Dismantling The Paramilitary Industrial Complex
Inside the mailbag: Gavin Newsom ... Mitch McConnell ... Impeachment
Ben W: The entire social media storm over Hasan Piker’s comments about Gavin Newsom are worrying. I don’t think anyone is pushing Newsom as the 2028 frontrunner - there’s simply an acknowledgment that he has his eyes on the presidency and has done the most to position himself as a potential nominee. That’s not the same as saying “he’s my man,” but a lot of leftists are acting like the game is rigged and they won’t show up... again. As if that worked for anyone in 2016 or 2024.
Why does the whole “if you don’t like this candidate, run or campaign for someone else” strategem seem to elude an internet mentality? That’s how it worked for decades and acting like everything’s rigged unless a certain kind of candidate wins is not good for our side.
The only morally correct approach for people who oppose Donald Trump should be bleeding obvious at this point:
Choose your favorite Democratic primary candidate and try to help them win the nomination.
Whether they win the nomination or not, vote blue no matter who.
I can’t think of anyone in America with a greater-than-zero percent chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination who’s so morally odious that they’d falsify this simple formula. If Kyrsten Sinema or Josh Gottheimer or even John Fetterman somehow walked away with the Democratic presidential nomination, I would be pretty bummed. But then I’d pole vault across a river of lava to vote for them over Trump or JD Vance or Marco Rubio or anyone being groomed to takeover America’s fascist governing party. And I’ve never attempted pole vaulting in my life.
Those of us who see things this way should treat this as an expectation akin to basic hygiene, at least in our online communications. You wash your hands after you use the toilet, you vote blue no matter who. You treat hostage takers with the same kind of scorn you reserve in your regular life for people who clip their toenails on the subway. They are at the tip of the horseshoe where moral scolding transforms into sadomasochism.
Factionalists in both wings of the party resist this logic for several reasons, only some of which pertain to the incentives of internet clout chasing. E.g.:
Conflict drives attention;
Purity rituals are more captivating than cold-blooded realism;
Audience capture places the private interests of the creator in conflict with the public interest.
There’s more to the story. Prior to the social media and online creator era, we saw the emergence on the progressive left of a permanent movement—one modeled intentionally on the formation of the conservative movement. Like the conservative movement, it grew from the fringes to enjoy policy-demanding clout, which in turn begets murder-suicide threats. Or “hardball negotiating tactics,” if you want to be generous. Many progressives hope to eventually commandeer the Democratic Party the same way the conservative movement mounted a hostile takeover of the GOP.
A big difference is that (for better and worse) the Democratic Party machine is much more active and organized about opposing left-wing entryism. If Democrats somehow nominated a left-wing Trump for president, someone gross and extreme and unfit for office, party elites would not rally around that candidate, no-enemies-to-the-left style, the way Republicans closed ranks around Trump after the Access Hollywood tape and the January 6 insurrection. One problem with that is that hostilities between party leaders and the left scans to rank-and-file progressives as incumbents abusing positions of power and influence to rig primary elections. I don’t see it that way, but I understand why they do. A bigger problem arises when party leaders reject the two-part test above, as when Chuck Schumer and (for a time) Hakeem Jeffries refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani.
Add it all up, and instead of leftists saying, “sucks that Newsom’s an early favorite, we need to rally around different leaders, and encourage them to steal his thunder,” they say “well, you better not nominate Newsom or we’ll throw the election to the GOP.”
It’s a bad dynamic, and I don’t really know how to upend it except through the use of shame and ostracism: normal people being active and numerous and cool enough to make wreckers seem repulsive.
The good news is, I don’t think we have to be super fatalistic about this. I can’t prove it with data, and perhaps it’s belied by academic research but my read based on three close modern elections—2000, 2016, 2024—is that this voting-as-self-expression thing that drives so much infuriating social-media commentary and threatens to elect far-right candidates, is actually less potent as a matter of fact in the social media era than it was when there was barely an internet. The internet makes it easier to catch people (whether centrist pundits or left-wing influencers) drawing false equivalences between Democrats and Republicans, and to refute them.
Sue K: I have deep concern about the administration’s effort to buy warehouses to form large numbers of detention centers. If Democrats manage to take the House (and Senate?) will they conduct oversight of what, in many cases, are extrajudicial detentions? But if they somehow win the presidency in 2028, what can they do about possibly thousands of detained people in these places, given the likely blowback over large scale releases? We will be left with many serious problems in the wake of this horrific presidency, but this is one that seems will be very difficult and politically risky to deal with.
I’m afraid you’re right to be concerned.
In some ways, defunding or abolishing ICE will be the easy part. We shouldn’t sleep on the emergence of what I call the paramilitary-industrial complex, which will create new political cross pressures beyond Democrats’ poll-based fear of helping immigrants. But even without cutting a dollar from the immigration enforcement budget, a new president can put executive-branch employees on desk duty.
The real difficulty, as you suggest, is that three years from now there may well be tens or hundreds of thousands of real humans in camps scattered across the country. There will be no easy or good solution to a problem like this.