What were we supposed to be celebrating?

A confusing July 4th in a transformed America; picketing against tourists; mind-bending elections overseas; the Beta Band

Boom! It was kind of a sedate July 4th as we all contemplated exactly WTF we’re supposed to be celebrating. Earlier that week the Supreme Court announced we were doing “democratic republic” wrong, and the President is King after all. More on that below.

I don’t know about you but I’m kind of over the Fourth of July. For the past decade or so, it’s felt like attending an annual anniversary party for your bickering uncle and aunt, who clearly should have divorced in the 1980s.

Are you a patriot? I consider myself one, in that I actually do love my home country even as its principles continually reveal themselves to be mere illusions. If you ignore our failing government and quality of life, the USA is a pretty great place to be from.

Other people also consider themselves “patriots,” but they love America the way a toddler loves their abusive daddy, or maybe the way Philadelphia Eagles fans love the Philadelphia Eagles. Like this gentleman, who moments after this image, sadly blew his head open with a lit firework:

If you were to assemble a lineup of 100 dudes and ask “which one is most likely to kill himself with fireworks,” this man would defeat all challengers.

McGrew suffered fatal head injuries after witnesses told authorities he sparked the large firework and bizarrely placed it on his head… The incident happened after he had been drinking for several hours…

“Allen loved this holiday,” his wife told the Post and Courier. “He was a patriot. He was living his best life last night.”

This is obviously a terrible story, as this man left behind a family. But it’s also a predictable one. Bootleg fireworks shows have exploded in popularity over the past few years. Around our house, early July always sounds like a god damned war zone, with explosions well into the early morning.

Playground casualty

People are expressing their patriotism with fireworks in new and innovative ways. Last weekend, two nights after Indy Day, an explosion shook our entire block. Some fine patriot blew up a piece of the playground next door, a spinning cup kids including mine have enjoyed for years. Nothing says American Exceptionalism like toxic drunk dudes playing around with war weapons for no purpose other than their own jollies.

Freedom! USA! 🇺🇸

The Supreme Court has overturned 1789

A couple weeks ago, before six Supreme Court justices ruled that the President is not subject to laws, The Economist asked in their cover story, Is America Dictator-Proof? I’ll save you the paywall and summarize their answer: Probably not.

The civics-class view of American government depicts the constitution as a far-sighted and masterful protection against tyranny. Yet replicas of America’s constitution have been adopted in other countries and failed to keep tyrants at bay. In the 19th century Latin America’s new republics copied the template—federalism, a supreme court, a legislature and a president—and their democracies were overturned by men with guns. In the 20th the Philippines cut and pasted America’s constitution, yet Ferdinand Marcos managed to undermine democracy and install himself as a strongman ruler for more than 20 years. In contrast, where America has helped set up parliamentary systems, such as in Iraq, Italy and Japan, the institutions have endured. That prompts a heretical thought: what if America has been dictator-proof despite the constitution, rather than because of it?

Well, this week the Supreme Court of the United States of America confirmed that Nixon was right all along, and America’s journalists were naive to be shocked when he said, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

SCOTUS decided last Monday that the President was never actually constrained by federal laws. This imperial power was apparently in the Constitution the entire time. Sorry, President Nixon! We owe you an apology. I guess Bill Clinton also never really had to sit for that deposition where he perjured himself about his Oval Office dalliances. Sorry, Bubba!

Those pentagrams tho ⛧

All joking aside, SCOTUS has just unleashed a American future that is something other than a democratic republic. It’s not just about Trump, but let’s start there.

This ruling obviously makes the next Trump presidency, if it happens, 100x more terrifying and tragic for most people reading this, and maybe 100x more thrilling and satisfying for people in his constituency. You may recall that in his former presidency, Trump freely disregarded all kinds of laws. For example, he held the Republican National Convention at the White House!

And Trump also extended this de facto immunity to his minions, using his pardon power to free Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon. The first two committed felonies on Trump’s behalf, the last a massive fraud against MAGAs who thought they were donating to build a border wall. (I dunno, it seems like scamming hateful people with fake hate projects should be legal and even encouraged LOL. Blanket pardons for all right-wing grifters!)

Elements of Trump’s plans for his second term always sounded like fantasies because they’re fucking illegal, but now nothing is illegal for him anymore. As a career criminal who always bought and manipulated his way out of prosecution, he’s the worst kind of person to have this license.

