Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 15 of 21

Periods of Popular Political Change Happen When…

By

On October 25, 2021

Comments

…people recognize that their problems aren’t personal, but social.

Oh this isn’t the only requirement for change, but it is one of the requirements.

In “normal” times most people see their problems as personal: if they’re poor it’s because of something they did or didn’t do, or is related to people around them. “That damned boss.” It isn’t seen as political or structural. The line for much of the 80s-2000s was that Americans saw themselves as “temporarily embarrassed rich people.” If they weren’t making it, the problem wasn’t the politics but theirs. The perception was that anyone could make it. Maybe the system was unfair, but not prohibitively so.

Of course, not all people thought this way (there’s never universal groupthink) but enough did that there was no widespread push for serious changes.

What has changed recently is that people no longer think “its me, not you.” They think, “it’s you, not me” where “you” = society and politics. They may have taken the student loans, but they know boomers paid nothing or a nominal amount for university. They know they can’t afford a home or apartment, not because they don’t earn enough, but because wages have effectively gone down and real home prices have gone up vastly compared to what they were when their parents or grandparents bought up. They know medical care is too expensive and that drugs didn’t used to cost nearly this much.

People, especially young people, are getting that the problem is the system, not them. It’s a game of musical chairs and the people in the good chairs never stand up.

This isn’t, again, sufficient by itself for political change, but it is one of the necessary first steps: people must understand that without political change their lives aren’t going to get better and will probably get worse.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Texas Lessons For Preparing For The Ongoing Collapse

By

On February 18, 2021

Comments

The Texas disaster is a very dramatic example of what I’ve been urging people to prepare for.

When I was a kid I lived in a number of third world nations: Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh, and visited a bunch more.

In a failing state, stuff just doesn’t work well, and when there is a shove, it collapses. You can count on infrastructure or the state when things go bad.

Most of the time it’s less dramatic than the Texas disaster, BUT when you have a fragile state and infrastructure, every disaster turns into a catastrophe. Texas is the worst first world infrastructure collapse we’ve seen, but California in recent years has embarassed itself.

In fragile ecosystems, as well, events burn out of control quickly, as with the Australian, Brazilian, Californian, and various other wildfires.

Further, “once in a hundred year” weather events are becoming common. This was predicted by Stirling Newberry back in the 90s to me (he couldn’t get it published) and it’s now understood by scientists to be the case.

So if you have a neoliberal austerity state which has spent 40 years de-regulating and privatizing public infrastructure and downsizing the public service into incapability, you wind up with a situation where you can’t count on the State for water, food, or power during emergencies.

That means you have to prepare for yourself. Some off-grid energy, some food and medicine and water stores or ability to get those even in a collapse.

Collapses are sometimes brief: Texas will be back to normal soon enough, though the water damage caused by bursting pipes will lead to a lot of folks winding up homeless.

But they will become more frequent and even when there isn’t a crisis America and various other nations will move to a situation where rolling brown-outs and black-outs are common; where you can’t trust the water (already true in large parts of America) and where healthcare is more and more rationed. (One scandal in the UK is how people with learning disabilities are not being ressusitated from Covid: that sort of “triage” will continue and become wider.)

There are a lot of different decline scenarios. For many people “chronic with irregular but frequent mini-crises” is a good one to expect. The state won’t go away entirely; the cities will not collapse 98% and empty into the country a.la. the Dark Ages, but life will get shittier and more uncertain the social supports that were common and routine; the competence expected from the Great Society and which lived on because the Great Engineers of the 30s-70s did good work, will go away.

In such a situation you need to be able to handle bumps. If power goes out for a few hours or days or even two or three weeks, you need to handle it. If food is disrupted, you need to handle it. (Hardest is water.)

That’s just how it’s going to be.

These solutions don’t have to be individual or family based, they can be communal outside the State, but if you don’t have them, it takes little to destroy your life. If you’ve got the money, something like this off the grid house in the inner city is a good idea, if you don’t you should still make preparations.

Remember, these sort of events will become chronic, and in time lesser versions will just become part of everyday life. I expect, assuming I live a normal lifespan (and I’m not young any more) to see in the first world the sort of brown-outs and blackouts that were common in the third world when I was young: but exacerbated by climate and social collapse.

Get ready now, while you still can. Leave it too late, and it will be, well, too late.

Worst case scenario, if by some miracle our society pulls itself together, you’ve spent money on some preparedness you don’t use and have a home with higher resale value.

And remember, don’t build your wonderful home on a Florida flood plain; a place where the aquifers will all dry up in 20 years or the equivalent.

