US - Greenland Crisis Thread

[Admiral Yi]

I would approve of it much more than what's going on now.  At the least I could respect the people doing it.

[The Brain]

Best one so far. 

[Richard Hakluyt]

There are always extremists who exploit protests for their own ends. These people are useful to whoever is against the protest, they can be shown breaking the law or with offensive slogans or signs, which is then used to blacken the name of the entire protest movement.

[Zoupa]

I would approve of it much more than what's going on now.  At the least I could respect the people doing it.

What do you mean by "what's going on now" that you disapprove of and don't respect? I'm not aware of any counteractions to the ICE stuff.

[Tamas]

I really liked Oex's summary and I do agree with it.

I am still worried on average people have it too comfortable to risk going against the rapidly forming autocratic state. Yes I do based that on myself as well. Would I risk my freedom and life and thus and future and life of my wife and child by resisting, when I could just lay low and continue my middle class lifestyle, or emigrate and do so somewhere else? Maybe in the UK I would as it's a home worth defending and a place that could hope to turn good again, but I already GTFO-ed once instead of staying to struggle on, so who knows.

I have nothing but respect for the people heckling and obstructing ICE in Minessota - especially since the shooting they know they are in mortal danger doing so.

[crazy canuck]

It's quite possible that these institutions hold. My point is always that these institutions do not exist in a vacuum, removed from civil society. It will be easier for them to hold if people know that someone out there finds something abhorrent. Institutions normalize: that's what they do, and it's frighteningly easy to get carried by the stream of the routine. They are also slow. It's part of the design: slowness allows for input. It's part of the problem: slowness allows them to be bypassed by fascists, who all celebrate swiftness.

In these circumstances, cowardice is easier when you feel you are alone. Resisting authoritarian impulse within institutions is easier when you know you have people who feel like you do, or whose passion, and slogans, and dedication, can also help you shape your own idea about the right and the wrong, not just the legal and the illegal.

ICE is beyond saving: that institution is much too steeped into authoritarianism. But there will be a time when the army may be asked to fire on a crowd, or to invade Denmark; a time when judges will be told the desired outcome of a trial; a moment when a Member of Congress will be offered a bribe, or cowed into silence or compliance. That time is upon us.

This is why I am concerned when people attempt to delegitimize protests, in the hope that normalcy will prevail on its own, or that they frighten the good people. Waiting for institutions to save you while they are being actively subverted leaves you defenceless when the outcome isn't what you were hoping for - because they you are left with a perverted doubt that, maybe, there's a legitimate reason why it didn't work. The Biden mandate should have imparted that lesson, more than once.

In the same vein of your very good point that one should not normalize behavior, one should also not take note that many of these institutions have already failed.

The FBI, the DOJ, the courts are all examples of their democratic institutions that have failed in the United States.

In the case of the courts, not everywhere, but at the federal level, the rulings that have been made are astounding and shocking.  It's just that the degree of failure is wrapped up legally and so not easily accessible nor understandable by the general public, even if very well informed on other issues.

Part of the reason for that is the way in which news media has been degraded.  Another pillar of the problem, democracy.

[bogh]

I basically think the division of power in the US is dead. The executive reigns supreme over the legislative, the judicial is (at least at the Supreme Court level) subservient to the executive and the so-called fourth estate of the media has been defanged entirely.

I fail to see which institution to pin my hopes on. So the US system and society seems to be heading only way - towards an authoritarian, kleptocratic state, riven with violence and no social cohesion.

In that context, handwringing about whether protestors are to rude or acting unruly seems like a massive loss of perspective.

[Valmy]

I basically think the division of power in the US is dead. The executive reigns supreme over the legislative, the judicial is (at least at the Supreme Court level) subservient to the executive and the so-called fourth estate of the media has been defanged entirely.

I fail to see which institution to pin my hopes on. So the US system and society seems to be heading only way - towards an authoritarian, kleptocratic state, riven with violence and no social cohesion.

In that context, handwringing about whether protestors are to rude or acting unruly seems like a massive loss of perspective.

I have thought, as a thought experiment, what if the Democrats had such a massive success in this election that they achieved a veto-proof majority in both chambers? I mean they won't but go with me here. They would just start passing bills and overriding Trump's veto and forcing them to become law. But Trump has already established that he can just ignore laws he doesn't like. He can just shut down departments and end programs and cancel treaties all approved by Congress and are in law. So what actual difference would that make? Not much as far as I can see. The Presidency is the only office that matters anymore.

