Go to Hard-Normal

Turn off the juice, boy!

It’s a plan, an effort to create something by pretending to describe it. You defeat it by declining it, and deliberately, persistently, stubbornly going the other way.

Escalation is everywhere. This week, the President of the United States said that his political opponents are domestic enemies, a grim and provocative framing of ordinary disagreement.

These comments come in the wake of equally aggressive language from Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the FBI, who compared Trump supporters to Islamist terrorists — causing journalistic joygasms over the call for heightened political surveillance of the American folk devils who dare to pose as our neighbors and family members.

While past and present federal officials call their countrymen enemies and terrorists for disagreeing with them, the National School Boards Association is imploding as state organizations withdraw from it in the wake of the NSBA’s brutally stupid letter calling for federal law enforcement to use repressive tools like “the PATRIOT Act in regards to domestic terrorism” against angry parents — a demand the attorney general promptly flattered and refuses to abandon. And the FBI now announces its plans to create a new domestic terrorism unit to target the political disagreement crisis, while the halfwit Keith Olbermann calls for the POTUS to fight for democracy and Our American Political Norms by viciously purging the class enemy.

Now: If you were looking to radicalize your opponents and stir up violence, what would you do differently than calling people who disagree with your political views internal enemies and domestic terrorists? The description itself — the claim, alone, but especially when coupled with the threat of new and more aggressive political repression by the instruments of state power — is a provocation. It amounts to jabbing someone in the chest to warn that they’re looking pretty agitated. You gonna do somethin’? Huh? Huh? Whatsamatter, pal, you mad? Poke poke poke poke poke.

If someone did this to you in a bar, you’d know what it was. It seems increasingly obvious that this is a maneuver, a political strategy. Provoke, push, agitate, stir up anger, and then run against the anger in the mid-term elections, and use the threat of violence to grow a national security apparatus that can be aligned to political party interests. The intention of the sad sack American ruling class, a dismal gang of mediocrities and failures, is to drive their opponents into a state of agitation so they can posture against the appearance of popular rage. The now-constant drumbeat of bien pensant warnings about the growing danger of a transition to a new American civil war is an effort to create something that can be made to look like the onset of civil war, so they can make a show of opposing it — so they can pose as the defenders of normal and functioning society, which DEAR GOD they are not, not after close to two years spent crushing society and warning against ordinary human interaction.

The answer to this attack-provoking-attack, to this button-pushing that increasingly seems quite clearly designed to force an enraged response, is just one simple thing:

Ordinary politics.

Against provocation, adopt a strategy of extreme calm and adamant political normality. Work for reasonable laws, support decent candidates, make clear political arguments firmly but calmly, and don’t take the fucking bait.

Act as if:

Act on the view that American political norms are persistent, that institutions are functioning, that people can listen to arguments. Much of that isn’t true; act as if. Just as messaging about the threat of domestic conflict and internal enemies is an effort to create the thing being dressed up with fake warnings, the recourse to normal politics is a gesture at creation. Against an increasingly desperate attempt to tear down the country and turn people against each other, it’s a parallel effort to bring a state of affairs into being. By simulating it, we can make some degree of it real. On the other hand, the alternative is that by rejecting normal politics we embrace a political maneuver to render society increasingly pathological for the purpose of harvesting power from the wreckage.

Fall back on normal. It’s our Alamo. Defend it.