There has been considerable discussion about what to do if Trump loses in November, yet refuses to leave office.
But, let’s look at a broader problem: there’s open discussion that Trump and the republicans are trying to steal the election (as has happened before) – what if they try to steal the election, and appear to win by some margin? Let’s talk about that, shall we?
In Bush V Gore, we now know that Gore actually won Florida, i.e.: the presidency. Between the “brooks brothers riot” and the supreme court, and Gore’s political cowardice, the republicans stole that election and put their man in, who proceeded to make a spectacular hash of things. In Georgia in 2016, Kemp V Abrams, Kemp “won” by “just under 55,000 votes” in spite of open and public discussion about how he suppressed the vote: [wapo]
- Kemp oversaw an aggressive effort to purge voters before the election, with nearly 700,000, or 10 percent, removed from the rolls in the year before the election.
- Kemp placed 53,000 voter registrations in electoral limbo in October, with the Associated Press estimating that 70 percent were black voters
- More than 200 polling places across the state were closed, primarily in poor and minority neighborhoods.
- A still-unexplained 4.2 percent undervote in the lieutenant governor’s race, especially prevalent in minority precincts, could indicate serious problems with paperless, touch-screen voting machines in those areas.
In other words, Kemp lost by an unknown margin, but a significant one. He does not belong in office, he belongs in prison.
If you believe in “democracy” as opposed to “representative democracy” (e.g.: oligarchy) you should be willing to come out on a limb with me and say that Trump V Clinton was won – handily – by Clinton. The electoral college is not a democratic institution, it is one of the many tools that the oligarchy has put in place to moot the popular vote. Trump was not, and is not, currently a legitimate president, he’s a pretender (in the old sense of the word: “a person who aspires to a title or a position.” In a fit of epic projection, he and his supporters ran around chanting “lock her up!” while middle-of-the-road roadkill like Nancy Pelosi tried to work within the system that has been so good to them, to keep the situation stable. In case you hadn’t noticed, that “stability” has cost everyone a tremendous amount. [including some truly spectacular instability]
To add insult to injury, Trump was installed over the popular vote, and it later turned out (surprise, surprise) that he had invited Russian interference in the 2016 election, and his family, his supporters, and he naturally lied about it. Dig back down the timeline of that sordid affair and you will realize that everyone gave false testimony about wikileaks, the meeting with Russian agent Veselnitskaya, etc. I don’t think the Russian involvement did a lot to influence the election – it was the FBI’s absurd investigations of Hillary Clinton’s emails that did the damage – but it still shifted the vote a bit, and the election was stolen at the electoral college, anyhow. Trump tried the same trick with Ukraine instead of Russia but Trump’s bozos (particularly Rudy Giuliani) couldn’t do anything but a half-assed job. By the time the democrats got around to impeaching him, it was thoroughly too late – but once again the fix was in and Trump was left in power by those who installed him there; and they would have left him in power even if he had shot someone on 5th Avenue, as they smugly said.
Trump never was a legitimate president, is not a legitimate president now, and is attempting to (with the aid of his co-conspirators) steal the 2020 election, too. And weak-kneed democrats ask hand-wringingly, “what happens if he loses and refuses to leave office”? Motherfuckers: he already lost and he’s served a full term. What do think is going to happen?
So, let’s fall back on Rousseau’s logic and why The Social Contract was considered a blueprint for revolution, and Rousseau was – in his day – seen as a dangerous, radical, weirdo and not a shining star of the enlightenment. Rousseau argues that the state derives its legitimacy not from divine authority, but by consent of the governed. This consent, he says, is a ratification of an unwritten social contract – an agreement between the individual and the state – in which the individual gives up some of their natural rights in return for the state aggregating them and using them, again, on behalf of the people. For example: tax moneys are collected in order to build organizations like a Center for Disease Control, which serves the people who paid for it. Tax moneys are not collected in order to support a president’s golf habit, whether that president is legitimate, or not. Rousseau further notes – and this is where he got into hot water – that if a government begins breaking the social contract, the citizens no longer owe it allegiance; in fact it’s no longer a “government” it is now an occupying power, and the citizens’ rights re-confer upon them. At that point, the former citizens are welcome to wander about wearing Guy Fawkes masks, take drugs, shoot cops, and burn things. Because it’s no longer their cop – by the magic of Rousseau’s political alchemy, when the government gave up its legitimacy, the cop had a choice: either join the newly criminal enterprise known as “the former government” or to home and find something else to do. The path for a government to regain legitimacy is equally clear: they need to do all the things a legitimate government does, and then they are legitimate, again. But it’s more complicated than just stopping sending goons to pick protesters up off the street without due process [ <- “due process” in that sentence is the fulcrum on which the social contract rests] it needs to stop pretending to be democratic, needs to stop negating the political will of the citizens, and needs to stop installing illegitimate pretenders to office. If you dial back on the zoom a bit, and look at the big picture of the United States today, you can see the social contract being ignored pretty much, absolutely, everywhere. For example, in Florida, The People voted to allow felons their voting rights back. First off, under the social contract, a “democracy” has stepped onto thin ice if it decides that anyone is disenfranchised; that’s manifestly absurd because a million felons in Florida are a tiny drop in a huge population, even if they voted as a bloc, which they won’t. Yet, when The People tried to correct this crime against them, the ruling oligarchs in Florida announced that they were going to simply ignore the popular will. Way to “social contract”, Florida!
