I appreciate the dark JVL. Almost everyone around me is either all in on MAGA or huffing the hopium about how all of this is going to work out simply by showing up to vote for someone who promises to ignore everything that has happened and be a dose of 90's normal like Biden. While rubbing my nose in a bleak reality isn't a balm to my soul, it at least reminds me I'm not crazy when I see the cascade happening as well.
I will say, while I don't expect you to have all the answers, I would like some more exploration of where we are headed. That as well as exploring what we might do to prepare for those darker futures. Recent articles that think about the implications of blue states sending national guard troops to these cities are a welcome step in that direction but I'd like to go deeper. Should liberals be setting up alternative structures of resistance in case the Dem party gets co-opted or disbanded? What would that look like? Things of that nature.
Dear Jonathan, I feel the same way you feel right now. I loved your sci-fi story analogy. I would have thought that our constitutional system was complex-complex, but I think the regime has done too much damage already for the system to survive. I fear that even if the majority of Americans want to change course dramatically, it is too late and too little now. 3 more years of this and we will not have a democracy at all. As you said, something will fill the void left by destruction, but it won’t be the same liberal democracy we had. And by liberal I don’t mean “liberal.” Also as you said, he has created serial catastrophes in very rapid sequence, too rapid for 330 million people to respond to effectively. The top court isn’t doing the right thing, and Congress isn’t doing the right thing. They both seem to be in on the destruction. The citizens are the only body left, and we don’t seem to know what to do. While we waste time, the country breaks. All the analysts are on the same page as Yeats: “things fall apart.”
Two weeks or more describing the reality is only a moment in the march of time. I hope you, JVL, are finding ways for your soul to sing. When tyrants tremble, when in prison cells and dungeons, may our thought be to him winging.
If the system is headed to inevitable decline and we are headed to prison cells, may our thought be lifted higher & may our souls continue to sing. For in carrying death in our beings, we find life. We will not be the first--nor the last--to sing from those prison cells from which St. Paul once sang.
Hi JVL, I joined the Bulwark+ specifically because I wanted to tell you this:
Your perspective is a relief. Yes, there are doomsday scenarios in every direction. But it's also real, not exaggerated, and unequivocal.
So much media is packed with obfuscation, obliviousness, excruciating naïvete, it's easy to feel unmoored. The amount of denial is maddening. But I know that if I read your blog or listen to a podcast appearance, you will call it exactly what it is. And that's a relief. We need to reckon with exactly how serious it is if we have any hope of getting to the other side of it.
Things are bad, and there are a lot of signals that the worst of it is in front of us. We know how bad fascism can become, and while I try to hang onto optimism, deep down I think there's a big chance that American fascism will outdo them all. I absolutely believe we are past the point of no return-- in some hypothetical future textbook, where there's a timeline of the 2nd American Civil War (or whatever this turns into), we have almost certainly passed the starting point. Would you mark the starting point as _past_ the president deploying the military into "enemy" cities, his cabinet speaking of "liberation" from illegitimate leaders?
So here's something I have found comforting in the last few months, if mildly fatalist: we are not the first people who have had to go up against something like this. We've been lucky for awhile, but it's just our turn now. There is a long tradition of antifascists; I admire many of them; we could do worse than to be in their company.
I couldn't agree more with your response. Looking at how other nations worked their way out of fascism is one way to keep despair at bay.
The press (and the public, largely) spent a couple of decades in denial about how bad the intentions of the opposition actually were, and trying to business-as-usual and both-sides the public into accepting every ominous overreach by the GOP and then Trump. Sugar-coating authoritarianism helps no one. I respect JVL for sticking to his Cassandra-ism.
I would rather not live out the last 20 years of my life in a fascist authoritarian dictatorship. You’re right, there will be something on the other side of this, but we don’t know what. I hope democracy.
Maybe if the basic problem is that if 40% of the populace doesn't want liberal democracy any more the solution is to give them what they want and separate the US into two basic groups. The red states that want a Trump dictatorship, and the blue states that don't. In many ways that's giving up but it can also be seen as salvaging what we can from the wreck that's coming. One can always hope that eventually the red states will decide that dictatorship is worse than democracy and want a new USA.
The trouble is, the red-blue divide isn't just between the states, it's within the states. Rural America is mostly MAGA, but they were heading in that direction since Rush Limbaugh hit the airwaves. Oregon is a blue state, but the farther you go from Portland and Eugene, the redder and loonier it gets. Hating liberals is almost a religious commandment in rural America.
