Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Morphing Of Civil War

Americans who know anything about the country’s Civil War tend to dismiss warnings of a similar eruption. After all, the War Between the States was a war between states, a conflict with antagonists defined largely by geography. Were there Union sympathizers in the South? Pro-slavery citizens in the North? Sure. But the war was largely between Americans who inhabited specific regions of the still-new country. As pundits like to point out, that’s no longer the case; deep Blue cities are located in even the Reddest states, and the nation’s suburbs have been turning purple for several election cycles. That absence of a geographical division means another civil war is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.

A book titled “The Next Civil War” begs to differ.

Lincoln Square recently interviewed the author, Stephen Marche. Marche’s essential thesis was that our notion of what constitutes “war” is outdated.

What counts as civil war isn’t cannons at Gettysburg but something closer to “Ireland in the Troubles,”…. Low-level clashes, targeted killings, the steady presence of fear — these don’t come with banners or declarations, but they tear at civic trust all the same. That’s why the term “political violence” undersells what’s underway: It’s governance by threat, a society reshaped by intimidation. Once fear becomes the organizing principle, there’s no real boundary left between war and politics.

Stuart Stevens, who conducted the interview, noted that Marche had documented the steady “sorting” that has given us two diametrically opposed “armies.” He began with a telling statistic: the party that once competed for nearly 40 percent of the Black vote under Eisenhower, now hovers at eight percent under Trump. Over the years, the GOP purposely collapsed its coalition, abandoning a “big tent” and diversity in favor of loyalty. Partisan rewards now go to those most willing to comply, and as Stevens writes–and as we can now all see– the result is a hollowed-out political class.

In the Republican Party, competence has been traded for obedience.

Blue state governors resisting the authoritarianism of MAGA and the Trump administration are–at least in Marche’s telling–engaging in what has been dubbed a “soft secession.” The result is an emerging patchwork that signals national fragmentation.

Marche reminds readers that authoritarian regimes around the globe provide ample evidence that control doesn’t equal competence. Meanwhile, democracy is fading every day, despite the lack of a formal death notice. More troubling, politically motivated violence is rising.

Reviewers have described “The Next Civil War” as a “chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction.” Marche conducted nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists–in order to produce a book predicting a terrifying collapse of the America most of us have inhabited. Marche also interviewed soldiers and counterinsurgency experts, asking what it would take to control the population of the United States, and he tells us that “the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels.”

Thanks in large part to a fragmented, partisan information environment that facilitates misinformation and propaganda, promotes conspiracy theories, and deepens suspicions and bigotries, MAGA Republicans inhabit a vastly different reality than the one Democrats and Independents occupy. Our divisions go deeper than geography. Marche concludes that the United States as we’ve known it is coming to an end, with the only question being “how,” and in his book, he offers several scenarios to illustrate the possibilities.

I’m not convinced.

Granted, America has never been Camelot. Our elected officials have always included grifters and blowhards and outright criminals; our public policies even today fall far short of the lofty–“woke”– aspirations of the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This country has always been an experiment, and people like  Marche have evidently concluded that the experiment is failing.

Marche’s book is part of a burgeoning industry of doom and gloom. Although it’s important to understand where these predictions of disaster are coming from–important to recognize the severity of the threats to our always-fragile union– it would be a mistake to give in to those predictions, to give up in advance.

Remember, those “woke” abolitionists won the last Civil War–and although it won’t be easy, We the People significantly outnumber the Trumpers who want to turn America into a White Christian Nationalist autocracy. We can win this one too.

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Call It What It Is

Yesterday, I posted about the importance of using accurate language, arguing that the media’s penchant for failing to distinguish between far-right ideologues and genuine conservatives blurs reality and distorts public understanding of where America finds itself.

Today, I want to address another issue of labelling: the common complaint that calling MAGA folks fascist or fascist-adjacent is an unfair aspect of the name-calling that Trump has made a prominent feature of our politics–that use of that label is no different from the claims of those so-called “conservatives” that advocates for national health care are all communists.

Yesterday, I compared the actions and rhetoric of Trump and MAGA to the definition of conservative, and found an obvious mismatch. Today, I want to compare them to the definition of fascist, in order to determine whether that label really is an example of uncivil exaggeration and misdirection, or whether it’s an accurate description of what we are seeing.