I’m actually sandbagging the case in favor of the US by pretending that it has, at some point in its political life, been a legitimate state – and I suspect that many of you know that I do not and never have thought that. Legitimacy is, obviously, a continuum between “totally legitimate” and “totally illegitimate” and no government is going to hit either of those ends; they’re mostly going to hover back and forth around the middle, with some dipping far one way or the other. Since its inception, the US has hovered toward the illegitimate end of the spectrum: after all, this is a government that negotiated into its founding documents that a significant percentage of the population were slaves whose ‘owners’ got to cast votes for them (that is the “representative” part of US “representative democracy”; the senate is based on the size of the population, including slaves as partial human beings). That’s disgusting. Then, the first major political action of the new US government was to raise an army to suppress popular tax revolts. The irony is rich: by the time the US had separated from England, taxes on the average US citizen were 30% higher than they were under English rule. The point is that, under Rousseau’s reasoning, Daniel Shays was in the right, as were the whiskey rebels – let alone Nat Turner and John Brown. To Turner, at least, the US was unquestionably an occupying power.
So, what happens if Trump – the illegitimate president – compounds his illegitimacy by refusing to leave office? By the way: of course he will – he feels he stole it fair and square, “never give a sucker an even break” and all that – he’s “all in” on illegitimacy already. We The People need to declare the social contract broken. The US government has no legitimate power over us, at that point, all they have is force. And, all we have is force, too. It’s probably too much to hope for, but 1 million people descending on Washington DC to burn the white house and everyone in it (who does not have the sense to repudiate their role in the occupying power and leave before the flames reach them) would be a completely legitimate response to a usurper. I’m not saying it would be a nice response, but when you’re talking about a government that is abrogating the social contract, that is what it means when The People say “we no longer owe you obedience.”
At this point, I suppose it’s traditional for a lefty/liberal/progressive to say a few things like “of course, I don’t believe violence is a good idea.” But that would be bullshit, and I feel like I owe you honesty: it may be the best option. For one thing, if you guillotine a few ci-devant now and then, the others are a bit more cautious for a generation, or two. Why do you think that European nobility switched from being “the anointed of god” to the “international rich jet set”? It’s harder to string them up, and in return they don’t expect The People to kiss their ring and their grubby feet. Right now, the US has a large body of well-armed morons who want another civil war but what they don’t understand is that re-litigating north versus south, slavery versus abolition, isn’t going to happen. That’s done. Sherman and Grant re-litigated that point:
by May the 10th (1865) Richmond had fell, it was a time I remember oh so well
The earlier part of the verse was “we were hungry, just barely alive.” Don’t forget that, either. The enlightenment-era politicians and nobility who clutched their pearls at Rousseau’s publishing a manual justifying revolution were right. Mostly. It’s a manual justifying anarchy, and revolution is on that path – you have to overturn the illegitimate political order to get them to fuck off, first.
Here’s where I’m going with this: if Trump refuses to leave the white house, We, The People need a response. It need not be a unified or coordinated response – and it won’t be, because we’ll be on our own. What we categorically should not do is look to Nancy Pelosi for our response. We should freestyle it, because, after all, we are no longer bound by the social contract as long as there is a pretender occupying the oval office. That means federal laws are all moot. That means nobody owes any taxes to the federal government. That means that federal marshals are occupying troops – and are legitimate military targets. Someone should warn them, first, out of courtesy. I was thinking about things to do at a local level and realized that one might be to (remember: use someone else’s printer because the NSA has hidden fingerprints in printer output) print up some fliers that read:
“Hello neighbor –
I see that you have a ‘Trump’ flag in your yard or on your house, and I would like to give you a few things to think about. Since Trump has decided not to vacate the white house after losing the election, he is a usurper – a counter-revolutionary – a traitor to the principles of US democracy. He’s going to eventually suffer some horrible consequences for that mistake, but that’s his problem. Let’s talk about you. By flying a Trump flag, you are publicly supporting a usurper; that’s treason. I don’t think it’s particularly smart to declare your treason so publicly, and I wonder if you’ve thought it through. Since the government has been taken over and has become an occupying power, when you chose to align yourself with it, you’re announcing that you’re part of the counter-revolution.
We would be quite justified to hang you from a tree with your Trump sign around your neck. When Trump finally is driven from the White House there will be arrests and prison sentences, but the inevitable purge probably won’t reach far down the hierarchy past the executive level. You probably think this will never affect you. You are wrong. Your neighbors who aren’t flying banners supporting treason are going to remember that you did, and that you stepped up and made yourself and your family fair game.
Signed,
Guy Fawkes, your friendly neighborhood ANTIFA.”
Cue shit-fit. A lot of postal letter carriers would get shot by hopped-up gun-toting Trump supporters who were hiding behind their couches waiting for ANTIFA to kick in the door in their fashionable Doc Maartens.
I’m fucking sick of stupid online journalists asking “what do we do if Trump doesn’t leave?” in the failing news media. The answer is: general tax revolt, general strike, and a million people march on Washington with pitchforks, torches, and rifles, and burn the White House. I’m sure that the slaves who built the place would have loved to see that. And leave the ash and rubble untouched for a few generations, pour encourager les autres.
The enlightenment ideal of political speech as protected speech is because as long as a dog is barking, it won’t bite. Governments want to have free speech because that way there’s an element of the body politic that keeps interrupting the revolutionaries with plaintive JAQing off like, “are you sure violence is justified?” Are you fucking kidding me? If there’s ever been a monument that needs to be torched, it’s the white house. If there has ever been a US politician who loses an election and refuses to leave the white house, then the pitchforks and torches are fully justified self defense against a usurper.
What do we do if Trump doesn’t leave? Pitchforks and torches. Barricades and guillotines. General strikes and insurgencies. Tahrir Square and The Maidan. What a stupid question.
