Here's the thing, and I quote: "Our main objective right now is to open up a real left-wing anti-establishment lane in American politics, because the right has managed to dominate the discussion for anybody who hates the system." The system has become hollowed out by shadowy forces supported by dark money, aka untrammeled capitalism. I say untrammeled because capitalism per se is not the base problem. IMO the root of the poisonous tree is greed born of fear, which behaves like a highly contagious virus, convincing too many of us that if we only concentrate on building our own wealth (sometimes in dizzying amounts and nefarious ways) life will be good. Well, that's a big, fat Effing Lie. The best things in life are love of family, friends and our fellowships with other living beings like plants and animals, with whom we live to our mutual benefit. We are all in this world, this life, together, and what harms others, harms us. No getting around that unless you swallow the Kool-Aid. IMHO Progressive change is the single best, and perhaps the only way to go, because it holds those truths to be self-evident.
Very well stated. But the "left" must widen its tent. Having worked in these circles for many years, I believe that we've been previously stymied in our best efforts by an intrenched secularism, internecine battles over dogma, orthodoxy and loyalty. As a result, we've lost a critical mass of opposition. (A noteworthy exception were the left efforts during the Great Depression.) We don't have the luxury anymore of battles that divide us. Like the right wing, we must agree upon a common mission (that will have many constituent moving parts). Our enemy is clearly defined now. We shouldn't seek uniformity amongst us, but unity for the ultimate goal: Ending the wreckage where we can and building a better nation where "people" are our first priority. My ideal nation is described, eloquently, in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (preceded by some 350 years by The Great Law of Peace by the Iroquois Confederacy.) We may not get there, but we can aspire.
Exactly right: “The best things in life are love of family, friends and our fellowships with other living beings like plants and animals, with whom we live to our mutual benefit. We are all in this world, this life, together, and what harms others, harms us.” This is ‘painting the beautiful tomorrow’ that Anat Shenker-Osorio talks about in The Persuaders. When we lead through this crisis instead of fight back, we will start getting somewhere.
A pastoral response to living in these days that has helped me deal with this tragedy at times.
Part of what we're feeling, besides fear and anger, is grief. Allow yourself to grieve. It's not all over, by any means. But we are losing something we love. Don’t deny yourself permission to be brokenhearted for this nation. Our anger isn’t mere self-righteous rage; our fury isn't merely panic. Our grief isn’t resignation but honesty that we go forward as broken people in a broken world, and therefore we go tenderly, even in our strength. Our grief isn't defeat but the longing for wholeness that in fact energizes us. Our grief enables us to let go even as we resist. Our grief beckons us to bond with each other, to keep friendships close, to stay connected with what and who we love. We stand by the grave of a loved one and wish we could bring them back from the dead, but can't—yet this loss is not final. Our grief empowers us to do all we can to bring back America from its dying. Grieve, my beloved. Give wings to your sorrow. Then turn that sorrow into song. Give flesh to your grief in art, in new friendships, in creative energy. Find beauty, and stay with it. Grieve, and resist.
This is off topic but something I’ve wanted to mention. I’d like to see a discussion of some of the, for lack of a better word, philosophical roots of the current takeover….specifically of Curtis Yarvin. Whether he is genuine about what he believes or a poser, those ideas, which are being implemented, might scare anybody into action. I was talking about that yesterday during a medical visit from my doctor, who is from Romania , where people, informed by history, are much less naive than people in the U.S. about these ideas and how they play out.
I was saying in a forum the other day that Silicon Valley people have weird ideas, and someone mentioned Yarvin and how popular he is with Vance and others like him. In my opinion these are very weird ideas but these tech bros are serious about them. Whether they can make them happen I don't know. They're so strange that I think most people wouldn't be receptive. OTOH, all this QAnon stuff is wacko too, and look at how people lap that up. I am a rational person so none of it makes any sense to me. It's like a new religion. But when was the last time a new religion took hold over a lot of people? I'd say it was Islam, so the chances aren't good for this one, but what do I know?