There’s a lot of great real-world work on complex systems, especially by the New England Complex Systems Institute. From a complex systems perspective, the “tipping point” framing doesn’t quite work, mostly because if it’s a complex system, liberal democracy is not a fixed architecture that either survives intact or collapses completely. Instead, we’re experiencing a “fitness landscape transition” to a more stable configuration. If we view the problem as institutional fragility, then the solution might be to defend institutions, but if the problem is power consolidation, then the solution is structural reorganization to prevent recapture. I would love a discourse on structural changes to our democracy that draws on complex systems research. It would likely point us to the adoption of natural regional structures that cross state boundaries, a distributed leadership architecture (like Switzerland’s Federal Council), worker and community-led stakeholder boards for large corporations, and the separation of information from profit through a democratically-funded public media commons. I recognize we might have to go through even deeper depths of JVL darkness to get there, but I believe there are even better systems than the one we’re emerging from.
Institutions are implemented to drive consistency and stability of an ecosystem. But they miss a fundamental truth. It's about PEOPLE! People > Process. We as people need to be roused to action. Filled with empathy. Driven by conviction to raise all people up.
That is the folly of us as Americans. Fundamentally, things were so good (for many) for so long that we mistook institutions for people. At best, they are a derivative sum of the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of the people who compose them. Look at the institutions that are fighting the hardest right now. I see a clear majority of woman and people of color who are willing to fight for those institutions. Comfortable men seem most likely to walk away when challenged.
Here is a deeply personal perspective. Had Kamala Harris won in 2024, **I** likely would not have gotten engaged in politics. Engaged with the Democratic party, protests, pro-democracy groups, community activism. I would have continued on as I had, wiped the sweat from my brow, whispered a "thank goodness" and moved on. Voted progressive, maybe a donation here and there, and quietly thanked the universe that there were other people doing this work, so I didn't have to.
My shame is I was comfortable enough to do nothing. Nothing tangible. As others, many close to me, continued to fight for what they deserve. Because they were more directly impacted than me.
Before 1776, we had nothing. Look at how far we came. What those people did, the amazingness of this great experiment. And look at how far below the ideals they fell, we all fell...with so many people around us NEVER getting the American dream. Something a white, cis, well-educated, man gets to take for granted.
Look at Roe and the VRA. Both fundamental victories for the ideals of America. And look how those opposed spent 50+ years undermining them. It's the will of People that make all the difference. They can be repealed, or undercut, but that does not mean we can't do something better. It may take time, it may make us (me) uncomfortable, it may even have an impact on my life and livelihood, but it can be done.
JVL, you are right, we may not go back to what we had. Many people would argue it wasn't that great to begin with. I refuse to believe liberal democracy is dead. It's current form may be hurt, but it also presents an opportunity to do something so much better.
Will enough people stand up. Will enough people care. And will we continue to care if and after this current threat is gone. Otherwise this ecosystem will resemble the derivative of the people. Apathetic and comfortable enough for many.
Will **I** continue to be as engaged in 20 years? It's the question we should all reflect on.
I hope I never take what I have for granted again. Time will tell.
This is the first time I've wanted to tell JVL to fuck off.
Democracy isn't a natural system?
My God, you're so fucking blind.
It took two centuries of intention and planning the total devotion of billionaires and power freaks and racist Americans to kill our democracy.
You're in "murder on the Orient Express" asking if the victim had a terminal disease.
I get it, as a conservative, being completely blind to everything is your natural state, but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
Here's a hint, democracy can be completely robust in OTHER counties.
HINT HINT!
But you know what other countries would have when faced with Fascism? Solidarity, trust among ourselves, care for each other. So yeah, Americans are as inferior as hell!
My hope at the moment is this. The one thing Trump doesn't see in people is empathy and moral outrage.
The thing that ended Jim Crow, gave us civil rights legislation, integrated schools - everything he hates. Maybe it even had something to do with the end of slavery.
If people come for him, so angry and so righteous that they are willing to die to topple him he's gonna panic like you've never seen.
And you know what Hitler, his hero didn't have to deal with? Phone videos of most of his atrocities.
