August 10, 2025

The States

Kids understand the world differently: as places of opportunity for play.

So it was that at age 8, walking down the sidewalk with my father, I saw a brown paper bag on the floor, just ahead of me and sprinted forward to kick it, imagining the delightful sound it would make.

But my father stopped me. Hard.

Quite seriously he said: don’t ever kick a bag like that. It could be a bomb.

He wasn't kidding. As many of you know, my father spent 10 years as a political prisoner in Cuba.

That’s what happens in countries where good people fail to stop bad people.

That’s the country you live in right now.

America’s fascists are already using violence to destroy the United States of America, which generations of Americans struggled to turn into a relatively rich, multicultural, multipolar, multiparty society and replace it with a poor, White Nationalist, single-party playground for the ultra wealthy and their stooges.

They have spent 50 years working towards this moment.

where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

They are just getting started.

And they will not be stopped at the ballot box.

"the continuation of politics by other means”

Most liberals – scientists, judges, teachers, marketers, consultants – have never been in a street fight, let alone a political war.

And it shows.

But now they are very much in a street fight.

“Kill ‘em!” he shouted, encouraging fellow rioters to kill the police officers guarding the U.S. Capitol. “You guys are disgusting,” he said to the officers.
Jared Wise told the cops he used to serve in law enforcement, then yelled: “Kill ‘em, kill ‘em, kill ‘em!” More than four years later, Wise is a senior adviser to President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ).

Street fights, like wars, are not ended by “making yourself heard”, especially not at the ballot box.

You win a fight by inflicting more pain.

Power exists only when it’s used.

People who are afraid to exercise power because it may lead to conflict have no place in government.

States have power ONLY if and when they use them.

In that vein, I present the following op-ed from the Washington Post:

To defeat the Texas gerrymander, Democrats need to go nuclear

It's not enough for blue states to redraw their maps. Leaders need to hit the GOP where it hurts most.

August 7, 2025 at 4:44 p.m. EDT
5 min read

By Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight
Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight are Democratic strategists.

At the insistence of President Donald Trump, Texas Republicans took the extraordinary step of advancing legislation to redraw district lines mid-cycle and trying to add five seats to the narrow GOP advantage in the U.S. House. In response, Democrats are finding a new boldness — Texas lawmakers are fleeing the state to deny a quorum, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is threatening a gerrymander of his own, and even some progressive groups supporting nonpartisan redistricting are reconsidering their stances.

Increasingly, Democrats understand that deterrence is not optional. It is the only alternative to collapse. But, if the debate around whether Democrats should play hardball is almost over, the debate about how is just beginning.

To that end, those looking to counter red state power grabs like Texas's should look to another period of brinkmanship for inspiration: The Cold War.

During the decades-long nuclear standoff between the U.S. and Soviet Union, leaders on both sides relied on a state of mutually assured destruction to keep the two countries from stumbling into an apocalyptic war.

There are two strategic concepts from that era that apply well to Democrats today: counterforce and countervalue.

Counterforce Strategy

Counterforce posits that the best way to deter an opponent is to credibly threaten the use of one's own nuclear capability to strike at the opponent's nuclear forces. In the context of today's redistricting wars, that means neutralizing the weapons Republicans are using — directly, surgically and proportionally — within the sandbox of redistricting, like we're seeing from New York and California. They gerrymander their big red state; we gerrymander our big blue state.

It's the cleaner option, keeping the battlefield limited to the same weapons — and targets — as the adversary. But it requires speed, coordination and a willingness by blue-state leaders to shed the "good government" constraints that now leave them unilaterally disarmed.

It's good that Democratic leaders are trying to leverage counterforce deterrence on redistricting. But, if New York, California and other blue states want to deter red state aggression more comprehensively, they also need to consider the grislier logic of countervalue.

Countervalue Strategy

Rather than threatening to destroy an adversary's military capabilities, a countervalue strategy in the context of actual nuclear war is focused on making credible threats against cities with tens of millions of civilians on the theory that those losses would be simply intolerable. While morally reprehensible, countervalue offered an efficient, credible and cost-effective deterrence strategy during the Cold War.

