Do You Want A Revolution?

I have been hearing people talking about American needing a revolution for 15 years. For a little less than that, I have heard that Donald J. Trump would drain the swamp of Washington and disrupt what ails our government.

What I never heard any of the would-be revolutionaries what their new government would be like. 

All I that swamp got drained by Trump into himself on his way to making himself the government of Indiana.

Going through my bookmarks, I started to see items that I had set aside until a later time. Seem that time has come.

And, so, in no particular order: 

American Revanchism: On Karen Joy Fowler’s “Booth” (Bennett Parten, LARB)

...Another, perhaps more uncomfortable view is that we’ve never needed to know John Wilkes Booth more than we do right now. His politics — white supremacy, grievance, conspiracy, revanchism — have suddenly broken open and become our politics. His contemporaries aren’t the United States’ mass shooters so much as the right-wing extremists who stormed the capital on January 6 and who now have apologists in the highest rungs of American government. Booth may be remembered as an egomaniacal lone wolf — this despite him working with a group of conspirators, most of whom would later hang for their crimes — but the truth is that he embodied a political tradition as American as the man he shot dead. Indeed, to know Booth, to fully reckon with who he was and to grapple with why he did what he did, is to have a window on the modern United States. 

A National Divorce? Separating the Red and Blue by Patrick Mazza (Counterpunch, 2023).

With this post, I start a series to explore three recent books that survey the potential for a U.S. breakup and what it might mean for politics in coming years. Two are written by authors coming from a conservative perspective. Neither advocate a breakup and recommend steps to avoid one. They are American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F.H. Buckley and Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation by David French. The third, written from a progressive viewpoint, is Break It Up: Secession, Division and The Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union by Richard Kreitner. He documents how secession movements have emerged from left and right, and how they are emerging again. Kreitner makes his own proposals for retaining national unity.

Importantly, all were published in 2020. The publishing industry has its fads, and this clearly was one, likely in anticipation of a fractious presidential election whose results might be contested. The only previous breakup, the secession of the Southern states that precipitated the Civil War, came about due to the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, a result the South could not accept. The January 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol indicates the publishers’ anticipation was not too far wrong. National divisions have not subsided since, and could return with a vengeance in 2024. These three books have a continuing relevance, as the Greene tweet underscores.

***

Buckley clearly comes from the conservative side of the aisle. But he espouses a sentiment that has broad appeal across the spectrum, that when systems and nations grow too large, they become abusers of their own and other people. He quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Greatness of Nations. Size of States! The first and principal source of the miseries of mankind.”

“Perhaps we’re just too damned big. After China and India, we’re the third largest country by population,” Buckley writes.

And neither China nor India are liberal democracies that allow people to talk about revolutions, so then we should become like them?

The Constitution set up a federal system that was based on classic liberalism of human freedom set out in the Bill of Rights. That is what gave us a common identity as U.S. of Americans, Buckley maintains. But, he adds, conservative nationalists are moving away from those traditions, and along with it that common identity. “We’re overlarge, and we’ve sacrificed the trust and fellow feeling that a common national identity used to provide.”

Meanwhile, the traditional federal system is being supplanted by a more unitary state that imposes common standards, ruled from a national capital that has become “a sclerotic society of special interests . . . We may want a fresh start.”

Buckley proposes a radical devolution of power to the states while leaving the federal government with important powers. “Today, federalism is not healing the country’s divisions, so something else is needed, something more like home rule.”

Something like home rule? The federal government creates a floor and a ceiling - the federal government will not allow the state to take rights away from its citizens (the 14th Amendment) and state law cannot overrule federal law (the Supremacy Clause). Will home rule include giving each state its own currency, the ability to put tariffs on another state's products, its own bankruptcy laws, control over its navigable rivers, and all other powers expressly reserved to the federal government?

Buckley notes that assertion of “states’ rights” was discredited by Jim Crow segregation laws. “Since then, however, the civil rights revolution has taken hold and it’s much less likely that secession would be employed to discriminate against a minority.”

That represents one of the weakest points in his argument. When the Supreme Court essentially gutted Voting Rights Act protections under the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, Southern states were quick to begin imposing new restrictions that make it more difficult for Black people to vote. After the recent Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning reproductive rights guaranteed under the Roe v. Wade decision, abortion restrictions went into effect in many states. Florida is attacking the use of equity, diversity and inclusion criteria in institutional governance.

Buckley acknowledges, “Different states might now go their own way on human rights . . . Diverse sets of rights would permit Americans to settle in jurisdictions whose policies match their own preferences.”

