Bunker Hill

The onslaught of Chaos continues at a bewildering pace.  There's too much to absorb, too much to understand.  The news is heartbreaking on a human level, and heartbreaking for those who see the future as well as current implications and devastation.

The news media is overwhelmed, especially in this era of reduced news space and rampant trivialities on every front page of every major news outlet at least in their Internet form.  Even the courts have been slow to see the threats to what holds our society together, and once those are gone, there is only the slow or fast extinction of civilization.  The bulwarks of our society have many serious flaws but they are now facing erasure: the rule of law, equal protection, due process, regard for the environment that sustains us, institutional integrity, organized empathy, to name a few. 

But people feel it--they are feeling fear, and expressing it as anger.  They are shouting at their Republican representatives for what they are doing and endorsing being done by the Chaos administration and the Lord High Executioner Musk.  But they are also shouting at their Democratic representatives for not fighting back with more urgency and force.

For the times are urgent.  Dismantling government agencies weakens this country for the stern tests ahead as well as the very near future, when students look for college loans, or adequate schools, and middle class Americans as well as the poor look for medical care support.

Having stopped programs that sent food and medicine to deeply needy people abroad--to the extent of letting food rot on American docks--Chaos has now "suspended" federal support for food going to food banks across America in coming months, many in rural areas--which therefore get hit twice, with farmers seeing their markets disappear.  I find this a lot more disturbing and consequential that the surrender of rich but cowardly universities and a rich but cowardly law firm that are laughably making deals (i.e. paying extortion) to the Chaos administration that will never hold up its end of the bargain they think they've made. (However, the precedent of a private company--that law firm-- being forced to/ agreeing to dump its diversity programs should be highlighted.) Of course that extortion is itself immensely destructive, especially as it will be applied to institutions and people with fewer resources.

Elected Democrats are divided by what seems like only different strategies.  Some follow the advice articulated by James Carville to do nothing, let Chaos have his way (they are a minority in Congress anyway) until the administration subverts itself.  Live to fight another day.

Others want to more strongly define and confront the Chaos.  In Congress, they were willing to let the government shut down rather than submit to extortion and vote for a horrific budget. The first side--with the Senate minority leader prominent among them-- said that Chaos could have done more damage with the government shut. 

 And who knows, he might be right. But it's beyond strategies now.  It's about seeing the true proportions of what's happening, and the extent and depth of the damage, how it will ripple out, how many people it will hurt, what it will do to future emergencies, and the civic and social suffering and breakdown that might very well follow.  And how painfully difficult and expensive it will be to rebuild systems and institutions, if that's even possible.

Let me say it again: no foreign enemy, even in war or Cold War or terrorism, over any time period, has done as much lethal damage to the American government as Chaos and his minions in the past two months.

It's about standing up for what has given us some protection we depend on.  It's about standing up for who we are, or at least who we want to be.

Not so long ago--and in some ways, still ongoing--there was this argument that Democrats had to tack towards some undefined center to return to electability.  Anyone still saying that is living in the past.  It's not about anybody's preferences anymore.  It's about survival.

One of the prime areas under siege is the Social Security system.  Thousands of employees are being shed while new demands for their time and presence are being heaped on.  And all for no defensible reason.  Social Security fraud is very low and its administrative costs are even lower--probably the best of any agency that large in the world.

Seventy million of us right now depend on those checks, and millions more eventually will.  In one day, the current chief of Social Security threatened to shut the whole thing down because he couldn't interpret a court decision, and the Secretary of Commerce said that anybody who complains about not getting their check is a fraudster.

Also on Friday, Rachel Maddow interviewed Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland and under Biden the head of Social Security.  According to him, the Chaos administration has already done "90% of what's necessary" to destroy the Social Security Administration.  And then he said this: "This should be the Democrats' Bunker Hill, upon which the party is willing to die."

That is the seriousness of the moment, and that is the urgency.  The Battle of Bunker Hill was the first major engagement of the American Revolution.  On the third try, the British army took the hill from the vastly outnumbered Americans, who had run out of ammunition. But the victory was more costly to the British.

Kim Stanley Robinson describes the Revolution from the American point of view in this way: Lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win.

Caring about living to fight another day isn't going to cut it in these circumstances. More than thirty thousand people showed up in Denver to hear Bernie Sanders and AOC make the case for meeting the moment.  Probably no one knows just how to defeat Chaos, or apart from the courts how to defend against it.  But the seriousness of what they are doing demands that they be engaged. The Democrats and whatever allies they still have in the anti-Chaos Republicans that stuck their necks out for Harris, need to give it all they've got.  Now.