Earlier I wrote about the DHS making the decision to brand every public Trump supporter a high-level "Quad-S" terrorist threat and using the power of government to surveil and harass them.
This is part of the "Whole of Society" means of "Combating Violent Extremism" (CVE) that Obama implemented, and is now SOP throughout the Regime-controlled government.
A couple of weeks ago, Jacob Siegel wrote a great piece for Tablet that is now getting quoted more and more.
To make sense of today's form of American politics, it is necessary to understand a key term. It is not found in standard U.S. civics textbooks, but it is central to the new playbook of power: "whole of society."
The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for the government to control public life that can, at best, be called "Soviet-style." Here's the simplest definition: "Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity."
In other words, the government enacts policies and then "enlists" corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them--creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don't like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.
And there's an additional catch. "The government"--meaning the elected officials visible to the American public who appear to enact the policies that are carried out across the whole of society--is not the ultimate boss. Joe Biden may be the president but, as is now clear, that doesn't mean he's in charge of the party.
As a modern political trope, whole of society dates to the Obama administration's attempt to pivot in the "war on terror" to what it called CVE--countering violent extremism. The idea was that by identifying at-risk individuals and then engaging them, American officials could "get left of the boom" and intervene before extremism led to violence.
Obama took the security apparatus that George Bush had created (with conservative support) and simply redirected it to surveil, harass, stigmatize, and prosecute normal law-abiding American citizens.
In concept, the strategy called for empowering "community-led interventions" as a method of conflict resolution. In practice, the White House paired its progressive efforts at community activism with an aggressive expansion of counterterrorist operations and drone strikes.
But the true lasting legacy of the CVE model was that it justified mass surveillance of the internet and social media platforms as a means to detect and de-radicalize potential extremists. Inherent in the very concept of the "violent extremist," was a weaponized vagueness.
That's a good term -- "weaponized vagueness."
Are they attempting to squelch violent extremists? Well, they're deliberately vague on that point, because they want to justify this program by talking about violence, but what they really want to do with the power is harass non-violent non-extremists -- normies who merely oppose socialism and Obama's brand of third-world triumphalism.
A decade after 9/11, as Americans wearied of the war on terror, it became passé and politically suspicious to talk about jihadism or Islamic terrorism. Instead, the Obama national security establishment insisted that extremist violence was not the result of particular ideologies and therefore more prevalent in certain cultures than in others, but rather its own free-floating ideological contagion. Given these criticisms Obama could have tried to end the war on terror, but he chose not to. Instead, Obama's nascent party state turned counterterrorism into a whole-of-society progressive cause by redirecting its instruments--most notably mass surveillance--against American citizens and the domestic extremists supposedly lurking in their midst.
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The whole-of-society trope can be traced from its initial popularization in the context of CVE in 2014-15 to its use as a censorship coordinating mechanism after the rise of Donald Trump initiated a panic over Russian disinformation, then as a call for increased social media clampdowns during COVID, to the present--where it functions as a generic slogan and coordinating mechanism of a party state, one originally built by Obama, and which now operates through the vehicle of the Democratic Party over which he presides.
What the various iterations of this whole-of-society approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and the right to free association, their embrace of social media surveillance, and their repeated failure to deliver results...
Indeed, whole of society is a totalizing form of politics. As the name implies, it discards the traditional separation of powers and demands political participation from corporations, civic groups, and other nonstate actors. Mass surveillance is the backbone of the approach, but it also consolidates a new class of functionaries who all directly or indirectly work for the party's interests. This is exactly how the party carried out its mass censorship during COVID and the 2020 election: by embedding government officials and party-aligned "experts" from the for-hire world of nonprofit activism, inside the social media platforms. The result, as I chronicled in an investigative essay last year, was the largest campaign of domestic mass surveillance and censorship in American history--often censoring true and time-sensitive information.
Read the whole thing, if the following rings true to you:
To avoid the appearance of totalitarian overreach in such efforts, the party requires an endless supply of causes--emergencies that party officers, with funding from the state, use as pretexts to demand ideological alignment across public and private sector institutions. These causes come in roughly two forms: the urgent existential crisis (examples include COVID and the much-hyped threat of Russian disinformation); and victim groups supposedly in need of the party's protection.
Siegel goes on to say that this "totalizing" form of politics is responsible for the quick and easy coup against Joe Biden and the rapid elevation of Kamala Harris -- after all, if we're all united in a Whole of Society war against dangerous "extremists," we cannot dilly-dally with tedious democratic functions. We must act swiftly and boldly to Save Democracy, and anyone standing in the way of our fight to Save Democracy -- including the current president (not to mention the last one) -- will just have to be shoved forcefully aside.