That assumes a certain level of resources and flexibility that many, such as millions of Black people in the South, might not have even if they wanted to move.

So, the conservative idea is to return us to when Dred Scott was good law in the United States - no one is a citizen of the United States, with rights under the federal Bill of Rights? Seems to me the goal is to divest us of our federal rights and their protection by the federal courts. It would also leave us without protection of the environment. Local majorities can then harass their local minority groups; they can decide whether big businesses can destroy the quality of life for their citizens.

However, I think the writer has a better idea of what we need to do in these days of national disunity: 

Indeed, we must take the possibility seriously, and build links across urban and rural geographies, red and blue states, and other dividing lines. We don’t need a national divorce. We need a new basis of unity, and that ultimately will come by talking with one another. 

Cashing in the idea of the United States may seem easy. It is not. Consider who will fill the vacuum created by our disappearance. What does a world dominated by China and its ideas mean for us?

 Ailing Empire Blues (Jed Esty, The Baffler, 2022)

As we move on the diagonal, across the Atlantic, from 1970 to 2020, the trails marked by the New Left historians lead to a more synthetic understanding of the complex life of an aging superpower on the downslope. The cardinal features of decline culture identified by the New Left have all become unignorable aspects of U.S. culture and politics: repetitive cultural scripts and stale thinking in media, academic, and political institutions; a deregulated and heavily financialized economy; ossified class relations featuring a holdover alliance that keeps non-elites voting against their economic self-interest; melancholic attachments to lost power that result in a morbidly conservative politics; popular and populist anxiety about the national future; contagious political myths predicated on the imaginary betrayal of the nation’s true essence; authoritarianism; white nationalism; white moral panic; the rise of control society and the carceral state; and widespread paranoia and conspiracy-theory thinking.

All of these problems plague the contemporary United States as the downslope steepens. Taken together, they point to the cultural malaise and political vacuum produced by economic decline. Declinist ideas fill that vacuum because without the cause of American supremacy—growth and greatness as ends in themselves—the language of national solidarity and national purpose has evaporated. America has its own version of the imperial deep freeze—stuck in a history of past success and present inertia.

The expansive success of the military-industrial complex of the 1950s with its corporate-managerial norms is now a frozen technocratic legacy blocking the historical imagination. Americans still measure themselves by the standards and values of the Greatest Generation and their boomer offspring. They measure economic and political success against an anomalous apex point of U.S. power and prosperity, the 1950–1970 period. These acts of obedient traditionalism impart to “future-oriented” American culture a deadening conservative backwardness. The norms and expectations of midcentury U.S. society have left two or three generations of younger America with a bland and belated dedication to replicating ways of life and myths of greatness whose economic base has been transformed by the last fifty years.

***

 The system of U.S. class compromise formed in the Cold War has shown remarkable staying power over the last forty years of relative decline. But its bonds are wearing down as the U.S. enters its terminal crisis. Decline has split the state/experts/minorities Democratic bloc from the corporation/managers/white working-class Republican bloc. One side protects the regulatory state and the other champions a freer market. The working class has also been more and more untethered from the idea of shared American success. When elite and non-elite interests separate, and the pie shrinks, the possibility for a fundamental shakeup of class relations becomes more real. But so does the entrenchment of existing hierarchies.

***

When class interests splinter in the age of decline, conservative visions of once and future greatness glue them back together. Culture wars pull non-elites to the right—a familiar truism of U.S. electoral politics. It is rare though for mainstream political commentary to root this truism in the baseline problem of superpower nostalgia. Panning back to look at both UK and U.S. trajectories over the last 150 years, it becomes clearer that the deteriorating consensus or lost center of American politics produced an identity crisis for citizens of all kinds. Political sentiments that once attached to America’s manifest destiny—from the western frontier to the moon landing—have nowhere to go now but backward. No wonder mythic attachments rule over rational class interests.

 The social conservatism of the economically marginalized is now more an established fact than a political surprise. The right-wing coalitions of Thatcherism then, and Trumpism now, are a familiar feature of decline politics. But they are growing more radical in contemporary America. The British example, even as a lost opportunity, is vital for that reason. It points to the need for a direct and concerted intellectual disarmament of declinism, of the superpower nostalgia that is the cultural jet fuel of right populism.

That cleans out my bookmarks. So, let us talk about the response, since these ideas have been floating long enough. Because now we have this to deal with for real: Trump Suggests People Might Want A Dictator For The Second Day In A Row (HuffPost)

Disdain and apathy in Washington DC (New Statesman, 8/6/2025)

 But the organiser didn’t want to get into that. He had an arid look in his eyes. He confessed regret at the turnout, then stressed that this was the first of many protests to come. His badge read: “I am the resistance,” with a stinging literalism. As we spoke, his expression became panicked. Perhaps this was because he was talking to a reporter. But if I organised a protest under the name Refuse Fascism and no one turned up, I would be panicked too.

