We Will Outlive Them

For me, it was Elon Musk taking over the Federal Government payroll that transformed this moment from sloppy far-right power grab to full on counter-revolutionary coup. It will be for future historians to debate, but at the moment, assuming things don't reverse course in the next few weeks, Saturday, February 1, 2025, seems as good a choice as any for the day the 2nd American Republic* died.

Appropriate to their movement of mall-kiosk red hats, desaturated flags, ugly cartoon frogs and AI generated Jesus Trumps, the crossing of the American Rubicon was a strange, tacky, bureaucratic event. The world's most divorced man, Elon Musk, flanked by a half-dozen or so damp palmed 20 year old Nazi engineers, bullied and harassed the Treasury official in charge of the federal payments system into resigning, and then plugged their computers into the system and took control of the whole shebang. While pulling off this administrative coup, he took a break to taunt on X (the everything app,) that Federal government took-off weekends so working Saturdays was like a cheat code, making a cute little "government bureaucracy, amiright?" joke for libertarians who collect gold coins stamped with Ronald Reagan's face. He did so under the authority of DOGE, the un-official department he heads named after a decade-and-a-half stale meme, one that now may be the most powerful office in America.

This intervention into a mechanical, technical side of the Federal government's daily operations does a pretty tidy little end run around the various "checks and balances" and other romantic legal fictions that sustain constitutional government. It is clever enough in the crude, brute force way of Musk and his Silicon Valley ilk. On a quiet afternoon, in a relatively anonymous federal office, the world's richest man, a Nazi who heiled victory and Hitler at the inauguration not two weeks ago, a man with no official federal government position, (oh how they assured us DOGE's lack of legal status would prevent him from accruing real power), suddenly had full control of 5 trillion dollars of annual funding, as well as access to the social security numbers and bank information of every single American individual and business.

The firehose of Executive Orders from Trump, many of which create constitutional crises, each of which forces a confrontation with said checks and balances to push back and prevent enforcement, are capable of eventually transforming the way the government operates, but they are still more or less just within the bounds of the last three decades of increasingly centralized executive power. They only functioned as an effective coup if he managed to organize the state sufficiently to enforce them and back them up, or had enough autonomous buy in from below. But Musk and a crew of random fascist fanboys having control of the money spigot makes most of those questions moot.

This isn't to say it's a done deal, an established fact. I think there are a few scenarios where this might, in retrospect, look like a feverish moment of chaos rather than the fall of the constitutional regime. The most likely way this happens, in my opinion, is if someone assassinates Musk. Not necessarily a Luigi Mangione, to be clear: between intelligence agencies (he shut down USAID, which means some percentage of the CIA probably wants him dead), to corporate and federal contracting rivals (whose data he has also stolen), to any of the millions of federal employees he is threatening with firing on a daily basis in an attempt to get them to quit, there are probably more people in DC right now with a good strong reason to murder him than not, and likely some good number of them have something like a plan in mind for how to do it.

The much less likely scenarios involve Trump somehow non-violently getting rid of Musk and DOGE, or someone on the Trump team managing to get the two of them to back down of their own volition, which, lol. Perhaps the two could engage in a power struggle sufficiently chaotic to stop both of their projects, but that seems like a fantasy at the moment.

There are a few other scenarios where historical forces might appear to defend the constitutional regime, the most optimistic being the return of the uprisings. I have been having that electric subcutaneous feeling again, that tingling in my muscles that says everything is ready to explode, everyone is just on the edge of taking the streets. That feeling, which I can't always explain but which I trust deeply, is based on some subconscious arithmetic of observations, combining increasing moments of protest, increasing expressions of frustration, anger and political attention everywhere I spend time– from social media to group chats to work place water coolers– an increasing tension in the shoulders of the people you see on the street and an intensity of purpose when friends tell you how they're feeling. An increase in the generalized sensation of rage.

Mass anti-ICE demonstrations have taken place across the whole West Coast, from Washington state down to the Texas borderlands. The media is so actively taking part in the coup that even friends of mine who live in the Pacific Northwest hadn't heard anything about these demonstrations, and only found out about them when I texted to ask questions. I only found them by scouring Twitch and TikTok live for livestreams after hearing reference to them in a single social media post or other. Over 2,000 people marched against ICE and shut down a freeway in LA yesterday.

This feeling isn't always right: I've had it many times when the feeling has simply passed of its own volition. And of course it's also influenced by my own strategic sense of the need at the moment, of my own energy accelerating and preparing me for confrontation, of the reenforcing cycle produced by my own recognition and trusting of the feeling. Still, sometimes it feels to me like insurrection is a kind of spell being cast by society, and revolutionaries are just people who have trained themselves to sense it, to act as conduits.

