I used to do on campus OCS recruiting a few years back. The more elite/liberal the school, the worse reaction I would get. I’d get in discussions with bright kids who would ultimately want to talk about politics (when I just wanted to tell them about how I liked being a platoon commander and later battalion staff officer). Occasionally, after they got snotty and made some comment about how the military was too “right wing,” I’d say “you really sure you want to live in a country where the people with big guns and bombs are just right wing.” Unfortunately that last ditch line never got me a prospect, but it seems relevant now.
"you really sure you want to live in a country where the people with big guns and bombs are just right wing?" Because "snootiness" is a human trait, not an ideological one (or you are centrist/right wing enough not to notice when right wingers are arrogant), how about an answer with a question? I'm really sure that I don't want to live in a country capable of destroying the planet in under an hour, a country that has the foreign policy record the US has, but like lots of folks, I put up with the dangerously unstable crap because there's no way to get the good stuff about the US without it unless and until the US rediscovers its tradition of anti-militarism. But no, not gonna be broken up about militant rightists being opposed by leftists.
I'm not exactly sure what your point is, I think you are expanding on the scope of my argument to make some partisan jab at me. College kids of all political persuasions are generally snotty, particularly the smart ones. The US military is what it is. We are (for now) the global hegemon that enforces the current global order with an overwhelming arsenal of advanced weaponry. When our time comes to pass, China (a country currently running large concentration camps full of Muslims) will likely assume that role to impose whatever global order fits their ideological vision. I'm not sure that will be any better than US foreign policy. But my point is that I made an effort (and was often successful!) to put liberals into the Officer corps because the military should be reflective of society. If it is not, that is a recipe for disaster.
The point is, we all live with things about the US we dislike and oppose, so "do you really want to live in a country that X" is besides the point. Plenty of leftists would indeed make the implicit trade.
Apologies, but as someone who indeed took Mike G (who gets respect) seriously when a similar argument presented itself, I still don't understand what you're getting at. What's the implicit trade?
Honest question: one of Noah’s points in this post is that a military that dwarfs the size of any possible right-wing militia ensures that said militias can never take over. Has there been any writings on how a more anti-militarist United States would deal with that problem? I, in general, find that the things we ask the US military to do generally range from distasteful to downright dangerous and harmful, but I also would hate if the US military and security forces were so small they could get overwhelmed by right-wing militias.
Is the answer as simple as to continue maintaining a large military but in almost every case refuse to deploy them across the globe? Or is there something else? Or is the idea that a less militarized US would somehow be less prone to militias in the first place? (Which may be true but also sounds like a huge bet with dangerous ramifications if it’s wrong.) Thanks in advance for any insight you have.
I'll be honest, a lot of military people have been freaking out since May. Social media has whipped everyone into a frenzy just like we've seen in other countries that fall into violence over the last decade or so. Noah is correct that militias could never take over, but insurrectionists/insurgents could cause a lot of trouble. In the case of a massive domestic uprising, I'm not as confident as he is that the military would quickly get the situation under control. I have close ties to Minneapolis, and it was The Purge there for 5+ days and it took the entire mobilization (14k troops) of the MN NG to stop the craziness. While Seattle/Portland got all of the attention the Minneapolis riots were really, really, bad (and under reported nationally) and in my opinion could have been a lot worse if more people with guns had participated. There were small pockets of people with guns driving around causing trouble but it was mostly arson attacks with relatively sophisticated incendiary devices being planted everywhere. The Minneapolis riots were basically what I'd call 5th Generation urban insurgency, where the tactics employed by both sides are generally less than lethal and the battle is for information (to project the moral high ground to the populace) via social media. A MAGA militia insurgency would be an even scarier animal.
Small pockets of militas could easily be defeated by Federal LEOs (think Waco), larger groups via the National Guard. But if whole parts of the country turn to rural insurgency (which is what we'd have imo) you'd have a big, big problem that would require active duty military. Employing active duty (non-National Guard) military on domestic soil to fight an internal enemy is the equivalent of political chemotherapy, you are essentially turning our own immune system on itself. Not a good place to be. Then it starts to look like Afghanistan where you don't know who the police are loyal to, the populace is scared or sympathetic to the insurgency, etc. In that case the military might have mass defections (some people aren't going to want to go fight their cousins, insurgents might attack your family at their house, etc.) and you'd have a huge mess on your hands.