The President of the United States has always had the power to destroy the world at his whim with nuclear weapons. This reality is so terrifying that we never really talk about it. But now the President will also have the power to destroy elements of America directly. Dave Karpf wrote a particularly bleak but also hard-to-dispute vision of what this means.

If Donald Trump wins re-election, there will be mass protests during his second term. That much is a certainty. There were mass protests during his first term… Trump will surely claim that those protests have been “infiltrated by antifa.” He said that last time. He’ll say it again.

Trump will direct the military to attack those protestors. You may recall that he threatened to do so in 2020, stating “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” His worst impulses were barely contained last time, thanks to generals who told him this was illegal.

It is illegal no longer. Trump is the Commander-in-Chief, and when he directs the military to attack American citizens engaged in counterspeech, he is acting in his official capacity. If members of the military are found to have broken the law by obeying his direct orders, then he also has the express power to pardon them.

I think this is correct, and also understates what Trump did when he was last president. He didn’t just threaten protestors, he sent out-of-uniform Border Patrol agents to nab and throw protestors in unmarked vans! Literal secret police shit.

But this isn’t really just about Trump. If he were to fatally combust as you’re reading this, nothing would get better. SCOTUS has just ruled that all future presidents are unrestrained by laws.

The thing is: I believe America is primed for a strongman, or at least enough people to form an Electoral College majority are. Our faith in all institutions (except the military) has collapsed. The only common belief we seem to share is that America isn’t working out for most people. We’re always on the wrong track.

Trump’s dismissal of democracy’s required norms and customs is core to his appeal. His supporters, even the ones not wearing red hats, say they like him because “he gets the job done” and doesn’t worry about the rules.

SCOTUS has effectively created, out of thin air, a new Red Button. Instead of destroying civilization, this one pops out a control panel that lets the President redirect the nearly unlimited arsenal of the federal government. They just have to be “official acts,” which is almost everything the President does. This power now exists until a different SCOTUS changes it back. That tends to take a few decades, on the rare occasions that it does. So this is America now.

Back to the Philippines. I’m currently reading Some People Need Killing, a book about the rise of Rodrigo Duterte. He started as mayor of the southern province of Davao, and rode it all the way to the presidency of the country.

Duterte was the most common kind of populist — privileged and educated, but with a chip on his shoulder and a talent for grandiose promises. He was also the worst kind of populist, one with a death squad. As mayor, he promised to restore security in a province overwhelmed by drug violence. He achieved this by building a paid paramilitary force to shoot people. Every day he would provide a list of names to the DDS (Davao Death Squad), whose members got paid by the hit. No due process, no trial, just bang bang, and sometimes a dumping into a swampy mass grave.

If a DDS member killed someone who wasn’t on the list, they could also claim that the person was a drug dealer or even just a drug user, and that was good enough. 1-800-Cash for Kills.

Duterte’s disregard for human rights propelled him to the presidency. He promised the streets would run red with the blood of drug dealers and users and even any politicians who tried to stop him. His richer and more educated supporters thought he was exaggerating or joking to win over the poor and uneducated. What a smart politician! He was elected in a landslide, but he wasn’t joking. The killing started in his first week. The streets ran red.

I don’t know if Donald Trump will be the US president again. I don’t know if he would use his new SCOTUS-granted super-immunity to kill people, or how many. I’m pretty sure he’d use it to round up, detain, and deport non-citizens, and a lot of innocent people would catch the strays.

And I don’t know who the president will be 5 years from now or 20 years from now, But that America will be very different because the Supreme Court — with a majority dubiously assembled by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote, and another justice who’s a paid employee of a different real estate heir — has rewritten the story of whom America is for. Over the past 10 years they have ruled:

• Money is free speech

• Corporations have the same political rights as citizens but not the same responsibilities

• Federal agencies can’t regulate business interests

• The president is not accountable to the law

The Economist article about the future of democracy in America isn’t hopeful. But it’s also of the opinion that Trump is probably too old, distractable, self-interested, and tactical to thrust the final sword into the chest of American democracy.

But let’s be honest. Sure, American democracy has been a global inspiration, but it’s never been a role model, which is why nobody copies it. For the past 234 years, we’ve been relying on a Constitution that was written to accommodate the support of slave states, and constructed to concentrate power to people with capital. Even as we expanded the vote to more citizens, capital has maintained its power over government.

Today, super-majorities of Americans express a desire for national health insurance, gun control, political reform, and environmental protection. But are America’s most serious problems even on the campaign agenda? The people with capital use their power to keep these broken systems lucrative for themselves, at everyone’s expense. People are so primed not to expect change, that media doesn’t even bother to cover the real issues at all.

