The Future is Binary:
either 45's presidency will go like this last week did for the remainder of his time in office, making the chances of a 2020 re-election threateningly possible; or he'll overreach and things will get too extreme. But we're not going back to the heady days of the early administration where he incompetently bumbled around in the White House without lights on. He's finally a President now.
Now what do I mean by 'he's finally a President now'. What I mean by that is that people elected him for various reasons. One of the major ones and the focus of the last three months was that he was elected to destroy institutions. That process he threw himself into gladly, and he can't fail because he's only capable of destroying shit, not building anything, so the outcome of that matter is next to predetermined. But another reason why he was elected was to erase Obama's presidency.
Erasure in racism involves both the undoing and the co-opting. It doesn't matter which is employed as long as the action is taken to do it. 45 ran as white America's primal scream against the very existence of a black President, and as such he has a role to fulfill as the new POTUS to either destroy or co-opt everything Obama has done to erase Obama's influence from history. It's not even great for Obama to be a bad president: he also has to be a useless one.
And making Obama useless is where it was less clear whether 45 would succeed, but he's now taken a great step forward. With the last week, 45 has officially proved himself capable of erasing Obama's presidency, which means he may just prove to be the popular President he thinks he should be.
------------------------------------------------------
No, this post isn't about Merrick Garland vs. Neil Gorsuch, but it could be, equally. At this point the Gorsuch win is a multiplier. But the Gorsuch win is also a perfect example of the why's of a more difficult and complex subject, so I'm going to return to it as the simple, base-level explanation of the wider erasure.
In August 2013, President Obama asked for Congressional approval on targeted air strikes of airforce and military equipment in Syria. The response was immediate and clear: 'America' wasn't having it. Obama's airstrikes in Syria were a no-go with no discussion, dead on arrival.
Why? Because liberals are reflexively anti-war and conservatives are reflexively anti-Obama. They made a perfect coalition with war-weary moderates suspicious of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' style adventurism from the Bush Wars, along with growing controversial over-reach regarding drone attacks in places like Pakistan and Libya.
Except that what Obama was asking for was the right thing to do and is what we should have done. And once Putin popped his head in and actually showed initiative to jump in and broker agreements regarding poisonous gas weaponry, that should have been the first sign for any American with even limited political awareness that something here was very wrong; because if America was not willing to jump into a potential miasma, why in the name of fuck would Russia actually offer to?
And in a great, in fact spectacular preview of 2016 to come, 2013 was the perfect Bizarroworld moment where liberals found themselves actually praising Putin for being a peacebroker and conservatives celebrating isolation and demilitarization. And it was perfectly wrong on every level. I remember being in New Mexico, watching this happen, and realizing that I had nobody to talk to about it, because literally every single person I knew had opted for the wrong choice for the wrong reasons.
Going back to Gorsuch, the problem with liberals is that they. fucking. suck at picking battles. Why does Republican obstruction work so well? Because they have fucking horizon lines. Republicans can say, "Oh, you want Merrick? Fuck you, elections are coming." Democrats can only, "Oh, you want Gorsuch? Uh, uh, fuck you, we're, uh, we don't have any leverage, so but like fuck you right?" Big fucking difference. Same thing with Syria. Liberals were so intensely interested in preventing American adventurism on ANY. FUCKING. ARENA. that they actively blocked one of the few times a nation of people had specifically reached out to us for help and, while we're at it, were being attacked by a totalitarian so vicious he was even breaking some of the few laws of war.
But conservatives are hawkish and they knew, somewhere deep inside of them, that they wanted to pound some Arab sand again. That's what conservatives do. They fight people. They're built out of aggression. All of that was suppressed by the terrifying concept of a black person actually achieving something they want. So they had to deny him that and leave the action ready to go once a white man could throw the punch. Now he's there and Obama's initiative is co-opted: it's erased. Obama's history is no longer effective; it was the white billionaire from Queens who actually did what America promises and challenged a despot. It's perfect.*
Just like Obama could never sit a justice to the Supreme Court. That writes history. History had to be erased so that a white person could sit a justice on the Supreme Court. In the case of Gorsuch and Syria, it's co-option. In the case of the Paris Agreement, Dodd-Frank, the TPP, it's reversal. Both are erasure.
