The Ragnarok Of Liberal Democracy: Why Democrats Lose
It wasn't difficult to predict the outcome of the 2024 elections if you understand the American system. Sadly for American democracy, the Democrats don't know themselves or their enemy.
In the end, it wasn’t even all that close. The polling averages once again underestimated Trump by about the margin of error. Once more, my seemingly pessimistic predictions about a US presidential election understated the magnitude of the danger the Democrats faced.
My standing theory of American politics as the Postwar Era comes to a bitter close has been completely validated. I do not say this with any cheer: over the past ten years I have become so very weary of being proven right on topics where highly paid experts are wrong. I know I’m not alone. How many Democrats were warned by subordinates they immediately scorned for being weak-kneed bedwetters?
This is what happens when an outdated scientific paradigm begins to die. The model jumps beyond expected parameters and prediction fails. Something new must be adapted, but the powers-that-be won’t react until it’s too late. Because who ever wants to confront the collapse of what they’ve worked so hard for?
Trump’s first election proved that something was deeply wrong in this country. I know that everyone shows up the day after the election insisting that they saw this outcome coming well in advance, but most haven’t spent eight years applying some pretty neat scientific techniques to understand what is really going on.
More importantly, the vast majority have been writing for an audience that has been adamantly determined to believe in only one possible outcome: Trump losing. A whole industry was constructed to feed the desperate need a great many Americans feel to see him beaten or even jailed. That’s a poor foundation for effective political opposition.
It’s brutal watching the liberal pundits begin casting about for someone to blame - Anyone but themselves and their audience, of course. Most Democrats are already jumping to point the finger at those miserable sexists and racists among the unwashed masses.
Their own pathetic failure to reach the third or so of eligible Americans who didn’t turn out? Irrelevant - in American society, fault is of the devil and must be assigned to decide who should be cast into the pit of darkness.
Around the loop we go, half of society trapped in an endless group therapy session where the same people always drive the conversation. Wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings with, you know, contradictory data and a consistent theory to explain it. The other half just goes with their gut, for better or worse. Sometimes that’s actually wiser. It sure won the day in 2024.
I am not here to argue that Trump is a good guy. Far from it!
As far back as 2016 I publicly labeled him a domestic enemy of the Constitution. When he first stated as his party’s nominee that he would only respect the result of the election if he won, he rendered himself unfit to hold office both in a moral and Constitutional sense. That the American system was incapable of or unwilling to pursue this necessary case damned the country to everything that has come after.
American leaders thought they could have it both ways with Trump: castigate him while profiting off the spectacle. The other essential ingredient in their epic fail was astonishing ineptitude in building a workable national narrative that didn’t amount to a passive-aggressive exercise in exclusion. It is those greedy fools, not the voters, who deserve the blame for Trump’s persistence.
The dismal failure to defeat Trump stems directly from the Democratic Party’s degeneration into a kind of church managed by what is in every meaningful respect a profit-obsessed corporate board. All that truly matters to members is maintaining the multi-level marketing scheme that convinces millions of donors to throw time and money at a system that is actively making the entire situation worse.
Full disclosure: this is and will remain a non-partisan blog. However, in the months to come it will be openly and viscerally critical of Trump, just as it has been Biden.
Anyone who ever got the impression that I was some kind of closet Trump supporter should be aware that as long as he lacked formal power, I considered him irrelevant. Nothing he said or did mattered once he didn’t have the power of the federal government behind him.
But I’ve not forgotten how non-uniformed federal officers abducted random citizens from the streets of Portland during protests that saw ridiculous levels of needless violence directed at completely non-violent individuals. One of them was a military veteran badly injured by a cop who beat him with a baton. Yes, there were a few idiot protestors who were violent, but the feds - with Trump egging them on - treated everyone in the area as if they were the same, ignoring their Constitutional rights. Nobody seems to want to talk about it now, though, I guess because silly Portland is more fun as a punchline. Which it is, in Oregon, but locals have their reasons.
When Trump was out of power, it was pointless and counterproductive to label him a fascist and obsess over his every move. His appeal has always been rooted in a cult of personality built around convincing people who feel like they’re losing ground in American society that, disgusting as he is, he’ll at least accidentally help them. The more you attack him, the more his supporters feel attacked. It’s never been a difficult equation to grasp - some people just didn’t (and don’t) want to, because it’s more fun and profitable to feel morally superior.
