Leftist Unity Council

A few months after the independence, in July 16, 1948, the Leftist Unity Council was formed to build mutual understanding between the Marxist-Leninists from Communist Party of Burma and the social democrats from the Socialist Party of Burma, given their hostile relationship as the CPB demanded to establish one party authoritarian Marxist-Leninist state while the BSP defended the multi-party social democratic parliamentary politics.

The committee encompassed of leftists from the military rank, the BSP, People’s Volunteer Organization, and Marxist-Leninists from different political entities. Ne Win, a former party member of Communist Party of Burma who later will be known as the first dictator of Myanmar for his coups in 1958 and 1962 was the chair of Leftist Unity Council while Thein Pe Myint, the third General Secretary of CPB, was the General Secretary of Leftist Unity Council. Thein Pe Myint, along with some members of the Leftist Unity Council encouraged Ne Win to lead the coup in forming a socialist coalition government around August 1948, only around 8 months after the independence. Ne Win, however, refused to conduct the coup in 1948.

Defense Services Institute

Defense Services Institute (DSI) emerged around 1951 ranging from the reasons of operating a non-profit canteen service for military personnel, to acting as a “social welfare” wing to boost military morale during the internal insurgencies of the post-independence era. Later, it had developed into an attempt by a faction of the military bureaucracy to seize control of the economy. Under the leadership of Brigadier Aung Gyi, the DSI expanded aggressively into the private sector, becoming the largest and most powerful business enterprise in the country.

However, the DSI’s true transformation only occurred during the first coup in Burma’s history, the era of Caretaker Government from 1958 to1960, when General Ne Win took power temporarily until the 1960 election. Here, it’s important to note that General Ne Win, who once refused to conduct a coup, became interested in becoming the leader of the nation after the establishment of DSI.

The DSI had grown into a huge multinational corporation by the late 1950s, expanding its business into vital industries like manufacturing, banking, shipping, and construction. Through well-known projects like the Burma Five Star Line and the Strand Hotel, this expansion enabled the organization to control Myanmar’s infrastructure and business environment.

Burma Economic Development Corporation (BEDC)

After the 1960 election, when U Nu returned to power, he attempted to restraint the economic reach of the emerging military bureaucratic class. In response, the military restructured the DSI into the Burma Economic Development Corporation (BEDC) in 1961. This move was envisioned to shield military assets by engaging them under a statutory body.

The BEDC’s reach extended from import-export businesses and bookshops to, eventually, bars and liquor shops. These businesses merged with the forces within “Burma Socialist Party” — where many of the era’s political power-holders resided—creating a massive bureaucratic apparatus. Since it was a military-owned enterprise, the very force meant to carry guns and defend the nation began to hold the scales of the economy as well. The officers leading the BEDC began to act as “know-it-alls,” moving from their field of expertise (military affairs) into uninvited realms of politics, economics, and other social matters. Regarding social welfare, they began to preach widely—using Japan as an example—the ideology that the military community deserved special privileges. BEDC and DSI were considered as the training fields and the honeymoon stage of their larger dream of driving national economy.

The Burmese Way to Socialism

General Ne Win, who once refused to a coup request by the Leftist Unity Council in 1948, became interested in becoming the leader of the nation after his experience of Caretaker government. Ne Win, founded a council called “Revolutionary Council” and conducted the coup in 1962. Then, he transformed “Revolutionary Council” into a political party named “Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP)”, introducing its economic program as “The Burmese Way to Socialism.” In doing so, the military bureaucratic forces were able to dominate politics, economics, and various other affairs despite internal issues. Under ” The Burmese Way to Socialism,” even small private businesses were nationalised.

Everything from bookshops to liquor stores was owned by the State. Essentially, the State was owned by the Burma Socialist Programme Party and the BSPP was owned by the entire military bureaucratic class which in turn was led by U Ne Win and a few of his followers.

Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited

After the downfall of BSPP in post-1988, the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited (UMEHL) was established by Announcement No. 7/90. At first glance, it appeared to be just another company being formed by the military government, to generate profits from light industry and the trade of commercial goods. However, the “government” portion was officially listed under the name of the “Director of Procurement, Ministry of Defence.” This effectively meant that the military had 100% control over UMEHL under the guise of the government. The 40% government share was acquired as a loan from the Central Bank while the 60% was contributed by the military community.

The military maintained its financial dominance by using its immense influence to secure unchecked bank loans from former officers in high-ranking banking positions, while also forcibly deducting shares from the wages of ordinary soldiers. This systemic abuse of power ensured that neither institutional oversight nor internal dissent could prevent the military bureaucratic class from funneling both state and private wealth into their own assets. With such funding, UMEHL acted as monopoly in a wide range of businesses in Burma, such as export of consumer goods, gems, agricultural products, timber, rubber and import of staple foods and cars as it managed to control at least seventy-seven firms, nine subsidiaries and seven affiliated companies. Also, MEHL was exempt from commercial and profit taxes given that its shares are limited only to military units, active duty and retired military and veterans’ groups.

During the era of National League of Democracy, the very first democratically elected government in Myanmar since 1960s, UMEHL privatized its operations and changed its name to MEHL only in order to divert the profits away from the national budget and direct civilian oversight.

Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC)

Parallel to MEHL, MEC is a holding company with businesses in the mining, manufacturing, and telecommunications sectors, as well as companies that supply natural resources to the military, and operate factories producing goods for use by the military. Back in 2009, MEC had 21 factories, including 4 steel plants, a bank, a cement plant and an insurance monopoly.

A subsidiary of MEC, Star High Public Company, owns 28% of Mytel, one of Myanmar’s largest telecommunications companies, in a joint venture with Viettel, a Vietnamese state-owned multinational telecommunication, under the leadership of Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV).

Aftermaths

By maintaining the power of military bureaucracy, the military dictators and their fellow military bureaucratic class could dominate every sector, anyone wishing to make changes—or even those seeking personal gain—always had to approach a member of the military bureaucracy. By treating taxes and state funds as a private treasury, the military bureaucratic class transformed into a crony elite, elevating themselves while granting exclusive business permits to their relatives to create a web of powerful tycoons. This systematic diversion of public resources allowed them to cement their control over the nation’s economy through a multi-generational web of relatives and insiders.

Knowing that a transition to democratic governance where market economy is prioritised would end their systemic privileges profiting from the state-dominated economy, the military bureaucracy has aggressively fought for its position, a struggle that resulted the 2021 coup. This last attempt for coup ignited the Spring Revolution, uniting all classes of society in an extraordinary and cooperative effort to permanently overthrow the military’s bureaucratic class and its cronies.

Personality politics pushes the mechanics of individual moral reflection and political reasoning to the backseat, and instead encourages people to orient and align with certain positions and beliefs primarily guided by another sentiment: how one feels about particular personalities, or the perceived virtuousness (or lack thereof) of other people.

In this way, it’s similar to identity politics, where people partly or fully align with certain moral positions and political beliefs primarily because of an aspect of their identity (e.g., gender, sexuality, religion, etc.). They become more comfortable with—or convinced of—certain conclusions and worldviews because it feels correct to match a certain aspect (or aspects) of their identity with them. On the flipside, personality politics makes people feel comfortable with certain conclusions and worldviews because they feel their personality is more of a “match” with other certain personalities.

In other words, personality politics is a tempting—yet dangerous—mental shortcut. It tells us that when we view someone else as a good (or bad) person with good (or bad) qualities, we should, in small or large part, be attracted to (or repelled by) certain beliefs and conclusions, and adopt (or reject) those beliefs and conclusions yourself—notwithstanding individual reasoning and thinking.

Small and Large-Scale Personality Politics

The effects of personality politics can be seen on both small and large scales. Large-scale results can be driven by a series of small-scale happenings, or driven by a larger-scale personality or event associated with that personality.

As for the small-scale adding up to larger outcomes, consider the following illustration: gun rights and gun ownership—everything from whether it’s “right” for an individual to have guns, through to if/how the state should allow or disallow it entirely or settle on policies that merely regulate it. People often orient their own thinking on this issue and align with certain conclusions based on personalities at play in different scenarios they’ve experienced.

For example, it’s not hard to see why a series of angry and off-putting uncles from out of town who won’t shut up about guns at Thanksgiving would put their 20-ish year-old, relatively privileged, and recently college-graduated nieces and nephews off from the idea of guns entirely. These people likely feel a galaxy apart from identifying with anything close to a pro-gun political stance already, and a universe away from even considering ownership themselves.

Further, those nieces and nephews might begin to stereotype outward, based on their uncle, about what types of personalities gun owners are. From there, it’s not hard to see how much of one’s feelings about guns can come down to being driven by a simple gut feeling of whether one likes, or dislikes, certain personalities—and in this case, views themselves as never wanting to be like, or associate with, those personalities.

That’s the small scale. On the other hand, large-scale personality politics typically orbits around relatively high-profile public intellectuals, politicians, academics, writers, and so on. People’s ongoing positive (or negative) perceptions of a certain high-profile personality can function to enforce and further entrench certain beliefs and opinions over time. Conversely, an event or discovery that majorly changes perception of a certain personality can upend certain beliefs or even cause re-alignment of them.

Misunderstanding the Donald Trump Effect

Donald Trump is almost a picture-perfect illustration of how a strong personality can drive people to certain moral and political conclusions, and not the other way around—a subtle but important distinction of cause and effect.

The lens of personality politics reveals why Donald Trump doesn’t lose as many of his core fans and followers as one would expect as he continues to display ongoing misbehaviors, gaffes, gauche behaviors, and so on—let alone administrative incompetence.

So many will change their minds or adjust their feelings about a particular topic, due to consistent liking of Donald Trump himself. And, this is where those who continue to be exasperated about the lack of mass exodus from Trump fandom and his maintenance of a core group of loyal followers often miss. They try to explain it all away with comforting self-aggrandizing feel-goods about how all his followers are stupid in general or uneducated about a particular issue (note that the inverse implication is the person saying this must be very smart and right all the time!). The reality is that a lot of what’s happening is people re-orienting or re-aligning themselves on certain principles or issues because they simply like Donald Trump’s personality—in other words, personality politics.

Take just one category of examples—the very least of what we could discuss here, but it directly addresses character: Trump’s private and public track record of lewd and crude behavior. Whether it was a leaked taped in 2016 that featured Trump casually talking about using star power to commit sexual harassment and assault and get away with it, or telling a woman journalist “quiet piggy” in 2025, the last 10 years are not short of examples where Trump repudiates  the kind of gentlemanly behaviour or “family values” allegedly sought by social conservatives and other factions of the Republican camp. Yet, he maintains a core fanbase and set of followers. Why?

People against Trump and his followers say facts don’t matter to his fanbase and continue to bash their integrity or character, trying to frame them as simply outright hypocrites that will excuse Trump’s behavior. To be clear, that is certainly the case in many instances. However, another large part of it is how followers don’t excuse Trump, but instead change their mind on an issue, scandal, or incident because of the power of Trump’s personality.

Many Trump followers maintain a very strong attachment to the man himself, and still view him in a way that they can relate to and like. In fact, while so many see Trump as as a brash, crude, incompetent man, others truly see him as a plain-speaking, non-Washington elite, and even friendly guy trying to use government power to make America Great Again. Yes, he talks down to people, but crucially he is often talking down elites and the media but usually not the average person as—plus, he can be funny.

Indeed, if you listen to what a lot of Trump supporters say, it’s personality-driven. Again, they aren’t excusing Trump’s bad decisions or behaviour, or simply ignoring the bad in favor of whatever good they perceive. In fact, their liking of Trump’s personality and strong identification with him leads them to manoeuvre the rest of their belief system around his behavior—the personality drives their conclusions. The beliefs of Trump’s followers continue to re-align in a way where the behavior is not that bad, or perhaps not even bad at all to begin with.

This is also an excellent example of how personality politics serves as a key cornerstone for and a launchpad for a robust cult of personality.

Ultimately, the accusation that Trump’s fanbase is ignorant, wilfully or not, is too simple. In an odd, self-defeating way, it even lets much of Trump’s base off the hook too easily. What many of them are in fact doing is allowing an attachment to a personality to re-align and re-orient their beliefs and conclusions about many subjects and the realities of the world.

Whether they’re doing a disservice to the issues at hand, or to themselves as well, is a different matter.

The Noam Chomsky Example

I left this example to the end because it is not only a good one and serves as a fine conclusion, but also because it has some personal implications that are interesting for me to reflect on.

Toward the end of 2025, more photos of Jeffrey Epstein and the company he kept over the years were released. A part of this series were photos of Noam Chomsky on a private plane with Epstein, and Chomsky with Steve Bannon looking friendly and relaxed. Chomsky wife’s—Valeria—has since released a statement, framing these events as an unfortunate series of manipulation. Without litigating what this could prove, disprove, or imply—an issue for another essay—I will say that it is a terrible look for many reasons at the very least, and leave it at that for now.

More important to the issue of personality politics was so much of the social media fallout I observed. Several people in various private and public Facebook groups expressed massive lament and accused Chomsky of being a fraud and hypocrite, while others mentioned something akin to how their worldview has been turned upside down and someone they very much looked up to as a hero had fallen. More than a few people mentioned something along the lines of having would have to “re-assess” all the thinking they had done on many subjects, especially where they were intellectually influenced by Chomsky.

It’s probably the last part that’s the worst thing to see anyone say. If so much of your worldview is wrapped up around someone else’s personality, then what kind of personal worldview is that?

I have no problem admitting that Noam Chomsky has been a major influence on me—in areas I have learned from him and agreed with him, but also in work I’ve done to deconstruct where I disagree with him or think he is unhelpful or wrong. To further open myself to some vulnerability here while making the point stronger, I will also say that my initial exposure to, and interaction with, his work was many years ago—well over a decade now—at a particularly odd time of my life, both politically and personally. That meant turning toward these new topics and points of view was both visceral and intellectual for me.

However, it turned out that my goal was to sort through political, social, economic, and philosophical questions for myself—not to be “right” or to re-align myself and worldview with a particular person because I started to enjoy their personality, found admirable qualities about it, and found myself listening keenly to what they had to say.

In fact, it was Chomsky himself continually paying lip service to the importance of building an “intellectual self-defence” against elements of personality politics and propaganda—and saying that everyone who speaks on political issues has some axe to grind, and is not the keeper of the secrets of objective reality—that drove home the point for me that you shouldn’t believe and take for granted what anyone says about one thing or another, including him. You should absorb the information, give it honest reflection and attention, and then go figure it out for yourself with a serious form of critical self-reflection.

So, it was an odd experience for me when a few folks in certain circles I knew asked me how I felt about the Chomsky photos that surfaced. The tone and approach came with the heavy voyeuristic implication that perhaps this would—or even should—affect me in some heavy emotional way or cause at least some intellectual trouble for me.

I’m happy to say it didn’t affect me beyond being abstractly disappointed in the man.

I had a brief moment where I almost thought it should affect me more, but then I remembered that it doesn’t because I actively try to remain conscious of a key thought process of intellectual self-defence against personality politics:

I don’t know this person. I’ve never spoken to them, gotten to know them, understood what makes them tick. Furthermore, I don’t have a real connection with them. They’ve never done anything for me, and I’ve never done anything for them. I don’t know who they are, and they essentially don’t mean anything to my life—beyond some ideas they have presented that have been intellectual food for me. Any serious personal attachment to this person—beyond a very arms-length, abstract-observer type admiration or inspiration—due to the perceived virtuousness of their personality and underlying character to the point of ultimately steering my moral and political beliefs would be very weird—not to mention detrimental to my thinking.

Let’s go further still. Let’s say I did know this person—even as a close friend or family member. Even in such a case, if I built my own belief systems independently and in a way that revolves around my own thinking and worldview and notanchored to their personality, then some sort of emotional reaction or disappointment related to their personality would be appropriate, but they wouldn’t be a thread that gets yanked that unravels my thinking.

Which brings us to the worst part of personality politics—or politics based on personality—if you let it get to you and aren’t careful. It diverts and poisons your own thinking and parsing through difficult questions and creates a weird form of vicarious intellectualism that ties your grasp on reality and positions on key issues to the perceived credibility, intelligence, and moral high ground someone else has allegedly accumulated—or lack thereof. Worse yet, it can shut down curiosity and prevent you from genuinely exploring or tackling certain issues and trying to understand reality for yourself.

The bitter pill everyone needs to swallow is that it is impossible to outsource our moral positions and political beliefs. And, handing them off to a stranger—no matter their perceived virtuousness or whether they’re a “good” person in other areas—is in many cases worse than avoiding an issue and choosing to remain entirely ignorant. Personality politics denies the responsibility you have in developing your own stances and convictions.

If you’ve ever unknowingly put yourself in a position where you feel the need to rush and jettison—or heavily modify—some or all of your beliefs and conclusions based on the perceived or completely-true character quality of anyone else, don’t beat yourself up too hard. Nobody is perfect. However, if you are aware that personality politics can trap you, or has trapped you, but choose to ignore it—or worse, lean into it—then you’re insulting the very idea of respect for your own individual and personal reasoning, and in some ways stamping your own thoughts as invalid. In this way, it says a lot more about you than anyone else, and demonstrates the every alluring power of personality politics.

All capitalists have are paper or digital claims on the right to allocate means of production or material resources. All of the actual material resources — means of production and raw materials — are entirely the product of labor acting on free gifts of nature.

The entire point at issue is the legitimacy of the process by which capitalists happen to be in possession of those paper or digital claims, and how workers come to be dependent on those claims. Why, instead of groups of workers simply acting on the free gifts of nature, advancing streams of material resources to one another, and using a simple unit of account to track the balance of these advances of material resources and who owes what to whom, do they have to go to someone who is in possession of stockpiles of these imaginary paper claims?

Why are capitalists able to interpose themselves between groups of workers, and create the illusion that they are “providing” something when they are in fact simply controlling a toll gate?

The problem is the myth that money is a “thing,” some sort of commodity with an independent existence and value of its own, when in fact it is simply a unit of measurement like an inch or a pound. We have a money and credit system based on the myth that a certain class of people must accumulate a pile of paper claims and then “lend” credit “against” them — a “service” for which they are entitled to payment.

It’s as nonsensical as the idea that, in order to cut lumber and build something, a carpenter must first find someone in possession of a pile of inches who can provide them. Imagine all the wasted resources, all the impeded production, if such a bizarre state of affairs actually existed. Imagine how much housing would go unbuilt, how much food would go uneaten, if before the carpenter could saw lumber or the butcher could weigh a cut of meat they had to go to the owner of a supply of inches or pounds and pay tribute for using them. There would be an entire class of people whose incomes came from such tribute, as a reward for the “productive service” of not impeding production. Great amounts of use-value would go unproduced despite the producers having the labor and materials required for production, for want of enough money to pay for the inches and pounds. The owners of inches and pounds would use their revenue to buy up still more inches and pounds, continuing to concentrate the ownership of them, so that they could charge higher and higher prices. There would be great accumulations of inches and pounds, far more than could be used, and equally great amounts of labor and material resources going idle, because producers could not afford the inches and pounds needed to put their labor and materials to use.

This is the world we live in.

But then ICE invaded the city of Minneapolis. And then the citizens fought back in a way that is seemingly a textbook application of what Carson wrote about in that book, to the point that if a second edition is ever published, I would not at all be surprised if it had an entire subsection in the appendix of the book, Case Study in Networked Resistance.

Making broader theoretical points that draw on an ongoing conflict is always a questionable undertaking. When tensions are heightened and the situation is fluid, rigorously thinking things through is challenging and things can turn on a dime. Narratives embraced in the moment can turn out to be laughably wrong in retrospect when the facts are coldly analyzed, or new evidence comes to light.

Nonetheless, I’m willing to stand by the statement until proven otherwise.

For those who haven’t read the book or need a refresher, a significant part of the early book is about establishing what Carson sees as the primary conflict going forward, namely a conflict between networks and hierarchies.

And while I am not personally involved in the fight, from all the news I’m seeing, it certainly seems like Minneapolis is utilizing a network to fight against a hierarchy. As anarchist Margret Killjoy wrote of their experience talking to people in the city.

This movement is not leaderless, but leaderful, and there are no few specific people who could be arrested to stop the movement. Because it is built out of so many interlocking networks, even if a bad actor managed to disrupt an individual piece of the network (by, for example, bogging down some particular organizing group in minutiae and preventing it from accomplishing its work), the disruption would be minimal. Because the network is democratic (not in the sense that people involved vote on decisions, but in the sense that it is run by the people who are part of it rather than by some vanguard of leaders), people are listened to only when their ideas actually appeal to people.

The basic strategy employed by people on the ground is identifying cars used by agents, following them, alerting others to their presence through the use of horns and whistles, and photographing or videotaping them when they try to accost and kidnap people on the street while getting the information of the people they seize. While ICE is still able to make arrests, the number of people they have so far been able to grab is far lower than what they would have done if the community was slower to organize.