These recent SCOTUS cases are built to make these problems worse, not better. Joe Biden, the consummate institutionalist, was never going to be the one to break norms and fix SCOTUS, even with his new immunity. Maybe the next President who isn’t one of these sundowning men… maybe they will.

Political science labs across the Channel

Things haven’t been great in the UK for a while. The British economy has been crumbling for more than a decade, and their society isn’t doing so swell, either. Brexit was a huge mistake, but also just one of several.

If you haven’t read this stat yet, it may blow your mind: When the Conservatives took control of the government in 2010, midway through Barack Obama’s first term, Britain’s per capita GDP was roughly equivalent to the USA’s. In those 14 years, it has sunk to about 60% of America’s. If the UK were a US state, it would be our poorest, behind Mississippi. (Some Mississippians consider this comparison an insult.)

So it was maybe no surprise that salty voters obliterated the Tories in this election, handing power to a surging Labour.

Yeah, but can we also talk about the ventriloquist?

But there’s a darker story lurking here. This election saw the second-lowest turnout in over 100 years, and Labour actually won fewer votes than they did in 2019, an election they lost badly. Tories lost power because their voters stayed home or defected to parties further to the right.

Translating this into American: Imagine if in 2026, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Michael Flynn were to start the Ultra MAGA Q-America Party, flipping 100 seats in the House, both handing the Dems a massive House majority and also sending the Republicans to the wilderness.

Meanwhile in France, the French Near-Nazis did better than expected in European parliament elections. So Macron said “it’s time for some GAME THEORY,” and he called for a snap election. Everybody who doesn’t prefer Nazis went, “WTF are you doing, Macron?” And then Macron confounded them even more by attacking the Left, instead of building a coalition against the Near-Nazis.

The runoff on Saturday shocked the world, because Macron was right about one thing and terribly wrong about the other. Unlike the UK, turnout for the French election was huge. The French really didn’t want the Near-Nazis to run the country. And they also really didn’t want Macron’s centrists anymore, who fell to third-place. Now France will be back in the hands of the socialist Left. LOL.

More like Marine Le Pained, am I right?

Translating this into American: Imagine if Joe Biden could use his new immunity powers to say “fuck it! Election is next week now.” And after the world scrambled to brace for Fuhrer Trump, we got President AOC instead. Surprise!

Anyway, these two elections have been very difficult emotional events for domestic MAGA types. They’re not doing great. If you know any, be sure to check their accounts on X, and engage in the high-IQ, free-speech debate they claim to cherish.

Track of the week

Most people know Scotland’s the Beta Band, if they know them at all, from a scene in High Fidelity. Which is a shame, because from the late ‘90s to the mid ‘00s, they recorded a whole lot of awesome, playful rock, and they were a blast to see live. It’s the 20th anniversary of their final album, Zeroes to Heroes. “Out-Side” is a terrific coda to their brief career as a band, because it’s like 100 amazing rock songs smashed into one, that’s also like 100 MTV analog-era mindfuck music videos smashed into one.

Rangelife Shorts

Barcelonans harass tourists. The overtouristing of the world is a difficult subject. After a couple years stuck at home, everyone with the time and money crowded to the same hotspots. (How’d you like Italy last year?) Well, Barcelonans have had enough, and they’re out in the streets telling tourists it’s last call — they don’t have go home but they can’t stay here. Their primary complaint is the price of housing, which is frankly a problem across every urban region in the world. So Barcelona is going to ban Airbnb-style short-term-rentals in a few years, which could put a few thousand more units on the market but won’t solve their housing problem, at all.

Sleepless in Seattle. As neighbors of ours continued to launch fireworks well into the early morning hours for several nights in a row, I kept thinking about that study about people who own loud cars that I shared here a few weeks ago. To review: people who drive noisy vehicles aren’t seeking attention, but are instead cruelly relishing your pain. This could presumably also apply to the “rolling coal” trend from the 2010s and the Bubb Rubb whistle tips of the early 2000s. (“Whooo-whoooo.”)

Well, a few weeks ago, the NY Times did an article on a 20-year-old psychopath who drives a modded Dodge Charger around downtown Seattle late at night, specifically to wake people up. It’s worth reading the story (gift link) because the dude knows he’s the bad guy, and the hate is what fuels him. Even worse he’s found an online audience to monetize his villainy. The internet was a terrible idea.

Alright this was a bleak one. Sorry for the blackpill. Go listen to some Beta Band.