I can't think of how to title this
But it is time to understand the constitution is now resting in its coffin
While I was spending Saturday trying to soothe my cat with one hand and typing was nearly impossible, I read the entirety of Project 2025. Yes the new constitution that Trump is following is written here. Lament for the old constitution if you will, but don’t confuse your lamentations with the morrow that is now our lives.
So being no better at prognostication than any other, I am going to suggest a few things are about to happen.
Before the end of February and into March the media critical of Trump will increasingly be censored and shut down. Sometimes the critical media is moved against at a more leisurely pace, but Trump has already put out feelers in the form of lawsuits to gain media compliance and I believe he will act to shut down and prosecute those who insist on continuing to claim he is in error.
Indeed don’t suggest, does he have any shame? His vengeance is about shaming all who dared shame him.
By June the democratic opposition in congress will be ended by prosecution or simple fiat. If there are any elections at all in 2026 (or 2028) there will be no candidates not approved by Trump. If you’re waiting around for voter backlash to “throw out the bums”; the bums have been working for thirty years now to end your opportunity to throw them out.
The coming great economic crash will be the incentive to arrest more and more; to round up indigents and to restore the institution of slavery.
And boy oh boy, who are going to be Hegsteth’s Generals and Patel’s FBI? I’ll give you a hint–who more willing than the pardoned proud boys and other pardoned jan 6’ers. That’s so obvious it’s not even a prediction, it’s a near certainty.
Trade wars will more than likely become open hostilities and wars and rumors of war will lead to an increased belief in the Christian Apocalypse and the need to destroy scientists who suggest otherwise. Somewhere in the mix the U.S. constitution will be declared unconstitutional or rewritten or simply a new constitution (project 2025?) will take effect,
I wouldn’t count on the courts too much; they can be intimidated—and replaced.
Very pessimistic? No, I remain the most optimistic pessimist you’ll ever meet. Out of the ashes humanity might regain its interconnectedness and might be able to fashion a society not based on individual property (and I include in that the Marxian fantasy of everyone equally splitting individual property); and a redefinition of statehood: not about people belonging to states but states belonging to people. A rise of individual communities and sachem councils that dialogue but whose members must represent their communities and not themselves, and whose main purpose is a manner not of legislating for communities but as a judiciary to prevent executive overreach.
Sometimes the sachem is translated to mean “chiefs” of the Iroquois but that is about as far from their role to the tribes that appointed them as can possibly be. The sachem didn’t represent their tribes and were certainly not tribal chiefs. The Haudenosaunee had village leaders who could make decisions for the individual Haudenosaunee (longhouse) and the Haudenosaunee had representatives that met in tribal councils. The fifty members of the sachem were discussion councils only, that didn’t legislate and actually not true representatives who spoke for the tribe that spoke for the Haudenosaunee within the tribes.
The sachem presented the results of their discussion to the tribes only when they were unanimous. The tribes presented the discussions to the Haudenosaunee within their tribe and if their was unanimity it passed back up the line. Then the sachem could speak in a judicious manner to represent the singular voice of the five Haudenosaunee nations.
Nothing, however, prevented any tribe within the confederacy from making their own deals of war or trade. They could all act independently if consensus did not reflect unanimity. The confederacy and the sachem were therefore a judiciary sanctuary to prevent intertribal tariffs and warfare within confederacy members.
{To call them Iroquois is irresponsible as Iroquois is a family of languages and their bitterest rivals (non-confederacy members) the Susquehanna and Huron were also Iroquois speakers, and themselves confederacies of smaller tribes.
Terming them as Iroquois is like saying the five prime English speaking nations consist of England. They often have common trading alliances; and war against common enemies; or ally to do so. That doesn’t mean no other nations primary or official language is not English because certainly it is the prime language n Jamaica whether you wish to accept that or not. (other countries as well.)}
There is no necessity to create a confederacy like the Haudenosaunee (it had its own problems), but I do think we need more judicious commonality and legislative practices that are more singularly responsive to individual communities.
Or, after the collapse, we simply try to return to the past as if there was no responsibility of the prior eco-political system in the eventual downfall we are now facing.
I may still think there is a blueprint in the separation of powers; but a revival, from my perspective, should more severely restrict the executive from ever being able to assume extra-constitutional powers. Perhaps the military should be transferred to the legislative branch. Of course depending on the degree of the severity of the looming conflict perhaps humankind will see some of the follies of militaries and abolish them altogether.
The duration of this “Trumpist” coup; and “democratic backsliding” elsewhere that might occur, will depend on how much physical resistance occurs…but the time for believing that active physical resistance will not be required is over. Certainly those with voices to inspire others will continue to play an important role.
But the one thing in the near future you must disabuse yourself of believing as probable is the next election and the opportunity to vote the trumpists out.
Ain’t gonna happen.
The best resistance now,though, from my perspective, is unity to save our neighbors. The altruism of humanity that exposes itself during crises needs to come alive and protect each other.
And just don’t work for the massa no mo’, no mo’.
Some of us will die, but fewer die the more we think of saving others than we think of saving ourselves.
And being who I am, I still believe the survivors will realize utopian schemes of any political perspective damn us into longing instead of concentrating on only what is beneficial today…and then maybe…weird conceptions of our desires; things like freedom and love might enclose itself around humankind.
An era of equal evaluation of all and an abandonment and/or removal from our cultures of those who would possess or teach the world to possess.
It is, or must be, about sharing and not about owning. That, I hope, becomes the value that emerges from this trumpist-deviation.