Welcome to the Occupation

I spent the day reading reactions to another attempt to kill Donald Trump. The usual parade of David Frum, Tom Nichols, Peter Baker, Jonathan Chait, Bill Kristol, and on and on, are developing a common theme in which assassination attempts directed against a person are proof that the person is very bad and it’s his fault. I’m sure David French will weigh in at some point, and then we’ll have another stain to wash off. My inclination for much of the day was to regard this message mostly as a manifestation of mental illness:

Speaking of sickness, the soulless husk of Hillary Clinton was on MSNBC on Monday, demanding in the wake of the second attempt to kill Trump that the news media be much more aggressive in framing the man as an evil creature who is dangerous to the entire world — and arguing that Americans should be “criminally charged” for posting messages “boosting Trump” on social media. For most of the day I was considering a boycott of this increasingly repulsive demoralization operation, and I think there’s a strong argument to be made for withdrawal and a deliberate silence. Convince me that I lose something important by not thinking about the existence of Tom Nichols anymore. At some point a fair response to the flow of sewage is to…get out of the sewer.

However.

Quasi-colonial administrators are isolated in the American Green Zone, scratching their heads about a country they govern and detest. It seems increasingly clear that this discourse about Trump and his evil MAGA supporters is a discourse of conquest in which the center regards itself as politically legitimate but regards the periphery as necessarily illegitimate in all of its political and cultural choices. Why are you people challenging our authority? More simply:

It seems increasingly like the American political and cultural “mainstream” is consciously or near-consciously conducting counterinsurgency operations against half the country.

During the Iraq War, a US Army officer named John Nagl wrote a book about counterinsurgency that defined the task this way:

Counterinsurgency integrates all elements of national power, including information operations, to build a stable political center against a menu of dangers that includes internal threats.

Here’s a description of the tactics of isolation and influence that appears in the US Army field manual on counterinsurgency, and note especially the paragraph numbered 10-41:

Counterinsurgency is the use of influence operations to achieve behavior modification, breaking support for the political resistance.

The relentless depiction of Donald Trump as a figure who isn’t politically legitimate, and can’t ever become politically legitimate, is the way Americans spoke about the Filipino president of a breakaway republic in Luzon after the American annexation of the Philippines. Donald Trump is Emilio Aguinaldo: a figure who claims a “presidency” but doesn’t merit one, an insurgent who should be crushed and exiled. Influence operations should be used to break the attachment of his supporters and end the insurgency, establishing the unchallenged supremacy of the prevailing power.

Hillary Clinton’s messaging about suppression of social media, arrests of social media users, and control of the information space is informed by the vocabulary of counterinsurgency. What she means, in a not terribly veiled way, is that the politically legitimate central authority should crush the internal enemy, the insurgent, through the use of information operations. Hillary Clinton never met a war she didn’t like, and her last great war is against us.

And so the Department of Defense is pouring out grant money for professors who study political attachments and social media, and for research institutes that work on “cognitive security.” The military is working on breaking your attachment to mean tweets, so you can learn to hold the proper political views.

There’s a subtext that seems to be rising to the surface. When members of Congress talk about Trump supporters as “domestic terrorists,” what they mean is….