[crazy canuck]

I basically think the division of power in the US is dead. The executive reigns supreme over the legislative, the judicial is (at least at the Supreme Court level) subservient to the executive and the so-called fourth estate of the media has been defanged entirely.

I fail to see which institution to pin my hopes on. So the US system and society seems to be heading only way - towards an authoritarian, kleptocratic state, riven with violence and no social cohesion.

In that context, handwringing about whether protestors are to rude or acting unruly seems like a massive loss of perspective.

I have thought, as a thought experiment, what if the Democrats had such a massive success in this election that they achieved a veto-proof majority in both chambers? I mean they won't but go with me here. They would just start passing bills and overriding Trump's veto and forcing them to become law. But Trump has already established that he can just ignore laws he doesn't like. He can just shut down departments and end programs and cancel treaties all approved by Congress and are in law. So what actual difference would that make? Not much as far as I can see. The Presidency is the only office that matters anymore.

Yep, and I know I am sounding like a broken record on this, but once the rule of law is lost, all is lost.

People can talk about getting political all they want, but short of revolution, politics is impotent if conducted within a state without the rule of law.

[bogh]

Yeah. Congress and courts are submissive, but also ultimately powerless. Not sure how to reverse any of it tbh.

[The Minsky Moment]

We really don't know yet. Admittedly the signs are bad.

The administration has ducked and weaved with the courts.  But they haven't flagrantly violated court orders since Emil Bove* ordered the planes to fly to El Salvador with Abrego-Garcia and others. The bigger problem has been the Supreme Court sabotaging lower courts trying to do their job and deliberately enabling Trump.  The institution isn't working because of a personnel problem.

With Congress, there is no check because the Speaker of the House is an empty suit, an errand boy for the President. Thune is a coward with little bark and no bite.   You can't make a judgment about the powerlessness of Congress when Congress is not even attempting to exercise power. The true test will be if an election is held in 2026 and the Democrats take one or more chambers.  Then we'll know where we really stand.

*Bove's reward was appointment to a federal appeals court, which is hardly reassuring.

[crazy canuck]

Saying the dysfunction of the US courts is a personnel problem is both accurate and a bit misleading. The court is the personnel sitting as judges.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

And now krasnov is threatening tariffs for countries that don't support his Greenland bs.

Bon, tariffs then and hopefully the eu retaliates tit for tat.

[Sheilbh]

It's quite possible that these institutions hold. My point is always that these institutions do not exist in a vacuum, removed from civil society. It will be easier for them to hold if people know that someone out there finds something abhorrent. Institutions normalize: that's what they do, and it's frighteningly easy to get carried by the stream of the routine. They are also slow. It's part of the design: slowness allows for input. It's part of the problem: slowness allows them to be bypassed by fascists, who all celebrate swiftness.

Also many of these institutions are not democratic or neutral in any event. Looking to institutions for salvation is, I think, often predicated on a partial reading of those institutions' histories and roles. The idea that the FBI is a force for civic good seems to me to only work if you focus on the Trump era very specifically. For about half of its history it was run by J Edgar Hoover and we literally don't know what was in the safe in his personal office. A significant part of its origin story is the first red scare which was the repression of certain political views and organising, often through deportations, and the Hoover era is not the end of its deep participation in domestic surveillance.

I think you can say something similar with the courts. These are broadly speaking non-democratic, relatively unaccountable bodies who recruit from a narrow spectrum of well educated, high status people (with all the intersections of class, gender, race that entails at any given time). I think their role has very often been supporting, disseminating and policing ideology that justifies and preserves their power - and therefore the system that is producing them.

To the extent we look at them as sources of civic virtue I think is in part because the background of their personnel is now more similar to the background of people on the broadly left-of-centre of politics in a way that wasn't the case in the past (and may not be in the future). But also I think it is through a sometimes folk memory of their heroic moments. For the Supreme Court a couple of shining eras of expansive and progressive judgemanship and the FBI literally just the last 10 years.

I also think there is a strategic trap here. In becoming the party of norms and institutions you can undermine your capacity to present an alternative. Part of this is the point that Buttigieg has made (which I think is also the Abundance point to an extent). Biden got big important spending bills passed and Buttigieg said that, to his huge frustration, in his department very little of that spending had actually happened by 2024 because it was wrapped up in process. If you are the party of norms and institutions and there are systemic/structural problems you may not be able to actually govern effectively which just reinforces the appeal of the outsider anti-institutional candidate. You maybe need to be able to subvert or cut through those norms to deliver. Similarly I think I was on the wrong side of this but Tusk in Poland after beating PiS used extraordinary legal powers to basically purge the state broadcaster of a lot of PiS appointments that basically turned it into a very party political broadcaster. On the one hand that creating a precedent for the next time PiS win - on the other they'd already done it so they don't need a precedent and not doing it is perhaps the equivalent of political unilateral disarmament. This is perhaps the Merrick Garland paradox: fabuloously qualified, astonishingly useless.