I don't really have the answers other than people should stop being so angry.
Insurgencies generally lose. One reason is that most insurgencies aren't against foreign occupying armies but against their own governments, who have intimate cultural knowledge. The problems involved in defeating a domestic insurgency in the United States would look nothing like the situation in Afghanistan for multiple reasons, but one of those reasons is that our strategic, operational and tactical intelligence would be order of magnitude greater. Figuring out who is who in Boise would really be much easier than it was in Jalalabad.
In addition, two strategic dilemmas disappear in this hypothetical domestic insurgency: (1) no corrupt local governments and (2) no warlords.
It's not that it wouldn't be a huge mess if it happened; it's just that I don't think Afghanistan is a good example. We've seen the movie about what insurgencies look like in urban postindustrial societies. Northern Ireland, Basque Country, and Corsica were not pretty but they weren't Afghanistan.
(That said, I am a fan of the DMZ comic books, so at some level I don't think it's impossible.)
Thank you for the thoughtful response. You are correct, insurgencies generally lose and the US military is extremely well funded and equipped. But I've also personally conducted counter-insurgency as a part of that force, and I also think we kind of suck at it. Counter-insurgency on our own soil would be a tragic nightmare for all involved. I didn't mean to imply that any sustained insurrection in the US would be analogous to Afghanistan, other than how the psychology of the security forces and population adds points of friction (like as I suggested an Army commander worried about the insurgents killing his family, or the military not trusting the ostensibly government-aligned police force). I'm guessing our future (if things turn violent) looks more like the Italian "years of lead" or maybe some scaled up version of The Troubles like you said. I hope that isn't too optimistic of a guess.
The Right has become insane but, as David Shor said recently, it's entirely rational to vote right if you don't like certain traits because you get the whole suite of traits when you go Left (including all of the bullshit) in a 2 party system. I worked with woke, Pronoun People for 9 years...it got pretty bad. Intolerable and unworkable if you're an independent thinker *because* of their culture of intolerance. I was literally fired because of wokeness, basically. Now I work with MAGAtards and they are kinda nutty politically but generally nice people and guess what? I don't ever have to worry about being fired for making some goofy jokes or not using someone's pronouns. You're constantly walking on eggshells when you're around Woke people. So, for me, it wasn't really an embracing of fear culture but instead a matter of practicality.
It just seems silly and lame to push back on the excesses of wokeness when the President is fomenting coups against Congress. Only after Trump and his insurrection are both gone will people be able to have a calm and sensible conversation about culture stuff.
This talk of coup and insurrection- it looks ridiculous.
If the liberal establishment’s idea of a coup is for Trump to send some overweight protestors to walk around the Capitol building like tourists, then we must be reaching the end of civilisation or something.
For sure, i mean, i voted for Biden for that reason. I've only voted Republican once, like 15 years ago. But for most people I'm thinking it's basically like asking them to stop being a Red Sox fan and start rooting for the Yankees.
The media’s business model is tribalism. You’re calling on antifa to go out and fight nazis and using captain America comics as your source material. I understand how you could view the shaman as a major threat to the United States, maybe he was sent by red skull
When I joined the National Guard, my father jokingly said that I was doing it out of "liberal guilt." A childhood friend (now an Army major) similarly joked that I was making myself a "human shield for American foreign policy." That is a way to say that I agree with you that more liberals should join the military.
But I want to understand why so few people do what I did.
Have you considered joining the reserves and if not, why not? (I don't think that it would interfere unduly with your career but if you disagree I'd also very much like to know why.) I understand that the question might seem hostile, so please know that I intend no snark, sarcasm, or implicit accusations of hypocrisy!
The limit used to be 42! I think it's down to 39 now, but there are waivers. I'd encourage you and if you ever want to talk offline about it I'd be honored.
