Flying Under The Radar Politics

While I mean this to be a stand-alone post, in some sense it can be taken as a sequel to my post from Saturday.  It was motivated by asking these questions.  If there were an effective way to fight back against regressive income distribution and someone like me wanted to support that effort by making a money donation to it, how would that happen?  How would I know to trust the mechanism wasn't some scam? How would I learn about this mechanism, in the first place?

My think-alouds qua blog posts do satisfy the requirement of flying under the radar, but that's because hardly anyone reads them.  The hidden message in my title is perhaps best thought about via a metaphor of a military submarine that deploys effective radar.  There is ample and full communication aboard the ship, but the enemy subs and other enemy vessels can't detect that communication at all.  Now, to make the problem harder, imagine that it is a virtual submarine, where the crew are actually geographically dispersed, as are those aboard the enemy ships.  Can this sort of communication still happen?  

My intuition tells me that yes, it can happen, but that much of the last mile in such communication will need to be done face-to-face rather than online. This is not a perfect solution, for sure.  The movie, The Conversation, comes to mind even though it came out more than 50 years ago.  And the money donation itself would almost certainly still need to be done online, as for someone like me that's how I do all my charitable giving.  So the face-to-face part would need to be sufficient as to not bring attention to those other bits of communication that remain online.  And the face-to-face part would also need to establish the credibility of the participants, thereby developing trust between them.  The intermediaries who do this work likely will require substantial training ahead of time, so they are effective in what they do.

Now let me get beyond this issue of communication and talk about other reasons for why one might want some of our politics to fly under the radar.  If you see the world as I do, then it seems that the Trump White House is proactive, for better or worse, mainly for worse, while those impacted by the decisions of the Trump White House are reactive. Their instrument to restore things as before is to rely on the courts by them suing the government.  Further, political activity by the rank and file has happened mainly through public protests, such as the recent No Kings Day.  Participants certainly felt empowered as a result.  But did this and other protests have any impact on the the Trump White House?  

It is my belief that the vast majority of us who didn't vote for Trump, as well as those who now regret from doing so, still believe in American Democracy and that the right curative for what ails us now should happen at the ballot box.  But what if intelligent insiders have come to believe otherwise, that we're too far gone done the path to totalitarianism, to expect the ship to right itself of its own accord.  In this case more proactive steps would be needed.  Let me leave for now which proactive steps to take, but rather simply consider this one question, whether proactive steps are necessary or not.  That is a fundamentally political decision that needs to be made and it can't be made out in the open.  Further, if it is decided by these insiders that a series of proactive steps are necessary, then some sketch of an implementation plan must be developed.  That plan also can't be distributed out in the open.  The secure communication that I briefly discussed above will also be needed to put such a plan into action.

Now let me switch gears and ask something different.  Even though this is impossible, if one could poll those who are outspoken against the Trump government, how would they react to the suggestion that their protestations are insufficient and that some sort of targeted guerrilla warfare is needed, because the ballot box solution will fail?  I posed this question to argue that a two-faced strategy will be needed.  The public face will continue to advocate for the ballot box solution, while the flying-under-the-radar face will advocate for a proactive strategy, which may then become known to the public, but only after the implementation is well underway.  And, if eventually making the public aware is indeed part of the implementation plan, then it must be the same political leadership who wears both faces.  

Could this be happening already?  I have no way of knowing, but I hope it is.