My wording in this title is one part provocation. But there is a serious point to it.

American political debates use the term “elite” in a fairly impoverished way. Its use is pejorative rather than descriptive. The elites are the bad guys. And the good elites aren’t actually elites. We’re all familiar with this and perhaps it’s inevitable in a political culture so rooted in the imagery and ideology, if not always the reality, of popular rule and the power and valorization of the ordinary American.

But the elite, in a more descriptive and non-evaluative sense, has been perhaps the biggest reveal of this live subject experiment we’ve been a part of since late January. Law firms, universities, big business, news publications and a million other examples. We’ve all been amazed, disheartened, aghast, whatever you want to call it, by the subservience of the prominent and the powerful. Even those who haven’t adopted a posture of subservience have generally adopted one of silence. I hear it from reporter after reporter. The kind of people they used to go to for quotes — a lot of those people don’t want to give them anymore. And, beyond moral evaluation, we know why: they have things on the line. A rogue President has vast untapped and illegal or unconstitutional but still usable power to come after really anyone who puts their head up. The challenges to Trump have much more been waged by ordinary Americans.

I was driving when this afternoon’s events in Los Angeles took place. So I didn’t know about them in real time and only found out what had happened a couple hours later. (Appropriately enough, I was listening to the audiobook version of a Raymond Chandler novel.) Secretary Noem is now claiming that she, along with everyone else there, didn’t even know who Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was. This is even more absurd than you might imagine. The press conference was in Los Angeles and he’s one of the state’s two senators. More than that, he’s the ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration. Of course she knows who he is. If she doesn’t remember his face, she’s an even dumber degenerate punk than I already thought.

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will begin “winding down” FEMA after this year’s Hurricane season and, perhaps the more significant statement, that he will begin distributing disaster aid directly from the President’s office. In other words, disaster assistance will be the President’s personal gift, an assist for friends and those who display loyalty. It’s part of the broader pattern we can see across the horizon: Trump takes the policing and military powers of the United States and the national tax revenues (drawn disproportionately from the blue states) and uses it to make war on states he considers enemies.

We’ve discussed in a number of posts over the spring that Donald Trump’s effort to build a dictatorial, autocratic presidency is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. I’ve also noted in a series of posts that the states and their separate sovereignties are a key, defensive source of strength in the effort to defeat Trump. Since they are a source of strength, they are by definition also a target. We’re seeing both these realities play out in the chaotic situation in Los Angeles.

Let me start with a few observations about the general situation.

National Guard troops are mobilized fairly frequently for domestic purposes, usually during natural disasters. Having them federalized isn’t that uncommon. But having them federalized over the objections of a state’s civil authorities is extremely uncommon and hasn’t happened in more than half a century. As this was unfolding over the weekend, I knew generally that this had last happened under LBJ as a part of enforcement of federal law during the Civil Rights Era. But I didn’t remember that the last time was specifically during the Selma-to-Montgomery March in March 1965. I was reminded of this this morning by a piece in NOTUS. This 2016 piece in Politico gives the specific details of how and why the federalization took place, which are interesting in themselves. A federal judge ruled that the march was protected under the First Amendment and that the state was responsible for ensuring its safety. Wallace refused to use state police power to do that, thus deliberately forcing Johnson’s hands (Johnson was pissed), figuring that he would gain politically if federal troops got into violent in encounters with anti-civil rights counter-protestors. As it happened, the larger spectacle was a key part of building momentum for the passage of the Voting Rights Act that August.