I think many of his ideas, as I understood them, are exactly what is being carried out. He seems disingenuous to me, manipulative and condescending. But that doesn’t change his alleged influence. Whether the people he is influencing actually believe in his ideas or are using them as an excuse to feel righteous about what they are doing, is another story. Whether Hitler actually believed in a master race or not , people used that to create legitimacy for their actions. I think many evil people like to feel justified, or pretend they do, for their heinous actions…you know, a place to hang your hat. There was a very interesting yet sickening interview with him in the NYT on January 18 of this year if you have access and might be interested.
I see wayyyyy too much negativity and defeat in these posts. I'm not grieving. I have hust started pushing back. I AM ANGRY, RAGING AND WORKING TO DIG US OUT OF THE HOLE WE ARE IN.
There is mega work being done.
there are indivisible groups, protests. 50501 protest groups, and a boatload of other actions. Everyone get off the couch, get going, meet some likeminded resistors and get moving saving our country!
I'm writing lots of postcards to encourage folks in WI, MN and FL to vote in the upcoming special elections. I joined and follow my local Indivisible 'chapter'. I signed up for multiple news sources on Substack (including The.Ink) and made a presence on BlueSky. I made protest signs and go to local protests, shouting out grievances until I'm hoarse. It makes me feel better to be doing "something", but in all honestly I don't think it's making any difference in the speed and breadth of the government takeover by Musk. Like USAID, I fear our government will be dismantled before courts can stop the unraveling. Thanks for asking.
Question: why no campus demonstrations? And how can our youth be engaged given that other Bezos clones/oligarchs control twitter/X and Facebook/meta? I have no answers but I recall (longingly) of our accomplishments of the past when our fights were critical yet nothing like trying to preserve our democracy.
Very good question. Why aren’t university students protesting as they have in the past? But notice what has happened to those students who protested against US support of the genocide in Gaza. Across the country, from Columbia to UCLA, students have been suspended, barred from campus and degrees have been withheld. I hope that today’s students will protest in large numbers, but some will pay a heavy price.
Yes!! When students felt Palestinians were being mistreated (30k plus dead many of whom are women and children) they were accused of being antisemitic and in support of Hamas. I don’t think that was true.
I think they were anti slaughter and angry with Netanyahu and his choices not the Israeli people. They were also furious with Hamas.
Then they were censored and lost opportunities for taking a stand. So now maybe they feel like protesting was not just fruitless but endangered their futures. I’m just guessing.
Also, Dems don’t listen well to the young voters. Young voters wanted Bernie. Dems picked Hillary. Young folks wanted Bernie. Dems picked Biden. Young folks want gun control and climate awareness and less collage debt and affordable housing. Nada.
Anyway, that’s what I think may be contributing to their hesitation in protests. Also, Trump promised to deport foreign students who protest on campuses. Long opinion. ♥️
I really appreciate your authentic, relevant and sensitive comments about our personal states of mind and the deplorable deluge of badness that is being rained on us at an alarming rate. Thank you for your humanity.
I think a lot of people are aware, but its hard to dechipher the impact. What I do feel is this is just the first of many spending blackouts, focused non spending days at certain corps. Street protests, phoning and raging at congress, boycotts, ... etc. We have to be in this for the long haul. We have lots of ground to make up. OUR COUNTRY IS JUST GETTING STARTED!
ps, DOGE IS A HEIST. and Proj 2025 is Religious Oppression. Act accordingly.
Listened to a livestream yesterday focusing on unions at Talking Feds Substack. It was Michael Podhorzer talking with Harry Litman. Podhorzer said support of labor and unions is crucial now, that it may be the best way of us fighting back by being organized together. He said to support the AFL-CIO at their website. Unions build power for all of us that keeps oligarchs in check. Read the free post at his Substack:
This is great information, Lynne. I was thinking it would be great to have a labor party like in the UK so that we who are no longer working can still support labor. The ability to donate is a good start though.