Be well.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

 

 

 

Rush Limbaugh Escapes The Hell-World He Created

By

On February 17, 2021

Comments

Stirling Newberry explained the concept of a death bet: you bet that the negative consequences of your actions will occur after you are dead. Classically this explains climate change: decision makers who could have stopped it will almost all be dead before it becomes significant.

Rush Limbaugh was one of the most important people in creating the modern right; driving deregulation and spreading hate and racism. It’s impossible to overstate how influential he was in the 90s, not just thru his own radio show, but because other radio hosts copied him. Radio was a BIG deal back then still, and had massive reach.

There aren’t ten people more responsible for America being what it is today than Limbaugh; there may not be five. (Robert Ailes, who ran Fox, is on the list too.)

All of these people died before they suffered from making the US a non-fuctional undeveloping nation. They were protected by their wealth and their power. Limbaugh died rich. Ailes died rich.

Meanwhile, in Texas, utilities deregulation and privatization has lead to vast suffering and death, which, yes, anyone with sense who wasn’t blinded by greed or the world’s stupidest ideology (if we give a lot of money to rich people that’ll be good for us!) knew would happen eventually.

America is divided into two tribes who hate each other. Eliminationist rhetoric is common. The media fans the flames, regularly lying and dividing people against each other.

Limbaugh. His legacy. What he worked hard for all his life. What made him rich. Hate, stupidity and the destruction of his country.

Limbaugh won. He’s dead, he never suffered the consequences of his belief.

But many of you, dear readers, will.

Men like Limbaugh at the enemies of all good people; all decent people. So are those who funded him and pushed him. So is every Texas utility executive; every member of the board, and every single politician who pushed deregulation, privatization and policies which increased climate change.

They sold your future; your lives; your children’s lives, so they could live well and be rich. This includes Pelosi and Biden, both of whom were very important in creating this world.

They’re going to die, never having faced the consequences of the evil they have done. You, on the other hand, if you’re not old and cushioned by wealth, will.

A functioning society would throw all these people in jail and take all their money and power. America? Canada? Britain?

We re-elect them and make sure they get richer and richer.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

 

AOC Is Right About Hawley and Cruz & America Is A Coup-able State

By

On February 3, 2021

Comments

Hawley and Cruz encouraged the January 6th riot.

That riot put AOC and other Congresspeople and staff’s life at risk. They were lucky to escape. We know that one rioter was texted that Congress had fled to the basement and that he was to turn on the gas and kill them.

It was a coup attempt. Because Trump is incompetent and tends to hire incompetents (with a few rare exceptions), the coup failed. The army wasn’t onside, only a few cops were willing to help, and so on. The best the coupsters could do is make sure that the outnumbered cops weren’t reinforced by more police or by the national guard.

Anyway, if AOC had been caught by the crowd, the best she could hope for was a beating. The crowd wanted to kill Pence, their own VP, as a traitor and AOC has been far more vilified than that. A beating would be the best case, death after some horrible abuse is the more likely case.

So AOC is right, and since she understands, correctly, that Hawley and Cruz and some others were part of making the riot/coup happen, she doesn’t want to work with them. After all, they did something that could easily have gotten her beaten, raped and/or dead.

It is also true that since there have been no consequences for those who aided, planned and abetted the coup attempt, just for the suckers they used, so there may be another one in the future. She is correct about that also.

What is not true is that this is particularly new: my judgment is that Bush Jr. could have pulled off a successful coup, he just chose not to. He would have had the military onside, and while he was personally suffering from some sort of brain damage, he had many subordinates who were, in their own narrow ways, competent. They knew how the bureaucracy and power works, and were brilliant at making it do what they wanted. The 2000 election was unquestionably stolen, and that was a coup without the theatrics.

America’s met the social conditions for coups for some time now.

In the present, however, it is also true that Cruz and Hawley; Hawley in particular, remain possible votes for things that AOC will want passed. Hawley pushed $2,000 checks hard.

Some of what Hawley wants done will help AOC’s constituents avoid poverty or death. This is a conundrum, and it is best answered by accepting their votes but not letting them take lead if at all possible. Hawley wants to be President, and AOC doesn’t want a man complicit in a riot/coup that could have killed her to have that sort of power. This is reasonable.

What happened January 6th was serious. It is not best answered the way that our political elites are answering it, with an increased security state which will not work when the threat is, as the horror movie line runs, “inside the house.”

But those who are mocking AOC for her fear and for her determination to not work with those who encouraged Jan 6th are missing the actual danger she was in. The protestors beat a cop to death, who they had nothing personally against. They’ve been indoctrinated to hate AOC.

And AOC is right that people who face no consequences for a coup, may well try again if they see no other way to get what they want.

