Thank you for once again summing up the situation perfectly and swiftly, I was looking for a piece like this to share and had almost interrupted what I am currently writing on to do it myself, but thank god you're faster than I am, as this is also almost certainly a better summary. Every once in a while it's really good to have these milestones and litmus tests summed up in order to pass them around - I'm over here in Europe and people still keep telling me it's half as bad.
I am not quite sure where they get their Koolaid supply but there must be enormous strategic reserves.
You are absolutely right about doing everything possible to safeguard the elections. Today's article by Heather Cox Richardson compared the country in 1890 to now. The McKinley Tariff was rushed through to the delight of the elites, who reveled in their wealth and power. The people knew ("the McKinley Tariff hammered home to ordinary Americans that the system was rigged against them") and the rhetoric then perfectly describes now: "The famous farmers’ orator Mary Elizabeth Lease told audiences that 'Wall Street owns the country…. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.' She told farmers to 'raise less corn and more hell.'" They did, and in the next election the opposition party swept into power and ushered in an era of reform. So, "join an organization that is in the fight, and fight."
You have described the present state of affairs perfectly. The true fascist aim of the Big Beautiful Bill is literally to kill Americans. As to the Supreme Court, you are also spot on. I believe we can also predict how the Court will decide future cases that curtail or restrict Constitutional rights of Americans by looking at the Free Speech Coalition v Paxton case that the Court decided on Friday. I wrote about that if you’re interested.
And if you gave any kind of answer about what's happening with the system now you'd probably be liable to be fired or something if conservative parents heard about it
I have no confidence in the Electoral process. The Democrats have proven that even if they were to sweep both Houses of Congress they will stand on their record and do nothing. The dweebs already in Congress do little to nothing and wouldn't even know how to climb up on a soapbox, much less stand a speak out. The only choice we have is between Nazis and enablers. Electoral politics in this country are done
The coup has already happened. The country has fallen. Every brutal ICE round-up proves the point. Every person deported to a concentration camp or third country seals the deal.
The surveillance state is an active and growing threat to resistance. People need to study up on the resistance movements before our high-tech dystopia and learn how to organize and act off their phones.
Check out and purchase or download and PRINT out Gene Sharp's guide to defeating despots, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation".
Resistance needs to be installed into daily life, from mass marches to small individual acts to gum up the system. Activist musician Pete Seeger got it right:
“When you’re facing an opponent over a broad front, you don’t aim for the opponent’s strong points, important though they may be. Pick a little outpost that you can capture and win. And then you find another place that you can capture and win it, and then you move slowly toward the big places.”
An excellent article, though depressing, especially if one thinks that there will be no elections in the future. If so, there is only one way through this, and it will be a civil war.
"“Laws are written by capital, the courts are bought by the right wing, it’s all a foregone conclusion.” Which is not true!" Why? You explained your objection to the other "extreme", as you put it, but not this one.
If I remember correctly the Revolution in France really got going after the people understood that the Lawyers and Courts could do nothing + they were overwhelmed.
Living rent free in my head: the discovery -by friend of mine researching a book about her grandmother who was a leader in the French Resistance- that the origins of every Western anti-fascist in the twentieth century was Communist. And that this FACT has been completely written out of western history following the twin tragedies of Stalinism 1, and McCarthyism 2. The only place for unregulated capitalism to go is fascism and communist power is very much needed to keep the greedy capitalists in check.
I’ve been saying since almost the first lower court decision that the courts would be of limited benefit because the highest court in the land was only secondarily a court. It was primarily an instrument to lawlessly impose party goals. And that’s how the Roberts court has operated since Day 1. My favorite example of the party first lawlessness is Shelby County which long preceded Trump.
And now this.
Guys, it’s time (probably past time) for eyes to open.
The only issue here is the trope of “future historians.” If we don’t overthrow this regime, there will be neither actual history nor a future for them to write in. Carbon, carbon, carbon.
The courts have always been a shitty place to look for salvation and we need electoral victories resulting from unity among all segments of the political left in order to save ourselves. Might not work, but let's get on with it.
Full Rant:
Listening to anyone on the broadly defined left whining about the failure of the courts to save us is a bit rich. It's not like the Dems haven't loudly and repeatedly been pointing out the Supreme Court matters in every election post-Reagan only to be rejected several times as alarmists or appeasers by Nader voters or Sanders voters or the like. And of course this happened while those same "appeasers" -- the new Dems of the college-educated management class -- ignored or talked down to the working class Reagan Democrats hovering to their right, which turned out to be an even more consequential sin. The tent on the left got smaller and the Dems managed to elect two Ivy League lawyers and Senator (and lawyer!) from the State of MBNA and hold the Presidency for about 20 of the past 40 years. But we did worse downballot and in the states. We failed to win many many winnable elections and there is plenty of blame to go around.