While I also worry about the catastrophes you describe here, I also remember something from the Nixon era.
I didn’t hear about it until a while later, but apparently at the height of the Watergate crisis, one of the non-appointees that keep the White House running quietly put in an order that if Nixon tried to call for a nuclear attack, the command would go through him, to cancel if necessary. Basically, there was enough concern about his mental stability that they were prepared to block any order that they thought was too extreme.
Granted, Trump has replaced most of the top people with people who would be prepared to do whatever he said, no matter how extreme, but a lot of the people below him are more committed to what we might call “the rule of law” or “the constitution” to the point that they might simply refuse to recognize his orders if he tries to hold on to command after losing the election. I can imagine the Secret Service simply saying, you’re not president any more and, if necessary, carrying him out the door.
The thing is, in the countries where the top person (man, usually) manages to ignore the rule of law, he has some enforcement arm behind him, like the Army or the Revolutionary Guards. So far, he’s managed to alienate most of the parts of the US government with the organization and resources to keep him in power. He’s only holding on because what he has done so far is arguably within the letter of the law and nobody wants to set the precedent of deposing a lawfully elected president.
It is, after all, the willingness of the overwhelming majority in the USA to adhere to a more or less common understanding of the constitution and the law, even if they hate the results, that keeps the country from dissolving into chaos.
HIstorically, crowds and marchers and strikes and all the rest weigh far less in revolutionary calculus than the 600-pound gorilla in the room: the military.
If Trump loses and comes up with some transparent excuse for calling the election illegitimate, Biden and the majority of Americans who voted for him will call upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do the one thing they have never had to do in our history: walk into the Oval Office and say “Mr. President, we are here to escort you to your civilian life.” Based on what I know of military thought and discipline, I believe they would do this.
If they refuse to carry out this duty, then they will have to call out their troops to defend against the inevitable strikes and riots you speak of. Then, based on history, the pressure would shift to the mid-level colonels and majors and lieutenants and so forth as to whether they would actually follow those orders, and things would get a lot more messy. But if the military were to form a unified front in support of Trump, then the uprising would probably lose, and that would be end of the American experiment in democracy. We the People simply aren’t desperate enough to engage in the sort of high-casualty tactics you speak of, which would be necessary to try to get the rank-and-file soldiers to shift sides.
Mao was right about one thing: in revolutions, power really does come from the barrel of a gun. That’s why I think we liberals should do everything we can to avoid the kind of violent confrontation you are describing in this post. When it comes to guns, the military easily comes in first. Conservative “militia” brownshirt 2nd amendment thugs come in second, and we liberals, no matter the number of warm bodies on our side, come in a distant third.
I also don’t think it’s helpful to call Trump an illegitimate president due to losing the popular vote, because it cheapens the word in case he defies an election and become truly illegitimate. He won the game playing by the rules as they were presented to him, and he can always say “If the rules had been different and the popular vote won, I would have run my campaign differently, and maybe I would have won that election too.” And maybe he would have; we’ll never know. I imagine if the positions were opposite, with a Democrat winning the electoral vote and losing the popular vote and making the same argument, I would find it convincing, so I have to accept it coming from Trump as well.
Bush v Gore is trickier, but I think Gore did the right thing by giving up. We’ve seen how horribly corrosive it is for a leader to turn his back on political norms, and leaders obeying Supreme Court decisions is definitely one of those precedents we want to preserve.
I’m wondering how to distinguish your arguments from those that might be made by J. Random SovereignCitizen (except that you’re likely more literate).
And I’m leery of thinking that it’s OK to do something that I wouldn’t call OK if “the other side” did the same.
billseymour, are you addressing me or Marcus? Either way, I don’t follow your argument. Sovereign Citizens are characterized by their fundamental failure to understand what the law is (which is that it’s whatever a bunch of judges say it is). I don’t see how either Marcus or I is saying that.
If the other side said “this election isn’t legitimate because you deliberately didn’t count our votes,” I would be forced to admit that they had a point. Indeed, I think I would start to question whether I was on the right side at all.
Lots of talk about the general election and all of its problems, but the Dem primaries/caucuses were also a long way from a genuinely fair and democratic process. Were they nonetheless close enough, whatever that means? Is it not a good time to mention this? Or maybe it’s obvious enough that most don’t need to hear it (again)?
Of course, part of the responsibility lies with Republican state legislators/governors/etc., who for example were happy to make many people risk their lives (and others’ lives and the stability of our whole society) during a pandemic, in order to exercise their voting rights (to the limited extent that those are even recognized in such elections). So I’m not suggesting it all falls on the Dem establishment, but they did also have a role to play in their own primaries.
I have no reason to think an absence of legal authority/legitimacy should mean that it’s morally/politically acceptable for people to do whatever they want. So, for example, murdering somebody is still wrong, even in a situation where there are no legitimate cops/lawyers/judges/etc. who might do something about it.
I’m no Rousseau expert (nor do I care much about what he thought), but that doesn’t seem internally consistent for him either:
The point I’m making isn’t about representative assemblies and such, so put that stuff aside for the moment….. The concept of individuals having their own moral agency is lost, if that were only supposed to consist of the laws that are on the books. Those appear to be distinct things for Rousseau. So it doesn’t follow that (without them or a state to enforce them) anything and everything is “justified” as you claim. You still have a bunch of moral agents running around, doing good and bad and neutral things, who still need to be able to justify their actions, even if some or all of them have rejected what they regard as an illegitimate state.
brucegee1962: sorry, your comment @3 and mine @4 crossed paths in the æther. I think you said @3 what I was trying to say, only better (or more completely at least).
