Terrible Opportunity

 It's been a rough few weeks, hasn't it? I'm not going to go through the whole list, because it's long, and to detail the destructive nature of each action taken by the current administration would be too long for a blog post, and too depressing for me or readers. Suffice to say, the Project 2025 Tracker is doing a good job of living up to its name. If you're not familiar with Project 2025, Democracy Forward has put together a good and not overly long primer. What we're witnessing is an administrative coup, in tandem with an attempt at something akin to the cultural revolution of Mao Zedong. They are "of a piece," as the saying goes, and separate fronts in the attempt to create the conditions that will achieve fascist authoritarian rule. What the press, domestic and international, has failed to grasp is that this is a fascist revolutionary movement. 

In the past few weeks, I've started to understand something else though. All of this is presenting an opportunity. It's a terrible opportunity, and not in a form any of us who appreciate the even the most basic concepts of human rights or democracy would have asked for, but it is an opportunity we can seize. All of us who have a vested interest in seeing this fascist revolution defeated (the majority of people in the US and the world), have to understand we cannot overcome it by trying to "go back." We are here, because we were there. Going back to the conditions of some ten, twenty, thirty years ago, to a version of US political and cultural norms we imagine were better than those we see active now, only postpones the inevitable, ending up back here in five years, ten years, in a generation, maybe two at best. We have to envision something new, because the way to defeat this fascist movement is not with the same ideas and strategies they have already defeated. 

The United States has always been a nation of two primary, but competing instincts. One, is outlined in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

The other is the instinct to accumulate power and wealth, to dominate. It's why less than twenty percent of the population was legally able to vote when the Constitution was ratified. It's why we end up with one of the first major compromises of those unalienable rights, the Three Fifths compromise, which established slaves as three fifths of a person for the purposes of the census, so that slave states would get recognition for a population of people who were denied even basic human rights, much less unalienable rights or the right to participate in the democratic process. It gave slave states better representation in Congress. This compromise came about because those in the process of writing the Constitution decided the nation needed the economic power brought about by the existence of slave labor in these states. They'd gotten quite rich off the deprivation of African and Caribbean peoples dehumanization. It was the compromise between these two competing drives that also gave us the Electoral College, and a Senate that is the stronger chamber of Congress, because it does not have proportional representation. 

The fear this order might come to an end was enough for slave states to start attempting secede from the nation, which brought about the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln stated unequivocally and plainly, he had no intention of outlawing slavery. He may deserve his hallowed place in history for doing so, but The Emancipation Proclamation ended up coming about as a practical way to weaken the Confederacy's economic ability to wage war. Say it was a matter of the times or whatever you want, but Lincoln was also a racist. He stated on multiple occasions he didn't think enslaved people could participate in "white" society, and though he found slavery abhorrent, this was the reason he gave for having no intention to end it. The Civil War was started, and initially found popular support among the white citizens of slave owning states, in no small part because of conspiracy theories and fake news to the contrary. 

After a bloody and costly war, the Union didn't levy the power of the federal government to obtain accountability for treason. It attempted to simultaneously go back to the order which existed previously, while extending the unalienable rights it had previously denied to the formerly enslaved. This was met by considerable opposition, not least of which was what we'd now call domestic terrorism. It's why the Ku Klux Klan exists. 

The reality is, the Union, the nation as a whole more or less abandoned the project of Reconstruction, as once again the wealthy interests of the North were more in concert with the wealthy interests of the South, and the prevailing belief in inferiority of the formerly enslaved (despite the number of whom that acquitted themselves admirably in state and federal government during Reconstruction). Reconstruction ended because we basically gave in to terrorists, and we've spent the years since trying to create a compromise about whether that was racist or whether it was practical, without considering maybe its impractical to attempt to establish a pluralistic democracy, a nation of laws, that not only refuses to marginalize racists, but is willing to empower them and bend to their violence. 

A significant part of our history is people fighting to have those unalienable rights recognized, and very wealthy interests fighting this recognition tooth and nail to prevent it. Suffrage, labor rights, queer rights movement (to my mind trans rights are inextricable from the rights of the rest of the queer population, and all of our rights more generally), disability rights, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement are all essentially the result of people who have decided they had to enforce recognition of their unalienable rights, and creating the conditions to advance the recognition of their rights. All of these, and others, have been opposed by extremely wealthy interests. If you step back and look at who benefits from all of these populations being kept from economic, political and cultural power that comes with the access marginalization and systemic discrimination are meant to deny, there is one beneficiary in common, the ultra wealthy. What this does is insure they have the least amount of competition for power, the least amount of competition and perspectives to compromise within the circles of power they have always had a grip on. We can see demonization of the poor and of immigrants as part of this same systematic process. 