I’m not the first to engage in that comparison; The Bulwark recently provided an excellent overview of the similarities that justify the label. (Interestingly, The Bulwark is published by “never Trump” conservatives–actual conservatives who know the difference between conservative philosophy and far-Right radicalism.) The essay began by quoting John F. Kelly, a now-retired Marine Corps general who, for a year and a half during Trump’s first term, was the White House chief of staff.

Shortly before the 2024 election, in a New York Times interview, Kelly was asked whether he thought Trump was a fascist. Kelly began his response by reading a definition of fascism.

Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.

Kelly then ticked off the ways in which Trump met that definition, concluding that he “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. . . . He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

It’s one thing to recognize that Trump himself is a fascist–that’s hard to deny, especially given his ramped-up megalomania since returning to the Oval Office. But what about his base? What about the MAGA movement? The Bulwark article cited a 1995 observation by Italian novelist and critic Umberto Eco, who defined the fascism he saw emerging as “a fuzzy totalitarianism” that he dubbed Ur-fascism. Eco proceeded to outline a list of its characteristics:

The most prominent feature of Ur-fascism, according to Eco, is the cult of tradition and the rejection of the modern world. In the irrational worldview of the Ur-fascist, disagreement is treason. Other prominent features of fascism that Eco detailed included the following:

“Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.”
“Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.”
“At the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
“The Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo. . . . Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”

The Bulwark article ended with a plea to MAGA folks to recognize these similarities and leave the movement. I’m afraid that such a plea is hopelessly naive. Hard-core MAGA folks are all-in on their ahistorical devotion to “tradition” and their hatred of those “Others” who populate modern societies. They have perfected the informational bubble they inhabit, and far from being appalled by the inhumanity of ICE raids or the anti-Americanism of Trump’s Executive Orders or the damage being done to America’s global stature, they applaud Trump’s increasingly autocratic (and arguably insane) behaviors.

Calling this administration and its supporters fascists is neither an exaggeration nor an inappropriate epithet. It is a word–a label– that accurately describes both Trump and a significant percentage of his MAGA supporters. The rest of us need to acknowledge that, and the fact that most of those supporters are irretrievably lost to the American Idea.

It is up to the rest of us–to the majority of sane Americans– to reject the fascist project and save the Republic. The situation really is that dire.

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Why We Must Resist

In a recent newsletter, Simon Rosenberg summed it all up.

First, let’s talk about Trump. That he is a wrecking ball, in clear physical and cognitive decline, and a wanna be dictator – not a President – has become impossible to ignore. In just a few months he has re-ignited inflation, slowed the economy, exploded the deficit, torched our alliances and damaged America’s standing throughout world. He is wrecking our health care system, attacking our world leading scientific and medical research centers, laying siege to the farm economy, throwing innocent people into foreign gulags without due process, invading our cities, recklessly walking away from the global consensus on climate change, leading an extraordinary coverup of a prolific sex trafficker and pedophile, enriching himself and his courtiers, and is now using the government to lawlessly pursue and silence his domestic opposition.

America under Trump has become less prosperous, less safe, less healthy, and less free, a far weaker nation. His regime represents a profound and historic betrayal of America and everything that has made us great, and the most powerful nation in history. All of this has also made him extraordinarily unpopular as the American people wake up to the destruction he is causing, wake up to that he really is pursuing an agenda of “more for me, less for you” now.

For sentient Americans, that summary is impossible to rebut. The obvious question, however, is: what can genuine patriots do about it? How can ordinary citizens who are horrified by the daily news (much of which might be introduced under the heading “what fresh hell is this?”) resist? More to the point, how can we come together to create a mass resistance movement?

I wish I had a snappy answer to that question. I don’t. But I do believe that massive participation in the upcoming No Kings protests will be essential. We need to turn out many millions of Americans who are ready and willing to send a. message of non-compliance, who publicly reject the lawlessness and the utter stupidity of the bigots who currently control the government–and not just in Washington, but in Red state capitols like Indianapolis.

