for them. Fifth, the kinds of people that want to become Americans are generally going to be the worst kinds of people in terms of only thinking about themselves. If they were people who thought about others or cared about other people like them, they wouldn’t have abandoned their home country, and they would not have seen going to the US as a good idea.

This is also true of any group of marginalized people. Think about it: Who would want to have being “marginalized” (regardless of how you put it) as a significant part of their identity. Nobody wants to be the victim; they want to be the winner, the main character, and so forth. This concept is all the more important in the US because US culture is based on selfishness, but even the best people do not want to be reduced to a single characteristic that is widely believed to be detrimental. For one thing, they’re sick of hearing about it. This is why so many immigrants Americanize their names — they are tired of being treated as different.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this — because we’ve heard this from the groups of people that Democrats thought they could win over — is that people assume that a criticism leveled against a group that they technically belong to does not apply to them. If Republicans say, “Immigrants are entering the country illegally!” then they naturally assume this does not apply to them because they did it legally, and they naturally dislike this hypothetical illegal immigrant as much if not more than a person who is not an immigrant would. This makes perfect sense. Never mind that the entire immigration issue was created as a dog whistle to appeal to white supremacists. The immigrant is not a white supremacist, so they can’t hear the dog whistle. Similarly, “I will do something about violent crime,” is a dog whistle about people of color, but if you are a person of color, you just hear the plaintext message, and everyone is concerned about violent crime. Just saying, “Crime is at a 50-year low,” (i.e., “your fears are unfounded”) is not effective.

In summary:

1. The Democrats failed to appeal to unaffiliated voters and unaffiliated potential voters.
2. Democrats have limits placed on them by the donor class that prevent them from appealing to working class people.
3. American voters are unable to receive nuanced or complex arguments, giving Republicans an enormous advantage.
4. Democrats do not understand how to appeal to minority/marginalized voters.

In my opinion, these are structural problems that are part of the essence of the Democratic party and cannot be overcome. To overcome them, the Democrats would have to:

1. Genuinely appeal to working class people, including thinking outside the box (of capitalism) in terms of economic solutions.
2. End their financial relationship with wealthy donors.
3. De-emphasize identity politics, and focus on a positive narrative that appeals to everyone.
4. Find a means of delivering simple messages to more people, including finding a candidate for President that is relatively unproblematic and easily recognizable by all Americans.

However, it really does look like 2024 was the last normal American election. Moving forward, we should expect elections to be more like the staged events that we see in places like Russia. Even if the Democratic party were to completely reform itself, it wouldn’t matter, because it will never again be given the opportunity to succeed again. If you understand the Democrats, I think you’ll agree that this situation will be fine with them. They’ll go ahead and raise millions of dollars for campaigns and talk about how they’re fighting for you, it just won’t work, so they won’t have to engage in that complex dance where they say that they’re progressive but then have to somehow always fail in order to satisfy the donor class.

Please stop giving money to the Democratic Party.

I’ve covered this before, but here it is briefly:

This election is fundamentally different from the attempted election theft by the MAGAs in 2020. In 2020, the plan was to have Vice President Mike Pence accept a fraudulent slate of electors from various swing states. Basically, ignoring what the people in that state voted for and instead providing electoral votes for Donald Trump. Pence refused to go along with it, and that’s why the MAGAs wanted to hang him.

The current MAGA group understands what went wrong and their manipulation of the current election is less dependent on a single individual and not dependent on the VP or that particular procedure at all. In this election, the idea is to delay in declaring the winner of several key states so that Kamala Harris can’t reach 270 electoral votes before it is too late. When it becomes too late (per the standard procedure), the election would go to the House of Representatives regardless of what anyone in the federal government does. The MAGAs plan to have control of the House of Representatives at that time, allowing them to choose whoever they want as President.

January 6 is the “too late” point. Any state that has not reported the winner of its electoral votes by then is essentially out of play and its electors basically don’t count. If neither candidate has 270 electoral votes on January 6, it goes to the House of Representatives. MAGAs might further frustrate the process at the state level by refusing to confirm the election of new Democrats in order to keep them from being seated in the House before the January 6 election of the President by the House (they would claim that there were voting or ballot irregularities). For the plan to succeed, it is essential that the Republicans control the House of Representatives on January 6.

The Democrats’ response to this has been, predictably, to demand that people “vote harder”. Their theory is that the new MAGA strategy will not work if Harris wins enough states by a wide margin. However, what is more accurate is that the theft becomes more obvious the greater the margin in those states (and we can hope that makes them chicken out); it does not prohibit the new MAGA strategy from working. It also does not address the next election (which could easily be closer) at all, and it does not reflect the fact that the electoral college itself is anti-democratic and strongly favors more conservative candidates (a Democrat must win the popular vote by several percentages to win the electoral college, whereas a Republican can and often does lose the popular vote but still wins the electoral college).

Related: Electoral College Fast Facts

Tomorrow’s election is the most important American election ever, and that’s why it is more important than ever that you get out and vote! However, if leftists don’t show up and vote for Kamala Harris (as is their duty), or if Trump’s people manipulate the electoral system in a completely legal way to invalidate our votes, then I just want you to know that I will be thinking of you from my new fourth home in Oakville, Ontario on beautiful Lake Ontario which I bought with all the money I’ve made from insider trading.

Please be assured that while Donald Trump is violently rounding up immigrants of color, their US-born children, the LGBTQ community, Jewish people, and any Democrats who are too poor to leave the country, I will be tirelessly fighting for you by posting strongly-worded messages on social media and accepting interviews from anyone who will have me. During this troubling time, it is important that you never resort to violence. Violence is never the answer, even if everyone like you is slowly being snatched off the streets, imprisoned, and systematically murdered.

Now, there are a couple of reasons for that, OK? First off, order is essential. Without order, the economy could be seriously threatened, and we can’t have that. I do care about you — deeply — but I obviously care about the economy more. The line must go up! I’m sure you understand. Second, violence is always wrong (unless the government is doing it), which is why you can never use violence to stop violence.

The key is civility, people. The other side is a mob of rabid nutjobs, but we can’t stoop to their level. We must be civil. That means following the law, but does not preclude destroying Trump and his supporters with a witty insult. Being uncivil by using violence or failing to abide by the law is simply unacceptable. So, if Trump changes the law to make protesting illegal, for example, then we simply can’t protest. That’s just how it is. If Trump makes it illegal for you to exist, well, then there’s only one way to be civil, and you will be missed. Get in a good zinger before you go.

I have a special message to those disgusting maniacs on the left who are refusing to vote for Kamala Harris: You belong to us. You have no choice but to vote against what you believe is right because what you believe is dumb. Ethics and solidarity are for stupid babies. Capitalism is obviously better than any other economic system, and we’re going to keep doing capitalism no matter what you say. Yes, I know it is killing the planet, but you need to just shut up about that. I’m sure Elon Musk will invent some computer thing any minute now that will take care of the problem. And shut up about Palestine, too. Don’t you understand that Israel’s fascist state is a key part of our dominance of the Middle East, which allows us to force the world to pay for oil with US dollars, which in turn makes it possible for you to get 85 flavors of Oreos, huge televisions for cheap, and all the avocados you can eat? You better not fuck with my stock portfolio. If you do, I will not be including any appeals for your well-being in my messaging from Canada. Just kidding, I was never going include you. You serve us, not the other way around, and I have already moved my money to a place where it will be safe.