And Marcus, I’m certainly not saying that you’re a ”sovereign citizen”…you clearly know what you’re talking about; and that’s a difference in kind. Still, I have a problem with thinking that the laws don’t apply to me. OTOH, LykeX@6 has a point; but I’m still hopeful that the Democrats are just gormless and not actively evil.
And consciousness razor @7
That, too.
I guess real people are really complicated. That’s probably why I’m a computer programmer…machines are so much easier to deal with. 8-)
I want to add something about the electoral college. It is a perfectly reasonable system to come up with if you start with one central premise: that no one should ever have to vote for anyone whom they have not met personally. So local farmers and landholders vote for one of their neighbors to go to the state capitol and represent them; at the capitol, they vote for someone in the room to go the national capitol and represent them, and the folks in the capitol get together and vote for one of their number to become president.
Imagine for a moment that your only sources of information about any candidate for president in your lifetime came from two places: what they had written, and what journalists (who also might never have met them) had written about them. You never got a chance to lay eyes on any of the candidates, never listened to them speak, never even got a chance to see a photograph. Would you really feel qualified to know which one was honest and which was a dictator wannabe or a con man? Listen to someone talk for ten minutes, and you get a sense for whether they’re honest or not — but the Founders were living in a world where most folks would never get that opportunity with a presidential candidate. Heck, they wouldn’t even get a chance to meet the journalists.
I think it’s obvious that if Madison and the rest had lived in the modern television era, they would have come up with something quite different. We’re just stuck living with the consequences of the best idea people in the 18th century could come up with. In a way it’s a bit like religion, where we’re stuck with morality that made sense in the bronze age.
Whatever happens in November things aren’t going to end well. Trump wins? Riots. Trump loses? Riots. Whether he leaves office or not there’ll be riots. If people march on Washington DC it’ll just turn into urban combat.
At this point i think the big questions are who will the military back, and what’s the weather in November going to be like?
brucegee1962@#2:
HIstorically, crowds and marchers and strikes and all the rest weigh far less in revolutionary calculus than the 600-pound gorilla in the room: the military.
Yes, I’ve pointed that out in my writings here many times.
The military might do something, or they might not – they’re not going to act with unity. So it’d be best if they stood aside, and my money would be on the secret service detail frog-marching him out of the building.
But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It’s that The People would be entirely within their rights, and justified, to demonstrate their extreme displeasure including violently or with maximum property damage if they want. It’s no longer their government, it’s an occupying power. Of course, none of us are naive or idealistic enough to imagine that it wouldn’t get back on its feet and take horrible revenge; government is always willing to fall back on repression and outright terrorism if it cannot get what it wants legitimately.
That’s not a cute hypothetical, either. During the miner’s strikes in 1921, the government did not hesitate to create military tribunals, suspend habeas corpus, and try, convict, and sentence defendants without even giving them legal representation or a jury trial. so much for “rule of law” in that social contract.
But if the military were to form a unified front in support of Trump, then the uprising would probably lose, and that would be end of the American experiment in democracy.
Most americans don’t know this, but because of fear of communications problems, like those represented in Doctor Strangelove the US ballistic missile submarine fleet … each boomer is under the control of its captain, who is capable of unilaterally ordering the release of nuclear weapons. For me, the nightmare scenario involves a pro-Trump boomer whose captain decides to single-handedly resolve a contested election by threatening force. Of course, nuclear weapons aren’t very precise for that kind of purpose but I’m presupposing a captain who is not rational.
Mao was right about one thing: in revolutions, power really does come from the barrel of a gun.
I don’t recall he qualified it to “in revolutions” – I think it was a general observation. Ah, yes, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” Mao did not believe in democracy, obviously – his view of the social contract was “you do what I say.”
Conservative “militia” brownshirt 2nd amendment thugs come in second, and we liberals, no matter the number of warm bodies on our side, come in a distant third.
I don’t believe that. The conservative 2nd amendment thugs are not good soldiers and there are lots of fluffy liberals with military training, who are capable of setting aside our liberal scruples for a while. But the 2nd amendment thugs would be stomped flat by the national guard in short order – and they know that. Why else do you think the “boogaloo bois” just stand around trying to look scary with their tactical gear they bought on the internet? They’re chickenshits and they know it. They’d only stand against unarmed civilians, and they’d probably shit themselves the first time one of them got coated with flaming gasoline.
I also don’t think it’s helpful to call Trump an illegitimate president due to losing the popular vote, because it cheapens the word in case he defies an election and become truly illegitimate.
Well, if you want to establish degrees of illegitimacy, then I’ll agree with you. But I think it’s ceding too much to respect that any “representative democracy” that has been internally gerrymandered by its oligarchs, is a legitimate political system. Also, the structure of the house/senate was also deliberately contrived to disempower the people, which is the kiss of death for any claim the US government might make to political legitimacy. It’s impossible to claim to be a representative democracy or any other kind of democracy at all, when there are structural mechanisms put in place to ensure that the will of the people can be ignored not “sometimes” but “virtually all of the time.”
I imagine if the positions were opposite, with a Democrat winning the electoral vote and losing the popular vote and making the same argument, I would find it convincing, so I have to accept it coming from Trump as well.
You do. I don’t. The democrats are not as overtly evil as the republicans but they are also part of the oligarchic system that the US’ founding fathers put in place over the people. When someone says “the system is not legitimate” that means that you don’t just accept the candidate you like; they’re all political criminals to some degree or another.