Disdain for democracy, rather than apathy, might explain the dearth of protesters. A few days before, I was in a bar in the neighbourhood talking to a man who had been an entrepreneur and was now a corporate manager. His deltoids looked like dumbbells and his favourite author was Malcolm Gladwell. He had a wife, decent money and a drive to succeed. He squirrelled down book recommendations as if he would actually read them. He also thought assassination was the only route out of this tyrannical age. One or two tech billionaires, he impassively evaluated, had to be shot as a warning to the oligarchy. I noted his own, personal success. He shook his head while sucking on a prawn tail and said I didn’t get it.

***

 Yet Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for New York mayor, the most significant irruption in the party in the past six months, shows something else. Mamdani offers what we might call polite, middle-class populism, conducted in a suit and fought on social media. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed socialist, manages to pit himself against the marauding Wall Street class without adopting Trump’s brash, indecorous type of politics.

That many party leaders want to break with bourgeois decorum – a last refuge of progressive dignity – speaks to their desperation. One Democratic staffer in Congress told me their colleagues were “very disappointed and disengaged”. Where five years ago Democrats “were running up and down the Capitol’s corridors trying to oppose Trump, lots of them now feel like it doesn’t matter”.

And so we go over the cliff, led by the lemmings who have no idea of how to stand their ground? 

 Cracker Barrel to restore old logo following MAGA backlash over rebrand: There is your cultural conservatism mentioned above, centered on a fake restaurant concept, and an ugly logo. What will happen to these right-wing populists when the restaurant goes bankrupt from poor service and food?

The left after Trump by Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel 

 What the left needs, according to Sandel, is a “political vision that combines populism and patriotism – a radical critique of inequality and unaccountable, concentrated economic power (that’s the populism) and a greater emphasis on community, solidarity, and our mutual obligations as citizens (that’s the patriotism)”. It is a mistake, he argued, for the left to “cede patriotism to parties of the right”.

In their conversation, Piketty is optimistic about the march towards equality. Does Sandel retain the same degree of hope? “The richest men in the world, tech moguls Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, are occupying seats of honour at Trump’s inauguration. Musk alone donated a quarter of a billion dollars to his presidential campaign. So it’s hard to be optimistic, at least in the near term.”

Trump’s “plutocratic populism”, though, Sandel pointed out, “may finally disappoint the working people who supported him. The question is whether progressives will have a more inspiring alternative to offer.”

Pentagon Document: U.S. Wants to “Suppress Dissenting Arguments” Using AI Propaganda - give them power and what did you expect, the hard truths that contradict their fantasies?

I call a good start, Was It Something I Said? 

 For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying. The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness. To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.

In reality, most Democrats do not run or govern on wildly out-of-touch social positions. But voters would be excused to believe we do because of the words that come out of our mouths—words which sound like we are hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent.

***

 In this memo, we are putting a spotlight on the language we use that puts a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities. These are words that people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats. Over the years we’ve conducted, read, and analyzed hours upon hours of focus groups, and we’ve yet to hear a voter volunteer any of the phrases below except as a form of derision or parody of Democrats. We’re not talking about techno-speak, like net-zero and climate resiliency. Those words put up their own Ivy League walls between policymakers and voters. Here we are focusing on the eggshell dance of political correctness which leaves the people we aim to reach cold or fearful of admonishment.

I have an education, I am literate, and I look at the list of used by Democrats (although I cannot believe it is used by all or certainly not locally) that should be banned from use by Democrat candidates without understanding most of them. Some give me outright fits (Dialoguing, Radical transparency, The unhoused, and Birthing person/inseminated person are but the tip of the iceberg) as being bad English, as being alien to the majority of people, and just dumb. It is jargon. Writing classes at my law school were openly opposed to jargon as not being informative because they created a barrier between those who knew the secret meanings of the jargon and those who did not.

 I am not seeing an opposition party in the Democratic Party. Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker give me hope, but that is not an organized opposition, and more importantly they do represent ideas that will inspire voters to join the opposition.

But there is an opposition forming out there: It’s About Time! (Sheila Kennedy).

No, the opposition does not need leaders, the opposition has to be us, the people.