Rest assured that you do not need to worry about me. That should be a comfort to you while you are being oppressed, tortured, murdered and so forth. Good luck and God bless!

“They’ve been pretty docile this year” -Jared Holt, senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, October 2024

“They might pop up somewhere else, but I have to say: militias in the last year or so have been relatively inactive compared to earlier eras.” -Heidi Beirich, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, October 2024

Probably like you, I lose sleep each night lately wondering about the 2024 US elections. I think about many aspects, but one I ponder more than others is: what will the paramilitary Far Right do after the elections are over?

It’s not hard to visualize what the Far Right will do if Trump wins; in keeping with Trump’s 2020 encouragement to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” we can imagine that January 6th convicts will be immediately pardoned and released, that hate groups will be among the first wave of assaulters on “enemies within,” and that their recruitments will blossom as the paramilitaries assault, attack, and harass perceived enemies. It’s hard to overstate how ugly this could be, and American centrists and liberals remain completely unprepared for what could happen to them, but that’s a subject for another article. (1)

But I am honestly perplexed as to what might happen in the street if Harris wins. I spent a fair amount of time chasing down data about this, and professional speculations around it are similarly vague. A consensus among many experts is that enlistments in groups like the Oath Keepers is much reduced after the January 6th prosecutions: “many of those far-right networks have dissolved, splintered or receded from public view since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack,” says a recent report from PBS, and the report mentions specifically that the Oath Keepers have withered since Stuart Rhodes’ arrest and incarceration.

Many others similarly maintain that memberships generally in Far Right groups have plummeted; a group called Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) summarizes it in a September 18th 2024 report:

“It is difficult to overstate how different conditions are in 2024 compared to the previous presidential election year,” continues the ACLED report, when there was widespread unrest around Covid restrictions, the George Floyd protests, and the 2020 elections. Hate groups and paramilitaries may now favor a “clandestine approach,” although this “represent(s) a drastic departure for many of these groups whose previous tactics sought to radicalize the public through displays of force and strength.” A non-profit called the Soufan Center similarly says that hate and militia groups have recently increased their “activities in the disinformation space,” providing as example the posts on Telegram and Gab and X about Haitians and Black people eating pets, which garnered 4.9 million views on the latter platform. The ACLED report agrees, and adds that the move to online platforms may be to avoid law enforcement, citing Proud Boy chats wherein street mobilizations are called “traps” and “honey pots.” They conclude that there is “little indication that 2024 will see a repeat of the patterns that characterized 2020,” but add that mobilization/recruitment could proceed quickly, as when dozens of Proud Boys rapidly materialized for protests in Springfield Ohio having to do with the aforementioned alleged eating of pets.

There are sources that disagree with the benign assessments above. A think tank called the Counter Terrorism Group emphasizes risks having to do with local security around voting locations and government buildings, but when it comes to organized paramilitary threats, says that if efforts to overturn the election are unsuccessful:

“Militia groups will likely attempt a second Insurrection, to prevent the ratification of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris as president. Oathkeepers and Three Percenters will likely stockpile weapons necessary to escalate a potential insurrection through large-scale violence using urban guerrilla tactics like ambushes and hit-and-run attacks. They will likely openly carry weapons at political rallies to intimidate and threaten elected officials, law enforcement, and federal government workers.”

Well, that’s a mighty ominous and specific stance, but it’s stated without reference to data. While the violence and attacks it specifies are certainly consistent with what we remember from 4 years ago, most other sources disagree that there are sufficient resources for the Far Right to carry out such operations today.

Or do they? Maybe let’s talk Proud Boys for a minute, because they appear to be a possible exception to the pattern of decay mentioned in most of the sources above.

Unlike the other analyses above, a June 2024 Reuters piece titled The Proud Boys are back: How the far-right group is rebuilding to rally behind Trump by Aram Roston maintains that the Proud Boys are “rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House.” Roston cites examples about Proud Boys actively recruiting, ranging from news about a Miami chapter to interviews with founder Gavin McInnes; “as the Proud Boys regroup, they’ve made changes designed to make them less vulnerable to law enforcement scrutiny, including doing away with layers of top leadership.” This includes, since Jan 6th, adopting a more decentralized structure. One tack mentioned by McInnes is for the Proud Boys to adopt “a loose organizational structure similar to the Hells Angels partly to avoid federal charges” under RICO. “The Proud Boys now operate with self-governing chapters in more than 40 states, with little apparent central coordination,” says Roston in the article; Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police assistant director of intelligence cited in the article, added that there were at the time of writing 154 Proud Boy chapters in 48 U.S. states.

In a superbly comprehensive and detailed piece written in October about the Proud Boy role in January 6th, Tom Joscelyn, on a forum called Just Security, makes an overwhelming case that January 6th, rather than being a rally that got out of hand, was orchestrated with forethought by the Proud Boys, who manipulated everyone from fellow travelers like the Oath Keepers to the “normies” who showed up for solidarity with Trump. Moreover, he faults the US government for lacking the hindsight to even properly frame the event afterwards: “the central lesson of January 6th clearly did not sink in,” he says; “the Proud Boys’ leadership marshaled a nationwide network, utilizing chapters in multiple states, to overrun the Capitol.”

Hmm. One would THINK that law enforcement and the US military might be prepared this time around, and that for January 6th 2025, there would be a surfeit of armed protection deployed in proper locations. But we should never underestimate the ability of government functionaries to misapprehend a given situation, such as when officials believed that the threats on January 6 would be from antifascists, or such as numerous other incidents where US government officials misread intentions about both foreign and domestic threats.

When I started writing this, my thinking was that if Harris wins, while of course nobody knows what will happen, it’s hard to imagine a Blackshirt march on Rome or another large-scale Capitol riot. (2) To be successful, magnetometers would have to be tampered with or destroyed, and locations like the Capitol and others will undoubtedly be heavily policed. Right now there aren’t even enough members in the paramilitaries to execute such operations; in order to muster enough rioters to carry things out, hate-group recruitment would have to blossom in a literal overnight fashion. Rather, as experts say lately, we should expect “lone wolf” events like the recent attempted assassinations of Trump, and, almost by definition, those are isolated and unpredictable.

But after reading some of these reports, although I still have trouble finding my crystal ball on all of this, I think I’ve changed my mind. I know what will happen if Trump wins, but I no longer think that the street will be secure from large-scale pre-planned ruination if Trump loses. I think that in the event of a Harris win and a failure to overthrow the result, there is a decidedly nonzero probability of directed and coordinated attack(s) by the paramilitary Far Right on American people, places, and institutions.

