Surrender?

Matt Taibbi has a fascinating but brief article out: The Surrender. In it he discusses signs that the political establishment has surrendered. To whom? In a sense, to We the People. My take is that the moves that have been made are motivated by the fear of a total collapse of credibility with such a large portion of the voting population that drastic measures—a surrender of sorts—is the only way to avoid that total collapse. Some of the moves that have been made have already been discussed here, but we’ll go over them.

First, there was the matter Morning Joe being pulled for a day or two—lest the regular guests would say more of the crazy things that are standard fare on mainstream shows of the left. It turns out that wasn’t enough.

Trump War Room @TrumpWarRoom

Former top Biden staffer and current CNN contributor Kate Bedingfield just said Democrats need to "turn their fire on Donald Trump" — days after a deranged lunatic shot him in a failed assassination attempt.

Democrats just can't help themselves.

Mainstream Dems turns out to be the lunatic fringe.

Second, Mayorkas made the decision to extend Secret Service protection to RFK Jr., “in light of this weekend’s events.” Taibbi states that it’s difficult not to take that as an admission that protection had been withheld out of political spite. Or worse.

I’ll quote the last two paragraphs in full, because they contain remarkable admissions of systematic social media bias and slanting of the playing field. It’s not the fact that’s remarkable—it’s the admission:

Meanwhile, in a move that went mostly unnoticed, Meta announced Friday that it was lifting restrictions on Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, with CNN citing company sources saying this was done “to ensure that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, would have equal standing with Democrat President Joe Biden.” The next day, after the attempt on Trump’s life that left firefighter Corey Comperatore dead, Axios ran a story about Democratic reaction. Burying the lede, they quoted a “senior House Democrat” at the bottom, saying, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”

In the following paragraph Taibbi describes what he calls the “core premises” of American politics:

There’s a longer story to be written about the sudden collapse of many of the core premises of the last eight years of American politics, in particular the notion that Trump is such a unique “existential” threat that the system would not bear treating him like any other politician. In conjunction with Trump’s documents case collapsing and a list of other retreats on the lawfare/prosecution front, we appear headed for a new world, though what that will look like remains very unclear. The two obvious options are retreat from the “at all costs” mindset and a double-down, the double-down being the pattern in the Trump era. Who knows yet, but it’s remarkable to watch.

Note that Taibbi hedges on “surrender” as an option. There are months yet to go before the election, so the double-down card has to be considered to be still on the table. What I found interesting in the first sentence is how densely packed it is with coded language. Normally a premise is a principle that’s arrived at by some sort of reasoning process. In this case, to posit Trump as an “existential threat” assumes there is something that “the system” believes Trump threatens, and that needs to be protected. Protecting whatever that is—power, money, policy—precludes treating him “like any other politician.” That means that, in a purportedly democratic or representative political system, Trump must not be engaged on the issues. He must be demonized and silenced, excluded from having a public voice by all means, fair and foul. Slant the media playing field, deny full SS protection, etc. We have to destroy the constitutional order in order to save it.

What Taibbi is saying, in a backhanded way, is that it is “the system”—the Ruling Class—that is an existential threat to the American constitutional order. It is the Ruling Class’ continued ownership of that order and its continued use of it for their exclusive purposes that must be kept hidden from public view—that is what is at stake. In these circumstances, can they really surrender?