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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
Until the 2020 election, Trump's opponents were mostly crying wolf. His first administration was a shit show, but besides putting a few migrant kids into cages, he mostly harmed the reputation of the US.
His election denial changed that. The idea that the vote is generally fair and sacred was previously a universal of US politics. Sure, candidates would sometimes quibble over individual districts with irregularities and might need the SCOTUS to resolve their differences, but at least once a verdict was in, the losing side would accept the result and concede. Trump was the first candidate whose ego could not admit defeat, and his party mostly backed him in his lies. J6 showed that he was not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.
Of course, the Democrats reacted with a lot of lawsuits. Some with merit, some pure lawfare. In his 2nd administration, Trump seems completely free of traditional political advice, instead relying on his clique of yes-men to implement his personal ideas. Previous administrations had the decency to do corruption under a mantle of plausible deniability. With Trump it is ubiquitous and brazen.
While I am reluctant to defend the woke mob, I will also notice that government can do a lot of things that most social movements can not do at scale. The BLM riots happened because local governments were willing to turn a blind eye to rioting rather than employ police violence. So the government should at least get half-credit for them. But a bunch of criminals looting is small fries compared to the kind of damage the federal government can do.
Saying that you are less worried about government because it has checks and balances is like saying that you are less worried about nuclear weapons than you are about knives because nukes need a code to activate them while knives let anyone stab people. Sure, the median crazy killer will murder more people with a knife than a nuke, but if the safety mechanism fails the nuke-wielding crazy will be able to do orders of magnitude more damage.
I think this is a fair take. My issue with it is that I have hard time believing a course correction of necessary magnitude can actually be done in another way. Certainly there are a lot of smart people who can theorize and think of good and less messy ways to do it, but there lies in wait an equal or greater number of smart people on the other side who are hellbent on suing, prosecuting, and rhetorizing against those ways who are already embedded within the institutions that need the reform. This system, as I see it now, is designed to do two things simultaneously A) dull any scalpel meant to cut out the bad parts, and/or B) complain that a cleaver was used while saying "A scalpel would have sufficed and done less damage!", knowing full well the scalpel has not been allowed to cut for quite some time.
So, when critics argue that Trump's methods are too messy, I hear "Why don't we try the things that have been proven not to work?"
It's totally understandable to be concerned, but there is critical number of our best and brightest who are all-in when it comes to their secular religion that they see as objective reality. Requesting they renounce it could be temporarily effective, but history is not on the side of people making that request. Better they be reminded that there is a very large portion of the population who do not believe what they believe and that they will wreck shop if necessary to make sure a proper counter balance is put back into place.
If there is a less messy and workable alternative, sign me up.
I understand the logic. My intuition of fascist power grabs is something like... there is a degree of bludgeon where you can break the democratic checks and balances of the country by moving fast enough that they simply cannot keep up with you; you create new institutions faster than they can be found illegitimate, and by the time they would be they have amassed enough power that the old institutions are no longer adequate to contain them.
I agree that "correcting" America, from a right-wing view, requires a bludgeon of a certain size. My worry is that this size exceeds the point where this bludgeon can also be used to abolish America-in-the-constitutional-sense, and if that is the case then this bludgeon must absolutely not be allowed to exist. I understand that right-wingers say "well I don't see how else it can be done", and to be frank, if it's between your political goals and the authority of the constitution, then it should not be done. In a democracy there's things that you just shouldn't get even if you want it and win the presidency, and both new and questionably accountable police and military deployment against internal "enemies" should be very much on that list. This goes triply if you've previously shown a very shaky respect for term limits.
Not to be flippant, but how do you respond to “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”?
Because increasingly to anyone who even has a shade of American nationalism in their body, the actions of the blue tribe writ large are unambiguously suicidal / homocidal (depending on your perspective on who’s included) to the American Nation as traditionally defined up until now or the very recent past.
I think not just that the constitution is a suicide pact, but that every nationstate is a suicide pact practically by definition. That's what it means to hand off the monopoly of force to the state.
This also illustrates that the alternative to law and order is either banditry or civil war.
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