the end of democracy

or, the day after the end

If you could go back in time, what would you do?

Go see the Roman Empire!

You wouldn’t go kill Hitler as a child so he never caused the Holocaust?

Oh, yeah, I mean that. Totally. First thing I’d do.

After Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon, he sent a letter to Yoko Onno asking for permission to write a book about the story of how he murdered her husband. Later in life, he also listed his various potential targets, landing on Lennon purely out of convenience. Ronald Reagan, then newly elected but not yet serving president, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, wife of the assassinated JFK, were also on his list. One may assume that, then, his motives may have been political in nature. After all, Lennon, post-Beatles, had drawn quite a lot of attention as a bit of a peace activist.

But Chapman said his only criteria was that the target be famous.

Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK but only after attempting to assassinate Edwin Walker. Edwin Walker was a Major General who Oswald described as a leader of a fascist organization. He was, after all, anti-communist, segregationist, and member of the John Birch Society.

So why did he go from shooting at a would-be fascist to shooting the president, whose politics at least were more aligned with his own?

Well, he did describe himself as a Marxist and JFK famously had a bit of a shake up with communists in Cuba.

Back then it was a lot easier to shoot politicians, though. Also a lot easier to shoot celebrities.

Now people who want to go murder a someone or a bunch of someone’s usually find an elementary school.

But I think the desire to be known, to be famous, even infamous, is a driving factor here. Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark David Chapman were not thriving members of their communities.

They had no manifestos to release to the public or even grand political statement.

But they turned that boring state of being a perpetual loser and failure into international recognition through one shining act of violence.

Now, our shooters often have some such tome of thoughts and diatribes to release when they go and kill a bunch of children.

But not Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot at the former president.

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After any number of acts of terror by the extreme right, blame gets hurled upon various pundits and politicians. Many have been blamed on Trump or Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro or Alex Jones and on and on. January 6th was, of course, blamed on Trump and the usual cadre of right wing American voices who make a living selling ideology.

The idea being that their rhetoric and ideological sputterings led directly to someone taking them seriously, picking up a gun, and rampaging.

For nearly a decade, various pundits have been calling Trump a fascist, directly comparing him to Hitler. For the last year, various pundits have said that if Trump wins this election, it will be the last one in US history.

Back in April 2021, I wrote about political violence, though I didn’t publish it until 2022.

My question, in essence, was that if you believe that climate change is real and happening and going to destroy the future for your children and grandchildren, where is the morality in not blowing up a pipeline or extractive infrastructure?

And so if you honestly believe that Donald Trump is the end of American democracy, that he’ll round up gay and trans people into concentration camps, that he’s going to murder immigrants by the boatload or send militias into the streets to disappear anyone who stood against him, doesn’t it make more sense to just kill him?

Aren’t you morally obligated to rise against a tyrant who threatens everything you hold dear?

Is that not the explicit purpose of the Second Amendment?

We need to bear arms to keep the government in check, to ensure that those elected to govern understand where the real power and authority is, that if they overstep, we will rise violently against them.

Et tu, Brutus?

Hell yes, me too.

That was Brutus’ internal monologue, I imagine. He was ending tyranny, or so he believed. Saving the Republic. Preserving Rome and what it meant to be Roman.

I find the above tweets literally incoherent.

If elections are so fragile that this one may lead to the end of elections, maybe we should seek another solution to this dire predicament.

If you think that this may be the last election in the US, why wouldn’t you ensure that democracy continues by assassinating the would-be tyrant threatening it?

Especially when you look at who he’s running against.

You think Joe Biden is going to save democracy?

Really?

Joe Biden?

No offence to Joe, but his debate performance didn’t exactly inspire confidence in his ability to even survive until November. I wouldn’t trust him to walk up stairs unassisted.

So if you were the sort of person who believed that Trump was the end of democracy and Biden was our only hope, you may buy a gun, go to a rally, and take your shot.

You might save democracy.