Due to Trump's many decades of insane statements worshipping the brutality of despots, I believe that his ambition isn't to become a dictator, his ambition is to massacre freedom activists like the Tiananmen Square massacre that he RAVED about "When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak ... as being spit on by the rest of the world"
Why do you think the first thing he had ICE do was kidnap hundreds of innocent people and send them to literal death camps in despotic countries against the orders of multiple courts?
He wants to FORCE people to kill his agents so he can radicalize ICE and have a force to kill Americans en-mass.
If he can't hold onto power for the rest of his life, he's going to prison. So he HAS to end democracy and the Constitution and law. And he needs a radicalized force to suppress the population.
But the violence he craves may backfire. Americans are not Russian serfs who have only known centuries of having no power and keeping our heads down for our betters.
You don't want to get Americans angry [Peter Lorre voice].
Sure the Fascists are sadistic, but the rest of us are too. It IS one culture.
We've done more violence at a societal level to OTHER PEOPLE than most countries.
If we can be the country that jailed so more people than any one else, that bombed so many people, we can turn that savagery on Republicans.
And to be fair it's because we're USED to feeling powerful.
Republicans try to steal all our power and abuse our neighbors. Oh oh, that's a mistake. They're gonna regret that!
And maybe even the Republican base will start to recognize that authoritarianism demands the end of that individualism they've been bragging about all those years. Maybe they'll realize that Trump and Johnson and Vance and fucking Stephen Miller are now now the hated Fed.
I think Trump is going to get Americans so angry that we're gonna fucking bulldoze the Republican party.
They won't see it coming and they'll be swept away so fast the survivors will be in a daze for their rest of their lives in prison.
1) An interesting topic for today. I don’t really have any good predictions on whether we have reached a tipping point or not. All I can do is throw a few observations out.
I used to design flight control systems so that makes me an expert on how to understand our current political climate. Because I believe that society writ large responds like an underdamped second-order system. What that means is that following some disruption (forcing function in control systems lingo), the system will overreact (overshoot) and then settle down to a different equilibrium point. What determines how much of an overreaction we get and how long it takes to settle down is the magnitude of the forcing function and the amount of damping (resistance to change) that the system has built into it.
I think there are some unique aspects of this in today’s political climate. Presidents always provide some disruption once in office. Most of the time it’s not that big (or it’s only big in one area). But Trump is one big, huge disruption everywhere. So the “system” is going to tend to react strongly by being pushed far away from its previous equilibrium point. And the other aspect that will cause a very large overshoot is the fact that the people who normally provide some damping (conservatives) are the ones who are aiding and abetting the disruption. The damping in the system just isn’t there.
And I further believe that the things that JVL has listed (Private enterprise, Military leadership, The Fed, Academia, The CDC) also provide some damping. When the influence of these institutions is compromised, damping goes down and overshoots go up.
These things mean that we are going to end up far away from where we started before things start to recover. And even when whatever recovery there is occurs, the new equilibrium point may not be very close to where we are today.
Normally, you can’t drive a stable system unstable by simply hitting it really hard. But you certainly can do it by monkeying with the feedback parameters that control its response. And that I think is the key question that JVL is asking: have we already (or even can we) monkey with those feedback mechanisms so much that it drives the whole system unstable?
Certainly, liberal democracy is not a simple-simple system as there are clearly multiple inputs that affect it (some of these inputs affect the feedback mechanisms which control the overall system response). I’d say it’s complex-complex.
2) There certainly is a tipping point. But I don’t think we are there yet. I think the acid test will come either in 2026 or 2028 with the elections in those years. For if the elections aren’t viewed as legitimate by both sides (including trying to get results overturned), all hell will break loose.
But there are worrying signs that we are headed toward a tipping point. First and foremost, it’s the idea that so many people like what Trump is doing and either don’t view it as authoritarian or like it because they see it as that. And personally I would count just about every last person who voted for Trump in 2024 as in that category. They either voted for Trump gladly or because the other side is just “so evil”. And if they view the other side that way, they will almost certainly go along with any measures that keep them out of power.
I have long castigated the Evangelicals for their support of Trump because it seems to me that they have completely flipped their worldview. What used to be “the means justify the ends” has now become “the ends justify the means”. And I fear that too many other people are following that same path. So if Trump deploys the military in cities, it doesn’t matter that he’s breaking lots of norms (if not actual laws) and misusing the military. It only matters that crime goes down.