45's attack on Syria is going to be, and already is, popular. Sorry liberals. Read today's New York Times for proof. Watch CNN for proof. Sure, there's debate over it, but the net narrative is that 45 'took decisive action' and that 'Russia neglected to or failed to fully live up to their promise to eliminate chemical weapons from Syria.' Yeah, a few liberal rags are throwing out there the cost of each of the 59 missiles (and the fact that this attack does little to reduce Assad's ability to continue to be a totalitarian despot), a few libertarian rags are upset that even a Trump Presidency doesn't magically make America exist in a closed system, and your sarcastic meme-addicted friend of Facebook thinks that 45 and Obama and Bush and Clinton are all the same person because lulz there's no distinction between literally three completely different wars (Afghanistan [ground war with specific defined enemy popular with the public and targeting a specific cause of 9/11], Iraq [useless adventurism by an overreaching and overenthusiastic warmonger], Syria [a totalitarian despot in desperate need of deposing for the security and safety of a region as a whole]; the three basically showing the examples of what war with a country really is); but the net fact of the matter is that 45 did what Obama should have gotten to do and what Obama should have gotten to do is the right thing to do. The people who KNOW it's the right thing to do are happy. The people who want 45 to do what they purposefully caused Obama to fail to do are happy. Those two groups constitute the larger and more influential demographics that actually run the United States.
Now. 'Let me be clear.'
45 still didn't do enough. He should have hit ALL of the airbases, the basic idea being confining Assad's military capabilities for both the benefit of the rebels and also limiting the spillover effect (but too late for all that now*). AND 45 didn't do it for the right reason. Obama looked into the issue and with his typically measured, technocratic style, decided that intervention may be necessary to prevent even worse consequences (* again). 45, it's reported, looked at a picture of mangled children corpses and suddenly had a Grinch heart-explosion moment.** His 'reversal' is pretty typical of the reactionary manner in which he deals with anything in his life.
45 has now achieved something, actually achieved something in the Oval Office. In terms of erasure, he's fulfilled his mission to co-opt meaningful agenda from Obama. But like a broken clock being right twice a day, it also happened to be something that needed to get done. Since need and achievement cohere in this brief moment, he's going to get positive feedback, he's going to get praise, he lives for that praise, and so now he is going to pursue replicating that success.
That's why the future is no longer about how chaotic his administration is versus the damage he's doing to American stability. The future, after this week, is whether he is so well persuaded by the people he's surrounded with to Do The Right Thing that he achieves the erasure of Obama via finishing things on Obama's to-do list; or, more simply, he connects "flexing muscle = people love me" and decides to start throwing missiles at all sorts of countries.
The liberals are already sure it'll be the latter, but hey, to be fair, apparently Bannon somehow got on 45's bad side and now the establishmentarians are starting to persuade 45 more. SOooooOOOOOoooooOOOooo... we'll only be screwed 80%, not completely?
--PolarisDiB
* And that's before we get into the negative consequences we COULDN'T expect, like say:
Russia's adventurism into the Ukraine.
ISIS' rapid expansion into Syria's power vacuum.
A refugee crisis that...
... disinterred every rotten fascist from whatever dustheap section of Europe and the United States they've been hiding in.
** I believe it but I don't. I believe that he actually did see the pictures, actually was effected, actually did feel the way he mentions. I don't believe that's the reason 45 decided to call for a strike. I'm pretty sure he's been looking for a reason to flex some muscle. If 45 was driven by pictures to make sudden reversals of course, then the Philandro Castile video would have made him a sudden advocate for Black Lives Matter. That didn't happen because he's not interested in empathizing with black people bleeding to death: he's only interested in empathizing with a victim he can throw punches for.
Now what do I mean by 'he's finally a President now'. What I mean by that is that people elected him for various reasons. One of the major ones and the focus of the last three months was that he was elected to destroy institutions. That process he threw himself into gladly, and he can't fail because he's only capable of destroying shit, not building anything, so the outcome of that matter is next to predetermined. But another reason why he was elected was to erase Obama's presidency.
Erasure in racism involves both the undoing and the co-opting. It doesn't matter which is employed as long as the action is taken to do it. 45 ran as white America's primal scream against the very existence of a black President, and as such he has a role to fulfill as the new POTUS to either destroy or co-opt everything Obama has done to erase Obama's influence from history. It's not even great for Obama to be a bad president: he also has to be a useless one.
And making Obama useless is where it was less clear whether 45 would succeed, but he's now taken a great step forward. With the last week, 45 has officially proved himself capable of erasing Obama's presidency, which means he may just prove to be the popular President he thinks he should be.
------------------------------------------------------
No, this post isn't about Merrick Garland vs. Neil Gorsuch, but it could be, equally. At this point the Gorsuch win is a multiplier. But the Gorsuch win is also a perfect example of the why's of a more difficult and complex subject, so I'm going to return to it as the simple, base-level explanation of the wider erasure.
In August 2013, President Obama asked for Congressional approval on targeted air strikes of airforce and military equipment in Syria. The response was immediate and clear: 'America' wasn't having it. Obama's airstrikes in Syria were a no-go with no discussion, dead on arrival.
Why? Because liberals are reflexively anti-war and conservatives are reflexively anti-Obama. They made a perfect coalition with war-weary moderates suspicious of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' style adventurism from the Bush Wars, along with growing controversial over-reach regarding drone attacks in places like Pakistan and Libya.
Except that what Obama was asking for was the right thing to do and is what we should have done. And once Putin popped his head in and actually showed initiative to jump in and broker agreements regarding poisonous gas weaponry, that should have been the first sign for any American with even limited political awareness that something here was very wrong; because if America was not willing to jump into a potential miasma, why in the name of fuck would Russia actually offer to?
And in a great, in fact spectacular preview of 2016 to come, 2013 was the perfect Bizarroworld moment where liberals found themselves actually praising Putin for being a peacebroker and conservatives celebrating isolation and demilitarization. And it was perfectly wrong on every level. I remember being in New Mexico, watching this happen, and realizing that I had nobody to talk to about it, because literally every single person I knew had opted for the wrong choice for the wrong reasons.
Going back to Gorsuch, the problem with liberals is that they. fucking. suck at picking battles. Why does Republican obstruction work so well? Because they have fucking horizon lines. Republicans can say, "Oh, you want Merrick? Fuck you, elections are coming." Democrats can only, "Oh, you want Gorsuch? Uh, uh, fuck you, we're, uh, we don't have any leverage, so but like fuck you right?" Big fucking difference. Same thing with Syria. Liberals were so intensely interested in preventing American adventurism on ANY. FUCKING. ARENA. that they actively blocked one of the few times a nation of people had specifically reached out to us for help and, while we're at it, were being attacked by a totalitarian so vicious he was even breaking some of the few laws of war.
But conservatives are hawkish and they knew, somewhere deep inside of them, that they wanted to pound some Arab sand again. That's what conservatives do. They fight people. They're built out of aggression. All of that was suppressed by the terrifying concept of a black person actually achieving something they want. So they had to deny him that and leave the action ready to go once a white man could throw the punch. Now he's there and Obama's initiative is co-opted: it's erased. Obama's history is no longer effective; it was the white billionaire from Queens who actually did what America promises and challenged a despot. It's perfect.*
Just like Obama could never sit a justice to the Supreme Court. That writes history. History had to be erased so that a white person could sit a justice on the Supreme Court. In the case of Gorsuch and Syria, it's co-option. In the case of the Paris Agreement, Dodd-Frank, the TPP, it's reversal. Both are erasure.