Outmaneuvering a hierarchically structured enemy with superior firepower instead of directly confronting them is nothing new. This is the bread and butter of successful guerrilla insurgencies since time immemorial. What Minneapolis leverages is real-time encrypted communications through phone apps like Signal, but also radio networks.

Such non-violent swarming tactics amplified by many-to-many communications technology have been around for a while. In his book, Carson draws on the classic work of RAND think-tankers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt and their concept of “Netwar”. They argued that advances in communications technology had enabled decentralized swarms to overwhelm more powerful, hierarchically organized targets.

One case study Arquilla and Ronfeldt gave considerable attention to was the swarming tactics used by direct action protestors in Seattle against the World Trade Organization all the way back in ’99. Despite the decades that have passed since they wrote about it, the similarities between the two are notable:

Netwars are fought by networks; collections of groups and organizations guided by non-hierarchical command structures which communicate through “all-points” communications channels of considerable bandwidth and complexity. 

Networks operate by “swarming” their opponents like bees or white blood cells—more like organisms than machines. They approach stealthily and from many directions in offense. In defense, they can react like anti-bodies moving towards points of attack. Netwar’s line between offense and defense can be blurred, leaving opponents unclear about what is occurring and how to respond. Throughout the protests, the Direct Action Network were able to offensively swarm their opponents repeatedly, as shown by the seizure of key intersections on Tuesday and the easy penetration of the “no-protest” zone on Wednesday. The anti-body defense was shown when crowds moved towards police attacks or mass arrests.

But while in Seattle such swarms were made up mostly of ideologically committed anarchists and activists looking to overwhelm defenders in the form of police to stop representatives from gathering at a conference, what we see in Minneapolis is society-wide mobilization that goes well beyond the usual leftist and liberal activists and marginalized communities of color with the aim of defending those targeted by ICE. As journalist Ana Marie Cox writes, “The mobilization has cut across class and racial lines even more deeply than the response to George Floyd’s murder.” With this, you have not just workers going on strike, but also regular businesses.

It’s a proper popular front.

The broad moral consensus that ICE should be fought is key to the whole struggle. One of the distinctions between networks and hierarchies that Carson makes is that people are intrinsically motivated to act because they believe in what they are doing, not because they are being forced, and so can be trusted to do the right thing. Lower transaction costs mean that people can just take action, which is critical given that people only have minutes to act when ICE tries to abduct someone.

While the principles Carson lays out apply in many cases of people organizing in a horizontalist fashion, there are specific reasons why the people in Minneapolis are able to do what they do.

First of all, it is built on pre-existing practices of everyday mutual aid and solidarity that are necessitated by the environment. Marie Cox again:

Bonds formed under the pressure of negative double-digit windchill are key to understanding what’s happening. It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snowblowing an entire block’s driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency. I cannot tell you one story about that happening to me. I have at least three or four. The pun is irresistible: Minnesotans have always declared common cause against ice, they’ve just changed their focus to the ice that you can’t also use for hockey practice.

You can dismiss it as a joke until someone at a café gives you a spare scarf because you can’t find yours. People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don’t think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, “Just pay it back someday.” 

There is also the technical infrastructure that powers the resistance in the form of an app like Signal. The slow, boring work of radical hackers over decades that have given protestors secure, easy-to-set-up lines of communication. Ancient struggles like the Crypto Wars of the 90s which made encryption legal for everyday people to use and the work to build, popularize and maintain Signal are what has enabled protestors securely communicate in ways that frustrate the regime’s surveillance attempts.

The specific structure of closed encrypted group chats means the resistance is more resilient. Hack right-wing “journalists” like Cam Higby can infiltrate individual chats, but they only reveal a small part of the broader network. Compare that to prior protests in which people openly organized over public-facing social media which was much easier to shut down or disrupt.

It’s worth talking about the broader political implications of all this.

I joke about Minneapolis activists using principles from a book that fewer than a handful of people in that city have even heard about, much less read, because it speaks how Carson got at something with his writing. The reason people are acting in this way is not because they have a formal understanding of the principles of swarming or netwar, but because they saw other people doing something effective that they could do themselves. The reason Minneapolis resistance has worked so well is that it consists of forms of activity that require minimal buy-in in terms of ideology (secret police shouldn’t abduct my neighbors) and resources (all you need is a phone, a whistle or a car).

Self-conscious radicals may have been the key to igniting the wave of action, but it’s become its own thing now. And with that it has become one of the most successful instances of “Propaganda of the Deed” in years. It’s a clear example of direct action that not only has a political impact but also sends a clear message to people everywhere.

“You, whether you live in Minneapolis or any other city in America, or even the world, can do something like this.”

Now just because people are organizing in an anarchist way does not make them anarchists. Like all popular fronts, the general solidarity we see in Minneapolis will dissipate, particularly if the city wins. But even then  it’s easier to have conversations with people that draw them closer to our position when they have the visceral experience of acting like an anarchist.

But the consequences of the conflict in the streets of Minneapolis go beyond just potentially making it easier to convert people to our position while also landing a solid punch on the Trump regime. It also speaks to the future of the left in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world.

One ironic thing about The Desktop Regulatory State is that, despite it championing the wild possibilities of horizontalist organizing going forward, it was published just when we were beginning to see the resurgence of the “New Old Left”, as Jacobin founder Bashkar Sunkara described himself, thanks to the electoral campaigns of figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. In the 90s and 00s a rough and ready “horizontalism” that drew inspiration from anarchist practices was common sense across the left, but in recent decades we saw a swing back toward “verticalism”.

Part of this shift were arguments that conflated decentralist aspirations and alternate technologies with postmodern relativism and quietism in ways that defined the many parts of the left in the 90s and 00s (never mind the frustrations anarchists had with postmodernism). As Sunkara described it.

A lot of my early work, including an essay I wrote in Dissent called “The Anarcho-Liberal”, is based on the critique of a left that I thought was afraid of grand narratives and the project of modernity and small political projects of resistance.

Yet when push came to shove the people of Minneapolis did not wait around for verticalist structures to form that could resist the encroachment via institutional measures or for a formal organization to start strategically directing people – although the Minneapolis Democratic Socialists of America are part of the resistance. No, they’re doing it themselves in a horizontalist manner that, so far, has not succumbed to the “tactical freeze” that Zeynep Tufekci diagnosed in their book Twitter and Tear Gas wherein they cannot shift in response to novel forms of state repression or the necessity of creating some formal institution that can “speak” on behalf of the city and present demands as Vincent Bevins argues in If We Burn.

The horizontalist response to the failures of horizontalism in the 2010s (and we have not been granted nearly as much in the pages of formal news outlets as our verticalist critics) is that we’re really just getting started. There’s still so much more that could be done in terms of cultural practices and technological possibility to be developed and spread. Despite verticalists rhetorically posturing as the serious adults in the room, they show no awareness of the fact that it is in fact entirely possible to contest and develop the technology that powers our organizing.

Whereas some of the radical hackers involved in the establishment of IndyMedia and Twitter acknowledged:

What we can learn from the failure of Indymedia and Twitter-inspired social movements is not that the widespread democratization of reading and writing is preordained to fail, but that simply the status update is not enough, a conclusion that is all-too self-evident. As social movements will continue to make new tools and utilize existing tools in unforeseen manners, the future of technology is still being written

The appropriate response to the ascendant reaction across the world is not to retreat to some verticalist organization that claims the pretense of superior strategic reasoning, but to instead go further in developing and spreading capabilities.

And while I can’t speak for everyone, for me the most valuable thing from Carson’s writings is a general orientation toward the world that points toward consequential action I and others could take in a changing world. Whatever inaccuracies or errors there are in The Desktop Regulatory State – and there are many just given the sheer scope of its subject matter – I believe those mistakes are secondary to the fact that it holds up as a guide to action a decade on.

The point, after all, is to change the world.

At Reason (“The Anarchist and the Republican,” April 13), Jesse Walker writes of a period in the 1970s when an Old Rightist speechwriter for Barry Goldwater turned New Leftist (Karl Hess), and a Nixon Republican and future Reagan speechwriter  (John McClaughry), could reach unlikely consensus around values like worker self-management and ownership, and neighborhood self-governance. 

Reading it makes me nostalgic for that period in the 70s where the New Deal model of capitalism had become unsustainable, and elements of both the left and right were exploring decentralist/worker-controlled and direct democratic alternatives to large-scale corporate/state capitalism.

It was a time when Community Technology (Hess), Neighborhood Power (Hess and David Morris) and the Radical Technology group in the UK — all developing technological ideas proposed by Murray Bookchin and Colin Ward — were in the Zeitgeist. The People’s Bicentennial Commission was advocating worker control of industry and local direct democracy in Common Sense II, and Harry Boyte was advocating similar ideas in The Backyard Revolution. The left wing of the Labour Party was prefiguring Corbyn’s decentralist stakeholder management agenda 40 years ahead of time. Advocacy for decentralism in every area of life was the theme of Kirkpatrick Sale’s magnum opus Human Scale. There were even strands of such thinking in Carter’s rhetoric. 

Most of these currents were attempts to address the unsustainability of New Deal or Postwar Consensus capitalism, not simply by reversing or repealing it, but by moving beyond it. 

The postwar model had sought to remedy chronic tendencies toward idle capacity and inadequate demand by simply boosting the purchasing power of the working class — an approach that was feasible so long as the United States and other industrial powers were engaged in rebuilding the enormous amounts of production capacity which had been destroyed by the war. But by around 1970 or so, Western Europe and the Pacific Rim had rebuilt strong industrial economies, and the problem of surplus capacity was back. Against that background, the bargaining power of unionized labor was putting unacceptable levels of pressure on profit margins.

The approach of the decentralist currents mentioned above was to transcend the crises of accumulation and realization; they aimed to do so by moving beyond the accumulation and profit imperative, to a model based instead primarily on the production of use values for the workers who kept the industry running and the communities it served. A shift to more decentralized, less capital-intensive production technologies (for example the model of networked production with small-scale, CNC machinery being pioneered in Emilia-Romagna, which was driven by the same technological trends that inspired the various alternative technology groups and the Labour left in the UK); and by a shift of income from savings to wages, would drastically reduce the problems of high overhead and idle capital that plagued capitalism in the 70s.

Unfortunately, at the same time, the leading think tanks and lobbyists of corporate capital were developing their own agenda for superseding the New Deal model with one based on offshoring and financialization, weakening popular influence on government, and breaking the power of labor. 