And there’s my old bugbear – the right-wing media ecosystem. As long as they are out there poisoning the airwaves, we won’t be able to settle down. And it’s not just Fox News. There are a whole plethora of conservative media outlets whose listenership numbers dwarf anything that liberals have. Think Newsmax, OANN, Alex Jones, Clay Travis, Buck Sexton. I listen to those folks periodically and if there is one common thread among them, it’s conspiracy theories that question the decency and patriotism of anyone who isn’t in their camp. And also that they make a lot of shit up (some of these are simply lies; but some of it is telling stories that are so distorted from reality that they are scant better than lies).
I have this idea for a "Bulwark Bulletin Board" where community members can post links to good info and announcements of protests and other such resources. Does anyone want to help with this? I have no idea of what I am doing, so I probably won't try to do it unless I have help. I imagine it would take five people to run, maybe more if it got popular and needed moderators. It would also need to have an organizational framework. Like tags; make things searchable.
There are lots of good resources that get posted in comments, and it gets hard to remember where you saw something.
I think that's a wonderful idea. I definitely feel that we would like more ways to talk with each other, connect with each other. I especially like saving and tagging information, so when you need it you can find it!!!! BUT the folks who already write and edit and publish the newsletters/podcasts/live meetings clearly are each working to capacity. Could we set up some sort of "Bulwark Community Talks with Each Other" that wouldn't lay any extra burdens on the writers/editors? -- no extra responsibility for them... of course we'd need to talk with them and be sure they approved.... can we be a self-organized asset? It could be a separate entity. "Friends of the Bulwark" "The Bulwark Huddle"
An update: I found this YouTube channel that I think might be a good source of hope/practicality. It's called "Best Of The Left Presents SOLVED!" I watched this video:
How to Live Under Fascism SOLVED No.18, Aug 16, 2025
Someone suggested a national push to establish citizen groups organized in key metro areas that could have weekly meetings to discuss ideas and new measures our average people can take. These discussions would also highlight critical friction points that adversely impact ordinary folks.
I feel your overall sentiment JVL. Things keep looking darker and darker day by day. Congress has basically abdicated every ounce of responsibility out of fear and misplaced loyalty to the cult leader. The courts do offer glimmers of hope, but I fear that the farther appeals go up the food chain, the Supremes will let all of us down with partisan hackery disguised as legal opinions. As we see with the recent decapitation of the CDC, the independent agencies are ripe for takeover. I keep trying to find some kind of hope in the fact that JD Vance is simply an unlikable dick and that if Dear Leader were to succumb to natural causes, then the resulting power vacuum could start to fracture MAGA. Without the titular head of the cult, Congress may realize that they do not need to cower in fear of mean bleats and threats of primaries. Other Republican voices may find the freedom to speak truth to power. If the timing of this vacuum coincides with the run up to the midterm elections, then perhaps the authoritarian impulses now being flexed will fail to find their power source and fall flat without the vulgar talking yam at the helm. I realize this might be threading the needle and misplaced optimism, but I think this could be a realistic scenario. At lest I hope it is.
I listened to the Secret podcast (finished it this morning), and I gotta say that Sarah is pretty blinkered.
The last thought was hers: "After WWII, Japan was in ruins, and their society decided to ban building armaments, and instead to re-industrialize and building cars that were the envy of the world (and some other things)" This was her prescription for a post Trump/post MAGA USA.
I have to say "poppycock".
After WWII, Japan was thoroughly defeated, two of their cities had been nuked, their military was in shambles, and there had been waves of fire bombing of Tokyo.
AND the US was occupying them, and had a lot to say about what Japan could and couldn't do.
Unless someone is going to (from the outside) thoroughly defeat the US of A, and then force a restructuring, her fantasy of "the people" being rational and rebuilding whilst improving the arm of the government is a pipe dream.
This is why I am letting my subscription lapse, and why I think that the never trump coalition is ineffective. Lots of words, but not really moving the electorate, but they really want the Democrats to be like the Republican party they fondly remember from their formative years.
We are in for a long, dark period. And unlike in Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy (the core) there isn't a Foundation and Second foundation to shorten the interregnum. It is going to be not very good to live through.
I need a detailed definition of "liberal democracy".
I appreciate the dark JVL. Almost everyone around me is either all in on MAGA or huffing the hopium about how all of this is going to work out simply by showing up to vote for someone who promises to ignore everything that has happened and be a dose of 90's normal like Biden. While rubbing my nose in a bleak reality isn't a balm to my soul, it at least reminds me I'm not crazy when I see the cascade happening as well.
