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Is Nullification on the Horizon?
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-condemns-president-bidens-illegal-rewrite-of-title-ix
Recently the Biden admin rewrote some regulations to encode gender identity in title IX. While this is stupid, it's not something that in itself seems likely to be a productive motte top level post. Ken Paxton sued the white house over it, but this is just the default assumption about federal administrative rules on culture war topics. No, what I'm getting at is the letter from Greg Abbott:
https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/O-BidenJoseph1.pdf
I guess telling the federal government to kick rocks back in January and getting away with it set a precedent- and, obviously, Joe Biden is not going to send the troops in to escort male athletes into the high school girl's locker room in an election year.
This obviously raises the question- are we on the cusp of an era where big state governors feel free to resist the federal government? Obviously, being combative with the Biden admin is a political winner for Greg Abbott. It's unclear what he'll use as a replacement for it in the likely event that Trump sits there next year; I don't think he thinks he can get away with bullying New or old Mexico but the strongman image requires something. And, of course, are Ron Desantis and Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul watching closely and learning? Will they resist Trump policies as brazenly(no, blue states have not denied federal forces the ability to operate, their examples of arguable nullification are more noncooperation than open defiance and resistance) as Abbott does Biden's, given that he's emboldened by a base which may not be pro-secession but is absolutely confident Texas would be fine if it did happen?
Be nice, until you can coordinate meanness. Abbott appears to be coordinating meanness.
From a Red Tribe perspective, there is no rational reason beyond naked fear to respect or maintain federal authority. Nullification is indeed on the horizon, it's just the one behind us, given that we're certainly two and perhaps as many as five generations past the point where Federal authority could plausibly be claimed to operate according to well-defined and well-respected rules. We Reds already know that laws we pass at the Federal level aren't real laws, that our Supreme Court victories don't count, that it isn't actual democracy when we win elections, that we do not enjoy meaningful rule of law. We know the existing system has no intention of cooperating with us at any level. Our situation is a conflict, not a mistake.
We won on immigration law, and our laws were ignored. Blue Tribe spent decades actively facilitated the illegal immigration of dozens of millions of people from the poorest regions of the world, and they did it while explicitly celebrating the thesis that this would give them an insurmountable and irreversible advantage politically. It seems pretty clear that they have in fact derived a very significant and irreversible political advantage from this tactic. Blues look at this as a fiat accompli, but why respect a system that doesn't respect you? @TracingWoodgrains points out that all the establishment institutions are solidly against Red Tribe. Given that reality, why continue to support and maintain those institutions? Because we need them to keep society running? Have you seen society?
The correct move is to withdraw the consent of the governed, and make them fight for every step. Impose costs anywhere and everywhere. Impose friction. Deny them freedom of action at every possible point. Contest every issue under every theory imaginable, and when those run out, think up new ones. Never concede their legitimacy, never grant them authority, never cooperate. When they push back, escalate, and when they push back on that, escalate again. Attack their institutions and organizations. Locate, isolate and persecute their partisans. Engage in economic and legislative warfare. All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play. The Progressive Coalition is not a stable entity, and it is already suffering severe policy starvation. It does not appear to have unlimited state capacity to spare. It is entirely possible that we can grind them down to the point that the social structures they're leaning on simply collapse, and their project of cultural imperialism dies of exhaustion, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions. Formal secession is not necessary, much less the severing of economic ties or serious breach of the peace, only a destruction of the mechanisms of centralized power.
And if we are not so fortunate as to get the happy end, all the efforts put into this strategy pay dividends at the subsequent levels of escalation.
Why isn't that fear enough?
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
Because you will be punished if you don't?
So, poking the (metaphorical, Federal) bear?
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Legitimacy is overrated. Don Corleone doesn't need "legitimacy" to get people to pay him for "protection," does he?
What does this look like, and how does it end in anything other than getting arrested, shot, etc.?
Try that with the IRS, or the FBI, and see what happens.
What makes you think this can possibly end well? How does this not end in the Feds and Blues crushing Red utterly. What does getting you (yes, you) and your entire family gunned down by SWAT accomplish, exactly?
Attack with what, exactly? As the old meme goes, you and what army?
Same question as above. They have most the big corporations and economic weight on their side, and only their legislation has "teeth," not ours.
Except we lack the means to do unto them as they have done unto us. It's like telling a man taking cover from gunfire to "just shoot back; tit-for-tat," when he's unarmed.
It doesn't need literally "unlimited" state capacity, merely enough to crush us. And as I see it, it has that in spades. What evidence do you have to the contrary?
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! It is not, in fact, "entirely possible" for us to do this. They are too powerful, and we are but ants beneath their boots.
How can you possibly believe that "the subsequent levels of escalation" are anything other than Red Tribe getting crushed harder and harder, until we're eventually eradicated?
Because, in my assessment, it's not rational. It appears that others agree with me, Abbott and DeSantis among them, among a number of other leaders and their supporters. Defiance of Federal authority is observably being coordinated, right out in the open where you can watch it happen.
You can believe that such defiance is inevitably doomed to fail, but I disagree, and it appears others disagree as well. Very well: we've made our predictions, and the outcomes will be as they will be.
It doesn't seem to me that they're getting it, and the trend seems to be that they're getting less of it over time.
It seems to me that their capacity for punishment is declining, and that well-chosen actions can force it further into decline.
