Charlie Stross
Pessimist me looks at all the photos/video of the excited and exercised folks attending the anti-Trump demos around the USA and is remembering the inexorable process by which the Biden administration tracked down and arrested the January 6 rioters.
If he isn't stopped FAST the same process will happen to today's demonstrators a year or two down the line, only with far less due process, far harsher sentences from the puppet courts, and no hope of a presidential pardon.
Jacek Wesołowski
@Remittancegirl @cstross Based on my experience with protests in Poland, I'm more worried about the protesters' cohesion than I am about repressions. Basically any kind of escalation Trump might try gives the protesters new options while limiting his. He would have to literally start shooting people Lukashenko-style.
Madeleine Morris
Hmmm. Let me be utterly sanguine about this: one aim of political protest is that you get a reaction. If it’s an over-reaction, you’re fucked. Let us hope Trump over-reacts. It will be the end of him.
Especially if he goes after those nice, white, elderly middle-class ladies.
Jacek Wesołowski
@cwdolunt @Remittancegirl @cstross My gut feeling is Trump can probably find a military unit or two to do the shooting, but the next thing would be an open mutiny, either in that unit, or an adjacent one. If that happens, congress Republicans will shit their pants and there will be defections.
Chris Dolunt
@jzillw @Remittancegirl @cstross
He asked the military to shoot protestors during the "Black Lives Matter" protests, but they refused.
I'm not confident the same thing will happen this time around.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-defense-secretary
Jacek Wesołowski
@Remittancegirl @cstross There's also the "this could be me" angle.
One of biggest mis-steps the govt in Poland did was when they arrested a trans activist who was controversial in her own community, i.e. an easy target. There was a small and *slightly* violent protest - and then the police lost their cool. They ended up - and this is key - detaining random passers by who just looked suspicious. Within days you couldn't walk 500m in Warsaw without seeing a rainbow flag or six.
Madeleine Morris
I think this is where his weakness might be the end of him. Middle America could give a shit about the national guard and shooting at BLM protesters.
But little old white ladies with signs? This is why I think it is so important that older Americans keep up their presence.
Newp. If he over-reacts with them. Middle America will turn on him and turn hard. They might be murderous authoritarians, but they don’t like to THINK of themselves as murderous authoritarians.
Charlie Stross
@jzillw @Remittancegirl Yes, and I think Trump would LOVE to shoot him some "rioters" and "EU loving traitors" next year to distract the Fox News audience from the onrushing depression.
Jacek Wesołowski
@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer For the record "Trumps gets assassinated by tescreals after mid-terms and they try to blame it on DSA" is on my bingo card.
Charlie Stross
@Remittancegirl @logomancer @jzillw
Trump could die of a heart attack tomorrow, J D Vance could fall off a ladder fellating a duck, and Mike Johnson could choke on a cucumber while wearing a bondage harness, and and the USA would still be toast afterwards.
The USA's credibility as a trading/diplomatic partner has been trashed for a generation. Nobody will trust y'all for a VERY long time to come.
The US system of checks and balances failed entirely because Trump ignores lane markings.
Madeleine Morris
Ultimately, none of us know. And I guess we’ll see.
One thing is for sure: if no one fights back, he’ll drain the entire country into penury and take the world into a global depression while he’s at it.
But I think he has a temper.
Logomancer
@cstross Maybe, but that would be a dangerous gamble on Trump’s part. And too much effort, from his perspective; better to let the protests burn themselves out than throw down and risk waking up the people with guns – who aren’t all MAGA – that the final crackdown’s upon them. He’d need the military to restore order, and a lot of them are pissed at Hegseth already.
He might haul the protesters into court, but that would take time. Biden spent years going after the January 6 rioters. He’d be occupied with that well into the midterms, and he can’t rig them all. Kangaroo courts would require Congress to play ball, and they’re already wavering on the tariffs; I don’t see enough of the GOP going for it to maintain their discipline in the House, even with them intimidated as they are.
Basically, I don’t think he’s consolidated power yet to try anything too drastic. If he had, he’d have done something already, but instead he’s going golfing. I expect them to try to find visa/green card holders and have them deported, but that might be it for now.
Jacek Wesołowski
@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer I see the research for the attack novel is going nicely! These people (especially Musk) strike me as the kind who could botch an assassination attempt in some hilarious manner. Musk hiring the hitman via Twitter, poison tea that leaves spots on one's fingers, this kind of stuff.
Charlie Stross
@jzillw @Remittancegirl @logomancer
I hear you and counter with "Trump assassination ATTEMPT by tescreals; they try to blame it on Roko's Basilisk (Curtis Yarvin gets the electric chair even though it was actually Peter Thiel lurking in the Oval Office with a poisoned Happy Meal)".