Sure, without the circular firing squads, maybe we win a few more elections in the past 50 years -- both national and local. Nationally, no Bush I victory over Dukakis means no Clarence Thomas. No Bush II victory over Gore means no Roberts or Alito. No Trump victory over Clinton means no Gorsuch, Kavanaugh or Barrett. And there's your current solid majority of Trump enablers with the possibility of Trump replacing one or more justices in the next 3.5 years. The left writ large (and women and immigrants and LGBTQ folks) sure would have been helped with a less conservative court, but even that would not have been enough. Because at bottom, going to court is never your best option . . . ever!
The worst part of all that infighting among the left-leaners in this country is that from more or less the election of Reagan until now, we could not do much better than make courts the repository of all lefty hopes and dreams. Courts are the venue of choice when you lack actual political power. The failure of the working class and union Dems, Clintonian triangulators,and the socialists and communists a bit further left all to work together had enormous consequents. The failure on our team to create popular support and legislative victories and popular/populist programs in this country to help lock in the advantages/rights/legal precedents gifted them by the Warren Court (and even for a few years after in Burger Court -- e.g, Roe v Wade/Buckley v Valeo) remains the signal political failure of the Boomer Generation. This failure was abetted by my GenXers in more recent years, particularly during the excruciating Obamacare fights -- which ended up in court so the justices could argue about whether it was a constitutional tax or an unconstitutional mandate. If we had political power, it would have just been a tax like Medicare in the first place avoiding the years of court fights. By the time Roberts waffled and called it a tax to save it, the delays and lack of benefits meant limited political upside. We truly managed to snatch a good bit of defeat from the jaws of victory there. Sigh.
And worse, the right recognized the left's knack for losing elections and so kept some of their powder dry to take aim at the one place the libs and lefties still held some limited sway -- the judiciary. So even before Reagan ascended, the right targeted the courts. They blamed those liberal legal decisions as illegitimate ("judges making law") or dangerous ("liberal crime loving judges") via well funded, concerted efforts by the Federalist Society and its fellow travelers (ol' Mitch McConnell held up liberal appointments quite effectively). This effort got bunch of dinosaurs on the federal courts (which Trump is now replacing with full fledged hacks).
And we have just watched as it happened and then still looked to the Supreme Court to save us from the worst of it. Aaaargh!! We are apparently prepared to let electoral losses continue rather than stand together, but electoral politics is the only path to power. The Occupy Wall Street protests did not blunt the impact of the Tea Party because the latter got folks elected and the former did not. The BLM related protests after George Floyd was murdered maybe got a couple of fading center-right Dems ousted, but the pushback from "aggrieved" whites turned what should have been a Biden blowout into a source of zornot much more. The No Kings protests were a great moment, but unless the ballot box victories start coming . . . we're gonna get a King Donald the Orange who makes George III look like a better option.
Just as the now-aging Boomers foolishly left their fate in the hands of the judges, the current generation seems prepared to put their faith in the only thing less dangerous than the federal judiciary -- the keyboard warriors of Twitter or Bluesky or even Substack (or still worse, the selfie warriors of TikTok, I mean c'mon). And yes, I recognize the low-level irony is that I am currently using my keyboard and not my money or my organizing skills or my protesting boots to fight. I plead guilty to misdemeanor hypocrisy. But I want to know who is organizing all parts the left-leaning citizenry to vote the actual felons out. Who can I support here? I agree with Hamilton that we need unions to come back, but can we at least pick up a few state legislators (or better yet, legislatures!) in the interim to help things along? Can we at least deliver the House to the Dems in the midterms to blunt some of the idiocy? NYC primary voters may have started us on the right track -- let's try hard to get Mamdani in office and then a few hundred more like him and hope like hell they do a good job.
Thank you for once again summing up the situation perfectly and swiftly, I was looking for a piece like this to share and had almost interrupted what I am currently writing on to do it myself, but thank god you're faster than I am, as this is also almost certainly a better summary. Every once in a while it's really good to have these milestones and litmus tests summed up in order to pass them around - I'm over here in Europe and people still keep telling me it's half as bad.
I am not quite sure where they get their Koolaid supply but there must be enormous strategic reserves.
