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I have two objections. One is that lawfare contributes to a decline in civility. Naturally, the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump, so you might say turnaround is fair. But it will also be a further step of escalation. At the moment, Democrats and MAGA are not yet in a state of total war against each other. Heck, even Iran and Israel are not in that stage. Unlike chess, neither war nor the culture war are zero sum games where hurting your enemy and helping your side are identical.
Every move in the culture war has two separate properties, one how much it brings your side closer to their objectives and one how much it escalates the conflict. Lawfare did not work particularly well against Trump. My second objection is that it will likely not work particularly well against the SPLC. So Trump's move will simply further normalize wasting taxpayer money to harass political opponents in cases which will result in not guilty verdicts.
Organizations like the SPLC, the Proud Boys and so forth exist because what they do is mostly legal and significant fractions of the population support them. Even if by some miracle Trump secures a victory against the SPLC and a few leaders go to prison for donation fraud, this will not be a major victory. The SJ left will not shrug and say "they destroyed the SPLC, too bad that nobody is keeping tabs on the far right now". They will simply found a new organization, and hire the former employees with all their informer contacts.
Yes. As I and many others have pointed out an innumerable number of times over the last decade, at the time when such observations might have done some good if people were willing to listen.
"the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump" is an interesting phrase.
In the abstract, if party A engages in some minimal level of lawfare against party B, I think you would agree that it's possible that the correct response is for party B to object, but otherwise continue their business as before. If party A continues to unilaterally escalate the level of lawfare, do you think there is a level at which it is reasonable for Party B to engage in lawfare back?
If you do not think there is a level at which engaging in reciprocal lawfare is justified, then lawfare must be a very bad thing indeed. What alternative consequences should be imposed on Party A for their engagement in this very bad behavior?
If you do think there is a level at which engaging in reciprocal lawfare is justified, what is that level and why are you confident that we have not already reached it? And in this branch is why I think "The Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump" is an interesting phrase.
What is "lawfare"? Does it have a commonly-understood, rigorously-applied definition? You claim the Democrats have "done a lot of lawfare against Trump"; was this lawfare generally recognized as such at the time? If not, was it recognized at some later time preceding, to put it delicately, five minutes ago? Can you name specific incidents where the democrats used lawfare against Trump, where you yourself recognized it as lawfare at the time? Can you show how the awareness of the existence of lawfare generated sufficient internal resistance from within the blue sphere to impede further such efforts?
Suppose I object in principle to lawfare, and want to see less of it. You are telling me that "the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump". My recollection is that this is not a sentiment Blues were willing to endorse when the lawfare in question was actually happening, which leads me to suspect that the reason Blues are willing to endorse it now is because they're on the wrong end of it. If we observably get closer to consensus that lawfare is actually a problem when my side reciprocates, why should I accept an argument that my side should refrain from reciprocating?
How deep does this newfound enlightenment go? Are the journalist and academic classes, the bureaucracy and the Democratic party itself willing to admit that "the democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump", or is hearing it from pseudoAnons in an irrelevant corner of the internet supposed to be sufficient? If this is a bad response, what other response do you believe would be more productive?
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
The state of total war between the tribes is not inevitable, but it is much more likely than other outcomes. You are correct to recognize that this is an escalation spiral. Unfortunately, actually breaking out of an escalation spiral requires considerably more than the statement "we are in an escalation spiral".
How much waste of taxpayer money to harass political opponents is currently happening, and how much has happened in the past decade?
Of course they will. The win here isn't jailing SPLC leadership or shutting down the org. It's probably better for me if they continue exactly as they have indefinitely!
It is better to consider the SPLC not as an organization, but as a particular instantiation of a cluster of political tactics. The proper goal here is not to maximally-suppress this particular cluster, but rather to suppress the tactic in general. When the SPLC's set of tactics is deployed in the future, I and hopefully others will point out how such tactics have been proven to work in the past, and argue that they should not be allowed to operate in the future. I will argue that the SPLC was for decades running awarded extreme levels of deference and influence while operating as a socially-corrosive grift, and as a consequence neither it nor its replacements should be given the benefit of the doubt. To arguments that it's different this time because it's a new organization, I will simply respond as you have here: it's a new coat of paint on the same old machine; it was a grift that Blues were willfully blind to before, and it will still be a grift that Blues are willfully blind to in the future.
This works better the more harm can be inflicted on the SPLC now; as we've seen with Trump's 34 felony convictions, the point is at the end of the day to generate legible, mimetically-fit tokens. Power flows from such things, and power is necessary.
The more fruitful discussion, it seems to me, is whether the viewpoint underpinning the above is wrong. One could argue that the SPLC was not a grift, that they were performing socially-useful work, that their tactics and policies were effective and necessary, that they and the money donated to them made the world a better place.
I note that no one seems all that interested in making such a case. It seems to me that this is because most here, even the Blues, understand that such an argument would not be sustainable, given the facts, but perhaps that assessment is wrong.
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Lawfare failed against Trump. It took out Alex Jones, Rudolph Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and multiple right-wing protest groups (e.g. carrying Tiki torches during a protest turns out not to be protected by the First Amendment when done by the right). It has harmed randoms por encourages les autres, such as the college students jailed for saying the N-word and the Virginia man pantsed by the police for objecting to his daughter being raped by a trans student. And of course there was the decimation of the NRA as @gattsuru mentioned.
It's not that lawfare doesn't work. It's that Trump was particularly good at getting past it.
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The ongoing existence of the SPLC also contributes to a decline in civility. Civility is a difficult thing to build, easy to destroy.
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The lawfare against the NRA did massive damage to the already-wobbly organization, and to the extent it moved its political arms to third groups (eg SAF), the soup-and-nuts fundamentals work - training programs, lead abatement, range insurance - still remains badly crippled and under the control of Blue Tribe administrators. I’m not sure there’s going to be any way for a non-NRA org to take over them, given the pressure applied against banks and insurers that only the NRA’s self-insurance warchest has allowed them to survive under.
That’s… kinda the problem. “It doesn’t work” is a testable hypothesis, and only survives so long as it almost never works. “It’s a bad escalation” only works if you can persuade people that refusing to push the button means it remains unpushed; that’s clearly not true and can’t become true without a Time Machine.
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I think seeing it as just 2 teams is more simplistic than is warranted here. I see this not as Trump or his ill attacking my side, but rather shooting out a cancer that's been rapidly and successfully killing the healthy parts of my side for decades. It'd be preferable to go to a surgeon who has expertise and incentive to keep the rest of us healthy and alive, but when all the surgeons have decided to join the cult of the cancer that values the cancer itself over the host, that's hard to come by.
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