In belated honor of Bastille Day, I would like to discuss the concept of guillotine insurance.
“Guillotine insurance” is a term a lot of leftists use to discuss ideas like national healthcare, or minimum wage, or something else that is supposed to keep the peasants from revolting. There’s at least one reason why a lot of people don’t take such rhetoric seriously, and I’ll get to it later. But as I’ve said, it is irrelevant to argue that “health care is a human right” or that anything else leftists want is a “right” when we have rights that are enumerated in the Constitution and the current government won’t even acknowledge those.
For example, Portland.
Apparently the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon had been dying down – one reason they hadn’t been in the news before now – but then someone decided to send in some people, not that anyone will take credit or give specifics. Starting July 7, resident rump sent in US Marshals Special Operations Group, Customs and Border Protection Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) and the Federal Protective Service, which is in charge of protecting federal properties. In the early morning hours of July 15, officers in unmarked camouflage were filmed as they got out of an unmarked van and grabbed a person in a helmet. More such reports came up in social media. According to the BBC, “The role of federal troops sent to Portland is the subject of intense speculation at the moment … They belong to a new federal force created last month in an executive order signed by President Trump which tasks them to protect historic monuments, memorials, statues, and federal facilities … When asked about the arrest of a protester captured on video, the CBP said the individual was suspected of destroying federal property. They said agents had identified themselves and were wearing CBP insignia but their names were not displayed “due to recent doxing incidents against law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our country.”
The goal is precisely to make sure that no one is accountable. If the tactic works (as in, it boosts Trump’s polls), Trump can step up to the podium with his retarded-toad grin and take credit for everything, and if it blows up, he can fire the alleged guy in charge like one of his wives. It’s the same way that Peter Navarro supposedly acted outside the White House when he wrote an op-ed against Anthony Fauci when we all know that Navarro won’t pee standing up before getting verbal permission from Trump. I call it “implausible deniability.”
Trump and his people have confirmed that this lawbreaking-and-disorder effort is just a test run for a wider campaign. Supposedly they’re going to go to Chicago next. Well, at least people there have guns.
I’m almost not joking. There is no reason why civilians can’t just shoot these guys. Why not? What agency do they represent? None? You won’t tell us? For THEIR protection? But if they haven’t done anything wrong, what do they have to hide? If you won’t tell us what authority you represent, you don’t represent ANY authority, and you have no more right to use force than anyone else, therefore anyone else can use force on you. Self-Defense! Stand Your Ground, man!
As terrible as this is, and it IS terrible, because it sets yet another precedent eroding American rights against an already established standard of letting the president of either party do whatever the fuck he wants, it’s worth remembering the analyses of people who point out that if Trump hadn’t let so many people die from coronavirus and the economy wasn’t endangered as a result, he wouldn’t be resorting to the usual tactic – escalate the chaos (even if he has to create it himself) and then tell his cult that only he can solve the problem he created. And as even Fox News told him, that’s not working anymore.
This, incidentally, is why the coronavirus is directly linked to Donald Trump’s decline in the polls and declining political fortunes when nothing else, up to and including impeachment, has knocked him off. Because people in 2016 already KNEW Trump was an unqualified, bigoted idiot, and they still liked the cut of his jib. Further revelations of his low character just reinforced the support of the people who voted for Trump precisely because of his low character. As long as his character deficiencies didn’t hurt THEM, they were glad to have a head of state who was dumb for public consumption and triggered the libs. Now that Trump’s dysfunction is the proximate cause of the spread of coronavirus in America, and even those people who aren’t directly affected yet still can’t go to bars and buffets and hair salons, they can blame the governors in their states, but deep down they know the governors aren’t the reason for the virus itself. Why else would Trump get such a horrible crowd in Tulsa, when he carried Oklahoma in 2016 by over 36 points?
Back in PC (Pre-Corona) it didn’t matter that our president was Liddle Donnie Clown Boy, because he at least knew enough to not interfere with one thing he’d inherited from Obama, and that was the economy. But because Trump isn’t even deep enough to be one-dimensional, he couldn’t understand that the coronavirus can’t be left alone to spread, and that if it isn’t contained, THAT destroys the economy. (Almost as if human beings are a necessary component of said economy!) Now we actually need a plan of action, and all Clown Boy can do is juggle his balls and holler at the marks to buy tickets to his next three-ring circus.
Just as Trump’s destabilization of Portland not only made the local situation worse but is counterproductive for his image as a “strong leader” who is actually solving our problems, his constantly casting about for demons and radicals and socialists to hunt down is doing more to radicalize the population than anything the Left has done on their own initiative. The apparent radicalization of America is nothing more than a growing part of the population realizing that cops already can abuse and kill anyone when they can get away with it, and the only reason this hasn’t happened to more white Americans is that it was not politically correct for authorities to do so. White protestors are dealing with what black people have been dealing with all along.