Notes

1. In the event of a second Trump administration, it’s likely that the paramilitary right will do the initial dirty work in the streets before the National Guard or active duty troops are called to continue the same work. Unfortunately for the paramilitaries, it’s also likely that after their coarse tactics are no longer useful in the street, they will be banned, much as the SA (Brownshirts) were in 1934 Germany and the Red Guard were in 1968 China. On a related subject, after successfully consolidating their power, both Nazi Germany and the USSR banned firearms for most non-party citizens (excepting for hunting in the USSR).
2. In October 1922, Mussolini was able to march to Rome with some 30,000 Blackshirts after King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister.

References in no particular order

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/nearly-4-years-after-far-right-extremists-stormed-the-u-s-capitol-election-threats-persist

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/29/election-threats-persist-four-years-after-far-right-extremists-stormed-us-capitol.html

https://www.counterterrorismgroup.com/post/psa-far-right-militias-pose-significant-threat-to-the-2024-election-law-enforcement-will-very-like/

https://acleddata.com/2024/09/18/when-is-quiet-too-quiet-understanding-shifts-in-extremist-mobilization-in-2024/

https://www.justsecurity.org/103956/proud-boys-threat-assessment/

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-proudboys/

Lessons from the colossal failure of the 1930s German Left

“…to the leading Nazis it suggested something more sinister: the Communists were preparing in secret for a nationwide uprising. The fears of civil war that had plagued German politics in late 1932 and early 1933 did not vanish overnight… The more they waited, the more nervous the Nazi leaders grew. Surely something must happen soon?” -Richard Evans from The Coming of the Third Reich

Political upheaval from despots in modern times has happened in locations ranging from Cambodia to China to Chile, but for some reason, we in the US most often want to compare the prospect of fascism here to Nazi Germany.

It’s understandable; we share with Germany a common western heritage and a similar middle-class industrial/economic base dominated by oligarchs. At the risk of being sprawling and academic, for my own knowledge I’ve wanted for some time to look at the events in 1930s Germany to see if there are lessons for us in the modern USA, and the question seems especially relevant in 2024.

For me the journey started in 1970 in 10th-grade Social Studies, where Mr. Cady announced one day that anyone who read William Shirer’s RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH for their book report would get an automatic “A” for the entire semester. It didn’t matter how good the report was, one merely had to read it (over 1,200 pages), write something, and you’d get an “A” because the book was so massive & crucial. It was an important book for Americans of the World War II generation, and my mom similarly told me that if I never read anything else while she was alive, this was the one book I needed to read.

Before I actually read RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH late in the 12th grade (Mr. Cady had left by then so the book report deal was off), I’d assumed that because Hitler came to power, the Nazi stormtroopers must have triumphed in the streets. But I soon learned that this wasn’t necessarily so. I was surprised to read in Shirer about pitched street battles between the Brownshirts and Germany’s Communists, the Red Front Fighters’ League. In a book published decades later, historian Richard Evans, in part one of his three-part history of the Third Reich titled THE COMING OF THE THIRD REICH, confirmed the intensity of the German Communists: “Of all their opponents, the Nazis feared and hated the Communists the most. In countless street-battles and meeting-hall clashes the Communists had shown that they could trade punch for punch and exchange shot for shot with their brownshirt counterparts.” (1)

But let us start nearer the beginning. Germany’s dominant party at the time of the Weimar Republic, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), traced its foundations to the 1870s Bismarck regime, during which it was outlawed because of its socialist proclivities. By 1890, although they were legal again, the SPD had come to see their own revolutionary Left as a detriment, and so became a semi-socialist party of skilled functionaries. By the end of World War I, although not having enough votes to be exclusive, they became the majority party of the Weimar Republic; as “social democrats” rather than true socialists, the SPD from that point came to embody Weimar, dropping their former Marxist orientation as they sidelined their own left wing, and opting to make gains for the workers by “reform” within the system by way of “peaceful class struggle.”

But there was little peace to be had in Germany. By 1930, after a decade of hyperinflation, unemployment, war reparations, and street violence, Germany’s problems were compounded and exacerbated further by the Great Depression. Hitler and the National Socialists gained appreciable seats in the government that year, but when it came to open conflict, the SPD, much like liberals in the US today, always made sure to take the side of civility. A tragic event that initiated the 1930s downfall occurred in 1932 when von Papen was illegally installed as Reich Commissioner of Prussia, Germany’s largest state and an SPD stronghold, in a largely bloodless coup. There was no resistance from the police, who were, allegedly, sworn to uphold the Republic. In predictable form, the Social Democrats felt that the violation of civility embodied in the coup was not as bad as violating their own cherished principle of civility; they “trusted that the constitutional process… would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic… extra-paramilitary and ‘unlawful’ actions were condemned by a leadership which trusted that constitutional processes and the return of reason and fair play would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic and its chief supporters,” observed a historian named Edinger. “The Social Democrats refused to take the Nazi program too seriously. It sounded utterly absurd and appeared unlikely to receive the support of a majority of the electorate.” “Avoidance of civil war,” said a historian named Winkler, was the party’s “supreme guiding principle” during the revolutions of 1918-1919 (in which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered) and remained so until the end. Winkler states that to cooperate with the Communists would have meant the SPD abandoning their coalitions with bourgeois parties, thus losing their hold on state power.

But true Leftists, even though cast off by the Social Democrats, still remained a legitimate force to be contended with on their own. In the 1930 elections, while the Nazis surprised everyone by electing 107 members to the Reichstag, the Communists also increased their representation from 54 to a respectable 77 seats. By 1932, membership in the Communist party (KPD) was 360,000, up from 117,000 in 1929, and by early 1933, they had 100 seats in the Reichstag; together by early 1933, the Communists and Social Democrats had a combined 221 seats in the Reichstag compared to the Nazis’ 196.

But the two parties would never cooperate. In an essay written from exile in Turkey in 1931 titled FOR A WORKERS’ UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM, Leon Trotsky foresaw the inevitability of fascist takeover; he implored the German Communists: “We are unshakably convinced that the victory over the fascists is possible – not after their coming to power, not after five, ten, or twenty years of their rule, but now… you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you.

“Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!”

Unfortunately, the German Communists’ strategy was not directed by Trotsky, or even by anyone in Germany, but emanated directly from Stalin in Moscow. The Kremlin saw Social Democracy as the greater threat; fascism, they said, was a logical consequence of end-stage capitalism, and therefore should be allowed to occur naturally; “After Hitler, Our Turn” became the call of the German Communist Party, whose stated belief was that furthering social democracy would only serve to delay the inevitability of capitalism’s downfall. The SPD were now labeled as “Social Fascists,” and “Social Fascism” became an enemy greater than Nazi fascism. The historian Winkler takes this insidiousness even further, proposing that for Stalin, at least a Rightist military dictatorship in Germany had the advantage of creating the alienation, or potentially the defeat, of Germany’s pro-western allies, who were the USSR’s sworn enemies.