Trump is certainly being punished. He has survived so far, and is plausibly going to win the election. If he does, they will stonewall him and continue their efforts to destroy him, and the result that matters is that the system will continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. If he does not win the election, or if they succeed in destroying him, the system will likewise continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now. Abbott has not yet been punished, and neither has DeSantis. Even if Trump is destroyed, and Abbott is destroyed, and DeSantis is destroyed, someone else will step up to take their respective places, and the process will continue.
Abbott has done so before, and Biden backed down. Abbott is doing so again, and Biden is very likely to back down this time too.
There is more defiance to Federal authority now than there was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. It does not seem to me that the trend supports your interpretations or predictions.
...As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe. I also maintain that it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale, think it should be our last resort, and do not believe that discussing it in detail is a good idea, especially in this forum. I continue to decline discussion of the ultima ratio beyond these points, and continue to be comfortable with your assumption and assertion that this means there is no substance to my argument. I invite you to dispense with the questions and simply proceed to state that I offer no explanation and thus should not be listened to. Others are free to draw their own conclusions.
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all. Von Neumann knew there was only one way to get it done: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?”
You don't need to be frothing at the mouth and shooting every minute of every day, but it needs to be the goal you base all your other plans around reaching or it will never happen, just like writing a novel.
And that's why the only possible response to someone cursing you out is a mag-dump.
Salami slicing is an actual problem. Coordination is an actual problem, a very serious one.
Let's say a man with a pencil mustache and a dapper black suit hands you a button. You press this button, and a randomly-selected two to five percent of the US population is abruptly mulched, the trains stop running and the power and water goes out for the indefinite future. There's also a 75% chance that the American Blue Tribe ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force, and a 25% chance that the Red Tribe ceases to exist.
Do you pressing that button right now is a good idea?
I would slam the button even if the odds were a coin flip: it's still a far better outcome than what will actually happen thanks to decades of zero resistance from "constitutional conservatives."
I am going to die when leftist looters burn my family alive FC. Any opportunity to win and then mulch them first is worth taking, no matter how bad the odds are (I'm assuming "ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force" means no effective resistance to mop-up mulching after victory, since a random 5% is far too low to include that part)
I have come across pictures like this, and contemplate that some day in the not-to-distant future, they could very well be my wife and children. But you are claiming certainty. Okay. What are the intermediate steps? What happens, specifically, between here and there? Make your predictions, and we can see how it goes step by step. If it doesn't go the way you're thinking, you can hopefully recognize that you are being irrational. And if it doesn't go the way I'm thinking, I can recognize that I've underestimated the threat. Either would be a positive result, no?
In the meantime... Do you live in a Blue area? If so, you should move. Do you own guns? If not, you should get them, not because they're particularly useful in a fighting-the-blues sense, but because you should have the means to protect your family. More than that you should be building skills and cultivating social networks. I worry about my family being burned alive, but not by looters, because I don't live near potential looter populations, the local authorities look favorably on armed self-defense, I have a strong social network, and my wife and I have plans to improve our position over the next few years.
Why? I hate Blues so much it often keeps me awake at night. But you are claiming you think they're going to kill a significant portion of the US population, and so you need to do it to them "first". Okay, how are they going to do that? What's the sequence of steps? Because we're talking about the power and water going out and the trains stopping, and also incidentally dozens of millions of your friends and neighbors dead. That means you get real poor real fast. that means crime goes through the roof and probably stays there. That means everyone's life gets fucked for the foreseeable future. If you're certain something bad enough to be worth all that is coming, you should necessarily be certain about how we get from here to there. So, how?
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And yet, you don't seem to think that the Red tribe's deep hostility to coordination of any kind is an issue with respect to their odds of success. How do you solve the coordination problem with the regular in Sarah Hoyt's comment section who declared that, even in a SHTF situation, everyone will do their own thing, fort up their own homestead themselves, and if you come around to his place talking about "organizing" or "joining up" or "coming together," it won't matter how long he's known you or how close a friend you are, you are The Enemy and he will shoot you dead on the spot?
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Exactly. Particularly if you are also fundamentally opposed to preparing for its use, and particularly to organizing in any fashion ("We are the people who, when someone orders us to breathe, suffocate to death. It's our superpower."). They mumble about "2nd amendment remedies" coming someday, eventually, when the gubment finally "goes too far"… and when their past idea of "goes too far" finally comes to pass, well, it's not that bad, but next time…
These are family and friends I'm talking about, and they have such terrible understandings of how successful rebellions and insurgencies are fought. Ridiculously wrong understandings of how the American Revolution worked, how the Taliban worked, how "fourth-generation warfare" works; it's all 80s action movie fantasies about how "lone wolf" fighters with naught but their rifle and the clothes on their back will Chuck Norris their way through hordes of faceless mooks to inevitable victory.
Back in my junior year of high school (98-99), we had an exchange student from the former Yugoslavia, briefly escaping the wars. And (until lefty classmates stopped asking because they didn't like the answers) she had interesting things to say about the conflict. My later readings have mostly matched what she said: that people and families who tried to hunker down on their lonesome — particularly those who "headed for the hills" and tried to make a go of it in the woods — got picked off by those who grouped up. It was the organized, the militias and such, who survived.
As I've seen it put, a rebellion is not going from one government to zero to one, but from one government to two to one. A successful rebellion is a parallel state — as is a successful mafia; the difference between the two is mostly down to political ambitions (as in the case when the Ming restorationism of the "Three Harmonies Society" degenerated into the modern "Triads" who draw their name from it).
In reply to Isaac Asimov's dictum that "violence is the last resort of the incompetent," fellow sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle replied, "you're right; the competent use it before it's the last resort."
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