The US has been tapping huge underground reserves for decades.
You are absolutely right about doing everything possible to safeguard the elections. Today's article by Heather Cox Richardson compared the country in 1890 to now. The McKinley Tariff was rushed through to the delight of the elites, who reveled in their wealth and power. The people knew ("the McKinley Tariff hammered home to ordinary Americans that the system was rigged against them") and the rhetoric then perfectly describes now: "The famous farmers’ orator Mary Elizabeth Lease told audiences that 'Wall Street owns the country…. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.' She told farmers to 'raise less corn and more hell.'" They did, and in the next election the opposition party swept into power and ushered in an era of reform. So, "join an organization that is in the fight, and fight."
You have described the present state of affairs perfectly. The true fascist aim of the Big Beautiful Bill is literally to kill Americans. As to the Supreme Court, you are also spot on. I believe we can also predict how the Court will decide future cases that curtail or restrict Constitutional rights of Americans by looking at the Free Speech Coalition v Paxton case that the Court decided on Friday. I wrote about that if you’re interested.
https://brentabrahamson1.substack.com/p/free-speech-coalition-v-paxton?r=3tcdr4
Liberals thinking the courts will save us, from abortion to corporate excess, has been one of the most stupid fantasy trips of my lifetime.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/28/blind-justice/
Can you imagine being a high school government teacher this fall and having to tell kids about our “robust” system of checks and balances…
And if you gave any kind of answer about what's happening with the system now you'd probably be liable to be fired or something if conservative parents heard about it
I have no confidence in the Electoral process. The Democrats have proven that even if they were to sweep both Houses of Congress they will stand on their record and do nothing. The dweebs already in Congress do little to nothing and wouldn't even know how to climb up on a soapbox, much less stand a speak out. The only choice we have is between Nazis and enablers. Electoral politics in this country are done
The coup has already happened. The country has fallen. Every brutal ICE round-up proves the point. Every person deported to a concentration camp or third country seals the deal.
The surveillance state is an active and growing threat to resistance. People need to study up on the resistance movements before our high-tech dystopia and learn how to organize and act off their phones.
Check out and purchase or download and PRINT out Gene Sharp's guide to defeating despots, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation".
You can learn more here: "HANDBOOK: How To Resist Musk/trump Fascism? Become Ungovernable" ... https://mark192.substack.com/p/handbook-how-to-resist-musktrump
Resistance needs to be installed into daily life, from mass marches to small individual acts to gum up the system. Activist musician Pete Seeger got it right:
“When you’re facing an opponent over a broad front, you don’t aim for the opponent’s strong points, important though they may be. Pick a little outpost that you can capture and win. And then you find another place that you can capture and win it, and then you move slowly toward the big places.”
Resist
Persist
Don't be complicit
An excellent article, though depressing, especially if one thinks that there will be no elections in the future. If so, there is only one way through this, and it will be a civil war.
It is up to US.
Brilliant piece. It deserves a Pulitzer.
"“Laws are written by capital, the courts are bought by the right wing, it’s all a foregone conclusion.” Which is not true!" Why? You explained your objection to the other "extreme", as you put it, but not this one.
If I remember correctly the Revolution in France really got going after the people understood that the Lawyers and Courts could do nothing + they were overwhelmed.
Living rent free in my head: the discovery -by friend of mine researching a book about her grandmother who was a leader in the French Resistance- that the origins of every Western anti-fascist in the twentieth century was Communist. And that this FACT has been completely written out of western history following the twin tragedies of Stalinism 1, and McCarthyism 2. The only place for unregulated capitalism to go is fascism and communist power is very much needed to keep the greedy capitalists in check.
<patting myself on the back>
I’ve been saying since almost the first lower court decision that the courts would be of limited benefit because the highest court in the land was only secondarily a court. It was primarily an instrument to lawlessly impose party goals. And that’s how the Roberts court has operated since Day 1. My favorite example of the party first lawlessness is Shelby County which long preceded Trump.
And now this.
Guys, it’s time (probably past time) for eyes to open.
Kick the hopium addiction.
Learn who your allies really are.
The only issue here is the trope of “future historians.” If we don’t overthrow this regime, there will be neither actual history nor a future for them to write in. Carbon, carbon, carbon.
100% accurate. And I am very fearful about what they’re going to pull in the 2026 elections.
TL;DR Version.
The courts have always been a shitty place to look for salvation and we need electoral victories resulting from unity among all segments of the political left in order to save ourselves. Might not work, but let's get on with it.
