A Facebook meme
“Hello. My name is David, and I live in a fascist country.”
“Hello, David.”
There is a well developed theory of what science calls complex adaptive systems. Each human being is an agent — meaning an autonomous unit with goals and capable of action — in a complex adaptive system. Agents live or die, wither or thrive, according to their ability to accurately judge the environment and adapt. When conditions change, agents must accurately assess the change and determine how to re-optimize their behavior in order to live and thrive, rather than wither and die, because the changed conditions may well be dangerous.
Agents compete for resources. Some agents use violence and deceit. Some rely on their wits, their ability to hide, or their ability to run fast. The wary may survive and thrive. The slow and foolish may not.
In complex adaptive systems, agents often have tags that identify what kind of agent they are. Agents may use flags to communicate with other agents. A deer’s appearance tags it as a deer. If you see a deer’s white tail, that’s a flag. The flag probably says to a baby deer, “There is a threat nearby. Run, and follow me.”
In human beings, skin color is a permanent tag that we are born with. Some tags are social. Tattoos are social tags that make some kind of subculture statement. Red MAGA caps are another kind of social tag. They help members of a herd identify each other while communicating a vague threat to non-members of the herd. Some agents can be safest if they fly under the radar by avoiding tags. That’s what camouflage is about.
Trump appeals to his witless and largely feckless herd of followers precisely because, as individuals, they have poor adaptations, and Trump promises to empower them. They have done something very clever. As a herd, acting in concert and following Trump blindly, they have found great power. It’s a collective adaptation, controlled by the uber-agent Trump, and it has been effective for bullying the rest of us and keeping us down.
But we are not defenseless. As agents, we are smarter than they are. Their uber-agent, Trump, is deteriorating, fast. If we don’t find a way to beat them, if we don’t develop adaptations better than theirs, quickly, and take our power back, then it’s our own fault. So, how do we adapt?
As liberals, caring and kindness are core moral values. We are capable of being civil even with people whom we find disgusting. Civility is a form of adaptation, even a kind of tag or camouflage. Civility comes with benefits. It keeps us from squandering our energy and our social capital on nonproductive conflict. Civility doesn’t have to be sincere to be effective.
How it is possible to be civil to someone when what you really want is to knock the living hell out of them? To want to knock the living hell out of people who deserve it is surely irresistibly human. And yet, especially because we are liberals rather than fascists, we believe that to be treated with civility is a basic human right. Even murderers, or Trumps, put in prison should be treated with civility. While treating MAGA types with civility as individuals, we must be as politically brutal as the law allows. They, after all, have gone way beyond the law in pursuing political brutality. There are reasons why they see us as weak. To be seen as weak in a dangerous environment invites even greater danger.
I live in a red rural county, surrounded by MAGA Republicans. If I was rude to them because of what they are, it would gain me nothing. They would treat me twice as rudely in return, mark me as an outsider, and abuse me in any way they thought they could get away with. But authoritarians are not like us. Caring and kindness outside their in-group is not wired into them the way it’s wired into liberals. They have a fear reaction toward out-groups, toward anyone who is different or who looks different. But if you look more or less like them, and if you are civil, and if you don’t touch one of their many triggers, they will be civil in return.
It’s very telling, really, that my Republican neighbors barely get along with each other. It’s in their authoritarian wiring. They’re always feuding. They make up, for a while, and then they feud again. I think they find pleasure in it. Property lines and dogs are the usual fuel, but they’re always on the lookout for something to get offended over. They don’t seem to notice that David, that nice Democrat, is the only one who doesn’t spat with them. As one neighbor said about me once, after they’d chased down, berated, and threatened to shoot the driver of a car who ignored the hand-painted 10 mph speed signs on our mile-long private road, “David don’t make no trouble.”
Indeed, David don’t. David has a lot of experience with white authoritarians. Only a few — two, actually, in the last sixteen years — have been pigs enough to try to provoke me or threaten me. The Republicans in this county actually like me. They treat me with respect, they call me “sir,” and they don’t see me as dangerous. But I hope I’m more dangerous than they know.
A common adaptation of gay people is to be seen as a nice person, even “sweet.” This is an adaptation often used by those with little power. It’s aimed at making their environment safer. They look for ways to make themselves needed. It’s a good adaptation when other agents are potentially dangerous. It’s also good for communities, because people who are needed do good things. Rural black people, I have learned, often have similar adaptations. Children sometimes do, and some women do. It’s a way of staying out of the way of abuse. Everyone could learn from that.
About 66 million Americans voted against Trump. Even if MAGA wanted to beat us down, they can’t beat all of us down because they need us. We’d do well to find little ways of reminding them of that. Part of the divide is that liberals as a group have superior skills, superior educations, and more resources. There is no nuclear accelerator here in my county, because no one would no how to operate it. You will find nuclear accelerators in liberal enclaves — Berkeley, say, or at Palo Alto near Stanford.