Yet with Trump once more posing a meaningful threat to the Constitution and the civil liberties of ordinary Americans, I won’t be holding back. The truth about the man is that he’s a wannabe fascist who cares for no one but himself, just as numerous military leaders serving under him have testified. His vice president is even worse, reminding me a great deal of the soldiers I knew who, when told our brigade was on alert to respond to domestic disasters, eagerly discussed ways to get around the rules of engagement to shoot anyone they could label a looter.
Not every American veteran respects their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. I have no doubt that Trump and Vance will attempt to shred numerous aspects of it, and when they do the consequences may be grave. Trump supporters shouldn’t forget that state’s rights are inviolate, and federations can crack apart.
But right now, having intensively studied the American political system’s degeneration since I was working towards a PhD, I feel it worth laying out the real reason why the so-called “Resistance” has failed. With the intersection between domestic and international politics now impossible to ignore - Putin has been banking on this moment since 2022 - Rogue Systems Recon might just have to evolve into a blog about the global fight against fascism.
For the present, while the machinery of assigning blame is only starting to get in gear, I’ll focus strictly on the real reasons for America’s decline and possible fall. Make no mistake: if Trump attempts half of what he has promised, the breakup of the USA will come in a matter of years.
But don’t celebrate too soon, friends of Putin, because the impact won’t be what you hoped. Like too many American elites, you fail to understand just how much American “leadership” has held the rest of the world’s democracies down. Now, they have no choice but to join together to hedge against America’s fall. And if the USA ever really did break up, the West Coast’s highly militarized, Japan-sized Economy is coming for you, orcs. As the russian world knows no borders and once tried to colonize these lands, Moscow is at war with us, too.
Why The Democrats Lose
If 2024 is anything like 2016, an intense blame game is about to begin. This time, it ought to tear the Democratic Party apart for good. This is how political realignments happen in the USA every generation or so - the coalitions that make up each continent-spanning brand split up and reconfigure. Internally, the process is bitter, and there is often collateral damage.
In full truth, I was forced out of my PhD program in 2017 in large part due to Trump’s election. Graduate departments are probably some of the most reliably Blue-leaning populations in America. As a result, the shock when he won was palpable, and faculty were soon discussing why it happened (the dumb, unwashed masses, of course), and how they would “resist” by, you know, backing up data abroad and stuff.
What happens in socially charged moments like these is that anyone who isn’t in good with the right people becomes a target. I had unfortunately witnessed several instances of abuse of fellow grad students by tenured faculty. Along with a couple other colleagues, we got the university administration involved. It soon became abundantly clear that our department admitted students to boost their recruitment stats, particularly when it came to diversity, but intended to push most out with terminal masters degrees.
In American identity politics terms, I’m a white cisgender man - y’know, the priviliged oppressor. But you know who is despised even more than someone who doesn’t look the part of a tenured professor from the 1950s? Anyone who does and also tries to help those who lack a patron willing to promote them. I didn’t fight for anyone because I wanted credit or to look good, but because as a soldier I had been trained to adopt a communal ethic of standing with comrades. It’s not even a choice, really, but a switch.
As a doctoral student, I had never made any secret about the fact that I was there to do innovative research, something I learned too late also didn’t endear me to department leadership. Neither did my repeated requests for clarity on future funding opportunities past my initial three year teaching assistant contract. I worked mostly independently and was very successful, but in the end, despite having a committee, all my coursework done, a research project underway, and TA/instructor ratings in the top ten percent across the university, none of it mattered.
Not long after the election, I noticed the department director and advisor I had been assigned to work with - and who largely ignored me for two years - speaking together during a gathering. I couldn’t help but notice them repeatedly looking at me across the room whenever they thought I wasn’t looking - it was eerie. Not long after that I got an official email instructing me to schedule my comprehensive exams. I was fine with this - but only if my advisor finally, after putting me off for over a year, actually committed to a format, topics, and future funding.
