Yea but they are going to escalate anyways.

There is some cost that will be too great for your enemy, and it need not be attrition.

The wealthy are few, and they have nice lives of safety and comfort because they can pay a subset of the workers to protect and serve them. Be that police, politicians, private security, etc.

There are 3 cost / benefit calculations in play in this scenario.

1. For those with wealth there is a cost to squeezing the population, the benefit is increasing their share of the wealth. Resentment, social instability, etc. These things aren’t free, wealthy people have to pay for security, pay for media to keep the populace on their side, pay for politicians. If the cost to obtain wealth outweighs the benefit, it isn’t sustainable to continue pursuing it.
2. Those that serve the wealthy. They get paid through salaries, benefits, access to power, and social status. They cost is that they work against the interest of the rest of us to protect the wealthy.
3. The rest. Society at large is a game where the cost is giving up violence, allowing the state to monopolize that. The benefit should be that the state wields that in the interest of the common good. That contract appears to be broken. So now we have a new cost / benefit scenario playing out. The cost of action against the state has been made very high, you see the groups 1 and 2 know how to play this game. They will beat you, they will imprison you, they will kill you. When those groups start ramping up the costs you should realize it’s for a reason. The benefits of tearing down the state get higher and higher the more authoritarian it becomes. The state would like to have your obedient labor without providing anything back to you. At some point people realize that there’s more benefit in destroying or reforming that system, which generally ends up with the people in group 1 and 2 having less comfort and power.

Terror really isnt the thing group 3 should be focusing on. Cost is.

It should be expensive to be in group 1 or 2, so expensive that people don’t want to be a part of it anymore. That’s how you win this group fight. You can see that groups 1 and 2 realize this and so they want to make the cost of doing anything to jeopardize their groups as high as possible.

It remains to be seen if anything will come of it. Americans have proven to be incredibly willing to accept insanely high costs that only benefit the few wealthy. They will go into bankruptcy to pay for egregious healthcare. They will fund the police 100x over the social systems that would prevent crime in the first place.

We are at the end of a nearly century long project of the wealthy propagandizing the populace. So much that “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” a phrase intended to mock the idea by being plainly impossible is just a thing people unironically say.

Americans hate the idea of paying money for someone else. Especially if that person is an “other.”

This means we can’t have anything nice because it might benefit someone that someone else hates.

There is a cruel and crude portion of this population that hates anything that might help the public at large. Public transportation, state run healthcare, the post office.

For many wealthy Americans spending $100 for every $1 of avoided taxes is worth it.

Now this would all be irrational and stupid if that $1 in taxes provided an equivalent service. So they have to break those systems or just plain make shit up.

I was educated in public schools in America, it was fine. I went to state university and obtained two degrees. Contrary to popular belief they taught us plenty. I had many bright and dedicated educators explain the world around me and make me fall in love with scholastic pursuits. Caring and driven public servants paid a pittance but still excited to share their time and talents with kids figuring out the world.

Whether it was an English teacher who decided he cared enough to run the academic decathlon team, or my calculus teacher senior year who made me fall in love with the beauty of mathematics.

The person I am is indelibly linked to the public school system. As a poor kid growing up in a poor neighborhood, education was a way up. And the wealthy in this nation can’t stand that. Success is for their kids going to expensive private school.

Hold on let me remove most of my brain.

This is so much more efficient than the shuttle program. You see when we made the space shuttle it cost the American taxpayer billions and in the end we owned and could operate the shuttle for the common good.

This way spacex spends billions of dollars (that the government gives them) and in the end they own and operate the spaceship for profit and can charge the American taxpayer anything they want to access space.

Musk is Tony stark!

Sorry I couldn’t get stupid enough to make this authentic.

Here’s the thing about violence, the state has an absolute monopoly on it. This might be the most important defining characteristic of a state, it’s the thing that’s allowed to do violence.

There will never come a time when the state says “our monopoly is over, you can do violence now.” They would march people into gas chambers and claim it was an important victory for law and order.

The state depends upon this social contract, we all agree to not be violent, they get to wield violence in the common interest. That’s sorta the deal.

If the question is “when will the average citizen be ok with violence against the state?” The answer is that for some it’s ok now, it’s been ok for a while. For some it will never be ok.

I think we are not yet at the point where a large portion of the population thinks it’s legitimate. But I don’t know how long that holds out. A lot of people will be unhappy or outraged with ICE but if they were truly targeting gang members or taking people in prison and deporting them, people aren’t likely to take up arms.

The quotas they are pursuing now are running headlong into reality. They can’t find 3000 people a day to disappear that are sufficiently marred by criminality that people will accept it. You tell a bunch of ICE agents and local cops they gotta start finding bodies, once they run out of the small number of people accused of crime in the immigrant population, they will start just looking for anyone to meet their quota. That’s why we are now seeing them raiding fields, and Home Depot parking lots.

People are a lot less accepting of this, community defense starts sounding very reasonable when it’s the nice guy that helped you build your deck and not a person rotting away in prison already.

Fascism’s great weakness is that it does not care about solving problems. The goal is to manufacture a convenient scape goat to blame problems on, then capture power by pledging to destroy that scape goat. Fascism does often achieve its aims, it destroys the scape goat, but since that had nothing to do with the original problem the problem persists. The bluff must continue though, so new scape goats are selected in an ever widening ring of state violence. The “worst of the worst” has already become “the guy willing to pick our food at slave wages.”

The question becomes, will the population become comfortable with the violence necessary to dismantle fascism before fascism destroys enough people that they can’t mount a sufficient resistance.

YouTube is convinced that the only thing I want to watch is police bodycams, and because I click them I suppose I’m not disabusing it of that idea.

There’s a world of police bodycam videos and if I see one that indicates the LAPD is involved, I know, with absolute certainty, I’m about to witness some of the worst policing known to man.

And the thing is it’s not that they are super abusive of their police powers in these bodycams, at least not intentionally, it’s that they seem to lack any kind of competence. Their reactions to situations are astounding in the amount of resources they will use to run around in a chaotic mess. I have to imagine their training manual is attempting to get criminals to give up through sheer cringe of watching them flail around.

If I were to ever encounter the LAPD I would immediately comply, because I would worry that if I at all failed to follow their instructions, 20 trainees would show up shooting each other with 40mm foam rounds until someone gets injured and I’d be on the hook for attempted murder somehow.