An Anarchist Analysis of the Impeachment Crisis

From It's Going Down

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast (originally recorded for Pacifica Radio), we present a discussion and analysis on the evolving impeachment crisis. Fundamentally we ask if we have a dog in this fight, as the Democrats, who have spent years advancing and helping to fund Trump’s drive toward war, his growing attacks on migrants, Muslims, and the poor, and his massive transfer of wealth into the hands of the elites through his tax cuts, are now pushing for an impeachment inquiry over totally unrelated matters.

During our discuss we primarily focus on Trump’s open calls for his base to take up the cause of defending him, pushing a narrative of “civil war” and a “coop,” as a means of remaining in power. Meanwhile, websites like InfoWars and groups like the Oath Keepers have run with this narrative, which Trump has re-enforced by claiming that if he is removed, the Democrats and the “radical left” with take away peoples’ “guns and religion.”

Above all, it should be noted that this is new political territory in American politics, as the neoliberal State continues to spiral into a crisis, the push towards authoritarian rule continues, and Trump motions to his base to take to the streets.

There are 13 Comments

Nice! Since this got posted by thecollective, can't wait to hear what blip they have to say about it in the anews podcast.
Every now and again I listen to the IGD podcast, and the This is America podcast.

It's interesting how much they can stomach analyzing mainstream media stream of party politics, considering that they're anarchists. Almost as amazing as how I can sometimes stomach to listen to the podcast, not because of them, but the topics they cover.

They really get deep into the minutia of the news (internet gossip, twitter) stream.
Which makes me want to tune out, but then i might miss out on the tidbits which make part of the panorama that i normally ignore. It might a boring droning daily real spectacle, but it's still happening, and were awash in it, and people react in tides to it.
Opportunities and trends will be determined or influenced or colored by that, so it's important to not be tone deaf, at least to appear that you're in the loop. But also, one can disregard and ignore all this and recognize it as unimportant and meaningless.
Hey, I'm really self-aware and meta, and nihilist-aware and not a red nor a liberal, don't judge me, i care so much about what you think of me, jk, sarcasm. Senileoldtroll please appear out of nowhere to comfort me with your normieness and red sounding non-red nihilist influence pragmatism and rich life experience based wisdom. Two choices in life: post screeds, or not post screeds. A lot of times I write the screeds and then don't post them. Then at other times, I post them. I am an insane person. jk, we don't believe in those categories right? Was just rereading Canenero. Psychs and screw wooo rasberries in your directions, wooohooo i'm freeeee wohooooo not in the nut house wooooohoooooo wooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

I was listening to this podcast in the back ground as i played a bit of online chess, got to a stalemate. I opened with h3 cuz yolo, i make bad decisions on purpose. im tired of the only reasonable opening i know (King's Indian Attack / King's Indian Defense, which i didn't memorize from reading it, but learned it was a thing after i had fallen into the routine of using it. it's a mediocre, unambitious, "safe" and defensive way to play. it's also aesthetically pleasing in its symmetries and asymmetries. it makes the game easier to read and manage for me, slower pace, less explosive. it really gets things "stuck" sometimes. constrains both our movements. rarely gets me a win, but draws out my loss for longer than other improvisation which would require thinking ahead various moves and scenarios like the pros. i rarely think one or two moves ahead. psychoanalyze my chess, daddy). the game was unorthodox which i like. we we're evenly matched; two unskilled casual amateurs, and the game ran out of time at a stalemate. I ran of time first, they had a few minutes left (like maybe more than three, you see, I was distracted by the podcast and typing this). I left them with only the king, I had a rook and a knight. Didn't have time for a mate.

wow, this podcast is endless, how boring (i'm boring), i mostly typing to avoid turning it off, and see if i have anything related to their topics i can comment...ugh so boring....what are they doing? what am i doing?...ok...i'm out....Tom Nomad needs to curb the news consumption, sounds kinda hysterical and seems to be talking to liberals that are somehow willing to transform into anarchist insurgents at the drop of a hat...send tweet

it is nice to hear these discussions from people who aren't thoroughly obedient to the standard democrat/republican dynamics, which now seem to be changing in part because of trump freakout.