After receiving a vague answer that suggested a clear desire not to put anything in writing, I laid out my deeper concerns about ethics in the department, fully anticipating what would happen next. Soon I no longer had an advisor, and the other eligible members of my committee refused to step up, one very clearly suggesting that the department director had been quietly discouraging anyone from offering me support. For the record, the director had previously, in private conversations, explicitly questioned my suitability for scholarly work because I had served in the military. They were also one of those whose favored students would suddenly get funding when supposedly none was available for others, all the while talking up the department being one big family. This conveniently made dissenters look like they didnt fit.
These are all the standard signs of an institution that had concerns other than transparency and ethics. In fact, by the end of my first year in the doctoral program, thanks to having been associated with the department for several years already during masters work, I had become deeply suspicious. All but one of six doctoral students from the cohort before mine - being there already I took some seminars to get them out of the way - were gone by end of my second year, their third.
So I expected to be forced out and was looking at ditching formal academia to do contract research anyway. Still, the total refusal to even consider my actual record of achievements or try to put my skills to use came as a shock. Most doctoral students don’t publish in a top tier development journal or write and submit a full National Science Foundation grant application (twice) just to verify that work can pass independent professional muster. No, I didn’t get selected, but it’s a 10% success rate with most NSF programs and - as I later learned by accident in an incident that said much about how “blind” peer-review is when dollars are at stake - individuals who set up non-profit organizations aren’t looked favorably upon by reviewers who mostly hail from educational institutions.
This is not a sob story about broken dreams. I went into doctoral studies fully aware that the odds of getting a tenured position when I wasn’t willing to move a great distance were nil. So I crafted a unique doctoral program of study rooted in systems theory and science that, to the best of my knowledge, bridges gaps between fields better than anything publicly available. I’m confident that I’ll eventually work out how to turn a profit that beats academia on quality of life and income grounds, probably impact, too.
By necessity, being on the autism spectrum, I follow an almost monastic lifestyle relative to most folks. This insulation from broader society has been deeply helpful in negating the social bias that afflicts too much research. However, the flip side is a lack of the connections or platform necessary to transform knowledge into income or impact. My blogging work is meant to indirectly mitigate that. But the primary motivation has always been a desire to publish something between a scientific journal and long-form journalism. I try to reveal the hidden truths that others are apparently too worried about what other people think to admit out loud.
I’m writing this all out in part to clarify where I’ve always been coming from and my motivations for doing this work, but also to help illustrate the fundamental problem with the Democratic Party in the Trump age. While members of the faith are eager to spot the defects in the rest of American society, applying scarlet letters with glee, they adamantly refuse to cleanse themselves of their own lazy bigotry. They pay for it at the margins in critical elections then invent excuses to avoid having to reform.
It is this inability to understand either themselves or their enemies, to paraphrase Sun Tzu, that leads to debacles like 2016 and 2024. The 2020 election was very nearly another. The day after Biden was pronounced the winner then I was certain that America had gained only a four year reprieve, and here we are today.
I have, in various forums over the past eight years, fought my own little independent war to protect American democracy. I have, time and again, made predictions that were later born out by events. Over and over again, I’ve tried to point out the critical defects in the Democratic Party’s worldview, which while pretending to be open and scientific is now almost as broken as MAGA’s.
You would not believe the vitriol I’ve experienced, nearly all of it from the Democratic side. This alone is deeply suggestive of deep groupthink - and weakness. If a criticism poses no threat, why attack it?
I grew up going to church every Sunday; I recognize religion when I see it. And religions define themselves through members demonstrating belief in a certain way. The trouble with this outside of church is that it can lead to extremely maladaptive strategy - I’m not against faith, but it isn’t the same as science.
Nobody wants to upset members of their group, and any gadfly type who spots problems swiftly becomes an irritant easier to expel than integrate. You can’t become paralyzed by criticism, but knowing one’s own vulnerabilities is invaluable when the enemy has every incentive to discover and exploit them.
Before I started publishing on Substack, I was actually getting reasonably popular on Medium, even generating a tidy income. But over time I began to realize that my critiques of the Democrats were having the exact opposite effect than intended: during the Trump years, any and all criticisms of the party or its leaders have been taken as direct attacks on the faith. This blinded millions of well-meaning people to the hard truth of how badly their hopes were being betrayed by terrible leaders making stupid mistakes.
