Anti-Democratic Developments – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

National Combustion, Part 2: Artificial Intelligence and the Collapse of the State

The fundamental equation:
Political instability + Artificial Intelligence
-> Collapse of the State

Forces of history, combined with the ways artificial intelligence multiplies the forces of technology, are already acting to undermine the polity of the United States. The recent Republican meltdown in the U.S. House of Representatives is a foreshadowing of what is likely to come.

National Combustion, Part 1 (link in next paragraph), drew on social scientist Peter Turchin’s historical framework to make sense of how we came to this fraught moment, when it seems quite possible the United States might slide into civil war. Yes, many of the January 6 insurrectionists are in jail and Donald Trump’s national con-job is fraying. Yet the factors going into Turchin’s model of “political disintegration,” with abundant historical antecedents, remain the same today as on January 6th, 2021. It’s no great mystery that we are in a highly unstable political situation; it matches a pattern that has been repeated time and time again in human history. So much for American exceptionalism.

U.S. society is already crossed by multiple fault lines besides that of the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election. On guns, voting rights, reproductive rights, minority rights, workers’ rights, the distribution of wealth, public health, immigration, affirmative action, educational freedoms, content of school and library books, historical analysis challenging the status quo, white nationalism—these fault lines, already under tremendous stress, could split open as a result of a precipitating event, sudden or prolonged. Another disputed national election; a political assassination; a nationwide or even international cyberattack; a Waco-like siege of an anti-government enclave; a takedown of the grid by actors unknown; a spate of terrorist attacks; a pandemic; a depression—any of them could unleash the partisans itching to fight a civil war against the federal government.

Continue reading “National Combustion, Part 2: Artificial Intelligence and the Collapse of the State”

National Combustion, Part 1: Political Disintegration and the Potential for Civil War

Foretastes of a new American civil war

If a new civil war comes to the United States of America, it will not come in the form it did in the 19th Century, with two large intact geographic blocks—the Confederacy and the Union–each with their own military locked continuously in armed conflict. It’s likely to take one of two tracks: (1) a coup attempt, like the January 6 insurrection; or (2) it will look more like the late 20th Century convulsions in Northern Ireland, known as “The Troubles,” marked by scattered and sporadic acts of violence inflicted by loosely networked paramilitary groups. In Northern Ireland, more than half the 3,500 people killed were civilians, in a conflict that spanned about 30 years from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

We are getting foretastes of something similar, now largely committed piecemeal by individual right wing “lone wolves” terrorizing racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, LGBTQ communities, and increasingly school board members, electoral officials, businesses that openly support progressive causes, law enforcement, and members of the judiciary.

The overall effect is to sow fear and mistrust broadly among citizens, citizen groups, and institutions. The intent of each violent individual is narrow, but the cumulative impact is wide, and deep. If paramilitary groups like those in Northern Ireland grow in strength in the U.S., the cumulative impact will be all the greater. What’s more, horrifically lethal weapons and ammunition now widely available in the U.S. and being stockpiled by extremists make individuals and groups far more powerful than those in Northern Ireland of the 1990s. The death toll from a low-level but widespread civil war in the U.S. would dwarf the numbers in ‘The Troubles’ of Northern Ireland.

Partisan divisions and proliferation of weaponry make for a combustible mix that threatens a breakdown in the institutions that so far have kept America relatively stable.

The attempted coup on January 6, 2021, the attempt by a militia to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan in 2020, and many individual hate crimes—mostly associated with white supremacy—are symptoms of what social scientist and historian Peter Turchin calls “political disintegration.” The conditions and causes for disintegration follow a pattern seen many times before in history among various states, and more often than not the outcome is bad for democracy.

One of the more common outcomes is civil war. The objective of the Michigan militia was expressly to start a civil war. Likewise, that was the express hope of Dylan Roof, who shot nine Black parishioners in a church in 2015. These are just two of the highest profile evildoers among many extremists who have sought, or advocated for, a civil war.

In his recent book End Times, Turchin illuminates the patterns of social and political disintegration from the past that closely resemble what is happening around us today. Continue reading “National Combustion, Part 1: Political Disintegration and the Potential for Civil War”

Another Weapon in the Radicals’ Arsenal: Deepfakes

Deepfakes: when you can’t believe your eyes, what can you believe?

Recently I sent out a link to an article on deepfakes that appeared in Reuters (not paywalled): https://www.reuters.com/world/us/deepfaking-it-americas-2024-election-collides-with-ai-boom-2023-05-30/.

