Thread by @Tinkzorg

Lmao. The US is just literally speedrunning down the checklist for serious political upheaval and collapse right now. Amazing.

https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1447937003362914308

Let me explain why this sort of thing is potentially quite significant. The US states are more or less countries in miniature, who are economically integrated into the broader republic but whose political capacity hasn't meaningfully atrophied or been taken away.

The federal government is experiencing a very serious crisis of legitimacy right now. The same cannot be said of the states. Partly, because this represents the founding mythos of the US, partly because they're the one possible alternative to the federal government.

From what I gather, Governor Greg Abbot isn't exactly the most popular political actor on the red team today. But insofar as that is true, that lack doesn't stem from challenging the federal government, quite the opposite. Challenges like this are seen as increasingly legitimate.

The states have latent political structures that can act broadly, independent of the federal government. They also have a political mandate and legitimacy that has long been dormant but never abolished, that lets them be seen as legitimate when or if they do this.

Once you have a situation like this one - a situation of *dueling legitimacy* - the states are going to start to rack up "wins", where their claim to being the legitimate decider in the last instance (to borrow from Schmitt) will be seen as stronger than the federal claim.

People are familiar with the concept of "monopoly on force", but in terms of politics, a *monopoly of legitimacy* is in some ways just as important. Once a ruler's monopoly is broken or challenged, he will quickly find that his power to enforce writ will rapidly start to leak.

Moreover, in a situation where states win the tug of war over legitimacy, using force to enforce writ becomes incredibly problematic. If the Georgian national guard think the state of Georgia is in the right, they will not follow writ from Washington over that of Atlanta.

That's why I've always been banging on the drum that any competent tyrant in the US - or a "blue Ceasar", to borrow a term from Michael Anton - would always start by abolishing the national guard. They are built to be unreliable in situations of dueling legitimacy.

If a state national guard pledges for that state in a conflict with the federal government, that's a real regime level crisis you have on your hands. Using army regular or the marines to enforce your writ is then a very dicey proposition. How reliable are those grunts?

Again, this particular vaccine mandate situation will blow over in due course. It's not going to lead to another 1776. But it has already created a potential situation of dueling legitimacy, and dueling legitimacy is the state equivalent of a severe cancer diagnosis. Very bad!

Honestly, the fact that the issue at stake is so *small* (I happen to be very skeptical of these vaccines, but even in a worst case scenario, the risk of dying from taking even a seriously faulty vaccine to the individual is fairly low!) is a very bad omen.

The fact that the state mandating people to take on a risk whose potential danger is somewhere in the neighborhood of driving to and from work for an extra week has led to potential dueling legitimacy tells you that more serious situations will lead to the same place.

Again, nobody predicted that these mandates would lead to these sort of political staredowns. I certainly didn't predict that either. I've merely said that the US is in a textbook pre-revolutionary situation, i.e. a situation where small things can trigger these showdowns.

Biden is obviously not in any shape to plan ahead or call any shots as it stands, and I think the people who claim that this is by design and that there's some shadowy powerbroker pulling the strings are just completely deluded.

Realistically, the federal government is at this point locked into a late oligarchical dynamic where there's a surfeit of veto power but almost no capacity for positive action. There's no-one at whose table the buck ever truly stops. The plane is running on a faulty autopilot.

If there was a guy in overall control of the situation around (but again, there most likely isn't!), the most pressing concern right now would probably just to walk back these mandates as quickly as possible. Losing face in the face of popular resistance is bad, sure.

But right now the US is at a point where even small things like this can realistically lead to dueling claims of political legitimacy, and that is the "threat level midnight" scenario for any conniving Prince. Abbot shouldn't be allowed to score these wins.

And the only realistic way to prevent Abbot or DeSantis or whatever from trying to - wittingly or unwittingly - usurp an already threatened federal legitimacy is to make sure there's no reason for them to do so. Once this bug bites, you've in fact already lost the patient.

Punishing the states, censuring the responsible politicians, trying to take away state prerogatives in the middle of a staredown like this is just going to make the situation worse.

But honestly? There's nobody around to pull on the brakes. The autopilot will keep going.

The fact that these mandates will be forgotten in five years makes this situation seem deceptively less serious than it actually is. US colonial complaints against the crowns had to do with things like tariffs. The calling of the estates had to do with raising new taxes.

Revolutions don't ever happen because of "the issues", but because the underlying state is too weak to handle these issues without seizing up. It is *state weakness*, that is the deciding factor, not the fervor or coffeehouse revolutionaries.

I think a realistic assessment of where the US is today has it that this current period of polarization, unrest and political breakdown will continue until the end of the decade at least. So seeing these very classical signs of state weakness this early on is not a good omen.