I eventually deleted my Medium blog entirely, sacrificing an income stream to focus on building this blog. That’s why pieces read by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, many laying out what’s been happening to America and why the resistance to Trump was a dangerous illusion, are gone. I couldn’t help but notice that one lunatic Trump acolyte in Congress began using the term “American Divorce” only a few months after I used it in the title of a piece read by a lot of people - before Facebook decided it was russian propaganda.
I actually invoked it to explain this research study from the non-partisan BrightLineWatch. Here’s a map:
Unfortunately, certain ideas about America have been baked in that originated from the fights of the 1960s. Today’s tenured professors mostly came of age during that period or were promoted by superiors who had. The political discourse of the day seeped into the very structure of the education system. Chief among them is the mistaken assumption that the way America’s federal system operates today can never fundamentally change.
About every eighty years, it does - the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s all radically reordered America. Right on schedule, as a result of political, economic, and social systems all cycling at once, the trajectory is set to shift again in the 2020s.
Yet most scholars, pundits, journalists, and politicians profess a certain myth of America derived from Christian eschatology that presumes endless progress towards some mythic unified utopia. That goes completely against the science of geography, presuming that distance and proximity mean nothing. Yet guess what the true sources of culture are?
But this doesn’t matter in a political system defined by morality: nor does comprehending the mechanics that underpin the other side’s appeal. Ironically, it’s the very same flaw that upends most counterinsurgency work: you can never defeat a movement that stems from a population’s fear of external oppression.
Democrats adamantly refuse to admit it, because this undermines the belief system that holds the party together, but the worldview they promote is not universal, nor does it truly care about equality. It is rooted in the presumptions of a particular class of Americans who back in the 1960s determined that as long as they had some minority friends, colleagues, and neighbors, that placed them on a moral pedestal tall enough to never fear allegations of bigotry. This let them pursue many of the same policies as the Republican opposition did, only insisting these are good when done by Democrats because they care about historic injustices.
Trump’s appeal is tied to a justified feeling among a great many Americans that the pie isn’t big enough for everyone, and the Democrats’ focus on identity politics is just a means of protecting their interests. Democrats talk a big game about social justice and protecting the poor, but notice how leaders tend to either be or be attached to extremely wealthy interests?
Nancy Pelosi’s net worth is over $100 million. And yet anyone is supposed to take her pronouncements about looking out for the less fortunate seriously?
Democrats have become a party that celebrates the filthy rich so long as they’re visibly apologetic about their good fortune. It doesn’t take a lot of reading through regular columns in national newspapers and magazines to spot the simple presumption that as long as you say the right things and donate to the right causes, your membership helps shield you from accusations of bad behavior. The people at the university I worked at were vocally pro-diversity… yet they always managed to define it such that the people they promoted sounded and acted like social clones. The best minds went somewhere else, like Europe, or even Texas.
The Democratic Party, top to bottom, treats critics worse than hypocrites, as evidenced by the recent embrace of the Cheney family in a bid to appeal to traditional Republican while Palestinian-Americans are told to shut up and let Israel do its thing. Ironically, they don’t ever seem to want to win badly enough to upset the feelings of certain members of their coalition.
Now the party faces a defeat of truly epic magnitude, after so many smug idiots insisted for so long that anyone who warned the Titanic was heading for an iceberg. This can only trigger a (metaphor, people) bloodletting - and should. As I argued a few weeks ago, those with access to quality polling began sending signals about how close the final result was bound to be.
Now the blame game begins, and everyone has a favored target aside from themselves. Americans are too sexist to elect a woman for president, cry some, and too racist for a mixed race person, insist others. Fans of that vapid twit Shapiro are already lining up to insist that as VP he’d have magically saved the day. That Biden was pulled too far left is one I’m seeing even former leftists shamelessly plug, as if what little he really achieved was anything remotely resembling socialism.
These explanations are all too convenient, designed to deflect the natural anger that Democrats feel right now away from those most responsible. Blaming the voters is the oldest scam in the book, the final homily in the holy textbook of virtuous Greco-Roman civic morality. But it was the party’s job to develop a narrative that appealed to enough people to win, and it was in fact entirely possible to do so.