The German KPD and their leader, Ernst Thälmann, took this Soviet directive seriously. (2) “The Communists, convinced by the very violence of the Nazis that the class struggle against ‘monopoly capitalism’ was nearing a climax and the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ just around the corner, fell victim to their illusions,” wrote Edinger. The Communist KPD held stubbornly to the belief that fascism was the logical consequence of end-stage capitalism, that capitalism via the Nazis would “soon collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.”

On the conservative end of the Left continuum, the Social Democrats remained steadfast believers in their tried & tested programme, clinging “to the organizational and tactical forms to which they attributed the party’s successes in the past,” including “respect for law and order.” Somewhat unbelievably, the SPD even had their own paramilitary wing, the Reichsbanner, who could have joined with the Communist Red Front Fighters in the streets, but usually ended up brawling with them instead; perhaps predictably, the Reichsbanner were mostly unarmed. (3)

After the substantial events of the aforementioned Prussian coup, which destabilized German government at large, on January 30, 1933, the aging Field Marshal Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor. With three Nazis (Goering, Frick, and Hitler) now holding cabinet positions, that night a parade of Brownshirts, SS, and Steel Helmets (the paramilitary wing of a Nazi-allied conservative party), estimated at some 61,000 men, marched for hours under torchlight in Berlin. Soon after, a February 4th decree made armed breaches of the peace illegal (except for those conducted by the Brownshirts); SPD members met with unionists on January 31th in Berlin to plan a nationwide general strike, but the SPD leadership backed down. Soon it became too late. Goering, now the Prussian Prime Minister, on February 22nd set up an auxiliary police force made up of SS and SA (Storm Troopers) that broke into and destroyed Communist and union offices, while local police either looked the other way or joined in; SPD newspapers came under bans in certain areas, while the SPD, in characteristic form, responded by attempting legal action; meanwhile, local police protections for the SPD were removed as well, and incidents of destruction and occasional murder proceeded apace throughout much of Germany.

And then came the burning of the Reichstag. In the days following the Reichstag fire, set by a supposed Communist, the Nazis warned of an “imminent German Bolshevik revolution” as some 4,000 Communists were arrested, many being dragged from their homes; by March 1933, the number of Communists under arrest was 10,000. Not immune from the destruction were Social Democrats, whose leaflets were burned, posters ripped down, and printing presses destroyed, and many of whom dragged from their homes. In the March 1933 elections, the last to be held before complete Nazi accession to power, the Nazis only gained a minority position of 44% in the Reichstag, but together with the Nationalists constituted a weak 52% majority. The fact that the Communists, Social Democrats, and Centrist parties had a combined 17.5 million votes to the Nazis’ 17 million “testified to the complete failure of the Nazis, even under conditions of a semi-dictatorship, to win over a majority of the electorate,” says the historian Evans. But the point was moot, because as long as Hitler and Goering held office, the legislature was irrelevant.

Much like the liberal critics of today, who take every blunder by Trump as a herald of his imminent downfall, the SPD, still in denial, predicted Hitler’s early demise. As late as March 18th an SPD party theorist predicted that Hitler would soon be abandoned by his supporters. Such views confirm the wisdom of Trotsky’s aphorism that “there is no greater crime in politics than that of hoping for stupidities on the part of a strong enemy.”

On March 6, the Nazis outlawed the Communist Party. On March 20, Himmler announced to the press that there would be “a concentration camp for political prisoners” opened at Dachau; the first of many, its wide publication in the press was meant to constitute a warning. (4) By the end of 1933, 130,000 Communist Party members had been arrested and an estimated 2,500 murdered. On June 23, 1933, Hitler also outlawed the German Social Democratic Party, and their members were similarly set upon, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.

After such a litany of horror, perhaps it’s time get back to the original stated question of this article: are there lessons from Germany’s 1930s failure for us today?

In the broad sense, similar to the German Social Democrats, there has been a general underestimation by US liberals about the ferocity of another Trump regime. While the mainstream finally has come to use words like “fascist” and “authoritarian” to describe Trumpism, they still fail to appreciate just how far this true authoritarianism will take us. For example, a special 2023 issue of Atlantic Magazine, assessing the likely effects of another Trump regime, employed a checklist approach about US institutions under Trump again – the military, NATO, journalism, and others – without seeming to consider the relevance of these institutions if all journalists are jailed or if the military becomes a domestic occupying force. A quote from historian Mark Bray bears repeating: the US media specifically (and mainstream liberal culture generally) “is not often attuned to politics outside of conventional elections” and “have no framework to interpret such a threat.… They are ill-equipped to contextualize this threat within the broader fascistic politics of Trump and his supporters.”

What about a more specific lesson? Can we learn from the failure of the German liberal Left (the SPD) and the Communist Left (the KPD) to unite in resistance against the threat of fascism? In other words, could we in the US become a more unified Left? I have to confess frustration with fellow Anarchists who insist on *not* voting this year, and the usual reason given is because both candidates will continue the US course of Zionism. This is undoubtedly true! But my response is that under one candidate you will at least be able to protest about US Zionism, while under the other candidate, you and I will likely end up dead or in prison. Of course, voting for many of us seems irrelevant anyway, because there are so few Leftists to vote, and many of us live in overwhelmingly red states anyway. Although cases have been made about spoiler candidates like Ralph Nader or Jill Stein ruining Democratic chances, in fact there is virtually no true American Left – Communist, Anarchist, or Socialist – whose votes number enough to matter in an election.

And when it comes to civil strife in the streets, it’s something that the far Right, and even the regular centrist Right, have been preparing for, for decades. You and I both know that they are well armed. We also all know that the liberal centrist Left, who make up such a large portion of the US, will always trust in the police to protect them when the shit finally comes down.

Notes
1. Statistics for 1931 bear out the ferocity of Communist street fighters, with the SA (Nazi stormtroopers) suffering the largest number of injuries and deaths – 4,699 compared to 2,924 casualties for the Communists and Reichsbanner (the unarmed paramilitary arm of the Social Democratic Party) combined. In looking at additional data, historian Daniel Siemens similarly concluded that between 1930 and 1932 Nazis were more often murdered in conflicts than their leftist and centrist paramilitary counterparts.

2. The Reichsbanner would be analogous to today’s U.S. Democratic party having their own paramilitary group like the Oath Keepers, which is an unlikely concept indeed. The Reichsbanner, which later became part of the Iron Front, considered both the far Right and far Left to be enemies of the Republic, and historians have said that the Red Front Fighters’ League and the Reichsbanner were often responsible for many of each others’ casualties.

3. Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann was imprisoned in 1933 and kept in solitary confinement at Buchenwald until he was ordered shot by Hitler in 1944.

4. In a recent column, historian Heather Cox Richardson rightly states that the first camps were for political prisoners, but neglects (perhaps deliberately) to mention that these political prisoners were Leftists.

References
https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2023/12/atlantics-janfeb-issue-next-trump-presidency/676227

https://truthout.org/articles/progressive-groups-are-mobilizing-to-de-escalate-far-right-violence-at-the-polls

Edinger, Lewis J. 1953. German Social Democracy and Hitler’s “National Revolution” of 1933: A Study in Democratic Leadership. World Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3 pp. 330-367.

