The behavior of the DC police at USIP should be a lesson for all of us!

[Cirsium]

26. Important point

Last edited Fri Mar 21, 2025, 07:39 PM - Edit history (1)

"I'm hoping that we can weaken the power of the autocrats without violence."

You are making an important point. The state has a monopoly on violence, and Trump has found it to be relatively easy to bend the state to his purposes.

Random acts of violence as a form of self-expression, which is what people are suggesting, is best described as vandalism The biggest problem with vandalism is that it scares off and alienates potential supporters. That is why right wing agents provocateur have infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests and started fires and broken windows. Let's not do their job for them.

A focus on tactics is not productive anyway, particularly disorganized or spontaneous tactics. There will come a time to discuss tactics. Now, the task is educate, agitate, organize. That builds a broad and solid base from which we can consider tactics and strategy.

We also should ask ourselves why it is that the state, the system, was so easily bent to Trump's purposes. There are some obvious reasons, obvious flaws and vulnerabilities in the system. The anti-democratic electoral college prevented the person who received the most votes in 2016 from taking office. The anti-democratic US Senate twice prevented the impeachment of a lawless president. 600,000 people in Wyoming had a say in that equal to 40 million people in California. There were over 2 million people who voted for Bernie Sanders in California in 2020, while the entire population of Wyoming is only a little over a half a million.

Some are hoping to return to normal, to restore the system as it was. I don't believe that is possible, but is it even desirable? We can't know now just how bad the coming battle will be, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can avoid a very serious battle. Then what?

The day will come when we rebuild from the ashes, and when that day comes let-s commit ourselves to making whatever changes are necessary to ensure that this can never happen again.