I was interested in the military as a kid but after seeing US soldiers get sent to Iraq and die for essentially no reason pretty much killed any interest I had.
I started the process of joining the Marines' ROTC in high school, then stopped. When it came down to it, I just didn't like the idea that a leadership that I knew had committed atrocities might use me to commit more, or use my contributions in one area to make space for atrocities elsewhere. If the military did much more to publicly acknowledge US foreign policy's recent (within the careers of many people in public "service") use of torture, mass murder, rape, and chemical warfare, and vow never to allow it and to empower its grunts to oppose it, I'd reconsider.
In a nutshell, uncaring people might use me to do horrible things. I can't stop them, but I can refuse to help directly. I think that objection is common among progressives, whereas conservatives have more of a jingoistic, authoritarian approach to martial matters.
It looks like progressives are more concerned about police views than military views towards Trump or right-wing riots. Which makes some sense, because the police do a lot of the day to day work where public local order is concerned for Americans. I worry speculation about a civil war is a red herring, just as a full military-backed takeover of the federal government was the wrong thing to argue and speculate about in November.
So going forward, it might be better to consider The Troubles in Ireland as an example for what more insurrections at various state legislatures could look like. Michigan was a warning sign. The election conspiracy theories and social media coordination seem like the most alarming focal points. If your democracy is being stolen, it makes sense to get outraged and do *something*, and you can find likeminded people online to coordinate with, it becomes more likely to happen. These are critical elements to how a unique political actor like Trump incited this event on Jan 6th. Which is why Jan 6th has made me a lot more pessimistic; the state of things is a lot worse than I thought it was prior to this event.
I don't think the things that polarized the two parties on cops are going away anytime soon. Maybe Biden can be 2nd Term Bill Clinton, that would be good for the country. But there are a lot of organized interests within the party pushing against precisely that. In order to be a guardian of the status quo, you have to believe that, with exceptions, the status quo is generally good. Can Biden sell his party on that? I'm skeptical. But then again partisans are more relaxed when their guy is in charge, so who can say.
Noah, I only found you because of Curtis Yarvin. I’ve read many of your past posts and new posts over the weeks. I’m not sarcastically following you or here to troll. I am genuinely openminded and read everyone, even if their views are on the opposite ends of the universe.
“The paradox of tolerance” applies just as aptly (and far more dangerously) to progressivism and extreme wokeness as it does to actual Nazis.
Progressivism is at heart a politics of intolerance. It justifies itself by saying that it is intolerant of intolerance, but that is just turtles all the way down.
It is really intolerance of the preferences of historical Western society, and a preference and tolerance of anything that opposes and destroys any vestiges of that society.
The thing about neoliberalism is that it makes life worse and worse for most people. Life getting worse and worse for most people is why people become Nazi's.
"[The US Left's ideological opposition to the US military] needs to go by the wayside." Why? You don't really give an actual reason why leftists should stop opposing the most powerful military on the planet, responsible for everything from the brutal repression of the Phillippines to the firebombing of Dresden to the napalming of Vietnam to Abu Ghraib and the rapes of Haditha. The hint seems to be that the US is such a failed society that we should cling to the only institution now capable of producing racial/social integration.
It's also the military that beat the Nazis, beat the Japanese Empire, beat the Confederacy, stopped North Korea from taking over South Korea, and stood down the Soviet Union.
A military is only as good or bad as what you use it for.
The war started by a wmd lie, published in the NYT, is your positive example? That’s exactly why you shouldn’t join the military, so you don’t get shipped off to die/kill people over a lie. Talk about fake news
Panama worked out well, even if it was to right a wrong that the US had perpetrated. (I wrote a book about that!) Some would argue that the original sin of supporting Noriega (or, heck, taking the Canal Zone) made later attempts to fix it hypocritical or immoral.
He is saying the left should stop opposing the military because, at the end of the day, the military is the vehicle of coercive force that keeps the prog-liberal consensus in power.
In other words it is way past time to stop pretending you are the resistance, and accept that you are the establishment. Difficult, I know, for obvious reasons. But still true.
This is the most honest statement in the blog and the comment section. Many will scorn you for pointing out this level of clarity, please keep doing this.
