Listen Up, Liberal: You need to make your peace with some difficult truths.
America is already several steps along the path toward a second Civil War, and Liberals’ inaction has gotten us here.
The first and most important thing for you to realize is that you do not have time to be complacent.
The world is heating up and all the worst people are on the march. A bigot made plans for a horrible thing that he will do to someone you love today. Those who are opposed to social progress are not content to sit back and tut disapprovingly. Fascists and their fellow travelers are not laboring under the illusion that the arc of history bends in their favor. They know they must actively bend it, and they are doing so loudly, proudly, and in public.
It is well past time that Americans took stock of our history and began to ask ourselves: What does it mean to be an American? How will America be remembered as a political project?
I do not know the answer if history ended today, but if we do not act swiftly and decisively, I know what the answer will be in a generation: America was the country that dragged the whole world to hell with its suicidal self-assuredness. America was the leader of the global backlash against liberation. America was the place where any hope of a bright future for humanity died.
In light of the decision by the Supreme Court that the Environment cannot be protected by the Environmental Protection Agency, I urge Americans to remember that the breed of Christian Fascism we are up against is an apocalypse cult.
A significant portion of the Evangelical movement has embraced a particular interpretation of biblical literalism that believes that the Second Coming is rapidly approaching. This has its roots in the American history of New Religious Movements — from Adventists to Scientologists to Qanon. Should the prophesied end of the world fail to materialize, they see it as their duty to ensure it happens. They are working tirelessly to realize the future that they believe in, and Liberals seem content in the idea that stating “But They’re Wrong” is enough to stop it. They do not care that we think they are wrong. They are convinced that they are right, and they have sunk far too much into this pit to ever consider pulling back.
Understand that bigots of every age are not content to just make a good argument and hope that the authorities agree with them. They seek to become the authority.
We are not at the point of direct secession yet, but that is always a last resort. Conservatives always seek to first seize control of the system before, if they fail, they reject it entirely. We saw what inaction from the Liberals got us when the Conservatives of 160 years ago began to pursue nullification of federal powers, fugitive slave laws, and abuse of federal power to preserve and expand their oligarchic slave republics. Now the Conservatives are pursuing fugitive abortion laws which could overturn the very notion of interstate travel being protected. They seek to nullify the will of the people by overriding the popular vote; they seek the installation of christian fascism as the governing ideology of America; yet still Nancy Pelosi says we need a strong Republican party. The Democrats are not going to save us.
Realize that the alarmists have been warning of exactly this outcome for decades.
None of this should surprise you. The Christian Right has been declaring their intentions loudly and in public since the death of segregation. The astroturfed campaign to seize control of America traces back to the Goldwater loss, the enshrinement of Civil Rights, and the judicial activism of the Warren Court. After a pair of Republican-appointed Chief Justices in Warren and Burger successively overturned the legal basis of the racial caste system which existed in the first half of the 20th century and then upheld the basic right to privacy, all the worst people in America were left seething. They had been betrayed, they felt — sold out. If this had happened to Liberals, they would have become demoralized and thrown up their hands. Oh well, the Liberals might have said, we are on the right side of history. The Christian Right made no such mistakes. They took careful study of what had happened and what they need to do to reverse it.
The lessons which the Right took away were clear:
In order to return to white minority rule, they needed the Court.
In order to get the Court, they needed the Presidency.
And in order to retain the Presidency, they needed to rig the Electoral College.
They succeeded.
In both 2000 and 2016, the candidate who won the popular vote went on to lose the election. Both illegitimate presidents appointed conservative activist judges to the supreme court, and the opposition failed to oppose them with the vigor that would be necessary to prevent these appointments.
Meanwhile, Liberals took away the lesson that they were right about everything and they didn’t need to fight too hard to prove that. In the face of blatant injustice and a stolen election, Liberals just sighed and vowed to fight another day. But Conservatives continued on with their plans.
The Conservative takeover was possible due to one of America’s many anachronisms. These holdovers are not accidents. They are very clever and well-designed counterweights against progress.
This country was not founded by enlightened philosopher-kings. Nor was it, as we like to pretend, founded by progressive thought-leaders whose outsized agency made it possible to throw off the reins of tyranny, so conveniently represented by a mad king and an ocean of distance. America was founded by slave traders and bankers and lawyers. It was founded by high-thinking hypocrites. Even if they were truly the greatest minds of their day, their day has come and gone and they have left us in quite the mess. Kill your heroes, and do not let your attachment to their positive qualities blind you to the parts of their legacy which we must actively work to destroy.
