Defeating the Deplorables
Your MAGA-Resistance Training Manual
We have two pieces for you today. In “Deplorables vs. Vermin: The Story of Two Comments,” we analyze the suspicious difference in press coverage between Hillary Clinton’s famous “deplorables” comment and Trump’s recent “vermin” characterization of his political opponents. In “The Just Nation Movement in Action,” we detail exactly how we go about standing up the global movement required to defeat Trump, MAGA and their fellow travelers, and identify the parts each of us could play in the fight.
Deplorables vs. Vermin: The Story of Two Comments
You may recall on the campaign trail of the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton referred to Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables. She got a lot of shit for saying at a fundraiser in New York City of then-candidate Trump’s supporters:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
The only problem I have with this comment is that she was wrong on the math, since basically anyone who threw in their lot with an admitted sexual assaulter who said weird things about his own daughter and said Mexicans are rapists is, definitionally, deplorable. My point here is not to relitigate 2016, but to offer a study in contrasts, using a more contemporary utterance from none other than the major domo of deplorability, Chief Insurrectionist and current GOP presidential frontrunner Donald J. Trump
At a Veterans’ Day speech in New Hampshire, these words, in this order, came out of his mouth:
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
Two comments. One is a generally accurate — if anything underestimate — in accounting of the unsavory characteristics of Trump supporters. The other…something Hitler might say. And yes yes yes yes we know, it’s gauche or cliched to jump to the Hitler comparisons. However, when someone says something that — word for word — could’ve been lifted from Mein Kampf, what are you going to do, not point out the obvious?
So, Trump’s comments sound like Hitler, HRC’s sounded like…reality.
Any guesses as to which comments generated more headlines? More handwringing? More articles and pundits and anguish about the state of discourse? Which of these two comments got our mainstream media apparatus frothing, and which passed with the equivalent of a shrug?
It should not surprise you in the slightest to learn that Trump’s nakedly fascist rhetoric did not generate the same outcry as HRC’s nakedly factual rhetoric. However, the disparity is pretty alarming, vast even. As in, the distance between earth’s sun and the nearest star vast. According to research from Media Matters:
“The Big Three broadcast TV networks provided 18 times more coverage of Clinton’s 2016 “deplorables” comment than Trump’s “vermin” remark on their combined nationally syndicated morning news, evening news, and Sunday morning political talk shows.
CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC mentioned Clinton’s “deplorables” comment nearly 9 times more than Trump’s “vermin” comment.
Print reports that mentioned Clinton's statement outnumbered those that mentioned Trump’s 29-to-1 across the five highest-circulating U.S. newspapers.”
A delightful numerical representation of the mainstream media’s ability to minimize the danger posed by the right.
Wherein we must admit that it’s difficult to assign a precise numerical value to something like language. How MUCH worse is it to call someone vermin than to accurately describe someone as deplorable? Hard to say, there’s not a handy conversion tool on hand. However, surely we must all agree that Trump’s authoritarian musings - musings, it must be said, which are backed up by his record as President and his attempted overthrow of the government, as well as his proposed second administration Agenda 47 focused on settling political scores, mass deportation, censorship, and purges of the FBI, State Department, and consolidation of power - are worthy of closer scrutiny and more condemnation that HRC’s prophetic comments?
When we see something like this, so ‘head scratchingly’ upside down, topsy turvy, backwards…WRONG, it’s natural to question how we got here.
None of this is news…to the news. The mainstream press is aware of the imbalance in its reporting. Periodical and television network staffs track and analyze such things religiously. They are also highly aware of the impact of their reporting in general, and reporting imbalances in particular. They are aware that this imbalance will result in Democratic voter disenchantment and reduced voting numbers. In fact, they report these analyses out regularly. They are also keenly aware that the Republican Party is attacking Democracy — they report on this regularly too.
Thus, they understand that they are creating imbalances in reporting with inevitably negative impacts on American democracy, yet they persist. All that said, this means that such reporting is not accidental but deliberate. Statistics - and we’ve highlighted just one case here, indicate that such an imbalanced reporting outcome is not random.