The majority of us have been taught that the both opposition to recognizing and the attempt to enforce recognition of these unalienable rights is a necessary and natural part of our political and cultural history. It's said this is one of the Great Debates of human history. There is some truth to this idea, but again, when we look back on history before the United States, it can't be denied that the most wealthy in every civilization, nation and empire were central to preventing rights from being recognized for whoever it profited them marginalized, and it has always been a matter of preserving their wealth and the power that comes from it. It is in the nature of power, for those who have it to do their utmost restrict access to it. That is part of what power is, by definition. 

If we begin to question this perspective, this narrative that this a "natural" part of "who we are" as a nation, it looks different, doesn't it? Is it who "we" are or is it essential to the nature of people who seek to accumulate wealth and power? The systemic racism of slave states and Jim Crowe didn't produce much of anything, in concrete material ways, for whites who weren't wealthy. What social and cultural benefits they did have, were as much levers in their exploitation as they were benefits. Patriarchy hasn't produced a happier, more well balanced, more rational or sensible male population. One of the major victories for feminism was in the revelations of the degree of violence and abuse men were committing against women and children before feminists came to the fore to highlight it. The research that resulted changed some fundamental ideas and systems in the United States. This recognition was part of what drove changes to regulations that outlawed lending institutions to require a male family member or other man had to co-sign for a woman to have access to credit. Rates of spousal and child abuse in the home were far higher before we made those changes, and despite what the current fascist movement suggests, I don't think this was a sign of men being happy and healthy. We can go down the line of all the different varieties of systemic discrimination and marginalization and see they don't produce good results for the populations they are claimed to serve, but they certainly prevent access to power and wealth for the populations they target, and when compounded, add up to a very small number of people given that access. 

I should be clear, I'm not turning to that old chestnut that says talking about the way people are discriminated against based on identity or immutable traits is a distraction, and that we should be focusing on economics. That's a foolish argument, specifically because the levying of identity, by way of these various forms of discrimination, has allowed the ultra wealthy to continue to split what should otherwise be a population oppositional to the amount of power they have within democracy. "Stop talking about that," is absurd. To say that is to accept it as impossible to prevent capitalism undermining and manipulation of democracy, and even if this is true, it means capitalism is incompatible with democracy, and that should be addressed. I believe, in contrast, we have to be informed and educated to prevent the wealthy from being able to use our anxieties, our fears and the culturally inculcated bigotries to their ends. We have to see this education as a primary shield in preventing the wealthy from being able to create schisms within any movement meant to challenge unjust and illegal usurpation of power, like the one we face now. The reason they are attacking the efforts to provide this education in schools, and across culture, is because it is inoculation against the use of these culturally inculcated bigotries to their ends. 

It can't be credibly argued that the current fascist movement would have been able to install its figurehead in the presidency without this weapon, this tool. At every turn over the last decade when it has seemed the grift, the populist cosplay of its leadership and the ultra wealthy who hold their leashes, was on the verge of exposure, they have been able to turn to these same methods to simultaneously distract and energize their supporters. When the plainness of racism becomes clear, they target trans people. When the plainness of the hatred for the poor becomes clear, they blame women, they blame immigrants and in that way of blaming the victim that is part of our cultural indoctrination, they blame the poor. When the plainness of their misogyny becomes too clear, they blame women, they stoke fear of trans people or people who are "not white" and on and on. This is an old song, and it resonates because of how old it is. 

Part of what's happening now is a portion of the ultra wealthy have decided they no longer want to compromise, about anything, including whose unalienable rights are recognized and whose aren't. They've decided conquest is the only future they'll accept. What we rarely think about is that four or five ultra wealthy people have the economic power of a hostile nation, should they decide to use it to this end, and now they have. What they've done within the US is similar to what they've partnered with the intelligence apparatus to do in other nations. Doing it domestically, they don't need to partner with the intelligence apparatus of the state. The firewalls which had been erected to prevent it are gone, as the result of a decades long effort to remove them. This is another part of our history. We have allowed the federal government to be involved in overthrowing and undermining democracies in other nations, in order to install or support authoritarians whose polices were more friendly to those ultra wealthy and their interests. They do this by sowing division within those nations, funding media friendly to their aims, funding more and more extreme and radical political and cultural organizations, until they've so destabilized the target nation, politically and culturally, that the conditions are ripe for an authoritarian takeover, whether that authoritarian is elected or installed in a coup. The United States has become victim of a set of strategies and tactics is helped to develop and taught to new generations of the ultra wealthy. 

