Nothing To Lose But Our Chains? Not Even 100 Days And We're There Already?

You Say You Want A Revolution?

"Lock Him Up" by Nancy Ohanian

You might expect Eric Levitz, Jamelle Bouie or Chris Hedges to have written a column called America Needs an Uprising, but David Brooks? His Thursday column was titled What’s Happened Is Not Normal. America Needs An Uprising That Is Not Normal. He didn’t mean with muskets or AR-15s. First he identified the problem, an actual threat to civilization: “In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must. But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short. Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power— power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit— learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.”

Yep, that’s the problem alright— and what we’re seeing right now is that Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Russell Vought and the other Nazis enabling Trump’s fever dreams recognize “that any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed.” So law firms, universities, the military, the bureaucracy, a network of international alliances… what Brooks called an “effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power.”

And he asserted, “it will take a concerted response to beat it back... Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities. So far, the only real hint of something larger— a mass countermovement— has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this too is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans. What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to— Democrat, independent or Republican.”

Republican? That’s Brooks' dream and his refusal to recognize that there are no longer Republicans like him, just Republicans like the ones who staffed Hitler’s concentration camps in the 1940s. Every Republican? 70%? 80%? 90%? That’s what he party turned into. Did anyone stand up and agree with Lisa Murkowski this week? Or the month before. Maybe I missed it.

Here a DWT we’ve been suggesting it is time for a General Strike. Brooks wrote that “It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power… lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.”

Historically, these movements— which take a degree of coordination— began small and built up. “They developed clear messages that appealed to a variety of groups. They shifted the narrative so the authoritarians were no longer on permanent offense. Sometimes they used nonviolent means to provoke the regime into taking violent action, which shocks the nation, undercuts the regime’s authority and further strengthens the movement. (Think of the civil rights movement at Selma.) Right now, Trumpism is dividing civil society; if done right, the civic uprising can begin to divide the forces of Trumpism... [A] civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism— one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator. I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

In his essay, The Mad King, Peter Wehner, wrote that Trump, who has spent most of his life, and much of his presidency, gaslighting the public, has now run into the brick wall of reality. When it came to his incompetent stewardship of the economy, “misinformation, disinformation, bullying, and nasty social-media posts proved ineffective. Stock and bond markets weren’t intimidated by the threats of the aging president. Trump fought reality, and reality won… So what can we expect, based on what we’ve witnessed? We won’t see qualities from Trump that we haven’t seen before, but we will see them in a more extreme version. He is more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic than in his first term. ‘He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck anymore,’ a White House official familiar with Trump’s thinking told the Washington Post. ‘Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do.’… Compounding the problem is that the president has surrounded himself with men and women who are utterly loyal to him, unwilling to challenge him, and certainly unable to contain him. On top of that, this is an administration filled with third-rate intellects, conspiracy theorists, and misfits. Their combination of maliciousness and incompetence has produced enormous, dangerous, and in some cases lethal disruptions.”

He reminded his readers that the danger is that “vindictive narcissists like Trump hold grudges and harbor resentments, blame everything on someone else, and weaponize information. They have a mean, even sadistic, side, belittling others to feel better about themselves and using, abusing, and discarding people. Empathy is, to them, an alien quality. When they begin to feel like the walls are closing in; when their external validation, sense of superiority, and grandiosity are threatened; when they experience setbacks or humiliating public failures, they can approach what is known as ‘narcissistic collapse.’ This can lead to intense feelings of rage and acts of aggression, to agitation, and to increased impulsivity and distortions of reality. So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end. Leaders who have been worse— more ruthless and more skilled than Trump— have been stopped, and few nations have been blessed by a system of government as wise and resilient as what our Founders created. Many of our institutions are stronger than those in most other nations. So Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost. It didn’t have to be this way. There are 77,302,580 co-authors of this catastrophe. They have left a crimson stain on this Republic.”

And no one more than Lonnie, who with his mastery of financial matters, could blasts off to his dream world— for Earth was an endless hassle and too much empathy (“the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy”) he prefers the colder wastes of the planet of the war god.

"Lonnie's Planet of the War God" by Greg Bart