A perspective that i would like to add to this, i've talked about this a lot with people i know but is not one that i feel needs to be taken very seriously, is maybe it's better that trump stays president just because he's more stupid and mentally unstable than most presidents? I mean, looking at this from a pure damage perspective, trump has been the instigator of mass shootings which of course aren't something to be happy about unless you're an eco-extremist or just like the thought of people getting killed, and has made the immigration process more hellish for people being caught up in it, but if you compare the way that the past three presidents have advanced neo-liberal policies, killed people, and fucked with immigrants, maybe trump is actually the least genocidal and destructive of the four? He certainly seems to be pretty unhealthy for US political hegemony overall.

What does the peanut gallery think of this perspective?

it all works in unpredictable ways, there's no way to know which is "better" and it's even more indeterminable if you go person by person, although it's patently clear for others, those who would be directly benefited or harmed in one scenario or the other.

but for the most part, in the big scale of things (which is an abstraction that is not of human scale and is therefore insensitive and not empathetic to all the little differences that are big deals and mean everything to many people particularly), it's really more or less the same whoever is president, and that has of course been the point all along around these parts.

the political divisions won't disappear or be ameliorated whoever wins, and Trump can't win forever. i don't think it will get as bad as civil war as the hysteric sensationalists, fearmongers, and instigators say. someone could say that whether it's Dem or Rep who wins will determine which side gets agitated the most into "firing the first shot" in this imagined civil war. but the first shots were already fired in the first civil war. it's the butthurt right and neo-confederacy that's wanting a confrontation and a divide.
the government is on the uncomfortable position of turning a blind eye to this faction to appease them and confronting them head on, which would make it look civil war-ish. if they support them head on, it would be civil war-ish as well.

but the conflict and tensions will not rise to that level [according to me] though unrest may resemble the level 60's era stuff, but a different scenario, of course. US (geopolitical) hegemony relative slight downfall is due mainly to factors that no president can help, largely macro things like demographic, economic geo-graphic/geologic/envoronmental/ecosystem factors at a global scale. you can only do so much with politics (includes policies, diplomacy and war). the current modern (urban westernized) way of life that's fairly homogeneous worldwide dictates the macro trends. US influence in the globalized culture was, is, and will keep on being a hegemonic one, but the trademark stamp fade away as it has been appropriated everywhere, affirmed by each as their own autoctonous form of """"progress"""".

"it's really more or less the same whoever is president, and that has of course been the point all along around these parts."

it's kinda what me and my RL anarchist friend say, that US presidents don't really have any power or control to speak of. In order to enjoy doing that you have to be very egotistical, and yeah trump is very egotistical but doesn't seem to be having a good time because he really doesn't know what he's doing. The US political machine much more resembles a machine than some sort of a dictatorship, which is why the misconception that trump is going to push "our" government into being some neo-third reich is very silly to me.

"it's the butthurt right and neo-confederacy that's wanting a confrontation and a divide."

damn right. I always have to laugh when the confederacy sympathizers say shit like "it wasn't about slavery and the north oppressed the south", first of all, it was very clearly about slavery, second of all, the confederacy started the civil war! Fuck the patriotic north as well, but i really hate people who play the oppression card in order to oppress people.

if you're reading this, there's an off-chance you look at the picture and thinks it's you, huh XD
#goals
hope you're doing alright, sorry for disappearing like that.
but you knew that was always the plan ; )

I read the description up to "civil war and a coop" and hahaha!

For the record it's a Honda Civic and a Shelby coupe. Wait, no a civilization and a chicken coop, or a chicken sedan.

Language is strange but coop rhymes with soup and coup rhymes with flu.

*mumble mumble*

neither the IGD, mainstream, anti-civ, post-leftism, nor Aragorn! should be taken very seriously...it's all pure entertainment.

u.

About talking things seriously: the way I see it, anarchists are like bicyclists. We can get around fine on their roads when no one else is using them. Usually, though, there are cars and trucks and potholes. So while we may not want to take cars etc. seriously we had better at least pay attention so as to not become collateral damage on the road to nowhere, or the highway to hell.
In other words we don't have to take impeachment (or politics & politicians) seriously but we may want to know enough to step out of the way, if necessary & if we can.