Though you haven't said this explicitly, the way you discuss this topic gives me the impression that you are letting American conservatives off of the hook because they are fueled by fear. But every fascist movement has fear as an element of public mobilization. The MAGA movement is a fascist movement and the republican party at large flirts and caucuses with fascists the same way that every other conservative party has always done. Pretty much every fascist power grab was preceded by a temporary alliance with the establishment that got out of hand (usually to counter socialists). This could very easily have been a beer hall putsch moment.
One way that the Right wing militias can over match the US Military is if the U.S. military become 50% female or LGBTQ, as in 50% Female or LGBTQ in combat positions. 100% of the U.S. military being composed of Females or LGBTQ would be even better. For the good of Humanity, we hope that this happens soon. The U.S. military should immediately start getting rid of Toxic masculinity in its ranks. In fact it should just get rid of masculinity altogether.
First off, yea I guess there were some “skinheads” in the punk scene in the 80’s, but you’d be hard pressed to find any of their music. In fact I’ve never heard a punk or metal song about killing Jews specifically, and I’ve heard a lot of this music, been to real life shows, etc. Christians on the other hand….
There are plenty of openly Satanic metal bands, and there are plenty of punk bands calling for the overthrow of Society and USG. Do I even have to link to them? You know they’re there.
Another point I’d like to make about punk music is that it really hasn’t changed much at all since the 70s. They still wear the same fucking outfits, their music is still about how much capitalism sucks and the US government is oppressing people, in music theory terms they haven’t innovated or changed anything. It’s technologically backwards and the people who make it are smelly weirdos.
Well, there is at one thing that I think Mr.Smith gets wrong in this and a couple of other posts. I am certain that it is not only him, so I would like to make a small remark if that's alright.
The scenario of FBI+Military+CIA+Every-cop-like-face-in-the-US vs Far-right militias is way too unrealistic. In fact, this almost never happens in real civil wars. Real full-scale civil wars include government structures splitting and new armies being created. I don't really see why it matters if Trump is supported by 55% or 45% of soldiers. It's not like they are going to have a vote about what side to fight on. In the end (and as someone from a country currently engulfed in a war, I wish you to never see it) it's every soldier for himself.
As Syrian war shows, the defectors do not even need to be generals or high-level politicians to get the conflict started. Most of the elite stayed loyal. On a related note, I am also pretty certain that if a real civil war starts in the US, there will be many foreign powers willing to help the weaker side, just to keep the US occupied. So what I'm trying to say is that there are two scenarios:
1) There are no mass defections, political and military elite is united -> There is no civil war
2) Some part of elite defects (again, it doesn't have to be large) -> There is a possibility of civil war
The posts that speculate about militias getting crashed by the government describe situation 1. But in that case, there just wouldn't be a war in the first place, so it's seems meaningless to study this scenario. Mass surveillance is too powerful to even start anything big. If you ever see local governors arming national guard to attack FBI facilities, then you will know that the war is about to start. Of course, it would be too late at this point :)
What you might be thinking about is insurgency, not civil war. Perhaps it is a possibility, but it really doesn't look like it can be sustained in a modern first-world country.
I used to do on campus OCS recruiting a few years back. The more elite/liberal the school, the worse reaction I would get. I’d get in discussions with bright kids who would ultimately want to talk about politics (when I just wanted to tell them about how I liked being a platoon commander and later battalion staff officer). Occasionally, after they got snotty and made some comment about how the military was too “right wing,” I’d say “you really sure you want to live in a country where the people with big guns and bombs are just right wing.” Unfortunately that last ditch line never got me a prospect, but it seems relevant now.
yep
"you really sure you want to live in a country where the people with big guns and bombs are just right wing?" Because "snootiness" is a human trait, not an ideological one (or you are centrist/right wing enough not to notice when right wingers are arrogant), how about an answer with a question? I'm really sure that I don't want to live in a country capable of destroying the planet in under an hour, a country that has the foreign policy record the US has, but like lots of folks, I put up with the dangerously unstable crap because there's no way to get the good stuff about the US without it unless and until the US rediscovers its tradition of anti-militarism. But no, not gonna be broken up about militant rightists being opposed by leftists.