But the problem is too far gone. The correct response is to expel those members and Senators involved, but since Congress operates on an entirely partisan basis, with no actual institutional or democratic loyalty, that is not possible.

This is part of why I say the US is in a pre-coup state: that the conditions are met. The responses required to remove the conditions are not possible.

In the meantime, there is a crisis, and it will be used, as all crises are, to do what those who actually have power wanted before anything happened: crack down on the internet, increase police state powers and so on.

And the abuse of the population, by both parties, will continue, until an elite faction does manage a coup, using the resentment that Democrats and Republicans have built and earned over the years as fuel, OR until America finds a way to be good to the majority of its population.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

The Terror of Liberals in a Time of Insurrection

By

On January 12, 2021

Comments

It took me a while to understand the reaction to the attack on the Capitol. At this point only five people have been killed, no actual Reps or Senators were harmed, and so on. The response, however, has been absolutely savage. If it is up to Liberals, everyone involved will go to prison, and Reps and Senators will be impeached. (It probably isn’t up to them on the latter.)

Biden is talking about creating a new law aimed at ideologically-driven violence, which will be Patriot Act II, and which will be used far more frequently and far more intensely against BLM and Antifa than against the right-wing. Among other things, it’ll be a tool for law enforcement, and law enforcement is right-wing or neoliberal, as are prosecutors.

As with 9/11, the reaction is being driven by FEAR. Terror, even. Those who have something in the US realize they could lose it all, and those who have little but are keeping their heads above water, realize that they could have those heads shoved below water and held there.

It’s the fear of a COUP, of insurrection, of the government being overthrown. Liberals now really believe it can happen in the United States. The attack finally broke through their shell of, “Oh, we can fuck over 90 percent of the population and put 99 percent of the population in fear and it won’t backfire! Oh no!”

They now understand that their political order is in danger, and not eternal. It is not “The End of History,” their version of political-economy is not eternal and everlasting, nor obviously the good and right and everyone knows it and agrees.

And it’s those ungrateful right-wingers, the ones they’ve been pandering to for 40 years. The nerve!

Now let’s first point out that this is TERROR of a COUP.

A coup.

The US has launched dozens of coups around the world. The US is the world leader in coups. The US overthrows governments regularly, including democratic ones.

My overseas friends are having a great time with this.

Why did the coup in DC fail? Because the is no American Embassy in DC to provide logistical support.

…

Why was there a coup in the US this year? Because travel restrictions meant they couldn’t do one overseas!

You get the idea.

So, if you are terrified of this attempted coup, and what will happen if a future right-wing coup succeeds, you now understand what those in dozens of other countries have gone through and those in a hundred countries or so fear.

Get it? Coups are terrifying and bad, especially when they overthrow a democratically-elected government.

THE US IS THE BAD GUY.

American-backed coups were and are an act of evil aggression. Biden will continue trying to overthrow Venezela and Iran, learning nothing, and Americans, learning nothing from this experience, will continue to support his efforts.

What’s happening in the US right now is that FEAR is controlling people’s reactions. Fear is probably appropriate, because as best I can tell, there are going to be similiar actions at almost all of the 50 state capitols. In Pennsylvania, Republicans refused to seat a Democratic Senator.

The US government has a legitimacy crisis. Something like 20 to 25 percent of voters think that the government is illegitimate, that the election was stolen, and that the Democratic party is illegitimate. Democrats feel the same about Republicans.

Twenty to twenty five percent is enough to sustain an insurrection more or less indefinitely, though somewhat below the threshold need to win a serious one.

The US is in for a bad period. People who genuinely think that an election was stolen and government is illegitimate, will do something about that and feel completely justified. Massive de-platforming and censorship of their views is going to be seen as confirmation of their world-view — that the media has been lying to them (which it has, but not about the election), and will not quell the insurrection.

Welcome to the Hell you imposed on other countries, USA. I didn’t want this to happen, even though, honestly, as a country, the US deserves it (though yes, many individual Americans don’t). Perhaps, instead of letting terror drive you to be even greater monsters, you might learn from this.

For those of you who are Christian, you might meditate on “those who live by the sword, die by the sword,” others on the fact that when you treat people badly, both you and they tend to become monsters. Those who are abused become abusers at a much higher rate than those who weren’t. (For a country that epitomizes this in obvious and sad ways, see Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.)

I reiterate my message of the last 12 or so years, that the US is in for bad times. With every year that has gone by, the time to get out or prepare for those bad times has decreased.

The US now has the necessary conditions for a low grade insurrection. How bad it will be, or if it will fizzle out, I don’t know, but the conditions exist.