ICE is beyond saving: that institution is much too steeped into authoritarianism. But there will be a time when the army may be asked to fire on a crowd, or to invade Denmark; a time when judges will be told the desired outcome of a trial; a moment when a Member of Congress will be offered a bribe, or cowed into silence or compliance. That time is upon us.

Totally agree. As I say in my view it is time for civil disobedience against ICE. It is that bad and, to the Gandhi/satyagraha point, given how violent and uncontrolled ICE are that may involve people putting themselves at risk. But I don't think lawyers or judges, for example, should cooperate and I think they should take the risk.

There are always extremists who exploit protests for their own ends. These people are useful to whoever is against the protest, they can be shown breaking the law or with offensive slogans or signs, which is then used to blacken the name of the entire protest movement.

Totally agree.

Although on the extremist point I'd add that I think there's a slight element of the self-reinforcing from the left on this. I think we are in an era of radical chic intellectually. So there's lots of work that has re-discovered radical movements ahead of their time and the ideas they had which may seem either still current (so by implication: still unachieved) or normalised. It's also done by looking at the radical history of sanitise figures like Gandhi or MLK. This is all true and valuable but I think it can be misleading. It can focus on intellectual fertile and important groups or groupuscules, while I actually think you need to look at the deliberately sanitising stuff that people like MLK or Gandhi did in order to make their movements succeed.

I think about this with the whole antifa, punch fascists stuff which is loosely inspired by the German Communist Party's Antifascist Aktion in the 20s and early 30s. Because I always wonder to myself - do the people making those points know what happed to the German Communist Party in the late 30s? It's a little like Peter Cook's gag about the power of satire and being inspired by "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to top the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War". I mention those examples because I think France is the only country where there was a serious fascist threat in the inter-war era and the democratic, republican system prevailed. And the lesson there is about broadening your coalition - it's Popular Front politics and mass mobilisation (obviously there was some street violence but it was less of the strategy than it was for the KPD).

As I say I think we are in a moment of the more radical wing and action just being a bit cooler if less effective. As well as provoking reactions that allow Trump to pose as the party of order (I think, incidentally, this is where ICE may undo itself because I don't think that's how it comes across). And I think we'd be better served with more thinking about how to build the broader coalitions, mobilise as many as possible etc even at the risk of disappointing the cool kids - I sort of think this about the slight disdain by some for the "resist libs" which I get but also think people need to get over themselves. Those are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people ready to be mobilised in my view.

I basically think the division of power in the US is dead. The executive reigns supreme over the legislative, the judicial is (at least at the Supreme Court level) subservient to the executive and the so-called fourth estate of the media has been defanged entirely.

I fail to see which institution to pin my hopes on. So the US system and society seems to be heading only way - towards an authoritarian, kleptocratic state, riven with violence and no social cohesion.

In that context, handwringing about whether protestors are to rude or acting unruly seems like a massive loss of perspective.

I think this is key. I'd slightly frame it differently in that I think a huge number of problems in the US right now ultimately comes from a decades long process of Congress successivly abdicating its role and its power. And if Congress isn't the place of governance and legislation - which it isn't - that power doesn't just sort of fall away. Other institutions will fill the void. The executive through executive orders but also the vast apparatus of the administrative state, the huge discretionary powers on foreign policy and matters of war and peace. But also the judiciary through a process of legalising political questions - because it's no longer possible to achieve political change through Congress. It is simply astonishing reading about even relatively recent periods in the past when Congress - and individual Senators and Congresspeople - were so much more significant.

I don't know how you unwind this. But I think any solution will run through Congress re-asserting itself and getting a little bit of its dignity and power back.

On your wider point I find the echoes with Latin American countries and constitutional breakdowns interesting. But I don't know (this goes for looking at the world too) as on the one hand I can't think of an example of a democratic society recovering itself from the sort of situation and issues the US has on the other hand not many people have made money betting against the US.

[Jacob]

So Denmark has invited the US to participate in the upcoming military exercises in Greenland.