Maybe it’s the money? (Usually it’s the money). In 2016, CBS executive Les Moonves said:
“[Trump] may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Is it because individual journalists crave access? Is it because of the perverse dynamics of both-sideism? The bending over backwards to present Democrats and Republicans as two sides of the same coin?
And further, where are the Democrats on this? Why is the only time they seem to ring the alarm bell on the encroaching fascism of Trump and the Republican Party when they’re fundraising?
Where are the attempts to hold insurrectionists accountable? To use the power of the Senate to further investigate January 6th? Where is the kind of ‘all hands on deck’ effort you’d see if Democrats truly, deep in their consultant-fed bones, believed that Republicans are an existential threat?
There are certainly a great many whys made salient by this comparison point. And to be fair, people have written entire books on the deficiencies in the US media ecosystem, and just as many books about what’s wrong with the Democratic Party.
Here’s what matters now. We know, with absolute certainty, that the media is going to fail us. We know, likewise, that the Democrats aren’t up to the job. Would it be better if the legacy media didn’t bend over backwards to distort reality and paper over encroaching fascism? Definitely! Is that something that we can easily influence, or is the best use of our limited time and energy to attempt to influence? I think we know that this is something of a leading question.
For our purposes, it almost doesn’t matter WHY we ended up here, really. Only that this is WHERE we are.
No one is coming to save us. The institutions won’t hold. There’s no law on the books, there’s no outside force, there’s no magic answer. If we want to stave off the worst of the possible outcomes, it’s going to be on us.
It’s going to be on us to accurately describe the threat, and it’s going to be on us to organize and mobilize a commensurate response. Mass movements are capable of incredible things. Suffrage, abolition, the Civil Rights Movement, Labor - every hard-earned right was paid for in sweat, tears, blood, and often lives.
No one is coming to save us - except for us. So, let’s get to it.
It’s more critical than ever that we’re clear eyed about what, and who, we are up against. And about the power of banding together to dream of something better. In our next piece we do just that, digging into the structure of an organized response to encroaching fascism within the United States.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Just Nation Movement in Action
We previously detailed the transnational movement (which we tentatively named the Just Nation Movement) required to secure democracy and save the planet from environmental destruction in the near term, and to enable universal human flourishing in the long term. And we’ve also exploded the domestic U.S. and global authoritarian ecosystem that has declared war on democracy.
What we’ve failed to do is to properly outline what the emergent movement ecosystem looks like, and how it spins up. We rectify that in this piece, which is an excerpt from our forthcoming book “Transcendental Agitation or- How we learned to stop worrying and embrace the Apocalypse.”
For context, what might the emergent progressive ecosystem resemble? I think we must acknowledge that a movement such as we advocate has never been accomplished before, in fact it’s never even been tried at the scale required. The “Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions,” formed in 1823, was indeed successful as a single-issue network, and thus has good lessons for us, but it attacked a complicated but discrete problem. In contrast, the Just Nation Movement must solve several nested complex problems. The solutions will be more difficult to engineer by a magnitude and will require multiple generations of dedicated adherents.
The scale and scope the movement must attain -- coupled with the power and determination of the opposition -- limit the value of exemplars and make modeling and forecasting problematic. That said, we can find useful organizational analogs in the United States military, the Chinese government, and Toyota. Each of these entities take – and succeed with – slightly different but overlapping transcendent, methodical, and trans-disciplinary approaches to mission effectiveness and success. (For reference: U.S. Army; Chinese Government; Toyota)
The movement will need to leverage Design and Systems Thinking, Lean Methodology, the Scientific Method, translational research, and AI – all combined into a methodological cocktail -- to have any hope of success. The good news is that these concepts and approaches share an underlying ethos and are easily learned – schoolchildren and non-degreed workers the world over use them every day. Optimally executing the approach will require us to: 1. avoid dogma and inflexibly doctrinaire approaches; 2. use what works based on facts and outcomes to change, transform, improve, and continuously adapt the movement to circumstances.
