Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

The presidential election of 2024 is in fact the unfolding of the rolling coup d’état that began in earnest four years ago. To imagine otherwise is to normalize what is patently abnormal and thus to falsify the crisis. It is to comprehend our politics as much of the political media does, clinging to shattered institutional norms, willfully blind to what is obviously the real story, always caught unawares when worse comes to worst. The superficial quadrennial trappings are here, of course, the primaries, the conventions, and the attendant hoopla. These reassuring atmospherics affirm the conventional wisdom of our pundits and pollsters that, despite the high-intensity fervor, this is at bottom a good old contest between rival political parties with different policies, different visions for America, campaigning to win two hundred and seventy electoral votes. In fact, this is no more an ordinary election than the election of 1860 was. Like then, Americans are confronted with a continuing power grab by a boundlessly ambitious and relentless force that repudiates the essentials of democratic politics (even when it avails itself of democratic language) and the rule of law. Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters have made it clear that they will not accept defeat in November any more than they did when Trump lost four years ago. They believe that Trump is the one true legitimate president, that those who refuse to accept this fundamental fact are the true deniers, and that any result other than Trump’s restoration would be a thwarting of history’s purpose and a diabolical act of treason. The authoritarian imperative has moved beyond Trumpian narcissism and the cultish MAGA fringe to become an article of faith from top to bottom inside the utterly transformed Republican Party, which Trump totally commands. So has the corollary (not stated as much publicly) that should Kamala Harris be declared the next president, self-styled patriots would be duty-bound to rise and resist her by any means necessary. The place of violence in the MAGA universe has been well established.  Trump, who does not speak in metaphors, has made it plain: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath.” This is a time for imagining the worst. Not a single loyal Republican official has objected to that statement or to similar MAGA warnings about an impending civil war. Nor have any objected to Trump’s promise to a rally of Christian Nationalists on July 26 that, should he win this year, voting won’t be necessary in the future: “Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians….” Yet many of even the most influential news sources hold to the fiction Trump and his party are waging a presidential campaign instead of a continuing coup. The broadcast news organizations barely, if ever, accurately and fully report on Trump’s repeated and explicit threats to end democracy. Instead, most journalists hide behind a false equivalence that has become a craven excuse for supposed balance.  That staggering failure of basic journalistic objectivity to recognize Trump’s stated agenda is helping to pave the way for the rolling coup. Winning the election, which of course Trump might well accomplish without fraud or overt violence, is but the first step in a grand seizure of power. And Trump is no longer merely a self-centered kleptocrat out of the Roy Cohn school of public service as he was in his New York real estate days. Surrounded now by disciplined right-wing figures and organizations with, in some cases, decades of political experience, he has become the most powerful enemy of the American rule of law and the established constitutional order in modern times. That is not partisan hyperbole. If conventional journalists would perform their duty, they would report it as objective fact. Indeed, a congeries of reaction envelops Trump. There is the MAGA-dominated House of Representatives, eager to do Trump’s bidding, whether by scuttling breakthrough bipartisan immigration legislation because Trump demands it, or undertaking asinine but incendiary political investigations (e.g., James Comer’s Oversight Committee, fabricating the ludicrous and failed impeachments of Joe Biden and the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas), or recycling wacky conspiracy theories as matters of