The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent. They aren't. They're attempting to return the Republicans to power at any cost. What was noteworthy about Bush V. Gore was the amount of dancing the Rehnquist Court did around the precedent they were setting - they made great pains to write out any possible future outcomes because really, all they wanted was for Bush to win.

Logic-based political parties suffer from the requirement that their moves make sense and are a part of historical continuity. Allegiance-based political parties suffer from the fact that their only cohesion comes from affinity and opportunism. The Democratic Party is and has been a logic-based political party. The Republican Party started transitioning to allegiance-based after Eisenhower but really nose-dived into pure fealty with Trump. The move for the Democrats is to do Democrat things in order to maintain their Democratic base; the move for Republicans is to amp up the passion for their base.

The problem, of course, is that their base has peeled away from the middle. They end up in a doom spiral that has a very real chance of sucking us all down with them.

I'm making my way through Second Hand Time. It's fucking rough. The through-lines, though, are crystal clear:

1) There is no Russia only Moscow

2) Every republic except Russia hated the USSR

3) Muscovites prefer to dominate others - even if they suffer - over actually knowing their place in the world pecking order

I see a lot of Republicanism in it. The Republicans have cooked up this imaginary past when everything was great and the Blacks and Mexicans knew their place and if we just own the libs hard enough we can return to 1952. When a Trump administration with both wings of government fails to get any traction? It's because the libs aren't being owned hard enough. If they just believe harder they'll be able to return to a utopia that never existed, when they didn't have to deal with the fact that other people have feelings and that there is no "away" in "throw stuff away."

"Trump is king" is the logical end result. There is not a speculative fiction writer out there whose basis of government was anything other than "we'll have a one-world government run dispassionately by people we agree with." The complications of actually running a country aren't interesting to that line of thinking. (1) Make Trump King (2) Whatever Trump wants is good for the country (3) If you don't like it learn to suck up better.

The USSR was corrupt. The people who ran it were the ones who most benefited from the corruption. Then Gorbachev tried to root out the corruption and the USSR collapsed. The people who came out on top were the opportunists, the people who lost were the idealists, the people who were crushed was everyone else.

The Roberts court is at "theocracies are simpler." Your soldier? Needs to carry out his illegal orders in hopes he does it well enough to get a pardon so he'd best please the King. That's simple strongman logic, which is exactly what the Republicans want.