Playground, by Richard Powers

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What Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) did for the astounding canopy of trees above our heads, Playground does for the super-abundance of seawaters that surround us. 

Part letter of appreciation, part eulogy, each novel employs intriguing characters to weave a scrim upon which to embroider an abundance of colorful facts and observations about the environment which gives those characters and all of us life, purpose and – if our eyes are at all open – a measure of sorrow for how carelessly we are diminishing our descendants’ futures.

Where The Overstory was structured around a tale of eco-warriors campaigning to stop forest destruction, here it is Silicon Valley’s takeover of our time and imaginations that drives the plot. Powers braids together the lives of a poet, an explorer, an artist and a social media software tycoon to create both compelling mystery and satisfying conclusion.  With thirteen previous novels to his credit, it should be no surprise the product feels mostly effortless and ordained.  What does startle though, is how the few moments which do feel effortful – when the wealth of scientific detail seems to veer into pedantry or showing-off – are cast in an entirely different light once it dawns on the reader just who has been narrating the story.  Suffice to say that that realization brings into focus yet another level of questions the novel is raising, about memory and knowledge, about fact versus fiction, brain vs. whatever, and about whether the answers to those questions will diminish the stories we read, hear and watch in future eras as greatly as we are currently diminishing our own and only habitat.

(As angry as Powers clearly is about our destruction of species and environment, he is wise enough to include reminders that nature itself will hardly notice our waste.  For as many species as we destroy and cry over, natural processes will someday create new ones.  Perhaps not as photogenic as the old or perhaps more so – nature has other things to worry about – but either way, new habitats will spring up and new species with them.  Long after mankind departs the scene in whatever fashion we do, natural processes will continue creating and embellishing, erring and correcting.  Only cosmic forces and events can end that process, and those will operate on their own scales regardless of human activities. It is only we and our descendants who will be injured by our carelessness; to the rest, we are irrelevant – as is whether we find that fact reassuring or insulting.)

Heartfelt, informative, moving and timely; the evidence of this outstanding novel suggests that individual human minds will continue to create entertaining and enlightening stories for many generations to come. 

One aspect of our future, at least, to which we can look forward with eagerness.

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible – and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new novel that explores multiple themes – language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its vision of a post-USA future.

The manuscript is available in six instalments, starting at:

E Unum Pluribus

Novel Words – fictional pronouns for the actual future?

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John McWhorter published an Opinion piece recently* about the evolution of pronouns, with particular attention to a new character gaining attention among users of the Mandarin language. Along similar lines, a new novel, E Unum Pluribus, speculates a future American city/state called Confluence in which government edict directs all official communications to employ non-gendered pronouns. The novel’s events make clear that Confluence’s government has plenty of faults and weaknesses, but this one of its policies merits some consideration.

For generations the convention in English was to use ‘he/him/his’ as default and inclusive of all, regardless of their sex/gender. Appropriately, that has now been perceived as favoring male identity over female; simultaneously reflecting historic inequality and perpetuating it. Replacing all those instances with ‘he or she,’ ‘his or her,’ etc. is hardly workable, especially in spoken communications, and still carries a hint of misogyny by placing one gender ahead of the other, whereas ‘she/he’ risks offending insecurities on the other side of the identity coin.

Recent efforts to innovate ‘they’ as a singular pronoun for persons who choose to declare themselves non-binary run aground first on its pre-existing function as plural, generating confusion where they intend clarity. That usage also seems to open the door to a trickle of additional new pronouns as various groups or orientations demand similar recognition; one need only read the snarky online critiques of how LGBT has grown to LBGTQIA2S+ to know that is not a path to tolerance so much as a guarantee of further friction. Worst, in this opinion, ‘they’ singular requires persons who prefer not to be stereotyped as either ‘he’ or ‘she’ to state that publicly, thereby outing themselves and very possibly inviting prejudice, at least at this point in our societal evolution.

