Monday, January 4, 2021

"The Coup"

 

These two words, “The Coup” are a litmus test or shibboleth that illuminates, but does not define the major factions into which our society has devolved.


Watching American society in great depth and detail for decades reveals the deep currents that most people simply accept without notice, like the air they breathe.


We are approaching what is perhaps the most dangerous historical nexus in the last two or three generations, and so a meta-analytical estimate of the situation, as of early January 2020 is important.


American society has always existed as kaleidoscopic factions. The current conditions are such that they have tended to polarize, lumping together into three mega factions. Almost everyone knows deep down which faction they most sympathize with, whether they’ve examined the matter or not.


It would take a book to analyze the history and underpinning of the thing, and that would be out of scope for this meta analysis.


First, the factions:

Two of the factions stand in opposition to each other. For lack of a better word, we’ll describe them as “the combatant factions”, which is less awkward on the tongue than the perhaps more accurate “factions in opposition”. They can be fairly characterized thus:

  • They operated from different, and incompatible first principles.

  • Accordingly, they do not agree on compatible, objective descriptions of reality, without any respect to the degree of accuracy of those descriptions. (This is why “The Coup” serves as a convenient phrase that distinguishes them.)

  • Finally, neither faction will accept the dominion of the other.

  • It is crucial to understand that these factions run in parallel to, but are not the major political parties. The parties are under the firm control of an elite, whose highest priority is their own power, and which mine and exploit their constituent factions for their own purposes. The significant gap between the factions and the parties has been gradually dawning on the people for the last couple of decades, as measurements of people’s trust in government institutions erodes.


The third faction is a bit of a mixed bag, into which people fall by default. “Centrist” is probably a bad label, it implies things that don’t pertain, and misses elements that are important. Their primary shared characteristic is that no matter which way they lean, they would prefer not to spend much energy on the matter, and would rather dwell in their ordinary, mundane lives and business: family, kids, jobs, sports and BBQ, accepting without too much question the conditions they find themselves in, and a sometimes inconsistent smorgasbord of beliefs and a mishmash of components offered by both of the factions in opposition. While they may be slightly skeptical of the propaganda they sit entirely immersed in, they are content to let “authorities” and institutions define reality for them, so long as their demands are not too outrageous. The parties vie for the affections of this faction, and their tendency to let the press define reality for them makes control of the mass media a force multiplier for whoever has their hand on the wheel.


Across all three factions, confidence in institutions, governmental and otherwise is collapsing. Despite unanimity on this, each faction has their own entirely different take on it, and a profoundly different story and mythology to explain it. Because our political system lacks any effective way to register a vote of “no confidence”, the people themselves have begun expressing such no confidence votes in as many ways as they can invent. This is manifesting paradoxically in acts of both defiance and compliance to everything from police brutality to lockdown orders and facemask wearing. All factions have also sensed danger coming, and have tooled up, buying every fighting gun and round of ammunition in inventory, and continue to buy them as soon as they roll off the production line.


That’s the background. Under these conditions, it is fair to question at an ethical level as to whether “the consent of the governed” can be said to exist, and also to question whether our institutions are even capable of carrying consent as they stand.


Now as to the shibboleth:

“The Coup” means entirely different things to the combatant factions.


  • One faction’s meaning pertains to Trump’s refusal to accept Biden’s electoral accomplishment, which they view as defying the authentic and legitimate expression of the democratic will of the people. To them, “Democracy is at stake”.

  • The other factions’ meaning pertains to viewing this electoral feat as poisoned fruit of a broken, fraud infested process for which no legal remedy has been, or can be obtained. To them, if this election stands, voting is meaningless, and “Democracy is at stake”.


The non-combatant faction, as is their way, may or may not be sympathetic to either position, but is willing to live with a Biden administration despite their reservations as the price of carrying on life and business as usual.


Continuing with the estimate of our political situation:

No government institution will take any action that will be perceived as “overturning the election”, and as such, the forms and ceremonies of Democracy (r)(c)™ will unfold resulting in a Biden administration, which may be tolerated, but will not be accepted as legitimate by the whole of one faction, and a great many of the non combatant faction will view the matter with skepticism. This fact of Biden taking office will be used by each combatant faction as proof of the validity of their position. One faction will claim that that because the courts did not intervene to stop the inauguration indicates that fraud did not exist, and thus ratifies the legitimacy of the election of 2020, and the other will cite it as a flat out failure of our institution’s existential capacity to correct the fraud that did exist.


Obviously, this will turn on RealityFact as to the actual happening of fraud, a matter which is now plowed under into oblivion, despite the existence of thousands of links to thousands of events, all of which have been dismissed as “unsubstantiated”. One faction will state that recounting votes is pointless, because it will not change the free and fair outcome, and the other faction will agree that it is pointless to repeatedly count fraudulent votes for which no audit is possible.


There is also the potential for the eruption of factional violence:


  • Our current state of low key political violence, which is not well reported, will continue, ebbing and flaring in response to current events.


  • If Trump retains office, eruption of violence will be instigated by the faction that opposes him immediately. The violence will be widespread, but relatively shallow, and mostly contained to the urban areas scoped out by antagonist and aligned groups over the summer.

  • If Biden is inaugurated, eruption of violence will depend largely on the actions of the Biden administration. Heavy handed approaches will be met with greater defiance, alienating increasing swathes of society. The opportunity to entirely suborn society in the fashion once undertaken by Woodrow Wilson no longer exists, and attempting anything like that will stretch American’s good natured tolerance past the breaking point.


The bottom line is that one faction has a definitive upper hand in this, and desperately wants their apparent victory to be ratified as legitimate, and sealed as the Official Reality. That legitimacy will be denied by the other faction, Biden’s* name will forever have and asterisk after it, and that leaves us as close to a state of nature as we’ve ever been in my lifetime.


Speaking of lifetimes, my father passed last spring, as a consequence of old age and a full life well lived. We’d often talked about politics, aligning in some dimensions and disagreeing in others. In our final discussion, Dad indicated disgust, sad that the country he knew, loved and fought for was gone, and somewhat relieved he would be spared witnessing its final collapse. He also indicated remorse, wishing he had left us a better legacy, a nation actually able to deliver on the promises of its founding. I think he found some comfort in the thought I’d conveyed that he had no more power than I to change the course of events, and that responsibility is impossible without power. Standing to be counted on the side of free humanity was enough.



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