The Trump administration, the wealthy fascists who've funded it, and the fascist movement they've together fomented, will never accept compromise. It's very popular to say, "Compromise is the foundation of democracy." It's not so popular to ask the question, "What happens within a two party system when one party is openly fascist, and the other is (at best) hamstrung by its reliance on an ultra wealthy whose material interests and desire for power are in line with fascists?" The fascist movement exists, specifically because they have decided compromise is no longer and option, and conquest serves their interests best. It's also the reason the Trump administration is taking so many of the measures it is now, including the attempt to convince federal agencies the courts are not the arbiters of the law, and Congress is not in control of the purse. These are the most basic foundations of the Constitution, compromise and separation of powers, which is why "Constitutional crisis" has now been repeated in more articles and tv news segments than it is possible to count. 

The opportunity I see, brought about by the events we're now experiencing and witnessing, is to break this cycle. It is to understand that the way forward is to envision a new future, one that puts first the recognition of that promise, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," because it predates the enshrinement of the willingness to compromise those unalienable rights as law. It is the stated reason for the nation to exist. Because of this, it is possible for this to be the central clarion call to repel this fascist revolution. It is from our past, but it calls to a new future. Who wrote it matters less than whether we believe it, what we believe it means and whether we are willing to make it real. This would be a new nation if we rejected the idea that its security, sustainability and viability are based on allowing a small minority to profit from denying the unalienable rights of those who are our fellow citizens. We can see, plainly, the history of doing so has been the denial of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness for many, many millions of people, and that denial has also allowed the accrual of wealth and power to now become an existential threat to the continuance of the United States as a nation, much less a constitutional democracy. To put it bluntly, our future depends on us starting to treat the promise of the Declaration of Independence not as a quaint sentiment, written as an excuse for a small group of wealthy men to extend their own wealth at the consequence of the masses, but as the primary reason for the nation to exist. 

I believe this in part, because it speaks to the struggles of all who've labored to secure recognition of that promise. As a nation, we have failed to live up to this promise, and right now, we have an opportunity to make that promise the center of how we envision our future. There are many who have, for good reason, come to look on this promise as empty, but we can change this by making it the center of our efforts, as opposed to constantly compromising so the extremely wealthy can further enrich and empower themselves. It can be the best of who each of us are, working and fighting for the best for all of us. It can be the meeting place for those whose apathy or anger is a symptom of the betrayal of the promise, and those who have loved the nation, in spite of that betrayal. 

We have this opportunity because the arrogance of the wealthy fascists behind this revolutionary movement, as well as within the Trump administration, has caused them to overplay their hand. The consequences of their actions are about to fall on all of us who do not have the kind of accumulated wealth that only a small population has. We're entering what will be a time of terrible horror, and the majority of the population has not shown any concrete, material loyalty to this movement. Only twenty percent of the overall population voted for this. 99% are going to pay consequences for it. There are those who believe their status among the top five, ten or twenty percent of wealth accumulation will protect them, and even among those of us who know we have no such status to turn to, this is often accepted and stated. History does not agree. Authoritarians strip wealth from anyone they believe they can, once they have solidified control of the entities which would prevent them from doing so, like courts, law enforcement and so on. One of the reasons the Third Reich became a shambling mess, was that its elites and officers were constantly undermining, attacking and feeding each other into machine they'd created. The popular conception of fascists as efficient is utterly false. They are anything but. They are, as we've been seeing for over two decades, chaotic, self involved, without loyalty to much of anything beyond their own aggrandizement. This belief that they are efficient or could be, is based on an assumption that this instinct for conquest ends when they have taken control of the levers of power, and this is not true. 

One of the clearer examples is The Reich attempting to conquer Europe, and in the over extension of its military forces that was central to its ultimate defeat in WWII. The chaos within Germany, caused by the destabilization of this unquenchable appetite for conquest, was part of creating the conditions that would have made fighting any war difficult, at best, but was made impossible by stretching their forces so thin in different theaters of the war, simultaneously. The urge for conquest becomes self destructive because it's not a solution to the problem it's claiming to solve. The Donald Trump's, Peter Thiel's, Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos' of the world could conquer the whole of it, and would only end up then trying to conquer each other, because the thing they're trying to solve isn't going to be solved by more power and more wealth. What it does, is establish an order under allowing them to create a system of laws making it a crime against the state to ask the question(s) they can't bring themselves to. 