The fictional founders of Confluence have taken another approach; directing official communications to use ‘e/em/eir’ for all individuals. This treats everyone with equal respect and does not require the clunky ‘my pronouns are…’ , which can itself incite prejudices. The specific form, ‘e,” ‘em,’ and ‘eir’ are brief and efficient, similar enough to other pronouns that they quickly feel familiar but with sufficient difference to avoid confusion**.

By applying equally to all possible personal preferences ‘e’ equalizes all in one swoop while tacitly expressing the truth that for virtually all public or official interactions there is no proper reason to indicate what genitalia an individual bears or with whom they choose to become intimate. Those are – and should remain – irrelevant.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, by the way, modern English already has gender neutral pronouns – ‘they’ does not presume the gender of a group or any of its individuals. ‘It’ can be used for all objects – unlike French, say in which some nouns require feminine constructions and other nouns masculine, despite the objects having no actual sexual function or accoutrements. Most prominently, ‘I’ is the same for any individual regardless of sex, gender or other characteristic. It is really only in the second person singular that our language’s evolution has codified an unfortunate and outdated discrimination.

In the world of E Unum Pluribus, that governmental edict for official communications also does not mean ‘e’ is used by everyone all the time. Non-official conversations use gendered pronouns wherever a subject’s preference has become clear and stick to gender-neutral when an individual’ p[resentationis itself gender neutral. As in real life, casual usage and common courtesy have the final word in how language evolves over time.

(For what it’s worth, future posts on this site may selectively incorporate ‘e/em’eir’ pronouns to explore just how functional they are – or are not.)

*“This Novel Word Speaks Volumes About How an Entire Language Works” N. Y. Times online edition, 2026-01-22

** E Unum Pluribus does not claim to have invented the ‘e/em/eir’ construct.  Variations on what are sometimes called ‘Spivak pronouns’ have been noted at least as far back as the late 19th-century.

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a tale of murder and conspiracy set a decade or so in our future in one of many small sovereignties sprung up in wake of the USA’s self-destruction. The novel explores multiple themes – language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its depiction of how much we all stand to lose if we continue to retreat into factions which each act only for their own needs and interests.

The manuscript is available in six instalments, starting at:

E Unum Pluribus

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible – and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

A free book? Why?

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As the years 2016 to 2020 unfolded, I found myself preoccupied with a particular aspect of human history: that even the greatest empires, dynasties, governments and nations have each eventually ended and been replaced by…something else.  The ongoing self-segregation of Americans along various lines – urban/rural, elites/masses, investors/workers, digital/analog, etc – suggested our own nation’s end might come sooner than later, and not through some external conquest, virulent plague or invasion of space aliens, but our simple failure to appreciate the myriad benefits of remaining ‘United.’ 

Starting in 2021, those thoughts began to coalesce into a speculative fiction, structured as a tale of murder and conspiracy happening a decade or so in our future in one of many new sovereignties sprung up among the remains of the U. S. of A. The novel toys with other themes as well – of language and gender, identity, guilt and even the origins of faith and belief – but speaks loudest in its depiction of just how much we all stand to lose if we remain divided into factions which each act only for their own needs and interests.  

Writing the book took many months and once it seemed ready, the publishing industry proved impenetrable, even as the politics of disorder and division grew stronger.  By the end of 2025 it had become clear I must find another pathway to the public and so I offered the first installment in a post which can be reached via the following link:

E Unum Pluribus

That and all subsequent installments may also be accessed via the ‘E Unum Pluribus’ buttons in the top menu or the right-side Categories list of this website’s home page.

Maybe the novel will find an audience this way, maybe not, but regardless, if you believe in the message that we Americans must overcome our divisions and preserve the USA as a government of all the people, by all the people and for all the people – or if you simply support authors being heard without reliance upon the gatekeepers of corporate commercial publishing – please share this post and the above link as widely as possible.