Ultimately the latter agenda wound up being implemented, as the decentralist and genuine populist currents of the late 70s were coopted by the fake populist astroturfing of the New Right — Jarvis, Thatcher, Reagan, Falwell, and Viguerie. Coincidentally, Jesse Walker, by private email, confessed his regret for a passage he deleted from the original draft for reason of length, quoting a 1983 Human Events article by McClaughry  

that celebrated that sort of decentralist populism, but also paused to warn that populism could be redirected toward a “renewed animosity directed against racial minorities and immigrants,” or a “temptation to react blindly to unfair trading practices of other nations…by erecting trade barriers of our own,” or “the ‘Man on Horseback’ syndrome — the search for the Great Leader who will make everything right.”

(Walker, incidentally, also expressed reservations concerning the “astroturf” label, since there was some genuine public support for that version of populism; but I think it’s fair to say that, at the very least, it diverted populist sentiments in a direction that would have been far less significant without corporate money behind it.)

The postwar model inevitably failed because it was unsustainable from the beginning. American New Deal capitalism could only sustain both high wages and acceptable levels of profit so long as the plant and equipment lost in WWII were in process of being rebuilt. And even then, it also relied on massive capital sinks like the military-industrial complex and automobile-based sprawl as the alternatives to even higher, politically unacceptable (to capital) wage levels. Once industrial capacity was restored to their prewar levels, those old gods of the copybook heading — overaccumulation and underconsumption — would reassert themselves.

The model of social democracy established under Atlee’s Labour government was unsustainable for the same reasons. It was also politically vulnerable because of the specific institutional model they adopted: the policy of conventional capitalist management Herbert Morrison adopted in nationalized industry, and a form of council housing in which residents were mere tenants managed by local authorities. Possession is nine-tenths not only of the law, but of power. With a model of “social democracy” in which workers were managed by the same sort of people from foreman on up as they would have been in a capitalist-owned enterprise, and in which occupants of social housing bore the same relation to their living conditions as tenants of a capitalist landlord, the power of possession was essentially nil. Once a new boss like Thatcher came along, it was a relatively simple matter to “privatize” industries and housing, and their workers and occupants had no more recourse then their counterparts in a conventional capitalist setup.

Fast forward forty-plus years, and it’s obvious the successor model is just as unsustainable as its New Deal predecessor. The cost implosion and ephemeralization of production technology has outpaced the ability of financialization and FIRE Economy bubbles to absorb surplus capital, and the drastically increased profits and levels of wealth inequality have exacerbated the problem still further. The most lucrative form of economic activity is collecting rents from ownership of intellectual property and control of finance, and actually producing things is relegated to low-wage contractors. We’ve reached a point where the deluge of rentier capital into the hands of the top 1% has not only not promoted productive investment and job creation, as per right-libertarian dogma, but has made asset-stripping and enshittification more profitable.

Once again, with the failure of financialization and corporate globalization, the American and other publics face the temptation of a false right-wing populism — the opposite of the kind McClaughry called for in his Human Events article, which would “reemphasize the importance of character, decency, honor, and generosity of spirit in public life.” Just like the New Right, the MAGA movement is a false populism that uses authoritarianism and tribalist hatred against the marginalized to distract us from solutions that offer the kind of genuine power over our lives that comes from solidarity and cooperation.

The real thing — that 70s model of industrial decentralization and relocalization, worker ownership and self-management, and neighborhood direct democracy — now seems more relevant than ever. Maybe it’s time to dust off our old copies of Radical Technology and Neighborhood Power.

Kirk As the New Horst Wessel / Ernst vom Rath / Reichstag Fire

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk Wednesday, all over the right-wing political world and commentariat we’ve seen mouth-frothing rage, as authoritarian crybullies blame the killing on the “violent rhetoric of the left” and attempt to leverage it as a pretext for repressing or liquidating the political opposition. The far right has attempted to turn him into a martyr on the model of Horst Wessel (an SA brawler for whom a Nazi marching song was named) or Ernst vom Rath (a German diplomat assassinated in Paris who was used as a bloody shirt for Krystallnacht), or use him as a “Reichstag Fire,” a pretext to “go full Bukele.”

Meanwhile, liberal or centrist figures like Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom are bending over backwards to praise Kirk for “doing it the right way” and call on people to “continue his work,” because — despite decades of evidence to the contrary that even a three-year-old should be able to understand — they operate under the delusion that if they just roll over and show their bellies to the mouth-frothing right-wing mobs one more time they’ll leave them alone. And far more than far right propagandists, it’s because of the cowardice or opportunism of people like Klein and Newsom that millions of people who never heard of Charlie Kirk and have no idea what gutter filth spewed from his mouth only know of him as that good-faith debater guy who tried to do politics the right way.

But that’s a serious mistake. Conceding the debate will only embolden the fascists and strengthen their hand in the future, while weakening the opposition and further demoralizing people who expect it to fight back.

We must respond to the attempted gaslighting by fighting back with the truth about what Charlie Kirk said, did, and stood for. As Ilhan Omar put it: “There are a lot of people who are out there talking about him just wanting to have a civil debate. These people are full of shit, and it’s important for us to call them out while we feel anger and sadness.”

None of this is to say that he deserved to be shot. He presented no imminent threat that would have justified lethal force in self-defense. And even the worst human beings are capable of learning, growth, and change, and becoming better people — an avenue that was forever closed off for him.

Donald Trump was in the forefront of efforts to capitalize on Kirk’s death as an excuse to persecute his enemies:

It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

The following day, speaking on the South Lawn of the White House, he said:

We have to be brave in life, in all fairness, we have a life. I probably shouldn’t be out here talking to you in all fairness but we will be brave. And we have a great country. We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.

Bear in mind that this pearl-clutching over the “demonization” of Kirk as a Nazi comes from a man who, as we will see in more detail below, has repeatedly demonized his own political enemies and entire demographic groups as far-left Communists, Marxists, fascists, vermin, and poisoners of the nation’s blood.

In writing this column, I suppose I run the risk of being classified by Trump as an instigator of terrorism since, as A.R. Moxon points out, “American conservatives tend to cast accurate naming and exposure of what they do and say as a violent threat against them.”

Katie Miller, a conservative political adviser and wife of prominent Nazi and racist Stephen Miller, whined: “You called us Hitler. You called us Nazis. You called us Racists. You have blood on your hands.”

Mollie Hemingway, Editor in Chief of The Federalist, complained of “the media and other prominent Democrat activists prepping the ground for open season on and assassination of conservatives.” Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of the publication, tweeted: “I hope that Trump also orders the extermination of the entire anarcho-terrorist network that has been terrorizing Christians in this nation unabated for more than a decade.”

Further on the right, calls proliferated for official war against the left, liberals, and the “Democratic Party.” For example Joey Mannarino: “The Democrat Party must be classified as a domestic terror organization and their members & leaders treated accordingly.” And again:

Trump has to go full Bukele. Now.

Fill the jails up with these terrorists.

White nationalist Matt Forney put it even more extremely:

Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.

Also:

The left must pay. Ban the Democratic Party. Shut down CNN and MSNBC. Military tribunals. If you are to the left of Lindsay Graham, you belong in prison. YOU CAUSED THIS.

In mainstream media interviews, right-wingers’ self-victimization reflexes were in full force. Some chud from a “major conservative organization” was interviewed on NPR Morning Edition on September 11 preaching about how the left’s “demonization” caused this. Michel Martin pointed out some examples of extreme demonizing rhetoric on the right, and the guy started hysterically sobbing: “I can see why you’re being defunded.”

The Truth: The Violence Is On the Right

But this is all bullshit. As Alex Nowrasteh points out, political violence by the right has outnumbered that by the left 6-1 in recent years. Consider a breakdown of some recent major incidents:

• The man who targeted and killed Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home in Minnesota in June was a Trump supporter.
• The man charged with the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, in April was a Trump supporter.
• The man convicted of orchestrating a series of shooting[s] at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022 was a Trump supporter.
• The man who tried to kidnap then Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assaulted her husband, Paul, in 2022 was a Trump supporter.
• The men who wanted to hang Mike Pence on Jan 6, 2021, were Trump supporters.
• The man who killed the son of Obama-appointed District Judge Esther Salas in 2020 was a Trump supporter.
• The men who were convicted of trying to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in 2020 were Trump supporters.
• The man who sent pipe bombs to the homes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and other top Democrats in 2018 was a Trump supporter.
• The man who killed left-wing activist Heather Heyer after driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville in 2017 was a Trump supporter.

There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years. In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by… right-wingers.

Further, the history of political violence throughout American history has been overwhelmingly right-wing. Violence by the powerful and their proxies — state, paramilitary, and vigilante violence — against subject and marginalized populations, to keep them in subjection and get their minds right when they get out of line, has been a constant throughout the country’s history. The history of the slave patrols; the various iterations of the Klan; strike-breaking by state militias, Pinkertons, and the American Legion; the Palmer raids; the white race riots that created hundreds of “sundown towns”; COINTELPRO and the assassination of Fred Hampton… these are as American as apple pie. Throughout American history, every time there’s been mobilization and victory by marginalized groups or workers, the response on the right has been state, paramilitary, and vigilante violence.

The right frequently as much as admits as it. Not only do they contrast their own ideology as one of “tough-mindedness,” condemn the “sin of empathy,” and celebrate the role of violence (“God, guns, guts”) in building this country; but they mock liberals for general softness and wimpiness, frequently taunting them with their lack of capacity for violence in a coming civil war.

Charlie Kirk’s History of Violent, Demonizing Rhetoric.

Charlie Kirk himself had a long history of demonizing political opponents and marginalized people, and presenting them as existential threats. How’s this for demonization?

The Democrat Party supports everything that god hates … I hope you give a Sunday sermon and you talk about how the Democrat Party believes everything that god hates.

He joked about the hammer assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband:

Why has he not been bailed out?… By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out, I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks.

He opined not only that there should be public executions, but that children should witness them. “Death penalties should be public, should be quick, it should be televised. I think at a certain age, its an initiation…What age should you start to see public executions?”

And of course, he heavily promoted the white genocide trope, including the alleged leading role of Jews in it:

In October 2023, just days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Kirk drew controversy after he derided Jewish philanthropy to American universities for “subsidizing your own demise by supporting institutions that breed Anti-Semites and endorse genocidal killers.”

Weeks later on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” he also said that Jewish people control “not just the colleges; it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

Kirk also said ”the number one funding mechanism of radical, open border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits” is “Jewish donors.”

