Examining Power - Sick Burns - 9/26/2025
Welcome to my new regular Friday feature where I share bits and bobs about what I've been thinking about, watching, reading, or following lately.
What I've been watching:
Last night, I watched the entirety of the 2015 miniseries Sons of Liberty, a Revolutionary war period drama about Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere and how a small revolt in Boston turned into a nationwide independence movement against the greatest empire in the world.
The production value in the show was pretty good and I at least found it entertaining. The British were portrayed as cartoonishly evil, as is standard in many American produced pieces of fiction about the period, but I found the show to be a much needed balm for my existential anxiety lately. It felt nice to see some young New Englanders seek justice by beating the shit out of their cruel oppressors from away.
I've been thinking a lot about the American experiment in democracy lately and how it is hanging on by a very thin thread, with regime leader Donald Trump nipping at that string on an almost hourly basis now. It calms my nerves that the man is almost universally unpopular with the average American, though our political class still pretends politics is a 50/50 game with no real life consequences. The people don't like what Trump is doing to the country and at some point the dam has to break, right?
Power has many forms. Traditionally, there's de jure power, which is the legitimate and enforceable power of the state, and de facto power (these concepts are explained better in this video), which are the people and factors which keeps the de jure leaders in power. In the United States, the people are supposed to have the de facto power, with the ability to vote out the leaders of the state when things become disagreeable. That, though the system certainly has not ever operated with total equality, has been the way of the country is supposed to have operated since it's founding.
It has mostly worked over that time, until very very recently. Trump and his crony Republicans hold exclusive federal de jure power at the moment, propped up in the legislative branch by extreme gerrymandering in the House and the inherent inequality of the Senate. Trump, who barely squeaked by former VP Kamala Harris in the last election, has pretended to have the Mandate of Heaven to try to rebuild the federal government into the conservative ideal. Except his election margin wasn't enough to justify such sweeping action, no matter how much the New York Times political team pretended it was.
With Trump's popularity falling apart, Republicans on the legislative side are scrambling to maintain power by further manipulating their state level gerrymanders. Not content with the modest electoral advantages they previously had, Republicans are fully nose in the trough digging for ever more votes and the further marginalization of red state Democrats.
It's the only bullet in their political gun and they are not afraid to use it.
The question of who holds de facto power in the US is perhaps more complex. It's not the voters, or the people, at least not since the Citizens United SCOTUS decision. It's billionaires who most directly influence elections now, and in the age of Trump, it's increasingly but not entirely tech billionaires who prop up this unpopular government.
Money has always played a key role in American democracy, after all it was wealthy merchants and landowners who wrote the Declaration of Independence depicted in Sons of Liberty. But these days they have absolute freedom to influence the political process as they wish. It's why you see oil and gas magnates paying millions for anti-trans ads. They don't really care about trans people, they just want Republican politicians in power who will maximize their profits.
I think this is the real reason why Democrats absolutely refuse to engage with their own voters and base of support. they feel the need to genuflect and prostrate for their donor class, to the damnation of those who vote to keep them in power. They are constantly searching for bipartisanship and cross-aisle voters because those are the voters the billionaires are capable of buying, but in an increasingly authoritarian one party government, the money need only to flow to those already in de jure power.
But there may be relative good news on the horizon. Investment in AI technology is reported to be propping up the entire US economy, but so far has failed to grab hold of general consumer attention. Tech companies are throwing AI into everything they do, hoping that the general public will latch onto some lucrative use of the new tech. But so far, nothing really has stuck. AI is a money loser.
If the bubble pops on AI, the de facto power balance will shift significantly, though that would also mean a significant recession for the rest of us. Regardless, something needs to break in order to snap us out of this hell world, and my money is on an AI crash. It certainly won't solve all of our problems, but it will present a new opportunity to seize some de facto power.
Whether we, and the Democratic party by extension, can then translate that shift into de jure power, remains to be seen.
What fascinated me this week:
This week I've gone deep on beaver YouTube. No not lesbians, get your mind out of the gutter. I mean actual beavers, nature's engineers. The algorithm has been feeding me a constant stream of videos about beavers being released into desolate and dried up river basins, and then a yar or two later that area is filled with wetlands.
I think back to colonial times and the American expansion westward when trappers and fur dealers nearly made beavers extinct on this continent. What a tragedy that would have been. Nature thrives in wetland environments and beavers are the wetlands' primary caretakers.
One video was about a multi-million dam project in Croatia that got held up by red tape and a lack of funding, only for a large group of beavers to come in and build a dam in the exact location proposed by the government. Nature's engineers saved the Croatian government over $2 million and produced a better quality dam than the government would have created.
I think beavers might be my new favorite animal.
What I Made This Week:
-Earlier this week I wrote about the precarious position American trans people have found themselves in over the last several weeks.
On my podcast, Cancel Me, Daddy, my co-host Christine Grimaldi and I spoke with journalist Kat Tenbarge about the free speech fallout stemming from Charlie Kirk's death. Watch on YouTube here.
Final Words:
"Hang tough!" - common phrase of former US Army Major Dick Winters, former leader of Easy Company, portrayed in the mini series "Band of Brothers"