In our domestic context, it means using the full weight of blue states' market power, cultural influence and legal authority to raise the stakes of Republican red state aggression. That means making it harder for corporations to operate in states that obliterate fair elections. It means using their economic might to impose regulatory and economic costs that bite hard enough to make the constituents of even the most insulated legislator feel the pain. In other words, it means countering red state aggression with potential actions that go beyond reciprocity and may impose disproportionate costs.

Learning from Red State Tactics

Red states have already designed their own weapons for the countervalue war plan. In their effort to uproot corporate "diversity, equity, and inclusion" and "environmental, social, and governance" practices, for example, Republican leaders used a full gamut of state economic leverage to not only influence in-state company operations but also to put the squeeze on their practices everywhere. For instance, Texas blacklisted BlackRock, the massive New York-headquartered financial asset manager, for promoting ESG investing, pulling more than $8 billion in state funds out of the firm and rallying other red states to do the same. As a result, BlackRock publicly abandoned its ESG focus.

Potential Blue State Responses

Drawing from the Texas playbook, blue states could band together to divest pension fund investments from — and bar any state contracts with — Texas companies. Blue states could also provide relocation bonuses to induce Lone Star teachers, doctors and nurses to leave Texas and move to underserved areas in their states — exacerbating staffing shortages in Texas while resolving them at home. States such as New York and California with large economies could explore creative financial transaction and data-processing taxes using facially neutral criteria that happen to disproportionately affect Texas businesses.

Considering countervalue deterrence is not about becoming what we hate. It is about denying Republicans the ability to leverage asymmetrical aggression to reshape the United States unilaterally. And there's no reason Texas should be winning the fight to leverage market power: The 15 blue trifectas (states where Democrats control the governor's mansion and both houses of the state legislature), with their larger state budgets and more generous pensions, have state investments that total almost 75 percent more than the 23 red trifectas.

The Cold War Lesson

As in nuclear war, countervalue responses by blue states to retaliate against red state aggression will ultimately hurt citizens in all states. But Cold War game theory tells us that the best way to avoid the mutual destruction of countervalue retaliation is to make your adversary believe in your determination to leverage it. Only then can you forge a lasting détente.

It may make voters in Illinois, California and New York very uncomfortable to consider economic warfare that could harm working class Texans — people they have no quarrel with. But their willingness to consider and credibly threaten such approaches may be the best, and perhaps only, way to preserve our national democracy for New Yorkers, Texans and all Americans.

Caveat:

For such gamesmanship to work, the counterparty has to be rational.

I still believe most Republicans in the US Congress, most GOP “megadonors”, are rational cowards and not stupid grifters; e.g., there are still more Mitch (“if that’s not an impeachable offense, I don’t know what is”) McConnell’s than Marjorie (“Jewish space lasers”) Taylor Greene’s.

If so, the current coalition is brittle.

The only way to find out is to present those cowards with a threat greater than they face currently.

Now, not later. Now.

Postscript

In response to J6, which was a protest against democracy, the White Nationalists will say: But there were ANGRY BLACK PEOPLE RIOTING ALL OVER AMERICA saying “defund the police.” What about them?

And to that I say: were. they. wrong?

What did the centrists achieve, running away from a rebuke of racialized state violence?

What did the centrists achieve by voting, year in and year out, to fund an agency with HEIMAT in its God-damnned name?

Face the facts: the facists are just getting started:

ICE is now the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. And it has the fewest checks on its power.

Instead of embracing immigrants as the singular engine of US economic and cultural dynamism, Democrats accepted the lie of a shrinking pie.

“ImMiGrAtIoN iS a LoSiNg IsSuE fOr DeMoCrAtS.”

No, brothers and sisters, immigration is a losing issue for the cowards at the helm of the Democratic Party.

Santa Monica’s finest, Stephen Miller, won the fight the Democrats were too scared to fight.

This, too, is the centrist legacy: