Los Angeles and the National Guard

Critical update via the BBC:

California Governor Gavin Newsom says Trump’s activation of 700 Marines in the Los Angeles area is a “deranged fantasy”.

He says that they are “heroes” who “shouldn’t be deployed on American soil facing their own countrymen to fulfil the deranged fantasy of a dictatorial president. This is un-American.”

This should chill you to the bone. The president will invoke the Insurrection Act, or just go around it. It is not a good thing. We are now in a very uncharted territory in the United States. It is hardly uncharted for students of authoritarians. It is very much textbook.

While I usually concentrate on Eastern Europe, it is essential to understand what is happening in the United States through the authoritarian lens. Mind you, our minds generally race to the rise of Adolph Hitler. It is understandable because World War II was the last good war. Accidentally, it could be argued that it was the last just war. We were on the winning side. We got to write some of that history. And boy, there are a lot of movies about it.

Korea is the silent war. We lost the Vietnam War. The global war on terror, the jury is still out. Our war of choice in Iraq helped create some of the present geopolitical instability in that region of the world. Like the Russians, we did lose in Afghanistan. So, of course, our mind goes to that distant war. And with the last vets dying, it is quickly entering the same mythological space as the Great…