Bush v Gore is trickier, but I think Gore did the right thing by giving up. We’ve seen how horribly corrosive it is for a leader to turn his back on political norms, and leaders obeying Supreme Court decisions is definitely one of those precedents we want to preserve.
Do you think that if Gore had gone to the wire, Bush would have felt he had enough political mojo to launch an invasion of Iraq, on phony grounds? Or, do you think that Gore would have done that? Because, if you don’t, then – no – I don’t think Gore did the right thing by giving up. He was just being a good servant of the oligarchy that made him.
billseymour@#4:
I’m wondering how to distinguish your arguments from those that might be made by J. Random SovereignCitizen (except that you’re likely more literate).
And I’m leery of thinking that it’s OK to do something that I wouldn’t call OK if “the other side” did the same.
Well-intentioned anarchists were making the same arguments long before the libertarianoid sov cit and fringe anti-tax crowd came along. I’m OK with saying that the arguments against the state’s legitimacy are well-founded and accurate – it does not matter who they come from. The next part is the trick: it does matter why. The anarchists in the 1900s were calling for the destruction of a system of capitalist government in which the government and its military always threw its force in on the side of corporate interests, against labor. They wanted to destroy the government and re-structure a system that was basically socialist. Naturally, there were some that just wanted to see the world burn, but the anarchists of the depression were serious people who were concerned with righting some grievous wrongs. It is unfortunate for us and the world that they did not succeed; imagine what the world might be like without the US empire. Meanwhile, the sovereign citizens and anarcho-libertarians appear, to me, to be engaged in motivated reasoning, working backwards from “I don’t want to pay any taxes and I want all the drugs I can afford.” Those that aren’t useful idiots are class traitors. But I haven’t seen many of them that are concerned with the welfare of the workers,
So, you can say “you may be right about this thing, but for the wrong reasons.” As I have mentioned elsewhere, this is one of the internal dynamics of revolutions – you can have a lot of people who are “against the government” but they’re not all “for” the same thing. If such a complex melange of different agendas manages to topple a government, they cannot agree and you wind up with horrific rounds of internal purges and you wind up with Robespierre or Stalin rising to the top, however temporarily.
I think we should challenge the US government’s legitimacy in the context of “hey, assholes, do better.” I don’t want to see guillotines in Lafayette Park unless they push the people to that extreme. The government could, fairly easily, in fact, re-structure itself to be less corrupt – as Howard Zinn once pointed out, Kennedy had the political gunpowder to overturn segregation, he just didn’t care. Pause for a bit and think about that.
LykeX@#6:
If the other side said “this election isn’t legitimate because you deliberately didn’t count our votes,” I would be forced to admit that they had a point. Indeed, I think I would start to question whether I was on the right side at all.
Exactly.
Apparently one topic of discussion in the democratic smoky rooms has been whether or not to attack gerrymandering, or just flip it around so they can take advantage of it. After all, it works great for the republicans.
If they do that, I’ll be here calling for them to be put up against the same wall as the republicans.
I don’t want to get into liberarianism, here, much, but I think I’ll offer a few things.
Libertarians seem to believe that if there was no government, there would be some kind of conveniently-arranged social structure that favored libertarians. That’s clearly fantasy-land. They don’t want big government, but they sure would like a government to step in when the workers say, “hey those libertarians look awfully well-fed and tasty to me! let’s eat a few of them!” They seem to imagine that the world will be pretty much like it is, with roads and internet and Avengers movies and pizza delivery – but that the only structural changes will be no taxes and no other social controls on their behavior. Except, you know, for social controls keeping hoi polloi from eating libertarians.
In my mind, I think of libertarians as literally “anti-social” – by which I mean that they are against civilization. They implicitly reject the idea that society is a give-and-take and imagine that, for them, it’s all “take” which is a silly fantasy-world. I will further add, that the libertarians I’ve talked with are some of the most politically naive people I have encountered outside of fundamentalist christians. They seem to have thought enough about politics to get to “… and then I pay no taxes” and stopped there.
billseymour@#8:
Still, I have a problem with thinking that the laws don’t apply to me.
Do you believe they apply to Trump and Kushner as they apply to you? Do you believe the laws are fair? If the laws are fair, then, OK, I can see how you might accept them. But if the laws are not fair, why would you respect them? Clearly, the law is not for you, so why does it apply to you?
We exist under compulsion: we are expected to obey these laws because otherwise the government’s agents will shoot 40 or 50 bullets through you, and they’ll get away with it. We show that we are obedient to the law, out of fear of the bullets, but that does not mean we owe the law obedience.
The argument the social contractarian makes is that, because we get these benefits from participating in a society, we owe the society certain things in order to make it work so it confers those benefits on us all. That is why, under a legitimate political system, we might say we owe taxes. Because, if we’re part of a legitimate state, we’re really just paying ourselves, anyway and the state is handling fair redistribution of surplus wealth. Right? The state uses the extra money it collects to take care of its less fortunate citizens, provide for roads, high quality medical care for all – that kind of stuff. When we see grifters that are epic tax cheats, who enrich themselves at the public expense, and direct public funds to their campaign donors – then we are staring into the abyss of recognizing that the state does not exist to serve anyone except its oligarchs; it is a failed state. It is not legitimate. You owe it nothing. Perhaps you owe your fellow worker solidarity, or perhaps you feel you owe someone less fortunate than you a bit of assistance – then, you need to recognize that the government is not going to discharge that duty for you. The tax money you gave to help that kid who needs a hand? It’s going to Lockheed Martin to buy a fucking F-35.
consciousness razor@#7:
Lots of talk about the general election and all of its problems, but the Dem primaries/caucuses were also a long way from a genuinely fair and democratic process. Were they nonetheless close enough, whatever that means? Is it not a good time to mention this? Or maybe it’s obvious enough that most don’t need to hear it (again)?