What this really means underneath the terminology is that people must learn to live radically different lives, changing the ways we think, solve problems, govern ourselves, organize, plan, and communicate – and to make this transition relatively rapidly from a historical comparative perspective. Because our human, earth, and sociopolitical systems are interconnected, we must simultaneously drive rapid changes to societal structuring agents – political theology, cultures, institutions, governance approaches, justice systems, and economic systems.
We often use the term “revolution in socio-political affairs” to describe this emerging change pathway, because a gradual or evolutionary pace won’t get it done. This is the key point that Peter Diamantis, Stephen Covey, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Pinker, Martin Seligman, and the like in the Positivity and self-help movements don’t get. The pace and breadth at which we change, and what societal elements we’re aiming that change, are every bit as important as identifying what needs changing.
Rapid change will not come from individual self-help efforts – in fact these are in the main diversions from, and in some case counter-productive to -- societal improvement, because they reinforce and lock-in the very problematic cultural and socio-political mores we most need to change. Most of the success and self-help industry posits heroes and approaches that are highly individualistic, inimical to collective efforts, detrimental to earth systems, and, paradoxically, non-replicable.
Making large-scale socio-political changes requires a whole other approach. One aspect of the approach is rigor and discipline. Movement members will need to view their work in the movement through the same lens they usually reserve for their jobs. Effective movement participants will be lifelong learners – otherwise they’ll be holding the movement back, getting lazy and falling back on doctrinaire solutions instead of fighting through to innovations based on new learning.
Let’s get started down the road to collective rigor with the following somewhat academic information related to networks and the ecosystem we need to establish. If you find it tough sledding, try to force your way through it.
The optimal form for the Just Nation Movement is a network. While there any several types of networks, we believe that a “Transnational Advocacy Network” (TAN) such as the Society to Abolish Slavery, is the best fit for our situation. A network is the optimal organizational form for movement defense and survivability, and a TAN is the best fit for our objectives/north stars.
Admittedly it’s tougher to create a network in the near term than a standard hierarchical organization because it’s difficult for prospective members to understand it, and it’s easy for the bad guys to paint it as a subversive entity. But they’re going to do that regardless.
It’s also difficult to maintain and execute and will thus retard the initial growth rate. But, if we start with a more traditional hierarchical structure, we’ll never break free from its DNA and learn how to optimize the movement. With MAGA we’re fighting an unacknowledged network that many confuse for a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” It will take a network to defeat one.
The MAGA network is conducting an insurgency with the United States as the primary theater of war, with the UK the secondary battlefield. Therefore, our movement and network will be executing a counterinsurgency. We’re going to need networked governments post-victory, best to learn how to optimize them beforehand.
Key Information about Networks:
“In general, a networked organization is one that is connected by informal networks and the demands of the task, rather than a formal organizational structure. The network organization prioritizes its “soft structure” of relationships, networks, teams, groups, and communities rather than reporting lines.
“Unlike governments and firms, advocacy networks generally have limited access to traditional sources of power. Instead, advocacy networks rely on the strength of information, membership numbers, organizational structure and leadership, and symbolic power. Their organizational form is characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of collaboration, which allows for flexibility, adaptability, and quick reaction to political exigencies; the advent of social networking media has significantly increased the speed and effectiveness of organization,” Britannica.
Even the most flexible organizations do have some reporting relationships, so a pure networked organization rarely exists. It is more a statement of intent to get things done flexibly rather than to rely on structure.
In this respect, the networked organization is very similar to a matrix. The key challenges of multiple stakeholders, influence without authority, competing goals and accountability without control mean that the skills required to be successful in a network organization or a matrix are very similar,” Wikipedia.
We pointed out that a network is best for defense – it is difficult to roll up an entire network with its many diffuse nodes. But it also has offensive advantages. It is especially effective at enabling networked swarming warfare capability. Swarming is a tactic that will enable the movement to leverage its hitherto unexploited advantage – its human numerical superiority.