I will say, while I don't expect you to have all the answers, I would like some more exploration of where we are headed. That as well as exploring what we might do to prepare for those darker futures. Recent articles that think about the implications of blue states sending national guard troops to these cities are a welcome step in that direction but I'd like to go deeper. Should liberals be setting up alternative structures of resistance in case the Dem party gets co-opted or disbanded? What would that look like? Things of that nature.
Dear Jonathan, I feel the same way you feel right now. I loved your sci-fi story analogy. I would have thought that our constitutional system was complex-complex, but I think the regime has done too much damage already for the system to survive. I fear that even if the majority of Americans want to change course dramatically, it is too late and too little now. 3 more years of this and we will not have a democracy at all. As you said, something will fill the void left by destruction, but it won’t be the same liberal democracy we had. And by liberal I don’t mean “liberal.” Also as you said, he has created serial catastrophes in very rapid sequence, too rapid for 330 million people to respond to effectively. The top court isn’t doing the right thing, and Congress isn’t doing the right thing. They both seem to be in on the destruction. The citizens are the only body left, and we don’t seem to know what to do. While we waste time, the country breaks. All the analysts are on the same page as Yeats: “things fall apart.”
Two weeks or more describing the reality is only a moment in the march of time. I hope you, JVL, are finding ways for your soul to sing. When tyrants tremble, when in prison cells and dungeons, may our thought be to him winging.
If the system is headed to inevitable decline and we are headed to prison cells, may our thought be lifted higher & may our souls continue to sing. For in carrying death in our beings, we find life. We will not be the first--nor the last--to sing from those prison cells from which St. Paul once sang.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw-ycev482k&list=RDMMSCX1D1T3eAE&index=14
Hi JVL, I joined the Bulwark+ specifically because I wanted to tell you this:
Your perspective is a relief. Yes, there are doomsday scenarios in every direction. But it's also real, not exaggerated, and unequivocal.
So much media is packed with obfuscation, obliviousness, excruciating naïvete, it's easy to feel unmoored. The amount of denial is maddening. But I know that if I read your blog or listen to a podcast appearance, you will call it exactly what it is. And that's a relief. We need to reckon with exactly how serious it is if we have any hope of getting to the other side of it.
Things are bad, and there are a lot of signals that the worst of it is in front of us. We know how bad fascism can become, and while I try to hang onto optimism, deep down I think there's a big chance that American fascism will outdo them all. I absolutely believe we are past the point of no return-- in some hypothetical future textbook, where there's a timeline of the 2nd American Civil War (or whatever this turns into), we have almost certainly passed the starting point. Would you mark the starting point as _past_ the president deploying the military into "enemy" cities, his cabinet speaking of "liberation" from illegitimate leaders?
So here's something I have found comforting in the last few months, if mildly fatalist: we are not the first people who have had to go up against something like this. We've been lucky for awhile, but it's just our turn now. There is a long tradition of antifascists; I admire many of them; we could do worse than to be in their company.
I couldn't agree more with your response. Looking at how other nations worked their way out of fascism is one way to keep despair at bay.
The press (and the public, largely) spent a couple of decades in denial about how bad the intentions of the opposition actually were, and trying to business-as-usual and both-sides the public into accepting every ominous overreach by the GOP and then Trump. Sugar-coating authoritarianism helps no one. I respect JVL for sticking to his Cassandra-ism.
I would rather not live out the last 20 years of my life in a fascist authoritarian dictatorship. You’re right, there will be something on the other side of this, but we don’t know what. I hope democracy.
Maybe if the basic problem is that if 40% of the populace doesn't want liberal democracy any more the solution is to give them what they want and separate the US into two basic groups. The red states that want a Trump dictatorship, and the blue states that don't. In many ways that's giving up but it can also be seen as salvaging what we can from the wreck that's coming. One can always hope that eventually the red states will decide that dictatorship is worse than democracy and want a new USA.
The trouble is, the red-blue divide isn't just between the states, it's within the states. Rural America is mostly MAGA, but they were heading in that direction since Rush Limbaugh hit the airwaves. Oregon is a blue state, but the farther you go from Portland and Eugene, the redder and loonier it gets. Hating liberals is almost a religious commandment in rural America.
Great idea!
