# A few simple points

1. The Republican Party has become in substance the American Nazi Party. Most Republican voters, most Republican electeds, did not intend to belong to the American Nazi Party, just as most Twitter users did not intend to be producing content for a Nazi website. They just found themselves there. The alternatives still displease them, it's hard to know what to do. It's forgivable. However, the longer you continue to self-ID as a Republican, the less forgivable it is. You don't have to become a Democrat. Just don't be a Republican. If you are an elected, you have a harder burden. If you don't want to be a Nazi, you do have to cease to caucus with Republicans. If you are a House member and a vote for Speaker is held, you must at the very least withhold your vote from Republican candidates.

2. If you voted for Donald Trump, you needn't feel guilty and you needn't apologize. It was not remotely clear at the time of the election that the new administration would violate black letter law and procedure to access and expose private and classified data; would decimate the already understaffed civil service; would illegally shutdown vital agencies and literally kill people; would impound lawfully authorized payments; would destroy the foundations of American science and technology; would destroy America's alliances and threaten its neighbors; would ship migrants to camps in Central America with no public transparency as to conditions; all in a continuing attempt at autogolpe that rather parallels Hitler's program in 1933. Yes, lots of people did loudly warn you. But our politics have become so polarized, so tabloidized, that a person of good will could have taken all that noise as self-serving hyperbole. Professional Democrats might have shouted Trump is Hitler, but neither the Biden Administration (hi Merrick Garland!) nor Democratic electeds in the run-up to the election really acted like they believed that. While Biden was still hanging on, when asked how he'd feel if he lost to Trump, he infamously said "I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about." Those aren't the words of a person who truly believed his loss would mean elevation of an American Hitler. (To be fair, Elon Musk's role was far less clear at that time.)

3. If you voted for Donald Trump and you are a person of good will, you do in my view need to recognize that you erred. In good faith you participated in what turned out to be a bad enterprise. At the very least you have an obligation to withdraw your support.

4. If you promoted Donald Trump, if you arrogated to yourself any role influencing others to support his election — among friends, on social media, in public writing — you are a locus of accountability. You do, in my view, have a positive obligation to communicate your error at least as powerfully as you once communicated your support, and to work to minimize the damage the movement you helped elect will do. Welcome to the resistance. It's better to be cringe than to crime against humanity.

5. Republicans are in substance the American Nazi Party. That oughtn't prevent one from recognizing that the Democratic Party is pretty terrible. In my view, the Democratic Party has made itself a jobs program for insiders. It consistently puts reelection and seniority-based promotion of incumbents before effectiveness at promoting the values of its supporters, or even governing effectively. No matter how much it fails it demands ever more cash to enrich a charmed circle of consultants. Culturally the party is a nest of risk-averse careerists, from which their timidity, their infamous "fecklessness", results. And yet. Democrats have the virtue of being the not-Nazis currently available. You save the country with the champions you have, not the champions you might wish to have.

6. The first order of business is to impeach and remove Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson. That's the only remedy we have within our Constitutional system. If possible, we should avoid joining the Nazis in stepping outside our imperfect but perfectly workable system. Obviously, at the moment, impeachment and removal is a pipe dream. But it can become an inevitability quickly, once Republican Congresspeople understand the absolute toxicity of this administration to the American public.

7. We are the American public. It is our business to behave in ways that communicate to our sheltered, gerontic representatives the toxicity of this administration in ways they can neither ignore nor write off as the mischief of an unrepresentative activist class.

8. Obviously phone and write your Congresspeople. Obviously, but really! Frequently! Communicate your shame over the actions of the administration and your loathing of anyone who enables its reckless, awful, behavior.

9. Our vulnerability to Nazi takeover derives in part from having substituted media for direct, human-to-human interactions with other another. The current emergency is a great opportunity to reverse that. Get in touch. Phone people you haven't spoken to in years. Rekindle those connections. Do that for its own sake. But also communicate, respectfully and without arrogance, the necessity that people of goodwill now participate in politics in ways they might understandably have absented themselves in the past. Encourage your friends also to phone and write their Congresspeople. Get together with people you haven't gotten together with so much to discuss the issues of the day, to make phone calls or write letters together. Host parties.

10. Demand meetings with your representatives, whether person-to-person, in small groups, or "Town Hall"-style public events. Communicate plainly and energetically that the current administration and the political apparatus that supports it are evil. If our representatives are to represent us, they must work to end the administration and to see that apparatus disgraced.

11. Consider frugality, as a matter of personal risk management, and as a vote against any justification an evil administration might make on the basis of a supposed go-go economy. Now is a great time to build a giant cushion of savings if you can.

12. Consider relocating outside the US, hopefully temporarily, as a matter of personal risk management, and as a means of withdrawing your contribution both as producer and consumer from an economy superintended by malign forces. Especially if you have children, if you have means to do so, creating an "outside option" is just wise.

13. Consider diversifying from US assets, especially absurdly overvalued US equities. I hesitate to say this because I've a conflict of interest. I try (but recently have failed rather spectacularly) to make my living largely through financial speculation. I am often short US equities. I am now. So this advice is self-serving. Nevertheless, I think divesting from US equities is ethically called-for. (I thought it ethically called-for even before this administration, but "now more than ever".) Obviously use your own judgment, ethical and prudential. But while our political system has largely denuded the vote of its expressive power, the American state remains relentlessly attentive to the level of the S&P 500.

14. Demand Congressional reform. A return to the status quo ante of state paralysis will sow the seeds of yet another disorderly, destructive paroxysm to try to right the ship. The total abdication by Congress of its role and function in our Constitutional system is the deep root of our catastrophe. The three branches of government may be coequal in legitimacy, but Congress is supreme in its power and authority. It's Article I, motherfuckers. We should not be surprised we experience morbid symptoms when the very heart of our system of government has stopped beating. We need electoral reform, so that the House is elected by proportional representation, so that citizens can replace the two legacy parties — one evil, the other torpid — with organizations each of us can find homes in, which will vigorously represent our interests and values. Senators should be elected by approval voting, so that they have incentive to represent their state's entire public, rather than rely upon copartisans, their "base". We also require reform of the arcane procedure that rigs the process of legislating within the two chambers of Congress. This needs to be simplified, made legible and subject to critique from the broad outside public, reformed to diminish status quo bias and disproportionate power based on seniority. The legislative branch must be massively restaffed, so it sustains expertise internally and does not depend upon lobbyists and donor-funded think tanks to write legislation. Term limits should be universal. Institutional know-how should subsist within parties, rather than in the persons of "experienced legislators" who create tradeoffs for voters between legislative effectiveness and their own values.

← Might Elon Musk be personally liable?
↑↑↑
A theory of Elons →

Subscribe to this blog (`drafts.interfluidity.com`)

E‑mail:
Display Name:
😎