I’m having a really hard time with my “friends and neighbors,” who by voting for Trump and his ilk, have put me and my family in danger. This is the cohort that voted for Nixon as the moral majority; voted for Reagan because he would lower their taxes; voted for W because—who the hell knows why; and voted for Trump because they wanted lower taxes and conventional pronouns and Christian nationalism. (Take your pick.) Did they ever get lower taxes? Nope. Did they get a moral majority? I don’t trust them and I think a great many are willfully ignorant, if not stupid. And did I mention Biden, who helped give us Gaza, thus grievously dividing the Jewish community. (Here I paused to cry.) America land of dumbfuckery. Land of the Know Nothings, Jim Crow, the Klan, the German-American Bund, Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, “Indian” schools, etc, etc.
Agreed. When I saw that horrible video Trump posted of his idea for a Gaza resort I felt like puking and crying. This is the culmination of all you've mentioned (except of course that it's always been there, from way before the Spanish plunderers through slavery and on and on. Humanity is a failed species, IMO.
I’m not yet at “988,” but have been creeping incrementally closer. Not so much personally, in light of being 79 and increasingly addled with Parkinson’s (and grateful for the productive and good life I’ve had), but more troubled with increasingly distressing empathic concern for others—starting with (but in no way exclusive to) my offspring. The Musk-Trump KlownSwastikar shitshow leaves me increasingly speechless. Some days it’s become an effort to just get up.
Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, wearing long robes, sitting at the front seats, blocking trillions and firing tens of thousands of workers in the name of efficiency making people invisible, atomized and commodified.
In the time of neoliberal incompetence, the median wealth skyrockets when Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg enters the bar! Firing 6K IRS workers makes life unjust and upside down!
The failures of the neoliberal brand of capitalism were once again on display in the February 23 German elections. In a political vacuum, with mainstream parties unable to offer anything other than the austerity that has been imposed for decades, the extreme right gains adherents.
I am a biophysicist. I often tend to look at the world through a scientific filter. In classical physics we characterize the dynamic behavior of a system by examining an equation called the Hamiltonian, named after the brilliant 19th century scientist William Rowan Hamilton. This is a powerful way of quantifying how the position, momentum and potential energy of a system predict its configuration through time. In our present fraught political crisis, this elegant physics can provide us with a crude but useful analogy. The momentum of our situation is the action taken by the various actors: government entities, corporate entities and private citizens. The potential energy of the society is the transformative force that different entities could bring to the system to change the momentum. Using this framework, we can ascertain critical potential forces for progress, distinguishing weak forces from strong. The weakest force is mass public protest. The Democrats, having lost the popular vote are in no position to assert that these protests represent the wishes of a majority of citizens. Add the possibility that Trump may be itching to use violence against protestors once his corruption of DOJ and the military is sufficiently secured and there is strong case that such protests are largely futile. Next, consider the major corporate players. Because of the innate devotion of the ownership class to financial profits, it has been no surprise that the resistance has been astoundingly feeble. A beautiful examination of this kind of capitulation in the early years of the Nazi regime is illustrated by the brilliant movie “The Damned” by the great Italian director Visconti. That brings us to Congress (I am skipping the courts because the power to push back is diffuse, slow and partially curtailed by a viciously corrupt Supreme court compounded by a lack of enforcement capability). In Congress there is real latent power, but seemingly no courage to exercise it. Clearly, the threat of primary challenges has paralyzed the Republicans, many of whom are said to be horrified by events when commenting behind closed doors. But I claim there is a real chance to powerfully push back. What I propose below is highly unorthodox but perfectly legitimate and doable and is also a way of deflecting the primary election threat. And, since Trump is, in fact, a profoundly cowardly human being, strong pushback would be very effective. Consider Article 1, section 5: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings”. Then consider the election of John Thune as majority leader. Scott, Trump’s choice, got thumped. Why? Because it was a secret ballot and there was no way to know how each Senator voted provided they respected each other’s security. Also note Trump’s meek response to this vote. If the senate and the house simply went to secret ballots Trump could easily be stopped in his tracks. Forced to withdraw