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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I don't know enough about the Brazilian situation to confirm if it is the same, but calling his supporters out for a riot was Trump's plan D after his plans to overturn the election before January 6th failed.

  • Plan A was the plan announced at Four Seasons Total Landscaping focused on changing the results in the swing states by state-level political action including trying to get lawsuits in front of sympathetic state-court judges, jawboning Republican secretaries of state, and lobbying Republican-controlled state legislatures to intervene in the certification process. I don't know how surprising it should have been that Republican state-court judges and Republican secretaries of state were completely uncooperative with the plan, but they were.

  • Plan B was a more conventional military autogolpe - the plan proposed by Gen Flynn to declare the Dominion hack/fraud a foreign attack on US democracy and rerun the election with hand-counting under military supervision. Assuming the Jan 6 committee report is accurate, this plan was being taken seriously until it became clear that there was no way the military would co-operate.

  • Plan C was the plan to get Pence to overturn the election based on the legal theories in the Eastman memo. I don't know what the plan was to consolidate power after Pence announces Trump's re-election and Nancy Pelosi orders the House Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest him for couping. Pence refused to co-operate.

  • Plan D was to use the mob to carry out Plan C over Pence's objections, either by intimidating him or by causing enough chaos that the Secret Service removed him to an undisclosed location and someone else (probably President pro tem Chuck Grassley) could be convinced to do it.

This is consistent with my theory (which appears to be shared by most Mottizens) of how American conservatives feel about the use of power. Plan A is to do things legally, plan B is organised violence, and plan C (probably) and D (definitely) are disorganised violence. At any point before January 6th, getting his supporters to riot makes plans A-C harder.

I don’t know anyone who supported a violence coup on Jan 6 versus just letting Biden rule. Even the proud boys just wanted new elections.

I do think medium term the right is beginning to build justification for rule by force but we haven’t crossed that bridge yet. And we won’t cross that bridge provided their is still a belief that they have a voice in Democracy.

And I strongly support Jan 6. We needed a large loud and poorly behaved riot after the events on 2020. The casus bellus for a riot wing riot had long since occurred.

The argument for the right to eventually use force (or other norm breaking) is a feeling that the PMC and institutions are aligned against them but that they still have the people. And that the left doesn’t just want to share governance but that they want to crush them. We are not at this point yet. The right is at a point of thinking about how they can regain control from a narrow PMC that currently controls a lot of key institutions. That’s why we are having a Church Commission. It’s why Desantis is attacking Disney. It’s why we are thinking about BlackRock and their huge corporate voting power as Etf managers and thus insulated and voting with woke corporates. Most rich people are old white men and they own the majority of stocks but the PMC have control.

Perhaps violence some day. For today it’s figure out how to regain a semblance of an institutional counterattack.

but calling his supporters out for a riot was Trump's plan D after his plans to overturn the election before January 6th failed.

Which is why he repeatedly told them to go home in peace upon learning the police line was breached?

Organizing protests at places of government in an attempt to convince decision makers a particular position has large popular support is like the whole purpose of a protest. Suggesting that Trump organized that rally with the intent of it going violent is highly uncharitable.