Sincerely hoping the world of E Unum Pluribus turns out to have been a naïve exaggeration, and wishing this great nation the good fortune of avoiding it, I thank you,

Robin Andrew

The Hundred Years War on Palestine – A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017

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Starting with early Zionist writings, Rashid Khalidi takes the reader step by step through the intricacies of Israel’s founding and expansion – and the parallel displacements of the families which once called the same ground their home (aka, the ‘non-Jewish residents’, to those by whom the label ‘Palestinians’ is taken as an affront).  No doubt there are some who will say his history is biased – despite being heavily referenced and filled with quotes from actual participants and documents – but then, what historian’s account is not shaped by their education and values? 

The overall impression one gets from reading The Hundred Years War… is of a disorganized and unsophisticated populace whose interests have repeatedly and consistently been subordinated by stronger forces to those of the Jewish persons who chose to emigrate to the region starting in the late 19th century for the purpose of establishing a nation of, by and for Jewish people.  It further claims that the colonial powers with the most control in those parts chose to favor the Zionists for a variety of geopolitical reasons, some about the Jewish people, some not, but which they hoped conveniently to sweep under the same geographic carpet. 

After recounting events from 1917 to 2017, Khalidi (writing sometime between 2017 and 2020), completed his history on a note of strained optimism.  Admitting that the year 2017 “… might seem an opportune moment for Israel and the United States to collude with their autocratic Arab partners to bury the Palestine question, dispose of the Palestinians and declare victory,” he cautioned that “It is not likely to be quite so simple.” In explanation, he offered the possibility that shifting popular opinion around the world combined with a U. S. government tight-focused on Mr. Trumps avowed ‘America First’ reorientation might “allow Palestinians and others to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another.”  Despite generations of  poverty and virtual imprisonment in their ghetto territories, despite Mr. Trump’s obvious sympathies toward Netanyahu and his methods (which are after all, ones Mr. Trump would dearly love to emulate in dealing with any who do not genuflect to him) Khalidi at that time held out a slender hope that the balance of events might shift just enough to allow the non-Jewish inhabitants of the contested lands some form of self-determination and self-rule.

Reading today, we know that the years since 2017 have not been kind to that hope.  The bright promise of 2011’s Arab Spring petered out, leaving autocracy the rule and cutthroat capitalism the guiding principle for much of the Middle East.  Despite Biden’s election in 2020, progress toward any just solution was impeded by the fact so many interested parties bought the line that Jared Kushner’s so-called Abaham Accords meant peace was fully under way, rather than seeing them for the callous money-for-silence racket they actually represented.

Most tragically, the brutal Hamas attack on Israel beginning October 7, 2023 dashed whatever hopes remained by giving Netanyahu and his conservative buttresses the perfect pretext for what they may have wanted all along – the virtual elimination of a non-Jewish ‘people’ in the Palestinian region, paving the way for total and permanent Israeli control of all the lands once referred to as Palestine.  Even avoiding the wilder conspiracy theories,* it is still possible to say that Israel has since taken full advantage of the attack as justification to bury any possible path to Palestinian self-determination. The U. S., far from becoming less of a player, has been drawn by Mr. Trump’s greed and ego into proposing a ‘Peace’ plan which is anything but, consisting of removing the non-Jewish indigenous people while his cronies rebuild their homeland (at significant profit) into a luxury resort wherein, if the original inhabitants are allowed to return at all it will be only to fill dead-end service jobs in the venture-capitalist’s high-dollar playground by the sea. 

For over one hundred years, The Hundred Years War on Palestine… shows us, repression has generated pushback, military tactics have generated militant responses and violent repression has been met with more violence.  There is, unfortunately, little reason to imagine that cycle will stop now – unless the result of Mr. Trump’s ‘Peace’ plan is that there will simply are no longer any ‘Palestinians’ in Palestine to remember that their ancestors once occupied those lands.  In that case, this book may well be crucial in reminding future generations of how they were disappeared, and why, and by whom.

