Thread by @dynamicsymmetry

I hate quote-RTing this fucker but I’m going to this time because it’s important: Look for attempts to delay the election or cancel it outright. I’m not saying he’ll succeed but I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries. Right now he’s feeling—reasonably—like he can get away w/anything

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1225174713992990721

Although I’ve been musing over something: @AlexandraErin has been saying for a long time that he’s at his most dangerous not when he feels cornered but when he feels bulletproof. I think it’s also worth noting that his bulletproof moods are often when he oversteps and fucks up.

His Ukraine call was made in one of those moods. The really scary thing about that call was that *he almost got away with it*, but the fact remains that he didn’t, and he so horrified a bunch of people that they called it out. It was an overstep.

I don’t think we can look to elected Republicans to do anything to stop him, but they aren’t the only people who can throw some kind of wrench in the gears, and regardless, an overstep is at least impossible to ignore.

When he feels like no one can stop him, he also doesn’t think in terms of backlash, especially when he doesn’t think he’s even doing anything “wrong”. He’s very bad at predicting what will be genuinely too far for the public in general.

I’m not at all saying I expect people to rise up and take to the streets en masse—that would be great but I did a whole thread a couple days ago on why I don’t see that happening—but people *do* notice things that are very bad and as of right now we *are* still having an election

Something else I want to note, semi-related: People very often don’t rise up and do much when we would expect that something would be so bad that they’d have to. But it’s also difficult to predict what *will* kick them into action.

There are a whole bunch of variables that affect when a social movement explodes into being a cohesive, rapidly-acting social *movement* for change, and often they’re only clear in hindsight, if even then.

Social science is good at analyzing what’s already happened but the fact is that we’re just not very reliable at predicting things. And again, social movements are super complicated. Sometimes the match that lights the wildfire isn’t what we’d expect.

One thing we can say fairly reliably is that stuff tends to happen when emotions are running very high and when people perceive an opportunity to change an unacceptable situation. This does not mean something as formal as an election; it’s more complex than that.

The key is that collective perception of opportunity and collective will to take advantage of it—what Manuel Castells has operationalized in an emotional/affective sense as hope, driven most fundamentally by indignation and outrage.

There’s a lotta outrage right now.

Outrage spread and fueled and shaped by social networks. The question is where the hope lies and how it emerges, how it’s incorporated into an appealing emotional narrative that successfully mobilizes on a massive scale.

I think right now we’re short on hope.

The, well, hopeful thing here is that Castells describes how hope itself *emerges* from anger, how anger transitions into hope through overwhelming the action-suppressing effects of fear and anxiety.

Essentially: Fear ➡️ an inciting event fueled by outrage ➡️ hope as the will projected into the future. The ability to *imagine and claim* a future.

Which is what I think we’re struggling with the most right now.

And wow, this turned into me just nerding out about social movements. Yeah, this was almost my doctoral dissertation until I decided I would spend years on extermination camps instead.

But lemme bring it back around to the beginning of the thread.

Donald Trump is a catalyst. Or rather, he’s a generator of catalysts. For better or worse, he gets things moving. He makes them happen. He makes everything happen so much. Which is exhausting, but also he’s a gigantic outrage factory.

Him feeling bulletproof right now makes him extraordinarily dangerous. But it also makes him more likely to do something truly outrageous. That may or may not end up being the match that lights the flame, but my point is to be watchful, and be ready to move.

This is going to be a wild nine months, just about anything might happen, it’s impossible to formulate any useful predictions, and everything happens so much. But possibility is positive.

In the end I truly think he’s his own worst enemy, his own greatest liability.

He’s cunning but he’s not smart and he’s not good at thinking about the future. He sees a future in which he’s king. He doesn’t see a future where the peasants get torches and pitchforks and start calling for his head.

Heads on pikes, indeed.

I AM NOT ADVOCATING VIOLENCE.

I’m saying that if something happens, when something happens, he won’t see it coming. Even if he’s the one who made it happen.

Also lmao I get the sense from his tweet that he really and truly doesn’t believe that he’ll ever die and I think he probably doesn’t