Evans, Richard J. 2004. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin Press.

Shirer, William L. 1960. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon & Schuster.

Siemens, Daniel. 2017. Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts. Yale University Press.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm

Winkler, Heinrich A. 1990. Choosing the Lesser Evil: The German Social Democrats and the Fall of the Weimar Republic. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 25, No. 2/3, pp. 205-227.

Israel will not survive to its 100 year anniversary. No, that statement is not meant to imply that Palestine will rise up and destroy it, or that some foreign power will destroy it. The fact that Israel cannot survive has nothing to do with Palestinians or any Muslim group for that matter.

The issue at hand is climate change, and the planet’s climate has now reached a tipping point beyond which no one knows what will happen, but experts are certain it will be extremely bad. The moderate camp of climate scientists just released a paper that says (in part):

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm… Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high… We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives…

Specifically, no carbon was absorbed by land-based plants in 2023, but there are other signs that our normal climate system is “collapsing” (i.e., becoming a very alien climate system). To be fair, researchers think that if there are no droughts or wildfires releasing carbon into the atmosphere, the carbon sink could recover — but what are the odds of that? Seriously. With climate change itself creating and exacerbating both droughts and wildfires, why would we think this trend would reverse itself?

What’s more likely is that the planet will find a new equilibrium point, but at a much higher temperature and humidity. Under such circumstances, places like Israel (which is part of the area that is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world) will become uninhabitable, probably in the next 5 to 10 years. If you look at the climate change page for Israel on Wikipedia, the data is based on the moderate course outlined by the most recent meeting of the IPCC. We know now, though, that the moderate course is not what is happening; we’re getting something much more extreme.

To be fair, it is true that there are many places in the world that are technically uninhabitable, but people live there anyway. Las Vegas would be the example that readily comes to mind. However, an uninhabitable place can only continue to exist in a meaningful way if resources are sent in from somewhere else. As the planet heats up, climate change will become a global crisis to the extent that every country will be struggling to survive. Moreover, the powers that be will be forced to start deciding which places to maintain, and which places to allow to die.

Israel is currently the country that has received the most aid from the US of any country on earth. Giving them even more would be absurd, and though the baby boomer generation might go along with it, younger Americans are not as enthusiastic about sending enormous sums of money to Israel, specifically. As we in the US also deal with the crisis of climate change, my bet is that Israel is one of the many places we will decide to simply allow to die — though, putting it that way is inaccurate. What we will decide is to save other places (places that are more saveable and less controversial) and people (like our family members and neighbors).

Israel will bake. Nothing will grow. Almost everyone will leave. Those who don’t leave will die.

Given all that, let’s consider the deep absurdity of the Israel-Palestine conflict. If humanity survives at all, that conflict will be remembered as a horrifically gory fight to the death over a piece of land that ultimately holds no value. Imagine if the billions spent on fighting over that stupid little chunk of land had been spent on doing something significant about climate change. None of this is what Zionists want to hear, so they will not hear it.

As you know, Democrats often promote the idea that you should vote for the lesser evil, and while I’m certainly not going to tell you what I think you should do given the immoral nature of the choices available (unless you live in a non-swing state), I do find that argument to be persuasive. The problem, of course, is this:

Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

~ Hannah Arendt

And I think that’s the bottom line. I’m old enough that I remember the Obama administration well. I voted for Barack Obama, and I was grateful to have such a polished, intelligent-sounding leader after the years of embarrassing Republican administrations. However, in terms of real progress, Obama came nowhere close to the promise of the marketing campaign that got him elected. He ultimately folded to pressure from the far right, failed to get control of the Supreme Court, implemented a right-wing health policy as his signature legislation, forgot to prosecute the big Wall Street bankers responsible for the financial panic, and killed a bunch of people in foreign wars. This is what Democrats always do, apparently. We (meaning anyone who voted for him) were told (by self-described Democrats) that we were not allowed to criticize him.

We’re in a moment now that is very similar to the pre-Obama moment in the sense that people are desperate for the Harris campaign to win, and are insisting that things will change under Harris. However, it seems like we now understand that things can’t really change under a new Democratic president; they can only get worse more slowly. Moreover, we now understand that the promises of the Democratic Party are essentially lies. Whether the politicians running for election on the Democratic ticket really want the things they are proposing is unclear, but it is no longer reasonable to believe that they believe they can really implement those proposals. We know they’re going to kiss up to conservatives. Self-described Democrats are in on the con.

But still, we prefer that the Democrats win because the Republicans are so much worse. So how is that going? The fact that the Democrats must put their donors before the average voter results in some weird marketing choices — choices that only make sense if you accept that the Democrats ask the donors what they want (or, rather, they are told explicitly before even having to ask), and then have to sell that vision to the average Democratic party voter.

