The Antisocial Darwinist

Last week I described how the political struggles in the United States seem to me to be just one part – a large part, sure, but just one – of a unified global struggle between universalizing globalism and a rag-tag pseudo-alliance of pluralist, localist, and nationalist groups who resist the globalists’ schemes. Watching the descent of milquetoast Canada into dictatorship only reinforces that belief. Justin Trudeau has been the face of “New World Order” cheerleading for years now, and at last the mask has come off and the brownshirts have come out, as his jack-booted thugs crush resistance while his bean-counters torpedo the Canadian banking system because he thinks it will hurt his rivals more than it hurts his friends. There can be no question that what Trudeau is currently doing is on the Democrat’s playlist here in the US; they’re just a few months behind, presumably because the resistance against them is substantially larger (and better armed) than its counterpart in Canada.

So where is this going? What are they thinking?

Increasingly since the left lost its collective mind in 2016 – and especially since they regained power after the 2020 “election” — it has seemed to me the Democrats have been engaging in political activities that are profoundly ill-advised, because in the long-term they set precedents that are bound to blow back on them eventually. Consider the following list, by no means complete:

1. They used their people inside the FBI and the State Department to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and later to actively sabotage his presidency and undermine his legislative agenda.
   
2. They have nakedly, even proudly, supported terrorist activities in support of leftist causes, while using the full might of the government against the smallest of right-wing protestors.  Consider their donations toward the legal defense funds for communist insurrectionists involved in the BLM attacks of summer 2020; or the absurd differences between the treatment of those rioters and the far less destructive or dangerous participants in the 2017 Unite the Right protest; or the ongoing persecution of the January 6 protestors, including individuals who didn’t even enter the capitol building.
   
3. They have openly suppressed the first amendment rights of Americans to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, using the aforementioned violent mobs (and their refusal to protect citizens from them), doxxing, and “lawfare” tactics designed to exploit their own immunity from prosecution and their bottomless legal funds to impoverish and destroy the working people who resist them.
   
4. They have directly and openly colluded with transnational corporations to further restrict the rights of Americans, blocking them from online platforms for dissent, removing their ability to do business or make a living, and bombarding them with continuous regime propaganda.
   
5. They have instituted propaganda campaigns through childrens’ programming and school curricula designed to turn children against their own parents and culture, and transform them into sexless, nationless, deracinated drones incapable of resisting the power elite’s commands.
   
6. They have adopted a religious framework for their party that effectively Satan-izes their political opposition, which by the nature of its skin tone is declared to be inherently evil and unworthy of equal treatment under the law.  This racist philosophy has been enforced by law at all levels of society, from the earliest education of children to the highest institutions of church, military, and science.
   
7. They inflated the risk of the coronavirus as an excuse to tank Trump’s booming economy, and to push through emergency election changes that made it dramatically easier to cheat in elections, and dramatically more difficult to investigate claims of fraud, especially in the chaotic urban hellscapes they control.  When people complained about the obvious problems with the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, they used it as an excuse to up the ante on suppression of political dissent, declaring the opposition to be terrorists and insurrectionists.
   
8. And as the opposition to this cavalcade of abuse rose, they doubled-down, comparing their opposition to Nazis and racist cops, further inflaming the religious fervor of their stormtroopers and cheerleading the descent of the country.

I could go on; there’s more, and every one of those points could be elaborated into a full post.  But the main thing that keeps coming up for me is that none of this makes any sense if they think there is any chance they will ever lose power again.  Every one of the bullet points above could in principle be turned against them by a future Republican regime; what’s to stop us from declaring BLM a terrorist organization and freezing the bank accounts of anyone who ever donated a single cent to one of their terror cells?  Why couldn’t we rebrand anyone pushing Critical Race Theory as an “enemy combatant” like was done to, for instance, Anwar al-Awlaki, Al-Qaeda’s blogger, justifying us murdering him and his teenage son with drone attacks?  Why don’t we replace the FBI’s leadership completely and turn it into a Gestapo-tier organization for rooting out Communist and racist agitators from the rank-and-file of the Democrat party; why not toss all the antifa professors into a squalid dungeon in rural Mississippi until they give up their enablers in the Inner Party? And beyond any of those draconian possibilities, a lot of what they’ve done is arguably just straight-up illegal, and when their political protection disappears after they lose power, a lot of them are potentially liable for the consequences of their actions. These are the acts of dictators consolidating their power; they are only reasonable if one believes the other side will be ultimately and permanently removed from power.