If the uprisings do restart, they might organize around a call to resist the coup (indeed, a brave crew of DC workers blocked Musk's Skibidi Hitler Youth from entering federal offices yesterday, and some of those workers held signs against the coup). But if such an uprising were to gain enough steam to actually stop the coup, that would mean it likely was engaged in overthrowing some part of the Trump apparatus, which would might quickly become more revolutionary than restorationist.

Another group that might claim to be acting to restore the constitution would be some combination of financiers, capitalists and intelligence agencies who might look to depose Trump and Musk and install Vance (or even Mike Johnson) in their place. This organized counter-coup grows more likely by the day, because the other thing going on, the thing that you and yours are probably paying attention to today, is the trade war Trump has started with Canada, Mexico and China.

The business class has been caught completely off guard by the tariffs, announced over the weekend, on the same day that the administrative coup began in earnest. They convinced themselves he wasn't actually going to do exactly what he said he was going to do, and were shocked to find leopards eating 25% of their faces so soon into the new administration. Traders, media tycoons, agribusiness heads and loads of other folks spent literally billions and billions of dollars on Trump's campaign on the brilliant theory that he wouldn't actually do tariffs, the policy he talked about the most consistently and which he had done in his first administration, because he knew that, actually, they would be too destructive. And even if he didn't, surely they would have bought enough influence to get what they want.

As a result commentators, economists, hedge fund managers and CEOs on Bloomberg and WSJ and CNBC and Twitter boldly proclaimed Trump wasn't actually serious about tariffs literally hours before Trump announced them.

Markets opened a few percentage points down today, but only a few percentage points because they continue to believe, for some reason, that these tariffs are only going to be temporary, that Trump is going to see the light. And therefore they still aren't pricing in the real damage these changes would make to the global economy, the real sell-off hasn't begun. Because the tariffs Trump has instituted, (as well as the change in small-shipment customs policy from China), will absolutely destroy the current economy, it will create cascading business failures, consumer good inflation and general supply chain breakdown on par with the Covid shutdown. China's economy is barely dragging itself through a recession in domestic demand, and the EU has been teetering even more precariously over the precipice than the US. All that would be true even if the AI bubble weren't already popping.

Between the economic damage and the rampant, chaotic, drug fueled chainsawing of the Federal budget (over the weekend Musk and Mike Flynn posted about cancelling a bunch of federal payments and grants to lutheran organizations, a collection of random disbursements they clearly found by word-searching "Lutheran" in some massive spreadsheet) there are a lot of different bags these two are threatening at once. And fucking with the money is a good way to end up getting handed a poisoned big mac or a tainted line of ketamine.

Of course such a violent apotheosis in order to install a "more controllable" empty suit would be an extreme violation of the constitutional order, but if done quickly enough it might be used to return some amount of status quo ante to the American empire.

With every day that passes, however, the explanation that these moves are designed to protect the constitution or the republic would become more and more moral justification and less and less accurate description. And again, if the people rise up in all of this – which they will only be more primed to do as prices explode upwards, people lose their jobs, the stock market plummets, and Musk and his gang of groyper boneheads fuck up federal payments, nevermind any of the other violent provocations against trans people, immigrants, disabled folks and people of color – there is no reason to imagine the crowds will stop at preventing this simple administrative coup. It's not even clear how they could, besides ripping Musk apart with their bare hands then going home.

You'll see I havent once mentioned the courts or the Democrats: they have abdicated their role in the historical moment. The judicial system is ultimately in the pocket of the administration, and even if individual judges strike down individual outrages (which they obviously should be doing!) the real struggle will happen at the level of politics and enforcement, which, thanks to the Democrats, tilts heavily in Trumps favor.

The Democrats refuse to even be an effective recuperative force. They aren't even loyal opposition, they're just 'loyal'. The Dems were willing to trade democracy for the chance at a few extra months of Palestinian genocide. Polls have shown that the margin of victory for Trump would've been overcome by potential Kamala voters who stayed home because of Palestine. While Al Aqsa Flood has (so far) failed to overthrow Netenyahu or end the Zionist project (nor has Netenyahu's war managed to defeat Hamas or unseat the PA) it already softened the Assad regime such that it could be overthrown, and has effected the destruction of the American constitutional Republic.

History loves a little joke like that, where an empire steps in to back up its client state and ends up the one on the chopping block. There is no denying that the liberation of Palestine is one of the core fulcrums in the world right now.