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible –and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new novel that considers the enormity of what the U.S.A’s current leadership may cost our nation, and how even tragedy of that magnitude may yet spawn new possibilities for the future. It is currently being serialized and you can be among the first to read its opening pages here by opening the post titled ‘E Unum Pluribus.’

*  Among the conspiracy suggestions I’ve read are:  Did Israel (and Netanyahu specifically) allow/encourag the Gulf States to provide many millions in funds to Hamas over the years because that would keep the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and other factions at one another’s throats, preventing the PA from unite the populace and so becoming more effective at dealing with Israel? Was it not obvious to Isreal and the U. S that the Abraham Accords, by leaving the Palestinians virtually no peaceful means of advancing their legitimate interests, would result in the most radical among them resorting to non-peaceful means? Did Israeli leadership in fact turn a blind eye to warning signs leading up to the Oct 7 attack because they were willing to risk some losses in order to have a pretext for their desired cleansing and achievement of the greater Zionist vision? And, if none of those claims are true, why has Netanyahu never allowed any substantive inquiry into the intelligence failures surrounding Oct. 7, when his entire administration is predicated on the claim that he and only he can keep Israel safe from exactly that sort of attack?

Age of Revolutions – Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

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In the historical/political realm, the word ‘revolution’ is commonly applied to a singular event of momentous change. In the realms of physics and mechanics, as Fareed Zakaria reminds us early in this very timely political history, ‘revolution’ means movement of an object or a system around its center, in which any point other than that exact center moves in a circle, initially getting farther away from where it once was but eventually returning to that same point before repeating the cycle.    

With that in mind, the author cogently and persuasively recounts several significant revolutions of the past 500 years, considering each as a cycle driven by some changed circumstances (new knowledge, new inventions, ravaging disease, etc.) and shaped by human choices (often with crucial contributions by extraordinary individuals).  Most importantly, he points out how in each case, the great upheaval we tend to best remember was followed by counter-revolution, a complimentary (in the geometric sense, that is, not the conversational) effort by those not in favor of that revolution’s effects to roll back the cycle of history.

A second crucial point of Zakaria’s is visible in his choice of ‘revolutions’ on which to focus: not only the political (England’s supposedly ‘Glorious Revolution,’ France’s admittedly horrific one) but also technological, economic and social revolutions.  Innovations in navigation and ship building lead to wider trade which brings different cultures into contact, at the same time it finances urbanization and thus greater education and innovation.  Industrialization creates new occupations and allows leisure for intellectual pursuits while also allowing wealth to be generated with less reliance on slavery, conquest or serfdom.  The printing press disseminates knowledge faster and wider than ever before, fostering ideals of personal choice and expectations that government should be a protector of freedom rather than an instrument of domination.  Paper and print in turn are overtaken by an electronic information revolution leading – well, we’re not yet sure where this one is taking us.

Less bloody than overt political ‘Revolutions’, it is arguably these knowledge revolutions which played the greatest role in enabling most humans today to live healthier, more comfortable and perhaps more satisfying lives than any who came before us, even as they present our greatest challenges for the future.

That’s the bulk of the book as finished in late 2023, and it’s an engrossing and valuable analysis.  Given how long it takes for even a veteran author’s work to navigate the publishing gauntlet, though, Zakaria has added an Afterword composed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s 2025 re-ascent to the highest office in our land. 