his vile leadership picks, threatened privately with impeachment and removal if he doesn’t start governing without destroying the civil service. Perhaps you say that the base would be livid. If those voters punish the whole caucus in 2026, they will be in trouble in several states unfriendly to right wing extremism, especially if Trump is underwater nationally. Nevertheless, this would take courage on the part of Republicans, something they demonstrably don’t seem to have. This brings me to the most radical solution of all, but also the most effective. Before proposing it, I wish to emphasize that I believe that the people who voted for Trump, no matter their justifiable grievances against American Society, committed the equivalent of treason. If the Democracy fails, they will have denied young people and those yet unborn the blessing of living in a healthy, if imperfect, constitutional republic, a terrible sin. While the Supreme Court in the Colorado case should have simply declared Trump ineligible nationally under article 3 of the 14th amendment because of January 6th, the vast majority of voters should have come to the same conclusion. We now live the nightmare of that failure. Sometimes in life lessons must be learned by tough love. The old adage is very appropriate in this case: F*** around and find out. The MAGA need a profound lesson in how much the overwhelmingly patriotic civil service does for them. I believe that this leads to the most powerful transformative political potential available. As John Lewis said when facing unjust law, make good trouble. To stop project 2025 in its tracks and force a reckoning for Trump the most effective action available is for the entire civil service to strike. Several things would follow. The intense societal pain would wake a lot of delusional MAGA up: no social security payments, no Medicare payments, no Medicaid payments, no food inspections, all planes grounded, no emergency aid from FEMA, no food stamps, no payments to Federal contractors, etc., etc. The politicians could not threaten to fire everyone because there is no way to replace them. Would many innocent people suffer? Indeed. If Trump destroys American Democracy the pain will be much worse. Will the civil servants realize that this may be the last true defense? I doubt it. Americans are essentially loners. We are not a tribe like e.g., the French or the Japanese. It is very difficult for Americans to think about collective welfare, except perhaps with respect to external enemies. I don’t expect the civil servants to grasp this, I also don’t expect the republic to survive. Courage is in short supply. Respectively
Here's the thing, and I quote: "Our main objective right now is to open up a real left-wing anti-establishment lane in American politics, because the right has managed to dominate the discussion for anybody who hates the system." The system has become hollowed out by shadowy forces supported by dark money, aka untrammeled capitalism. I say untrammeled because capitalism per se is not the base problem. IMO the root of the poisonous tree is greed born of fear, which behaves like a highly contagious virus, convincing too many of us that if we only concentrate on building our own wealth (sometimes in dizzying amounts and nefarious ways) life will be good. Well, that's a big, fat Effing Lie. The best things in life are love of family, friends and our fellowships with other living beings like plants and animals, with whom we live to our mutual benefit. We are all in this world, this life, together, and what harms others, harms us. No getting around that unless you swallow the Kool-Aid. IMHO Progressive change is the single best, and perhaps the only way to go, because it holds those truths to be self-evident.
Very well stated. But the "left" must widen its tent. Having worked in these circles for many years, I believe that we've been previously stymied in our best efforts by an intrenched secularism, internecine battles over dogma, orthodoxy and loyalty. As a result, we've lost a critical mass of opposition. (A noteworthy exception were the left efforts during the Great Depression.) We don't have the luxury anymore of battles that divide us. Like the right wing, we must agree upon a common mission (that will have many constituent moving parts). Our enemy is clearly defined now. We shouldn't seek uniformity amongst us, but unity for the ultimate goal: Ending the wreckage where we can and building a better nation where "people" are our first priority. My ideal nation is described, eloquently, in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (preceded by some 350 years by The Great Law of Peace by the Iroquois Confederacy.) We may not get there, but we can aspire.
Exactly right: “The best things in life are love of family, friends and our fellowships with other living beings like plants and animals, with whom we live to our mutual benefit. We are all in this world, this life, together, and what harms others, harms us.” This is ‘painting the beautiful tomorrow’ that Anat Shenker-Osorio talks about in The Persuaders. When we lead through this crisis instead of fight back, we will start getting somewhere.
A pastoral response to living in these days that has helped me deal with this tragedy at times.
Part of what we're feeling, besides fear and anger, is grief. Allow yourself to grieve. It's not all over, by any means. But we are losing something we love. Don’t deny yourself permission to be brokenhearted for this nation. Our anger isn’t mere self-righteous rage; our fury isn't merely panic. Our grief isn’t resignation but honesty that we go forward as broken people in a broken world, and therefore we go tenderly, even in our strength. Our grief isn't defeat but the longing for wholeness that in fact energizes us. Our grief enables us to let go even as we resist. Our grief beckons us to bond with each other, to keep friendships close, to stay connected with what and who we love. We stand by the grave of a loved one and wish we could bring them back from the dead, but can't—yet this loss is not final. Our grief empowers us to do all we can to bring back America from its dying. Grieve, my beloved. Give wings to your sorrow. Then turn that sorrow into song. Give flesh to your grief in art, in new friendships, in creative energy. Find beauty, and stay with it. Grieve, and resist.
-Rev. Steve Garnaas-Holmes
This is off topic but something I’ve wanted to mention. I’d like to see a discussion of some of the, for lack of a better word, philosophical roots of the current takeover….specifically of Curtis Yarvin. Whether he is genuine about what he believes or a poser, those ideas, which are being implemented, might scare anybody into action. I was talking about that yesterday during a medical visit from my doctor, who is from Romania , where people, informed by history, are much less naive than people in the U.S. about these ideas and how they play out.
I was saying in a forum the other day that Silicon Valley people have weird ideas, and someone mentioned Yarvin and how popular he is with Vance and others like him. In my opinion these are very weird ideas but these tech bros are serious about them. Whether they can make them happen I don't know. They're so strange that I think most people wouldn't be receptive. OTOH, all this QAnon stuff is wacko too, and look at how people lap that up. I am a rational person so none of it makes any sense to me. It's like a new religion. But when was the last time a new religion took hold over a lot of people? I'd say it was Islam, so the chances aren't good for this one, but what do I know?
I think many of his ideas, as I understood them, are exactly what is being carried out. He seems disingenuous to me, manipulative and condescending. But that doesn’t change his alleged influence. Whether the people he is influencing actually believe in his ideas or are using them as an excuse to feel righteous about what they are doing, is another story. Whether Hitler actually believed in a master race or not , people used that to create legitimacy for their actions. I think many evil people like to feel justified, or pretend they do, for their heinous actions…you know, a place to hang your hat. There was a very interesting yet sickening interview with him in the NYT on January 18 of this year if you have access and might be interested.
I see wayyyyy too much negativity and defeat in these posts. I'm not grieving. I have hust started pushing back. I AM ANGRY, RAGING AND WORKING TO DIG US OUT OF THE HOLE WE ARE IN.
There is mega work being done.
there are indivisible groups, protests. 50501 protest groups, and a boatload of other actions. Everyone get off the couch, get going, meet some likeminded resistors and get moving saving our country!
I'm writing lots of postcards to encourage folks in WI, MN and FL to vote in the upcoming special elections. I joined and follow my local Indivisible 'chapter'. I signed up for multiple news sources on Substack (including The.Ink) and made a presence on BlueSky. I made protest signs and go to local protests, shouting out grievances until I'm hoarse. It makes me feel better to be doing "something", but in all honestly I don't think it's making any difference in the speed and breadth of the government takeover by Musk. Like USAID, I fear our government will be dismantled before courts can stop the unraveling. Thanks for asking.
Question: why no campus demonstrations? And how can our youth be engaged given that other Bezos clones/oligarchs control twitter/X and Facebook/meta? I have no answers but I recall (longingly) of our accomplishments of the past when our fights were critical yet nothing like trying to preserve our democracy.
Very good question. Why aren’t university students protesting as they have in the past? But notice what has happened to those students who protested against US support of the genocide in Gaza. Across the country, from Columbia to UCLA, students have been suspended, barred from campus and degrees have been withheld. I hope that today’s students will protest in large numbers, but some will pay a heavy price.
Yes!! When students felt Palestinians were being mistreated (30k plus dead many of whom are women and children) they were accused of being antisemitic and in support of Hamas. I don’t think that was true.
I think they were anti slaughter and angry with Netanyahu and his choices not the Israeli people. They were also furious with Hamas.
Then they were censored and lost opportunities for taking a stand. So now maybe they feel like protesting was not just fruitless but endangered their futures. I’m just guessing.