Among the various norms that Trump has destroyed, the latest is the most ironic: he is undermining the concept of white privilege itself. This is a term often used by the Left, I would say, used to death, but if “white privilege” means anything, surely it means the privilege of not being harassed, beaten or killed, even IF you’ve committed a crime?
When you try to explain the concept of white privilege to a non-leftist, salt-of-the-earth, “Why don’t we have a WHITE History Month?” kinda guy, you can point out that when the cops confronted Dylann Roof after he shot up everyone in a black church, the FBI de-escalated and got him lunch on the way to the police station, whereas Eric Garner was strangled by cops over selling loose cigarettes. When you put it that way, a lot of people get it.
Very soon, and certainly if Trump is re-elected, we are all going to find out what it is like to be black people.
No, not in the figurative “The Irish are the blacks of Europe” sense, or the disingenuous “Irish Catholics were the first indentured servants in North America” sense, I mean in the practical sense that I’ve already mentioned. It was easy to treat black people and other minority groups as having no sovereignty because they didn’t have much in the way of numbers and even less political influence. Black people still don’t have much in the way of numbers, but as a whole, people “of color” are an increasing plurality. More than that, the country as a whole, including white people, is turning away from a Republican view of the world, even as the Republican world is becoming increasingly self-enclosed and reactionary. That’s why they’re so afraid of mail voting and absentee voting (even though upper-class groups and absentee homeowners have often had to use such measures) because they don’t think they can win elections fair and square anymore. The ruling class is afraid of public sovereignty.
David Frum was right: “If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” It used to be that Republicans like Reagan and even the Bushes could win majorities by giving the public something to vote for, and a vision of government that appealed to the majority. But apparently now that’s just too hard. What you are seeing under Trump and Mitch McConnell is an effective agenda to rule not only as a plurality, but actively against the majority, sort of like apartheid South Africa. After all, Frum has also said: “The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”
There always was a contradiction in the Declaration of Independence in saying broadly, “all men are created equal”, but in practice asserting that only white men are equal. We have lived with this contradiction because we saw the universal point behind the declaration and worked to resolve the contradiction by creating a white ethnic “melting pot”, freeing the slaves, giving women the vote and moving towards greater equality. The Banana Republican Party now seeks to resolve the contradiction by rejecting the Declaration itself, by asserting that men are not created equal, that there is one law for the ruling class, and the law for everyone else is simply to serve. The fact that this standard would have kicked both Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s ancestors out of the country is an irony that is lost on them, as most ironies are.
The Trump Organization is undermining the legitimacy of government itself.
Now if you’re one of those “libertarians” who always votes Republican and is perfectly fine with anonymous thugs throwing civilians in vans as long as they’re the people you hate, you can at least take comfort in knowing that your heroes are undermining support for Big Government, just not in the way you expected.
When leftists raise the concept of “guillotine insurance” they are perhaps being a bit naive in assuming that that’s how government in America works. We don’t assume we have to fight the government for our rights, which is one reason why we never assert them. We don’t have guillotine insurance in America, because we didn’t think we needed it. Partly it’s because there was more of a race culture than a class culture (compared to largely homogeneous European countries) but one of the reasons that we didn’t even have a class culture is because all of us, even the elites, actually believed in the American Dream. We had reason to believe that it didn’t matter how poor you were or where you were born, you could make it. That was the case for the white melting pot, and it’s even true for the large numbers of non-white immigrants who continue to come to America.
But that may not be the case any more. Income inequality in the US is not only higher than it’s ever been, it approaches the inequality levels of 1789 France. This is not an exaggeration. Trump Republican policies did indeed keep the economy going, but they deliberately hollowed out the safeguards we needed to keep it going in an emergency, including the pandemic response team that helped stop Ebola. And once Trump let the coronavirus spread to a national catastrophe, his Republicans only grudgingly allowed middle-class supports for a cratered private sector while cronies were allowed to dip their beaks in the limited “small” business fund. And it doesn’t matter if that was too little too late, we’ve gotta get the kids back in schools, even though there’s no vaccine and the resident is deliberately undermining mask-wearing efforts, we’ve gotta get adults back to work and get the economy going again. After all, it doesn’t matter how many people die, Wall Street bounced back, and that’s all that really matters. You’re just supposed to shut up and obey. Goosestep back into the offices, back into the shops, back into the schools, be a good little soldier, cough out your lungs and die for The Leader.
FUCK.
THAT.
A political class doesn’t do that sort of thing if it fears losing power. And if it doesn’t see a threat to its rational best interest in flipping off the public, it must be because they have reason to believe they’ll never lose an election again.
People on my side – or what I thought was my side – have used slogans like “Fear the government that fears your gun.” I would add, “Fear the government that fears your vote.”
Because if you don’t use one, you’d better be ready to use the other.