Rain Without Thunder
Random Thoughts On The Eve Of Civil War
As I write this, the government in my country is now hours into a shutdown that might drag on for weeks, due to the polarization in the U.S. Congress. For those living outside our borders, this might seem like the behavior expected from one of those Third World crapholes our current president is so fond of deriding. I suppose now’s an inconvenient time to mention that we’ve been in this situation before - but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Now, all services not considered ‘essential’ will no longer be delivered or provided, and all personnel in those positions will no longer get paid. By law, they’ll be paid retroactively, unless our current president decides they’re no longer needed. He’s threatened to “…cut a lot of the people that ... we’re able to cut on a permanent basis.”
In other words, he’s going to use this shutdown to conduct another purge.
There are some connected threads to all of this, as it turns out.
The Military, and The Enemy Within
By now, you’ve seen the reports, photos, and some commentary from retired personnel on the recently-concluded senior military personnel meeting at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. This was the brainchild of Pete Hegseth, the newly-minted ‘Secretary of War’, whose credentials for the post are, not to put too fine a point on it, less than stellar.
Trump and Hegseth set this up to be a rally. It was more like a meeting of funeral home directors, with stone-silence the order of the day - and any applause or approval was right out. It was supposed to be a meeting to tell senior generals, admirals, and senior enlisted personnel, in the words of one of my more earthy relatives, ‘how the cow eats the cabbage’. Instead, it exposed the complete lack, not only of leadership, but basic qualifications.
Hegseth made it clear that preparation for war, and its conduct, were the new mission of the U.S. military. He went on to outline new rules of conduct: “…we unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.”
He went on to say that only white males are welcome. Everyone will pass the same physical requirement tests. DEI and ‘woke culture’ are a thing of the past. He defended his firing of the top Army general (a black man), and the top Navy admiral (a woman). They were part of a broken culture, he said, and concluded by saying, “If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, you should do the honorable thing and resign.”
He continued, stating that basic training will be ‘restored’ to what it should be - “…scary, tough, and disciplined.” Drill instructors will be allowed once again to ‘put hands’ on recruits, and practices like ‘shark attacks’ (where multiple drill instructors will swarm a recruit) will once again be permitted, along with overturning bunks and other behaviors long rejected as ineffective and abusive. “Department policy defining conduct by Service members that constitutes hazing, bullying, and harassment is overly broad, jeopardizing combat readiness, mission accomplishment, and trust in the organization,” Hegseth concluded.
Trump then took the stage - with a backdrop of a large U.S. flag which made his appearance look much like the introductory scene from the film, ‘Patton’ - and began what can only be called a rant.
He wasted no time stating one of his primary visions for the military. He named several cities - San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Portland, and Los Angeles - stating that “…we’re gonna straighten them out one by one. And this is gonna be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within…I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military…” He reiterated that we are now dealing with an “…invasion from the enemy within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
Trump began his rant by saying, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.” There’s no ambiguity there; no room for discussion. Both Hegseth and Trump are of a mind on the new mission - it’s war, and nothing but, and they’ll fine-tune their new military internally before unleashing it on external ‘enemies’.
It’s worth noting that autocrats love abusive training techniques, and are generally abusive toward their senior military leadership. It’s also worth noting that history is instructive here - this sort of thing never ends well for the autocrat. Retired general Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarked after this event that Trump is “…now the most dangerous person to this country; a fascist to the core.”
It’s not a leap - more like a small step - from this to a scenario much like the ‘60’s film, ‘Seven Days In May’. Removing someone like Trump from office is a huge step, and it won’t happen without the help of the military. Everything will depend on what they do.
Of course, scenarios abound. Again; they’re all interconnected.
The States - And Their Actions
Recently, in response to Trump and his Secretary of HHS, RFK, Jr.’s actions regarding the CDC and vaccination requirements, the three far western states (Washington, Oregon, and California), formed their own Health Alliance. This was followed shortly by Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont, which formed their own.
Actions like these have been called ‘soft secession’ by some media pundits. Also included are the establishment of ‘sanctuary cities’ and ‘sanctuary states’ with regard to immigration, the passage of specific abortion rights protection in the face of the overturn of Roe, and the establishment of their own climate change initiatives.
Discussed, but not implemented, is the withholding of tax funds to the Federal government in favor of creating and funding their own programs. This, obviously, would be considered a flash point for the current administration.
It’s not lost on Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, that his state produces more of the nation’s GDP than any other. In fact, Texas and Florida are the only ‘red’ states which produce more than they get. The thought of ‘blue’ states refusing to contribute tax revenues or seceding from the Federal union outright is (or ought to be) a worry to some officials in the current administration.