Survey research tells us two things: one hopeful, one depressing. It’s hopeful that polling uniformly shows that a majority of Americans loath Trump and oppose virtually everything his administration is doing. It’s depressing that the minority is so large–depending upon the poll, somewhere between 37% and 42% of us still approve of him.

It’s hard for me to get my head around the fact that so many of our neighbors are perfectly willing to support a lawless and increasingly vicious regime, willing to ignore or excuse or even support the reality of the summary with which I opened this post. Many of them, no doubt, are unaware of much of it–they live in bubbles, getting their “information” from Fox and multiple other propaganda sites. To the extent that they are aware, they are evidently supportive of what they see as an exchange of constitutional civic equality for the White Christian male dominance they would prefer.

Historians tell us that the effort to turn America into a Christian theocracy–an effort summarized and documented in Project 2025– began decades ago. Normal Americans have largely been unaware of that effort as they’ve gone about their daily lives.  It’s understandable that the majority are only now waking to the magnitude of the threat. (The pace of that recognition has actually been abetted by the sheer buffoonery and incompetence of the Trump administration.) 

There are a number of signs, large and small, that the majority is finding its voice: the increasing number of spontaneous protests; the huge Jimmy Kimmel response; the efforts by lower court judges to hold the constitutional line and protect the rule of law… and the fact that Amazon is selling lots of pre-made protest signs, suggesting there’s a substantial market.

In the future, it may be necessary to mount massive boycotts of the companies bending the knee to our wanna-be autocrats. It may be necessary to participate in a national strike, or take other measures to resist the destruction of the America most of us love. But right now, No Kings Day is our vehicle, and we need to ensure that it demonstrates an enormous resistance by millions of citizens ready, willing and able to retake our country.

See you on OCTOBER 18TH.

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Teams Versus Tribes

I generally hate sports metaphors, but sometimes they are too apt to ignore, so bear with me…

I recently had a conversation with a friend who–like me–remembered the “old” days of politics, when Republicans and Democrats differed on some issues and agreed on others, and when those conversations and debates were about policy.

When I served in Indianapolis’ City Hall (I know, a zillion years ago), city leaders often met with the state legislators elected from Indianapolis. Some were Republican, some Democrat, and while they reflected the priorities of their opposing caucuses on most issues, they frequently came together to support the priorities of the city. They worked with the Mayor on initiatives that would be good for Indianapolis.

Back in that day, Republicans and Democrats were two teams. The thing about teams is that they are playing the same game and obeying the same rules. That political “game” was governing, and the goal was to score policies that benefited your constituency. (Yes, both teams had players who were all about themselves, or in the pocket of some moneyed interest, or embarrassingly dumb, but those were the exceptions. The majority really did care about legislating policies they believed were sound, even if they disagreed about what those policies were.)

Those days are over.

Over the intervening years, the “Red team”–the Republican team I played on back then–has morphed into a tribal cult. Its more liberal, moderate and thoughtful members have been ejected, leaving virtually everyone unwilling to accept the new tribal identity without a team. Some of us became Democrats, others, disenfranchised Independents.

The problem with that change from teams to tribes should be obvious. While teams are competing to win the same game, tribes aren’t interested in either competition or the game–instead, they are intent upon clearing the playing field of those despised “others.” Rather than engaging in policy debates–the “game”–or concerning themselves with issues of governance, they are focused on defeating those not in their. tribe. They are intent upon establishing dominance.

In other words, today’s tribal folks aren’t interested in governing or in the relative merits of policy A or B–their goal is much simpler: to own the “libruls” and put those uppity Blacks, women and gays back in their proper, submissive place.

Historically, tribal bonds were crucial for survival. Membership in a tribe offered deep psychological and social connections, and contributed to  human well-being and achievement. However, as we are seeing, the persistence of strong group loyalties based upon identity can foster extreme attitudes, undermine democratic principles, and inculcate an “us versus them” worldview that is deeply corrosive. When tribes are based upon racial and religious homogeneity, rather than common values and aspirations, there is no middle ground.

So here we are.