The revolution sought by some does nothing to help us, the people; only the haters and plutocrats will benefit from their so-called revolution. 

sch 8/26

 Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode  (Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian) provides an indictment of us and Trump:

Those cities are all run by Democrats and, not coincidentally, have large Black populations. They are potential centres of opposition to Trump’s rule and he wants them under his control. The constitution’s insistence that states have powers of their own and that the reach of the federal government should be limited – a principle that until recently was sacred to Republicans – can go hang.

Control is the goal, amassing power in the hands of the president and removing or neutering any institution or person that could stand in his way. That is the guiding logic that explains Trump’s every action, large and small, including his wars on the media, the courts, the universities and the civil servants of the federal government. It helps explain why FBI agents last week mounted a 7am raid on the home and office of John Bolton, once Trump’s national security adviser and now one of his most vocal critics. And why the president hinted darkly that the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is in his sights.

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It’s why he has broken all convention, and possibly US law, by attempting to remove Lisa Cook as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve on unproven charges of mortgage fraud. Those charges are based on information helpfully supplied by the Trump loyalist installed as federal housing director and who, according to the New York Times, has repeatedly leveraged “the powers of his office … to investigate or attack Mr Trump’s most recognisable political enemies”. The pattern is clear: Trump is using the institutions of government to hound his foes in a manner that recalls the worst of Richard Nixon – though where Nixon skulked in the shadows, Trump’s abuses are in plain sight.

And all in the pursuit of ever more power. Take the firing of Cook. With falling poll numbers, especially on his handling of the economy, he craves the sugar rush of an interest rate cut. The independent central bank won’t give it to him, so he wants to push the Fed out of the way and grab the power to set interest rates himself. Note the justification offered by JD Vance this week, that Trump is “much better able to make those determinations” than “unelected bureaucrats” because he embodies the will of the people. The reasoning is pure authoritarianism, arguing that a core principle of the US constitution, the separation of powers, should be swept aside, because all legitimate authority resides in one man alone.

 ***

In that same spirit, the Trump White House now argues that, in effect, only one party should be allowed to exercise power in the US. How else to read the words of key Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who this week told Fox News that “The Democrat party is not a political party; it is a domestic extremist organisation.”

It’s the same picture on every front, whether it’s plans for a new military parade in Trump’s honour or the firing of health officials who insist on putting science ahead of political loyalty. He is bent on amassing power to himself and being seen to amass power to himself, even if that means departing from economic conservative orthodoxy to have the federal government take a stake in hitherto private companies. He wants to rule over every aspect of US life. As Trump himself said this week, “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” The former Obama adviser David Axelrod is not alone when he says, “We have gone from zero to Hungary faster than I ever imagined.”

And what about we, the people?

The trouble is, people still don’t talk about it the way they talk about Hungary, not inside the US and not outside it. That’s partly the It Can’t Happen Here mindset, partly a reluctance to accept a reality that would require, of foreign governments especially, a rethink of almost everything. If the US is on its way to autocracy, in a condition scholars might call “unconsolidated authoritarianism”, then that changes Britain’s entire strategic position, its place in the world, which for 80 years has been predicated on the notion of a west led by a stable, democratic US. The same goes for the EU. Far easier to carry on, either pretending that the transformation of the US is not, in fact, as severe as it is, or that normal service will resume shortly. But the world’s leaders, like US citizens, cannot ignore the evidence indefinitely. To adapt the title of that long-ago novel, it can happen here – and it is.

You who voted for this delusional buffoon brought this about. This is not making America great, it is making America into a cheap banana republic.

sch 8/30 

And this came in this weekend: GOP Rep. warns Muslims want to impose “Sharia law” in US at very time he’s imposing “Christian law” (The Dean's Report). Very disturbing to me was the GOP rep's complete divorce from reality.

Whatever the reason, there was Brecheen warning the audience: “We’ve got Sharia Law trying to be set up in America today. Absolutely we do. You have Sharia Law trying to be established in America today.” He went on to claim that somehow the “Muslim Brotherhood” from Turkey was involved and they want to make America into a nation based on Islamic law—and even create a new Ottoman Empire.... 

Brecheen wants people to believe that Muslims in America—including me—that make up about two percent of our nation’s population, have the desire plus the power to turn our religious beliefs into law!

 ***

Brecheen doesn’t even attempt to hide his goal of imposing “Christian” law. For example, his official congressional website tells us that he “believes our nation desperately needs a return to biblical morality,” because in his view” Our country has been degraded by a hypersexualized culture pushed by the far-Left and it threatens the very fabric of America.”

A member of Congress is telling you in writing that he wants our nation to be governed by “Biblical morality.” Imagine if one of the four Muslim members of the Congress posted on their website that our nation needs to be governed in accordance with the Quran?!