Here’s another perspective from Jim Puzzanghera published in the paywalled Boston Globe where the content is nearly identical but adds a couple of political points. From the Globe:

There are very few rules right now and few, if any, are likely coming. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation mandating the disclosure of AI in political ads, but no Republicans have signed on.

and . . .

On June 22, the Federal Election Commission deadlocked along party lines on a petition by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen to consider rules banning AI deepfake campaign ads. All three Republicans opposed the move, with GOP commissioner Allen Dickerson saying the agency lacked the authority.

and . . . from Republican strategist Eric Wilson (not to be confused with the true conservative and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project Rick Wilson) who maintains that regulation isn’t needed right now:

I want to tamp down the moral panic because this is something that happens with any new technology. You go back to TV debates and people were worried about what that would do for voters,” he said. “We’re having conversations about it, but no one’s sitting around and having struggle sessions around artificial intelligence on our side. . . .

We are unlikely to see professional campaigns use generative AI for disinformation purposes. That’s not to say that malign actors like nation states aren’t going to try it.

Yeah. What malign nation states could Wilson possibly be referring to? Maybe states like Russian and China that are already hard at work confusing the American public with fake news and outright untruths? Who are already busy trying to undermine trust in our institutions, particularly the federal government? Who are hoping for an America increasingly fragmented into warring tribes? Whose activities support the agenda of the Radical Right? Those nation states?

Continue reading “Another Weapon in the Radicals’ Arsenal: Deepfakes”

Debt Ceiling Impasse: Biden Needs to Go on Offense

Delay is the enemy

Let there be no mistake: Republicans are forcing the current debt ceiling crisis for political purposes. It is not about fiscal responsibility. If it were, the Republicans would not have cavalierly raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump presidency, thereby pumping up the debt by about $7 trillion. The Republican debt ceiling hostage-taking is calculated to push the economy south sufficiently to undermine Biden’s economic policies through the 2024 election. If the result is a recession or a depression does not matter that much to them, as long as it creates economic pain and thereby gets votes in 2024. True conservatives—the Party siding with rich people and corporations—would prefer it be only a recession, but if driving the economy over a cliff is what is required to boot Democrats out of power, they’re on board The MAGA Republicans who have contrived the deficit dilemma really have no political philosophy apart from fear and detestation of the federal government, and a concept of individualism bordering on anarchy. So they don’t care either way. These are bad people who cannot be counted on to act in good faith.

These bad people—either by extreme action or through the tacit threat of extreme action to include physical violence—are the ones driving the debt ceiling crisis. Their main strategy is intimidation. This strategy of intimidation is what stayed Merrick Garland’s hand in pursuing Trump and Trump henchman over the stolen documents case back in 2021 and continuing into 2022. It is also delaying President Biden’s hand in his fight with House Republicans over the debt ceiling.

Let there also be no mistake regarding House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s shows of negotiating with the White House: the MAGA Republicans are capable of, and willing to, sabotage any compromise between McCarthy and the President at the last minute.

Continue reading “Debt Ceiling Impasse: Biden Needs to Go on Offense”

Tribal Dynamics 2: Subversion and the Price of the Southern Strategy

Preface: a reader characterized one of my recent posts as “philosophical musings.” I get that, just as I get the frequent dismissal of philosophy as largely useless in solving real-life problems. But some philosophical musings are more relevant to real life than others. The discussion of “moral foundations” in Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is an insightful, clarifying guide to the most divisive political dynamics today. It matters to understand the values and motivations of political and cultural adversaries while withholding reflexive judgements. The “Authority/Subversion” foundation—a foundation key in greater or lesser degree to maintaining a stable society—sheds light in particular on the divisions within the Republican Party today.

In an earlier post “Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty” I drew upon Jonathan Haight’s hypothesis of Left/Right tribal divisions being rooted in different degrees of adherence to five “moral foundations.” (See bottom of this post for a list of the five foundations as described in Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and another [if you missed it before] link to a video discussion.) For example, the stronger adherence to loyalty among conservatives (loyalty/betrayal being one of the moral foundations) explains Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who privately knows better—spewing wild partisan accusations against Biden and the Democrats in responding to Biden’s State of the Union speech. Sanders dug deep into the Right Wing pit of grievances to demonstrate her loyalty.

The country is now witness to the roiling of divisions within the Republican Party—of which the widest is between the MAGA mob and true conservatives like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney who have been branded traitors by the MAGA mob.

The distance the current Republican Party has diverged from traditional conservatism illustrates its unmooring from the positive anchor of the “moral foundation” which Jonathan Haight identifies as the “Authority/Subversion” foundation.