We are not inherently better than these men because the evils of their time are more obvious to us today. The lesson to take away here is not to smugly pat yourself on the back that your time is better than theirs. Rather, ask yourself — if these men could come up with these great justifications for things that were plainly evil, what evils of your own time might be invisible to you today?
It is important for you to remember that the system is not broken: It is functioning exactly as designed.
The Framers did not believe in the lofty universal assertion of equality which they offered in the Declaration. The Framers believed that they should not have to pay taxes for a war to defend the place they lived. The slave owners and enablers of slavery who founded this country feared the empowerment of the majority. They held the unwashed masses in contempt, as Conservatives and far too many Liberals still do. Do not mistake their words and ideas for their deeds.
Remember: the Constitution of the United States is explicitly designed to frustrate true democracy, not foster it.
Despite all the self-congratulating lies we tell ourselves about America as a bastion of hope and progress, there is nothing inherently progressive about the American political system and there is much that is inherently conservative about it. The truth is that every single iota of admirable history in this country has come from the blood, sweat, and tears of all the people whom the framers intentionally excluded from power: Women, Black and Brown People, Indigenous People, Queer People, and the mass of poor regular people — these have been the motors of progress, and the system that the Framers drew up has always been the thing they were fighting against. They have always known that it was not simply enough to sit back and wait for time to catch up to the idea that they were full people who were entitled to the respect and autonomy that comes with that. Our predecessors understood that freedom is not something that falls into your lap. You must take it for yourself. Every inch of progress that America has made toward living up to the potential embodied by the Declaration of Independence has come at great personal effort and none of it was inevitable.
How to Kill a Social Democracy
In the 50 years since Roe v. Wade was handed down, the Democratic Party had countless opportunities to enshrine protection for Abortion or indeed broader medical freedom into law. They failed. Democrats held the House for four decades from 1955 to 1995. People lived full lives and died without ever seeing a Republican national legislature. With the exception of the Reagan Revolution in the 80s, they also controlled the Senate through that entire period. Women attempted to become authors of their own fate with the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, but Democrats could not get the job done. They could have worked systematically to eliminate the violence that our system visits on the most vulnerable, the way that Johnson did with his Great Society and Roosevelt did with the New Deal. But they did not.
Instead, the Democrats embraced NAFTA and Neoliberalism in 1992, and the working Americans they had abandoned felt the sting. They fled the party in droves.
These trends have only got worse since Obama in 2008. It is tempting to put that all on racism, but we must also understand what makes racist narratives appealing to people. It is not just that most people choose to be hateful. Do yourself a favor and throw out this simplistic analysis. Very few people hold hatred and bigotry close to their heart. Instead, they turn to racist narratives and frames of analysis because there is some underlying need that they have that is not met, or else because they can tell that something is very fundamentally wrong in our society and they attempt to explain it using the tools that they have. Remember that many people who are victims of systemic violence or deprivation end up arguing in favor of the systems that have deprived or victimized them as a self-defense mechanism. They seek to explain and analyze away the trauma they have felt so that they can continue living. It just so happens that the tools of analysis that we have in the United States are Racial, rather than Economic.
It’s the Economy, Stupid.
The Democratic turn away from Social Democracy and toward Neoliberalism and its attendant austerity, spending cuts, and bootstrappery began under Carter; but since 1992, the Democrats have very intentionally distanced themselves from the preceding half-century when they had any commitment to economic justice. They have become truly and irreparably a party of billionaires. Do not mistake my meaning: the Democrats have never been and will never be a force for liberation of regular people, but in the past when the bottom rungs of American society were willing to make demands of them, they were willing to listen.
A century ago, when Capitalism was failing so profoundly that the ruling class felt a genuine threat to their own security and the first wave of Fascism was taking over the Liberal world, the Democrats were willing to use the power of the State to address the material needs of people. When a hostile supreme court threatened to overturn the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded with a promise to pack the court — and all the forces of reaction could do was whine and cry.
