As most of my readers probably know, I recently joined Substack and began distributing my articles from The Memory Cache blog via Substack emails as well.
In the past year, as media consolidation under the control of billionaires has accelerated, and those wealthy corporations and owners have bent the knee to the current regime in Washington, many talented and well-known writers and thinkers have fled to Substack from mainstream media platforms. That has made Substack a great place to find good writing and opinion on current events.
I subscribe to a number of popular Substack writers, and would recommend any and all of them. My list includes Heather Cox Richardson, the noted American historian; Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who resigned from the New York Times; Timothy Synder, famed historian of authoritarianism who wrote On Tyranny and On Freedom; and several others. Most of the people on my list would be familiar as regular guest commentators to anyone who’s spent time in the past few years watching CNN or MSNBC. I’m sure there are many other good ones too, if only I had time to keep up with the ones I’m already reading.
Interestingly, though, the writer who has most caught my attention in recent weeks is someone I’ve never seen on TV, or heard of before. I’m not even sure how I first had one of his emails show up in my inbox, but after I’d read a few of them, I quickly subscribed. And having followed him now for a couple of months, I am recommending him to everyone who is concerned about the ongoing political, economic and moral calamity of the Trump 2.o administration and our current moment.
His name is Christopher Armitage, and he writes under the publication name of “The Existentialist Republic”. I don’t know him, or that much about his life story, and because of that, in recommending him I assume the risk that there may be negative things about him and his background I don’t know. I have no reason to think so, but I can’t be certain. It’s just a caveat.
What I do know based on what I found online (and what he has written) is that he lives in Spokane, Washington. He is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, with multiple deployments overseas. He also has experience as a security consultant, and a background in law enforcement and prison administration. He has written several books and peer-reviewed research articles, including one book on police reform and another on the psychological roots of American conservatism. He ran as a Democrat for Congress in 2020, but lost in the primary. He also claims to live alone with three cats.
That’s what I know about him so far. I’ve never seen him on TV, but he has 37,000 subscribers on Substack. Apparently I’m not the only person taking him and his writing seriously. So what does he have to say?
In his almost daily email articles, he has focused on a few recurring ideas and themes, which he bolsters with well-footnoted research from a wide range of credible sources, including legal decisions and court opinions, news stories, histories, studies and position papers. The major themes include:
o American democracy at the federal level is already in a death spiral due to corporate and right-wing ideological capture of Congress, the Supreme Court, and mass media, along with gerrymandering and the undemocratic elements of the Constitution itself. He explains and provides extensive examples and reasoning to support this assessment.
o The crisis posed by Trump’s authoritarianism and his regime’s lawlessness and corruption can best be opposed by using the same kinds of state power, aggressive tactics and local prerogatives that the right has used for generations to resist federal authority.
o He advocates for “soft secession” by blue states. This is not a call for an “armed civil war” type of secession, but rather for developing alliances between blue states, and building new state-based institutions to resist the worst policies of the current federal regime, and to provide citizens in blue states with the social goods and safety net that the federal government seems so determined not to provide to the nation’s people.
His daily articles are full of specific, detailed plans and legal tactics that could plausibly be carried out, and would almost surely be popular in at least the half of the country that wants to live in a democratic society of equal rights, the rule of law, prosperity, fairness and generosity, along with a strong social safety net.
One idea of his I have heard elsewhere advocates states withholding or delaying tax payments to the federal government, based on several possible legal theories. Because the larger blue states in general are wealthier and more populous, and pay more in taxes than they get back from the federal government, shutting off the flow of tax money to the feds and needy red states would be a powerful means of exerting financial and political pressure. I have read elsewhere that several large Democratic-controlled states are already considering this option.
In another recent article, Armitage pointed out a clause in the Affordable Care Act that allows states to band together to provide access to healthcare plans across multiple states. He writes that this was written into the law as a concession to Republicans, to let red states join together to offer cheaper, less generous policies than offered by the federal government through Obamacare. But ironically, he argues, blue states could band together to develop multi-state healthcare plans where they could leverage their combined economic clout and population power to create major, unified multi-state single payer systems, all without any federal means of stopping them (since it’s allowed under the existing ACA law).
He has also advocated for the idea that blue state attorney generals could and should bring the full force of state law against federal officials who commit state crimes and corruption under supposed federal authority. Even if these cases (civil and criminal) don’t always succeed, he contends, they can make the individual cost and personal risk to federal officials much higher, and slow things down. He provides examples of how and when this has been done. And as he points out, this is just flipping the script on MAGA Republicans: it’s showing that Democratic-controlled states too can assert their rights boldly, and use state legal systems to frustrate overreaching and unpopular actions by federal officials from the opposing political camp.
He has so many good and novel ideas and observations, many of which I’ve heard from no one else, that it’s hard to keep track of them all. But what I also really like is that after proposing these creative ways to fight back effectively against the Trump regime at the state level, protect the people and institutions in our states under assault, and build the sort of just and compassionate society we want to live in, he gives his readers the tools to advocate for these ideas, by providing the contact information for the state officials in our own states to whom the ideas should be addressed.
Of course, no one has all the right ideas, and after the 2025 electoral results on Tuesday, November 4th, many people might say that those who want to save democracy and the rule of law now should focus on winning the 2026 mid-term elections as the best means for resisting Trump and his followers. But in the meantime, if you are looking for positive, constructive, realistic and original ideas for how to defend democracy and a free, prosperous American society, you’ll find them in Christopher Armitage’s Substack writing at The Existentialist Republic. Highly recommended.
This is a great review, and I heartily agree. I'd never heard of Christopher till I joined Substack recently, but already I feel I owe him a debt of gratitude. His articles and suggestions have kept me sane and kept me fighting in these perilously dark times.