The White “Christian” Nationalist tribe that has “evolved” from the once-respectable GOP is uninterested in anything but regaining social and political dominance. They are unconcerned with the Trump administration’s destruction of our federal government and its flouting of the constitutional rules of the game and unperturbed by Trump’s embarrassing and damaging international antics– because governing in the national interest isn’t the “game” they’re playing. The tribe believes that making America “great” means putting them in charge.

It’s no wonder the Democrats are at odds over how to proceed in this new environment. Most Democratic politicians still think of themselves as members of a team that is concerned first and foremost with matters of public policy, and they’re ill-equipped to face opponents whose “policy” preferences are limited to eradicating opponents and establishing White “Christian” Nationalist dominance.

I have no idea how we extricate the country from this mismatch. If this sports analogy is right, pious exhortations to find “common ground” are unrealistic, to put it mildly. Americans will simply have to choose between the team and the tribe.

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Data? What Data?

It’s bad enough that a substantial percentage of our fellow Americans reject probative evidence that is inconsistent with their preferred realities. What is arguably worse is the administration’s effort to erase such evidence–its conduct of a war on data that might undercut Trump’s fantasy realities.

The New Republic recently focused on that war.

Trump has always made things up. Remember that he entered politics promoting the hoax that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But what’s new about Trump’s second presidency is that not only have his lies escalated in dimension and scope, becoming increasingly brazen and weird—London is under sharia law!—but he’s also waging a concerted all-out war on facts that contradict his narrative, which is to say, all reliable sources of data.

As the article notes–and as most academics know–for many years, the government has been one of the best sources of data available; not only has it been an important source of probative, vetted information, it has made that information easily accessible to journalists and citizenry alike.  That informational history is under attack by Trump, who–as the article notes– doesn’t want any facts to get in the way of his made-up stories.

To declare that Trump has been right and the scientists have been wrong about climate change is so counterfactual that it requires a massive suppression of available data. Good thing Trump has thought of that. Through a combination of layoffs and weird directives, his administration has dramatically reduced its ability to collect data on industrial pollution that causes climate change, extreme weather caused by climate change, greenhouse gases contributing to climate change—really any facts related to the climate crisis. To take just one example, an effort launched by the Biden administration to collect emissions data was canceled by Trump on his first day in office. The same could be said about his Tylenol claims; lucky for him he has made significant cuts to autism research.

What about the autism claims unsupported by any credible medical research? Or the wild and dangerous claims from Trump and RFK Jr. about vaccines? As the article points out, those vaccine claims will be insufficiently challenged since he has cut vaccine research by more than half a billion dollars.

It goes on. And on.

Trump’s commitment to falsehood—and to eradicating facts at their roots—is not limited to science and public health. This summer he claimed that his policies were leading America into “another golden age” and that economic growth under his presidency “shatters expectations.” The data said otherwise: Whether you’re talking about job growth, inflation, or just about any other measure, the numbers did not chart in a direction favorable to the president. Here again, Trump is not willing to tolerate the facts: When the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month reported numbers that contradicted his sunny narrative, he fired the head of the agency.

Trump constantly says bizarre and unsupportedd things about crime–at least, in cities run by Democrats. He claims violence is surging although it’s  decreasing, actually, in some places, at historic rates,  He constantly blames immigrants, although relatively little crime is committed by immigrants, and he and MAGA are now trying to blame mass murders on transgender Americans, despite the fact that only 0.1 percent of mass shootings are committed by transgender people—and very few murders of any kind.

Are these and multiple other assertions inconsistent with the data? Well, there’s an easy “fix” to that–stop gathering and reporting the data.

Trump’s Agriculture Department cut its annual food insecurity survey, so Americans won’t know how many people are going hungry as a result of Trump’s cuts to food stamps and his inflationary tariffs.

We also won’t know how children are doing in school after his massive cuts to K-12 education, since the administration gutted the Department of Education’s research offices and the National Center for Education Statistics.

States, universities, and other nonprofits are trying to make up for the loss of the data, but in many cases the information provided by the federal government was irreplaceable.

When every day brings a new assault on our constitution and the rule of law, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that data, research, and facts are dangers to authoritarian regimes. Trump doesn’t know much, but he does understand that “data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts.”

If and when we rid ourselves of Trump and the MAGA plague, rebuilding and restoration will take many years…..

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