Succession by Design
A Doctrine of Prefiguration, Inheritance and Continuity
Coups are not always heralded by blood and flame.
Sometimes, they’re a bulldozer taken to ledgers,
Theft of records,
A wiping of institutional memory,
And interposition of a new piloting will grafted into the carcass of the old.
The body of the old Executive still walks—as a living homage to The Body Snatchers.
The wreckage will not provide safe or stable ground upon which to rebuild—what has not been gutted has been repurposed, and if we do restore American democracy? We won’t be able to trust the bureaucratic remains sieved from the rubble.
Speculation: The code is backdoored; the records falsified where they aren’t shredded; the sheer logistics wiped out and the civil servants in some cases unreachable. Speculation. Who can ever be confident it’s wrong?
What the Pandemic did to supply chains, this plague has done to the government—and more.
Collapse, when it comes, is often procedural.
Radical Federalism does not wait for it.
It builds through it.
For many reasons, we must begin now—while the remains are still animate.
That is the core of succession by design:
We prefigure what is missing.
We inherit what is dropped.
And we ensure that governance survives—not as authority, but as responsibility.
I. Prefiguration
A Doctrine for Building What Comes Next
You do not wait for collapse to build what replaces it.
You build before it falls.
The German WWII military doctrine of Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, fused mechanized speed with concentrated force to rupture enemy lines, encircle command, and annihilate resistance before it could organize.
It is no accident that this is what we are now experiencing as barriers fall one-by-one.
What the Regime is doing was planned in advance.
We will probably never find their operational plans, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t written.
How do we respond to that?
Not with waiting. Not with shock.
But with prefiguration—building parallel forms, resilient lines, and a living alternative before the breach is total.
They escalate with coordination; we respond with coherence.
They seize with speed; we endure with structure.
They write plans in secret; we build futures in public.
Because collapse is not the end.
It is the moment the next thing becomes possible.
And if we haven’t built it by then—we will not survive what follows.
Prefiguration is not hope. It is method.
It is the deliberate design of systems that function now and endure later:
Local courts—formed through state or tribal jurisdiction, staffed with community defense attorneys, able to issue injunctions even as federal courts fall silent.
Redundant grids—municipal microgrids powered by solar and wind, owned by the public, and capable of islanding during blackouts or federal sabotage.
Independent libraries—with offline archives, meshnet backups, and banned book repositories, acting as memory cells for the free republic.
Mutual aid pods—ten-person units trained in food distribution, emergency medicine, legal observing, and digital security.
Legal shadow files—pre-drafted lawsuits, constitutional briefs, and habeas petitions that can be filed within hours when lines are crossed.
Backup comms—Signal trees, GMRS radios, local MESH nodes, and whisper networks that reroute around federal surveillance.
Off-chain ledgers—for food, fuel, and local resource exchange, built on trust, not extraction.
Urban sanctuaries—rented or purchased properties pre-designated as shelter nodes, with legal defense contacts and hardened access.
To prefigure is to govern before the mandate.
To legislate before recognition.
To survive before the disaster is declared.
We don’t prepare for power.
We simulate it. We script it. We scaffold it.
We train block captains, run mock drills, print alternate IDs, and pass down protocols in zines, not PDFs.
We pre-load court filings, train paralegals in attestation, and establish escrow accounts for collective bail.
We write curricula for schools that don’t yet exist—and host classes in homes that already do.
█ We don’t rebuild after the collapse.
We build through it—and inherit what remains.
II. Inheritance
A Doctrine of Post-Federal Succession
The Mesh will not conquer the center. We won’t. We can’t.
Our Institutions may withstand the siege, even while the federal bureaucracy in its near totality has been bombed to rubble.
We wait for it to drop what it can no longer hold—and pick it up.
Radical Federalism is not a movement of revolution.
It is a movement of succession.
A system designed to take responsibility, not territory.
To receive authority, not seize it.
If Washington collapses in practice—though not in name—and there is a vacuum:
We do not race to fill it.
We make sure governance never left the ground.
