A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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An Autocracy of Dunces
How stone-faced generals, Wall Street pushback, and a government shutdown may save America’s quickly declining democracy
By Paul Krugman | Oct 02, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-autocracy-of-dunces
If America still had a fully functioning democracy, Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday to the assembled generals would have ended his presidency. Trump treated the event like a political rally and was clearly taken aback by the refusal of the audience to applaud or laugh at his jokes. Delivering a nakedly partisan speech to a mandated assembly of military officers was a gross violation of the Hatch Act. The content —telling the officers to be ready to use force against U.S. citizens — was clearly an impeachable offense. In an earlier era, Trump’s incoherent ranting would have paved the way for his immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment.
But how did this happen?
It’s clear that the decision to summon top officers from around the world to receive a lecture about “warrior ethos” from a man who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon was made by Pete Hegseth. It confirmed publicly what is being whispered within the military, and presumably among our allies and enemies: that Hegseth is an abject incompetent who isn’t remotely up to the job. And this toe-curling performance is a reflection of his underlying panic.
It’s yet another example of Trump being undone by his even more chaotic minions – RFK Jr. and vaccines, Peter Navarro and his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Bill Pulte’s scurrilous use of private mortgage information (which implicated his own family) and Brendan Carr’s own-goal from going after Jimmy Kimmel. I could go on, but I think the point is made.
Back in August I wrote about “hackification,” invoking what I dubbed Arendt’s Law. As I noted, Hannah Arendt argued that authoritarian regimes don’t want competent people, who might sometimes take a stand on principle. They prefer crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
My case in point in that post was E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, who Trump was trying to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous Commissioner because he didn’t like the numbers the agency was reporting.
While there are many competent conservative economists, Antoni isn’t one of them. He is, instead, stunningly, Stephen-Moore-level incompetent, with a toxic history on social media. Trump’s choice of Antoni proved Arendt’s dictum: crackpots and fools are likely to be more loyal than people who actually know something.
The same logic surely explains the appointment of the hapless Hegseth.
Hackification is also an important factor in the government shutdown. Democrats have made their willingness to supply the extra votes needed to keep the government open contingent on an extension of the Biden-era expansion of health insurance subsidies, which will expire at the end of this year.
It’s good ground for them, politically: More than 24 million Americans get health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, almost all of them subsidized. And if the subsidies are allowed to expire, many families will face a disastrous financial hit:
Source: KFF
The political puzzle is why Republicans didn’t see this coming. The One Big Beautiful Bill carefully and cynically delays big cuts to Medicaid until after the midterms. Why didn’t it include a similarly cynical delay to the looming premium apocalypse?
Well, Chuck Schumer, who met with Trump Monday, said that the president appeared to be “not aware” of the impact of expiring subsidies. I just had a conversation with Jonathan Cohn, which will be posted on Saturday, and we agreed that many Republicans, like Trump, simply weren’t a
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Hegseth’s Hatred of Americans Makes Him Unfit for Office but a Perfect Fit for Trump
The secretary of war is a Christian nationalist who wants to eliminate those who don’t agree with his totalitarian vision
By Cathy Young | Oct 01, 2025
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/hegseths-hatred-of-americans-makes
The image of Hegseth that emerges from his authorship of The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold.
The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a “free” country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.
In addition to treating a broadly defined “Left” as the enemy, American Crusade also heaps scorn on ostensibly patriotic but overly complacent “fifty-fifty Americans.” The term comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who is quoted in the epigraph to the first part of the book: “There is not room in the country for any fifty-fifty American, nor can there be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes.” The quote appears to be a garbled amalgam of several passages in Roosevelt’s speeches and writings, all of them from a very specific context: divided loyalties among some German-Americans during World War I. Hegseth’s “fifty-fifty American,” by contrast, refers to a well-meaning non-combatant in the culture war: a “squish” who disapproves of the perceived excesses of the progressive left but shrugs them off in the hope that “common sense will prevail,” or who doesn’t want to be “overly political,” or who thinks his or her local public school is great. For all his talk of reverence for America’s founding ideals, Hegseth’s version of Americanism sounds at times more like proto-totalitarian French Jacobinism, whose ideologues asserted that not only “traitors” but the “indifferent” and the “passive” must be punished.