Watching the Democrats go further and further down the authoritarian rabbit-hole, I wonder why nobody within their own ranks tries to get them to stop (I mean, there’s Manchin and Synema, I guess, and I’m all for giving both of them the Congressional Medal of Freedom for their principled resistance if we somehow pull out of this).  I’m often reminded of the sensible right’s objections to George W. Bush’s USA-PATRIOT act after 9/11 – that the unconstitutional surveillance powers it afforded the government would not long be restricted to foreign terrorists, but would eventually be used on domestic suspects and, nightmarishly, against the current regime’s political enemies — and in all likelihood, would be used against Bush’s own party during the regime of his successor.  Of course this is exactly what Edward Snowden revealed, and also what happened in 2016, when Obama’s FBI decided to spy on Trump’s operation using e.g. authorizations from PATRIOT Act FISA courts, first to try to defeat him electorally, and later to sabotage and undermine his presidency for the benefit of the neoliberal/neocon “deep state” machine.  In a democracy, legislation must always take into consideration the possibility that the powers secured by a regime sympathetic to one’s cause might give the opposition unwanted power when the pendulum swings back to the other side.  If one oversteps, as Bush did, the resulting pendulum swing is likely to bury your side – as it may have already done.

In other words, if you play the game of thrones, you win or you die…

So is that what’s happening?  Like House Lannister, have the Democrats (and the oligarchs who own them) set in motion a clever and cruel plan to seize the country once and for all?  Maybe.  One could certainly look at their efforts to alter election laws over the past decade and see evidence of it.  They’ve made sincere attempts to lower the voting age, enfranchise felons and foreigners, and abolish the electoral college, on top of their efforts to remove election integrity safeguards.  Their immigration policy is arguably about throwing elections as well – not so much that illegal immigrants would reliably always vote for them, but their presence creates voter-roll chaos, which is exactly what their “electoral reforms” exploit.

On the other hand, it’s always a good idea to not ascribe malice where incompetence would suffice as an explanation.  It’s entirely possible that they have no plan; that all they have done has just been the religious fanaticism of their base dragging them along on a leash, and they can’t help but to keep going forward, no matter how bad it hurts them down the road.  Amongst historians of the Holocaust, there is a split between “intentionalists” that thinks that Hitler and the Nazis always intended to exterminate the Jews, and “structuralists” that thinks they sort of blundered into the Holocaust by a series of ill-conceived steps moving toward unrealistic goals (e.g. deporting the Jews to Madagascar while in the middle of a total war) and ended up in a situation where they had no choice but to either give up on anti-Semitism or else try to kill everybody and hide the evidence.  Diabolical malice, vs. incompetent moron malice.  Given the way the Democrats have bollocksed up everything else they’ve touched since they took the reins (Afghanistan, energy production, vaccination, supply chains, etc etc etc, an almost unbelievable list of failures for a single year), it’s a good bet they are in that second category, not the first.  Which isn’t very reassuring; you end up in the gas chamber either way, I suppose.  But at least it’s easier to imagine that their utter incompetence and myopia will result in their regime collapsing under its own weight before this goes too much farther.

In the end, then, I suspect the Democrats’ end game is less “The Rains of Castamere” and more “Steve Buscemi in the Woodchipper” at the end of Fargo:

Hopefully they won’t get away with it, either.  We’ll see.