“The concept of networked swarming warfare was first proposed by HUO Dajun in 2003. The key feature of the information age is the networking of organizational structure. The rising networked organization will overcome the limitation of traditional geography and link the operational resources distributed widely to form a military action network which combine strike range, speed and lethality, three elements of originally different developing, fundamentally transforming our idea of battle space. With the trend of decentralization of forces, we need to develop more small units with independent combat functions; meanwhile we can join these small units into a whole network as the technology's development. The warfare based on this network is called networked swarming warfare.
Networked swarming warfare (NSW) is the wide-scope maneuver warfare to attack dynamically the enemy in parallel by flexible utilization of "assembly" and "dispersion", which integrates the multiple forces distributed widely into the operational network with obvious flowing feature in a multi-dimensional space. It provides us with a networked form of operations which allows organizational flowing that amount of dispersed combat units on battlefield could rapidly formulate the operational swarms which centering on objectives and rebuild according to the requirements of battlefield environment,” Wikipedia.
Movement Principles and Objectives
Movement Objectives: We suggest that our movement will have two dynamically competitive objectives/North Stars. The first is to establish Participative Democracy as the dominant mode of collective political expression globally. The second is Victory over our adversaries. Authoritarian movements like MAGA must be suppressed, vanquished, and prevented from recurring through the movement and emergent vigilance and governance mechanisms.
The dynamic tension between the two objectives will prevent the “ends justify the means” rationalizations that have plagued major left and utopian movements in the past.
Movement Principles:
Innovative Pragmatism: in the proposed movement there will be no all-powerful leadership cadre determining in a vacuum “what’s best,” but a disciplined trial and discovery path to determine “what works” according to data and modeling. The movement leadership must be primarily leader-practitioners who know how to strategize, win, build and execute. These two planks will prevent the typical academic/doctrinal left in-fighting that leads to movement splintering.
Design Thinking – an integrative scaffolding enabling trans-disciplinary approaches and multi-competency solutioning. Design Thinking is “An iterative, non-linear process, design thinking includes activities such as context analysis, user testing, problem finding and framing, ideation and solution generating, creative thinking, sketching and drawing, prototyping, and evaluating. Core features of design thinking include the abilities to: deal with different types of design problems, especially ill-defined and 'wicked' problems, adopt solution-focused strategies, use abductive and productive reasoning, employ non-verbal, graphic/spatial modelling media, for example, sketching and prototyping.
Designing deals with design problems that can be categorized on a spectrum of types of problems from well-defined problems to ill-defined ones to problems that are wickedly difficult. In the 2010s, the category of super wicked global problems emerged as well. Wicked problems have features such as no definitive formulation, no true/false solution, and a wide discrepancy between differing perspectives on the situation. Horst Rittel introduced the term in the context of design and planning, and with Melvin Webber contrasted this problem type with well-defined or "tame" cases where the problem is clear and the solution available through applying rules or technical knowledge. Rittel contrasted a formal rationalistic "first generation" of design methods in the 1950s and 1960s against the need for a participatory and informally argumentative "second generation" of design methods for the 1970s and beyond that would be more adequate for the complexity of wicked problems,” (Wikipedia).
Systems Thinking – “Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts. It has been used as a way of exploring and developing effective action in complex contexts, enabling systems change. Systems thinking draws on and contributes to systems theory and the system sciences,” (Wikipedia).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As we mentioned, the movement takes the form of a network, but since it must confront an opposing force, it is important to propose some definition to its force structure – to describe how it goes to war.
Much like any other organization, the movement as “force” comprises a series of interconnected yet non-overlapping functions. These include:
Mission Command – Mission Command includes the movement and network coordination mechanisms that cover various concepts commonly known as “Command and Control,” “Control Systems,” “Governance,” “Chain of Command,” and C3I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence), and is the central force design mechanism as well.
