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General poll of opinions here, since I don't see much conversation about it - either because of news bubbles or general disinterest in discussing the ugly side of authoritarianism.
Main query: Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?
Genuinely, I don't have a steelman for blackbagging tactics. Right now, ICE is targeting a certain type of "undesirable", namely, allegedly undocumented illegal immigrants, and appear to have carte blanche to apprehend anyone who disrupts that process. But the hallmark of authoritarianism is to expand the definition of "undesirable" to include your political opponents - and if blackbagging undesirables is already palatable, then you can blackbag your political opponents. It's a matter of convenience that political enemies are already attempting to disrupt the blackbagging of undocumented illegal immigrants - it makes that leap that much easier were it to happen. How convenient as well that there's now an entire organizational apparatus gaining valuable experience in how to make people disappear on US soil? They may look like mall cops who are dressed for the paintball arena for now, but if they happened to get any of that DoD money...
Blackbagging by ICE seems to be an extrajudicial process by design, as a flex of the unitary executive theory that the judiciary exists only to serve the will of the executive. The judiciary is viewed as uncooperative and painted as obstructive, despite being intentionally hamstrung by the right wing of congress that has refused for several presidential terms to pass any immigration reform despite bipartisan efforts. One doesn't have to look very hard at all to find red tribe voices foaming at the mouth to declare enemies of the state: official mouthpieces of the current administration, senators, congresspeople. History rhymes, and I know enough of the current admin has read Carl Schmitt to recognize the paths that are available to them at this point if they happen to be hungry for power.
Ending query: Assuming (for the sake of this question) that the end goal of this administration is to establish a type of authoritarianism where people are kidnapped and disappeared because of vocal opposition to the regime, what should be the response by the opposition that would want to prevent that? History buffs, what are the best examples of countries barely recovering from the brink of authoritarianism?
Edit: I appreciate the responses, there was actually quite a bit of variety which was nice to read. I came away with a steelman (which I didn't have originally) which is that the theatrics of ICE is meant to intimidate illegal immigrants. In effect, it would seem like that would select for immigrants who are reckless and fearless (yikes), or immigrants who face such extreme danger in their home country that even Twitter videos of brown people being tackled by men in masks doesn't slow them down (these desperate people would probably be considered "authentic" refugees by most leftists, and not just "economic migrants").
Maybe this is just my biased right-wing brain thinking, but my answer is the 2nd amendment. Government needs the ability to do violence, but it needs the people's overwhelming force to keep it aligned.
Private individuals should arm themselves. Officially, the opposition should expand private militia. If the government doesn't allow this, then the authoritarianism has already been established.
I will note that since mechanisation, you kinda need militia to have tanks and MANPADs in order to provide a credible deterrent to tyranny. This isn't a reductio ad absurdum; that's colourable. But that's where the goalposts are.
(I am armed up to the extent of the law in Victoria - i.e. I have a compound bow - but this isn't to FIGHT THE POWER. This is as a moderately-unlikely contingency in case of the police failing to control cannibal looter mobs subsequent to nuclear war. Cannibal looter mobs are much easier to fight off than SWAT.)
What's your understanding of how the GWOT went? That's what it looks like when the American military goes up against a determined adversary armed primarily with small-arms and scrounged explosives.
Now, you might argue that America's heart wasn't really in it. Is their heart going to be more in it when it's their own homeland they're burning and shelling? Also, in the GWOT, America's military operated in a foreign land, while their entire support structure, industrial base, and their soldiers' friends and family were perfectly safe on the other side of an ocean. Try to picture how this goes when it's not just a soldier's fellow squaddies getting mortared in their barracks, but their kids' preschool.
This claim that government overthrow requires nation-state resources appears to be unkillable, and it will never cease to baffle me. There is approximately a zero percent chance that America as a going concern could survive a significant portion of its population concluding that they were being ruled by actual tyrants. Things would go so bad so fast it would make your head spin.
"Outgroup vs. Fargroup" comes to mind here. Fighting a bunch of people on the other side of the world who you are somewhat sympathetic toward, versus fighting the useless, inbred, gap-toothed, room-temperature-IQ, religious fanatic, every -ist and -phobe, Klanazis that make up the hated enemy tribe?
Which means they had nothing to fear from giving up and going home. When "home" is where you're fighting, it's win-or-die, so the motivation is much stronger.
I don't remember where it was, but I remember a year or two ago reading an editorial online from a retired general, ostensibly about the possibility of civil war in the US (though he ultimately used it to lay out his — IMO ridiculous — position on counter-insurgency), where he gave this as one of the arguments as to why whichever side of a second civil war the military pics simply cannot lose — the US military, since the 20th century, has not been and cannot be defeated, the politicians have merely gotten tired and called it off; but since doing so in a civil war is suicide…
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It did once (twice?) before right? Sure a Civil War would be bad, but countries come out the other side all the time. If one side wins conclusively I see no reason why America wouldn't carry on. Both the US and the UK have had actual real civil wars and both survived (and thrived in fact!) as going concerns. The US is even to an extent the product of a Civil war (you call it Revolutionary, but you're still just fighting against people from the same nation at the time). I can see circumstances where that wouldn't happen of course, but it seems like setting the bar at zero percent is just ignoring history needlessly.
You can in fact kill large numbers of your civil war enemies, burn down their homes, conquer them and force them back into obedience for hundreds of years. You can in fact lose a Civil War, relinquish your former ruled areas and still be a going concern and then later become firm allies with the very nation formed from that Civil war with both of you still being going concerns.
The chance of any of that certainly isn't 100% but I don't think it's 0% either.