This had to include material promises about how the party would make lives better for everyone. Especially when prices have jumped, a prospective leader has got to tap into the anxieties of the portion of the population that is always more badly off regardless of economic conditions. But the Democrats, bless their kind hearts, no longer have a sufficiently strong connection to non-college voters to understand how to reach them. Trump figured out that if he just said enough stuff that a sufficient number people thought meant he would advocate for them, he could win through.
Harris and Walz will cop plenty of blame, too, and much of it deserved. They chose to empower campaign staff who created a strategy by committee that tried to harness positive associations and plastic pop stars. Time and again they doubled down on a message designed to maximize turnout among the affluent. It’s like the entire party has structured itself to cater to suburbanites addicted to The Simpsons. But they were badly served by their staff, who should have known better.
What’s happened is clear: a feedback loop formed where increased donations and social media participation by one chunk of the public convinces the Democrats that they’re reaching the population at large. They get so wrapped up in portraying themselves as desirable to everybody that a huge number of voters feel either pandered to or ignored. The pundits then say that it’s social media’s fault, but they’re the ones recycling the same trope-filled justifications for failure that drive people to other sources of information in the first place.
The media’s obsession with taking every utterance of Trump’s and choosing to interpret it in the most negative way doesn’t help. He long ago learned to game this with great effect, those long winding rants and seemingly random antics on stage all part of the act. When smug writers talk about how dumb and unstable he is, what they’re really doing is attacking his audience. This makes him stronger.
But Democrats just can’t get enough of bashing Trump - even when he’s not in office people have proven willing to pay for anti-Trump content and punish anyone who contradicts their belief system. For years they’ve been strung along with promises of the guy being thrown in jail or somehow legally barred from office. Never have they confronted the fact that even if this had happened, his own supporters might well have turned to violence. And what then?
They had no real plans - already the ball of “resistance” is being pushed into the voters’ court, likely taking the form of protests that won’t accomplish anything - unless people get hurt, and then half of the country explodes. Not the outcome anyone should hope for. If it does, don’t expect Democratic party leaders to do anything but disclaim all violence and tell people to trust that Trump won’t find a way to rig the system for Vance in 2028. If he lives that long - and no, that’s not a threat. He’s old.
That brings me to the reasoning behind the title of this post. Up until yesterday, Democrats were insisting that Trump meant the end of liberal democracy. So now what? Unless that was all just empty rhetoric, it has to be assumed that the USA won’t necessarily have free and fair elections going forward. If that’s the case, what is the Democratic Party from here on out but the loyal opposition, a toothless public conscience waiting to be treated like Navalny’s party is in Putin’s empire?
When the French, Belgian, Dutch, and British forces were defeated in 1940 by a maneuver that was far from unpredictable, if risky, the shock was enough to break the center-left French government. It was replaced by a group that became known as the Vichy Regime. They signed an armistice with Hitler that surrendered half of metropolitan France to occupation, reasoning that since Germany would win the war, France should accept its place in the new European order.
De Gaulle and the leaders of what became Free France rejected the legitimacy of the regime and fought on beside the other Allies. It wasn’t legal, but they did it anyway, and won.
Right now, the Democratic Party in the USA faces a stark choice. It can roll back the fascism rhetoric and tacitly admit it cried wolf, or embrace a posture of total resistance, come what may. This need not be violent: there are plenty of tools available, namely the Senate filibuster, even if the Republicans still control the House when all the votes from rural California are counted. States retain quasi-sovereign rights under the Constitution, and there are limits to what the feds can enforce anyway.
In reality, the “Resistance” during Trump’s first term was a mirage designed to boost donations, media audiences, and eventually turnout in the midterms - which the Democrats lost, then pretended they hadn’t because the Republicans didn’t win in a landslide (another sign of groupthink). The pandemic is all that saved the world from a second Trump term in 2020, masking a dramatic deterioration of the Democratic Party’s position that stemmed from pushing most of the burden of dealing with the pandemic onto people who couldn’t work remotely.
For a significant chunk of the Democratic Party, the next year will be about laying the blame for losing in 2024 on most of the very people it insists it exists to protect. Mark my words: nearly every group or cause the Democratic Party has embraced over the past decade is at risk of being thrown under the bus, accused of undermining the party’s chances by holding positions that are too far from the mainstream.