In the 1960s when racial tension was threatening to tear this nation apart, Democrats were able to throw off their roots in Racism and embrace the path that Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had forged for them of championing desegregation and the federal government as a force for social- racial- and economic justice. Between the New Deal and the Great Society, a vigorous and insistent movement of normal people demanding better lives and very loudly stating what the stakes were if they failed to deliver reminded Democrats that complacency was not enough. Liberal moralizing is not enough. Believing and Saying the right thing is not enough. People need action. Some time after Roe, however, those people stopped applying the pressure, and the Democrats grew dizzy with success. In the thirty years since the Clintonian wing of the Democratic Party has attained complete ideological dominance, the Conservatives in America have seen a level of economic and political and social success unprecedented since the time immediately leading up to the first civil war.
In the final analysis, the Conservative says: “If you elect me, I will hurt the people you want to see hurt.”
Then if he is elected, he makes an earnest attempt to hurt those people. If he hurts the people who voted for him in doing so, that is okay. They know what they are voting for. They are not stupid.
The Liberal says, “If you elect me, I will help the people you want to see helped.” Then they do not deliver.
Liberals believe that Conservatives have been tricked into voting against their own interests. The truth is rather more depressing: Conservatives know how to wield the power of the State. They know that politics is a dirty game full of dirty people doing dirty deals. They have no illusions about what is required to wield the power effectively, nor of doing so benevolently. Meanwhile Liberals prefer feigning not to know how the sausage is made.
For half a century, Democrats have refused to vigorously embrace the very obvious policy-based solutions that could have prevented this moment.
It is not enough to simply implore us to Vote Vote Vote. Voting Blue even if they are actively standing in the way of progress is not how progress will be made. The party leadership could have embraced the nascent progressive movement that propelled Obama to office and utilized its forces of economic justice to forestall a new reactionary movement. They chose to neuter the resurgent left wing as soon as it appeared. Now Roe is dead and Pelosi still says we need a strong republican party and anti-choice Democrats. Do not mistake her meaning: The Democrats have no solution. The Democrats have no Political Program. But they have you hostage because there is a loaded gun pointed at your head and they are standing between you and the emergency exit. All the Democrats have to offer is a nebulous Belief in the Norms and Traditions handed down by syphilitic slaveholders, and the idea that if they meet with the fascists in good faith and are willing to hash things out, that the Government Machine will spit out good policy at the end.
Listen, Liberal: Democrats desire to have their cake and eat it too.
They will always try to forge a middle path between the changes that are needed to stave off the apocalypse and the people who are attempting to bring it about, because that middle path is what gives them legitimacy. They are the Big Tent. But you can’t stay in a big tent with a grizzly bear that is trying to eat you.
At some point between Roe v Wade and The West Wing, Liberals in America got high on their own arguments and convinced themselves not only that progress was inevitable but that they did not have to fight like hell to keep from backsliding. Every time Conservatives have passed a blatantly unconstitutional and immoral law, Liberals have confidently declared, “See you in court!” All the while not realizing or not caring that the Republicans were in the process of fundamentally remaking the Courts. The result of that smug self-assuredness is the present in which we live.
In place of securing the right of medical freedom and privacy and marriage equality or even the existence of LGBT+ people throughout the country — in place of securing in law the gains that had been made so tenuously through the courts — Liberals have spent the last half a century assuming that every court will be as empathetic, reasonable, and moderate as the Warren and Burger courts were — an idea that is laughably naive and ahistorical.
The planet is rapidly headed toward climate catastrophe. The largest migration crisis in history is rapidly approaching. If we do nothing, over a billion people will be displaced.
If you think the Fascists are empowered now, imagine after another decade of climate catastrophe, water scarcity, and enshrinement of white minority rule.
If we continue as we are now, the story of the 21st century will be that of eco-fascists arguing that migrants deserve to drown or be killed. It will be the story of a descent into a world just as oppressive and invasive as anything described by Orwell, but where our masters are not party apparatchiks but silicon valley tech bros.
But if we do something — literally anything, it will be the story of the American people striking back against the death cult that is attempting to steer us into the iceberg because they know the people they hate are on the ship, too.
Listen, Liberal: the GOP has successfully struck down their single biggest cultural bugbear of the last 50 years. What do they do now?
Well, the answer is clear: they go on to the next one.
Clarence Thomas specifically says that the Court should review decisions that made marriage equality the law of the land (Obergefell, 2015) and, worse still, that made the open existence of gay people throughout the country a possibility (Lawrence, 2003). Not content destroying the right to privacy, in their assault on the Fourth Amendment they lowered the status of Miranda Rights to some lesser, quasi-constitutional status — opening the door for their complete overturn down the road. The senior republican senator from Texas crowed on twitter that the court should overturn school desegregation next. Now they have announced their intent to review a doctrine that would allow gerrymandered state legislatures to brazenly and openly override the will of the people as expressed through the popular vote.
None of this is accidental. They are not hiding their intentions.
As the reactionaries in the United States ramp up their eliminationist rhetoric targeted at queer and trans people, Hillary Clinton suggests that perhaps the lives and security of our trans compatriots are a necessary sacrifice. As Christian Theocrats seize control of the state apparatus, Democrats loiter about and sing God Bless America. The conclusion is unavoidable that the democratic leadership have become so enamored with their strategy of inaction and calls to vote for more inaction that they have seemingly resigned themselves to going down with the ship.
Where the GOP understands that in order to hold power in a nominal democracy, you have to win elections — and to win elections, you have to motivate a base of people to feel that they need or even want you around — the Democrats seem completely tied to the idea that trying too hard to get what you believe in — or indeed, even believing in anything too much — is per se bad.
They seem to have convinced themselves that all they need to do is show up, be polite, and be willing to bargain with their fellow rational actors across the aisle, and the Government Machine will do the rest, spitting out Good Policy which is Good by definition of the fact that it is Bipartisan, never mind the fact that it is Bipartisan because the only things the two parties can agree on is how best to lurch this nation farther into a christian dominionist hellhole.
Authoritarians will always find an excuse to justify the further erosion of your rights so long as you allow it. Remember that before Jim Crow, there was Reconstruction. Before the Nazis, the Weimar Republic was the most liberal and progressive state on Earth.
Do not take progress for granted.
Let it never be forgotten that Jefferson Davis was inaugurated before Abraham Lincoln, that the first shots of the Civil War were fired from the South into a territory held by the federal government, nor that the Southern States were offered every opportunity to retain their peculiar institution for all time.
They were not content to be left alone. They wanted control.
Then the first thing they did after seceding was abolish any hint of the rights and sovereignty of individual states within the new Confederacy. States’ rights were always a pretext — a means to an end. The end is White Supremacy. It is the return of closets and conversion therapy and every other horrible institution that you thought we had outgrown by now. We didn’t. People just fought like hell to make them go away.
Remember: Reactionaries in every age do not wait for their feared plot to materialize.
You will not convince an anti-semite that Jews don’t control the world using facts and logic. They did not arrive at that conclusion from facts and logic. They are happy to take whatever action they deem necessary in order to protect the exploitative system which they believe in. It is not sinking to their level to defend yourself from dirty tactics. When someone goes low, you do not have to go low to meet them — but you should not delude yourself that simply taking the high road is on its own enough to beat them.
Why have Democrats failed so colossally?
Because their goal was never to protect us. The democratic leadership understand class solidarity, through a green-tinted lens. They understand that they will not want for Abortions or Healthcare or Housing. They understand that their children will not be dislocated by climate change. That, or they do not care. What is in their heads is between them and their deities, but their actions make it clear: God isn’t coming to save us. The Democrats aren’t coming to save us.
The politicians will always prefer the negative peace that is the absence of tension to the positive peace that is the presence of justice.
They will always insist that the only solutions are the ones that require them. Liberals and Leftists and Anti-fascists of America, you have abdicated the responsibility you bear as a believer in liberty. You have a duty to fend off the rising tide of tyranny.
It is time for you to learn what solidarity means.
—
I feel hopeless. What can I do?
Any or all of these actions can be helpful!
Arm yourself if it is safe to do so.
Learn basic gun safety and stop being afraid of the best tool you have to defend yourself in the immediate term. Have no illusions about opposing the State — that is not the purpose of armed self defense. If the Fascists take full control of the state, we are well and truly fucked. But we are not yet at that stage. We are at the stage where the Brownshirts are attempting to ramp up the violence in order to cow you so that you do not resist yet more escalation. Do not let them. Do not count on the Police to prevent them from harming someone you love in the near future. The Police always side with the Fascists. Take the defense of yourself and your loved ones into the hands of someone who actually cares about them: You.
Learn basic first aid.