Force Development – Force Development is the effort that builds the network capacity and develops the differentiated capabilities required to win. “It follows a holistic, learner-centered approach that deliberately connects training, education and experiences to succeed in complex, multi-domain operational environments” DoD definition.
Knowledge Management (KM): KM is the program to optimally and cost-effectively generate Actionable Situational Understanding from data and information. Actionable Situational Understanding is the knowledge threshold that enables operations with a defined probability of success. The KM function also provides thought leadership and conducts translational research.
Inspector General (IG) – The IG is the independent and objective oversight mechanism that ensures we don’t recreate the current system or any other suboptimal system despite our best intentions. The IG will report to an entity that does not report to the Mission Command element of the movement.
Force Composition: The proposed force is composed of the following elements that execute the above functions in a combined manner, as opposed to the discrete nature of function execution in a typical commercial enterprise.
Vanguard: Responsibility for Leadership and Mission Command is vested in the Vanguard, which would be called “Management” in most organizations and the “Officer Corps” in the military. This group is accountable for mission success, but it delegates responsibility throughout the force to ensure flexibility and redundancy.
We consider it likely that there will be national structures within the network, and thus national as well as movement vanguards, but with a network structure this will be a more fluid concept than we see with most existing transnational organizations. Members of the vanguard will be selected by the membership based on proven ability to generate results. For further detail on how leadership selection will work please read Abraham Maslow’s book “Maslow on Management,” the most underappreciated management book ever written.
The force responsive to the vanguard will be divided into two complementary major groupings, Combat Arms and Combat Support.
Combat Arms includes:
Oppositional Force: The pointy end of the spear, the oppositional force conducts operations across a spectrum from communications campaigns on the softer end, to general strikes, and on to civil disobedience on the harder end. Operations will range in scope from discrete and localized to international network swarming warfare as best befits the situation. The oppositional force operates within the guidance framework of the vanguard but has great flexibility in planning and conduct of operations.
Government and Education Advocacy Force: This element is responsible for direct contact with elected and appointed officials from heads of state to local school boards. It advocates for specific laws and policies and provides oversight of officials and reporting on their actions. This group works closely with the knowledge management and legal entities.
Intelligence: This is the highest leverage function in a counterinsurgency and networked organization. It provides actionable information to all other elements on what threat forces (MAGA, et al) are doing and forecasts the threat’s likely future courses of action. There will be of necessity a robust counterintelligence capability to protect the network and its members within the broader capability. All other elements in the network provide their information requirements to the intelligence element, which in turn satisfies them on a vanguard-prioritized basis.
KM: Knowledge Management is the second highest leverage function. "Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers," Gartner.
In a competitive environment, the organization with superior intelligence and KM functions will achieve information superiority and eventually information dominance, without which victory is impossible. The U.S. Army avers that “every soldier is a sensor.” What that in mind, you can see how a transnational network of hundreds of millions of “sensors” could outweigh the advantages currently enjoyed by the right’s ecosystem and financial resources.
Legal. Since we’re speaking of hybrid warfare, top-notch legal resources will be critical in this fight. Critical movement victories can be achieved by legal resources alone in many countries, and even losing legal efforts can retard enemy advances, tie down its resources, and allow the network to grow in capacity. The ACLU should join the network and temporarily set aside its current efforts, but we can’t count on that happening. Their resources would not be sufficient regardless.
Combat Support includes:
Talent Management – this function prioritizes recruiting of course, but learning, personnel assignment, and selection for advancement are also key aspects. In the movement this function will be much harder edged than Corporate HR, especially in the selection component of its work.
Information, Cyber, and Communications Technologies – the movement must have access to allied sources of technologies to avoid surreptitious penetration and ensure Mission Command continuity. Thus, technology producers must be identified and incentivized to join the movement. This capability set need not break the bank, it just must be as good as the adversary’s.
