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22 years is a lot.
One would hope, for the sake of the 'right wing', that these events force right wing activists to smarten up and push the 'right wing' base towards more radicalism, distrust and pessimism towards the state.
But I think in reality this will just be seen as a failed circus act. Which people will want to quickly forget so the memory won't spoil the next circus troop coming to town.
Do that and you're asking to be buried under the jail like these guys. The message is "comply, because if you don't none of the boxes (soap, ballot, jury, cartridge) will save you; they are all in your enemies' hands.
Of all the boxes, the last one still hasn't been tried.
What the American right should take from analyzing this rationally is that no amount of legal or illegal remedy will ever be enough, submit to the reality that good government as they conceive of it requires at minimum a coup, and start plotting effectively.
If the punishment for dissent is the same as insurrection, there is no downside to the latter. And the powers that be know this which is why they immediately started purging the military.
No wistful demonstrations, no standing back and standing by. If any goals are ever to be met, then clearly one needs to start stockpiling weapons, making close connections, weeding out informants, subverting the military and planning for a violent confrontation.
It's either that or run your community away to another country that will protect you. But clearly, as demonstrated here, you will not get what you want by peaceful protest, votes or judicial review. Dissent is terrorism.
You can't. The right knows this, too. State capacity today is large enough to make Stalin's ghost (or Honecker's) blush. Overthrowing the government of the United States by force of arms is impossible, and their ability to prevent subversion is unparalleled (largely because it's run by those who subverted it).
It's certainly difficult, but since the alternative is a slower but certain annihilation, you don't really have a choice.
I think you overestimate the strength of the regime because of your penchant for pessimism however. There are weaknesses.
There's two ways Red Tribe can go. One is annihilation via essentially forced assimiliation. The other is annihilation by annihilation. The best way they can resist is basically the Afghanistan way -- make areas ungovernable and uncontrollable until the government puts a concentration of force in that area. This leads to annihilation. The Afghans were able to hold out against the USs little pinky for 20 years. The Feds aren't going to get tired of trying to control the US, and they will have vastly more resources to do so. And Red doesn't have the culture to hold out, eating poorly, freezing, and screwing goats as their women defect to the winning side.
Do you really think that the US military is going to be capable of wiping out an actual "right wing taliban" in the heartland? US anti insurgency tactics are pathetically bad (how's Afghanistan doing? Iraq? Vietnam?) and they're going to be even less effective in the parts of the US where the most competent soldiers actually come from. How many Trump voters do you think are still in the military? At the same time, I don't think you realise how little resilience there is in domestic US infrastructure. The US military couldn't wipe out the Taliban after two decades of occupation, and you think they're going to be able to do the same back home when their infrastructure is substantially more vulnerable and the population they're wiping out is the single largest supplier of effective troops? An actual domestic insurgency, if it was justified by the Feds/deep state nakedly seizing power, would not actually be stoppable by the Feds in any way that matters.
Yes, but even if they don't, they don't have to. Like I said, the US proved it could hold though not pacify Afghanistan more or less with its little finger for decades. The Feds merely need to do the same to any ungovernable areas of the US until the people die off.
They'll still have most of what was once Red on their side, because they're the Legitimate Government and that matters.
As we have seen in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan the people who are on your side when the issue is purely theoretical, and when the risk is immediate and material, are not always the same people.
The people who take material action to assist outsiders are usually corrupt. They do not care about the outsiders, or their community. They care about the money. This pattern repeated itself in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. Our allies took every dollar they could get and then did as little as possible (on average, there were of course exceptions). They exerted minimal effort and took as few risks as possible.
In all three cases the leadership of the boots on the ground trended toward telling their superiors what they believed their superiors wanted to hear. Those superiors then told Washington, and the public, that the situation was trending in a positive direction.
It was not. The Afghan security forces were not improving by the month. Our Iraqi partners in democracy were not developing robust systems of administration and government. The Vietnamese military was not rooting out corruption.
We have lost the same type of war three times in a row. Our performance in Afghanistan showed no meaningful improvement in outcomes relative to our performance in Vietnam. In fact, it was even worse.
I have no doubt red tribe areas would have some elements who side against their red tribe fellows. But all arguments I have observed as to why the US military would be successful this time are "cope", as the kids say. Lessons have not been learned. Material conditions on the ground are less favorable. The dynamics between recruitment, battlefield performance, and population demographics are a nightmare for a blue tribe domestic counter insurgency force. Surface area exposed to domestic enemy action is orders of magnitude greater. The force-to-space ratio for an occupying force is nightmarish. And this does not begin to cover the potential threat of geopolitical considerations.
I've read your comments for many years. You're one of the smartest people on the motte. But you are smoothing over the nuance of an incredibly complex dynamic with many externalities and permutations of neigh impossible to predict events interacting across interconnected domains.
You are arriving at a conclusion and stitching together facts to create a narrative that supports it. I am sorry to be so blunt. I have a lot of respect for your powers of intellect. But neither you, nor anyone else, can say what would happen in a large scale domestic insurgency without investing FAR more work.
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