The Doomers Are Inheriting The Earth

Washington, D.C. has the sheen of a fascistic wonderland.

The Kennedy Center at nighttime is awash with red, white, and blue lights, Trump’s face glares at passersby outside the Labor Department, and armed American soldiers walk aimlessly around the streets or pick up trash or talk with activists and reporters asking: What is it you do around here anyway? 

I’ve been to D.C. a few times since the regime in bad faith declared a crime emergency and took over the city’s police department and recruited National Guard soldiers from parts of the Old Confederacy and the New Confederacy (Ohio, mostly) to help with the occupation and trigger the libs into oblivion. It looks nothing like an actual occupation though. The occupying forces are not marching up and down the streets, threatening city residents just trying to live their lives. They’re not ransacking businesses and places of worship and schools expressing insufficient loyalty to the sovereign. 

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It is, I think, a simulation of an occupation. It’s what the president and his terminally online lackeys image an occupation to be. Having never read a book and having no understanding of history and no real concept of the 20th century fascist movements they so adore, these folks are playacting fascism, sometimes to great effect – kidnapping immigrants and U.S. citizens off the streets – and sometimes in ineffective and silly ways. Listen to the vampiric Stephen Miller blather on like he’s Dwight Schrute speaking to a Dunder Mifflin conference, trying his best to be frightening and authoritative, and try not to laugh. 

Miller, like Trump and JD Vance and Kristi Noem and Brendan Carr and Pete Hegseth, is doing a bit. He’s simulating what he thinks a tyrant should sound like, what they sound like in documentaries. It’s not the real thing, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie recently said, but a simulacrum of an authoritarian state generated so that, maybe, one day, these people can “make the simulacrum a real thing.” 

“This administration desperately wants you to believe that you are living in a fully consolidated state,” Bouie said in an online video that should be required watching for every single doomer who sees the regime’s elaborate simulacrum and believes American democracy is dead and all paths back to self governance have been decimated. “You have to understand that it is an illusion.”

The American right, fully radicalized and very much done with the niceties of a pluralistic democracy society, might want to make Trump a “god emperor of the United States,” as Bouie says, but everything they’ve done through nine months of this second Trump term has (mostly) been shadows dancing on the cave walls, convincing you that you’ve suffered a permanent loss, that there is nothing left to do but to submit to the mighty sovereign, who represents the will of the people. It’s a message mainstream media outlets and elite universities and big law firms have absorbed readily. This, of course, makes the shadows feel more real. 

But wait. I bring you some good news in these trying times: You don’t have to play along. You don’t have to believe the illusion if you don’t want to. If you want, you can say no, none of this is real. You have an choice here.

It’s Time To Notice Our Suffering Machines

A Buddhist lesson in an era defined by immense suffering

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

That doomers are inheriting the earth comes as no surprise. The American fascist movement’s illusion can be overwhelming, with their heinous social media posts celebrating the hunting and abduction and imprisonment of human beings escaping poverty and violence in foreign lands and the TV spectacles that adorn our screens every day: Titans of industry sweatily scurrying to the White House to get on their knees and kiss the ring of the sovereign; regime officials gathering around long tables and taking turns heaping praise and adoration upon the sovereign; grand pronouncements from the sovereign declaring himself above the law, blessed by Jesus Christ and John Roberts with all the power of a king in a land that does not have kings. 

In the third decade of the 21st century we live our lives via screen. Nothing is real unless it’s on our TV or on our laptop or on our phone. Unfortunately fascists – who have always had a keen eye for aesthetics – understand this better than their pro-democracy counterparts. They’ve hijacked the algorithms and turned our screens into reality-generating machines. Sometimes the illusion is too unreal. Even the hypnotized can see through theses illusions – rich white folks in South Africa are not, in fact, a repressed minority in need of refugee status – but sometimes the illusion is quite strong. I’ve fallen for it. Probably you have too. For all the anti-dooming blog posts I’ve written over the past eighteen months, my feeble human brain is susceptible to those goddamn wall shadows, dancing and gyrating and growing bigger all the time, morphing into shapes that may or may not be human, casting spells with a mere image. These faceless shapes glare at you from on high.

That shit is scary. I get it. Once in a while you have to turn around and see who, exactly, is casting these images. They're less scary that way.