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We live in extraordinarily stupid times and so it seems fitting that the stupidest assassination attempt should occur. And that is saying quite a lot, considering the assassination that began World War I. If you don’t know what this means, go pick up a book or something. Knowledge won’t save you but there is some real comedy in history, though that comedy often leads directly to mass tragedy.

We have the two oldest men in the world fighting for presidency. One can barely speak above a whisper and the other seems a decade younger though he’s also older than any other presidential candidate outside of the current president.

The debate seemed like an emperor has no clothes moment, only for Bernie Sanders and other prominent leftish politicians coming out to stand behind Biden as the nominee, while the centrist and conservative Democrats floundered, desperate to meet reality and find a solution to this disaster they thrust upon us. Which is quite something when you have someone like AOC saying that Biden is the author of a genocide in Palestine earlier this summer to standing behind him as the best candidate to stand against Trump.

But political incoherence is the fashion and it suits any occasion.

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Thomas Matthew Crooks’ politics seem to lead us to believe he was a Republican or at least a conservative. But he has very little digital footprint—perhaps the most baffling and peculiar thing about a 20 year old in 2024—and has left no statement as to why he took aim at the former president and probable next president.

But I think trying to find a political motive here is missing the point. Or, not missing the point, but it would allow for a narrative that you can grapple with. It would make the world make sense.

As if it ever did. As if it ever will.

Donald Trump, best known for firing people on TV, was president, after all.

It would be nice if Crooks left a digital paper trail so we could group him with some ideology or party, but he seems to have been, like many before him, kind of a loser.

Likely, his politics are riddled with the same kind of brainworms as everyone else’s.

When the empire gasps its rattling last breaths, we begin measuring the stars, the phases of the moon, and consulting birthcharts to predict our future. We consult the oracles and study the bones we threw and pray to the golden ram’s severed head for a reprieve.

Was he a CIA operative trying to assassinate Trump? I mean, I know incompetence is also on the rise, but I guess I have a bit more confidence in spooks than I do in the random weirdos who go on to become cops and secret service bodyguards.

I mean, I at least expect them to make a shot from 100 yards.

I bet I could’ve hit Trump’s big head and I’ve only held a gun once in my life.

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The 2008 financial collapse was the end of American Dream and Covid was when we lowered that Dream down six feet.

The middle class is gone. Just obliterated like it was never there. Not even a whiff of it left. Everything costs too much. Everyone makes too little. You can’t afford a house but, sadly, your rent costs more than your potential monthly mortgage. Everyone you know has been addicted to opiates or alcohol and even those who haven’t are addicted to their phones.

Material politics have become so divorced from our lives that most people don’t even consider politics anything but culture war topics¹.

Can you, dear reader, even tell me what Trump’s policies are? What is his platform? Is the 2025 plan really the future of the GOP or is it just what your favorite twitter accounts are freaking out about?

What will Trump do in Israel if he gets elected?

What will he do about the antitrust cases against big tech? Will Lina Khan still be the head of the FTC next February? What does his venture capitalist ghoul of a VP believe in?

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I remember talking to

J David Osborne

as the election results of 2016 came in. Even after Trump won the south, we still knew Clinton would win. We weren’t thrilled by the idea, but there just seemed no way Trump would actually win.

That night, my wife and I were up very late wondering if the end of democracy was here, voted for.

And I spent most of that presidency reading US history, as if understanding where we were would explain why we’re here. And it did. It does. But that’s neither as comforting nor as frightening as you may imagine.

US history is a horror show of cruelty and incompetence, and it ambles along, breaking bodies beneath its massive heels.

It may be a comfort to know that every country’s history is like that.

The world is a nightmare, yet here we are living anyway.

We hardly have a choice in the matter.

The good and bad news is that the present and future often look exactly like the past.

Fortunately for all of you wondering if concentration camps are coming to your local town to round up queer and brown people, we can look at what happened during the four years Trump was president.

