Sedition, Conspiracy, and Rebellion

[jsburbidge]

 Apparently about 45% of Republicans do not object to the storming of the Capitol. Although appalling, this is not really new news. 45% of about 48% is approximately the crazification factor of the early 21st Century (actually a little lower). Things have not shifted much.

 

Although the immediate focus on security up to and through the inauguration in Washington is certainly important (critical), the bigger concern is longer term and more broadly spread.

 

This has been a worry since at least 2008: that if even a small but significant fraction of the American population refuses to accept the legitimacy of the government, and a proportion of those are inclined actively to resist the government, then the mechanisms of government fail or need to be heavily reworked.

 

For all that we think of democracy as being about majority rule, it is even more firmly based on the idea of general acceptance throughout the entire population. Without that acceptance, those in power have little option but to exert such a high degree of direct power as to have a negative impact on experienced freedom of choice, or alternatively to withdraw from areas particularly affected by the levels of disaffection (e.g. Stephenson's Ameristan), or both. (This is the basis of the strategy of '60s radicals such as the Weathermen: force the government into ever more repressive behaviours by acts of violence, so that the population would reject the government as a whole for its repression.)

 

Even now, prosecuting everyone who trespassed on the Capitol or continued to be present after a riot had been declared would overwhelm the courts for many months to come. That means either dropping all but the most serious charges or dispensing with important procedural safeguards.

 

If every non-urban county seat in the US becomes potentially hostage to a cadre of Trump's base who are ready to express their views using violence, there is a potential massive failure of governance just waiting in the wings.

 

Secondly, the reaction of those conservative voters who are not so inclined - already visible - is likely to destroy the viability of the Republicans as a national party. (Trump lost; a weaker pseudo-Trump would lose worse; a "moderate Republican" would be rejected by the Trumpists.) Internal fighting will hobble the party in any case.

 

The Republican Party, since 1980, has not been a beneficial power, but its viability has at least meant that there has been an actual choice at the polls. If it ceases, for a generation, to be viable, then one of the important parts of a representative democratic system with parties goes away: the ability to keep the current ruling party in check with the implicit threat of rejection at the polls. (There are other ways to get this effect.  If one eliminates parties altogether and reverts to the Elizabethan model where all choices are local and based on character and reputation (and local alliances) of individuals, that works as well, especially if there is a general acceptance of the importance of unanimity, not merely majority support, in choosing a member, things can also work, though it does not scale easily. It does reflect the wishes of the US founders. It's not going to happen.) And that electoral weakness would further inflame the right.

 

This has been building for a long time and there is no obvious fix, especially as the underlying factors driving the domestic disaffection continue to be there: the retreat from imperial power, the economic dislocations from the information economy, and the impact of climate change. I'm not sure there's any obvious way out of this, save some extraordinary run of good luck over an extended period of time.

Comments

[graydon]

Fragmentation, co-option, and reincorporation work fine.

Fragmentation requires you to shut down the global comms platforms; you have to basically make advertising illegal. (Because otherwise you WILL have a global comms platform.)

After that, you get fragmentation of the far right; those less committed start to drift away. You keep this up; you deplatform all the nazis, all the time. (and anybody else who has an outbreak of supremacy.)

Co-option means you need to pull the escaping uncommitted into something; that requires there to be a thing there. That's why you decarbonise; to give you some place to pull those folks into where they're not actively useless so they can stop being a problem out of the despair brought on by their uselessness. Since you are doing this to improve air quality in cities (which is important! air pollution kills a lot of people, many more than previously believed per the ~2010-2015 studies that got big databases to look at), livability, etc., you have lots of room for people to remediate land; find all the garbage, plant stuff, count the sticklebacks and the orioles, all the stuff associated with a switch to a custodial, conservationist culture. (This is going to take ethnogenesis.)

Reincorporation is what you do with the institutions; for example, Energy, Mines, and Resources needs to be utterly replaced; shut down, start over. Same with whatever Indian and Northern Affairs is called this year. This is where the income and asset caps come in, as part of a general egalitarian project to redistribute agency. (Nobody has any; if you don't work, you starve, and the available work is narrow and marginal for almost everyone.)

So totally doable from a policy perspective. It's not politically trivial but there are a few encouraging signs.

[jsburbidge]

It would work. To make it politically feasible would require some more really bad examples to react against.

Part of the issue in the US is that the structure was explicitly designed to make decisive action really difficult. This was helpful in the Trump years - it's one reason he never got his Wall - but it makes transformative action of any sort even more difficult.

[graydon]

It does certain kinds of decisive just fine. (Trump has handed over a lot of land to mining companies, for example. And the border wall is real enough to have destroyed a lot of saguaros.)

The thing that sticks with me about Biden is that he's plausibly motivated by duty; that meant-to-be-private reported-as-campaign-related visit to Beau's grave especially stood out to me as an odd thing to be doing.

Someone planning on being a one-term president out of duty is in an interesting mindset. And it's not like he doesn't know how the machine works or where the switches and levers are. So I'm very curious about the plan.