We must also recognize the ultra wealthy could not have done this alone. They have relied on the legacy of cultural indoctrination into bigotry and discrimination in order to achieve this. This legacy, that it exists for them to leverage to gain further wealth and power, is the harder issue to face, and in the most practical sense, address. The truth is, we have all been inculcated, infected, with it to one degree or another. It can take decades for an individual to begin to untangle the ways in which we've been inculcated with it. Even by the simple osmosis of just existing in our culture, of learning the history of the nation (as it's most often been taught), engaging with and participating in cultural, political and economic institutions, it's instilled on basically all of us. One of the reasons the ultra wealthy have decided now is the time they will no longer accept compromise, is that they see the cracks in the foundation of this legacy forming. Our educational institutions had taken steps to seriously interrogate this legacy in ways they didn't previously. The digital age and social media have helped to create more cracks, and have helped to widen those already existing. Average people, communicating with each other, has started creating new norms and new avenues for highlighting and making ineffective the way these bigotries and discrimination have been instilled. This is why Musk bought Twitter, and why he hasn't just given free reign, but privileged those most invested in insuring this legacy continues. 

It isn't coincidence that fascists have targeted, as their base of popular support, the people who are most inundated with, and whose lives have been most centered in, a culture that sees bigotry and discrimination as either "necessary" or "natural" is the only acceptable culture, and who see any degradation of this culture of bigotry and discrimination as an attack on themselves personally, their way of life and the future they have believed they have been trying to build for their children. Maybe the best way to describe this is to say that it is a population who can't fundamentally understand the framing of the idea of race when James Baldwin said, "Because they believe they are white..." It is to understand the contradiction inherent at the founding of the nation. It is to understand we have created a history and legacy which has attempted to ignore and obfuscate the contradiction between the sentiment stated as reason for the nation to exist, "... that all [people] are created equal" and that some people can be 3/5 of a person, to then be adopted into the Constitution. These cannot be true simultaneously, and every single lie of the fascist movement is firmly rooted in this contradiction. 

Baldwin's framing of what we have come to call race works for almost every form of bigotry and discrimination we have continued to allow as part of our cultural legacy. He is talking about the collective ideas and perspectives which are referred to as "whiteness." To to understand what Baldwin meant is to understand that the population who have been the base of support for this fascist movement believes their sense of identity is the only legitimate identity. Melanin exists. That it exists isn't proof of anything else, but that recognition isn't our cultural legacy, is it? It is why we weren't a democracy for 196 of the 248 years the nation has existed. Even within, say, heterosexual identity, it is suffocatingly narrow, and seeks to punish and eliminate any other expression of that identity as acceptable, much less worthy of being seen or treated as valuable. It's not coincidental heterosexual identity has very specific, narrow ideas about dominance and aggression either. It is not sufficient to be heterosexual, it is to also believe and enforce the belief in the inherent superiority of heterosexuality, in every sense. This is evidenced in the way bigotry against trans people has been activated. A trans woman who seeks relationships with men, is unacceptable. She may meet all the other standards of femininity, may perform womanhood in all the ways this fascist base hold as the standard, and for some trans women this is a fulfilling and satisfying way to live, but her existence is a challenge to those narrow parameters of acceptable identity. The same can be said of trans men and their expression and performance of masculinity. It has been our cultural history, and legacy, which allows this population the belief that it is possible to somehow regulate out of existence or into a state of eternal submission, the variety of the human animal. They have been centered and treated as the "norm" for all of our history. I don't know it could ever be more clear than it is today, that this has served to insure the most wealthy and powerful are able to restrict access to wealth and power to the smallest percentage of the population possible. These two problems are inextricable. It is why arguments claiming appeals to economic circumstances alone are the solution to the problem of the appetite for conquest among the ultra wealthy. 