Welcome to the way the rest of the world lives.
I'm not exactly sure what your point is, I think you are expanding on the scope of my argument to make some partisan jab at me. College kids of all political persuasions are generally snotty, particularly the smart ones. The US military is what it is. We are (for now) the global hegemon that enforces the current global order with an overwhelming arsenal of advanced weaponry. When our time comes to pass, China (a country currently running large concentration camps full of Muslims) will likely assume that role to impose whatever global order fits their ideological vision. I'm not sure that will be any better than US foreign policy. But my point is that I made an effort (and was often successful!) to put liberals into the Officer corps because the military should be reflective of society. If it is not, that is a recipe for disaster.
The point is, we all live with things about the US we dislike and oppose, so "do you really want to live in a country that X" is besides the point. Plenty of leftists would indeed make the implicit trade.
Apologies, but as someone who indeed took Mike G (who gets respect) seriously when a similar argument presented itself, I still don't understand what you're getting at. What's the implicit trade?
A more domestically violent country that doesn’t have a large military that can be inflicted on foreign people who can’t vote in the US.
Honest question: one of Noah’s points in this post is that a military that dwarfs the size of any possible right-wing militia ensures that said militias can never take over. Has there been any writings on how a more anti-militarist United States would deal with that problem? I, in general, find that the things we ask the US military to do generally range from distasteful to downright dangerous and harmful, but I also would hate if the US military and security forces were so small they could get overwhelmed by right-wing militias.
Is the answer as simple as to continue maintaining a large military but in almost every case refuse to deploy them across the globe? Or is there something else? Or is the idea that a less militarized US would somehow be less prone to militias in the first place? (Which may be true but also sounds like a huge bet with dangerous ramifications if it’s wrong.) Thanks in advance for any insight you have.
I'll be honest, a lot of military people have been freaking out since May. Social media has whipped everyone into a frenzy just like we've seen in other countries that fall into violence over the last decade or so. Noah is correct that militias could never take over, but insurrectionists/insurgents could cause a lot of trouble. In the case of a massive domestic uprising, I'm not as confident as he is that the military would quickly get the situation under control. I have close ties to Minneapolis, and it was The Purge there for 5+ days and it took the entire mobilization (14k troops) of the MN NG to stop the craziness. While Seattle/Portland got all of the attention the Minneapolis riots were really, really, bad (and under reported nationally) and in my opinion could have been a lot worse if more people with guns had participated. There were small pockets of people with guns driving around causing trouble but it was mostly arson attacks with relatively sophisticated incendiary devices being planted everywhere. The Minneapolis riots were basically what I'd call 5th Generation urban insurgency, where the tactics employed by both sides are generally less than lethal and the battle is for information (to project the moral high ground to the populace) via social media. A MAGA militia insurgency would be an even scarier animal.
Small pockets of militas could easily be defeated by Federal LEOs (think Waco), larger groups via the National Guard. But if whole parts of the country turn to rural insurgency (which is what we'd have imo) you'd have a big, big problem that would require active duty military. Employing active duty (non-National Guard) military on domestic soil to fight an internal enemy is the equivalent of political chemotherapy, you are essentially turning our own immune system on itself. Not a good place to be. Then it starts to look like Afghanistan where you don't know who the police are loyal to, the populace is scared or sympathetic to the insurgency, etc. In that case the military might have mass defections (some people aren't going to want to go fight their cousins, insurgents might attack your family at their house, etc.) and you'd have a huge mess on your hands.
I don't really have the answers other than people should stop being so angry.
Insurgencies generally lose. One reason is that most insurgencies aren't against foreign occupying armies but against their own governments, who have intimate cultural knowledge. The problems involved in defeating a domestic insurgency in the United States would look nothing like the situation in Afghanistan for multiple reasons, but one of those reasons is that our strategic, operational and tactical intelligence would be order of magnitude greater. Figuring out who is who in Boise would really be much easier than it was in Jalalabad.