It's when you buy into their illusion that you make it real. Maybe that's hard to hear. Maybe you think I'm blaming you for dooming. I'm not, but you need to know that lying down for these people and saying yes, you have seized control of Everything and Everyone, you have consolidated power in a nation made of fifty state governments and fifty governors and 350 million people with 350 million varying political ideologies, empowers them to actually take control. Fascism requires acquiescence from its enemies and opponents. Their terrible little secret is that they can't make their best-laid plans real unless you allow them. Like Dracula asking to come into the house, they require your permission.

Politics Is The Art Of Repeating Things

“Assertion pure and simple, disconnected from all reasoning and all proof, represents a sure means for instilling an idea in the popular mind.”

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Rejecting fascism's reality generation – its illusions – is easier when you believe (correctly) that nothing is forever and that the pendulum never stops swinging. Sometimes it swings hard, sometimes it barely swings at all, but it always swings. Today you are told to believe the pendulum has been snapped off and thrown into a landfill. It's a nice story for those who want permanent power. Look closely though and you'll see the pendulum, ticking back and forth like it always has.

Kate Ertmann of Dame Magazine wrote this month about the unstoppable entropy of authoritarian regimes and the cults of personalities that drive them. Every authoritarian regime in history has seemed invulnerable, usually shortly after they've seized power by democratic or violent means. The idea that these powerful people and their governments do not have a soft underbelly, Ertmann wrote, is widely embraced both by supporters and opponents of the regime. But that's all wrong, Ertmann writes: They have an underbelly. They know it, and like an animal fighting for its life, they will do anything and everything to protect that vulnerable underbelly.

When a system is relatively new, like the Trump regime, there’s a lot of energy that keeps its pendulum slowly swinging on the functional side. The cult of personality is turned all the way up, and there is hardly any chance of a prolonged state of entropy. But, as it is in the lifecycle of all systems, as time passes, a regime’s pendulum swing will begin to have diminishing returns. That’s what is meant by “what used to work just doesn’t work anymore.”

A lack of a legitimate succession plan, mishandling of information, internal upheaval among regime members, self destruction: These are all forms of authoritarian entropy that have taken down other regimes that pitched themselves to the public as unstoppable forces with an edict from God to rule now and rule forever, as Ertmann writes.

I think we're already seeing entropy of the Trump regime. It's mostly coming in the form of overplaying their hand: Interpreting the confounding results of the 2024 election as an ironclad mandate from the American people to eviscerate constitutional governance and reshape the nation in the image of the man who wants you to believe he is sovereign. That the sovereign won by a single percentage point doesn't seem to factor in their bad-faith interpretation. They are deeply, astoundingly unpopular, as one BFT blogger predicted fifteen minutes after the 2024 election.

I've grown so tired of Bluesky doomers storming my replies every day telling me with great certainty that American elections are over. There will be no midterms and there definitely won't be a presidential election in 2028. This, for the doomer, is locked in. There is no scenario in which elections continue in the United States.

The most inconvenient rebuttal to such dire doomerism is that elections have continued in the months since Trump used democracy against itself. There have been hundreds of elections big and small over these nine months. And here's the thing: The elections are going quite well for opponents of the regime. Pro-democracy candidates are over-performing in every part of the country, even regions most loyal to the regime. Opposition forces are organizing and speaking clearly about the threat we face and people are listening. These elections are not being canceled; opposition candidates are not being black-bagged or imprisoned in the weeks before Election Day; voting machines are not being seized by regime-aligned forces. The shit that happens in an Actual Authoritarian regime is not happening. Yet folks are acting as if they are. It's a gift to your political enemies.

Opposing these people is as easy as not believing their bullshit. Laugh at the shadows cast upon that cave wall you keep in your pocket, the one that tells you what is real and what is not. Reject their messaging. Counter it.

"For those of us experiencing the daily impact of Trump’s regime, it’s apparent that our democratic system of government has ventured into gaps of loopholes over the past eight months," Ertmann wrote. "Yet, by being familiar with the entropic process of a regime, we can better anticipate and recognize when any of its inherent weaknesses, that underbelly of authoritarianism, will be exposed. We can choose not only where to place our energy within this system, but also when to act for the greatest impact by recognizing the behavioral actions that precede a regime’s descent into vulnerability."

The regime is commanding you to believe a lie: That is has no underbelly. Stop listening. Stop dooming.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.