Post #2109: A glimpse of clarity

Dual State

I don’t normally say “you should read this”, but you should read this, in The Atlantic: America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State, by Aziz Huq. That term — the dual state — crystallized a whole lot of what’s been going on.

Read. Or read not. The full thing is behind a paywall.

It’s not something that can be easily nutshelled.

The economic gist is that continued rule-of-law, for the little people, is of great economic value. In essence, it’s increasingly harder to do normal business as civil order breaks down. E.g., Nobody’s stupid enough to turn off the electricity over an ideological difference. So far.

The end product is the dual state. Partly, it’s a place that seems to be governed in a fairly normal fashion (particularly if you are fairly mainstream), but with an increasingly large “other” sphere of government run as if it were unrestrained by law, essentially life at the whim of the King-and-Advisors.

You hope you’re living your life outside of their sphere of interest.

You keep on keeping on.

And you wish somebody could keep that lawless behavior in check.

But if the House won’t impeach and the Senate won’t convict, there can be no Constitutional crisis, because the Congress (currently) will not invoke the powers granted to it by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court doesn’t impeach. The Congress won’t. Ergo, no Constitutional Crisis.

Subscribing. I’ve been doing a lot of subscribing. It’s the least I can do. Or damn near. And occasionally I read something that clarifies the picture.

First they came for the Socialists,

This entire genre of memes can now be classified as common corollary of the dual state.

If, at first, neither the King nor his minions take exception to you, then, presumably, you are OK. At least in the sense of being safe, for now.

You do have to worry, though, if there’s not some sort of internal dynamic at work. To maintain something like this, don’t you always have to have an an enemy. And, as you succeed in cowing/conquering your enemies, don’t you nedd a continuous supply of fresh enemies? At which point, you turn from a simple yes/no safe/not-safe binary, to more of a continuous variable: If there’s an enemies list, and there’s an imperative to keep it fresh, then how far down the list are people like me?

All else aside, the size or extent of that safe space remains unknown.

Putting aside the entire issue of that the unsafe space — the “whim of the King” portion of Dual Government — should not exist.