I felt that, by pointing out that the US government has had legitimacy issues, I was painting some criticism on the democrats, as well. But, for the record, they’re also a problem – not only with respect to how they manipulate their own internal processes, but by participating as the “designated opposite” in the two-party system, they are complicit in locking up the entire political system into a rigidly controlled anti-democratic structure. Is that good enough? Elsewhere I have pointed out that we need to get rid of the republican party, and – when that is accomplished – the democrats. Although I suspect that cowardly, amoral lot, would fall all over themselves to “reform” and damn quickly. Or, they’d split into two opposed parties and go right back to playing their usual games.
I have no reason to think an absence of legal authority/legitimacy should mean that it’s morally/politically acceptable for people to do whatever they want. So, for example, murdering somebody is still wrong, even in a situation where there are no legitimate cops/lawyers/judges/etc. who might do something about it.
I’m arguing about the duty and obedience that contractarians argue we owe the state. If the state is not legitimate, that obedience is no longer owed. When I say “do what you want” I mean, simply, that. It’s complicated and I may not explain this very well, but let’s take the idea that the state and its laws establish a system that serves as a sort of legally established ethics. That process is, naturally, subject to a great deal of debate, as the state and the people go back and forth trying to parse foundational law (the bill of rights) into specific law. It’s a legal system that may be an ethical system but if the state is not legitimate, then those negotiations no longer necessarily hold. We see the threat of that, in the US: if the nation dissolves into warring militias, some of them would be pushing their own racist/fundamentalist interpretations of some ethical system or other. Is there a moral system underlying all of that? I see no evidence of such a thing. I see only a mass of different opinions regarding “what is right?” that are almost unique at the level of the individual.
This is relevant because, in its laws and the process whereby the state establishes a legal system, it is a stand-in for an ethical system and a moral system. Some people are more or less in agreement with it, but the state uses its tools of compulsion (and the contractarian’s duty to a legitimate state) to spackle over disagreement in order to maintain the peace.
If we’re approaching things purely as contractarians, what’s left when the state is illegitimate? So are its laws and the ethical system it has tried to establish. When I say “people do as they want” I mean that they may feel free from that restraint and “do as thou will shall be the whole of the law.”
I am a social being (see my comment @#15) in that I believe it is society that creates and mediates the ethical systems we use to resolve basic inter-human conflict. Rejecting those completely is, again, what I could call “anti-social” – someone who wishes to act as though the agreed-upon interactions between people no longer apply is trying to establish their own society/civilization.
So, for example, murdering somebody is still wrong, even in a situation where there are no legitimate cops/lawyers/judges/etc. who might do something about it.
Absent a government establishing an ethical system that says murder is wrong, who does? Are you pointing toward some kind of natural law theory? I don’t see where “wrong” comes from.
I might also observe that a claim that “murder is wrong” in the absence of society or government is ahistoric: the first thing that seems to happen when society is upended is that people immediately begin to disagree about such things.
That’s a very libertarian interpretation of Rousseau. Like most of the enlightenment philosophers, though, he threw ideas in a lot of directions and it’s pretty easy to hang one’s interpretation on one or another. “A form of slavery” is not an interpretation I am familiar with, but I’m not going to dig through and try to find it. I wish the quote you cite referenced where Rousseau claimed that.
I’m not sure where that comes from, either. That interpretation seems to be at least somewhat rooted in Rousseau’s childhood trauma, when his father discovered that the “little committee” that ran Zurich was a completely false-front pseudodemocracy. I’d agree that many of his views regarding representative democracy appear to be tilted toward distrust of representatives.
I happen to share some of his distrust of representatives. I mean, look at the US congress and house of representatives, and tell me that distrust is unreasonable. Unlike a shockingly large number of house/senate members, for example, I am not a massive tax cheat or other criminal. If members of my family were getting hauled in by the FBI at the same rate, I’d be seriously concerned. Instead, I wonder how these people represent me in any way.
The concept of individuals having their own moral agency is lost, if that were only supposed to consist of the laws that are on the books.
Agreed.
I think where I diverge from you is that I see nothing but profuse, disagreeing, moral opinions once the laws are off the books. I’m OK with an argument that individuals have moral agency (i.e.: they have their own moral opinions and want to act on them) beyond the state. To me, it all looks like a great big mess – and I don’t see agreement even to the extent that “murder is wrong” is a reliably shared moral opinion.
I do think that you’re describing a very real dynamic that is important: there are people who feel that they are obeying the laws of the state, but those laws try to superceed their personal opinions. For example, an anti-abortion activist may acknowledge that the state (in principle) can allow something they, in their moral opinion, consider a crime,
So it doesn’t follow that (without them or a state to enforce them) anything and everything is “justified” as you claim. You still have a bunch of moral agents running around, doing good and bad and neutral things, who still need to be able to justify their actions, even if some or all of them have rejected what they regard as an illegitimate state.
But that is exactly how people behave when a society collapses and government is no longer around to enforce its laws (as an ethical system) Surely that can’t be coincidence?
I’ll also add that I am not promoting Rousseau’s ideas as right, in general. He was complex and contradictory and had a lot of ideas that strike me as flat-out ridiculous. For example, he made the argument that, before civilization was invented, man existed in a “state of nature” free of shame, laws, compulsion, money, and all of the evils of society. His apparent view – that society conveys a bunch of evils – is fundamentally silly, as well as anti-social. Voltaire famously took him to task for this ridiculous position, writing:
Voltaire’s argument is social, Rousseau’s is anti-social and ahistoric. Rousseau was writing before we understood evolution and the notion of co-evolution. It does not appear that there was a period in which humans, which are social animals, were anti-social. Indeed, it is our being social that distinguishes us and appears to have been critical to our survival.