1. Replacing Biden was a fantastic choice. Biden is clearly no longer up to the task of being President of the United States and another 4 years simply did not make sense. However, the second reason to replace him was because of his crazy, homicidal-sounding, “I am a Zionist” bullshit; my hope was that Harris would just shut the fuck up about Israel and Gaza. The real reason he was replaced is solely because the donors (specifically) were afraid he could not win, and that was solely because of his age-related cognitive issues, not because of any policy positions.
2. Israel and Gaza could cost the Democrats the presidency. I don’t know whether this is one of those cases where Democrats are trying to appeal to a few “moderate” (right wing but not far right) voters at the expense of alienating a greater number of progressive voters, or if instead it is a valid strategy because so many American voters are right wing. It is clear, however, that you cannot get to the right of Republicans on any subject. If supporting the genocide is a good and practical position to take from the perspective of American electoral politics, Republicans will always be able to support it more. In this case, Democrats are saying that the US should support Israel (by giving them billions in weapons) but they need to stop indiscriminately massacring civilians (with those weapons) and the Trump position is that we need to pressure Israel to finish the genocide. The Democrat’s position on Israel and Palestine is a direct result of them trying to do what their donors want while still appealing to the voters. (Regardless of what either party does, Israel is unlikely to make it to 100 years old thanks to climate change.)
3. Kamala’s Glock is a really interesting feature of the Harris campaign. You would think that her owning and apparently carrying around a loaded weapon would turn off the Democrats. However, the Democrats are not anti-gun — they’re just opposed to civilians owning guns. Democrats (meaning people who self-identify as Democrats, not people who begrudgingly vote for Democrats) love the police. When people call Kamala Harris “Kamala the Cop”, Democrats literally see that as a good thing. The “the gun is OK because she’s a cop” angle is readily apparent to both Democrats and Republicans, so I don’t think it will make any difference in the election.
4. Harris recently announced that she would attempt nationwide legalization of recreational marijuana, and I have to say, I was impressed that the Democrats actually chose to embrace that strategy. The fact that marijuana was villainized for so long is a testament to the glacial pace of cultural change and the effectiveness of racist scaremongering. To really do it right, they could release everyone who is in prison on a marijuana-related charge, but the lesser evil strategy means being grateful for the rare case where the lesser evil does something marginally good. Clearly, Democratic Party donors are ready to accept nationwide legalization because otherwise the party would not be promoting this idea. I think we might be looking at nationwide legalization in the next 4 years if the Democrats win, and perhaps eventual nationwide legalization even if they don’t. The only question is whether marijuana legalization will outweigh the Democrats’ terrible position on Israel and Palestine enough for them to win.
5. Democrats continue to tout their economic successes, but they continue to define economic success in ways that don’t really reflect the material conditions of the average voter and are frankly alienating. For example, yes, the stock market line keeps going up, but most voters do not own stock. Similarly, the rate of inflation has dropped dramatically, but prices are still far above what many working class people can afford. Telling people that the economy is great and they should shut up isn’t helping the Democrats’ cause.
6. The best thing about the Democratic Party continues to be that it is not the Republican Party, and the best thing about Kamala Harris continues to be that she is not Trump. The complete insanity and, yes, weirdness of the Republicans makes the normalcy of the Democrats (despite it being a dystopian normalcy) seem delightful, and Harris and Walz’s ability to be coherent, knowledgeable and upbeat makes Trump and Vance seem that much worse in comparison. Being less bad just isn’t a very reliable strategy toward winning a lesser-evil election, though, and it is starting to look like the Republicans will replace Trump with Vance right after Trump takes office (via the 25th Amendment). This magnifies the ambiguity of the “What would a second Trump term look like?” question by making it unclear whether Trump or Vance would actually be the President. Hopefully, Democrats can spin that into anxiety for potential Republican ticket voters rather than allowing them to project their aspirations onto that ambiguity.
7. On that note, the Harris campaign continues to make stupid mistakes by kissing up to right wingers, such as saying that her cabinet would include Republicans. You do not win over consumers by telling them how similar your product is to the competition. You will not make enthusiastic supporters out of those voters who are terrified of the next Republican presidential administration by promising to allow Republicans to influence your administration. The peculiar and self-destructive impulse on the part of Democrats to kiss up to Republicans also seems to have manifested in Tim Walz — who was, for a short time, their greatest asset — having been effectively neutered. I suspect his trouble during the debate with Vance was largely because he had to try to remember all the things he couldn’t say while also remembering the ultimately meaningless double-speak phrases they wanted him to recite.
8. The Democratic Party still does not appear to have a strategy to deal with the obvious plot by MAGAs to steal the election. It feels like being in a bank while some robbers are slowly cutting a hole in the vault with a blowtorch and the bank employees just keep saying, “Oh, yes, it’s very naughty, which is why we all have to set a good example by following all the banking procedures to the letter!” because, you know, the robbers could be future customers, so we don’t want to make them mad. Thanks to the corrupt Supreme Court, Joe Biden has been granted God Mode — he can literally do anything he wants to neutralize this threat — but has so far done nothing except tell people to vote harder and send money. I can only hope that the FBI will arrest everyone who has been plotting this coup on the morning of the election and hold them for 24 hours so they can’t implement their evil plans, but honestly, I don’t think they will do shit.
9. Finally, the Democrats continue to completely ignore the environment. On October 8, the moderate faction of climate scientists (contrasted with the more extreme faction that is more often correct in their predictions) released an article that says, in part: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.” They go on to talk about how nothing substantive has been done to forestall this disaster which has resulted in climate warming gasses in the atmosphere continuing to increase even during the Biden administration; despite the fact that the percentage of energy produced by renewables during that time having increased, the absolute amount of fossil fuels burned also increased. The default plan for climate change, which is the Democratic Party’s plan because it is their donor’s plan, is to just let it happen, and allow billions of people to die while they ride out the catastrophe in their luxury bunkers. Those who self-identify as Democrats despite not being part of the party apparatus seem to have a different climate change plan: To just shove their heads so far up their own asses that the have no idea what’s coming.

There it is. Lesser-evilism continues to be a terrifying roller-coaster, like if the Prowler at Worlds of Fun had been hastily re-assembled by a crew of carnival workers on meth the night before you rode it, and they also left out most of the bolts, and have a whole truck full of parts that they just didn’t bother to use. I’ll say something here that should be obvious: Having evil people run your government is a bad idea. You can’t necessarily predict what they will do, but you know it is going to be bad. When lesser-evil people run your government, it isn’t good — it’s still bad.

After resigning from office, Richard Nixon spent nearly 2 years away from public life. He re-emerged when a British journalist named David Frost asked to conduct a lengthy interview with him. The most enduring single statement to emerge from that interview was this:

“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

That was Nixon’s response to Frost’s question about whether it was acceptable for a US President to do something illegal if it is in the best interest of that nation. I had always assumed that this concept was universally condemned at the time, but as I look around at other Americans and their political opinions now, it seems that a lot of people agree with this kind of thinking. Most notable of late is this unspoken edict:

When Israel does it, it is not a genocide.

I said it was unspoken, but it is spoken in a very specific way:

Israel has a right to defend itself.

Certainly, Israel — and any other nation — has a right to defend itself, but when that phrase is applied to situations where Israel was clearly not “defending” but rather attacking, destroying, invading, conquering, colonizing, burning, raping, dismembering and maintaining an apartheid state in direct opposition to international law, while intentionally committing war crimes, the meaning of the phrase is clearly something more than its literal meaning.

Someone in my family is a little obsessed with video essayist Jacob Gellar, and his video Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything? really digs into the heart of this concept. Call of Duty is a video game where you play as an American soldier, but while a soldier is quite possibly the most political thing a person can be, Call of Duty‘s producers claim that the game is not political. Spoilers for that video are ahead, but I’ve watched that video 3 times now, and I can tell you that knowing the answer does not really spoil the video. (Jacob Gellar’s videos are also available on Nebula, where he’s allowed more creative freedom, so the videos you’ll find there are better versions of the ones he posts to YouTube.)

The answer is that, in a sense, Call of Duty does not believe in anything. In another sense, though, the answer is that Call of Duty believes that “we” are good people, and that whatever good people do is good. If that sounds like a Nixon level of narcissistic subjectivity, that’s because it is. We are the good guys, so when we kill people, it is good; even if we are killing babies with white phosphorous, our actions are the best possible actions. On the other hand when they (the enemy) kill people, it is bad, because they are the bad guys; never mind killing babies — the bad guys must completely submit because any other action is evil. In fact, the only way for the bad guys (who are, by definition, anyone who is not on our side) to be good is to stop existing. Even peacefully protesting “our” violence is unacceptable; even pointing out that it exists is unacceptable.

The really interesting thing about that concept is that it is a principle shared by Democrats and Republicans. When I say “Democrats and Republicans”, I am specifically talking about people who actively claim those labels (e.g., Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal) and not people who begrudgingly darken the circle next to the name of a Democrat or Republican while actively hating that person.