In Haidt’s framing, conservatives lean heavily toward respect for, and honoring of, authority. Conservatives are, for example, much more comfortable with an institution such as the military, where lines of authority are clearly defined by rank. (Note that Haidt’s framing does not equate conservatism with the policies of the U.S. Republican party, and certainly not the Trump wing. He is talking about a conservative construct that people are not inherently good, and therefore “need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external restraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions.” He cites especially Edmund Burke as a source of this construct.)

Continue reading “Tribal Dynamics 2: Subversion and the Price of the Southern Strategy”

Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty

Sarah Huckabee Sanders aces the loyalty test

“I’m amazed she would make a speech like that! I know her! She’s a nice person! She has a sense of humor. . . .” That was the immediate reaction of Van Jones following Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech on February 7. Jones was participating in a CNN panel performing a postmortem on Biden’s speech and the morose rejoinder by Sanders. The rhetoric of Sanders, the newly elected governor of Arkansas, bore the imprint of Trump’s inaugural “American carnage” address seven years earlier.

The opening mood on the CNN panel was one of shock and head-shaking perplexity at the bizarre content and bellicose tone of Sanders’s speech, made especially dark by contrast with the upbeat tone of the address by Biden that preceded it. Sanders ran through the litany of right-wing victimology from the tyranny of a bloated federal government, to hordes of illegal immigrants swarming across the Mexican border, to defunding the police, to transgender turpitude, to disregard for the patriotic white working class, to the critique of institutional racism embodied in Critical Race Theory, and other “woke fantasies.” On behalf of victims of imagined religious oppression, she protested being told “every day” that “we must . . . partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship false idols.” Especially shocking was her disrespect toward President Biden, whom she called “the first man to surrender his Presidency to a woke mob who can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

Continue reading “Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty”

Democracy Is Not to Blame

Democracy’s strife on an unlevel playing field

Democracy’s greatest weakness: itself?

There’s an idea circulating among the intelligentsia that democracy carries the seeds of its own destruction. This is more or less the thesis of a book entitled The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion, by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing. These are brilliant, learned gentlemen, and while I haven’t read their book I recommend it based on this in the New York Times which you may have access to, and a three-cornered podcast which you probably do have access to and sheds light on what appears to be the essentials of their thinking about democracy. One of the corollaries of their argument is that democracy can easily slip into autocracy, and this is not a bug but a feature—that is, autocracy itself is not a feature but the potential for slipping into autocracy is. The podcast differentiates between just plain democracy—where you can have a tyranny of the majority—and liberal democracy, where you have minority protections. It’s more complex than that—they say we might see the end of liberal democracy but keep some more generic kind of democracy—but I’ll drop it because I’m more concerned about what’s missing in the discussion.

What’s missing is that when we’re talking about democracy in the United States, we don’t even have a democracy, much less a liberal democracy, to talk about. Don’t have, never did, and by the look of things probably never will, unless . . . (see last section, Voices of Hope below).

The very wise Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, two of the most influential framers of the Constitution, called the American experiment a republic. To resolve the semantics, I like this source, which lands on the side of calling what the U.S. system is, purportedly, a “hybrid democratic republic.” This is the entity that Gershberg and Illing are calling a “liberal democracy.”

But . . .

Any suggestion we did have a liberal democracy (hybrid or not) up to about 2005—before social media began to make a hash out of our political discourse and undermine even our pseudo-democracy —is misleading.

Continue reading “Democracy Is Not to Blame”

Trump Stolen Document Drama: Even Split on Responsibility

An inexplicable delay: what really happened here?

Who’s to blame for Donald Trump having a horde of classified documents including Top Secret and Top Secret compartmentalized (a narrower category than mere Top Secret) at Mar-a-Lago for 18 months?

Well Donald Trump obviously. But he had plenty of help, starting with the people who elected him President in the first place, and even more the large segment of them who took to worshiping him to the degree that he really began to believe in his own godlike status–not bound by the rules and laws by which all American citizens, including the top office-holder, are bound in principle. Next layer above voters consists of Republican politicians, primarily hypocrites who felt it was necessary to support Trump publicly for the sake of their political skins (and given the violence of Trump’s True Believers, perhaps their literal skins) even when they were well aware of his wrongdoing. The layer closest to Trump comprised members of his administration, most notably Bill Barr as Attorney General, who sank the Mueller investigation, and even launched a counter-investigation led by John Durham—a counter-investigation which basically in three years turned up nothing corrupt about the Mueller team. Bill Barr, first fired by Trump for dismissing Trump’s fraudulent charges of election fraud that cost him the 2020 election, and now horrified by the trove of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, has withdrawn his support of Trump . . . a bit late to curtail much of the enormous damage the ex-Prez has done to the country. (Done even if he hadn’t taken all those documents.)