Voltaire could not resist zinging Rousseau:
Billions of individual people say it’s wrong. And we say that because it’s something which causes people harm in various ways, and that can ignite more conflict which may result in even more harm.
We should know, because as conscious/sentient beings we’re able to have the experiences associated with those things. In other words, it’s based on empirical data that ordinary people can easily gather in their everyday lives. That’s where it comes from. Or if you like, that’s where it can be found in the real world — tons of disparate events scattered around all over the place.
That’s not how some think or what they’d like to be true (e.g., “God says so” is a popular alternative), but I think that’s basically correct and that it’s sufficient.
Well, I think I get what you mean, but even a civil war or a revolution isn’t literally “the absence of society,” if that’s interpreted very broadly. We’re a social species, and we always have been, as you know. So I’ll just interpret it as “no government.”
If people disagree about something, it’s not clear what you think that’s supposed to entail. The fact that there are murderers or liars or oligarchs or whatever — who are certainly capable of thinking all kinds of stuff that neither of us think, because we don’t have only one brain to share among us — that does not mean that we are incorrect about the fact that those people have done something bad or harmful. It should be easy for you to agree on some basic premise like “people are fallible; they can be mistaken,” and if that’s the case, then other minds thinking something else doesn’t create a genuine logical problem.
I’m not saying it’s a coincidence. Some may think they can get away with it, when there aren’t serious consequences dished out by some kind of law enforcement and criminal justice system, which may be very hard to avoid or counteract (much more than just your neighbor or whoever it may be).
Anyway, you can say this about practically any criminal activity, in all kinds of political environments (including a very stable and powerful state that’s not even close to collapse).
Bank robbers think they have a plan in which they can rob the bank and will not be caught. So they do rob banks, which doesn’t invalidate a general claim that “you shouldn’t rob banks.” (And of course, if your real interest is in fighting capitalism, let’s say, which is not wrong, then there are many better ways of doing that.)
Another type of example…. A guy who beats his wife thinks he can do it without her retaliating in some way, or that others won’t discover what’s happening, or that those with power in his patriarchal society won’t care, etc. So, yes, that kind of thing does still happen, no matter what the government may be like (or not like). But again, it doesn’t mean that we’re incorrect when we say that this behavior is harmful and immoral.
Let me elaborate on this a bit, just to emphasize a few other points….
Suppose that I kicked you in the balls. (Don’t worry: I don’t plan to actually do this.) That’s harmful to you in certain specific ways. You’d experience a sharp jolt of pain, probably more dull throbbing pain for a long while, nausea, perhaps long-term fertility problems, etc.
So, you will probably think something like “this is bad. I would have a preferred it if you (CR) had not done that. It was possible for you to not do that, which is more or less how I think things should be. Let’s not do that again.” That’s at least what I expect a person to think, given that they’re not so radically different from me that it would be a non-issue. But for something like a rock, which doesn’t have any such experiences, there is no reason to be concerned about that. Also, they don’t have balls, so there wouldn’t be any to kick in the first place.
Moving on. If you also happen to think “the cops will come to save the day somehow,” that is neither here nor there. Whether or not you think this, whether I’m worried about the cops arresting me for it, whether they do actually arrest me in cases when they get involved…. none of that changes the fact that kicking you in the balls is harmful.
It’s fairly obvious, but it’s worth saying that this is where the focus should be. And that’s just part of your experience, one that doesn’t depend on the cops (or others), how they might respond, whether those particular people happen to care, and so forth. I don’t think you could even get off the ground with a moral or political theory, if it’s supposed to be rooted in something like the latter, rather than how things can affect our experiences (or those of other animals, aliens, sentient AIs … anything that may have them, not just human beings).
Representative democracy is not an oligarchy. It is just that the oligarchy that has controlled the US from the day that the constitution was signed has put up limitations to prevent their loss of control. Suggested starting point to uncouple those two would be the end of the two party system. No self financing of candidates but through the government, I suggest a barrier of entry (aside from the age minimum in the constitution) but anyone that passes that can run, require anything supporting a candidate to be run through a PAC and 50% (just a random percentage) the money going into the PAC gets shunted into the fund that finances candidates. Not perfect by a long shot but it breaks the stranglehold of the two party system and reduces the need for money by the candidate themselves to start. Changes to how the voting itself goes is another avenue to be explored.
I find it hilarious that people complain about Hillary losing to Trump since she won the popular vote. Why? Hillary lost the popular vote to become the nominee of the democratic party. The numbers you see are with the votes cast by the super delegates which were instructed to vote for Hillary. This caused enough of a stink that they added a cosmetic change to the rules for choosing a candidate through the convention. Super delegates are not allowed to vote in the first round anymore so that at least the popular vote percentages can be seen, it is cosmetic since the only way to win in the first round is to get enough delegates that it doesn’t matter if the super delegates are added in or not.
Sorry but at this point you are nothing but someone like the people in the MAGA crowd around Trump who tried to smear Kamala Harris as not being an US citizen. There is nothing illegitimate in the way that Trump won. That you do not want him as president (I don’t as well and I’m not an US citizen or live in the US), that you don’t like how the system is setup, none of that invalidates that it was a legitimate win as opposed to that hanging chad win of Bush where they instead of doing a recount, or even a complete revote, said he wins.
