Colorado supreme court ruled that they can take Trump off the ballot, now it looks like California is trying to do that as well. Meanwhile, republican states are threatening to retaliate in kind.
This seems unprecedented for US, does anybody know what happens in this scenario?
Indeed.
The imperial narrative is discursive and inherently contested. It is not simply created and enforced by conscious state agents, but is also an inherent part of the social relations and characteristics of the public. It is a result of contradictions and relations, not mere top down hegemony. However, the divide doesn’t necessarily inhibit imperial hegemony nor does it necessarily signal a decline, only development, which may actually end up invigorating imperial power.
There have always been massive contradictions in the American system and now is not even close to as dire as past struggles have been. In fact when internal contradictions really got hairy for the US leading up to the Civil War, it eventually allowed for massive expansion at the cost of breaking the enslaver plantation class. There was no intial intention to pay such a price but they did it anyway and it got them a continent once the dust settled. The US is not as rigid as many believe.
Like all the people that know Trump tried to incite a coup, even if it was carried out by incompetent people that have no clue about anything at all? The idea that prosecuting Trump will choke the US seems to be a massive stretch. If anything it will bring it more cohesion and make it easier to achieve the consent you are concerned about.
The question is how will it actually play out? Has Trump played his role already? Is he necessary for legitimizing the already popular democracy vs tyranny narrative or is Putin/Xi enough? Is he still needed to solidify the Democratic Party and the Republican Party? Maybe they decide he is better to keep around so they can inflate fears over project 2025 or maybe he is booted off more ballets anyway and they roll with it. I don’t see a bad option. Even a Trump win has imperial benifits discursivley and materially.
Clearly we don’t exist in the same universe in regards to this topic. It’s the facts as you see them here as well.
The difference between the slaving, plantation owning class of yesteryear, and the petit bourgeois and working classes’ discontent today, is that one side happens to be overwhelmingly representing US industry and production- agriculture, domestic industry, etc… and the other side is the financier/managerial class which has been starving out the former, or exporting it overseas for its own profit. In the US civil war, the Union represented American industry- that same industry has been gutted into a shadow of what it once was, and its bitter remnants are coalescing with all the other demographics who have been left at the wayside of the globalized economy. And- for all the “blue state, red state” divisions- both sides’ spread across the country know no borders; the comparison of the “slave state, free state” does not exist.
I ain’t concerned about the “cohesion/consent.” Frankly, if every American citizen decided tomorrow that the US was an illegal government, and the country balkanized into thousands of microstates, I would be very happy. I don’t care about your country, actually I see it as the epicenter of all modern evil and what’s wrong with the world, I’d go so far as to describe it as the likely “great filter” humanity must overcome, lest we face extinction.
If you think this is going to lead to more “cohesion” though… really? What are you smoking? Unless by “cohesion” you mean jackboots on the ground, not beyond the official borders of the empire, but within the continental USA…