Tootfinder

Every time leftists talk about escalating against Trump, liberals point out that Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke the insurrection act. This is true. But they don't notice that he's the least popular president in history and the military has largely already made it clear that they won't be used against civilians. That risk assessment completely lacks context.
Trump could not possibly win against an insurgency because the only thing he could possibly offer to end it would be his own resignation. If Trump tried to escalate to civil war he would either lose or be removed.
More importantly, Trump compulsively escalates. He will continue to start wars because he thinks he's doing a good job and he's a hero. When he gets frustrated at some foreign enemy because he's actually completely incompetent and only able to win against incompetent and wildly unpopular opponents, he threatens war crimes.
I am familiar enough with history to fully believe that he ordered a nuclear strike last night and people said "no." Humanity has been saved multiple times by people refusing to follow orders, and you don't find out until years later. (This is also not the first story of a president dangerously deep in mental decline. Reagan lost the nuclear football.)
The longer this goes on, the greater the risk that eventually someone will actually let him do something unthinkable. But that's significantly less likely if he's trying to fight within the US border.
Just looking at things from a risk perspective, "he's going to invoke the insurrection act" is not nearly as big of a threat as democrats think it is, and it's about time they think realistically about this fact.

I tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.