There’s a lot of great real-world work on complex systems, especially by the New England Complex Systems Institute. From a complex systems perspective, the “tipping point” framing doesn’t quite work, mostly because if it’s a complex system, liberal democracy is not a fixed architecture that either survives intact or collapses completely. Instead, we’re experiencing a “fitness landscape transition” to a more stable configuration. If we view the problem as institutional fragility, then the solution might be to defend institutions, but if the problem is power consolidation, then the solution is structural reorganization to prevent recapture. I would love a discourse on structural changes to our democracy that draws on complex systems research. It would likely point us to the adoption of natural regional structures that cross state boundaries, a distributed leadership architecture (like Switzerland’s Federal Council), worker and community-led stakeholder boards for large corporations, and the separation of information from profit through a democratically-funded public media commons. I recognize we might have to go through even deeper depths of JVL darkness to get there, but I believe there are even better systems than the one we’re emerging from.
Institutions are implemented to drive consistency and stability of an ecosystem. But they miss a fundamental truth. It's about PEOPLE! People > Process. We as people need to be roused to action. Filled with empathy. Driven by conviction to raise all people up.
That is the folly of us as Americans. Fundamentally, things were so good (for many) for so long that we mistook institutions for people. At best, they are a derivative sum of the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of the people who compose them. Look at the institutions that are fighting the hardest right now. I see a clear majority of woman and people of color who are willing to fight for those institutions. Comfortable men seem most likely to walk away when challenged.
Here is a deeply personal perspective. Had Kamala Harris won in 2024, **I** likely would not have gotten engaged in politics. Engaged with the Democratic party, protests, pro-democracy groups, community activism. I would have continued on as I had, wiped the sweat from my brow, whispered a "thank goodness" and moved on. Voted progressive, maybe a donation here and there, and quietly thanked the universe that there were other people doing this work, so I didn't have to.
My shame is I was comfortable enough to do nothing. Nothing tangible. As others, many close to me, continued to fight for what they deserve. Because they were more directly impacted than me.
Before 1776, we had nothing. Look at how far we came. What those people did, the amazingness of this great experiment. And look at how far below the ideals they fell, we all fell...with so many people around us NEVER getting the American dream. Something a white, cis, well-educated, man gets to take for granted.
Look at Roe and the VRA. Both fundamental victories for the ideals of America. And look how those opposed spent 50+ years undermining them. It's the will of People that make all the difference. They can be repealed, or undercut, but that does not mean we can't do something better. It may take time, it may make us (me) uncomfortable, it may even have an impact on my life and livelihood, but it can be done.
JVL, you are right, we may not go back to what we had. Many people would argue it wasn't that great to begin with. I refuse to believe liberal democracy is dead. It's current form may be hurt, but it also presents an opportunity to do something so much better.
Will enough people stand up. Will enough people care. And will we continue to care if and after this current threat is gone. Otherwise this ecosystem will resemble the derivative of the people. Apathetic and comfortable enough for many.
Will **I** continue to be as engaged in 20 years? It's the question we should all reflect on.
I hope I never take what I have for granted again. Time will tell.
This is the first time I've wanted to tell JVL to fuck off.
Democracy isn't a natural system?
My God, you're so fucking blind.
It took two centuries of intention and planning the total devotion of billionaires and power freaks and racist Americans to kill our democracy.
You're in "murder on the Orient Express" asking if the victim had a terminal disease.
I get it, as a conservative, being completely blind to everything is your natural state, but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
Here's a hint, democracy can be completely robust in OTHER counties.
HINT HINT!
But you know what other countries would have when faced with Fascism? Solidarity, trust among ourselves, care for each other. So yeah, Americans are as inferior as hell!
My hope at the moment is this. The one thing Trump doesn't see in people is empathy and moral outrage.
The thing that ended Jim Crow, gave us civil rights legislation, integrated schools - everything he hates. Maybe it even had something to do with the end of slavery.
If people come for him, so angry and so righteous that they are willing to die to topple him he's gonna panic like you've never seen.
And you know what Hitler, his hero didn't have to deal with? Phone videos of most of his atrocities.
Due to Trump's many decades of insane statements worshipping the brutality of despots, I believe that his ambition isn't to become a dictator, his ambition is to massacre freedom activists like the Tiananmen Square massacre that he RAVED about "When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak ... as being spit on by the rest of the world"
Why do you think the first thing he had ICE do was kidnap hundreds of innocent people and send them to literal death camps in despotic countries against the orders of multiple courts?