Take that into account, and remember, the right-wing militias include a lot of eliminationists. They want to kill left-wingers, Jews, Blacks and “race traitors” in vast, vast numbers. If they ever get the chance, don’t bet on them not doing so, because if you’re wrong, it’s the last bet you’ll lose.

It’s also true, of course, that this could be a cyclical thing that doesn’t hit the worst excesses possible in the cycle and subsides. I certainly hope so, for a variety of reasons. Just understand that right now we don’t know that it will subside.

The next four years, at least, are going to be UGLY. Be prepared.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

Americans Have Found the Enemy, and It Is They

By

On January 7, 2021

Comments

I want to return to this once more.

If you’ve watched videos of the protestors who got past security in Congress you know they weren’t exactly the A-Team. It’s true they had a little bit of inside help, and that the cops clearly didn’t want to seriously oppose them. Even so, it wasn’t a super-sharp operation.

Yet, they did get in, and if a few of them had automatic weapons in bags, they could have killed a lot of Congress members. It is fortunate for Congress that’s not why they were there.

The conclusion I draw from this, though I’m no military man, is that an organized attack could easily take Congress and kill or take hostage almost all its members.

Even if the Capitol cops made an effort to fight back, I don’t think they’d stand a chance against people who knew what they were doing.

The defense is essentially intelligence: If you know an attack is coming, well, the Capitol cops have plenty of backup they can get onsite. That was, apparently, offered before the protest/attack and refused.

So, anyway, anyone with decent op-security can eliminate most of the legislative branch any time they want. Good to know.

(America continues to amaze. With the largest military and police budgets in the world, they persist in the legacy of 9-11, when they couldn’t get any armed planes into the sky, despite having the world’s largest air force.)

The next thing to note, AGAIN, is that the people who did this appear to have genuinely thought they were saving democracy. Had that been the case, they’d be heroes. What they are, instead, is suckers. The people who convinced them are the primary criminals here, not the schmucks who believed them — who are now likely to get a hammer dropped on them, as a cop has now died.

Next, note the following:

I have seen polls where about 70 percent of Republicans think the election was stolen. So what happens next is the creation of a myth:

There was an election, it was stolen. We tried to intervene, mostly peacefully, and we lost.

Trump has now backed down fully, and his partisans appear to be furious. They feel used, but that will turn into a “stabbed in the back” narrative.

In other words, the ideological justification for a coup will be in place: “They stole the election, and mostly peaceful efforts didn’t work, and the patriots who tried it are martyrs.”

Now this doesn’t automatically mean a coup, or revolution, or anything, but understand absolutely clearly that what has happened is a consequence of the swamp of American politics and governance. You have a massively polarized electorate and a media system which repeatedly lies to people or lets them believe lies. Slamming the barn door isn’t going to work, because what will happen is a complete distrust of remaining media.

This distrust is rational in its own way. It’s not like the “liberal” media doesn’t lie all the time, about consequential things too, like Iraq or whether Russia is putting bounties on American soldiers. They just lie about different things, in service of a different set of elites.

Once you lose trust, as in the case of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, it’s hard to get it back — even when you’re telling the truth. There’s no reason to trust the New York Times, say, or CNN, or MSNBC. They might be telling the truth, but they’re serial liars.

Add to this the fact that the US has spent 40 to 50 years dealing with economic decline for a plurality to a majority of the population, especially the young, and you have a classic recipe for bad times, including the possibility of insurrection, coups, civil wars, and so on.

There’s no way to be certain what will happen, but we can recognize that the necessary conditions are in place for very bad events.

The US has no real enemies who can harm it, except Americans. It has been that way ever since the Revolution; it’s a simple matter of geography (and these, days, insane over-armament.)

The enemy is inside the house, and he’s you.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

Trump Has Proven the US Is Ripe for a Right-wing Coup

By

On January 6, 2021

Comments

So, my take on Trump was always that he wasn’t a coup threat because he was too incompetent to pull it off, but that he was dangerous in the sense that he was showing someone who IS competent what was possible.

I still think that’s the case. He’s a boob.

But Trump has proven something important today: Capitol police, whose job is to protect Congress, just let the protestors through. They removed barriers and even took selfies with them.

If an Antifa group had tried this, swarming up, trying to climb through windows, shoving aside barriers, lounging in the Speaker’s Office, they’d have been shot down like dogs. Instead, I’m seeing arrest totals of around fifteen.

So what we now know is that when a serious right-wing mob or militia, one that really does intend to overthrown US government (this group did not), shows up, the cops will not stop them; their opposition will be no more than token.