Jacek Wesołowski
@Remittancegirl @cstross @logomancer No no, ignorance and incompetence tends to exacerbate the damage. The Nazis murdered 600 thousand people just in my home city. They lost the war precisely because they had gone on a mindless murderous rampage, but they still got to do the rampage.
Madeleine Morris
@jzillw I think it’s important to remember that a lot of the Nazi hierarchy was also lazy and incompetent too. It isn’t wise to assume, as we can see, that ignorance or incompetence moderates the damage. There are always very precise little worker bees beneath them who are fastidious. They, in there way, are strangely attracted to autocrats. @cstross @logomancer
Charlie Stross
@per_sonne @tbortels @Remittancegirl There's one other avenue, as happened in the Levant and Asia: by backing the Ba'ath (initially pan-Arabists, decaying into fascist dictatorships) and the Shah of Iran against the communists, all left-wing opposition was smashed … leaving the only avenue for dissent via the Islamic clergy.
Hence Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, etc etc.
Neofascism is just the west's equivalent of islamism, in this frame.
Personne
@cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl
When you remove the option for left-wing policies off the table (as neoliberals, their institutions and media have been doing for 40 years, "there is no alternative") fascism is the only road open for discontent.
Personne
@cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl
It fucked it up because it was never a "reunification". It was an annexation and privatisation of public assets from the East.
That was the goal of the Treuhand.
The West capitalist industrialists were never interested in improving the conditions of life for people in the East. They wanted new consumers to expand their markets and above all, fresh cheap industrial assets at bargain prices (the Treuhand was a fire sale of public goods, just like in 1990's Russia; they literally stole public funded and public built property and gave it to oligarchs) and cheap, flexible and downtrodden labour to outcompete and crush unions in the west. Furthermore, they could use the east Germans as "examples" to prevent western Germans from ever considering any temptations of "socialism", by conflating socialist policies and labour rights with autocracy ("socialism = bad").
There was never other outcome to be expected.
Tom Bortels
So - do you trust Germany? I do.
2025 is 80 years after 1945. And I think we've mostly trusted them not to repeat the ugliness for most of that, because they took steps internally to regain that trust.
The real question is, does the US have what it takes as a nation to disavow and prevent this once cured in the same way Germany did? And I don't know the answer to that.
Charlie Stross
@tbortels @Remittancegirl Germany fucked up 1991-21 by not taking redevelopment of East Germany seriously enough. The East never fully de-Nazified—they shot obvious Nazis, but then set up an authoritarian state where rank-and-file authoritarian types simply switched slogans and slotted right in, then they left the East to rot. This created the swamp in which the AfD emerged: a large region in which far-right reactionary politics is mainstream.
(Here in the UK I'm in no place to throw stones …)
Madeleine Morris
And, thinking more on this. (And this is something our US friends might not understand for a while), the world has changed. It’s never going to be the same again. The man who wanted to make america great again was the guy who ended the American Century.
And even if they kick him out, the world isn’t going to go back. They’re never going to trust America again the same way. And that’s probably for the best.
Madeleine Morris
@cstross I think it’s very wise to be pessimistic. History doesn’t have a great record on a citizenry turning back a authoritarian tide before it starts to commit huge atrocities.
But I’m keeping my fingers crossed on this one. Hey, we have nothing to lose. Right?
Charlie Stross
@Remittancegirl But will it be the end of him? Seems to me that the Republicans in congress have shackled themselves to him so tightly that they're terrified of assassination if they defect. Without Republican defectors congress can't do anything. And even *with* congress turning on him, who are they going to send to arrest the POTUS (who the USSC last year granted immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while president, remember?)
He has to lose congress, the police, and judiciary too.
Madeleine Morris
Anything at all that weakens him is good. Republicans can be as scared of him as they like, but if they think they’re going to lose their seats, then what Trump thinks will suddenly matter less.
It’s never a one and done solution. And it’s never a single battle. But every wound that it’s possible to inflict on him is one more victory.
This isn’t going to be a sprint. It’s going to be a marathon. And at some point, when he starts to get scared, he’ll over-react.
D. G. Marshall
@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer @jzillw
"Trump could die of a heart attack tomorrow, JD Vance could fall off a ladder fellating a duck, and Mike Johnson could choke on a cucumber while wearing a bondage harness..."
Finally! A science fiction writer whose work should actually be an instruction manual for the Alt-Reich.
Jacek Wesołowski
@mavu @cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer It's a problem with multiple layers. On the most superficial level it's procedural: the law has loopholes in it and those need to be plugged. On the deepest level (and there are other levels in between) it's a matter of custom and practice, which aren't codifiable, but have to support "democracy as an ideal".
tl;dr there always have been and will be evil people who are smart enough to sabotage what they don't like, and you need to keep adapting.