We could go on naming enablers and Trump cult members on the Right, lawyers with preposterous claims about the 2020 election, and other lawyers who knew the facts but nevertheless created a legal cocoon around the ex-President, but you already know most of them, if not by specific names then the groups to which they belong.

Enough rightward finger-pointing. Let’s try some
more targeted finger pointing.

At this point, it’s evident that half the blame belongs to the parties named above.

The other half belongs to the Biden administration, in particular Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Continue reading “Trump Stolen Document Drama: Even Split on Responsibility”

Gun Violence: Facts, Alternative Facts, and Frightening Facts

Polls say Americans’ overall support for gun control is tepid

Despite what you may be hearing on CNN and MSNBC or other left-leaning news organizations, recent polls indicate that Americans’ support for more gun control legislation nationally has been falling, has rarely topped 60%, and lately has dipped to 52%. I’ll list the polls at the end of this post—three by Pew Research and two by Gallup. These polls were taken before the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX. As in the past there will now surely be a surge in support for more and more effective gun controls—but if the past is any guide, the surge will subside and in a few months support for gun controls will flatten out again. Although a slight gain in support for more gun restrictions might occur, it can hardly be decisive legally due to our political paralysis.

What’s missing in most of these polls is a comparative breakdown by state and region. Does high public support for stricter gun laws correlate with lower rates of shooting deaths? Hard to tell. There’s a lot of data on gun deaths and shootings by state and region, but when it comes to public support for stricter gun laws the data are either missing or confusing. One obstacle to doing so is that there is no one single metric by which to rank “support” because what gun control means in one location is different from what it means in another location: background checks, age requirements, license requirements, training requirements, red flag laws (and their level of enforcement), properties of the firearms themselves (e.g. semiautomatic vs fully automatic, rate of fire, accuracy, ammunition, size of magazines, etc.), can all be mixed in proportions that are not standardized.

Nevertheless, an attempt was made by “World Population Review” in which there is a table (scroll down to “Strictest Gun Laws by State”) comparing “Strictness Grade” and gun death rates, and using a single number to represent a group of measures that vary from state to state. In general, the states with the strictest gun laws have the lowest gun death rates. Sure, say the liberals, duh. But that’s not the point, say Second Amendment zealots. The pro-gun counterargument is, that states with the strictest gun laws are the least “free.” Murders and suicides by guns are as Bill O’Reilly once said, “the cost of freedom.”

Continue reading “Gun Violence: Facts, Alternative Facts, and Frightening Facts”

Joe Biden’s Perfect Storm

A storm of woes haunts the Biden presidency

*COVID-19 Original
*COVID-19 Delta
*Fox News
*Divisive social media
*Donald Trump
*Russia
*Countless claims that Biden lost the 2020 election, believed by 78%
of Republicans
*Trump toadies Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, et al
*Trump thugs Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, et al
*Senate obstructionist Republican team, head thug Mitch McConnell
*Senate obstructionist pseudo-Democratic tag team Manchin-Sinema
*Militant House progressives
*Pigheaded House moderates
*Anti-Mask rebellions
*Anti-Vaccine rebellions
*Republican governors taking every opportunity to undermine his authority
*Anti-democratic Republican state legislatures
*Sinister conspiracy theories
*Bloodthirsty crazed dupes of conspiracy theories
*Threats against his life rising along with deadly threats against all office-holding Democrats (and some non-Democrats who refuse to be intimidated by the thugs)
*Emboldened white supremacists
*Irresolute Attorney General
*Bungled Afghanistan pullout
*Chinese saber-rattling
*A tsunami of pandemic-rebound shopping
*Oil price shocks
*Clogged supply chains

and now . . .

The headline in the November 10, 6:24 pm story in The Hill was: “Biden Gets Inflation Gut Punch.” Sure enough, just when it looked like a coalition of moderates and progressive Democrats was going to stitch together enough of the remains of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation to have all House Democrats call it a win, along comes inflation to poison the deal.

The result of too many dollars chasing too little capacity as the economy ramps up boosts inflation, and makes big government spending—of the magnitude that would benefit Americans up and down the economic ladder—enough of an inflation risk to stall or starve Biden’s Build Back Better legislative agenda.

Continue reading “Joe Biden’s Perfect Storm”

The fundamental equation: Political instability + Artificial Intelligence -> Collapse of the State