A few days ago I mumbled something about dire predictions that the GOP would mount procedural challenges to Harris (esp re her candidacy and fund-raising), and how those predictions prompted a wave of splaining about how there are no real legal issues — as if the GOP needs “real” ones? Please. But the larger point was deeper, a divide between an event-driven view (which lurches from one arbitrary, inconclusive circumstance to another, imo) vs a more ‘continuist’ view (mine, which emphasizes the right’s wider strategic, integrative approach — rightist media noise + legal prep + judicial corruption, etc). Some thoughts:
(a) Harris may be the candidate, but Biden is the president and Garland his milquetoast enforcer. So between when Trump loses the election (he will) and the inauguration, we’ll find ourselves in a very strange moment: Harris, as both VP and presumptive but not yet legally certified president-elect, on a collision course with Garland, who’s far more concerned with being formally scrupulous than politically effective.
(b) It’ll be easy for the GOP to seize control of the phrase “peaceful transfer of power” – from Biden to Trump of course — and contrast it with the actual transfer of power from Biden to Harris, which they’ll cast as a sort of “autogolpe.” Sooner or later, one side will need to WIN, and there’s very good chance that imposing that outcome will involve capital-S State violence — by which I mean the entity that claims a legitimate monopoly on violence, not “Texas.”
(c) The US “left” (such as it is) is utterly unprepared for this. Or, rather, it’s prepared wrong for this. Like, uniquely and completely fucking lost-in-the-forest, head-in-the-clouds, head-up-its-own-ass wrong. Why do I say that? For the same reason I’ve been saying for years and years that the left will need to get over high-minded abstractions (peace! love!) and finally embrace the use of force to achieve its poltical ends — in this case, inaugurating the winner, Harris. Dunno about you, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of single example over the last 40 years in which the left said “fuck the details, this is an absolutely legitimate use of State violence.” On the contrary, tha absolute (if mainly rhetorical) rejection of violence is pretty much how the left (mainly progressives) distinguishes itself from centrists, moderates, etc.
So: let’s say: (1) Harris wins the pop and EC vote, (2) the GOP besieges judiciaries and the media with a truckload of legal spaghetti aimed at generating chaos and (3) insists Trump “really“ won, and (4) plans to stage its own “true” inauguration of Trump with some critical mass of GOPer legislators and celebutantes attending that one. At what point would Garland step in and say, with every State lever at his disposal (police at every level, maybe even soldiers) nope, not happening. Answer: when it’s too late. Why too late? Because his style, which has defined his tenure, is that he‘s a good little jurist — because he is, above all, reactive. He believes, in his heart of hearts, that everything can be resolved in the courts. How’d that work out with the J6 prosecutions or in Georgia or the DC case?
If something even vaguely like this plays out, which way will the US “left” go? Will it do a Tokyo drift and suddenly say, “We changed our minds — violence is A-OK!”? Or instead, will it get lost in endless bloggy minutiae, event-driven wanking that (BINGO!) lurches from one arbitrary, inconclsusive circumstance to another, and get utterly played by dark social media memery?
Peace ’n’ love, people, peace ’n’ love.