Of course, none of this stopped Ashley Rindsberg at Fox News from whining about statements that Kirk promoted the “antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory,” when, according to Rindsberg, “Kirk was widely known as one of the most influential supporters of American Jews in the country.”

As you might expect, Kirk was also a strong promoter of the myth of anti-white persecution.

Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.

…Okay, I’m going to say it. More than six hundred white women a year are murdered by Black men. Six hundred white women a year. Did you know that? By Blacks. So six hundred white women are murdered by Blacks a year. One just happened, well he was a Hispanic, he might have been half-Black doesn’t really matter, here in Scottsdale. Young, twenty-nine-year-old girl, walking on a hiking trail, and a trans-Hispanic comes and stabs her to death.

He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” and warned that we were heading toward “white genocide” like that supposedly occurring in South Africa.

Where is this headed? South Africa. That’s where this is headed. They repeatedly have calls for genocide against white people….

How much — and by the way, why are whites taking this? Why are we just sitting idly by and allowing corporate America to give all the jobs to nonwhite people, and the destruction of meritocracy?

And just to put the icing on the racist cake:

If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us! They’re coming out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.”

Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

Likewise: “…if I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I don’t — I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?”

Oh — don’t forget LGBT, and particularly transgender, people.

These people are sick… I blame the decline of American men,” Kirk said. “Someone should have just took care of it [sic] the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s.

He characterized “the transgender thing happening in America” as “a throbbing middle finger to God” and then proceeds to deadname Lia Thomas and tell her “you’re an abomination to God.” He also quoted a Bible verse used to justify stoning gay people, and called the verse “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”

And how’s this for “calling for political violence”: “Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled Alzheimer’s, corrupt, tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”

Aside from his own violent, red meat rhetoric, Kirk was at best lukewarm in admonishing his more enthusiastic followers when they called for violence. At an event in Idaho, an audience member asked: “When do we get to use the guns? … How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?” Kirk prefaced his reply by reassuring the questioner that he was on their side, but then warning that his “overly blunt” rhetoric was “playing into their hands,” before agreeing that “we are living under fascism.”

Charlie the Fake “Free Speech Advocate” and Real Totalitarian.

It’s also bullshit that he was a “free speech advocate.” This “free speech advocate” created a Professor Watchlist, encouraging students to inform on professors who said “woke” things in class, in order to instigate harassment against them. One of them, Stacey Patton, reported:

I am on Charlie Kirk’s hit list.

His so-called “Professor Watchlist,” run under the umbrella of Turning Point USA, is nothing more than a digital hit list for academics who dare to speak truth to power. I landed there in 2024 after writing commentary that inflamed the MAGA faithful. And once my name went up, the harassment machine roared to life.

For weeks my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: “bitch,” “c*nt,” “n****r.” They threatened all manner of violence.

They overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office with calls demanding that I be fired.

Now, after the fact, his partisans want to rewrite his history of violent rhetoric and frame him as a “debater,” a voice of reason. James Woods, for example:

The left says they want “national conversations.” Charlie Kirk actually did just that. In the lion’s den, no less, at left-leaning venues, hoping facts and common sense would prevail. And they murdered him for it.

At Reason, Intellectual Dark Web wannabe Robby Soave gushed: “He did not confine himself to the company of the already converted, and he seemed to enjoy venturing into the fray and arguing with liberals and leftists — the more of them at once, the better.” His colleague Liz Wolfe, like Robby fond of calling Black women “affirmative action hires,” was equally sycophantic: “He valued the art of persuasion, of discourse, of changing a mind or letting your own be molded, as it so often is, by fierce exchange.”

All of this is, once again — all together now — bullshit. The nature of the “debate” Kirk was engaged in at the time of his death is itself instructive.

Audience member: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

Kirk: Too many

Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?

Kirk: Counting or not counting gang members?

The questioner asked the number of trans shooters and total number of mass shooters in order to establish the numerator and denominator, and thereby show what a tiny fraction of mass shootings were actually committed by trans people. Kirk, seeing the bind he was in, immediately pivoted to another talking point in order to shift from demonizing trans people to demonizing non-whites. He was literally in the process of losing — badly — one of his precious “debates,” while using sophistry to stave off defeat. As Mike Masnick described his Duane Gish “debating” style:

He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”

The right’s perception of it is a reflection mainly on their critical thinking capacity. Here’s how Jack Posobiec dishonestly characterized that pathetic performance: “Charlie died fighting, even as a question was asked about violence and chaos in our country. His last public act was speaking into the storm with courage and clarity.”

Kirk’s idea of “debate” was, in fact, a living illustration of the worthlessness and banality of the so-called “conservative ideas” we supposedly close ourselves off from in our left-wing “echo chambers” and “bubbles.”

Kirk Was Typical of the Right’s Violent, Eliminationist Rhetoric

As already seen above, violence has always been inherent in the ideologies of the right and in the American power structure. It’s baked into the “paranoid style in American politics.” Since the emergence of the New Rights after WWII, we’ve had our Phyllis Schlaflys, Willis Cartos, and angry grandpas ruining Thanksgiving by muttering darkly about “George Soros” and the “globalists.”

But the right’s rhetoric took a major step in the direction of violence with the election of Barack Obama, which drove a sizeable share of the white population absolutely bonkers with paranoia and rage, and the formation of the so-called Tea Party. And it continued to escalate by orders of magnitude as channer-manufactured online projects like Gamergate, Comicsgate, StandWithVic, the Men’s Rights movement, etc., cooked the brains of millions of young men — followed by Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the MAGA movement, QAnon, and anti-vaxxine batshittery. The panic over the “transgender ideology” was completely manufactured whole cloth as an astroturf project, much like the anti-abortion movement in the ‘70s; but it succeeded in further cooking the brains of white men. The right whines about “woke mobs,” but the actual mobs are Gamergaters and other manbabies swarming people like Anita Sarkeesian, Sarah Jeong, and Leslie Jones with death and rape threats.

It’s no exaggeration to say that death threats have become standard operating procedure for the right. For example, consider Tim Nordin, president of the Eau Claire Area School District, who

was at home ahead of a school board meeting in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, last spring when he checked his email and found a threatening message from someone with the alias “Kill All Marxist Teachers.”

“I am going to kill you and shoot up your next school-board meeting for promoting the horrific, radical transgender agenda. It’s now time to declare war on you pedos. I am going to kill you and your entire family”…

As the article points out, this is a logical consequence of the dehumanizing, eliminationist rhetoric current on the right.

Right-wing personalities now routinely — and falsely — refer to LGBTQ people as “groomers” and “pedophiles.” They’ve also accused teachers of “grooming” children, while claiming doctors “mutilate” and “sterilize” minors. The result has been an escalation in threats targeting trans-inclusive hospitals and school districts generally, as well as specific workers within them.

Then there’s the Texas legislator who stated his proposed response to undocumented immigrants as “shoot, shovel, shut up.” True to form, in a country that produced the Ku Klux Klan.

Chief among the voices of violence and hate on the right is Trump himself. The man is unable to give a single speech without demonizing and dehumanizing his enemies, resorting to eliminationist and “enemy within” rhetoric, and calling for violence against them. In a timeline of incendiary Trump rhetoric at The Atlantic, the president can be seen instigating or celebrating violence against reporters and hecklers:

On hecklers: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.” “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?”

“Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my guy!” October 18, 2018, referring to then-Representative Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for physically assaulting a reporter.

On two separate occasions he called for the imprisonment of reporters, and the use of prison rape as a tool of extortion, to force them to reveal the names of leakers.

Trump has also dehumanized immigrants and the opposition party as “vermin” and “poisoning our blood,” and presented them as existential threats:

We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.

I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries … We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.

It is the enemy from within. And they’re very dangerous—they’re Marxists and Communists and fascists … They’re dangerous for our country. We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick; they’re so evil.

On undocumented immigrants, Trump has said, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country:”

In Colorado, they’re so brazen, they’re taking over sections of the state. And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story. They should have never been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them.

The Atlantic article didn’t mention Trump’s attempt to incite a racist pogrom against Haitians with the blood libel that they’re “eating the pets,” or the constant lies from Trump, Noem and Leavitt that the immigrants they’re arrested — many of them on their way to comply with immigration law, because Stephen Miller considers them the easiest to kidnap — are “dangerous MS-13 gang members.”

Trump also joked about the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and posted a meme on Truth Social showing an AI slop image of helicopters leaving a city skyline in flames and quoting the Kilgore line about the “smell of napalm” from Apocalypse Now, along with a declaration of “War” against Chicago.

Throughout 2024, Trump, his campaign staff, and auxiliaries like Marjorie Taylor Greene constantly paraded a string of stories from the press about alleged violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants — most notably Greene shrieking “Say her name — Lakin Reilly” during the State of the Union Address. All of this despite the fact that immigrants — whether documented or not — commit crimes at lower rates than the native born. But as with the minuscule numbers of actual trans-involved mass shootings or late-term abortions, or the declining rates of violent crime in big cities (Chicago, in fact, has a significantly lower murder rates than many cities in Red States), statistics don’t matter; stupid people think in anecdotes, not statistics.

In closing, I quote Erin Reed:

Political violence is corrosive and we must not excuse it — killing Charlie Kirk was horrific. But we also must not sanitize the memory of a man who wished harm on those he disagreed with, and who spread a message of hate to anyone willing to listen or pay him to so [sic]. We can denounce the violent killing of Charlie Kirk without praising his abhorrent legacy.

When I wrote my original piece after the election and before Trump took office, I somewhat underestimated how rapid and extensive his power grabs would be. I very badly underestimated how incompetent he’d be at it. What Trump has in mind is clearly a consolidation of power on the model of Hungary’s Victor Orban; but he’s doing everything completely in the wrong order, and as ineptly as humanly possible.

In fact the speed with which he has moved, spreading himself thin on so many different fronts, is an indicator of his ineptitude. 

A would-be strongman trying to consolidate power and establish a hybrid regime — if he is competent — will not gut the economy and threaten the livelihoods of a majority of the population. He will not do things that reduce his approval ratings to the upper thirties — a record low for a president seven months into his term. Donald Trump is not competent.

A considerable number of doomers respond to such observations with “polls don’t matter when you can declare martial law!” But you don’t attempt a total seizure of power by military force with a 38% approval rating unless you want a Euromaidan or Ceaucescu scenario. 