Medical – movement participants and their families deserve and will require medical care that will in many cases be denied to them because of their participation in the movement. “Doctors Without Borders” provides an excellent model and hopefully that group would be among the first to existing organization to affiliate with, if not join, the Just Nation Movement.
Finance – The movement will require billionaire support but can’t be totally beholden to it. Nor can it impoverish members who are already risking if not totally foregoing income based on their membership. Therefore, we expect most movement revenue to be derived from membership dues, which will be variably dependent on services received from the movement’s professional services such as medical and legal. We’ll need the affiliation and cooperation of banks and several nation states to optimize movement finances, and this effort must be prioritized.
Logistics – we’ll need transportation and supply chain specialists in large numbers, but also the cooperation of international transportation and shipping companies. We may find the need to establish new companies in this and other support areas due to the inevitable conflicts existing companies will have with their stakeholders, and we must prepare for this possibility in terms of staffing and start-up money.
Ideas and Communication - One area where the right is kicking our butts right now is idea generation and propagation. To counter, we need our own purpose-built think tanks. We suggest that they take a new form, populated primarily by a combination of experienced leader-practitioners vice policy wonks, augmented with younger thought leaders. A great model is the United States Military Academy’s Modern War Institute.
To propagate and fill communications channels with movement-enhancing content we need to field purpose-built, adversarial matching analogs; with an initial emphasis on volume and reach. Here is some early thinking on the entities required: a Fox Broadcast Analog – think BBC and NPR, not MSNBC; a Sinclair Broadcast Analog – think Walter Cronkite – if you build it first-rate newscasters will come; and a team focused on Emergent/Future Communications. Social Media is dying, it will be replaced shortly, we must be there at the inception if not driving it ourselves.
Affiliated Businesses and Organizations. We need to seek likely early adopters first. Then we’ll methodically pursue large existing companies when movement momentum is manifest, by incentivizing them to get on the right side of history. Likely early allies include self-identified Green and/or Corporate Social Responsibility firms; Emerging Technologies companies; Women, Minority and LGBTQ-led entities; Legal, Medical, and other credentialed bodies and professionals; and Trade Unions.
Now for the hard part, getting this thing up and going. While a lot more meat needs to be added to these bones, here’s how we see it going at this point.
1. First, progressive thought Leaders and Communicators align, create a sense of urgency, develop a broad vision, outline a formation plan, catalyze movement formation, create a pathway for member joining and participation, and assume logical movement roles.
2. The movement’s vanguard then establishes the network and “unionizes” the movement.
3. Exponential membership growth is achieved, and the establishment of network protections and strategy proceed apace.
4. Offensive operations commence.
5. Resource and capability cascades are purposefully generated.
6. Influence is exerted at key societal and governmental leverage points; entrenched oppositional power centers are methodically eliminated.
7. Power is devolved to participative democracy organizations on mutual agreement and based on pre-set milestones.
8. Global backsliding prevention mechanisms are emplaced.
What must be preserved and protected during the transition: Power Balancing; Oversight; Human and Minority Rights and Freedoms; Social and Financial Safety Nets.
What the movement needs to eradicate promptly and globally: the “legal personhood” of corporations, political parties unaccountable to citizens and possessing degrees of legal impunity; unlimited political campaign financing; lifetime jurist appointments; and corporate taxation shell games. While we usually shy away from specific policy recommendations because the whole purpose of participative democracy is for the people to come to their own conclusions; these are so egregious and high leverage that to leave them intact is to doom the movement.
Conclusion: Bringing this back to plain language again – the war to defeat MAGA is going to be bloody and protracted. It will look like a failure until it doesn’t. And people will die because they joined the movement – many of them. The right is going to use every resource it has to prevent the Just Nation Movement from gaining traction. There will be mass shootings at protests, assassinations, restrictions on medical care, vaccines, and supplies for movement members. And we must expect restrictions on travel and access to financial holdings.
History and modeling tell us that all that’s going to happen to liberals whether or not we form a mass movement. We have an affirmative obligation to limit the damage and fight for the objectives we identified early in this piece.