Ironically, it is this instinct to triangulate by adopting conservative positions - but only as they see them through the funhouse mirror of partisanship, hence the uncanny valley effect this produces - to look bipartisan, that is exactly what kills the Democrats. They are so bound and determined to look at everything on a left-right spectrum that they ignore the more complex truth of American political life.
The very people who tell students to check their privilege and not accept simplistic single stories about any group do more to reify the status quo than anyone else. Instead of telling an honest story about how pervasive bigotry and bias are across the human experience, oppression is pulled into a political narrative that empowers a few wealthy types to act like they’re different than their less-enlightened peers.
But they’re no different, and can’t be, when it comes to politics. Political economy is a grim and dismal system - one I’m working on simulating in gamified form - but it is what it is. There are never enough tax revenues to fund everything people desire. Everyone knows that not all groups benefit equally from every policy.
Fortunately, identities are not fixed. People can belong to multiple groups. So you can achieve substantial benefit for whatever underprivileged groups you like by creating universal systems rooted in natural and Constitutional rights. Nearly every problem in society ultimately stems from poverty - people with decent work opportunities, a place to live, and a basic level of services tend not to engage in a lot of criminal behavior.
But America’s weird moral political economy has always been explicitly designed to break people up into firm categories ranked in a kind of pyramid. Because everyone is worried about slipping down, special treatment given to any other group but theirs generates tremendous angst. Worse, the boundaries of membership then become extremely important, leading to the emergence of entrepreneurs within groups who impose yet another power gradient based on their interpretation of the rules of belonging.
This is the nightmare that the trend of liberalism over the past thirty years has wrought. Contrary to common perception, Western Liberalism is just Christian morality repackaged in secular form. It emerged as a justification for the preferences of an emerging industrial oligarch class that didn’t want to be bound by the old norms of Christian charity - or, more accurately, church officials. That’s why Putin’s ruscism is a dark mirror, just as Hitler’s Nazi movement was: ultimately, the West must find a demon to slay and will create one in its own population if no outside threat exists. Sometimes even then.
Unity in this context is the seed of the system’s own destruction. The real power of a federal system lies in its ability to generate constant creative churn while firewalling the impacts of anyone’s choices. That is what creates unity, not authority figures passing judgement from on high.
A truly scientific philosophy rooted in systems is warranted, but unpopular - and so in a society where popularity equals raw power, effectively ignored. The consequence is that Western leaders lose, lose, and lose again, perpetually shocked when people don’t behave as planned.
Postmodern naval-gazing has become so universal that people have lost touch with material reality. Just because a college professor or textbook declares something to be a fact does not mean that reciting it verbatim constitutes real understanding. Assembling endless strings of facts together in a familiar pattern and calling them analysis or science is another bad habit of American students taught to them by their teachers.
In the end, Democrats lose because they’re unable or unwilling to separate logic and emotion. Most popular media reinforces this serious flaw by both encouraging participation in public action but also a lack of critical reflection on broader strategy. The net effect is akin to running in circles shouting about the meteor on the way in the belief that raw effort alone can stop it. Most talk of climate change is going the same way.
If enough Democratic strategists had been monitoring the battlefields in Ukraine, they might understand more of how the world really works. Set aside the violence, and the lessons are the same, taught over and over again in defiance of anyone’s belief.
Veterans know - but in America, they aren’t many. And most are as trapped in the grand social muddle of it all as anyone else. It’s hard to know what target to hit in the fog.
But the first step to coming up with a better strategy is to admit the old one has failed. Once misguided assumptions are burned away, the path forward is often revealed.
The Future Of American Democracy
Americans are taught in school that our system is better than any other, but it’s barely even a democracy. The vicious partisanship that’s making life so hard even at the community level is a function of the warped national culture, one largely imposed by wealthy interests rooted in the Yankee Northeast
It’s difficult for foreigners to understand America because it isn’t a country in the same sense as even fellow former British colonies like Canada and Australia. Though we also have a lot of territory, the evolution of the US federal government and the USA’s far larger population have led to the country effectively splitting into separate political-economic regions.