If it is about election interference first two things. 1) Pot kettle black (or in the case of the US a whole kitchen calling the kettle black). 2) Two wrongs don’t make a right. This is another of those absolutely laughable things that the true believers around Hillary have been using so that they wouldn’t have to do that evil thing called introspection to understand why she lost, much easier to blame an evil outsider for their own failing. Just think for a moment. The DNC and the GOP are the two foremost entities on the planet in needing to understand how a US citizen thinks so that they can use that to undermine their opponents (that is the DNC or the GOP) while bolstering their own side. These two entities and affiliates spent billions on an election while being so clueless about what mattered that an outsider spending mere millions managed to outperform both the DNC and GOP in manipulating the US voters in the way that someone putting their foot down in an Indy500 car outperforms me when I grab my bike to bike the same distance. That is just not believable. If it comes down to the hacking, the screeching of the Hillary true believers again looking for a culprit so that they didn’t have to look at their own failings (hint when the strategists of your party state that Hillary is the only one who doesn’t have a 99%+ chance of winning against the Cheetos, Valium Man or Fake Born Again Fundamentalist and no chance against the 10 other GOP candidates and her being the only one with those bad chances, then the fault is probably with you and not some outsider) drowned out the voices of the GOP candidates and the party itself which noted they were also getting hacked. The Russians were equal opportunity assholes and hacked everyone they could get their hands on, including neutral parties like voter roll databases. In general they were working (both with the manipulations which were on both sides to just make everyone look bad and the hacking) more to undermine the trust of the US voter in the system then getting a specific candidate elected.
And now for the fun part. If the Russians have this outsized influence, they don’t, on the US presidential (and congress + senate) elections expect them to use it to get rid of Trump. They need international stability if they want to ever become relevant again. I mean just Europe has 4 economies bigger then them with two having more working nuclear submarines (and probably more nukes that can be used as well) then they have at the moment heck the Europeans even have functional aircraft carriers (for certain definitions of functional) where the Russians effectively lost their last one when they tried to fix it in the dry dock.
And if Trump doesn’t move in January the secret service will remove him from the White House. Unless that branch has also had the core deciders replaced by yes men.
I think that it’s one thing to talk about whether a government is or is not legitimate in theory because of how it responds (or doesn’t respond) to the popular will, but quite another thing to talk about whether an uprising or civil war is actually a good thing in a practical sense. Historically, uprisings and revolutions tend to result in a lot of people, both innocent and guilty, getting killed, and often result in a new government that’s just as bad or worse than the old one that was toppled. From a pragmatic point of view, I think that a government has to be really, really bad in order to justify the violence that usually accompanies a “regime change”, and to justify the risk that the new government will be even worse.
One thing that the troubled times have done is given me a lot more understanding and sympathy with people in countries that fall to dictatorship. I used to naively wonder, “why don’t they fight back, or at least leave?” Now looking at the situation in my own country I realize how difficult it is to make decisions when one can’t foresee the future at all, and find oneself facing many different possibilities, including many ugly ones. In the face of so many bad possibilities, the best course of action often seems to be to keep one’s head down and just hope for the best. Or maybe I’m just a coward trying to justify my inaction. I do think, though, that I have a lot of historical evidence on my side when I fear the consequences of violent change.
Between current events in Belarus, the pre-election election scandal Trump is busily creating in the US and this post, I’d love to know what the Republican’s looking over to Belarus are thinking right now. I doubt they’re thinking they could never end up in the same situation as Lukashenko. Six months ago they might have bet on complaceny, but after the protests aka riots across the US that seems doubtful. Lukashenko’s heavy-handed response seems to have backfired, if anything, which again is reminiscent of the protests.
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“That means that federal marshals are occupying troops – and are legitimate military targets. Someone should warn them, first, out of courtesy.”
Why? US cops and company have a long tradition of treating people as hostile, armed and dangerous without reason. Some more so than other. In any case they’re always at high alert and have been making things worse because of it, so no further warning should be required.
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At least that flyer would be one of the seemingly rare instances of “hate crimes” and “death threats” police/FBI/prosecutors might be interested in pursuing. Finally something important, not the usual anti-feminist, racist or far right
extremismtrivia people usually complain about. And then there’s the terrorism angle that’ll make them look good. There’s no one worse than Antifa…—
“I’m fucking sick of stupid online journalists asking “what do we do if Trump doesn’t leave?” in the failing news media. The answer is: general tax revolt, general strike, and a million people march on Washington with pitchforks, torches, and rifles, and burn the White House.”
A very American solution would be to nuke DC, which would cut down (no pun intended) on the manual labour inolved in individually decapitating the ruling class. After clean-up, some rebuiding and turning the ruined White House into a memorial you can inaugurate the new president, senators and a lot of other new appointees right next to former president Trump’s carbon shadow. Maybe even add a tasteful plaque, “Don’t mess with our inalienable rights!”, in case it’s too subtle for the new lords. Carbon shadows could become this century’s (or your country’s) guillotine.
The memorial is borrowing from the Japanese a bit, but the rest is genuine US Strategotactical Thinking in action. I suppose NYC would have to go as well, because apparently one city is not enough to demonstrate your resolve.
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Re: Libertarians (#15):
“They seem to imagine that the world will be pretty much like it is, with roads and internet and Avengers movies and pizza delivery – but that the only structural changes will be no taxes and no other social controls on their behavior. Except, you know, for social controls keeping hoi polloi from eating libertarians.”
Maybe they should try feudalism. 9999 out of 10000 libertarians won’t like it, but they probably didn’t work hard enough or something. Now why does that sound so familiar?