He wants to FORCE people to kill his agents so he can radicalize ICE and have a force to kill Americans en-mass.
If he can't hold onto power for the rest of his life, he's going to prison. So he HAS to end democracy and the Constitution and law. And he needs a radicalized force to suppress the population.
But the violence he craves may backfire. Americans are not Russian serfs who have only known centuries of having no power and keeping our heads down for our betters.
You don't want to get Americans angry [Peter Lorre voice].
Sure the Fascists are sadistic, but the rest of us are too. It IS one culture.
We've done more violence at a societal level to OTHER PEOPLE than most countries.
If we can be the country that jailed so more people than any one else, that bombed so many people, we can turn that savagery on Republicans.
And to be fair it's because we're USED to feeling powerful.
Republicans try to steal all our power and abuse our neighbors. Oh oh, that's a mistake. They're gonna regret that!
And maybe even the Republican base will start to recognize that authoritarianism demands the end of that individualism they've been bragging about all those years. Maybe they'll realize that Trump and Johnson and Vance and fucking Stephen Miller are now now the hated Fed.
I think Trump is going to get Americans so angry that we're gonna fucking bulldoze the Republican party.
They won't see it coming and they'll be swept away so fast the survivors will be in a daze for their rest of their lives in prison.
Octavia Butler wrote, "God is change." There's no road back, but there might be a way forward that's worth the effort.
A few comments...
1) An interesting topic for today. I don’t really have any good predictions on whether we have reached a tipping point or not. All I can do is throw a few observations out.
I used to design flight control systems so that makes me an expert on how to understand our current political climate. Because I believe that society writ large responds like an underdamped second-order system. What that means is that following some disruption (forcing function in control systems lingo), the system will overreact (overshoot) and then settle down to a different equilibrium point. What determines how much of an overreaction we get and how long it takes to settle down is the magnitude of the forcing function and the amount of damping (resistance to change) that the system has built into it.
I think there are some unique aspects of this in today’s political climate. Presidents always provide some disruption once in office. Most of the time it’s not that big (or it’s only big in one area). But Trump is one big, huge disruption everywhere. So the “system” is going to tend to react strongly by being pushed far away from its previous equilibrium point. And the other aspect that will cause a very large overshoot is the fact that the people who normally provide some damping (conservatives) are the ones who are aiding and abetting the disruption. The damping in the system just isn’t there.
And I further believe that the things that JVL has listed (Private enterprise, Military leadership, The Fed, Academia, The CDC) also provide some damping. When the influence of these institutions is compromised, damping goes down and overshoots go up.
These things mean that we are going to end up far away from where we started before things start to recover. And even when whatever recovery there is occurs, the new equilibrium point may not be very close to where we are today.
Normally, you can’t drive a stable system unstable by simply hitting it really hard. But you certainly can do it by monkeying with the feedback parameters that control its response. And that I think is the key question that JVL is asking: have we already (or even can we) monkey with those feedback mechanisms so much that it drives the whole system unstable?
Certainly, liberal democracy is not a simple-simple system as there are clearly multiple inputs that affect it (some of these inputs affect the feedback mechanisms which control the overall system response). I’d say it’s complex-complex.
2) There certainly is a tipping point. But I don’t think we are there yet. I think the acid test will come either in 2026 or 2028 with the elections in those years. For if the elections aren’t viewed as legitimate by both sides (including trying to get results overturned), all hell will break loose.
But there are worrying signs that we are headed toward a tipping point. First and foremost, it’s the idea that so many people like what Trump is doing and either don’t view it as authoritarian or like it because they see it as that. And personally I would count just about every last person who voted for Trump in 2024 as in that category. They either voted for Trump gladly or because the other side is just “so evil”. And if they view the other side that way, they will almost certainly go along with any measures that keep them out of power.
I have long castigated the Evangelicals for their support of Trump because it seems to me that they have completely flipped their worldview. What used to be “the means justify the ends” has now become “the ends justify the means”. And I fear that too many other people are following that same path. So if Trump deploys the military in cities, it doesn’t matter that he’s breaking lots of norms (if not actual laws) and misusing the military. It only matters that crime goes down.