In addition, two strategic dilemmas disappear in this hypothetical domestic insurgency: (1) no corrupt local governments and (2) no warlords.
It's not that it wouldn't be a huge mess if it happened; it's just that I don't think Afghanistan is a good example. We've seen the movie about what insurgencies look like in urban postindustrial societies. Northern Ireland, Basque Country, and Corsica were not pretty but they weren't Afghanistan.
(That said, I am a fan of the DMZ comic books, so at some level I don't think it's impossible.)
Thank you for the thoughtful response. You are correct, insurgencies generally lose and the US military is extremely well funded and equipped. But I've also personally conducted counter-insurgency as a part of that force, and I also think we kind of suck at it. Counter-insurgency on our own soil would be a tragic nightmare for all involved. I didn't mean to imply that any sustained insurrection in the US would be analogous to Afghanistan, other than how the psychology of the security forces and population adds points of friction (like as I suggested an Army commander worried about the insurgents killing his family, or the military not trusting the ostensibly government-aligned police force). I'm guessing our future (if things turn violent) looks more like the Italian "years of lead" or maybe some scaled up version of The Troubles like you said. I hope that isn't too optimistic of a guess.
The Right has become insane but, as David Shor said recently, it's entirely rational to vote right if you don't like certain traits because you get the whole suite of traits when you go Left (including all of the bullshit) in a 2 party system. I worked with woke, Pronoun People for 9 years...it got pretty bad. Intolerable and unworkable if you're an independent thinker *because* of their culture of intolerance. I was literally fired because of wokeness, basically. Now I work with MAGAtards and they are kinda nutty politically but generally nice people and guess what? I don't ever have to worry about being fired for making some goofy jokes or not using someone's pronouns. You're constantly walking on eggshells when you're around Woke people. So, for me, it wasn't really an embracing of fear culture but instead a matter of practicality.
This is the problem we've made for ourselves.
It just seems silly and lame to push back on the excesses of wokeness when the President is fomenting coups against Congress. Only after Trump and his insurrection are both gone will people be able to have a calm and sensible conversation about culture stuff.
This talk of coup and insurrection- it looks ridiculous.
If the liberal establishment’s idea of a coup is for Trump to send some overweight protestors to walk around the Capitol building like tourists, then we must be reaching the end of civilisation or something.
For sure, i mean, i voted for Biden for that reason. I've only voted Republican once, like 15 years ago. But for most people I'm thinking it's basically like asking them to stop being a Red Sox fan and start rooting for the Yankees.
Yep. Years of hardened partisanship are hard to overcome, and that tribalism gives an opening to bad actors.
The media’s business model is tribalism. You’re calling on antifa to go out and fight nazis and using captain America comics as your source material. I understand how you could view the shaman as a major threat to the United States, maybe he was sent by red skull
When I joined the National Guard, my father jokingly said that I was doing it out of "liberal guilt." A childhood friend (now an Army major) similarly joked that I was making myself a "human shield for American foreign policy." That is a way to say that I agree with you that more liberals should join the military.
But I want to understand why so few people do what I did.
Have you considered joining the reserves and if not, why not? (I don't think that it would interfere unduly with your career but if you disagree I'd also very much like to know why.) I understand that the question might seem hostile, so please know that I intend no snark, sarcasm, or implicit accusations of hypocrisy!
I mean, I'm pretty old for it now, but I've considered it.
The limit used to be 42! I think it's down to 39 now, but there are waivers. I'd encourage you and if you ever want to talk offline about it I'd be honored.
Thanks!!
I was interested in the military as a kid but after seeing US soldiers get sent to Iraq and die for essentially no reason pretty much killed any interest I had.
Makes sense! And yet, turns out there's a good reason we have a military...
I started the process of joining the Marines' ROTC in high school, then stopped. When it came down to it, I just didn't like the idea that a leadership that I knew had committed atrocities might use me to commit more, or use my contributions in one area to make space for atrocities elsewhere. If the military did much more to publicly acknowledge US foreign policy's recent (within the careers of many people in public "service") use of torture, mass murder, rape, and chemical warfare, and vow never to allow it and to empower its grunts to oppose it, I'd reconsider.
