The Force Threshold
It's happening here. And Americans are allowing it.
“Sic semper tyrannis!”
—“Crazy” Joe Davola1
Where we are:
Until the past week or so, I was planning my fourth essay to be about something a bit more removed from our democratic emergency. In November and December it seemed as though the Trump regime’s efforts at autocratic consolidation had stalled to some extent and were being more frequently and effectively thwarted. I don’t want to overstate things: we were still very much in crisis, as the rampant corruption and profiteering out of the Oval Office persisted unabated. This was also likely the regime’s most destructive period on the international front, as the abandonment of Europe went from being a hypothetical to much more of a reality. But domestically at least, it felt like, for the first time since Trump retook office, there was a tiny bit of cause for optimism. Democrats, despite their ongoing identity crisis and unpopularity, managed to romp to decisive victory in the November elections. During oral arguments, the “conservatives” on the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of the administration’s position in the tariff case (though they still have not issued their ruling). And several of the regime’s attempts to prosecute its adversaries on phony charges got torpedoed by grand juries. During the past couple of weeks, however—with the murder of Renee Good, the ongoing lawlessness and brutality from ICE officers in Minnesota, and the revelations of the regime’s efforts to intimidate the Fed chair by initiating a bogus criminal investigation into him—I think we’ve entered a new and even more dangerous phase in our descent into despotism. I thus feel compelled to revisit some of my arguments from the first two essays in light of these recent events.
The efforts to use the DOJ to strong-arm Powell are of course horrendous on multiple levels. They provide a clear indication that with his term expiring in just a few months, the Fed’s independence—along with the solvency of the dollar and the entire U.S. economy—is likely on life support. While a handful of GOP senators have signaled their intention to push back, it’s hard to see at this point how anyone other than a lackey will even want to serve as Fed Chair going forward. The escalation and increasing brazenness of ICE, however, represents what I think is an even more serious and urgent threat.
Despite everything that’s happened and the many Rubicons that have been crossed since last January, there’s a strong case to be made that the killing of Renee Good, along with the ensuing wave of violent repression by ICE officers in Minneapolis against citizens exercising constitutionally protected rights (see clips below), constitutes the watershed moment of this second Trump administration.
Keep in mind that this is just a tiny fraction of the heinous scenes coming out of a single city in a single weekend (limited by my apparently fruitless attempt to keep this article under the email length limit). It’s also important to be clear-eyed about the fact that this is not merely a reflection of overzealous enforcement, mission creep, or poor training. This is, by design, the deployment of an extra-constitutional national police force that answers only to the President of the United States, and is empowered to selectively target citizens in parts of the country that didn’t vote for him with intimidation, assault, and now—execution. The January 6th insurrection, in other words, has now gone mobile and will soon be coming to a blue state near you.
Authoritarian Whac-A-Mole:
In my last essay Epistemic Populism, which was recently published in the Cosmopolitan Globalist, I used the term artificial stupidity to refer to the psychological phenomenon common among citizens in countries devolving into authoritarianism whereby they learn to selectively disable their critical faculties in order to place themselves in harmony with a society that’s descending into madness. While my use of the term was in reference to those who continue to support such a transition, I think it can sometimes apply to MAGA’s opponents as well.
Ever since last January, as I’ve witnessed the rapid implosion of the system of checks, balances, norms, and institutions that has long served to defend basic individual freedoms and subordinate the personal greed and avarice of our political leaders to the rule of law, I’ve at times experienced reality as an almost surreal, dreamlike haze. In this bizarre cognitive state, everything seems to flicker back and forth between tragedy and farce, real and imaginary, or transient and eternal. It’s as though it’s all just too fast, too big, too sweeping, and ultimately too devastating to absorb all at once. I sense that my subconscious is attempting to triage the task of processing the various unfolding disasters, becoming overwhelmed, and looking for an escape hatch: “This is only an isolated case,” “It’s just temporary,” “It can be fixed,” “It’s just until the next election,” “It’s just until Trump is gone”…
The tendency to try to look for psychological escape hatches, to avoid thinking about and preparing for catastrophic scenarios until they happen, to assume “Trump wouldn’t try to do X,” or that somebody will stop him if he does—while undoubtedly human—I believe is nevertheless a dangerous one. Beyond simply fostering complacency, it tends to lead to a rejection of the principle “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst” in favor of “Prepare for the best, because the worst is simply too horrible to contemplate.” And this is the mistake we’ve seen the opposition repeatedly make over the course of the past year: First when they appeared to have no political strategy or mass mobilization effort in place when Trump took office, despite having warned incessantly about Project 2025 and the threat to democracy. Then when Senate Democrats repeatedly failed to use the little leverage they have over the budget to slow the regime down. And now, as many appear ready to accept the presence of a lawless and violent militia terrorizing blue cities (while leaving the resistance to private citizens equipped with nothing other than whistles and cellphones), based on the theory that Democrats will be rewarded for it in a free and fair election in ten months’ time. The Trump regime has been blessed to face opponents who are left perpetually befuddled and two steps behind because they lack the imagination, the sense of urgency, and the courage to confront our situation for what it is. What we’re left with is a sad pantomime of resistance that never truly contests for power, takes risks, or accepts that the rules aren’t going to save us.
