Doppelstaat

Memorial tablet in Berlin, at the house where Fraenkel lived before his forced emigration in 1938, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Two or three weeks ago somebody pointed me to a wonderful piece in Mother Jones by Pema Levy, on the "dual state" theory of dictatorial government, created by the German-Jewish jurist, labor advocate, and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, based on his observations of the Nazi state in Germany from its origins until his escape from Berlin in 1938, according to which authoritarian regimes can survive and even thrive for some period of time as they consolidate their control by maintaining in effect two distinct legal systems in a single Doppelstaat, a "normative state" covering most of the population, in which civil and criminal laws function in normal and predictable fashion, and a "prerogative state" for the unlucky people scapegoated by the regime—in 1930s Germany union members, members of leftist political parties, Jews and Romani of course, homosexuals and the disabled, and so on—where the dictator's will overrides normal legal considerations and he can "do whatever I want" as Trump has put it on numerous occasions, usually applying to some claimed state of emergency. 

In this way life in the normative state does not change much, at least at first, and its inhabitants were enabled to ignore much of what was happening, if they so chose: "I was silent, for I was not a socialist," as Pastor Niemöller wrote. He himself was a national conservative and an antisemite, and when they finally "came for" him it wasn't because there was nobody left to speak for him, it was because he had bravely changed his mind, I'm pleased to say, and helped start up a Lutheran resistance and got sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau for that, and survived to die in the German Federal Republic at the age of 92, too, may his memory be a blessing.

Fraenkel became part of the discourse on Trump 2.0 in a footnote from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the matter of Trump v. CASA, arising from the birthright citizenship case, where the Court decided not to ask whether or not the 14th Amendment means what it says, but did say the judges ought to stop issuing universal injunctions, like maybe birthright citizenship is real in San Francisco (one of the parties in the original suit) but not across the bridge in Oakland and it's none of a federal judge's business to assume that the Constitution is the same all over the country, which is not what they thought during the 19 or 20 universal injunctions issued by federal judges during the Obama administration, the 20 under Trump 1.0, or the 14 in Biden's single term, or at least that when the president is told there's something he's constitutionally forbidden to do in San Francisco that doesn't mean he can't do it in Oakland, as Jackson wrote:

Shitposting and Pissposting

📌 Told y'all he is trash 🤮🐥

[image or embed]

— tweety (@bluskypolitics.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 7:45 AM

That's at https://bsky.app/profile/bluskypolitics.bsky.social/post/3m3ka37hh7s2z if you want to look at the video

Maybe what he's doing here is asserting that he isn't king, at least not yet, in the sense that if he was king that's what he'd be doing, jetting around in his shitbombing jet with his crown on, shitbombing all his  enemies in the urban streets, or maybe we should read it as a warning of what he's going to do once he's taken the final steps, or maybe we should read it as a metaphor for what he's already doing to his enemies, in which the jet stands for his weaponized Department of Justice and the shit for the bogus lawsuits and unfounded criminal investigations he's flinging at all the people who exposed his criminality, and he's claiming to be king already.

 Then again, there's this one:

Beutlerian Jihad

T-Shirt by BumLung, $23 from Etsy.

 Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!

Brian Beutler, a veteran of Talking Points Memo and The New Republic, now mainly active as a Substacker, is one of the best at doing this one thing I can't stand, which he was up to again over the weekend: getting himself so worked up over Democratic politicians' failure to thwart the far right in its evil plans that he ends up assigning them all the blame, in a kind of vicious Murc's Law feedback loop—since only Democrats have agency, they are the effective actors when the right succeeds: they must be the ones responsible for the way our country is turning rapidly into a police state, they literally made it happen, through their fecklessness and timidity and lack of leadership. While Miller and Vought are diligently constructing fascism, Beutler is so busy complaining about Schumer and Jeffries that he hardly has time to talk about that.

Which isn't to say he doesn't have a point about Schumer and Jeffries, or whoever he's mad at at a given moment. What I want to say, rather, is that it isn't a good approach to doing something about it; it's a counsel of despair, frankly, which precludes the reader from trying.

This was especially evident in this particular post, where he's responding, precisely, to readers asking "What can we do?"

...the answer is unsatisfying, because it’s the same one you’ll get everywhere: Do what JB Pritzker says. Protest peacefully, record abuses on your phone, share the videos widely. Join organized marches—if you’re a U.S. citizen, the incremental risk of protesting is minimal. You’re likelier to be hit by a falling object or trampled to death at a concert than you are to be targeted for carrying a sign, or being an Indivisible volunteer or anything else. If you’re able, and if it comes to it, engage in genuine civil disobedience, though there’s more danger there: a greater risk of arrest, assault, political harassment.

Moving Mountains

Mountain moving, via.

I'd been struggling for a couple of days with the need to write a post commemorating the second anniversary of the Gaza war on October 7 when the news came that the negotiators in Sharm el Sheikh, including the Israeli and Palestinian delegations who had arrived on Monday, had brought the war to an end, sort of, or were about to do so, or that the beginning of its ending had been at any rate announced, on Donald Trump's social media platform under his account:

"Well, I'm blessed!" said the president. 

Not by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, though, which pointedly announced that they had already made their final decision (as it turned out this morning for the Venezuelan democracy advocate María Corina Machado) on Monday, that is days before Israel and Hamas assented to the 20-point Trump peace plan—Norwegian politicians are warning that Trump might express his rage in tariffs. The White House has issued its official complaint:

"President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will," White House spokesman Steven Cheung said in a post on X. "The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace."

I have to say I very much welcome the plan as far as I understand it, in spite of its seemingly being the old mountain-mover's accomplishment. It obviously can't make up for the suffering of the last two years, of those Israelis especially living in the desert kibbutzim near the Gaza border who endured the October 7 attack and of all the Gazans who bore the constant bombing and deprivation thereafter, victims on both sides of unspeakable collective punishments—it's so much better if that stops than if it doesn't. And there seems to be a great deal of hope that it really is stopping, for some kind of long term, though the initial declaration that the war was over has been giving way to more cautious reference to a ceasefire.