Also, Dems don’t listen well to the young voters. Young voters wanted Bernie. Dems picked Hillary. Young folks wanted Bernie. Dems picked Biden. Young folks want gun control and climate awareness and less collage debt and affordable housing. Nada.
Anyway, that’s what I think may be contributing to their hesitation in protests. Also, Trump promised to deport foreign students who protest on campuses. Long opinion. ♥️
I really appreciate your authentic, relevant and sensitive comments about our personal states of mind and the deplorable deluge of badness that is being rained on us at an alarming rate. Thank you for your humanity.
Hello, still not sleeping so well. What do you think about the boycott that is trending for tomorrow. Is this effective and are people aware?
I think a lot of people are aware, but its hard to dechipher the impact. What I do feel is this is just the first of many spending blackouts, focused non spending days at certain corps. Street protests, phoning and raging at congress, boycotts, ... etc. We have to be in this for the long haul. We have lots of ground to make up. OUR COUNTRY IS JUST GETTING STARTED!
ps, DOGE IS A HEIST. and Proj 2025 is Religious Oppression. Act accordingly.
Listened to a livestream yesterday focusing on unions at Talking Feds Substack. It was Michael Podhorzer talking with Harry Litman. Podhorzer said support of labor and unions is crucial now, that it may be the best way of us fighting back by being organized together. He said to support the AFL-CIO at their website. Unions build power for all of us that keeps oligarchs in check. Read the free post at his Substack:
https://www.weekendreading.net/p/oligarchs-understand-power-do-we
Also at the Contrarian.
This is great information, Lynne. I was thinking it would be great to have a labor party like in the UK so that we who are no longer working can still support labor. The ability to donate is a good start though.
No one is safe until everyone is safe, and at the moment, none of us are safe because so few of us are safe.
I’m having a really hard time with my “friends and neighbors,” who by voting for Trump and his ilk, have put me and my family in danger. This is the cohort that voted for Nixon as the moral majority; voted for Reagan because he would lower their taxes; voted for W because—who the hell knows why; and voted for Trump because they wanted lower taxes and conventional pronouns and Christian nationalism. (Take your pick.) Did they ever get lower taxes? Nope. Did they get a moral majority? I don’t trust them and I think a great many are willfully ignorant, if not stupid. And did I mention Biden, who helped give us Gaza, thus grievously dividing the Jewish community. (Here I paused to cry.) America land of dumbfuckery. Land of the Know Nothings, Jim Crow, the Klan, the German-American Bund, Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, “Indian” schools, etc, etc.
Agreed. When I saw that horrible video Trump posted of his idea for a Gaza resort I felt like puking and crying. This is the culmination of all you've mentioned (except of course that it's always been there, from way before the Spanish plunderers through slavery and on and on. Humanity is a failed species, IMO.
Yeah, the “paragon of animals,” my ass.
What a piece of work is man.
I’m not yet at “988,” but have been creeping incrementally closer. Not so much personally, in light of being 79 and increasingly addled with Parkinson’s (and grateful for the productive and good life I’ve had), but more troubled with increasingly distressing empathic concern for others—starting with (but in no way exclusive to) my offspring. The Musk-Trump KlownSwastikar shitshow leaves me increasingly speechless. Some days it’s become an effort to just get up.
Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, wearing long robes, sitting at the front seats, blocking trillions and firing tens of thousands of workers in the name of efficiency making people invisible, atomized and commodified.
In the time of neoliberal incompetence, the median wealth skyrockets when Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg enters the bar! Firing 6K IRS workers makes life unjust and upside down!
The failures of the neoliberal brand of capitalism were once again on display in the February 23 German elections. In a political vacuum, with mainstream parties unable to offer anything other than the austerity that has been imposed for decades, the extreme right gains adherents.
Systemic Disorder
+
I just found out that our esteemed Hakeem Jeffries accepted $700,000+ from AIPAC! How can we count on chickenshit “leaders” like that?
“We need to go in the other direction. We need a government that serves the common good.”
Perfectly stated!
