by Ender
Steve Bannon is full of shit. But, so am I at times. It’s eerie to me how similar Bannon and I are when it comes to our fascination with wargaming. At the moment, Bannon is on the march. The nebulous group of agitators he leads are destroying the institution we use to elect people in our previously free-and-fair elections.
And because we’re letting him do this in broad daylight, he has a huge advantage. No one is going to stop him. By the time 2024 rolls around, all the conditions will be there for us to slip peacefully into autocracy. But, of course, for one thing — if Donald Trump runs again, then, we’re probably going to have a civil war.
So, if anyone would listen to me — which they won’t — here’s what I would do in response. Lean into the passion, leadership and vision of the people associated with The Lincoln Project. (I’m not unaware of their lingering scandals, etc, but I’m working with what I got.) Then you get the usual Deep State Radio podcast folks and the Crooked Media folks to form a United Front with them
Then you plot.
Once you establish that because of Bannon’s tyrannical machinations that we’re at the very beginning of a severe political crisis, we need to stop dicking around. If we can get some concrete nation-wide plans organized for what we’re going to do when the entire election system fails us in 2024, we’ll at least be a lot better off than we would be if we just wait for Bannon’s evil little baby of Trumplandia to be born.
They key thing is — stop relying upon hope. Trump has proven time and again that if you rely upon “hope” to fix him as a problem, you’re suffering from a mixture of denial and delusion.
The first order of business for this proposed United Front would be what to do at the critical juncture in the 2024-2025 timeframe when we face autocracy or civil war. And if it looks like the country is — gulp — going to actually descend into civil war (ugh) what will Blue State war aims be?
I only stress this because Bannon has specific war aims for any civil war. It’s all they fucking talk about these days! They want to establish a white, autocratic Christian ethno state of “blood and soil” where scary brown people controlled and women know their “place.”
Instead of waiting for the civil war to start, the United Front needs to game out the ideology of the Blue States, now. What would the Fight To Save The Union be about? What would be for? Who would be good political leaders in such a crisis for Blue States to rely upon on an existential level?
For no other reason than it gives me some sense of empowerment, I’m probably going to spend way too much mental energy thinking up what all those goals should be in the coming days.