News comes this morning that Christian Ziegler, embattled chair of the Florida GOP, accused rapist and one half (or perhaps one third) of the threesoming Zieglers, wants a buyout. Yes, a buyout. Usually we think of a buyout as a cash offer in exchange for some property interest in something, or a job in which someone has something akin to a property interest. It’s not usually something you get when you agree to relinquish an elected political office. But as we noted earlier, the bylaws of the Florida GOP don’t appear to contain any process for firing a party chair. The party can ask him to leave. They can investigate him. But they can’t fire him. So far Ziegler has been adamant in his refusal to resign.

Back in August 2015, based on a TPM Reader making the connection, I described how a concept from the world of military intellectuals — the OODA Loop — helped explain the uncanny power of Donald Trump’s impulsive and thoroughly un-theorized way of engaging in political fights. It’s not the point of this discussion, but I need to explain the basic OODA Loop concept to have it. So I’ll summarize it quickly: In any fight or combat, each side is in a process of seeing what’s happening, understanding it, making a decision how to react based on it and then attacking. John Boyd, the military theorist who devised the concept, called this Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — OODA. If you move fast enough, you can act and thus change the observed reality to something new while your opponent is still in the process of making sense of and reacting to the old one. Conventional military theory captured the same insight, albeit in a less analytic way, in its emphasis on taking and maintaining the initiative. Act and make your adversary react to you, not vice versa.

I wanted to give a quick update on American and Israeli wrestling over the pace and duration of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. The U.S. has been pushing the Israelis with increasing vigor to end the campaign in Gaza in early January. It has also been demanding greater consultation and coordination between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. We want to know exactly what your plan is, basically. Publicly the Israeli government has been saying that its campaign will take as long as it takes. As much as it appreciates U.S. support it won’t agree to any arbitrary timetable.

In practice, however, something else appears to be happening on the ground and in the air.

Frequently I will hear from TPM Readers who tell me that they fear and believe authoritarianism is on the rise both in the United States and abroad and, critically, that it is on the cusp of winning. This is an understandable fear and belief, and it may be right. But I do not think it is the most accurate assessment of the information before us. Rather than Team Democracy battling back against and defeating Team Authoritarianism, or vice versa, in a final confrontation or series of final confrontations, we’re seeing something different. We have a new model in which we no longer have parties of government of right and left but rather a civic democratic party and an authoritarian populist party. There’s a good chance they’ll be contesting elections for a while, even as the authoritarian populist party is trying in various ways to end them or radically change how free they are.