This crucial update begins by recounting China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’(1966-1976), a backward-facing assault on what Mao perceived as the threat of modernization and ‘liberal’ thought among his subjects. Tellingly, the excesses and destruction of Mao’s minions soon led to their own counterrevolution; an opening up and partial shift toward capitalism and entrepreneurism resulting in tremendous economic progress for the people of the PRC (though far less on social fronts). This history serves as a lamp under which Zakaria examines the USA’s current leadership and direction, bringing to mind another observation about ‘revolutions’ in classical mechanics: that when a revolving object or system is simultaneously moving along a larger axis – a wheel, say, revolving around its axle as a cart moves along a road, or humankind’s cycle of innovation/reaction/regression/innovation as it moves along the axis of time, for another – what results is not an endless repetition of the same events, but a sine curve of events rising up and then sinking down before beginning to rise up again. At any given moment, in fact, some specific parts of the revolving system are moving ‘forward,’ others rising up or dropping down and some are even, for an equal moment, moving backward, despite the entire system continuing its overall progress along its axis of road or time.

Do not mistake one moment’s regression for permanence, Zakaria’s text reminds.  Humanity throughout known history has been incessantly creative and innovative in seeking betterment.  For all recorded history, despite individual points upon civilization’s wheel moving upward, downward or backward, the overall motion of us all has been forward, in the direction of greater equality, greater freedom and greater physical wellbeing for more and  more of us.  If we can avoid the greatest catastrophe of total self-destruction, there is every reason to believe that future revolutions of time’s wheel will see us our fitful history continuing to move in those directions.

A reassuring conclusion in this very daunting moment…

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new novel that considers where our current divisiveness may lead in the near term, and how even tragic events can spawn possibilities for better futures. It is currently being serialized at robinandrew.net and you can be among the first to read its opening pages there in the post titled ‘E Unum Pluribus.’

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible – and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

Change your party – change the future!

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E Unum Pluribus – a tale of The Big Diss, imagines the United States of America dissolving into chaos because its elected representatives ceased to work together for the common good.  While the novel is fiction, its premise is plausible, which begs the question – what can an individual do to avoid such a tragic outcome?

Plenty of folks more knowledgeable than I have commented that we’ve all gotten so isolated into our own bubbles – republicans/democrats, conservatives/liberals, red states/blue states, urban/rural, blue collar/elitist; however one summarizes it – that it’s easy to dismiss everyone on ‘the other side’ as unreasonable, unapproachable, unsalvageable or worse. 

If (like me) you fear there is some truth to that description, and if (like me) you think forever encouraging division is a dead end – if you’ve ever felt the impulse to disagree when you’ve heard someone say the ‘X’ party is corrupt and they’re all a bunch of ‘z#fqt*^k!s,’ – how about switching your voter registration: to the X Party! 

WTF?

First off, once you switch, you will know for certain that there is at least one reasonable person in the X Party – one grain of sand to begin a beachfront of unification.

Second, you may (depending on your state) gain the opportunity to vote in the X party’s primary and improve the chances of their most reasonable candidate.  If enough of us do that, we could all have a better set of candidates to choose between in the actual election, instead of one we  cannot stomach and one we can support if we have to, but only by holding our collective noses.

Third, although there is no need for any else to know about your switch, should you ever hear someone thoughtlessly badmouthing either party, you might choose to respond by pointing out your agreement or disagreement “even though I’m a registered X!”  A single brick pulled out of a wall can improve communication between the two sides.

For whatever it’s worth: I switched to ‘the other party’ over a decade ago.  Since that time, I have found myself much more open to hearing ‘other party’ statements and proposals. I certainly do not dismiss all members of my new party out of hand – I am one of them, after all!  And I still do not always agree with their (our?) positions, but I feel obliged to at least listen, and much less resistance to acknowledging when a representative of my new party has proposed something worthwhile or productive.

Changing your party doesn’t mean voting for candidates you don’t support. It does mean choosing a future where each side is not so committed to smashing and trashing the other side that it’s virtually impossible to accomplish anything constructive. 

Government of the people, by the people and for the people should not be a cage-fight; it should be – and it can be – a mission in which we all share, together.