After all, we don’t have to wonder how he’ll govern. We saw it. Lived through it.

Most of our greatest fears didn’t materialize. Some did, like the camps at the US/Mexico border where children were ripped away from their parents and sexually abused by border agents.

But I have bad news about those camps.

Biden didn’t shut them down or reunite families. The Squad went to the border and wept for these kids in October of 2020 and then no one ever mentioned them again after February 2021. Though there is a report from the BBC from that summer. You can read for yourself how the Democratic president and Congress handled what they described as concentration camps during the Trump administration.

And I say that not as an excuse but as a bit of cold water dumped onto your head.

Will Biden save democracy from Trump?

I mean, if you consider the last four years salvation, then I guess so! If you felt that the last four years were more or less the same as the previous four years, well, then I think that’s your answer as well. If you land somewhere between those poles, which I imagine most people do, then I think that’s also an answer.

We’ve seen both of these men govern. They’ve both been president. We were all there. We’re still there, in the shadow of these ancient men who seem to struggle not to babble incoherently at every opportunity, reminding me of my father at his most stroked out.

Now, I’m not going to say that you’ll be safe, that there will be nothing to worry about, but I do think it’s very unlikely that Trump is going to start a holocaust against his political enemies or that gender re-education camps are coming or that the children of immigrants who are US citizens are going to be rounded up and shipped to some foreign country out of spite.

Will we see something like Charlottesville again?

Maybe. Even probably.

But it’s worth remembering what the actual material outcome of that was. All those prominent alt-right voices that seemed so frightening have largely been marginalized and erased from the public’s consciousness. The stochastic terrorism of disaffected men seemed to spike, but it’s not like mass shootings ever slowed down here in the good ol US of A.

Will everything change this upcoming January after Trump probably becomes president again?

I doubt it.

And if I’m wrong, I’ll happily apologize, though I imagine we’ll all have quite a lot more to worry about than my newsletter about books and movies.

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The world goes on. It does often get worse. Sometimes it gets better.

Will Trump end America?

Probably not.

Will Biden save it?

Also probably not.

We live in a decrepit golem, corroding at the joints, the colors of the flag faded to hues of grey, hobbling forward while it struggles to hold its head high. We remain the largest golem in this vast world of monumental powers and the other golems fear us, all take notice of where we go, what we say and do, but they do not feel the abscess growing larger and larger in our golem’s chest. They do not feel the rattle of its body as it lumbers along.

The unipolar world, which has more or less been the state of the world since at least the end of World War II and has maybe been the practical state of the world since the sinking of the Spanish Armada, is coming to an end. The dreams of a worldwide government have all died. Even the unification or union of nations, like the EU, seem to be an illusion splintering.

I do not know what comes next. I cannot.

Neither can you or anyone.

And so we consult our tea leaves and give into our worst fears that we broadcast over the world wide web² and we let the anxiety, or at least the performance of anxiety, become our identity as life keeps on happening.

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I do believe we live in extraordinarily stupid times. Vile, hopeless times.

But I do not believe in salvation either.

There is no one coming to deliver us from our dying golem stomping the globe into an uninhabitable desert.

And so I do not blame you or anyone for giving into despair.

But I ask you, instead, what will you do tomorrow?

Despair comes. It burrows beneath our skin and settles in our guts. A nasty, foul bezoar that may kill you from within.

But the sun will rise. Your children will need to be fed. Your neighbor will need your help. Your parents are old and sick and need you to care for them.

Will you let despair own your life or will you rise and continue on?

1. I’ve written about this several times because I never learn my lesson, but you can read them at these links:

• The Gaping Maw of the Culture War

• The Future of the Culture War

• An Example

• Where do Politics and Culture Congeal

• The Internet is a Diseased Brain

• The End of Nonviolence

• Henry Kissinger Won, Idiot

2. I have a theory about this behavior but it is, perhaps, too mean to bother putting into quotable phrases.