I flatly reject the idea that we are incapable of dislodging this contradiction from the center of the life of the nation. We don't know if we are capable of doing this, in no small part because of the level of influence and power we have always allowed the most wealthy to have, and how useful this contradiction has been in their continued hold on both. When I look at the history of the United States, I see that effort, by the wealthy to always hold and tighten that grasp, and I see a history of incredible creativity in resistance to it, by all of the people who have been targeted by it. Collectively, we have been robbed of the truth of that history, and we can together rediscover it, and we can find out what we can do if we put that creative effort into creating a movement which takes all of them, these separated histories necessary in their times, and begin to fuse them together into a new chapter in our history. These movements, though they have been separate in the past, have all had in common that they are enforcing the recognition of inalienable rights. We can make this our American history, instead of the history "Great Men" which upholds wealth and power as justifications, in and of themselves. I believe in the creative imagination of my fellow Americans, because our history does say it exists, however much that history may have been obscured to give wealth and power the ability to manipulate how it's been expressed. It will take learning from all these histories, and to no longer allow them to be treated as simply separate, but as signs of the contradiction we now have the opportunity to dissolve. I believe it has always been in the interest of the ultra wealthy and the powerful to convince us this is not possible, they have used that power to spread this most cynical idea, and to give evidence to it at every opportunity. I believe all of the reasons we have for not believing this, all of the answers to the questions we have for whether or not it is possible are only answered in the creation of it, and because the fascists have demonstrated the fragility and instability of the old order, we now have the opportunity to do that. 

This is why the "Trump voter" cannot be centered in the effort to fight the fascism now empowered in the United States. They have already demonstrated that they are the most susceptible to the delusions that fascism is selling, including that it is somehow "natural" that we have been unable to bring together this other cultural legacy, the one that says we are a collective of people in a nation established to protect our inalienable rights. That they experience consequences of that susceptibility, and a preference for not experiencing those consequences, is not evidence they are no longer susceptible to it. A lifetime of cultural indoctrination into this belief in superiority and the moral obligation to enforce it, willful ignorance and refusal to recognize their fellow Americans, does not turn around over economic consequences. If this were true, they wouldn't still have been susceptible to the delusion fascism has been selling. If this were true, the Republican Party would have been caused a depth of defeat that it would have long ago had to have chosen a different strategy. 

To center the Trump voter in this early period of of attempting to find a new vision, is to recreate the same conditions which have lead us here. It will mean, we once again are unable to render inert one of the most formidable tools of the ultra wealthy to force their will on the rest of us. In practical terms, it will mean that in every town and city, the ultra wealthy will be able to leverage this same cultural legacy of discrimination to give themselves the most advantage to hold power, and we have to recognize power has no inherent morality, no sense of common need, no belief in that central idea that we are all created equal. One of the reasons it is so easy to recognize the hypocrisy of this fascist movement is that it cares for nothing other than acquisition of some power, and maintaining it in the effort acquire more. We have to recognize the population that has been its base is both incapable of believing this or refuses to. We have to recognize the future rests of whether or not we can create a nation where a population that would be susceptible to the delusions of fascism is impossible, and any attempt to resurrect it would be treated as reason for the equivalent of exile. The Trump voter is inherently obsessed with a future that creates a population whose majority isn't just susceptible to fascism, but is intent on propagating it, because it is "their culture" and "their way of life," and that's what cultures do. 

I am not making an argument simply on moral grounds either, though I do believe morality is an active component. It is also intensely practical. Defeating this fascist movement is going to take solidarity. It is going to mean practical decisions must be made about how each circumstance and condition is faced, as they arise. Allowing them into the coalitions which are going to be necessary is going to mean a constant thrum of contention and a rightful depth of suspicion about their motivations, and whether they are dedicated to the goals of those coalitions. Our cultural legacy of discrimination and bigotry makes a significant contribution to making those coalitions extremely difficult to maintain, in the best of conditions, when everyone involved already has a demonstrated history of believing in the common goals. To accept this population who has demonstrated their belief in or even their casual susceptibility to the fascist delusion, is the equivalent of allowing The Manchurian Candidate into campaign headquarters, when you know they haven't been deprogrammed. It is putting a bomb on the table, and without any idea of who has the detonator or when it might go off. They are nineteen percent of the overall population. They are a minority, and crucially, they have established themselves as this minority not because of some inherited or immutable trait, but because of their behavior and their actions. Nations necessarily decide which behaviors and actions are unacceptable, we have to start acting like we're a nation where supporting fascism is unacceptable, if we want to become a nation where that is true. 

It is our task now, in both the practical and moral terms, to begin to think in terms of defeating this fascist revolution, and how that will inform what comes after. I believe the place to begin this, is to make real and actionable the belief and concept that all people are created equal, understanding and willing to engage with how incomplete our education and cultural legacy has been in this, that if our decisions spring from this goal, even as we are guaranteed to make mistakes, they will be a better quality of mistake, with less dire consequences than to continue trying to make decisions from the belief that the way forward is to go back to the norm and order that lead us here.