It isn’t just that Democratic and Republican Americans believe that their soldiers are all good guys, and it isn’t just that they believe any military action the US takes as a whole must be good. Those things are both certainly true, but this halo of goodness extends to many of our allies because those Democrats and Republicans have decided that those people are like us; they are American by proxy. In a way, those Americans see the whole planet as being part of America, and in the context of empire, they’re correct about that in a way. German industrial band Rammstein has a whole song about it (here it is with English subtitles) and they are not pleased. In essence, the White House plays the tune, and the whole world is obliged to dance.

How did the Muslims end up being the enemy? The West started it with their invasions, and then when Islamic nations chose to fight back instead of submit or, better yet, participate, they became the bad guys because, remember, the bad guys are anyone who is opposed to the good guys, and we are the good guys specifically because we are us (and no other reason).

Wilhoit’s Law states that:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Unspoken, but strongly implied, within Wilhoit’s Law is that the in-groups are presumed to be good, and the out-groups are presumed to be bad. In-groups are protected and not bound because they are the good guys, and whatever they do is good because they are the good guys. They are also us, but we are obviously the good guys because we are us. In contrast, they (the out-groups) must be bound because whatever they might do would be bad, and, for the same non-reason, they ought not be protected.

When a Republican-style conservative says that we should avoid moral relativism, what they mean is that we must not reject the in-group’s inherent goodness; i.e., we must not start basing morality on an ethical analysis of our actions because then, we would stop being the in-group. This is the thing that both Democrats and Republicans are terrified of: Becoming the out-group.

Democrats and Republicans are both conservatives. The difference between the two comes down to which groups they see as in-groups and out-groups, but they agree on certain groups, including nations such as Britain and, of course, Israel. The difference between conservativism and fascism is that conservativism is the static idea (as described by Wilhoit) whereas fascism is the idea put into action.

The fact that fascism reflects complete unreason is a direct result of how it must rationalize action in service to the central idea of conservativism, that we are good because we are us. My initial example was this idea that, “Israel has the right to defend itself,” which is true, but really means, Israel has the right to do whatever it wants, including stealing people’s homes, murdering children, bombing hospitals, and even killing their own citizens, which is how almost all the civilian deaths on October 7, 2023 occurred according to the Israeli press. “An investigation by Haaretz in July 2024 concluded that the directive had been used on several occasions on that day, starting with a 7:18 a.m. order for the situation at Erez border crossing.”

Consider this:

“White people have the right to defend themselves.”

Again, the literal meaning of that statement is true, but the literal meaning isn’t what matters or even what is intended when someone makes that claim. Let’s try something else.

“Straight people have a right to defend themselves.”

Again, literally true. Perfectly fine when taken literally, but it isn’t meant to be taken literally. It is a dog whistle whose implied meaning is far greater, more complex, and completely sinister. Right-wing gun rights advocates take the idea to the extreme of subjective narcissism:

“I have the right to defend myself.”

It’s certain very true when taken literally, but we know that they mean they believe they have the right to kill anyone that they are afraid of, and that their perceived enemies do not have the right to fight back or even defend themselves.

In stark contrast to Democrats and Republicans, leftists mostly abide by the concept of “critical support” which means that leftists will support the side that is actually good (rather than simply “good because they are us”) and, moreover, intends to embrace criticism of the groups it supports because we all make mistakes. Given enough evidence, the left will reject groups whose actions are, on the balance, bad, but will also support the group being victimized in cases where both sides are bad.

While conservatives claim that it is moral relativism whenever the left criticizes both sides, the truth is that conservativism represents the maximum extent of moral relativism. Normally, moral relativism means that morality varies based on culture; most moral philosophers, liberals, and leftists disagree with moral relativism based on culture but do believe the cultures of others should be respected as much as possible.

Conservative moral relativism is not based on culture; if it were, they would apply the same rules and punishments to their own group that they apply to others. They do not. Take, for example, stealing an election by interfering with the vote count. When the enemy does this, they are evil and should be locked up. When conservatives do it, it’s the right thing to do because they are doing it, and they are good. You may be thinking, well, then how are the Democrats conservative? They accuse the Republicans of being undemocratic, but then either forego a primary process or put their thumb on the scale to make sure their pre-approved candidate wins. I say “thumb” but it is more like a whole hand. While these two kinds of anti-democratic action are different, they are both clearly anti-democratic and I’m really not sure which one is worse — at least with the Republican system, you could potentially end up with a socialist candidate. In fact, about half of the arguments Trump used to win the 2016 were socialist talking points.

Related: Trump as Threat to Democracy

On September 25, 2024, Bill Kristol (a well-known conservative guy) tweeted:

Kamala Harris, Reagan Democrat! https://t.co/NJgyQyJmeT

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) September 25, 2024

First off, I can’t help but mention that “capitalism” and “free markets” are far from the same thing, but what I really want to talk about is how the DNC keeps trying to compete with the GOP for right-wing votes. If you prefer memes to essays, my thoughts are summarized with this:

We’re talking about the USA, so there really aren’t any moderate voters. The Democratic Party is right wing as a group, and the Republican Party is far right as a group; those “moderate” voters are actually right wing voters, and progressives are centrists for the most part. If you believe the Democrats represent the center because they represent the center of American politics, then apparently Hitler was also a centrist because he represented the center of German politics in his time.

The why of the DNC’s strategy is likely two things:

1. It is well-established that the DNC responds to donor money and does not respond to its constituents. They certainly pretend as if they will serve their constituents, but then there is little to no correlation between their actual actions and what their constituents want. On the other hand, the wishes of their wealthy donors are well-reflected in the DNC’s actions. That’s partly because the donor class limits the actions that the DNC can take and partly because both parties are controlled by wealthy individuals, so policy that is beneficial to wealthy people is easier to implement.
2. The individual politicians who have the most control over the DNC’s actions are they, themselves ideologically right-wing, and are able to gatekeep access to power within the DNC, thus preventing any real progressive from steering the direction of the party.

The DNC tries to appeal to right-wing voters even though it is a bad strategy because they are not capable of genuinely appealing to progressives. Sure, they can rhetorically appeal to progressives, but since they can’t take progressive action, they can’t appeal to them genuinely. (I’m emphasizing my point here because I’m sure someone will fail to read and comprehend all the words the first time.)

The DNC switched to Kamala Harris from Joe Biden not because Harris is more progressive, but rather because Biden is completely cooked at this point. Harris is just as right-wing as Biden, which is saying a lot. The choice of Walz was odd because he does seem to be a genuine progressive (i.e., centrist), but we can see from last night’s debate that the DNC has gotten to Tim Walz, and he fell into that same pattern of trying to appeal to right-wing voters and failing specifically because Trump and Vance can easily go further right.