45's attack on Syria is going to be, and already is, popular. Sorry liberals. Read today's New York Times for proof. Watch CNN for proof. Sure, there's debate over it, but the net narrative is that 45 'took decisive action' and that 'Russia neglected to or failed to fully live up to their promise to eliminate chemical weapons from Syria.' Yeah, a few liberal rags are throwing out there the cost of each of the 59 missiles (and the fact that this attack does little to reduce Assad's ability to continue to be a totalitarian despot), a few libertarian rags are upset that even a Trump Presidency doesn't magically make America exist in a closed system, and your sarcastic meme-addicted friend of Facebook thinks that 45 and Obama and Bush and Clinton are all the same person because lulz there's no distinction between literally three completely different wars (Afghanistan [ground war with specific defined enemy popular with the public and targeting a specific cause of 9/11], Iraq [useless adventurism by an overreaching and overenthusiastic warmonger], Syria [a totalitarian despot in desperate need of deposing for the security and safety of a region as a whole]; the three basically showing the examples of what war with a country really is); but the net fact of the matter is that 45 did what Obama should have gotten to do and what Obama should have gotten to do is the right thing to do. The people who KNOW it's the right thing to do are happy. The people who want 45 to do what they purposefully caused Obama to fail to do are happy. Those two groups constitute the larger and more influential demographics that actually run the United States.
Now. 'Let me be clear.'
45 still didn't do enough. He should have hit ALL of the airbases, the basic idea being confining Assad's military capabilities for both the benefit of the rebels and also limiting the spillover effect (but too late for all that now*). AND 45 didn't do it for the right reason. Obama looked into the issue and with his typically measured, technocratic style, decided that intervention may be necessary to prevent even worse consequences (* again). 45, it's reported, looked at a picture of mangled children corpses and suddenly had a Grinch heart-explosion moment.** His 'reversal' is pretty typical of the reactionary manner in which he deals with anything in his life.
45 has now achieved something, actually achieved something in the Oval Office. In terms of erasure, he's fulfilled his mission to co-opt meaningful agenda from Obama. But like a broken clock being right twice a day, it also happened to be something that needed to get done. Since need and achievement cohere in this brief moment, he's going to get positive feedback, he's going to get praise, he lives for that praise, and so now he is going to pursue replicating that success.
That's why the future is no longer about how chaotic his administration is versus the damage he's doing to American stability. The future, after this week, is whether he is so well persuaded by the people he's surrounded with to Do The Right Thing that he achieves the erasure of Obama via finishing things on Obama's to-do list; or, more simply, he connects "flexing muscle = people love me" and decides to start throwing missiles at all sorts of countries.
The liberals are already sure it'll be the latter, but hey, to be fair, apparently Bannon somehow got on 45's bad side and now the establishmentarians are starting to persuade 45 more. SOooooOOOOOoooooOOOooo... we'll only be screwed 80%, not completely?
--PolarisDiB
* And that's before we get into the negative consequences we COULDN'T expect, like say:
Russia's adventurism into the Ukraine.
ISIS' rapid expansion into Syria's power vacuum.
A refugee crisis that...
... disinterred every rotten fascist from whatever dustheap section of Europe and the United States they've been hiding in.
** I believe it but I don't. I believe that he actually did see the pictures, actually was effected, actually did feel the way he mentions. I don't believe that's the reason 45 decided to call for a strike. I'm pretty sure he's been looking for a reason to flex some muscle. If 45 was driven by pictures to make sudden reversals of course, then the Philandro Castile video would have made him a sudden advocate for Black Lives Matter. That didn't happen because he's not interested in empathizing with black people bleeding to death: he's only interested in empathizing with a victim he can throw punches for.