Besides Hegseth’s quasi-totalitarian demands for complete fealty to the right and intensely held animus toward the left in the culture war, there is also the troubling question of just how literally he takes the “war” part. American Crusade, after all, explicitly invokes the medieval Crusades as a model for the fight against “the Left.” Although Hegseth acknowledges that the history of the Crusades is “complicated” and that it includes nasty episodes, such as horrific violence toward Jews, he sees in them a model for civilizational conservation against an existential threat. He even justifies them based on a bizarre alternative history in which they served the cause of peace: “After centuries of fighting … Christianity in Europe was saved, Jerusalem was liberated, and Christians did not seek further war with Muslims.” In fact, Jerusalem was captured by Christian forces in the First Crusade in 1099 but recaptured by Muslims in 1187; seven subsequent Crusades over the next century were unsuccessful, and Jerusalem
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Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out.
An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times.
By Peter Turchin | Oct 2, 2025, 5:00 AM CDT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
. . . the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?
Our current predicament is not unprecedented. We can learn from how past societies survived through, and ended, their crisis periods.
The “wealth pump”
The collapse of ancient empires, the revolutions that convulsed early modern Europe, or the tensions tearing apart today’s democracies are often treated as products of unique historical circumstances. But my analysis of more than a hundred past crises spanning the last two millennia shows that these outbreaks of societal instability are driven by a mechanism that operates with surprising regularity across different historical eras and places: the wealth pump. The term describes a set of conditions — economic and political — that transfer wealth from the broad base of the population to the elite, a small proportion of people who concentrate power in their hands.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703238/end-times-by-peter-tur
chin/
Free download from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Peter+Turchin
The wealth pump consists of various means by which the fruits of economic growth are, instead of being shared equitably, siphoned upward the social ladder. In the past, this was from peasants to landlords; today, from workers to business owners and corporate executives. First, economic inequality rises. Then political inequality follows, as the wealthy convert their riches into influence. This development erodes democratic institutions, making it harder for the non-elite majority to defend their interests through formal politics. Eventually, systemic stability is threatened.
Undermining society
The wealth pump undermines the stability of societies in three ways.
1) It causes growing popular discontent.
The obvious effect of the wealth pump is that it enriches the upper strata and increases their numbers via upward economic mobility — for example, enabling CEOs of large companies to enter the ranks of uber-wealthy. However, this happens at the expense of the majority. To understand this, consider the relative wage, defined as the wage earned by typical workers (technically, the median wage) relative to the GDP per capita. When the relative wage declines, non-elite workers receive less and less of the fruits of economic growth. This decline in relative wages means that while wages stagnate, the costs of housing, education, and healthcare soar.
In the United States, for example, the relative wage began falling from the 1970s onward. Even as the economy grew, most Americans fell behind. This results in anger and increased mass-mobilization potential.
https://peterturchin.com/population-immiseration-in-america/
2) The wealth pump creates too many wealthy elites — more than there are high-power positions.
This is most clear when we consider that some top wealth holders are interested in translating their economic power into political office (think Trump, but also Michael Bloomberg, Steve Forbes, and so on). There are 10 times as many decamillionaires today (and the number of billionaires has increased even more), but still the same number of political positions — one president, 100 senators, and so on.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28383/w28383.pdf
3) The wealth pump creates too many youths pursuing not just college but even more advanced degrees in hopes of escaping looming “precarity.”
Increasing the number of elite wannabes (stemming from the overproduction of both wealth-holders and degree-holders) who compete for a fixed number of power positions results in a game of musical chairs. As
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Your self-proclaimed "experts" have all flushed their credibility down the toilet.
Nobody cares.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:
...the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?
Stop selling civil war, traitor.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:I'm selling the idea that if Trump were dead, America's problems would be solved. Killing the fat, dumb motherfucker and pedophile is a worthy scientific experiment to test the hypothesis. Numerous presidents have been killed in the spirit of scientific endeavor, and after each experiment, America was stronger and wealthier. It is time to run the same experiment again, to see whether the same improvements will follow.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
...the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?
Stop selling civil war, traitor.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
Very Impressive, Mr President!
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/katie-johnson-civil-case-for-rape
-trump-epsteinpdf/257375882
Case 5:16-cv-00797-DMG-KS Document 1 Filed 04/26/16 Page 3 of 6 Page ID #:3
11. On the third occasion involving the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson was forced to engage in an unnatural lesbian sex act with her fellow minor and sex slave, Maria Doe age 12, for the sexual enjoyment of Defendant Trump. After this sex act, both minors were forced to orally copulate Defendant Trump by placing their mouths simultaneously on his erect penis until he achieved sexual orgasm. After zipping up his pants, Defendant Trump physically pushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the "poor" quality of their sexual performance.
12. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, was tied to a bed by Defendant Trump who then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff Johnson. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff Johnson loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to "please wear a condom". Defendant Trump responded by violently striking Plaintiff Johnson in the face with his open hand and screaming that "he would do whatever he wanted" as he refused to wear protection. After achieving sexual orgasm, the Defendant, Donald J. Trump put his suit back on and when the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, in tears asked Defendant Trump what would happen if he had impregnated her, Defendant Trump grabbed his wallet and threw some money at her and screamed that she should use the money "to get a fucking abortion".
It’s only 6 pages! See them all in their original form at https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/katie-johnson-civil-case-for-rape
-trump-epsteinpdf/257375882
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
If you meet the requirements ( slightly to the right, middle and liberal ) and you have an interest in starting a discussion say so.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
...the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?
Stop selling civil war, traitor.
Not to worry comrade. Jack, i.e. Gilligan, will be in his ICE uniform any day now. They couldn't possibly stamp rejected on his forehead and kick him out onto the street.
T
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Declining American Democracy: Trump is a Symptom, Not the Cause
The modern GOP is inherently authoritarian
By Paul Krugman | Oct 03, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/declining-american-democracy-trump
It’s now undeniable that American democracy is in very big trouble. An autocratic president, abetted by collaborators in the Supreme Court and the Republican party, is actively attempting to use the military, the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, trade policy, voting rolls, federal spending, and any other weapon he can get his hands on to punish his critics and lock in permanent power. Yet it still comes as a shock to have the dire state that the country is in confirmed by the experts.
On Wednesday G. Elliott Morris directed us to the findings of Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists who monitor the functioning of democracy in many countries. They now rate the United States as an “illiberal democracy”. That means that the ruling party can still lose elections, so we aren’t a full autocracy just yet. However, that democracy is on the ropes because the power of the state is being used to put a heavy thumb on the scales, tilting us towards autocracy.
Much of our legacy media is still in denial about this reality, or is actively trying to cover it up. I still see news reports describing some offense by the Trump administration as potentially “worse than Watergate” – a description that is ludicrously quaint when applied to an administration that does things worse than Watergate several times a week. Two weeks ago I hosted a recorded interview with Karen Attiah, the former Global Opinions editor of the Washington Post, who was summarily fired for refusing to canonize Charlie Kirk, while the Times’s Ezra Klein has faced no consequences, despite widespread outrage, for declaring that Kirk did politics “the right way.” And I needn’t remind you about the Disney-Jimmy Kimmel saga.
But how did we degenerate like this? Nixon, who was a piker by comparison to Donald Trump, was repudiated by his own party. Not only is Donald Trump a wannabe dictator, surely the worst person on multiple dimensions ever to occupy the White House, but he made his intentions clear in the January 6th insurrection and his promises of retribution if re-elected. But unlike Nixon, Trump is backed by a Republican party that has become so extreme, so unwilling to acknowledge that opposition is even legitimate that none of his actions matter. Today’s Republicans show no hesitation whatsoever in adopting the Führerprinzip, the “leader principle”, in which Trump’s diktats override all written law and democratic norms.
Is calling the modern GOP an extremist party just my subjective assessment? No, it’s an assertion backed by solid evidence. And like Morris, I loves me some visual data. So let’s talk about political polarization supported by hard data.
I’m a big fan of Voteview, which uses roll call votes in Congress to place politicians along an ideological spectrum. The details are complex, but it turns out that you can predict senators’ and representatives’ votes on most legislation by assigning them positions in a two-dimensional, abstract “issue space.” One dimension is left versus right — support or lack thereof for progressive taxation and social spending. The other dimension historically had to do with racial equality, although it’s harder to interpret now.
Here’s where Republican and Democratic senators were located in that abstract space during the Watergate affair:
Source: Voteview
As you can see, there was a lot of overlap between the parties. There really was a political center, illustrated by the red and blue dots straddling the half-way mark of the horizontal axis. And it was that center that basically decided that Nixon must go.
We shouldn’t romanticize this era of r
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