At that point, it will come down to the military. In this case, it’s clear the military would not acquiesce, but for a President who gets the military onside enough to at least paralyze them, or is smart enough to make sure that the colonels or generals in charge of capitol-adjacent troops are on his side or will not intervene, the coup will succeed.

Anyway, the US is now a pre-coup nation. The necessary conditions are in place: vast inequality, poverty, a stabbed-in-the-back narrative, and a storyline that a right-wing President was overthrown through voter fraud. The police have indicated they will not stop a coup. All that remains necessary is to paralyze the military, or make a deal with them, and a smart, would-be dictator will be able to do the job.

I don’t say this lightly, and I don’t say it WILL happen. I don’t know if it will. But the conditions for it are there.

Note that the conditions are there, right now, for a right-wing coup, not a left-wing one. The cops and many members of the military are sympathetic to the right, not the left.

I’ve been saying for some time that left-wing people should consider getting out of the US if they can, and if not, figure out how to protect themselves from what is coming.

That is now more true than ever. A right-wing coup in the next ten years or so, or a civil war is now at least in coin-flip probability territory.

Might avoid it; might get lucky. But it is a bet and one with near equal odds.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

Plus c’est la même chose

By

On December 31, 2020

Comments

***MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST****

Jeremiads notwithstanding, it appears that Biden’s strategy of appealing to Trump-disgusted suburban voters worked. At the US presidential level, at least, left-populists and Sanders supporters proved to be essentially irrelevant, politically. The Democratic consultant class has had its biases confirmed. What is, haha, left to the left-wing populist is to double down on the jeremiads: to predict that in the future, the inevitable failure of now-successful beige neoliberal centrism to reinstate its heavenly mandate in the USA will result, down the road, in the election of a smart fascist/right-populist Man On Horseback, if we’re lucky, merely a Viktor Orbán figure or suchlike for the American context — or worse, possibly much worse.

This reasoning seems very plausible to me. Because it is true that unless the neoliberal establishment has a change of heart, Bidenist/Obamaist US leadership will not be able to turn the ship around from an on-going trajectory of national and global decline. And insofar as that decline is felt in shrinking living standards, and insofar as “beige centrism” manages to suppress left-wing alternatives, the population will likely turn to forceful/violent right-wing populism, and all the inherent divide-and-conquer grifts that right-wing populism brings with it alongside the nationalist emotional highs and the “sugar rush.” As I said, it seems very plausible.

One of the bad habits of neoliberal intellectualism is an excessive reliance on “counter-intuitive” explanations as exemplified by the once-popular book Freakonomics.   We should be rightly suspicious of narratives that tell us that things we view in common-sense terms as bad are actually good. Sometimes counter-intuitive explanations like that are valid, but only sometimes. But we should not fall into the reverse trap and always uncritically accept simpler explanations that happen to match our moral intuitions. A common left-wing moral intuition is what I explained above: A people increasingly deprived of access to the good life and unable to access progressive responses to that deprivation will eventually provide reactionary forces a breakthrough. It has, after all, happened before.

It is the implied determinism that we should view with at least a little bit of suspicion. First of all, although we should heed history’s warning signs, history actually does not truly repeat reliably, and context matters. Trump’s senility and incompetence was, in point of fact, part of the Trump political brand. It was the riposte to a failing elite in a time when elite “competence-signalling” was part of the elite self-image. The specific trajectory to the “competent Trump” is much harder to fathom, when the incompetence was specifically a part of what he was and still is lionized for by his most ardent followers.

If we leave aside the typical and easy materialist determinism that thrives particularly on the more left end of the spectrum and accept a little bit of “counter-intuitive” reasoning, a different picture emerges. One in which the success and failure of Trump was highly dependent on circumstances over and above material discontent, circumstances that are difficult to line up again.  Circumstances in which the very competence of the future feared competent fascistoid is one of the features that prevents his (or her) rise, just to give a possibility. One in which the bad memory of Trump is sufficiently mobilizing for a long enough period of time that the mainstream neoliberal centre is protected from attempts at overcoming it.

In that world, between every election, things just keep getting worse and worse. And yet, the process of coalition building in a complex society given the American political system simply throws up Biden after Biden, Democrat or Republican. Decline centrism, unending. Like Tyler Durden’s vision in Fight Club, with people drying meat on the asphalt of a ruined highway, except they’re still arguing over whether they should choose the chieftain with the red trim or the blue trim as head chieftain, out of fear that one of them might reduce the incentives created by the fear of winter freezing by their proposed “peltfare” program.

Imagine this future: the soft, dirty sole of a comfortable white Reebok runner gently stroking a human cheek — forever.

Page 15 of 21

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén