This is a response to Mike Daisy’s series of monologues based on the book A People’s History of the United States. Each monologue deals with a specific time in American history. I’m listening to each and posting a reaction here.
Let’s transition to Occupy Wall Street. If there’s one good thing you can say about the 2008 financial crisis, it’s that it’s not as bad as murdering an island full of innocent people. Let’s dive in!
Occupy was a thing that happened when people who felt they were not winning in the big bank capitalist economy came together to lose collectively. And to make decisions through group consensus, since, as Daisey points out, “Unlike [in] democracy, where there’s a winner and a loser, with consensus, everybody’s a loser.” He compares it to choosing what to eat with your cantankerous relatives — eventually, you all get worn down from arguing and you end up picking a thing. Rather than have my dad win and subject everyone to the tyranny of chicken liver, we go to the the ok Chinese place, maybe with promises to him that we’ll go to Chicken Parts R’ Us next week. Consensus! We all pull in different directions, and each of us can individually create enough havoc that the others will throw us some kind of a bone. Nobody is going to get everything they want, but my vegetarian cousin is going to make sure we go the the Chicken Parts R Us that is next door to a salad place.
There’s value in that! There’s comradery in that! Losing in a group is fun. It’s why so many people continue to follow many professional sports teams.
Another thing that can be said for losing together is it’s the opposite of alienation. I was a college student in the early aughts, and I remember reading an article about why my generation wasn’t more politically active. One obvious reason was lack of a draft, but another was that we grew up in the Reagan era, which harped on the idea that everything that happened to an individual was 100% that individual’s fault. My medical debt, student loan debt, employment issues, health issues, etc, are things I’m supposed to feel a sense of shame about if they’re not going well. If they’re not going well, I should sure as hell not complain about them (which is a neat Orwellian trick, identifying a problem being the first step in solving it). I’m treated like a kid who eats an entire box of cookies and then complains about a stomachache.
This still holds to some degree. I was just texting with a friend who has a newborn who turns blue and stops breathing, and for awhile, he didn’t have enough oxygen in his blood. Also, he had a bowel obstruction. He’s 2 months old. She _has_ a job with insurance, but it comes with a $25,000 deductible, which she’s already blown through. She’s going to declare bankruptcy when she blows through her 2019 deductible, which presumably will happen soon. She’s not out marching in the streets. I’m not sure how she’d be able to identify people to march with.
One thing about suffering alone with problems you blame yourself for and are not allowed to complain about is it’s profoundly alienating. You know what’s not? Being in a group where everyone is unexcited about eating lo mein. You may be feeling meh, but you’re eating lo mein together. And it wasn’t because some king or CEO told you to, you decided to, yourselves.
The monologue transitions now to the unequal society that was colonial America, specifically, the little-talked about idea that the American revolution was about taxes because it was lead by business and political leaders, who cared a great deal about taxes. Slaves didn’t pay taxes and hence didn’t get too worked up about new tax acts from London. 68% of the signers of the declaration of independence already had positions in the colonial government. It wasn’t a revolution so much as it a branch office kicking out the head office. It’s the St. Louis branch of Goldman Sachs declaring independence from the New York office of Goldman Sachs.
There were rebellions — quite a few — by people from the lower rungs of society, but these weren’t successful. The anti-tax crowd was successful. And that’s why people like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin are on money.
The original Constitution doesn’t say much about rights. It was mostly concerned with taxes. What happened, however, voters in the states refused to ratify it until they got certain guarantees of their rights. And many of those rights deal with the very things that let them do cantankerous group decision making. The right to protest. The right not to be locked up without being convicted of a crime. No unreasonable search and seizure. Anti-federalist voters knew what they were doing.
The key to demanding anything from those in power is to be difficult enough to get rid of that it’s preferable to negotiate with you. What the Bill of Rights essentially provides is numerous ways to make oneself difficult to get rid of. This is not to say that those in power can’t try, and that they don’t often succeed. But the Bill is designed to make it harder for them than it otherwise might be. If the press is covering disability activists shutting down city bus lines to protest the fact the buses are inaccessible, that makes the issue harder to get rid of. (Related: why the hell aren’t we more outraged that 75% of the NYC subway system is inaccessible to people in wheelchairs? What century is this?)
What social movements essentially do is give people the opportunity to feel good about themselves by signing on to some kind of change that needs to happen (carrot) while making clear that they’re going to be making it impossible to conduct business as usual until their demands are met (stick). And there’s nothing those in power like so much as business as usual. Daisey says that when a social movement reaches a tipping point, those in power simply coopt it and act like it was for that thing all the time (The Civil Rights movement seems to not be going away, so let’s pretend 90% of white people liked MLK when he was marching on Washington instead of 25%!). This is true and Orwellian, but it’s important to remember those in power regard the rest of us less as equals to be outsmarted with psy-ops tactics and more as toddlers to be managed. I’m not saying that it’s never the former. It’s frequently the former, but it’s more often the latter. And we can use this. I’d love to see some cross-group solidarity, wherein we all get together and decide everyone’s going to throw a big hubbub about, for example, the fact that people in wheelchairs can’t use 75% of the NYC subway. It could be an ongoing hubbub, and then the mayor and the governor, who frankly regard us as toddlers, will give us the blankee equivalent (in this case, elevators) so that we will cease our tantrum. Then we’ll hold a vote about what to hubbub about next.
