Just a real tour de force of different ways to dodge real, meaningful moral responsibility while trying to make it seem like you've taken it

In some sense, the current GOP may have started as a "Trump problem" (I'm skeptical, and tend to view him as early symptom rather than cause, but it's at least a plausible story), but it is clearly no longer primarily a "Trump problem." And that's very bad!

For long-term recovery, voters *must* recognize that fact. Even if voters reject Trump but return power to GOP in future elections, while it is still pervaded by illiberal authoritarianism, the authoritarians will likely have enough chances to make authoritarianism stick. I'm not optimistic.

First, as dispositionally authoritarian as Trump is, he isn't *ideological* in the way that all of the plausible successors are. Second, to whatever extent Trump's approval is going down, I see little evidence that the relevant voters recognize the fact that the GOP is an authoritarian party.

I'm sure someone else has made this observation before me, but this seems to be the sort of "president commits murder under the guise of official duties" situation that we were told was an implausible hypothesis unworthy of consideration during the SCOTUS immunity decision?

/4 SCOTUS has lost the presumption of regularity -- the mandate of the legal heavens -- through its shadow docket actions, which by invoking SCOTUS' equitable discretionary powers have obliterated the pretext that SCOTUS is merely calling balls and strikes, merely calling lines where they see them.

"concerns about the Turbo Brain Liquefying Gizmo 9000 are absolutely just a moral panic," says person currently in an advanced stage of having her brains liquefied by overexposure to the Turbo Brain Liquefying Gizmo 9000.

Thanks for the rec!

The court pseudo-thinkers of the Right (Yarvin, etc) are largely convinced that the collapse of the current liberal-democratic system is inevitable, and so they plan for how to take over in the aftermath. If our side doesn't have people taking that possibility seriously, we'll be flat-footed.

It's possible that JVL (and me) are wrong about our prophecies of doom. My point here is just that I think it's easy for people to think that ignoring doomerism is cost-free or at least unproblematically beneficial. Ignoring doomerism *if we're actually doomed* can waste a lot of time, etc.

Harm-mitigation and, most importantly, rebuilding strategies demand different things from us. And it's at least possible that strategies and mindsets that would be helpful in the 'prevent system collapse' model could be counterproductive in the 'gotta rebuild' model, and vice versa.

But on the other hand—and this is the part that I think often gets underrated—the kind of stuff you think and do when you believe you can still save the system is often fundamentally different from the stuff you think and do when you recognize that's no longer possible.