But despite such sweeping and ironic allusions, all of this is terrifying and violent. The weight of the horror feels immense. But this is the situation right now, at least as I understand it. This is the present, and we need to describe it as it is, as accurately as we can, not in order to despair, but to see what remains possible.

Because in this moment of counter-revolutionary chaos they are incredibly vulnerable. They are very very weak right now, they have alienated huge swathes of the federal bureaucracy, and have done so without getting the full repressive apparatus in hand. Of course they always-already have the loyalty of the fascists and MAGA-ites in ICE, CBP, and the police. But their street movement isn't re-organized yet, and the military and foreign services may be more damaged then helped by the current move fast and break the government strategy. They've agitated every sector of society they have potential direct power over, all at once, in the hope that everyone will get so overwhelmed that they will fail to resist.

They are killing, perhaps have killed the federal regime that has reigned since 1865, a regime that has reigned that long in part because it has been incredibly good at putting down resistance, both at home and abroad. I know way too much history to pretend things will necessarily get better, or that we wont come to wish that it had never happened. But I also know that that is not the only possible outcome, and at this moment it is the case that one of the great enemies of human liberation has been felled. Not the way we would have wanted to see it, but felled nonetheless. We do not get to act in historical moments of our own choosing.

This may well feel apocalyptic because the US hasn't lived through regime change (the closest things have been a few stolen election results, an impeachment driven resignation and a few deaths in office) since the Civil War. But almost every other state in the world went through some kind of regime change between one and five times in the same period. France has had like seven. Not all of them were apocalyptic, or permanent, or lead to fascism, although some of them were, and some of them did.

The fact of the matter is we have careened into a (counter)revolutionary period. Every revolution is a throw of the dice. In all likelihood the next years will fundamentally redefine the "America" that comes out the other side, but what that looks like will depend on who manages to take power and control events in the vacuum produced.

There is going to be a lot of possibility, a lot of fast change. It's likely the US empire comes out the other side way weaker, and that is a horizon we can fight for and push towards. Whatever happens will be weirder and more chaotic than any of us can anticipate: history always is. But there will be a lot of opportunities for us to make moves, build community power, and transform the way things are done.

And now, right now, there is the chance to topple the ancien regime entire. We needn't necessarily overthrow the whole government in one go: A series of riots that emptied jails and detention centers, well, that might be the American Bastille. A series of localized uprisings could create autonomous regions that could operate independently, or slide things inexorably into civil war, or both, and that civil war could be of a low or high intensity. The Trump administration could regain control and order and reestablish things under a fascist dictatorship. Nothing is certain, what they have done is forced the issue in the hope that they're more prepared to act than their opponents.

They have the Democrats dead to rights. But the masses?

Whatever happens, if you're reading this, you have likely already outlived the constitutional republic. That centuries-old hypocrisy that dominated this continent, that war-loving imperialist colony that screamed freedom and liberty with its mouth while it stomped on Black people, indigenous nations and the third world with its boots, that great factory of progress, science and ingenuity which poisoned the very air we breathe, filled the oceans with garbage and leveled the forests for pavements, that miserable ecocidal white supremacist project may have just been dealt a fatal blow by a group of pathetic little men, sniveling cowardly hucksters who have all the money in the world but are still so unpleasant to be around that they can't maintain a single relationship.

They are the apotheosis of the American project, of settler-colonial patriarchy, and they are so deeply imbued with the values of this society that the only way they can think of to show they love something is by owning it, and the only way to really own something, they understand deep in their bones, is by killing it. A fitting end to the project, a fitting pair of grave diggers, family annihilating fathers but acting at the scale of a whole society.

What's next is up to us, and if we don't act, it could very well be worse. But we have likely already outlived one American regime, one whose end seemed more or less unimaginable, until that end turned out to be as vulgar, violent and stupid as its beginnings.

We can outlive them, and the best way to do it is by fighting to make a world worth living in. And if we get started now, right now, that world might prove to be much closer than we thought.

*When I say the "2nd" American Republic, I'm referring to the one established at the end of the Civil War, which you could date at either 1865 or 1877. Of course, none of us have ever known anything but said 2nd Republic, and the 2nd Republic claimed the continuity of presidential elections and the Constitution across the Civil War as evidence that, in fact, it was the self-same government as the one established with the ratification of the Constitution in 1790. But like so much propaganda that a regime uses to legitimize itself, I think this story will die with it, and historians will see them as distinct periods of American history, with the First, the Slave Republic, going from 1790 to 1860. I have not yet read Marisha Sinha's The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, which sees that era as lasting from 1865-1920, after which comes the era of American Empire. I find this periodizing very compelling, and look forward to reading the book.