Full Rant:
Listening to anyone on the broadly defined left whining about the failure of the courts to save us is a bit rich. It's not like the Dems haven't loudly and repeatedly been pointing out the Supreme Court matters in every election post-Reagan only to be rejected several times as alarmists or appeasers by Nader voters or Sanders voters or the like. And of course this happened while those same "appeasers" -- the new Dems of the college-educated management class -- ignored or talked down to the working class Reagan Democrats hovering to their right, which turned out to be an even more consequential sin. The tent on the left got smaller and the Dems managed to elect two Ivy League lawyers and Senator (and lawyer!) from the State of MBNA and hold the Presidency for about 20 of the past 40 years. But we did worse downballot and in the states. We failed to win many many winnable elections and there is plenty of blame to go around.
Sure, without the circular firing squads, maybe we win a few more elections in the past 50 years -- both national and local. Nationally, no Bush I victory over Dukakis means no Clarence Thomas. No Bush II victory over Gore means no Roberts or Alito. No Trump victory over Clinton means no Gorsuch, Kavanaugh or Barrett. And there's your current solid majority of Trump enablers with the possibility of Trump replacing one or more justices in the next 3.5 years. The left writ large (and women and immigrants and LGBTQ folks) sure would have been helped with a less conservative court, but even that would not have been enough. Because at bottom, going to court is never your best option . . . ever!
The worst part of all that infighting among the left-leaners in this country is that from more or less the election of Reagan until now, we could not do much better than make courts the repository of all lefty hopes and dreams. Courts are the venue of choice when you lack actual political power. The failure of the working class and union Dems, Clintonian triangulators,and the socialists and communists a bit further left all to work together had enormous consequents. The failure on our team to create popular support and legislative victories and popular/populist programs in this country to help lock in the advantages/rights/legal precedents gifted them by the Warren Court (and even for a few years after in Burger Court -- e.g, Roe v Wade/Buckley v Valeo) remains the signal political failure of the Boomer Generation. This failure was abetted by my GenXers in more recent years, particularly during the excruciating Obamacare fights -- which ended up in court so the justices could argue about whether it was a constitutional tax or an unconstitutional mandate. If we had political power, it would have just been a tax like Medicare in the first place avoiding the years of court fights. By the time Roberts waffled and called it a tax to save it, the delays and lack of benefits meant limited political upside. We truly managed to snatch a good bit of defeat from the jaws of victory there. Sigh.
And worse, the right recognized the left's knack for losing elections and so kept some of their powder dry to take aim at the one place the libs and lefties still held some limited sway -- the judiciary. So even before Reagan ascended, the right targeted the courts. They blamed those liberal legal decisions as illegitimate ("judges making law") or dangerous ("liberal crime loving judges") via well funded, concerted efforts by the Federalist Society and its fellow travelers (ol' Mitch McConnell held up liberal appointments quite effectively). This effort got bunch of dinosaurs on the federal courts (which Trump is now replacing with full fledged hacks).
And we have just watched as it happened and then still looked to the Supreme Court to save us from the worst of it. Aaaargh!! We are apparently prepared to let electoral losses continue rather than stand together, but electoral politics is the only path to power. The Occupy Wall Street protests did not blunt the impact of the Tea Party because the latter got folks elected and the former did not. The BLM related protests after George Floyd was murdered maybe got a couple of fading center-right Dems ousted, but the pushback from "aggrieved" whites turned what should have been a Biden blowout into a source of zornot much more. The No Kings protests were a great moment, but unless the ballot box victories start coming . . . we're gonna get a King Donald the Orange who makes George III look like a better option.
Just as the now-aging Boomers foolishly left their fate in the hands of the judges, the current generation seems prepared to put their faith in the only thing less dangerous than the federal judiciary -- the keyboard warriors of Twitter or Bluesky or even Substack (or still worse, the selfie warriors of TikTok, I mean c'mon). And yes, I recognize the low-level irony is that I am currently using my keyboard and not my money or my organizing skills or my protesting boots to fight. I plead guilty to misdemeanor hypocrisy. But I want to know who is organizing all parts the left-leaning citizenry to vote the actual felons out. Who can I support here? I agree with Hamilton that we need unions to come back, but can we at least pick up a few state legislators (or better yet, legislatures!) in the interim to help things along? Can we at least deliver the House to the Dems in the midterms to blunt some of the idiocy? NYC primary voters may have started us on the right track -- let's try hard to get Mamdani in office and then a few hundred more like him and hope like hell they do a good job.