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/r/somethingiswrong2024 posters keep wondering when the military and 3 letter agencies will take out Trump. Also more confusingly wondering how NATO can assist. Of course they use "saving democracy" type rhetoric.
They never use the word "coup" when describing this. And I don't think they get that democracy would not be restored post-coup. As though a cabal of CIA and military leaders would overthrow the elected government and then decide to appoint Kamala as President. They explicitly talk about Kamala being made President.
What's really interesting to me about that group is that they're an incredibly niche subreddit while their right-wing equivalents are running the Republican party.
Their right wing equivalents would be the Q believers, who are not running the republican party, although they're often cynically exploited for votes by farther right wing factions within it.
They are indeed Qanon, but for progressive democrats. Including trying to find secret messages that they are obviously imagining. And completely wild conspiracy theories.
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That niche group appears to be running much of the federal government regardless of election results, which should interest people. If that's the case it doesn't much matter who's running the parties.
That seems like an extraordinary claim. What is your basis for thinking a small group of redditors constitutes the unelected shadow government of the United States?
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I finally realized they're convinced because of the statistical differences between 2020 and 2024 election results. I think they've proved 2020 was very anomalous, I wonder if any of them will realize it and get very quiet.
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I'm reminded of so much of the rhetoric, often out of Europe, about Hungary and its "democratic backsliding," its "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," how it maintains a "quasi-dictatorship" by winning elections (by giving the majority what they vote for); and the invocation of various "democracy indices" whose inner workings reveal a definition of "democracy" in which elections and the will of the voters play a relatively tiny part, and it becomes "undemocratic" to respect the outcomes of elections when the electorate 'votes wrong.'
Sure it will, given — per my previous paragraph — the way they define "democracy." After all, as I once saw some wag online put it (in a snowclone) "'Democracy' is when Democrats are in charge; the more Democrats are in charge, the more democratic it is."
I mean, I've exposed to a lot of melting-down lefties over on Tumblr, and there's quite a few coalescing around the position that if "democracy" means giving the voters a say, but a majority of American voters are either so stupid or so evil to support racist rapist Fascist felon Trump and his pure evil Nazi Party 2.0 over Kamala Harris's "flawless campaign" of "joy, hope and unity" and a Democratic Party that stands for all that is good and right in the world, then "democracy" has got to go — proposed solutions start with massively rolling back the franchise (such as requiring a bachelor's degree to vote), through "reeducation camps," to "kill all Trump supporters."
Well, who do you think "a cabal of CIA and military leaders," deathly opposed to Trump, Vance et al, and seeking to save the Left's hold on the permanent bureaucracy, would choose to install as their puppet in the White House? Newsom? Hillary? Liz Cheney?
I view this as further proof of my presumption that the only way for liberalism to capture a society through democratic (non-violent) means is by boiling the proverbial frog; rhetoric of the sort you mentioned is what is used when this project fails. Boiling the frog does not just entail the Gramscian long march through institutions but also incremental steps to secure limited but permanent political gains while at the same time avoiding generating worthy opposition that actually may be dangerous to your project; all this is to take place while society is distracted by ultimately irrelevant other stuff.
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To steelman this perspective, my lefty sister explained to me that, on a trivial level, democracy doesn't just mean tyranny of the majority: a necessary precondition of a functional democracy is ensuring that everyone who ought to be entitled to the franchise has it and is able to exercise their voting right. If every other Republican was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia by a malicious Dem-voting psychiatrist and carted off by the men in butterfly nets, and hence unable to go to the polls, everyone would recognise that this wasn't a fair election in any real sense. Likewise if gangs of Antifa goons were bussed in to red states to stand outside polling stations and level AR-15s at anyone in a MAGA hat.