There is an important distinction between the current USA and the USA of 1860. Namely, one of these has eleven times the population of the other despite being mostly the same size (yeah, yeah, Alaska, but it's not exactly the breadbasket of the USA). The modern developed world has staggeringly-high, unprecedented population densities, and while some of that is from permanent knowledge gained, a lot more of it is from economic sophistication. A farmer of 1860 can make most of the stuff he needs - not all, but most, and his tools are at least pretty durable and repairable. A farmer of 2025 is using agricultural equipment manufactured in cities from mined minerals and fuelled with petroleum products from oil fields to spread mined/synthesised fertilisers, pesticides, and F1 hybrid seeds whose progeny aren't viable. Most of those things are produced hundreds of kilometres from his farm if not thousands, and many of them are well beyond his capacity to even repair let alone replace, and they make him more efficient.
Civil strife means things hundreds of kilometres away are not available to you anymore because there are enemies between you and them, and they can't get their inputs either. What we've built is a gleaming metropolis of elaborate, carefully-built crystal towers, not an indestructible pyramid. Guess what happens when your food production drops by 80% and you were only a moderate food exporter in percentage terms before this, and you also have difficulty importing food. Then consider what people will do in their desperation, and the resulting lasting damage to culture and society.
I am actually eliding a fair bit of stuff here because, um, some Mottizens want bad things to happen instead of good things.
(The extent of Australia's food surplus is such that with the standard abandonment of grain-fed livestock (which is super-inefficient in terms of food calories) we'd still clearly pull through if the music stopped. This is a special and highly-unusual privilege. The USA, despite being the biggest food exporter in the world in absolute terms, does not have that absurd cushion of safety.)
Sure, but that is not a 0% of pulling through as a going concern. The population could drop 80% as you point out and you can still be a going concern. The US might not be a super power any more and it might take a long road to recovery, but even what you are describing is not a zero percent chance of pulling through.
Depending exactly how a civil war breaks out and where the fighting is concentrated, the damage could be greater or lesser. It could be 3 states vs 20 with the rest sitting it out. There is simply no way that we can say 0% is the correct figure with something so nebulous.
see the comment here. This may be little more than a disagreement over semantics.
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I did not say the population would drop 80%. I said food production would drop by 80% (though that's a rough estimate). There's give in a few places (the USA exports food and that would be redirected; grain-fed animals would be replaced by eating the grain; also, while Westerners do need more food than Third-Worlders to not die - because the body stunts from undernutrition, but that's not retroactive - we don't need quite as much food as we get) - just not 5x worth of give.
I think you also have a different opinion of what constitutes "a going concern" than FCfromSSC.
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Probably, yes. Civil wars do tend to have a lot of massacres because both sides consider the other to be traitors and not a legitimate state actor to whom the laws of war apply. Remember, "The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe." That's a lot of hatred, although perhaps still less than that which the Red Tribe has for the Blue.
On reflection - and you're right, I was kinda repeating old arguments without sufficient reflection - I was basically assuming "tyrant has first move, has the armed forces in lockstep, and is willing to wage Vernichtungskrieg", which is the worst-case scenario for the militia. I will note that you are, in fact, still talking about a lot more than small arms here; mortars are far, far more effective than small arms, and are not something the Blue Tribe is currently trying to take away from private citizens (I'm... pretty sure there's nowhere in the USA where random people can walk into a store and buy a mortar? Something something, Federal Firearms Licence? So then, a militia that has them is specifically either one with illegal stockpiles, one that's basically pulled a fast one on the tyrannous government regarding having such licences, or one with improvised mortars constructed after the start of hostilities when the term "legal" becomes meaningless). And even then, I don't think that's enough to win the war. The peace, yes, I'll vaguely allude to that being a fairly-likely win (if an extremely-Pyrrhic one). But not the war, not if the armed forces are united against you for reasons.
Some soldiers are going to have more sympathy for the people they're being told to bomb and shell than they would for Durka Durkas. This will cause reliability issues, of the sort where they don't want to fight, may sympathize with the enemy, and may even defect. Some soldiers are going to have less sympathy, because Y'all Qaeda/Soros-Funded Pedo Antifa killed their kids. This will also cause reliability issues, of the sort where they commit uncontrolled atrocities, which in turn remove the ability to control the intensity of the war. Both sorts of reliability issues make it very hard to return to a state of peace.
I do not think it really matters if a Tyrant tries to go full first-strike Vernichtungskrieg or if they play it like Platonic Lincoln and scrupulously attempt to maintain rule of law. People look at those two scenarios, and they imagine that there's a clear difference in the scale and character of the initial inputs, so obviously there should be a difference in the outputs, but the mistake they're making is in the assumption that the inputs are driving the process. If you have a forest dried out by six months of drought, it makes approximately zero difference if you start a fire with a cigarette butt or a flamethrower; two hours later, you will not be able to tell the difference between the resulting fires, because the exponential growth of energy-release will utterly eclipse any variance in the initiating inputs.
However it starts, whichever winner comes out the other side might possibly still call itself "the United States of America", maybe, but the likely scenario is a dirt-poor, fanatically-paranoid military dictatorship populated by heavily-armed, criminally-inclined murderers with severe PTSD, huddled in the dark, dreaming of electricity and clean water. And sure, "there are levels of survival we are willing to accept", but people should at least be clear-sighted about what they're walking into. It will not be clean. It will not be quick. It will in fact be the worst thing that ever happened to you and everyone you know and love, by far, and it will neither reverse itself nor end for the forseeable future.
I'm defining small arms as weapons you can build in your home and pack on your back. Mortars are absurdly easy to manufacture out of ubiquitous materials, and I think even the people nodding along with that sentence are still overestimating what "easy to manufacture" and "ubiquitous materials" requires; you do not even need metal. And again, our armed forces were united against the Taliban to a degree that is unlikely in a civil war here. It still wasn't enough.
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