The Trump administration has crossed the Rubicon of authoritarianism and turned true patriots into enemies of the state
America is deeply divided. This is the phrase we’ve been using for years now. We’re deeply divided as a people and as a nation. The culture war that began as an unsubstantiated bit of fiction has been made manifest through the dissemination of a cruel ideology. Partisan rancor has taken the place of civil policy debate, but until recently, the violence had been restricted to mentally unstable individuals who were using the language of politics as an excuse to exercise their own personal demons. We could still count them as outliers.
It’s true that the government has been violently attacking American citizens for centuries, just ask any person of color, but up until quite recently, they weren’t attacking white people. That has clearly changed. That in no way excuses or explains away the behavior, but previously, one could always make the argument, bullshit though it was, that the police were simply trying to prevent crime, or that it was an us-or-them situation. Now it’s clear that race has nothing to do with it. It’s a power play.
We’ve reached the point where the only litmus test is whether or not you blindly accept the administration’s unchecked power to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants, and that anyone who refuses to capitulate is now part of the insurgency. They are waging a war on democracy, plain and simple, and anyone who disagrees becomes an enemy of the fascist state, no longer protected by law and order, with no God-given rights to speak of.
I’m sure that many read the headline of this story and immediately thought that we’ve been in a civil war for quite some time now, but I must disagree. Wars don’t pop up out of the blue, and all conflicts, internal or not, are not civil wars. Wars are a response to many factors, which eventually erupt into prolonged violence and constitute a complete breakdown of social order. We have not seen that up until now.
In the past, whenever anyone spoke about the prospect of a second civil war in America, I could never quite wrap my head around what that might look like. Our divisions aren’t so easily defined by anything as simple as geography, ethnicity, or even religion. They began as allegedly ideological, but are now just tribal, and self-assigned at that. There’s no reason to believe that American citizens disagree on most things, except that they’ve been told they do. It has become a purity test for inclusion in their own chosen tribe. Fight or die. For what, no one is quite sure.
Even institutional oppression of a minority group doesn’t, in itself, constitute a civil war. The Black Lives Matter movement was a protest movement with broad support, and had it’s share of antagonists, but still did not rise to the level of a civil war. It was not an armed conflict, but in fact, a peaceful protest. All the violence came from white supremacists, regardless of whether they were civilian or governmental. The violence was a reaction to the protest, not the other way around.
What is happening now is new and unprecedented in the history of the United States, but is also all too familiar to the world. Whenever governmental security forces push to operate outside of any legal framework, begin arresting innocent bystanders and journalists, kidnap citizens in broad daylight, and murder protestors in the streets, all without due process, the masquerade is over. The regime has nothing left to lose by abandoning all pretense of pretending to be accountable to the people. The Trump administration has already crossed the Rubicon of authoritarianism and has gone all in on fascism. The only way to stop them now is to defeat them.
I suppose I always thought of a civil war as being between two sides of the population, such as Republicans versus Democrats, or even conservative versus liberal. Or that the military would split into two sides, and everyone would rally around one side or the other. That’s how naive I was. I never considered a civil war where the government attacked its own citizens, and its supporters cheered them on. I don’t know why I didn’t think that was an option here. Did I mention my naivety?
That’s our current situation, even though it’s not really political because it’s not in any way ideological. You have a large portion of the population who have been convinced by the billionaire class and a few useful idiots that a partisan dictator you believe is on your side is preferable to a democracy that favors all. They claim to subscribe to an America-First ideology, but really, what they’ve adopted is a Me First theology.
It’s greed that unites them; a zero-sum game that assumes if anyone else gets anything, it comes out of their pocket. It’s why the immigration argument hits so hard. They have been told that immigrants are the reason that wages are stagnant, food prices are up, and housing and healthcare are unaffordable. None of this is true, of course, but it sounds true for their distorted Fox News worldview, and that’s enough. Corporate greed and a thirst for power are disguised under the cloak of xenophobia and fear of the other. It’s a playbook as old as time, coming together like clockwork.
It’s impossible to accurately perform an autopsy on an organism that is alive and kicking, so we won’t really know what happened when until some years from now. We’ll need a bit more historical distance to gain real perspective, but one thing is clear to me: This is no longer a problem that can be solved by the political establishment. We will not be saved by the Democratic Party, no matter how we organize or who we get to vote.
The Democrats will likely be a significant part of our recovery, albeit reimagined as a party, but they are not wartime generals. There is a Venn diagram whereby the best of them end up somewhere in the center of the diagram and become wartime leaders, but most of them are useless at the moment. We need an insurgency that understands how to fight a war, not a bureaucrat who knows how to raise money from corporate lobbyists and billionaires.
I’m highly suspicious of establishment Democrats such as Gavin Newsom and others who are cozy with the donor class but pretend to represent working people. They are just a different breed of wolves wearing rainbow-colored wool, hoping to get back to the status quo through the poetry of dissent. They are impostors and should be immediately purged. There’s no point in throwing off the yoke of a dictator only to accept the bridle of a technocrat. Same shit, different douche, or to quote Pete Townsend, “New boss, same as the old boss.”