Trump and Stephen Miller think we don’t need the 20 million immigrants that they want to deport. Corporate America may see that differently. The propaganda tells the MAGA herd that immigrants are here because liberals opened all the doors and invited them in. Nope. Immigrants are here because of corporate America’s need for cheap labor. Blaming liberals is corporate propaganda. Corporations work very hard to keep people from knowing who works in the slaughterhouses, who works in the fields, and who runs the sewing machines. Immigrants serve two purposes — they are a supply of cheap labor, and they are the powerless scapegoats that fascists require.
You can count on this: If the Trump administration actually goes through with a plan to deport 20 million immigrants, then new scapegoats will have to be found. Not to mention someone to work in the slaughterhouses, work in the fields, and run the sewing machines. Deporting millions of people would cost a huge amount of money. It also would require places that look just like concentration camps, which they will try to keep us from seeing.
There is no contradiction between civility and payback. It’s actually one of the oldest rules of adaptation in the book — speak softly and carry a big stick. If we are going to beat today’s fascist Republicans, then we are going to have to play some serious hardball. With no insult to Kamala Harris intended, the people who have been recruited into fascism don’t get “joy.” The willingness to kick some ass is what’s joyful to them.
I’m not saying that women can’t play hardball. Nancy Pelosi does, magnificently, as did Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. Hillary Clinton probably would have played good hardball as president, though her track record was more about diplomacy (which certainly sometimes involves hardball) rather than plain old political hardball. If Democrats want to run a woman for president again, it had better be a woman with a proven, and publicly known, track record of hardball.
Lyndon Johnson played hardball. Bill Clinton did, until he was politically castrated, caught with his britches down. What would you expect Republicans to do upon catching Bill Clinton with his britches down? Why don’t we do the same to them? At how many crimes has Trump been caught red-handed and even with his britches down? One of the reasons I like Beto O’Rourke is that he is hardened by Texas politics. He radiates the Lyndon Johnson style of hardball playing. Can Gavin Newsome play hardball? I don’t think we know for sure. Can Pete Buttigieg play hardball? I suspect he can. He has been tested in Afghanistan, though not yet in politics. I never saw Barack Obama as a strong president. I see him as weak one, because he was afraid to play hardball with Republicans. I suspect that Jimmy Carter is seen as a weak president because he didn’t play hardball.
Timidity in playing hardball is a fatal characteristic of today’s Democratic Party. If Biden’s Justice Department had moved quickly and aggressively to try Trump for his crimes, Trump would be in jail now. We didn’t. Instead the Justice Department pussy-footed around and played croquet while Trump and his lawyers played hardball. And now here we are, paying a terrible price. A criminal con man who should have been in prison by now will instead return to the White House.
Ken, whom I mentioned in yesterday’s post, is onto this theme. Hardly anyone else is. For whatever reason, liberals today devalue and suppress old-fashioned, masculine, high-testosterone hardball and the high-testosterone pursuit of liberal goals. We’re paying dearly for that, politically. Even young men are now moving toward fascism. If we’re ever going to beat the Republicans and win men back, we’ll have to beat the living daylights out of the fascists, at hardball. We also need to make a spectacle of it, as Trump does. Would young males rather go to a weenie roast and sing Kumbaya? Or to a football game, and get that testosterone rush?
Hardball is scalable. Even in my small-pond experience as a Democratic county chair, I had to play some hardball. If someone broke the rules and did some dirty politics (I had two serious cases of it in six years as county chair), I paid them back, and I found ways to do it without breaking the rules. That was a skill I learned in my years in the hyper-competitive environment of the San Francisco media. Many tried to eat my lunch. No one succeeded. I took them all down by beating them at hardball, even as I preserved my reputation for integrity and broke no rules. In the corporate world, petty tyrants who break the rules will eventually make a fatal mistake, and the HR department will then get rid of them for you. My super-power here in Trumpland is understanding how to play hardball while enforcing, rather than breaking, the rules. I know how the system works and how to work the system. Most rural fascists have no idea how to do that. They outsource their agency by joining the fascist herd. If they win together, as they did on November 5, they also will lose together, if we stick it to them.
Part of the trick of out-competing other agents is to adapt more quickly than they can. We liberals have been terrible at that.
Trump and his fascists just won an election, but they do not have a clear path to total and everlasting domination — not unless we let them have it, anyway. They want us to see them as invulnerable and to see their domination as inevitable. But many things are going to go wrong for them, and many things are going to stand it their way. Our job is to move faster than them and to maximize the damage from every obstacle they hit. The media will repeat their lies for them. We still have not figured out how to counter that. We must try, perhaps by shaming the media. We must profit from fascist mistakes. We must outsmart them. We must move without hesitation when what is needed is clear.
Nice people can play hardball. Unless we give the fascist machine time to corrupt the law, the law is on our side. We can play hardball without breaking the rules and without breaking the law.
Everybody I know is angry. Let’s channel our anger. We are not rabbits. We are apex predators. We have the numbers, the resources, and the smarts. Let’s start now, and let’s beat the living damn daylights out of them.