Learn how to apply a tourniquet and how to stop someone from bleeding out. Learn basic trauma care. Learn CPR. Learn how to use an epipen and naloxone. Teach yourself the signs of shock. Learn how to treat pepper-spray and potentially-lethal wounds from less-lethal ammunition. Make a plan for what you will do if someone you love is injured in civil unrest.
Learn and practice protest tactics.
Protesting in authoritarian states requires the understanding that police will use military tactics against you. Identify these counter insurgency tactics so that you can avoid being rounded up in mass arrests. Always be aware of your surroundings. Don’t post images of protests on social media. Don’t take your phone to protests. Cover identifiable tattoos and piercings and hair. If you are white, be prepared to place your own body in harm’s way in order to discourage the police from harming your darker-complected friends.
Learn your rights inside and out.
Do not talk to the police. Do not use biometrics to unlock your phone. The cops can legally make you unlock it with your finger or face but not with a password.
Do not talk to the police. Do not trust them. They are allowed to lie to you. The supreme court has repeatedly found that police have zero obligation to serve or protect you.
Do not talk to the police. Throw out the notion that they are there to protect you. They are the army of the ruling class against those whom they rule over. Police understand that they may be asked to crack your skull. In every authoritarian regime, the Police are the people who arrest their neighbors and turn them in to the Supreme Leader. Make your peace with that fact. If you are a police officer reading this and this fact makes you uncomfortable, resign tomorrow and free yourself from the horrific institution that has failed you as much as it has failed us. Rejoin your fellow regular people and reclaim your humanity.
Learn how to de-arrest someone.
The Surveillance State is nearly old enough to vote. All the groundwork laid after 9/11 is now maturing into a fully-realized police state. Do not simply go quietly to that good night. Practice tactics to keep your friends and neighbors from being disappeared into an unmarked van. Decide ahead of time exactly how far you are comfortable escalating things, and do not give them an excuse to kill you.
Figure out in the near future who you can trust and who you cannot.
Remember that fascism is always a movement of little, normal people who either do not realize the cruelty they are enabling or see it as a means to an end.
If someone shows you they are not worth your trust, believe them.
We do not have time to win every heart and mind. Some bullies just need to be reminded what will happen if they bully you.
Listen, Liberal: Direct, Collective Action is our only hope of survival.
Organize your neighborhood into a tenant’s union. Organize your workplace into a union or co-op. Join or start a mutual aid network. The people in your community must become the heart of your politics. Volunteer and organize a robust community inside your community. Talk to the people you love and who you interact with daily about what you will do when things escalate again. Talk to your neighbors and make sure you understand who they are and that they understand who you are.
Think about your medications. Think about your housing situation. Think about your own safety first.
As American cohesion continues to break down, social services will get worse before they get better.
If you are a queer person in a conservative state, make plans immediately for your own self-defense, both physically and legally.
If you are in a same-sex marriage, contact a lawyer. Get all your documents in order and prepare to fight when the Supreme Court inevitably strikes down your status.
Plan for what you will do when the violence breaks out in earnest.
The vast majority of people will not be soldiers on the front line. A resistance does not need a bunch of perfectly disciplined revolutionary soldiers. Rather, a resistance needs people of every political tendency and every occupation doing little and imperfect things every single day. We will not defeat the enemies of progress unless we put in the work to build a network of power that is based on solidarity rather than exploitation.
We need a broad popular front against Fascism if we are to have any hope.
You have a role in that. Only you can find it.
To be clear: The solution here is NOT armed insurrection against the government.
Until and unless the Conservatives make good on their stated plan to allow state legislatures to override the popular vote, we must not be the initiators of violence. That can only elicit the total destruction of the nascent popular front.
The axiom by which we must organize in the immediate term is nothing more or less than vigorous self-defense.
Every American must consider what Self-Defense truly means in a country that despises them and holds in contempt the idea that they might have control of their own destiny.
This is going to get worse before it gets better.
America is headed into a Time of Troubles, and God only knows where that road will lead. Whatever the justifications in the moment of states’ rights and the “natural” order of the races, first American Civil War saw half a million siblings killing siblings so that the rich could keep their property, no matter how many people had to be kept in horrible conditions to ensure that. Similarly as we descend into narratives of queer degeneracy and racial violence, the billionaire class is laughing at our inability to realize that they are the cause of all our troubles. The second American Civil War, if it ever materializes, will likely put that bloodshed to shame.