We’re still in the early stages of this episode in our nation’s history, so it’s hard to tell if this is a temporary situation, a failed coup, or if it will become a messy and prolonged insurgency. Will a majority of Americans decide this is unacceptable and not what they had in mind, or will they roll over and go back to sleep? That’s the real X Factor. If conservative news media continue to paint fascism as the only way to preserve white Christian supremacy, will anything cause them to change their minds? Maybe not.
I continue to hold out hope that Trump’s support will erode to catastrophic levels and that we will get out of this by the skin of our teeth, but I’m practical enough to recognize that we could be in for a tragic end to democracy in America, at least for the short term. I do not wish to grow old and die under a fascist regime, but I don’t get to make these decisions unilaterally. We are not quite to the point of escape or die, but that could change on a dime. Many Jews in 20th-century Germany thought it couldn’t continue as it was, so if they were patient, they could get back to normal eventually. You might have heard that it didn’t work out so well.
The ultimate irony could be that the rise in fascism is what lights a fire under American patriots to re-embrace democratic values such as liberty, free speech, due process, the rule of law, and the pursuit of happiness as a protected ideal. The best way to cure a population of apathy is to take away everything they take for granted. We’re like children that way. Don’t underestimate the petulance of the American public.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” wrote George Orwell in his classic tale of warning, 1984.
That seems to be the game plan of the current administration, which doesn’t seem to care about reality, but only what they can sell to their base. If enough of their people believe the lies, then the rest of the electorate doesn’t matter. Which is why they’ve been gaslighting the public within minutes or hours, not days and weeks, of extrajudicial killings.
Blame the victim and claim victimhood. Uncontrollable radical leftists are to blame, you see. Pay no attention to the six video angles, all showing a completely different narrative. That’s all a hoax. Believe the lie we tell you, and all will be well. They can always cry fake news and position everything as radical liberal propaganda designed to tear down America. They are counting on loyalists saying things like, “I’m not even going to look at the video. I know it was manipulated, because that’s what we would do.”
The thing I’ve been impressed with in Minneapolis is the training, coordination, and organization of the protestors. It’s a coordinated, decentralized movement of well-trained civilians, acting in concert to spontaneously erupt in protests designed to swarm and harass ICE agents.
The irony that these agents are so comically outfitted with their cosplay uniforms and toy soldier accoutrements only makes the whole exercise that much more comical. The fact that they are using live ammo and have zero restraint is what will be their undoing. They have executed two people in broad daylight, while being filmed by dozens, and this has resulted in the rallying of support for their destruction.
The American people were already concerned, but now they’re pissed. This administration is not hunting criminals, as they claimed they would be. They’re hunting moms and nurses, people like us. They’re hunting Americans, and they seem fine with this. Americans killing Americans, for fun and glory.
Now that we call a civil war.
When will they come for you and your town? If we do nothing, presumably soon, especially if you live in a blue state. If you live in Texas or Florida, where there are reportedly over 3 million illegal immigrants and 1 million, respectively, compared to 85,000 in Minnesota, you will likely be spared the first wave, but eventually, even those states will come for the Democratically-controlled cities like Austin, Dallas, and Miami.
So, what do we do? What’s next?
I saw an interesting discussion this weekend with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway about this very topic. They both agreed that physical protests were important in raising awareness and galvanizing widespread support, but Galloway was convinced that protests themselves would have little effect on the administration’s actions, simply because Trump doesn’t care about public opinion. He’s beyond being shamed, so march all you want, but it won’t matter. To be fair, Swisher disagreed.
What Galloway thought would be effective is an economic strategy. A single blackout day in Minnesota wasn’t enough. It would need to be nationwide, and more like a week or even a month, of no discretionary spending. A complete freeze of the citizenry’s pocketbooks for anything other than pure survival. Put off that iPhone upgrade. Cancel subscriptions, especially tech subscriptions such as GenAI. Don’t go out to eat. Don’t shop. Don’t buy online. Don’t support any businesses. Eat and pay the bills. Nothing else.
The power is always in the purse, but it’s the coordination that matters. If a large portion of the population could refrain from spending at the same time, for a protracted period of time, it would be a massive hit to the economic fortunes of the people Trump does care about. The current US GDP is $85 billion a day, so if half the country just stopped buying, we’re talking about a serious dent in the economy. That’s where we are more powerful as a group than anything they can muster or imagine.
We have to think strategically, and we need to get creative in our response. Great social change has never been driven by a single opposition leader or group, but through a grassroots movement of citizens who have simply had enough. When a large enough portion of the 350 million citizens who call America home have decided that they’ve had enough and begin thinking in terms of existential action, we will see a paradigm shift.
People of conscience in this country have been fearful and despondent for far too long. It’s time to get pissed and to allow that righteous anger to motivate us to organize and make plans for a better future. It’s time to take America back. It’s time to dream big. It’s time to fight for something we believe in.
It’s time.