From the perspective of these Dems, if you take them at their word, they believe that Trump will do something like this to American democracy. Either he'll abolish it entirely and crown himself Dictator-for-Life (the less outlandish version of this talks about him abolishing presidential term limits); or he'll use various procedural tricks to manipulate election outcomes - taking away the franchise from assorted reliably Dem-voting demographics, straight-up shipping them off to concentration camps, or simply instructing police officers to look the other way when members of these groups are assaulted or mudered. Thus, in order to ensure the long-term survival of American democracy, actions which are surely undemocratic in the short-term must be undertaken, as a "pre-emptive strike" to prevent the destruction of democracy in the long-term.
Needless to say, I don't agree with any of this. No concentration camps will be constructed during Trump's second term, the rate at which black Americans are stripped of their voting rights (e.g. because of felony disenfranchisement) will be no different than under Biden, the murder clearance rate will be largely unchanged (i.e. there will no massive spike in unsolved murders of black Americans, LGBT people etc.).
But if you were one of these people who sincerely believed that the long-term destruction of American democracy was imminent, I could certainly imagine thinking that, therefore, short-term undemocratic actions might be justified to protect. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.
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I would guess it would be a Pinochet situation. The cabal would rule and select one of their own to be the figurehead†. "Let's loop in Kamala" wouldn't cross their minds. Some public facing cabal member would be the new official leader. A Smedley Butler for 2025.
†Mild academic Pinochet of course seized control and his co-conspirators lived in fear of his wrath and never got the chance to co-rule with him. But I think Americans could pull off a ruling council that doesn't degenerate into helicopter rides and torture camps.
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Probably Hakeem Jeffries.
I give him much better odds than Kamala.
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This reminds me of the Roman republicans who naively assumed assassinating the king-adjacent Julius Caesar would re-establish the Republic. Oh how wrong they were.
Assassinating Julius Caesar did re-establish the Republic. The problem is that it didn't fix the problem that made the Republic unstable to Caesar in the first place, so we see exactly the same process happen again within about a year. (Formation of a triumvirate, eventual fall of the weakest triumvir, civil war between the other two, winner established one-man rule).
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One of the recurring elements of the resistance to Trump is that those decrying Trump and his supporters as a fascist don’t understand they are engaged in a self fulfilling prophecy.
I don’t think Trump and his supports are fascist, I generally think that fascism is not a live political force of any real consequence in the USA. I think people who throw the term around loosely almost always don’t understand what fascism actually is, and why it arose.
I cannot think of a better way to actually facilitate the birth of a real American homegrown fascism than killing or jailing Trump and successfully using extralegal methods to suppress the maga movement and stifle their (very popular) core political agenda.
It’s as if these people are trying to do a Weimar Republic speed run. If they got what they wanted, they’d likely also subsequently get what they are afraid of and what they deserve.
While I agree that murdering Trump would be terrible for the US, I want to point out that the Weimar Republic was basically cuddling up to right-wing extremists. "Oh, he lead a Putsch attempt in which a few cops died. But look at him, he was provoked by all these bloody centrist forces. And nobody who feels as German as he does could possibly be a bad person, so let's just give him the tiniest slap on the wrist to teach him to respect the rule of the law when taking power."
We remember it that way because of how it ended up, but the Weimar was absolutely lousy with serious, revolutionary communists and honeycombed with the most stomach churning levels of sexual and cultural degeneracy ever witnessed in the west at that time. It very easily could have gone the other way.
My general feeling on this matter is that a healthy society capable of self government with aligned values and incentives would have never produced the Nazis in the first place, so if you’re frightened of a reappearance of them the moral imperative is not to produce the same levels of abject moral depravity that produced them in the first place.
Up until very recently, I felt that we were obviously failing that. I feel much more hopeful now.
I recommend reading The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon. He battled these leftist revolutionaries and wrote about his experiences.
He was too young to be a WW1 vet and Freikorp member. He was a young regular soldier in post-WW1 Germany. So he fought against all sorts leftist revolutionaries circa 1919. But there was a strange issue in which his squad is killing socialists, but a few squad members were secretly socialists and he himself was very socialism-curious.
It is so crazed. The casual acceptance of both mass desertion and slaughter of communist uprising. The wild chaos of that time could have led to the Soviet Union consuming Germany. Instead it led elsewhere in the desperate struggle against communist revolutionaries.
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An easier way to facilitate American homegrown fascism would be to let Trump and conservatives do whatever they want. What would result is not precisely fascism, but it would be close enough for all intents and purposes.
I have argued in the past that Trump does not pose any serious risk of fascism because the rest of society would be able to exert sufficient counter-force to prevent the true right-wing extremists around Trump from getting much done.
I might have been wrong. The left seems to have quietly accepted defeat, and the right is quite energized. The counter-force I expected is, so far, not materializing. And certainly plenty of people around Trump would create a form of fascism if they could.
Your entire analysis is wrong because your framing is wrong; Trump is the counter-force.
The ideologically motivated fracking of the American genetic, cultural and social foundation is pure Weimar-style dangerous nonsense that has been going on since at least 2012.
Failure to apply this counter force will convert a legitimate immune response to a real problem (MAGA) into a full on auto immune disorder. I don’t want to be around to see that.
Trump is Gracchus. If no course correction, then comes Sulla. Then the Caesars.
Tiberius Gracchus, perhaps, but his much less temperate brother carried on his legacy- and after a bit more rotting, Marius, then Sulla, then Pompey, Caesar, and then Octavian and Marc Antony.
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Unfortunately, so would the rest of us. And there's no spare United States to save us.
As a high IQ right winger, a hypothetical American fascist takeover would probably be good for you and your immediate circle.
That wouldn't go well.
"Unteroberfeldwebel Nybbler, you can either stop kvetching for five minutes, or we start an Eastern front to send you to!"
"... I'll get my bags"
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Tell it to the SA. Fascists, like Commies, have a tendency to purge their early backers.
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I agree, avoiding this is incredibly important.
An additional irony is that, like the modal “shitlib” resistance type I am also very frightened of fascism. But like, the real thing and not the fake & gay secular satan stand-in for non conformity to the vagaries of fashion, but rather an actual militaristic totalizing death cult.
“Please stop doing Weimar stuff, for the love of god.” Is my actual point of view.
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Yes, but so what? Why can't they then just crush said "American homegrown fascism" like Hitler was crushed?
And I remember a comment on Tumblr from someone arguing that "fascism" is hard to pin down. First, because many fellow leftists use it as a boo word meaning "anything I don't like." But more, that to the extent that it has a narrower, more concrete definition than that, but a broader definition than "the specific Italian ideology of Mussolini and co." (such that even Hitler and the Nazis "aren't really Fascist), then it refers to a sort of cluster with overlapping traits (what, per here, was called a "family resemblance" by Wittgenstein), where no specimen has all the associated traits, and no trait is shared by all members — Hitler and Franco had different positions on religion, Mussolini and Pinochet on economics, Imperial Japan lacked a clear "strongman" figure, Orban uses electoral democracy differently, and so on. But it is a cluster, which includes (but is not limited to) Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Salazar, Hussein, Pinochet, and Orban (and, according to some people, China from Qin to Qing); and thus, Trump — particularly as he is now — fits into that cluster; into what, if you reject the label of "fascist" for the whole thing, is still a space containing fascism, and other unacceptable right-wing regimes adjacent to it.
This is again, a position I encounter from people all over the multi-dimensional political spectrum, from old school conservatives to libertarians to progressives to self-described "fascists," that it's acceptable (or at least tolerable) to be socially right-wing, as long as you're also in favor of "free markets" and "small government" — to the point you prioritize those over social issues — and categorically opposed to actually ever trying to use government power (as opposed to the classic libertarian bits about "seizing power and ruthlessly leaving people alone" and "drowning government in the bathtub"), but the moment right-winger actually try to wield power — rather than just block the left from using power and "standing athwart history yelling 'stop'" — they've gone in to forbidden territory, too close to Hitler to ever be allowed.
Same reason America lost in Vietnam and to the Taliban. Occupying America would be enormously harder.
I wish I could find again the essay I read a couple years ago by a retired general, talking about the risk of civil war in America, and why it needs avoided at all costs because neither side could win, and would thus grind on forever.
The key part I would reference was the part where he reasons that whichever side the US military goes with cannot lose, because the US armed forces cannot be defeated. He specifically mentions Vietnam and Afghanistan, arguing that the US military did not lose, was not defeated, in either of those cases, they were forced to quit and go home by politicians more sympathetic to the commies/Taliban. He then notes that in a civil war, you can't "pack up and go home" because home is where you're fighting; any politicians more sympathetic to the other side are on the other side, are part of the enemy you're fighting and not people who can give you order; and no one's just "calling it quits" while not losing militarily, because while nobody in the upper levels suffered any consequences for the Afghanistan withdrawal, giving up in a civil war has much more dire personal consequences.
Of course, he then went on to argue that the US military could not win a civil war either, taking a position much like yours, except that the reason he gave for the US's failures in counter-insurgency operations was…
…that counter-insurgency is and has always been completely impossible. Indeed, he went on to make arguments about the inevitability of the populace perpetually rising up to throw off any occupier, such as to imply that military conquest is impossible. Do I need to point out how ahistorical that is? Per his view, we should expect present-day England to be wracked with violence from Anglo-Saxon insurgents still fighting to throw off the Norman yoke. It was reading this essay that led me down a rabbit hole of looking up and reading works on Roman methods of suppressing rebellion, as well as a few discussions of why Anglo-Saxon peasants didn't rise up against the Norman conquest, and some of the "fourth-generation warfare" experts on why American counter-insurgency strategies are so terrible (basically, that there are two effective strategies, but since we lack the patience for one and the stomach for the other, we try to do something half-assed in between that ends up the worst of both worlds; and also over-focusing on technological superiority and "precision" strikes as the go-to "solution").
Most of the material I've read on the history of guerrilla warfare points out that guerrillas usually lose. Further, that the image of their effectiveness in the popular imagination is mostly a holdover of Communist (and particularly Maoist) propaganda of the "invincible Marxist guerrilla." Also, they "work" best as an adjunct to a professional military force — for example, despite the over-inflated reputation of the Viet Cong, they were mostly gone before the war was over, and pretty much all the real damage and progress against the US was accomplished by the North Vietnamese Army.
I can't remember if it was Max Boot, or someone else's work citing his, but I recall reading a work on guerrilla warfare that laid out three preconditions, which are necessary but not sufficient, for a successful insurgency.
At least one foreign ally providing material and financial support to the guerrillas
At least passive cooperation from the general population
and to be fighting against a foreign occupier.
That last one is the most important. No "guerrilla" or "terrorist" insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy.
And beyond all this discussion of insurgencies and military matters, why would crushing "American Nazis" ever even rise to that level? Why couldn't it just be done by civilian law enforcement, with each "cell" of "real American homegrown fascists" getting Waco'd the moment the state learns about them?
After all, AIUI, the reason there "hasn't been any more Wacos" isn't that, as some would have it, that the government was soundly deterred from ever trying again by what happened there, and by Oklahoma City. No, my understanding is that local law enforcement wanted to arrest Koresh and a bunch of other leading Branch Davidians, and had various opportunities to do so, but were held back from doing so by the Feds, because Janet Reno wanted to make a big show of rolling the whole group up all at once. And thus, what the FBI, ATF, etc. learned from the resulting debacle was to let local law enforcement break them up.
The reason we don't "see more Wacos" isn't that the government has stopped trying to shut down groups like the Branch Davidians, it's that its become so effective at shutting down such groups, with arrests by local cops, long before they ever reach the "armed compound" stage, that it never makes the news.
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