In a nutshell, uncaring people might use me to do horrible things. I can't stop them, but I can refuse to help directly. I think that objection is common among progressives, whereas conservatives have more of a jingoistic, authoritarian approach to martial matters.
Being intolerant of the intolerant is a crucial point. Thanks.
It looks like progressives are more concerned about police views than military views towards Trump or right-wing riots. Which makes some sense, because the police do a lot of the day to day work where public local order is concerned for Americans. I worry speculation about a civil war is a red herring, just as a full military-backed takeover of the federal government was the wrong thing to argue and speculate about in November.
So going forward, it might be better to consider The Troubles in Ireland as an example for what more insurrections at various state legislatures could look like. Michigan was a warning sign. The election conspiracy theories and social media coordination seem like the most alarming focal points. If your democracy is being stolen, it makes sense to get outraged and do *something*, and you can find likeminded people online to coordinate with, it becomes more likely to happen. These are critical elements to how a unique political actor like Trump incited this event on Jan 6th. Which is why Jan 6th has made me a lot more pessimistic; the state of things is a lot worse than I thought it was prior to this event.
I don't think the things that polarized the two parties on cops are going away anytime soon. Maybe Biden can be 2nd Term Bill Clinton, that would be good for the country. But there are a lot of organized interests within the party pushing against precisely that. In order to be a guardian of the status quo, you have to believe that, with exceptions, the status quo is generally good. Can Biden sell his party on that? I'm skeptical. But then again partisans are more relaxed when their guy is in charge, so who can say.
Noah, I only found you because of Curtis Yarvin. I’ve read many of your past posts and new posts over the weeks. I’m not sarcastically following you or here to troll. I am genuinely openminded and read everyone, even if their views are on the opposite ends of the universe.
“The paradox of tolerance” applies just as aptly (and far more dangerously) to progressivism and extreme wokeness as it does to actual Nazis.
Progressivism is at heart a politics of intolerance. It justifies itself by saying that it is intolerant of intolerance, but that is just turtles all the way down.
It is really intolerance of the preferences of historical Western society, and a preference and tolerance of anything that opposes and destroys any vestiges of that society.
The thing about neoliberalism is that it makes life worse and worse for most people. Life getting worse and worse for most people is why people become Nazi's.
Nah https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/01/10254783/who-stormed-capitol-rioters-police-officers-ceo-lawyers
You don't have to be blue collar to be pissed off life is getting worse and worse. Neoliberalism exclusively benefits the top 1%. Everyone else is primed for radicalism. https://bostonreview.net/politics/william-callison-quinn-slobodian-coronapolitics-reichstag-capitol
"[The US Left's ideological opposition to the US military] needs to go by the wayside." Why? You don't really give an actual reason why leftists should stop opposing the most powerful military on the planet, responsible for everything from the brutal repression of the Phillippines to the firebombing of Dresden to the napalming of Vietnam to Abu Ghraib and the rapes of Haditha. The hint seems to be that the US is such a failed society that we should cling to the only institution now capable of producing racial/social integration.
It's also the military that beat the Nazis, beat the Japanese Empire, beat the Confederacy, stopped North Korea from taking over South Korea, and stood down the Soviet Union.
A military is only as good or bad as what you use it for.
And since it hasn't won a war since WWII what does that say?
It won the Korean War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War, plus plenty of smaller engagements
The war started by a wmd lie, published in the NYT, is your positive example? That’s exactly why you shouldn’t join the military, so you don’t get shipped off to die/kill people over a lie. Talk about fake news
Panama worked out well, even if it was to right a wrong that the US had perpetrated. (I wrote a book about that!) Some would argue that the original sin of supporting Noriega (or, heck, taking the Canal Zone) made later attempts to fix it hypocritical or immoral.
I cannot say that I understand those arguments.
He is saying the left should stop opposing the military because, at the end of the day, the military is the vehicle of coercive force that keeps the prog-liberal consensus in power.
In other words it is way past time to stop pretending you are the resistance, and accept that you are the establishment. Difficult, I know, for obvious reasons. But still true.
