Is there any ember of a resistance to a declaration of war of annexation against Canada (I know there's no hope for Panama, Greenland, or Gaza if things come to that)?
I don't have in mind something like a cabal of colonels suddenly unveiling that they will be the new arbiters of the Constitution. I mean action in the context of something that goes beyond the scope of protests and resignations. At that point the only ethical option seems to be violent resistance by those Americans best equipped and legitimized to supply it. And if that sounds like a civil war, I would submit that the occasion of an American government cartoonishly conquering Canada for the sake of raw power would be the signal that we are already in a hot civil conflict. I can believe Americans would slouch through almost anything out of inertia, but in this scenario we're approaching what could be the limits, as far-fetched as it all still is to contemplate.
I don't believe Democrats have lost the culture war - their positions remain by and large more popular in isolation! What's happened is the information war waged over generations by the right has indeed contributed to a persistent demeaning of the Democratic party brand. So even when Democrats say or do things people like, too many in the middle or of mixed/incoherent politics will revert to dismissing Democrats as a party of 'incompetent manhaters and racebaiters', as they were taught. And the right only needs to make a couple percentage points out of this cohort to be competitive. The US has been fairly split politically for many generations, but before polarization it used to be possible to achieve very large swings in either direction. But the most important change here is that conservative elites have been self-radicalized by their media projects (they drank the Kool-Aid, and now all their leaders are "Fox News grandpas"), and are happy to lead their radicalized base in overthrowing the entire basis of American government. At least when the same pattern unfolded in 1920s Germany, there was an immediate tradition of monarchy to hearken back to.As for culture overall, they, like most conservatives I know don't like how Trump and his crew talk and act but think it's worth any amount of damage to destroy the 'DEI mind virus.' As I've commented in the past, the progressive social policies of the Democrats, especially in regard to gender politics, white guilt, affirmative action/white male replacement, and drug/crime rehabilitation have cause the Dems to essentially lose the culture war. MAGA supporters don't really care about anything else so long as they 'win' the culture war.
To be fair, the Dems have too often wound up frozen by special interests and centrism even when they do control government, often producing the kind of lackluster governance people around the world hate as they watch it fail to address the escalating problems they observe brewing, which has the effect of undercutting for the less engaged the Democratic selling point of being = better at governance than Republicans. But this has also been changing as various cities and states get more aggressive in policymaking.
But people like e.g. Ken Long, a veteran who has proposed that he will choose death over getting a heart transplant, because he rejects being vaccinated as a prerequisite to the transplant (and we heard countless similar stories during the pandemic), aren't turned off by progressives "going too far" or whatever, they just veritably hate the entire edifice of modern, advanced civilization, if not its conveniences, to their cores, because it undermines the hierarchy they intuit. They want to enjoy the masochism of victimhood, the mirage of Christian victimhood like Long is lusting after, while still holding the unlimited power to do whatever they want to those who aren't in their club. And that is a fascistic mindset, the belief in being under unlimited threat no matter what, and therefore deserving the power to achieve sadism no matter what. There was never a way to satisfy the atavists, only to contain them, so long as conservative elites still bought into the American experiment.
For a more succinct description, as always "the cruelty is the point." [VIDEO]
But what was Thunberg supposed to propose? It is useful for someone with a modicum of influence to point out the cumulative failures of the system. That is, someone who isn't on the right and isn't using their own contribution to those failures to make things worse. Thunberg is wrong in that the steady application of moderate energy transition policies from the 1990s on would arguably have solved the climate change problem by now, at least in terms of a crisis. But the fact that we were never able to approach such sensible policymaking due to greed, shortsightedness, and the massive resistance of the right and center is what makes her right! So any "realistic" solution she could offer would itself be unrealistic for lacking relevance amid a broken political environment. Maybe you could call it "damned if you do, damned if you don't", but she's got to be the last person to blame for that. This is by the way how Martin Luther King Jr. came around to socialism being necessary in the fight against racism - he perceived that all the pernicious systems making up the whole society, its politics, and economics, were bound together in a mutually-reinforcing way, such that you couldn't cut one branch without getting at the others. Similarly, it's not surprising to me that the civil rights movement reached its peak at a simultaneous peak in the energy of American liberalism and the welfare state, and at the same time at which the American economy showed less inequality than at any other time in its history. But we don't usually put that context side by side, right?This is also why I've never actually been a fan of Greta as I don't think she's contributed anything of value, she's not working toward any realistic solutions, just demanding radical unrealistic change.
Nowadays, it feels like every possible political philosophy has substantially failed to meet the moment, but I lack the intelligence and creativity to imagine a satisfying novel alternative that might emerge in the future. I believe politics must henceforth become reducible to psychology and neurology rather than ideology or economics or culture or class, as the radical and increasingly-divergent diversity of psychological orientations among human beings may make liberal democracy untenable where it isn't contained by other factors. This is something authoritarianism always seeks to achieve in some fashion, but it brings its own inevitable failings in trying to pull things back together coercively. Countries like Russia, Iran, China, Israel, India, Turkey, etc. are led by people who seem to have converged on versions of a certain philosophy I would call "soft totalitarianism" or "moderate fascism", which uses nationalism and semi-overt thought control to try to convert the fractious impulses of the population toward a single national project less aggressively than Marxist-Leninism, Nazism, etc. used to. The goal is to keep the country united and stable, while projecting strength on the international arena, without resorting to methods that are too self-destructive. They are continuing the dream of achieving a perfect enlightened despotism: "Everything for the people, nothing by the people." It remains to be seen whether these versions of totalitarianism will prove any more resilient than the 20th century ones did.Sadly, all of the above is due to the rise of social media. Instead of getting news from 'the news' it essentially comes from the gossip guy/gal in the village pub and as that person is a 'good bloke' they correct because 'why would they lie?'
The bottom line is as follows: A world where humans all shared a Joe Biden kind of mentality and sensibility would produce more of a Star Trek utopia than any left-wing ideology ever could. On the other hand, a world where humans shared a Donald Trump kind of mentality and sensibility would be a troglodytic one, and it's questionable how far in advance of chimpanzees we would have been able to rise.
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