Red Gold, Alan Furst

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Through half a dozen novels I’ve read since 2014, Furst has never disappointed.  In a deceptively quiet voice he portrays the complexity of life in situations too often cartooned as ‘dramatic’, ‘heroic,’ or ‘epic.’  Heroes are not sprung from the loins of goddesses, he shows us, but grown from the soil of ordinariness, seeded by terrible circumstances, watered by relationships with other decent human beings and nourished by the force of life itself as they seek the paths which will allow them to go on for another day, a week or if they are very lucky, even longer.

For Red Gold, we travel in the company of one Jean Casson, a Parisian film producer trying to survive under the Nazi occupation.  Having once been picked up by German intelligence and escaped their clutches, he must now hide in plain sight, growing a mustache and dressing poorly as he adopts a false in hopes of not being recognized contacts from his old life.  Learning to watch in every direction at every moment Casson, who is himself no socialist, drifts into contact with Communist resistance fighters, directed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union.  They in turn find his character and connections useful, loosely employing him as liaison to other factions – free French disruptors, conflicted Vichy collaborators and anti-Communist nationalists partially directed and intermittently supported by the Allies’ military for their own ends.  All of these, and also the Nazis, of course, are quite willing to sacrifice any individual at any time, if it serves their particular ‘greater purpose.’

As always, Furst paints a convincing and absorbing picture of life under occupation: the drabness, the cold, shortages and unexpected moments of plenty.  Casson’s inner voice is witty enough to entertain and resourceful enough to keep him and the reader out of the worst trouble, at the same time he manages to find enough minimalist romance to leaven the despair.  These characters have no foreknowledge of how the war will turn out; at any moment this depressing moment in history may take their life and so define it – a tragedy deeper and more painful than the destructive result of any brilliant explosion or dramatic car chase.

Life goes on, even under the heavy hand of war, and as much as some persons may fight for glory or principle, what most really want is simply to keep on living, with perhaps a bit of food, a sip of drink, a smoke or a hint of love to make it worth the effort.

Definitely an author to return to, and with around fifteen novels focused on the war years in Europe (published between 1988 and 2019 and collectively referred to as ‘The Night Soldiers series’) there’s plenty of opportunity to keep Alan Furst on the shelf.

(Note: Furst’s The World at Night (1996) shares a common plot and protagonist with Red Gold, so other readers may benefit from reading that volume first.  His three earliest novels, published in ’76, ’80 and ’81, concern drugs and crime in the U. S.  I’ve not sampled them but hope one day to do so).

My own latest novel is currently being serialized on this site. You can read the first installment in the recent post titled E Unum Pluribus.

If you like what you read here at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible, and consider subscribing – it’s totally free!

E Unum Pluribus

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Wondering where our nation’s increasingly divisive politics may lead us? E Unum Pluribus is a new novel which explores one very real possibility:

Amid feudal chaos following the USA’s collapse, one city-state seems promising, until an amateur’s murder investigation exposes its weaknesses and the conspiracies threatening to destroy it.

In order to receive community input, I’m serializing a Beta Test draft of E Unum Pluribus free of charge. (So I can track interest, the final installment may be posted only to subscribers, but even that subscription will be totally free of charge or obligation.) A .pdf of Installment One is included below and may also be downloaded for a more comfortable reading experience. Either way, you get to explore this new novel at absolutely no expense!

2025-01-01 E Unum Pluribus – Installment OneDownload


Succeeding installments are available at robinandrew.net by selecting the ‘E Unum Pluribus’ button in the home page’s top-menu.

In addition to posting the manuscript, I will be sharing thoughts about the novel’s themes and objectives in future posts on both this website and on Substack at nobodysays2025.substack.com

If you find E Unum Pluribus of interest – or if you simply support the concept of authors sharing their work without reliance upon commercial publishing corporations – please share this post as widely as possible.

Have a wonderful 2026!

Robin Andrew

MAGA’s Great Replacement Fantasy (Delusions of the popu-lost)

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By now many observers have noted Mr. Trump’s tendency to accuse his detractors of whatever sin he himself is engaged in. Those observations suggest some thoughts around the Great Replacement Theory which, in Trumpian usage, holds that Democrats are intentionally perverting democracy by opening our sacred borders to untold millions of immigrants (who just coincidentally tend to be black, brown and/or from ‘shithole’ countries not part of the Anglo-European heritage which we are now being told defines true Americans).