Use it or Lose it:
In January of 2017, I’m quite certain most Senate Republicans did not expect that they would eventually be handing all of their power over to Donald Trump. Nor that they would vote to acquit him for dispatching a mob to kill them as part of an effort to steal the 2020 election. Nor that they would be acquiescing to the destruction of NATO and the realignment of the United States with fascist Russia. Nor that they would eventually be voting almost unanimously to confirm people to top cabinet positions who at the time they rightly regarded as leftist crackpots. Nor that they would be prepared to go along with his effort to take over the Fed and destroy the currency. How did it all happen? One day at a time. One concession at a time. As he grew more brazen in his lawlessness, many likely assured themselves (and each other) that these scenarios represented red lines that they were prepared to enforce. What they failed to take into consideration (beyond their own cowardice) is how much all of the insanity that they accommodated and excused in the interim would change them. So when it came time to enforce their red lines, they confronted the prospect as diminished, defeated shells of their former selves: untethered from any past principles, having long since lost their self-respect, in addition to that of almost everybody outside the cult—thus leaving them without a world to go back to and ever more dependent on Trump’s favor. In the end there’s nothing left, and all you have is a cipher with an empty, befuddled, pathetic look on his face:
Democratic leaders, both local and national, may think they’re not in any danger of having something similar happen to them. But maybe it’s happening already. Every time I hear one of them speaking out, it feels like they’re stopping halfway through their sermon. Various iterations of clichés like “Pay attention,” “Bear witness,” “History will not be kind,” and “Stay in the fight” are spit out and recycled by officials who seem to think their only job is to document (rather than reverse) the descent into dictatorship so they’ll be regarded as the good guys when the books are written. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey instructs ICE to “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” but argues he simply doesn’t have a large enough number of police to enforce his orders or protect his citizens. Meanwhile, lame-duck governor Tim Walz condemns ICE, while failing to dispatch the Minnesota National Guard or state police forces to Minneapolis in order to make up for the shortfall and protect citizens, instead instructing them to take cell phone videos of the crimes and abuses that they witness.
Many in the opposition seem to think that a confrontation between local and federal officials is exactly what Trump wants. The thinking goes that ICE’s behavior is designed to provoke this very response so that Trump will have an excuse to seize ever more power. Thus, many would argue the prudent and responsible move is to stand down, not give Trump the excuse for escalation that he’s looking for, and hope that voters will reward your restraint in the midterms. I believe this to be a catastrophically stupid and self-defeating approach.
The crucial fact that Democratic leaders need to grasp is that the cost of allowing a rogue national police force operating outside the law to harass and abuse citizens with impunity at the behest of the President of the United States for the next ten months goes way beyond the immediate damages inflicted on those who are assaulted. And those who would accept that this state of affairs must be permitted to stand temporarily in service to obtaining more political power in the future are making the same fatal mistake as the Republicans who sacrificed their power, dignity, and policy agenda at the altar of Donald Trump. Concessions to madness don’t dissipate. They add up. And after Democrats have allowed a post-constitutional American police state to emerge based on the theory that enforcing their own laws against a lawless regime could lead to escalation and thus must be put off until after the next election, they’re likely to find that both their will and their ability to resist tyranny will have atrophied severely. Power isn’t a non-depreciable asset. It’s anti-fragile. As Gary Kasparov has pointed out, when it isn’t exercised, it withers and dies:
Dictators, Spectacle, and the Common Knowledge Game:
The nature of political power is very different in liberal democracies than it is in countries ruled by authoritarian governments. As fear, secrecy, and coercion replace persuasion, transparency, and consent as the primary mechanisms through which the state secures its legitimacy, power itself becomes a type of pyramid scheme. When rule of men replaces rule of law, the relationship between perception and reality is fundamentally altered. An authoritarian leader is powerful in large part because a lot of people believe they’re powerful. Or simply because a lot of people believe that a lot of people believe it. The reason common knowledge2 is so critical here is because wielding autocratic power largely revolves around thwarting collective action. And often the best way to do this at scale is by cultivating social pathologies like preference falsification and spirals of silence that undermine the capacity for cooperation.
The centrality of common knowledge also helps explain why spectacle plays such a fundamental role in the exercise of autocratic power. One reason which I think is under-appreciated for why Trump has been able to push the envelope much further in his second term than in his first is that his most public crimes—January 6th in particular—were never punished. Far from making him weaker, escaping any and all accountability for an attempted self-coup has given Trump an aura of total invincibility that can be leveraged to great effect.
Artificial stupidity3 in a budding autocracy consists, in part, of disabling your capacity for foresight in service to confining yourself to the narrowest possible appreciation of the broader implications of your accommodation of insanity. Bringing this all back to what’s happening in Minneapolis, what Democrats are in danger of doing if they accept that ICE’s tactics can only be recorded and protested but not thwarted or punished between now and November is giving Trump the propaganda victory of a nationwide unpunished January 6th. The federal takeover of the city isn’t merely an abuse of power. It’s a statement. The statement is that local authority means nothing when it refuses to bow to Donald Trump. It’s a way of announcing, and demonstrating to the entire country (and the world), that he’ll treat the citizens of blue states however he pleases. He’ll withhold federal funding if he pleases. He’ll have them beaten if he pleases. He’ll even have them shot if he pleases (and make sure that the shooter is treated as a hero). And he wants everyone to know (and for everyone to know that everyone knows) that the Constitution, local leadership, and state law are all completely powerless to stop him.
Right now, members of the military (of all ranks), others in important positions within the federal bureaucracy, state officials, and ordinary Americans are all watching to see what happens in Minneapolis. And if it spreads to other cities they’ll be watching that as well. If agents of the state are permitted to go all over the country harassing, beating, and waving guns in the faces of citizens simply because Donald Trump says so, and all of these people see blue state leaders acting helpless and federal officials following his illegal orders, it becomes far more likely that they’ll also follow his orders to seize voting machines, harass people on their way to the polls, or arrest members of the opposition—the reason being that they’ll rightly believe that if they resisted, they’d be doing so alone.
Fascism! But Only Until the Midterms:
Currently, the Democratic opposition appears to be going through the bargaining stage. They can’t quite accept that they’re on a path to surrendering to autocracy, so they’re kicking the can down the road when it comes to going for broke in much the same way that Trump’s GOP enablers did as they gradually surrendered all of their power: “Using state force to protect citizens could lead to escalation. And it’s what Trump wants. It’ll give him an excuse to call up the military. So we just need to endure living in a police state and let his goons ignore our laws and terrorize our citizens until the midterms, or until 2028, or until Trump dies…” This is what surrendering to a dictatorship sounds like. Local opposition leaders don’t suddenly say “Hail King Trump!” They simply make increasingly obscene concessions a day at a time, until they’re effectively saying to their citizens “Trump is your governor now. And your mayor. We can’t protect you from his violent thugs. But only until the midterms. So just sit tight and take cell phone videos of them until November.”
Renee Good may have been the first American citizen that the Trump regime murdered in cold blood. But she will not be the last. Under such circumstances, for local leaders to refuse to use state power to protect citizens is a complete and total dereliction of duty. During the last year of Biden’s presidency, red state governors throughout the country dispatched National Guard units to the border in defiance of the administration. The governors of Florida and Texas also bussed hundreds of thousands of migrants to blue cities in the northeast. The point is, they found creative ways to band together and use state power to thwart and undermine administration policy. They didn’t ask for permission. They didn’t hide behind a lack of manpower. And they didn’t make moralizing speeches.
As for concerns that using local law enforcement against ICE could “give Trump an excuse” or lead to civil war, I find them underwhelming. Not because I view these things as unlikely, but because I think our current trajectory is worse.
Back in September, about a week after the Kirk assassination, I wrote the following4:
Over the past ten years, Western liberals have forfeited one game of chicken after another to the world’s authoritarians. Over and over again, tyrants who are willing to push their societies to the edge of the abyss have extracted concessions from risk-averse liberals prioritizing de-escalation.
I don’t know where a direct clash between ICE and state law enforcement would lead. Maybe someplace horrific. But I do know that if we’re willing to give ground on every freedom in order to mollify Trump enough to avoid civil war, then we’ll be left with nothing. And that’s exactly where we’re headed.
There is no low-risk path out of where we are right now. That ship sailed for the final time when Democrats fumbled the presidency back to Donald Trump. Every option has the potential to lead to catastrophe. Ultimately, however, I believe our best chance is for blue states to coordinate and share law enforcement resources in order to protect citizens, even if this places them in direct confrontations with ICE. These powers should be exercised responsibly, but firmly. As with most attempts at authoritarian takeovers, it’s likely to come down to the loyalty of the military. We simply have to hope that if Trump orders a Tiananmen Square, enough of them will remain loyal to their oaths and refuse.
Attempting to delay this confrontation in the hopes that we can avoid it by accommodating fascism for the next ten months and then winning a free and fair election is pie in the sky. And after giving the Trump regime another ten months to corrupt the military and advance further along the path of autocratic consolidation, our chances of making it through such a confrontation will be significantly lower. Seeking to put off these risks only magnifies them. While blue state leaders shouldn’t deliberately provoke such a scenario, neither should they shy away from using force to protect their citizens against a rogue national police force in an effort to avoid it.
No human being on earth, least of all an American, has any moral obligation to submit to violent state repression. Not to win the midterms. Not to avoid giving Donald Trump “an excuse.” Not to prevent civil war. If local and national opposition leaders do not intervene now to put a stop to what’s happening in Minneapolis and instead allow it to spread to other cities, then citizens who are assaulted by ICE’s masked thugs will have every right to stand their ground and shoot to kill. And good luck to the Trump DOJ finding a jury that’s willing to unanimously convict for that right now.
“Crazy” Joe Davola was a character on the fourth season of Seinfeld. He was a mentally unbalanced screen writer and brief love interest of Elaine.
The term common knowledge in this instance is not merely meant in the colloquial sense as “knowledge that everyone knows.” It refers to what people know (or think they know) about what people know, as well as what people know about what people know about what people know, and so on ad infinitum. It has broad relevance to group dynamics at every scale, ranging from the interpersonal all the way to the global. The Emperor’s New Clothes is generally regarded as the canonical story for illustrating the concept of common knowledge. Additionally, there are many more interesting and complex common knowledge scenarios, some of which are explored in Steven Pinker’s recent book When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows.
As noted above, this term was defined in my latest essay Epistemic Populism, which was recently published in the Cosmopolitan Globalist.
The passage comes from my essay The Weak, and is contained in the section titled The Ten Million Pound Elephant.
Thank you for this, Josh. Your essay deserves wide distribution. Anyone who believes that the current situation will end peacefully knows nothing about the history of fascist regimes.
Claire, thank you for cross-posting this. Josh writes:
<< Attempting to delay this confrontation in the hopes that we can avoid it by accommodating fascism for the next ten months and then winning a free and fair election is pie in the sky.>>
<<...blue state leaders shouldn’t deliberately provoke [confrontation], but neither should they shy away from using force to protect their citizens against a rogue national police force…>>
Josh posits that we should confront armed force with armed force — our police and national guard, even ourselves. He is right. I’ve been aghast that this has not been done, the reasoning stated above notwithstanding. ICE must at least pay a price (in death and injury) for what they are doing.
I’m sorry people, but ‘free and fair’ midterm elections are far from guaranteed. Ever since Marc Elias posted (January 2025) that "no one is coming to save us” I’ve been explaining to friends and family that “we are now in an era domestically where ‘might makes right’, and we possess no might, not even our own National Guard.”
Absent asserting some ‘might’, at this time next year we will be hoping that the courts remedy election results where millions of votes were thrown out, not cast due to polling place intimidation, or seized voting machines.
Stand up to the bully and the bullying. Civil war has been a long time in coming, and the hour is near.
Great piece Josh, more of this please. People need to understand.