And if you’re planning to use the military to consolidate power, you sure as hell don’t start out by systematically alienating a major portion of the troops with deployments they view as demeaning like Los Angeles or the Trump birthday parade — and especially not attempting ham-handed purges that insult your career officer corps’ professional sensibilities. Trump or Hegseth has replaced competent career officers in the Joint Chiefs, and the Director of DIA, with political hacks — in some cases on the recommendation of Laura Loomer. Hegseth himself is a bumbling, drunken oaf that Trump had a parasocial relationship with because of his Fox News show. His agenda consists basically of purging the military of “woke” officers, and replacing technical competence with a “warrior ethos” — a warmed-over version of the Red vs. Expert, but repeated viewings of 300 substituted for Mao’s Little Red Book.

I confess no small astonishment that Hegseth hasn’t attempted a purge of the middle ranks of field-grade officers, or made any effort to secure their loyalty. As Kathryn Brightbill noted:

Yeah, they’re moving so fast that they haven’t done the steps that people like Erdogan took to take over the military, so we’ve got a whole lot of career military leaders who absolutely are not going to go along with martial law orders….

Basically, if you’re going to use the military to quell civil unrest, you have to replace the entire leadership structure with your loyalists first, which they very much have not done.

Perhaps it’s because their political attitudes are too opaque to evaluate; perhaps he has no one on the inside who can reliably assess the loyalty of that number of people, or he’s fired so many competent staff people that there’s no one left capable of even processing that much information with sufficient granularity.

In any case, even if the entire military were fully reliable and willing to participate in an unconstitutional seizure of power, my initial post-election assessment — that the federal government lacks the necessary resources for martial law on a national scale, or even in more than a handful of cities at once — remains valid.

Regarding things like martial law, Greg Doucette is one of the best antidotes to doomer scenarios (much of the analysis below is based on these three threads). The fundamental consideration is that there are simply “not enough personnel to do martial law.” Government authority rests, ultimately, on the fact that “most people voluntarily follow most laws most of the time.” Or more colorfully: “The Government’s ability to govern rests almost entirely on a combination of the honor system and apathy.” If that state of affairs changes for a significant percentage, “things get overstretched very fast.”

Even in the case of military deployment against one major city, Los Angeles, Doucette writes:

LA has like 4M+ people. Sending every single ICE officer is ~20K, LAPD is 9K, LASD is 10K. Going in at 100:1 manpower – leaving zero bodies for literally anything else – is foolish

“But not all 4M Angelenos are protesting!” you say 

Well yeah, but the Government doesn’t have the logistics to deploy 40K officers across 300K acres of land either….

And on the question of whether throwing in all available federal law enforcement resources would give them sufficient force for general pacification, he replied:

Not even close. FBI gets you another +13K…. Then there’s logistics. Where do that many cops eat / sleep / shit? Goes downhill fast 

Not to mention coordination among thousands of officers across multiple agencies with their own personalities, protocols, and egos

Militia like the Proud Boys “only get you a few hundred extra bodies. And protestors are much more comfortable fighting back against them than they are against uniformed officers.” 

The same is true, exponentially, for California as a whole or for the entire United States. In response to a doomer who raised the possibility of “invading” Blue States, arresting Democratic legislators and governors and installing “caretaker” replacements, Doucette replied:

CA is the same acreage and population as Iraq, with more areas of urban density. “Invading” literally can’t happen while still having enough bodies for NY. There are ~7400ish state-level elected officials. The logistics for imprisoning more than a fraction are LOLable

Do you know how much martial power was required to manage the conquered states after the Civil War? 

The idea the federal government is going to replace Governors or state Supreme Courts is pure applesauce

Look at 2020 to see how many armed personnel it takes to control a city block for a few hours 

Now multiply by all the blocks they’d need to pacify 

Now multiply by 3, b/c you need 24/7 coverage and soldiers still sleep 

Now house + feed + water + transport them all 

Logistics always wins

You think the same generals who did nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq are going to occupy Los Angeles + NYC + Chicago + Seattle + Atlanta + Denver + DC + Minneapolis + Portland + etc etc etc? 

Especially after Kegseth’s personnel cuts?? 

The same logistical hurdles and lack of state capacity apply, more generally, to any project of seizing and maintaining control over the civil machinery of state and local governments. Consider the scenario, so glibly voiced by many doomers, of the feds simply “taking over” elections.

Elections are run by the states, the military has no role in it 

Even if the military did have a role in state-run elections, there isn’t enough military – not enough physical bodies – to make a difference 

In response to the hypothetical of ICE officers being distributed among polling places to intimidate voters or election staff, he responded:

Not logistically possible IMO. There are several hundred precincts just in Charlotte NC alone, and that’s with only 1M people or so…

Not enough physical bodies to matter. It’s logistically no different than the failure to pacify Los Angeles…

I think some of y’all may be underestimating just how vast this place is, both in terms of people and acreage 

And the states control essentially the entire election machinery; if they’re allowed to function at all, it will be virtually impossible to deal with the possibility of an undesirable outcome except through blatant nullification after the fact. I think everyone in Washington knows that if the states ignored Trump and conducted elections as they saw fit, and Trump somehow got the Supreme Court to throw out their votes, what happened the next day at the White House and Supreme Court building would make the Capitol on Jan. 6 look like a ghost town.

What’s more, special elections this year have shown an electorate with a Democratic lean of +15-20% compared to 2024. In that kind of environment, gerrymandering is next to useless, and the wave election may be too decisive to rig.

Gwen Snyder notes the home ground and defensive advantages of noncompliant Blue States against attempts to subdue them with Red State National Guards. 

We’re a country with more guns than people. 

And while reactionary right wingers are probably more likely to have guns stockpiled, it’s worth remembering that if they want totalitarian control at gunpoint… THEY would have to come to US

And these guys are afraid to take the fucking subway. 

I cannot IMAGINE them trying to take and hold an urban center.

And those who might be that foolish… Well, they might have a lot of guns. But also, how many of those can you realistically wield at once

Likewise the psychological hurdles entailed in attempts to turn federal law enforcement, whose experience is entirely limited to retail enforcement in situations where they outnumber their targets, into an occupation force for an entire population.

ICE literally runs away if you’re mean to them, they are not gonna be Confederate supersoldiers when the time comes

Like 1000% they would shoot unarmed civilians (and have already tried) but they are not gonna take a bullet for that man. 

And even if they were actually willing, they are not gonna be an elite fighting force. 

The administration is not competent enough to make that happen

And none of this so far even touches on the question of malicious compliance or noncompliance by the military if they’re ordered to use large-scale force against the entire civilian population of a hostile urban center. In my opinion a significant number of officers would simply refuse to pass on orders to fire on a crowd of civilians, another significant number would passive-aggressively fail to receive the orders, and further significant numbers of soldiers in a full-blown martial law scenario would either refuse to fire on crowds of civilians or would just go AWOL and melt into the general population. It doesn’t take very large minorities of such people, distributed across all levels of command and in support functions like logistics and communications, for the cumulative effect to paralyze an organization and demoralize those who remain.

Aside from all that, there’s just not a whole lot that you can do with regular military forces. Because of their training, they’re virtually useless for retail law enforcement tasks like arrests. About all the regular military is good for, if deployed wholesale by a would-be despot consolidating power, is Budapest 1956 stuff — turning machine guns against entire crowds of people, turning the whole city to rubble, and tearing every major thoroughfare up with tanks. And as previously noted, they don’t even have the numbers to do that on a scale of more than a few cities. What’s more, if Trump were actually willing to try it, in one or more cities, regardless of what the doomers say, that would be the end of the fucking ballgame. The military would just disintegrate internally.

And in fact the Marines and National Guard proved to be next to useless in Los Angeles in June. The Trump administration deployed the equivalent of a brigade, at the cost of over $100 million, in response to one protest confined to an area of a few blocks in Los Angeles. Most of their activities amounted to one or another form of “support” for local police — much of it the moral equivalent of carrying around a cooler of Gatorade for the high school football team. And they were completely unprepared to handle the logistics of even that deployment, for all the reasons given by Doucette above. 

The Guard is proving equally useless in DC. And it’s probably not great for morale that a significant number are assigned to the sort of tasks usually performed by county jail inmates, like picking up trash and mulching ornamental trees. 

And as Robert Hubbell points out, most of Trump’s loudly trumpeted future National Guard deployment in Blue cities is just a rebranding of deployments actually already announced weeks ago, to carry out the same sort of administrative and logistical support that comprised most of the actual Guard activity in Los Angeles.

The Pentagon has been planning for several weeks to deploy National Guard troops from a dozen-plus red states to provide clerical, case management, and logistics support to ICE to handle its burgeoning backlog of detained immigrants….

Discussion about the current deployment began a few weeks ago as red state governors responded to Trump’s request for National Guard troops to assist in cities across the US. But that proposed deployment is (appropriately) limited in a way that would not violate the prohibitions of the Posse Comitatus Act…. 

As of Sunday evening, those existing plans for case management, logistic support and clerical work have been converted by Trump into threats to “send troops” to various cities.

In the process of their deployment of the Marines and Guard, the Trump administration probably amped up the scale of protests in the Greater Los Angeles area itself and other major cities by an order of magnitude. Tom Homan complained of as much, saying that “protests in Los Angeles are complicating immigration raids, making them more ‘difficult’ and more ‘dangerous.’” One LA resident described the hostile environment in which ICE operated:

In the first Battle of Los Angeles, the good people of LA County have prevailed. We beat ICE back. It started a couple weeks ago. The ICE-watch notices slowed down from a river to stream, then to a trickle. The parks and playgrounds in the neighborhoods that had been empty showed signs of life, the age of the average street vendors started to rise and now, today, officially Los Angeles is back in action…. 

Why? Well, for starters, 300 ICE agents have been moved to Chicago, leaving only about 300 in LA County which is about what we had before Trump took office. Why are they leaving? Because LA made their jobs TOO FUCKING HARD. LA Organized. LA sat on corners outside Home Depots with radios. LA got on Signal and ICE-watch. LA’s biggest non-profit advocacy groups like the LA Tenants Union widened their missions to incorporate saving the whole fucking city. LA showed up. LA filmed. LA knew its rights and handed out red-cards at every opportunity. LA kept a small, peaceful, totally fucking irritating presence at the Federal buildings and LA showed up at the hotels where ICE was staying and made sure they didn’t get any sleep. LA Unions got involved. LA limousine liberals got out of their fucking limousines and stood watch on corners.