This map shows five potential regional groupings overlaid atop a base graphic that offers a better view of the social fault lines beneath American society than most I’ve seen. Thanks, Nationhood Lab, for the work you do!
A better America would give each natural region its own federal government with full license to uphold the Constitution according to the will of local residents. Over time states could shift between regions. All would remain united under an EU-like shell responsible for the Federal Reserve, nuclear deterrent, and common economic standards, but everything else would be handled more locally.
This sort of arrangement could actually be put in place through a Constitutional Amendment using an alternative procedure, never before invoked, that allows state legislatures to call a Constitutional Convention. In theory, if authorized by legislation written the same way in enough states and the decision was ratified by another vote, the topics under consideration could be constrained to avoid chaos and produce an outcome that the vast majority of Americans would find more functional. Most states have been culturally part of one political coalition or the other for almost twenty years.
Sadly, it will probably take Trump losing a war - not at all unlikely, despite of his rhetoric - to shock enough Americans into accepting that there’s probably no other way to keep the country together in any formal respect over the long run. Remember that Trump, facing no need to run for re-election, will do whatever he feels most benefits himself, which now probably includes securing a legacy. When things don’t go well, he’ll find enemies abroad. His type always does - and contrary to his claims, he actually did start a war with Iran by killing Soleimani at the end of 2019.
Iran, thankfully, limited its reprisal, and things settled. They might not next time - probably won’t, because Iran would be crazy not to make a rush to the bomb now.
In the short run, expect a whole lot of people who have spent years calling Trump a fascist are about to gaslight everyone about it. To preserve their own ambitions, prominent Democrats are bound to channel public fear into visible but meaningless actions that distract from their own failures. Whether their craven Vichy nature can be successfully opposed is an open question.
Given the rhetoric the Democrats chose in 2024, there is no moral, ethical, honorable, or practical path forward now but maximum legal resistance. Trump must not be given a functioning government unless he moderates his behavior. Two hundred years ago leaders in Congress understood how to leverage formal power, but now they’re too keen to respect norms so that they can accuse the other side of sabotaging them. They’re also all in bed with special interests that do not want to see the consequences that a totally paralyzed federal government would bring.
Still, they can be forced to act if their donors get mad. The question is how many will give up and move on, proving their hypocrisy for all time, or commit to the defense of democracy for real.
The reality is that we would all have been a lot better off if the USA had crashed hard in 2017 after the Democrats responded to Trump’s actions by treating him as an effectively illegitimate president. Now is the time for total legislative gridlock, a proper demonstration of how little Trump is actually able to achieve without resorting to illegal acts.
Correctly-educated Democrats are bound to find a thousand reasons to collude for the good of the country, but so did the rulers of Vichy. After a few years the Nazis wound up taking over the rest of France, and that was that.
I’m not using the Nazi analogy for rhetorical purposes; the structural sources of Trump’s appeal are identical to those which animated Hitler’s. But this is not the 1930’s, and the USA is not Weimar Germany, despite certain structural similarities, like a President being able to govern through executive orders. Geography matters, and though voters from both parties live in every state, most would remain intact and functioning even if the federal government ceased to exist tomorrow because they already firmly controlled by one party or the other.
And fortunately this isn’t the 1860s, either: it isn’t possible to call up a hundred thousand volunteers, hand them weapons, and march off to do battle. US military institutions just don’t work that way, and though each state has a National Guard, local formations are not capable of waging independent offensive operations. Yet nobody else in the country is organized enough to defeat any portion of the US military in an open attack, so the odds of states going to war are pretty close to nil. The vast majority of Americans, it’s important to note, have never served in the military and would be swiftly crushed by even a small number of combat veterans if they formed a militia.
And believe me, if anything ever did actually go down, I’d soon have a drone strike company, then battalion, and eventually full army group built along Ukrainian lines. Don’t mess with the West Coast, Trump.
Back to reality: the correct form of resistance to a threat like Trump is to cut off his ability to act. In the worst case, any military officer with the slightest concern about the legality of their orders is obligated to refuse them - or modify their actions in the field as needed. If that fails, following orders absolutely literally is a time-honored way to sabotage an operation without anyone being able to accuse you of more than gross incompetence.