Before this ends, courts may be forced to stop filing.
Agencies may become devoid of what is not malignant.
The mandates which come down may seem madness.
And someone will need to keep the lights on.
Someone will need to protect the vulnerable.
Someone will need to define the law, uphold the memory, manage the grid, feed the neighbor, govern the city.
That someone is us.
What that looks like depends on the events unfolding.
Marginalized communities already know—have always known—what it is to be abandoned by the center.
Whether underground support amidst a dark night or day-to-day survival post collapse, the Mesh—the people, the communities—are vital.
█ We don’t take power.
We hold what the regime abandoned—until no one remembers they were ever in charge.
III. Structural Continuity
The Alloy of Prefiguration and Inheritance
Prefiguration without inheritance is architecture without transition.
Inheritance without prefiguration is capture waiting to happen.
We cannot inherit what we did not build.
We cannot build what we are not willing to hold.
Prefiguration ensures that something is ready.
Inheritance ensures that what comes next is not claimed by opportunists.
Together, they allow continuity without conquest.
We do not seek authority.
We seek function.
We do not rush the handoff.
We create a system that does not need one.
A structure that continues without applause.
A town council that governs while the center stammers.
A school district that adapts before the state crumbles.
A confederation of cities that reroutes the national grid—without ever boasting it to be more than continuity.
Succession by design means we are not waiting for collapse to justify ourselves.
We are building institutions that justify themselves by working—quietly, locally, immediately.
This is, already, an American heritage.
One illegible to the center.
Our marginalization of immigrants? Our segregation of communities of color? Our multifront attacks on the people of the First Nations? Our abandonment of Appalachia from all discourse on American equality and progress?
These were not preparation. They were injustice.
But what emerged in their shadow was something else—resilience.
Mutual aid without permission.
Healing without recognition.
Sovereignty without statehood.
The communities who were never protected by the center are already surviving without it.
They’ve had to.
We have built resilient communities that are prepared for what is to come, whatever its shape. They’ve had to be.
█ This is not succession through force.
It is succession through function.
And it is already underway.
It is overdue we recognize that.
Appendix: Lineages of Prefigurative Governance
The principles of prefiguration, inheritance, and structural continuity are not new. They are ancestral. They are American. And they are already proven. What follows is not an exhaustive record, but a living lineage—a proof of what America still carries in its traditions; a source of hope.
Tribal Confederacies — from the Iroquois Great Law of Peace to the Choctaw Nation’s matrilineal civic design, Indigenous governance on this land predated the United States and often surpassed it in accountability, balance, and durability. These systems modeled distributed authority, consensus-building, and continuity without conquest.
Maroon Communities — fugitives of slavery built autonomous enclaves in the mountains, swamps, and forests of the South and Caribbean. Their survival was not symbolic. It was logistical, agricultural, and military—an entire society built on exit and endurance, resisting both capture and assimilation.
Black Panther Survival Programs — these were not charity. They were parallel governance: free breakfast, ambulance service, medical clinics, housing cooperatives, and political education—all before collapse, all without federal recognition. They exposed the state’s failures by doing what the state would not.
Appalachian Mutualism — far from elite centers of power, Appalachian communities practiced mutual aid, barn-raising, debt forgiveness, and food co-ops out of necessity. These were not romantic traditions—they were resilient economies against abandonment.
Underground Railroad, Sanctuary Movements, and ACT UP — resistance networks have long protected the vulnerable when law turned against them. These traditions inform our present-day need for legal shield structures, rapid-response teams, and data-secure lifelines.
Radical Municipalism and the Black Radical Tradition — from the Reconstruction-era Freedmen’s Towns to Jackson, Mississippi, from Ella Baker to the Combahee River Collective, the architecture of just governance has always been alive outside the center.
Radical Federalism is a framework—but it is also a continuation.
We owe our coherence not to novelty, but to fidelity.
We do not erase the hands that built the roads we now walk.
We build in public—but never alone.
█ Let this doctrine be transparent in lineage, humble in power, and accountable to the ancestors who built governance where none was given.