And there’s my old bugbear – the right-wing media ecosystem. As long as they are out there poisoning the airwaves, we won’t be able to settle down. And it’s not just Fox News. There are a whole plethora of conservative media outlets whose listenership numbers dwarf anything that liberals have. Think Newsmax, OANN, Alex Jones, Clay Travis, Buck Sexton. I listen to those folks periodically and if there is one common thread among them, it’s conspiracy theories that question the decency and patriotism of anyone who isn’t in their camp. And also that they make a lot of shit up (some of these are simply lies; but some of it is telling stories that are so distorted from reality that they are scant better than lies).
Also Hey Everyone!
I have this idea for a "Bulwark Bulletin Board" where community members can post links to good info and announcements of protests and other such resources. Does anyone want to help with this? I have no idea of what I am doing, so I probably won't try to do it unless I have help. I imagine it would take five people to run, maybe more if it got popular and needed moderators. It would also need to have an organizational framework. Like tags; make things searchable.
There are lots of good resources that get posted in comments, and it gets hard to remember where you saw something.
I think that's a wonderful idea. I definitely feel that we would like more ways to talk with each other, connect with each other. I especially like saving and tagging information, so when you need it you can find it!!!! BUT the folks who already write and edit and publish the newsletters/podcasts/live meetings clearly are each working to capacity. Could we set up some sort of "Bulwark Community Talks with Each Other" that wouldn't lay any extra burdens on the writers/editors? -- no extra responsibility for them... of course we'd need to talk with them and be sure they approved.... can we be a self-organized asset? It could be a separate entity. "Friends of the Bulwark" "The Bulwark Huddle"
Hey Everyone!
An update: I found this YouTube channel that I think might be a good source of hope/practicality. It's called "Best Of The Left Presents SOLVED!" I watched this video:
How to Live Under Fascism SOLVED No.18, Aug 16, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KREp4HjaVk&list=PLglIK31x4--jYzaNF6LIiWIVsxR_lqlg8&index=12
Someone suggested a national push to establish citizen groups organized in key metro areas that could have weekly meetings to discuss ideas and new measures our average people can take. These discussions would also highlight critical friction points that adversely impact ordinary folks.
I feel your overall sentiment JVL. Things keep looking darker and darker day by day. Congress has basically abdicated every ounce of responsibility out of fear and misplaced loyalty to the cult leader. The courts do offer glimmers of hope, but I fear that the farther appeals go up the food chain, the Supremes will let all of us down with partisan hackery disguised as legal opinions. As we see with the recent decapitation of the CDC, the independent agencies are ripe for takeover. I keep trying to find some kind of hope in the fact that JD Vance is simply an unlikable dick and that if Dear Leader were to succumb to natural causes, then the resulting power vacuum could start to fracture MAGA. Without the titular head of the cult, Congress may realize that they do not need to cower in fear of mean bleats and threats of primaries. Other Republican voices may find the freedom to speak truth to power. If the timing of this vacuum coincides with the run up to the midterm elections, then perhaps the authoritarian impulses now being flexed will fail to find their power source and fall flat without the vulgar talking yam at the helm. I realize this might be threading the needle and misplaced optimism, but I think this could be a realistic scenario. At lest I hope it is.
I'm with you there.
I listened to the Secret podcast (finished it this morning), and I gotta say that Sarah is pretty blinkered.
The last thought was hers: "After WWII, Japan was in ruins, and their society decided to ban building armaments, and instead to re-industrialize and building cars that were the envy of the world (and some other things)" This was her prescription for a post Trump/post MAGA USA.
I have to say "poppycock".
After WWII, Japan was thoroughly defeated, two of their cities had been nuked, their military was in shambles, and there had been waves of fire bombing of Tokyo.
AND the US was occupying them, and had a lot to say about what Japan could and couldn't do.
Unless someone is going to (from the outside) thoroughly defeat the US of A, and then force a restructuring, her fantasy of "the people" being rational and rebuilding whilst improving the arm of the government is a pipe dream.
This is why I am letting my subscription lapse, and why I think that the never trump coalition is ineffective. Lots of words, but not really moving the electorate, but they really want the Democrats to be like the Republican party they fondly remember from their formative years.
We are in for a long, dark period. And unlike in Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy (the core) there isn't a Foundation and Second foundation to shorten the interregnum. It is going to be not very good to live through.
I have posted a response to this in the comments on the Secret Podcast.
Great answer. Thanks for the hint to go look there!
Germany had the US to de-Nazify it.
Who's gonna de-Magafy the US?
Heck, the US never really got really got Reconstructed, and we're now seeing how that turned out.
Precisely.