Yet chances of Trump actually attempting to abuse his authority over the military goes way down if he encounters stiff and unrelenting resistance in Congress and the courts. Even if Republicans narrowly take the House as well as the Senate, the works can be gummed up dramatically without much effort. The trouble is getting Democratic legislators to do their job instead of colluding, hoping the party will bounce back in the Midterms or 2028.
Here again it’s a question of integrity: was the party’s strident rhetoric during 2024 real, or a cruel lie? I can’t help but recall back in 2006 when, after all but promising to impeach George W. Bush for lying about the need to invade Iraq, Nancy Pelosi decided to refrain for the good of the country. How fitting that she decided to impeach Trump for, what I’m sorry to say, will always be less evil than getting thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed.
It’s a big part of why America is where it is.
I suspect that the source of most meaningful resistance to Trump will come at the state level. With his term in office up soon and ambitions in 2028 obvious, maybe Newsom’s California will work with Oregon, Washington, and Hawai’i to forge a united front, as they should. The rest of Americans already see the West Coast about like Muscovites do Ukrainians. We also happen to be the frontline in any fight with China.
The trouble with the Democratic Party’s likely collusion with Trump while still profiting off of the outrage he generates is that the Dems will only beat his successors by accident. An alternative strategy is required, one that transcends the insipid identity politics pushed by people who never intended to bring material improvement to the lives of Americans at the bottom of the national pyramid scheme.
It almost certainly must be rooted in a hybrid of progressive and conservative thinking, empowering local communities to build the solutions that work for them. A conservative-progressive approach doesn’t try to speak for every vulnerable community or even see them as such: it’s a mission-based way of looking at problems that respects difference and doesn’t demand unity, just cooperation in the spirit of mutual self-interest. Empower people, don’t command them.
This is actually not a bad foundation for looking at the future defense of Ukraine and the broader democratic world, especially now. Stable democracies everywhere have got to come together and build common institutions that evade the traps of obsolete Western ideological thought patterns.
The failure of the Democratic Party to beat Trump stems from the same source as the Western World’s broader inability to accept the necessity of defeating Putin in Ukraine. Fear of what could happen leads to ceding all initiative to the other side.
Europe and the Pacific democracies have to assume that the old American security guarantees are now defunct. Trump can’t be trusted - he won’t necessarily abandon every ally, but everyone has to worry that he might. In the American conception of the world that Democrats themselves have fostered, only the USA truly matters. Trump says what they’re all really thinking, which is why they hate him so much - but also grudgingly surrender to him, leaving everyone else to their fate and blaming them for it.
But there is enough economic strength and military capacity in the hands of the world’s democracies to beat Putin, then turn to the task of protecting Taiwan. Let the USA back Israel and go to war with Iran whenever Netanyahu is ready and Putin is prepared to sell out Tehran, as Moscow has often done before. China will probably make a move in a few years, but that leaves enough time to smash russia and rearm.
If it can fight, and a country’s laws don’t prohibit transfer, it needs to go to Ukraine - now. Countries like Japan and South Korea that don’t let their stuff go to warzones can backfill for those with less restrictive laws. Industrial cooperation efforts should accelerate. And if countries like Hungary and Turkey keep messing with NATO, build an alternative within.
Fortunately, the USA will always be happy to serve as the world’s gas station, and nothing is going to stop half of the USA from fracking oil and gas out of the ground until the water table is contaminated from the Rockies to the Appalachians. America will also continue to sell arms. which can find their way to Ukraine.
It should be assumed that American aid will cease beyond the next fiscal year, and that once in office Trump will interrupt it in a bid to force Ukraine into negotiations. To counter this, Biden must open the floodgates at last, pushing everything Ukraine can afford to the country immediately. He should also dramatically build up US force presence abroad, allowing Trump to work out how to pull it back and establish a new deployment cycle.
There’s simply no excuse for Biden failing to do what little he can to salvage his legacy. If a flood of arms reaches Ukraine and the general counteroffensive being planned for 2025 succeeds, it will undo at least some of the damage done by his and his team’s endless hesitation.
As for Americans, well - I did what little a nobody could. Here’s hoping what I know I can have slightly more of a positive impact on Ukraine’s fight. Just like I’ve been afraid would prove the case since 2022, the future of democracy will be won or lost in Ukraine.