This is the most honest statement in the blog and the comment section. Many will scorn you for pointing out this level of clarity, please keep doing this.
💯
Hey, interesting seeing my tweet in here! You are correct Noah - I would very much prefer to stop Nazis than yammer about neoliberalism
-Stephen L.
Though you haven't said this explicitly, the way you discuss this topic gives me the impression that you are letting American conservatives off of the hook because they are fueled by fear. But every fascist movement has fear as an element of public mobilization. The MAGA movement is a fascist movement and the republican party at large flirts and caucuses with fascists the same way that every other conservative party has always done. Pretty much every fascist power grab was preceded by a temporary alliance with the establishment that got out of hand (usually to counter socialists). This could very easily have been a beer hall putsch moment.
"what america will be after trump is gone"
>images from conservative authoritarian ethnostate
> like Mao letting Chiang Kai-Shek do the heavy lifting of fighting the Japanese in WW2
Mao actually colluded with the Japanese and sold out Chiang's KMT
Source: https://www.japanpolicyforum.jp/diplomacy/pt20160517095311.html
One way that the Right wing militias can over match the US Military is if the U.S. military become 50% female or LGBTQ, as in 50% Female or LGBTQ in combat positions. 100% of the U.S. military being composed of Females or LGBTQ would be even better. For the good of Humanity, we hope that this happens soon. The U.S. military should immediately start getting rid of Toxic masculinity in its ranks. In fact it should just get rid of masculinity altogether.
First off, yea I guess there were some “skinheads” in the punk scene in the 80’s, but you’d be hard pressed to find any of their music. In fact I’ve never heard a punk or metal song about killing Jews specifically, and I’ve heard a lot of this music, been to real life shows, etc. Christians on the other hand….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OsHcegl8tg (Deicide – Kill The Christian)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmDRkXsplHA&list=PLNdLvPfz5nY9lIcxqDi8IGQjH5llPdH29 (Infant Annihilator – Crucifilth)
There are plenty of openly Satanic metal bands, and there are plenty of punk bands calling for the overthrow of Society and USG. Do I even have to link to them? You know they’re there.
for good measure:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5ZbMMZ6Hk (Bad Brains -Self-Titled 1982 album ) Check out the album cover btw
Another point I’d like to make about punk music is that it really hasn’t changed much at all since the 70s. They still wear the same fucking outfits, their music is still about how much capitalism sucks and the US government is oppressing people, in music theory terms they haven’t innovated or changed anything. It’s technologically backwards and the people who make it are smelly weirdos.
Well, there is at one thing that I think Mr.Smith gets wrong in this and a couple of other posts. I am certain that it is not only him, so I would like to make a small remark if that's alright.
The scenario of FBI+Military+CIA+Every-cop-like-face-in-the-US vs Far-right militias is way too unrealistic. In fact, this almost never happens in real civil wars. Real full-scale civil wars include government structures splitting and new armies being created. I don't really see why it matters if Trump is supported by 55% or 45% of soldiers. It's not like they are going to have a vote about what side to fight on. In the end (and as someone from a country currently engulfed in a war, I wish you to never see it) it's every soldier for himself.
As Syrian war shows, the defectors do not even need to be generals or high-level politicians to get the conflict started. Most of the elite stayed loyal. On a related note, I am also pretty certain that if a real civil war starts in the US, there will be many foreign powers willing to help the weaker side, just to keep the US occupied. So what I'm trying to say is that there are two scenarios:
1) There are no mass defections, political and military elite is united -> There is no civil war
2) Some part of elite defects (again, it doesn't have to be large) -> There is a possibility of civil war
The posts that speculate about militias getting crashed by the government describe situation 1. But in that case, there just wouldn't be a war in the first place, so it's seems meaningless to study this scenario. Mass surveillance is too powerful to even start anything big. If you ever see local governors arming national guard to attack FBI facilities, then you will know that the war is about to start. Of course, it would be too late at this point :)
What you might be thinking about is insurgency, not civil war. Perhaps it is a possibility, but it really doesn't look like it can be sustained in a modern first-world country.