One example from the debate would be the issue of the genocide in Gaza. Walz attempted to appeal to right-wing voters by saying that the US will always support Israel’s right to defend itself. In the meantime, however, the Trump campaign’s position on Gaza is that Israel/USA should “finish the job” meaning finish killing and/or displacing every Palestinian in Gaza so that Israel can proceed with it’s plan to make Gaza into a tourist beach with additional housing for Israeli citizens and a new canal (the Ben Gurion Canal project, first proposed in the 1960’s) that will provide an alternative to the Egypt-control Suez canal. The DNC has sabotaged itself in this by continuing to villainize Palestinians and pretend that the conflict began on October 7, 2023 (Walz himself did this during the first few minutes of last night’s debate); if the Palestinians are the unrepentant, unjustified villains that establishment Democrats say they are, then why would anyone want anything less than their complete and utter eradication as a people?

The next example would be immigration. Walz correctly pointed out that the Democrats have tried to pass hard-line immigration legislation and that the Republicans have (at Trump’s direction) shot down that legislation in order to give them the opportunity to falsely claim that Democrats are soft on immigration. The problem, of course, is that the Democrats have collectively created the impression that they agree that there’s an immigration problem in the sense of people coming into the continental US illegally, but that isn’t the case. In truth, the major issue is that there isn’t enough funding to evaluate applications for asylum, so there’s a huge backlog at the southern border, but when the agreed-upon position is “immigrants bad”, the GOP proposal for mass deportations makes much more sense than what the Democrats (especially Walz during last night’s debate) are saying. I suppose there’s a second issue of finding a legal way to allow non-citizen migrants to do the work required to produce food, but that seems odd given that the current system is working (except for the issue of inadequate pay for farm workers, but I dare you to try to frame it that way to a right-wing voter).

Perhaps the biggest issue with the DNC’s strategy of courting right-wing voters is the issue of empathy. Right-wing voters want vengeance no matter what the issue. Walz’s approach is to empathize with everyone and empathy is antithetical to vengeance. Meanwhile, Trump and Vance seem to have a distinct lack of empathy for everyone and a conspicuous comfort with resentment and hostility. The Trump/Vance attitude is simply more relatable to right-wing voters, and no matter how much anger Walz or Harris expresses, Trump and Vance will always be able to shimmy to the right of them and pick up those right-wing votes.

I do not want Trump to win this election; despite the fact that the Democrats do not represent my views, I agree that Trump is worse. When the DNC switched from Biden to Harris, I was hoping they would at least shut the fuck up about Gaza, but instead they dove right into alienating Muslim voters. I was hoping they would switch to a more “let’s have rules that make sense and enforce them” approach to the border, but they went right ahead with alienating immigrants. This dynamic is the reason why liberal democracies (i.e., anocratic tyrannies of capital) eventually slide into fascism.

Related: Why Liberalism Leads to Fascism

Recently, another Republican voter tried to kill Donald Trump. This one was a Vivek Ramaswamy supporter and one of those “Never Trump” people. That attack, as well as the ongoing problem of mass shootings in the US, has led many people to again contemplate limiting access to firearms. Or at least, that’s how the media is portraying the situation. It does makes a great deal of sense because even though guns don’t kill people by themselves, they do require a person to operate them, so preventing the gun and the bad actor from meeting up would clearly prevent that person from shooting others.

Literally everyone agrees with the idea of trying to prevent the wrong people from possessing firearms, and of course, if a particular person should not possess a gun, it’s even more clear that they should not possess an effective gun (even though we also might not agree on what characteristics an effective gun has). Even the “any person, any gun, any time” people have limits — they just think the wrong people should be executed on the spot. We need to stop pretending that we disagree on this point.

The real question is: Who are the people who should be prohibited from owning firearms?

Conservatives have been very clear for a very long time that they intend to use their firearms for the purpose of gaining total control of America. They have a long list of the wrong people, and have made clear that the wrong people should be sorted into 3 general categories: dead (e.g., liberals), banished (e.g., people with brown skin whose parents were not born in the USA), and completely dis-empowered (e.g., women). To complete that sorting process, they would like to have a monopoly on violence — or at least come close. They are constantly worried that liberals are going to “come for their guns” because that would foil their plan, and also make them vulnerable to the same kind of actions they have planned for others.

Meanwhile, liberals think only “the government” should have a monopoly on violence, but they keep forgetting that the government is made up of individual people, and that most of the agents of violence within that government are c0nservatives. Moreover, they willfully ignore all the times that the government’s agents of violence failed to act (e.g., Uvalde), over-reacted and killed someone (e.g., Mike Brown), or straight up murdered an innocent person (e.g., Breonna Taylor). If we widen our analysis to outside of the USA, we see the US military and its allies and client states committing all sorts of atrocities; most liberals are opposed to those actions, but only after they are historical. When the current genocide is actively happening, liberals are strangely unwilling to call for our government’s agents of violence to be disarmed.

The conservative insistence that a private individual with clear mental health problems and a history of violence should not be prohibited from obtaining a firearm is just as absurd as the liberal insistence that a police or military group should not be prohibited from obtaining firearms despite a history of violence based on bigotry or even active genocide.

I’m not going to try to pretend that the left’s view on who shouldn’t be allowed to have guns is perfect, but it is better. There are certainly genuine leftists who who are opposed to guns — but unlike liberals, they are consistent in that opposition because they are opposed to literally everyone having guns. More commonly, though, leftists want to prohibit fascists from having guns. You could expand that to “all violent, immoral people” but leftists generally see things like domestic abuse and bullying as faces of fascism, so that would be redundant.

In essence, the left will not tolerate intolerance, and that means intolerance must not be allowed to be armed. This is not some kind of logical fallacy because fascists have no respect for the general social contract, and thus exist outside of it — they ought not be protected by it. The only people who view fascists as a legitimate part of society are fascist collaborators — which is just another way to say fascists. This might be a shocking framing for both liberals and conservatives since they are both currently engaged in a contest over who can most thoroughly lick the boot of US authoritarianism, but that’s how it is.

Here’s a great example:

Recently in New York City, police pursued a man in the subway who had avoided paying the $2.90 fee. They claim he had a knife, but have been unable to produce a knife that they can connect to the man. They opened fire on the fare-evader hitting him, two innocent bystanders (one hit in the head and in critical condition), and another cop. What should happen is that any cop who fired their weapon in that crowded space loses their ability to possess a firearm for some number of years — at the very least. But what actually happened is that the mayor talked about how brave these hotheaded cops were, and the police have arrested at least 18 people protesting their extremely dangerous actions. Various representatives of the cops and the city are blaming the incident on the “armed perpetrator” but it was the cops who escalated a petty theft to an attempted murder and there is no proof that the fare-evader was armed. NYC has recently upped their spending by $150 million/year in order to reduce fare evasion, which costs them approximately $690 million dollars/year in fares. To put that in perspective, however, they received $5 billion dollars in fares in 2023, so those lost fares are only about 14% and — here’s the kicker — subway fares are a regressive tax. Fare evasion is essentially a way for citizens to naturally reduce the regressive nature of that tax; it’s no different from an impoverished person stealing bread.

Related: Protests erupt after four hurt in New York subway shooting

Related: Cracking down on fare evasion on New York’s subways and buses

Below is the Inrange TV episode on the incident in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.