At this point, some of you are probably thinking, “Whoa! Wait a minute! You used the ‘S’ word!”. Yes. I did. We should probably normalize its usage, also. I’ll get to why in a moment.
Secession - not in the 19th century context, but in a brand new one - is, indeed, on the table, and for good reason. The nation’s as polarized as it’s been since the 1850’s, and while we’re not yet to the point where Congressmembers are beating each other with canes as in the illustration at the beginning of this piece, we’re probably not far from it. The current governmental shutdown is a symptom of much larger problems.
Division and Politics
It’s been beaten like the proverbial Dead Horse, but the current Congress can do nothing, as they’ve been very neatly co-opted by a cabal of monied interests who, starting in 1970 with the Powell Memorandum, began a long game of quite literally buying Congress, culminating in the abomination of Citizens United, which legalized the process. We no longer have a representative democracy in any real sense, and haven’t, for over twenty years. (I’ll leave it to others to determine exactly when, as arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin really isn’t my game.)
The current version of the Democratic Party is useless. (Again, we can argue this one until the cows come home, but the fact remains.) Third parties have no chance in the current system, which makes no provision for national ranked choice voting or other means of allowing representation by percentage, so putting together any sort of representative coalition is simply impossible.
The Republicans, for their part, are busy at the behest of the current president at the game of Gerrymandering - redrawing Congressional maps to favor their own constituency and thus gaining seats in Congress. Twenty-nine out of fifty states have ‘red’ legislatures, and while getting them all on board will prove a daunting task, the Republicans have a little over a year to get the job done, and most appear more than willing to undertake a partisan redistricting effort. The successful conclusion of this process will stack Congress (and perhaps even the Senate, also) for decades.
Protest - The Real Thing
Frederick Douglass once famously said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” He went on to say that “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder…” Numbers are a good thing, but they prove meaningless if protests are done on a Saturday (with brunch conveniently afterward).
Real protest - the kind that effects change - is inconvenient to those in authority. It involves things like general strikes. Blocking freeways with thousands of people. Shutting down access to airports. Preventing legislatures from meeting (especially if that meeting will include the aforementioned redistricting). Doing the same at the Federal level - blocking access to everything from local Federal buildings and ICE facilities to shutting down Congress in Washington, if necessary.
Demanding real change.
In 2011, during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, author Chris Hedges probably said it best: “There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place…or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience…or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.”
A Summation, If You’ll Have It
It doesn’t take much to connect the dots on this, and the clock is ticking. With Trump and his cult firmly in charge, the Supreme Court stacked in favor of same and doing his bidding, the Republicans with their new electoral districts will be in a position to do whatever their Leader sees fit. (If that means putting him up for a third or fourth term, they’ll have the ability to do so.) Democracy is meaningless. So is any form of protest, if it’s not inconvenient to the government.
Once again, Frederick Douglass is instructive. He said that there were four ‘boxes’ from which a population in democratic crisis could choose; the ballot box (voting), the soap box (protest), the jury box (litigation) - and when all else failed, the cartridge box (armed revolt).
We are now faced with the failure of the first three. Voting is ineffective, for reasons previously stated; the monied classes have co-opted the electoral process with money. During the Occupy movement, the government, in a one-day coordinated effort, shut down the Occupy encampments and arrested its leaders. Again, the message was clear: Further meaningful protest will not be allowed.
Litigation has, likewise, proven ineffective. In a two-year fight, several litigants sued the Obama administration for its indefinite-detention provision in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. A Federal judge threw the case out, citing a ‘lack of standing’ among the litigants. Again, the lesson was unequivocal - redress by litigation is not possible.
That doesn’t mean we should cease those activities. In its plutonomy memo to its wealthiest investors, Citibank stated that its biggest fear was that people would begin to vote as a bloc, and thwart the efforts of the monied classes to run the show. Likewise, real protest may ‘not be allowed’ by the government, but the simple truth is that they can’t lock up everyone. Packing the courts with lawsuits will slow the government’s attempts at autocracy.
It’s possible without outright revolution - but that window is very narrow now, and frankly, I don’t see the U.S. population waking up without a serious catalyst - another Kent State, if you will, or something similar - to spur enough action.
JFK said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I’d like to think that last one’s not true. I’ve studied enough history - and lived long enough - to believe otherwise.
In 1787, on the conclusion of the Constitutional convention, Benjamin Franklin was approached by one of Philadelphia’s best known citizens, who asked, “Doctor Franklin, what have you created?”
His reply was, “A Republic, madam - if you can keep it.”
We will prove - or not - in the next year whether we can do just that.