Alien software, human hardware
@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer @jzillw i have been thinking about this:
Has anyone heard people talk about how to prevent this thing happening again?
What would need to be changed to prevent a future takeover in this fashion?
Is it just too early for people to consider this?
And
Would credible measures to prevent this restore faith?
Jacek Wesołowski
@MEGA @cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl In Poland the standard of living has arguably improved since 1990, but a number of things that were taken for granted under communism are now gone. Whole industries were rolled back. Public healthcare is largely gone. One of first things "democratic" rightwingers did was a partial abortion.ban. Transition away from communism pulled the rug from under a lot of people.
Sir Jo
@cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl
The BRD made huge efforts of investment into the ex DDR.
It was no good. You can't wipe out
12 years of Nazism followed by 45 years of Stalinism that easily.
I crossed the iron curtain many times,
and life there was really bad according to my western standards.
But you can't beat nostalgia, because life is always cool when you're young.
45 years of propaganda, where Russians are the good guys and western democracies the nazis...
Jacek Wesołowski
@MEGA @cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl My pet peeve is how the communists invested in housing. This stopped in the late 80s, but when I was finishing my studies in 2004 I still had a clear path to buying my own flat. Then the parliament decided it would be great to make it easier for people to take loans. Housing prices about doubled in three years. The older I get, the more I can't afford a home, which means I pay literally 4x as much for my home as a person who got one from their granny.
Jacek Wesołowski
@EmptySet @Remittancegirl @cstross @trurl @logomancer People in the US would indeed do well to step down from their exceptionalist soapboxes and start studying other countries for a change. There's like a dozen and a half countries in Europe alone that had to build their democratic frameworks from the ground up more or less overnight, and more or less succeeded at it (with some caveats). And it only happened some 30 years ago.
Overdrawn at the Gravitas Bank
@Remittancegirl @cstross @trurl @logomancer @jzillw
I am not a monster advocating their extermination. I have no idea how to contend with them effectively,
It might take maintaining decency where we can in a less federal U.S. and their descendants' seeing that this were a better way to live, but given the way media works, confirmation-bias, and their leaders being True Believers or utterly shameless or both, I don't know that such would work. See: U.S. ignorance of social democracy in Europe.
Madeleine Morris
What are you actually saying?
Are you advocating their extermination?
The US had to live with each other after the Civil war. After the Vietnam war. After the Civil Rights Era. And you’ll have to do it again.
Or become them.
There’s no final solution to your problem. And only Nazis crave them.
Overdrawn at the Gravitas Bank
@Remittancegirl @cstross @trurl @logomancer @jzillw
I'm afraid that shaming such requires authority-figures they at least formally respect holding and promoting the norms that make bigotry and savagery shameful. The Right, roughly speaking, were upset at the reduction of the shame people used to feel at having sexual desires, at not being a Christian, of not being born 'white' or at-least–middle-class created their own authority-figures telling them that bigotry and savagery were _fine_.
Madeleine Morris
Look, there have always been a stable population of really unpleasant, racist, brutal people. In every society.
And if you are a civilized society, you can’t kill them all. Or you basically become them.
The only option is to offer a better narrative that shames them back into their bitter obscure little lives, - which they have mostly created for themselves anyway.
Overdrawn at the Gravitas Bank
@Remittancegirl @cstross @trurl @logomancer @jzillw
He will retain the loyalty of the worst of them, who my biases suggest will be still numerous and also be very heavily armed, which unfortunately matters a lot for his power—a fair number of potentially alterable Republican legislators at all levels might be able to handle the threat of primary opposition xor the threat of violence against them and their families, but not of both.
My biases might be wrong.
Madeleine Morris
"He's not trying to build a loyal base any more. He's walking on quicksand.”
Exactly this is why I think he’s going to go down ignominiously. There is simply no payoff the the complicity for regular MAGA voters.
Charlie Stross
@trurl @Remittancegirl @logomancer @jzillw
Here’s a ray of hope: Hitler maxed out the credit cards *but* used it initially to ramp employment up to 100% very rapidly (from Depression-era levels of unemployment) as well as re-arming. He thus gave lots of disgruntled poor folk a stake in Nazism.
Trump's maxing out the credit cards again, but he holds his base in contempt and won't lift a finger if they're drowning. He's not trying to build a loyal base any more. He's walking on quicksand.
dstu
@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer @jzillw the way I was putting it to friends recently was that one of the USA's major exports was a stable economic playground for the wealthy of other nations to play in (and the threat of force to keep that system running). The mask is off now, and trust in that system isn't coming back.
That system was doing a lot of people a massive disservice, but I don't see "massive power vacuum" + "cut social programs and unleash the Gestapo" as an actual improvement.
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