[ndrosen]

These statements about what “you” do raise questions about who would in fact do them, and what the results would be. Make advertising illegal to shut down the global comms platform — people would be unlikely to stand for that. Deplatform the Nazis— fine, if it stopped there — “and anybody else who has an outbreak of supremacy— who judges who is having “an outbreak of supremacy”? It seems that some would need a lot of supremacy to exercise such a power, and it would be easy to declare people with dissident opinions, or who tell unpopular truths, as Nazis or Trumpublicans or whatever the condemnation of the month was.

“Abuses of the freedom of speech ought surely to be repressed, but to whom dare we entrust the power of repressing them?” — Benjamin Franklin

[graydon]

There's anti-trust legislation still on the books that would entirely suffice to shut down the global comms platforms. Just have to find the will to use it. And then get started on the long list of objectionable monopolies in other areas, the necessary regulatory role of setting interoperability standards and requiring everyone in that market to follow them, and probably having the discussion about whether the internet is a public good or not.

Advertising exists to make you more insecure, so you'll spend money to fix the feeling of insecurity. It's malicious. It's only challenging to get rid of because (in the US) you'd need a constitutional amendment to the effect that money is not speech, but that seems politically vital for other reasons. In general, taking steps that reduce people's anxiety will be politically popular.

You're having an outbreak of supremacy if you assert that your fellow citizens lack or ought to lack or should be caused to lack the same rights you yourself are exercising. It wouldn't be quite that simple after some case law accumulated, but it's not complicated. It wouldn't be any more difficult than existing "true threat" tests. That's currently not true in the US because the US concept of free speech was carefully designed to cover "I own you", "I ought to own you", "it is right and just that I own you on the same terms I own non-living personal possession" as protected speech. It would not be before time to stop constructing free speech quite that broadly as part of an acknowledgement that part of the purpose of society is to prevent that category of constructions of social power.

[ndrosen]

Giving the government more power to suppress whatever speech those currently in power don’t like will increase my anxiety.

Also, not all advertising exists to make people insecure. Granted that some advertising is inane or worse, the same could be said about some political rhetoric, some news reports, and some discussions on Dreamwidth. I do not want any of these kinds of speech to be easy to suppress because some instances of them are foolish or dishonorable. I recall an article I read many years ago, titled “A Free Society Must Advertise.” You might try using Google to find it.

By the way, America’s First Amendment was not written specifically to protect pro-slavery speech. During the decades before the Civil War, anti-slavery speech was more likely to be punished (by State authorities, to whom the First Amendment did not apply before the Fourteenth Amendment was passed). Various reforms and extensions of liberty, e.g., to women, blacks, homosexuals, etc., were possible because (imperfect) freedom of speech and of the press existed.

[graydon]

The US does not have, and never has had, freedom of speech or the press. There's a ritualized something around how speech is suppressed, but it's definitely suppressed. (e.g., leaders of the Ferguson protests winding up dead, or how neither Black Lives Matter nor Occupy could stay in the news, or, well, it goes on forever.)

And in terms of real liberty -- the opportunity to do something other than work until you die -- the US has done relatively poorly among industrialised nations. It's important to look at what happens, rather than what's said to happen.

In that respect, in recognition of both the risks inherent in illusory truth and unfiltered feedback loops attached to society's collective id, on the one hand, and of the minimum amount of exercised civil power necessary to get through the collapse of agriculture -- maybe this decade, maybe this generation, but I'd bet decade -- I'd tend to think the "formalisation, regulation, and control" pattern applied to increasing the uniformity of justice might well give an overall better outcome for the exercise of speech, and indeed rather many other things.

[sraun]

I don't know enough about my American History - I know that we've had one of the two major parties disappear in the past. How long has it taken for a second major party to develop?

[jsburbidge]

The US Whig party basically collapsed all at once with the formation of the Republican Party, which was formed to be essentially Whig policies plus firm opposition to slavery. It did follow years of relative decline of the party. The transition was a very short timeframe.

In England, it took decades for the Liberals to be replaced (effectively) by Labour, and they still straggle on as a component of the Lib. Dems.

More recently in Canada we've seen several provincial parties disappear in the face of competition from new or existing parties in the same ideological space after a scandal (e.g. the Saskatchewan Party vs the Conservative Party, BC's Social Credit and the Liberals, Alberta's Social Credit and the PC's), and in several cases there have been mergers rather than complete collapse (Canada's PCs and Reform, Alberta's PCs and the Wildrose Party). In a few cases there's been party collapse in a kind of generational handover (the Union Nationale fading away in Quebec).

So I don't think there's a single pattern. And in many cases the continuation party ends up looking an awful lot like the one which officially died. A new party which tried to draw on "moderate Republicans" and "conservative Democrats" but exclude the Trumpists, white supremacists, and radical social conservatives might sound like a good idea, but in the current circumstances it would probably just split the vote on the right with the Republicans and for that reason would probably not look attractive to anyone who actually wanted to gain power; whereas one which was just like the Republicans but under a new name would solve nothing.