Riding your bike on an highway or boulevard deserted of cars for an unknown period of time is one of the best ways to imagine anarchy irl.

the political nonsense even if we wanted to, not without compromising just about everything we respect about ourselves as anti-statists. Maybe we can wait for the republicans to cut security spending for congress in the name of opposing big government and we can go down there and make animal noises and throw paint balloons at everyone.

I go by one infallible rule, if a person owns a car made within the last 5 years, they are a Statist!

The most dangerous possible condition for us is an uncontested Trump victory in the 2020 election after no or failed impeachment attempts. All of the worst-case post-J20 scenarios would be far more likely if Trump is able to say "voters just ratified everything I stand for" no matter how much overseas interference he invited into the so-called "election."

So long as Trump is in the White House, the alt-right including all-out neo-Nazis have a reliable friend in the White House. Some alt-right people work with Trump while others drive 600 miles to shoot up a Wal-Mart full of non-white shoppers. Some work for ICE while others join Atomwaffen, Patriot Prayer, or the Proud Boys. As we saw most recently in Boston,the cops and Klan work hand in hand now more than ever, with white nationalism being all but official US policy. That is a direct threat to us, and let's not forget those direct efforts both by Trump AND by GOP state governments (especially in "pipeline" states) to make protesting with a mask on a felony.

There is also the case of Trump "winning" in a Bush vs Gore contested election, in which case he is probably too busy to worry about antifa roundups. This goes double for the scenario of Trump losing but refusing to leave office peacefully. That scenario (Trump defies the outcome of the election or tries to stay on past 2024) is made far less likely by even a failed impeachment attempt.

Defiance of a loss in the 2020 election would require GOP support for a fake claim of "election fraud" based on false reports of massive voter "turnout" by undocumented migrants. Trump has only two MAGATS in the Supreme Court, and their are 3 Dems. To win there and stay in office by Supreme Court edict he needs to get three "mainstream" GOP justices to vote with the Kavanaugh Krew. Also the Senate can refuse to certify the election results, requiring substational GOP buy-in and a willingness to go down with the ship if the gambit fails. Trump would have a very, very hard time defying an impeachment followed by a Senate vote to remove him (which only requires 6 more GOP Senators to pass). Anyone helping Trump defy an impeachment and removal would join a crew of thugs facing potential criminal charges at the hands of the Democrats if the "coup attempt" fails, and would have to go all-in or stand down. In none of these scenarios does Trump have time to engage us directly, and he would be in a weak position to get mask laws or anything else past the House.

Second worse case after Trump behing inaugurated in 2021 is Hillery returning to the race (as she is now threatening) and winning. Then, white nationalism returns to being UNOFFICIAL policy of the US government and their shit has to be deniable. We return to a position somewhat short of the 2011-2015 status quo ante, still duking it out with GOP state governments trying to criminalize pipeline protests etc but the alt-right becomes greately weakened along with efforts to gut Roe v Wade. Gender based activism, migrant activism, climate activism, and Black Lives Matter can then go on offense rather than having to constantly play defense against new and novel threats from Trump. We still have to fight but our enemy is weaker and their assaults are more dispersed.

There is also the less likely possibility of a left-liberal like Warren or Sanders winning outright. Our goal then becomes to keep authoritarian elements out of new social programs e.g. ensuring that desirable "Medicare for all" does not get coupled to compulsory preventive care as one of Obama's rivals proposed in 2008. We will need to go on a major, major offensive on both the climate and racial justice issues while we have the chance to get results. While the government willl no doubt still resist this, they will be much slower to respond than Trump's regime and we might get enough "running room" to create some real facts on the ground before corporate Dems and their GOP allies can react.

If you want to know what the Left was able to do while Obama was in office, ask yourself how much tar sands oil has flowed though the Keystone XL's northern section (over the Klanadian border) since 2013 when it was probably meant to go into service. The price of oil plunged below the level at which tar sands are profitable in 2015, meaning pro-Earth activists may have permanently denied the tar sands industry two years of big profits-and possibly prevented a major spill of the most toxic "oil" on Earth. Trump has been in office three years, and it took until now for TransCanada to seriously threaten another push to build the Keystone XL. If they don't get it all the way done while Trump is still in office, they may never be able to use it. That fear in turn is probably making it hard for TransCanada to find new investors.

For those of us with Indigenous ancestry or connections, that is a major, major "dog in the fight!"

Add new comment