I am a biophysicist. I often tend to look at the world through a scientific filter. In classical physics we characterize the dynamic behavior of a system by examining an equation called the Hamiltonian, named after the brilliant 19th century scientist William Rowan Hamilton. This is a powerful way of quantifying how the position, momentum and potential energy of a system predict its configuration through time. In our present fraught political crisis, this elegant physics can provide us with a crude but useful analogy. The momentum of our situation is the action taken by the various actors: government entities, corporate entities and private citizens. The potential energy of the society is the transformative force that different entities could bring to the system to change the momentum. Using this framework, we can ascertain critical potential forces for progress, distinguishing weak forces from strong. The weakest force is mass public protest. The Democrats, having lost the popular vote are in no position to assert that these protests represent the wishes of a majority of citizens. Add the possibility that Trump may be itching to use violence against protestors once his corruption of DOJ and the military is sufficiently secured and there is strong case that such protests are largely futile. Next, consider the major corporate players. Because of the innate devotion of the ownership class to financial profits, it has been no surprise that the resistance has been astoundingly feeble. A beautiful examination of this kind of capitulation in the early years of the Nazi regime is illustrated by the brilliant movie “The Damned” by the great Italian director Visconti. That brings us to Congress (I am skipping the courts because the power to push back is diffuse, slow and partially curtailed by a viciously corrupt Supreme court compounded by a lack of enforcement capability). In Congress there is real latent power, but seemingly no courage to exercise it. Clearly, the threat of primary challenges has paralyzed the Republicans, many of whom are said to be horrified by events when commenting behind closed doors. But I claim there is a real chance to powerfully push back. What I propose below is highly unorthodox but perfectly legitimate and doable and is also a way of deflecting the primary election threat. And, since Trump is, in fact, a profoundly cowardly human being, strong pushback would be very effective. Consider Article 1, section 5: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings”. Then consider the election of John Thune as majority leader. Scott, Trump’s choice, got thumped. Why? Because it was a secret ballot and there was no way to know how each Senator voted provided they respected each other’s security. Also note Trump’s meek response to this vote. If the senate and the house simply went to secret ballots Trump could easily be stopped in his tracks. Forced to withdraw his vile leadership picks, threatened privately with impeachment and removal if he doesn’t start governing without destroying the civil service. Perhaps you say that the base would be livid. If those voters punish the whole caucus in 2026, they will be in trouble in several states unfriendly to right wing extremism, especially if Trump is underwater nationally. Nevertheless, this would take courage on the part of Republicans, something they demonstrably don’t seem to have. This brings me to the most radical solution of all, but also the most effective. Before proposing it, I wish to emphasize that I believe that the people who voted for Trump, no matter their justifiable grievances against American Society, committed the equivalent of treason. If the Democracy fails, they will have denied young people and those yet unborn the blessing of living in a healthy, if imperfect, constitutional republic, a terrible sin. While the Supreme Court in the Colorado case should have simply declared Trump ineligible nationally under article 3 of the 14th amendment because of January 6th, the vast majority of voters should have come to the same conclusion. We now live the nightmare of that failure. Sometimes in life lessons must be learned by tough love. The old adage is very appropriate in this case: F*** around and find out. The MAGA need a profound lesson in how much the overwhelmingly patriotic civil service does for them. I believe that this leads to the most powerful transformative political potential available. As John Lewis said when facing unjust law, make good trouble. To stop project 2025 in its tracks and force a reckoning for Trump the most effective action available is for the entire civil service to strike. Several things would follow. The intense societal pain would wake a lot of delusional MAGA up: no social security payments, no Medicare payments, no Medicaid payments, no food inspections, all planes grounded, no emergency aid from FEMA, no food stamps, no payments to Federal contractors, etc., etc. The politicians could not threaten to fire everyone because there is no way to replace them. Would many innocent people suffer? Indeed. If Trump destroys American Democracy the pain will be much worse. Will the civil servants realize that this may be the last true defense? I doubt it. Americans are essentially loners. We are not a tribe like e.g., the French or the Japanese. It is very difficult for Americans to think about collective welfare, except perhaps with respect to external enemies. I don’t expect the civil servants to grasp this, I also don’t expect the republic to survive. Courage is in short supply. Respectively