Thought number one: acknowledging that Mr. Trump won the election in 2024 and so is legitimately occupying the Oval Office, he still received fewer than half the votes cast,* an inconvenient truth which makes one wonder if perhaps there is a hidden thread connecting several of his administration’s current priorities.

To whit: contrary to the populist image their leader loves to act out, he and any thoughtful members of his court must be aware that theirs is a minority faction and so will never be able to hold power by democratic means. Unable even to rely upon their slender majorities in Congress to do their bidding, they know they cannot govern by legislation (as the Constitution intends) but must rely almost exclusively on Executive Orders, Presidential Determinations, Proclamations, administrative directives by their chosen technocrats, petty prosecutions and the like – despite the dubious validity or effectiveness of many such.

Second, since he and they are unwilling to adjust their policies to the beliefs of the voting majority, they choose instead to speak and act as if the voting majority itself is invalid, tilted toward ‘radical’ outcomes by the presence of millions of non-citizen immigrants. If – goes the fantasy they imply to their base – the administration can eliminate enough of those ‘illegals’ through holding-camps, deportation, self-deportation, remigration or whatever other terms they come up with next, then the voters who are left will constitute their dream of a majority MAGA electorate. That hope energizes their base and recruits enforcers for ICE and other agencies, but unfortunately for MAGA, their inability to produce any credible evidence of voting by non-citizens in numbers that would make any difference in any election at any level demonstrates the fallacy of such hope. Illegal immigrants have never swung actual voting so even their complete extermination would not affect any future outcome. The pro-Trump minority is not democratically viable* and his power can only be ensured by non-democratic means.

Which explains the Administration’s doubling-down on tactics to frustrate the democratic will. Demands for state gerrymandering, discouragingly cumbersome voter ID requirements, restrictions on drop-boxes, voting locations, hours or mail-in options, false accusations of voting machine irregularities, placement of threatening ‘monitors’ at election sites, these and many other strategies are designed to deter enough voters to ensure MAGA victories whether or not the majority of eligible voters want them or, in the worst case, to provide excuses to override the true verdict when it proves they do not.

One can even interpret MAGA’s recent call for Americans to have more children as a supply side complement to these strategies. Refuse to naturalize any but the wealthy and pale at the same time the MAGA faithful produce more and more purebred American babies (who will, presumably, be groomed by their parents to vote the ruling party’s ticket from birth) and they might just turn their minority into a real majority – in twenty or thirty years.

All this can be seen as one more indication we’re lost on a dark and very slippery slope or, looked at from another angle, it may give a sliver of hope. Since the people he is tossing out the door were never part of the majority who voted against him, Mr. Trump’s epic cleansing will do nothing to change his minority status. In fact, if the callousness and brutality of it repels even a few of his past followers, it will actually drive his share of future vote tallies lower. In which case, the majority of the American electorate may one day reject Mr. Trump’s imperium by a large enough margin that not even doomed third-party candidates and the misrepresentative calculus of the Electoral College will be enough to save him.

Here’s hoping that whenever that day comes, there is still a nation left to rebuild!

*Of the three elections in which Donald J. Trump has ever competed, he has never won a majority of the votes cast. If that is any sort of mandate, it is a mandate against Mr. Trump, not for him. The fact that he was elected in 2016 reflected just how unsuited our present Electoral College structure is to today’s electorate, in which the population disparity between large states and small ones is more than five times as wide as it was at the time the Constitution was being developed, yet each of those states still gets an equal two Senate-related votes. The fact he was elected in 2024 despite not winning a majority is its own indictment of an election process held captive to two ossified major parties which cannot possibly represent the true diversity of their electorate.

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