Public opposition and obstruction, more broadly, is creating a great deal of friction for the deportation effort. Airlines have been forced to resort to using dummy call signs for deportation flights and are blocking the planes’ tail numbers from tracking websites”; and even now, action groups have found “other ways to follow the flights, including by sharing information with other groups and using data from an open-source exchange that tracks aircraft transmissions.” Meanwhile, immigration activists have finally found something AI is good for: identifying masked ICE agents.

Dominick Skinner, a Netherlands-based immigration activist, estimates he and a group of volunteers have publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests. He told POLITICO his experts are “able to reveal a face using AI, if they have 35 percent or more of the face visible.”…

ICE agents “don’t deserve to be hunted online by activists using AI,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on border management and the federal workforce.

Well, yes, Jim. Yes they do.

The public reaction in Washington, DC to the August deployment of ICE, the National Guard, and Trump’s challenge to local control, likewise, has significantly impeded deportation efforts. For example:

At approximately 5:40 pm ET on Tuesday, August 19th, Columbia Heights residents came together to drive out a group of ICE agents. It all took place within about 10 minutes around 14th Street and Irving Street. ICE agents got into their unmarked vehicles on Irving Street and drove off. There were 150+ DC residents. 

Meanwhile, self-organized night patrols by DC residents are an ongoing headache for the invaders.

Armed only with cell phones, medical kits, and the confidence to assert their dwindling rights, groups of local residents trail and record Trump’s occupation forces. They’re known as the night patrols.

These night patrols watch over the city to ensure that people are protected from state violence, false arrest, abduction, and harassment. Failing that, their goal is to document the constitutional violations or brutality they witness, so people can see the truths about the occupation that a compliant, largely incurious media are not showing. Their footage has gone viral and exposed the mainstream media’s lies about how happy DC residents are to see the South Carolina National Guard marching by their kid’s elementary school.

There is no centralized night-patrol planning committee. People in different groups don’t necessarily know each other, but everyone with whom we spoke was either experienced in this kind of work through previous cop-watch trainings or are compelled by what is happening to play their part in making sure the foot soldiers of the surveillance state know they too are being surveilled.

In Rochester, NY, protesters chased ICE away from an attempted roofing site raid. And electrical workers are training for job site defense in North Carolina.

As I already mentioned, ICE is used to retail operations — arresting individuals, or conducting individual workplace raids — without large-scale public attention or interference. The larger the scale of their sweeps in a given area, the more public awareness and opposition they generate. They are basically cowards who will retreat when outnumbered by a hostile crowd.

And they’re subject to serious personnel attrition, as a result of demoralization from new levels of public attention and hostility. It’s not what they signed up for. That’s why ICE is desperate to attract new recruits by waiving age limits, offering new perks, putting new people out on the street with even less training, and transferring people against their will from agencies like FEMA — and it’s still not working.

Administration officials meet the same palpable levels of public hatred when they step outside their bubbles. Vance, Hegseth and Miller attempted a public appearance, only to be met by hostile crowds shouting things like “Hey, it’s couch-fucker! Hey, buddy, you here to fuck a couch?”

The lack of state capacity we’ve noted so far in regard to national military resources applies even more strongly to Trump’s goal of subduing civil society.

Snyder comments, in the specific context of the recent court ruling against the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp in Florida, on compulsive doomers whose response to every legal action, every court ruling, against the Trump administration is “It doesn’t matter. The courts don’t matter. The laws don’t matter. Trump will just ignore them.”

Folks, this is a ruling against DeSantis. 

He can’t hide behind SCOTUS’ declaration of presidential immunity, he could face actual consequences. 

Trump doesn’t like him, he’s a coward, there is plenty of likelihood he obeys. 

Also: even the Trump admin obeys courts. Frequently….

Not feeling terribly patient with doomers who see a far right politician lose in court and immediately chide those of us who say it’s a positive development. 

Courts got people back from CECOT. 

They are still relevant. 

They are still sometimes an effective mechanism against this administration.

Folks, obviously we do not put our faith in court rulings or treat them as things that will necessarily be obeyed. 

But anything that tosses sand in their gears is a good thing, the whole game right now is slowing them down and making everything harder for them.

And I say “they” but again let’s remember that this is a DeSantis attempt at Trumpism. 

The dude simply does not have the advantages Trump has when it comes to ignoring the courts. Or the cult, or even an assurance of a pardon if he tries and shit goes south for him legally

As I’ve repeatedly stressed, the courts’ lack of enforcement capability works both ways. It’s difficult to impossible to force Trump to comply with a court ruling on the legality of Executive Branch actions because possession is nine-tenths of the law. Executive officers are all in the direct chain of command under him. But the same rule applies, in the opposite direction, to Trump’s ability to enforce his “executive orders” outside the federal bureaucracy under his direct command. The states can simply respond “fuck you, make me,” and I doubt even this Supreme Court would enforce the EOs. And — again — there’s enough troops and federal LEOs to fully impose direct federal rule on maybe three major cities.

His lack of direct executive authority to enforce his commands on civil society actors like universities, media outlets, and big law firms, and on politically independent state and local governments, is to some extent compensated by his ability to threaten federal funding and/or abuse the justice system. But his success rate has been driven mostly by premature acquiescence rather than his actual capacity to inflict harm; and the works have been significantly gummed up by court challenges, and by actors like the universities and law firms that have refused to acquiesce. His ability to engage in lawfare is severely limited by the number of competent lawyers who have left the Justice Department, so that he can only go after a handful of targets at a time out of an immense target environment; grand juries are unlikely to be cooperative in most of these cases, as well. In fact Reason’s resident Schmittian and Trump bodypillow owner, Josh Blackman, clutched his pearls so hard his monocle popped off because grand juries thrice refused to indict someone who allegedly scratched a Gestapo agent’s hand. And it’s a pattern:

It is rare for a federal grand jury to decline to indict, but it’s become an emerging trend in Washington amid Trump’s federal crackdown, with grand juries made up of local residents declining to indict at least six times in recent weeks.

Last week, a grand jury declined to indict a former Justice Department employee, Sean Dunn, who was seen on video tossing a hoagie at the chest of one of the federal law enforcement officers patrolling the streets of Washington. Dunn has become a symbol of opposition to the federal takeover among D.C. residents, with Banksy-style art depicting a man tossing a sandwich appearing around the city.

A grand jury also declined to indict Alvin Summers with assault on a federal officer. And three federal grand juries refused to indict Sidney Lori Reid with assault during a scuffle with an FBI agent, and her charges were downgraded to a misdemeanor.

And as a stark a reminder to the Guard that everyone in DC hates them, a grand jury returned no true bill on someone accused of threatening them. Might be one reason for reports of widespread feelings of “shame” among the troops.

I should perhaps add a clarifying note on my repeated use of the word “doomers” in this piece. God knows there are enough legitimate reasons for dooming, even if Trump’s successful consolidation of power isn’t one of them. Even if his regime is unsustainable, he is doing things that endanger the livelihoods of broad swaths of the population, destroying social infrastructures that the most basic quality of life depends on, and inflicting incalculable harm and misery on the most vulnerable marginalized groups. But the damage he can do in the process of failing is indeed a scenario of doom.

What I mean by “doomers” is people whose reflexive, dogmatic response to any news of the courts, bureaucracy, or other procedural mechanisms challenging Trump, is to proclaim that “nothing matters, laws don’t matter any more, he’ll just ignore them, bold of you to assume there will be free elections in 2026, the protests and resistance are exactly what he’s hoping for as a pretext for martial law,” et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam, world without end, amen.

It’s safe to say Trump’s regime is unsustainable and his attempts to consolidate power will ultimately fail. But what happens instead? That’s a subject for Part II.

You’ll notice, of course, that these are things that happen under “normal” capitalist regimes as well. This is because fascists — while a unique threat who must be fought in different ways — do not invent shit. They pick up already available tools of repression and go to fucking town [emphasis added].

This is a level of nuance which, unfortunately, a certain kind of Very Online leftist edgelord fails to grasp. For these people, fine distinctions in the names we call things are a form of ideological capitulation. If late stage, financialized, or vulture capitalism involves an intensification of tendencies that always existed under capitalism, then it makes no sense to have a special name for vulture capitalism. If someone uses the term “alt right” instead of “fascist” for Richard Spencer and his ilk, they’re somehow guilty of soft-pedaling the fascist nature of their politics. If present-day American fascism as it has emerged from the MAGA movement is an outgrowth of characteristics that have always existed in American culture to dome degree, then American capitalism and the bourgeois liberal state have always been fascist.

The problem with this bludgeon approach to language is that it renders language less useful as a tool for analysis. Someone on Twitter once asked me what benefit there was to using the term “vulture capitalism,” if capitalism has always involved rent extraction, with large elements of value destruction or impeding value creation in its profit model. I responded that under vulture capitalism or financialized capitalism, asset stripping and enshittification as the primary source of profit had reached such a quantitative level as to amount to a qualitatively new stage of capitalism. But if this is an inevitable late stage of capitalist development, this person asked, what is to be gained by having a special name for it; isn’t the existence of that stage implied in the generic name ‘capitalism’?” By that argument, I said, you shouldn’t have separate words for a baby or an old person, since they’re all implied in the human life cycle; but that would make language a great deal less useful for describing human life.

Similarly, if you simply refer to the alt right as “fascist” with no further distinction, you have no conceptual apparatus for addressing the unique features of the specific form of fascism that emerged on social media in the 00s, under the influence of neo-reaction and gamer culture, and is exemplified by Richard Spencer or GamerGate.

And getting back to our original example of Trumpian fascism as an outgrowth of the many preexisting toxic, authoritarian tendencies in American culture, we’re left with no way of distinguishing the level of authoritarianism that has emerged from the Tea Party on, and culminated in Trump, from the levels of authoritarianism in previous American history. If we lack anything more nuanced than “America was always fascist,” how are we to deal conceptually with an administration that takes a Schmittian view of executive power and legality, and is following the playbooks of Orban, Erdoğan and Putin in attempting to systematically destroy the independence of the courts and all civil society organizations? As Beth argued above, fascists make use of the authoritarian tools of the existing society — but they do so on a greatly intensified level.

In stressing the unique level of the fascist threat today, we do not deny that it is an outgrowth of strong racist, patriarchal, and authoritarian currents which have existed throughout the country’s history. If anything, the fact that this new level of authoritarianism has grown out of the previous American culture makes it clear that we cannot go back to the status quo ante. Once Trumpism is defeated, we can never return to “normal.” We must finish the work of Reconstruction that was never more than half-heartedly begun after the Civil War, and ended before it was fairly started with the Great Betrayal of 1877; we must reckon with the toxic political, social, and economic culture of our society, and all its structural injustices, on a scale greater than the denazification of postwar Germany, in order to make sure this never happens again.

There seems to be a great deal of overlap, probably not by accident, between the edgelords who say “America/capitalism has always been fascist,” and the assorted tankie, campist, and Dirtbag Left types — Greenwald, Dore, Taibbi, etc. — who actually hate liberals and centrists worse than they hate full-blown fascists. They have a lot in common with Third Period Stalin, who, by denouncing Social Democrats as “social fascists” and forbidding Communists to join them in united fronts, facilitated the Nazi rise to power while at the same time alienating many potential sympathizers. Indeed, as they say “America was always fascist” and “liberals are fascist,” these people often wind up denying that the actual fascists themselves are fascist. Hence their unique level of hatred for “shitlibs” and the “professional-managerial class,” to the point of repeating right-wing talking points (“TDS,” “Russiagate was a big nothingburger”) to own them. We see it in their jostling for guest slots on Tucker Carlson, and in people like Matt Taibbi volunteering as “Twitter files” hacks for Elon Musk. Behind the facade of leftism, they are actually friends of fascism.

The practical effect of saying “America was always fascist,” “capitalism was always fascist,” etc., is the same as that of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary in 1984: it leaves us less capable of making meaningful statements about reality or acting to change it.  

As for the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet, Reich falls into the common mistake of thinking that economic growth is necessarily tied to physical growth. As I explained in a recent article, economic growth is really about value, not stuff, so the physical limitations of the planet — while very real and consequential — are not a good reason to be suspicious of continuous economic growth as such.

Previously, he made the same argument at greater length against David Attenborough:

Sir David Attenborough expressed a very popular sentiment when he said in 2013: “We have a finite environment — the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”

The problem with this thinking is that it completely misconstrues the concept of growth in economics.

“By growth, economists mean value-creation exchanged in the marketplace,” writes Joakim Book. Once we understand the economic perspective, it becomes clear that growth in this sense can be practically infinite, even in a world of limited physical resources.

“Although we live in a world of a limited number of atoms,” write Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley in their 2022 book Superabundance, “there are virtually infinite ways to arrange those atoms. The possibilities for creating new value are thus immense.”

As Tim Worstall writes, “GDP is not minerals — or anything else physical — processed. It’s value added. The limit to GDP is therefore in knowing how to add value. Therefore, while physical resources are obviously scarce — there’d be no subject called economics if that were not so — it is not physical resources which limit economic growth. It’s knowledge.”

He also states quotes economist Josh Hendrickson to the effect that economic growth “is about ‘finding more efficient uses of resources.’”

But if the typical debate between degrowthers and ecomodernists degenerates into their talking past one another because of failure to agree on a coherent definition of “growth,” or even clearly state differing definitions of growth, Carroll simply shifts the ambiguity to new ground by failing to define “value” adequately. He fails to clarify whether he’s talking about exchange-value or use-value, or to explain why an increase in use-value or efficiency should necessarily result in increased exchange-value. 

In fact capitalism’s imperative of ever-expanding accumulation and profit operates through “value-creation,” not primarily in the sense of creating new utilities or use-values, but of finding previously non-commodified things to commodify. Sharon Kuruvilla (“Neon Veins, Iron Fist,” Feb. 21) writes: 

Borrowing a phrase from Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas, cyberpunk explores the “colonization of the lifeworld by systemic imperatives.” For a bit of background for those of you not aware of Habermas’s thought, Habermas defines the lifeworld as the everyday domain of intrapersonal values, meanings, and cultural norms; it’s the everyday world we all inhabit, governed by human agency and community. He defines this against what he defines as systemic imperatives – which for him are large-scale impersonal mechanisms such as the market and bureaucracies that are governed entirely by instrumental rationality (efficiency, control, and goal-orientation). For Habermas, while systemic imperatives have their role in governing societies, contemporary societies tend to colonize the lifeworld with the systemic imperatives — in plain english, the everyday world we live in is slowly replaced with a world where the only imperative is that of the cost-benefit analysis — does this make me better?

And when capitalism does increase use-values, that should not result, in the long run, in an increase in exchange-value unless it also requires increased material inputs like labor or natural resources. The natural tendency, absent monopoly pricing through enclosures like intellectual property, is for technological advances that reduce the need for resource inputs to similarly reduce the exchange-value of outputs. 

As I argued elsewhere, the natural tendency of technological progress, efficiency, and abundance is deflationary — i.e., their tendency is to destroy exchange value. 

Although most degrowthers are not as clear on the matter as they could be, the prevailing idea of degrowth is not a reduction in material living standards, but an end to growth in GDP and in ecological footprints (i.e. the consumption of material inputs) — the two of which are linked. GDP is a metric of the total exchange-value of all goods and services produced; other than embedded rents from artificial scarcities like intellectual property, the exchange value of goods and services is primarily a measure of the total cost of inputs. So the idea of infinite growth resulting entirely from expansion of exchange-value, with no increase in material resources consumed, is inconsistent with reality unless a major part of GDP consists of unearned monopoly rents. And that’s particularly true for the idea of economic growth through finding more efficient uses for resources; more efficient resource use should reduce production cost, and hence price and GDP.

Applying this principle to Carroll’s argument, the only way “knowledge” can result in economic growth is if it is enclosed as a source of profit through artificial scarcities like intellectual property. Otherwise, its natural tendency is toward degrowth. 

The economic model of growth in exchange-value through enclosure, even as technologies of abundance decrease the material cost of producing a given level of use-value, was described by Peter Frase as the “anti-Star Trek.” In the anti-Star Trek universe, the same post-scarcity technologies — matter-energy replicators, etc. — exist as in the regular Star Trek. The difference lies in the socially constructed relations of ownership.

Anti-Star Trek takes these same technological premises: replicators, free energy, and a post-scarcity economy. But it casts them in a different set of social relations. Anti-Star Trek is an attempt to answer the following question:

Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?…

Like industrial capitalism, the economy of anti-Star Trek rests on a specific state-enforced regime of property relations. However, the kind of property that is central to anti-Star Trek is not physical but intellectual property, as codified legally in the patent and copyright system….

This is the quality of intellectual property law that provides an economic foundation for anti-Star Trek: the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that you “own”. In order to get access to a replicator, you have to buy one from a company that licenses you the right to use a replicator. (Someone can’t give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license). What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. So if the Captain Jean-Luc Picard of anti-Star Trek wanted “tea, Earl Grey, hot”, he would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea.

If anything, the imperative toward capitalist growth in the real world has driven a reduction in use-values and utilities alongside the increase in exchange-values. What we actually see is an increasing tendency toward what’s variously called enshittification (Cory Doctorow) or the rot economy (Ed Zitron) or the supremacy of business over industry (Thorstein Veblen). There is more profit in stripping assets, cannibalizing productive enterprises for the parts — and in the process reducing utility to the consumer — than in creating new utilities.

Kuruvilla describes the cyberpunk reality that has resulted from the subordination of the digital public square and the body politic to the imperatives of capital.

From the toxic social networks produced by digital publics being infested by bullshit and rage (not helped by today’s digital intelligence), biotech CEOs promising designer children, a president backed by technocapitalist elites such as Elon Musk and venture capitalists, a vice president inspired by a neoreactionary thinker (Curtis Yarvin) in favour of a “digital patchwork”, Elon whining about the “woke” design of female game characters, or violence being more and more accepted as a means to achieving one’s ends, the lifeworld we now all inhabit appears more closer to that of cyberpunk fiction than that envisioned of any optimistic futurist such as Johan Norberg, Stephen Pinker or Iain Banks.

But none of this is an inevitable side-effect of technology as such. The mistake of theorists like Lewis Mumford (The Pyramid of Power) and Jacques Ellul (Technology) was to see totalitarianism as inherent in cybernetic technology itself, rather than in the power structure into which it was adopted. Norbert Wiener himself, the father of cybernetics, made that distinction, according to Kuruvilla. He  

criticized the drive of capitalists and fascists to reduce people to specific, clearly delineated roles and responsibilities. His critique of this drive, not just moral but instrumental – reducing the broad scope of what people can do limits their greatest potential. A person is not born with a specific role to play given by their genetic inheritance, rather they are capable of constant engagement with the world and thus are capable of a great many things throughout their life. It’s this possibility that our aspiring autocrats and oligarchs wish to crush.

To take one example, the enshittification of social media results from the legal enclosure of network effects as a source of rent, artificially increasing switching costs and thereby enabling corporate owners to create walled garden “Death Star” platforms. The way to prevent such enshittification and totalitarian enclosure, on the other hand, is what Cory Doctorow calls “adversarial interoperability”: eliminating the artificial legal barriers to ordinary people building their own instances atop of or outside the platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Amazon, etc., without their permission.

The same is true of most of the toxic aspects of corporate globalization, which are not the result of production or transportation technologies as such but rather of the social structure. The “comparative advantage” that drives most outsourcing and offshoring is an artificial one, resulting from state interventions that make long-distance shipping artificially cheap (massive transportation subsidies, a foreign policy centered on controlling fossil fuel resources, etc.) and facilitate legal monopoly over product designs contracted out to nominally independent shops (draconian global intellectual property accords, which enable a “manufacturing” corporation to outsource all actual production to nominally independent contractors, while maintaining sole legal right both to authorize production of given designs and to dispose of the product). The primary “efficiency” sought out by Western capital in Third World countries is cheap, easily exploitable labor — labor which is, in fact, as skilled or more skilled than much of the labor in Western countries. And exporting production to where the cheap labor is is artificially feasible because of the interventions already mentioned. Absent the transportation subsidies and IP laws, factories in Asia could simply disregard Western patents and produce identical goods for sale to their own domestic markets at a fraction of the price, rather than selling them for a pittance to be marked up several hundred percent on Walmart shelves. And under those circumstances, with all costs fully internalized and artificial barriers to production removed, it would be more efficient to relocalize production of a major share of goods consumed in the West.

That is not to say that protectionism is good or trade is bad, obviously. What’s bad is false efficiencies created by externalities and artificial scarcity.

What’s needed, ultimately, is to strip capital of its ability to pursue an extensive growth model based on ever-growing consumption of resources, and to enclose what efficiencies it does create as a source of rents and passing them along to the consumers. Just as the Diggers almost 400 years ago tore down physical walls and began cultivating a reclaimed commons, we must tear down the legal walls and reclaim for ourselves the benefits created by our own collective intellect.