This is a LOADED post. There is a lot to unpack at this critical juncture of American society, and we need to find a way to understand all of that very quickly so we can prevent an entire social collapse of the place we call home. This is serious business, and we don’t want to go on living like this every day. So, be ready to reflect and ask yourself a lot of tough questions which you’ve never had to give thought to, because we need you to understand the root of the issue so you’re ready for what lies before us. If you don’t, then this is our life for the unforeseeable future. Yes, it’s that serious.
I’ll start with fascism, then COVID-19, and then the recent protests.
Fascism
America is fascist.
Is that a hard statement to see and process? Then let me make it easier.
Donald Trump is a fascist.
Why does that make it easier to process? Is it because it’s easier to blame it on a single figure?
Yes, Donald Trump is an authoritarian demagogue who blames problems on minorities and anyone who isn’t white. And anyone who isn’t white is seen as lesser or weaker. It’s not a coincidence that instead of guiding a nation through chaos, his response was to tell governors that they need to not be seen as weak, and instead increase police presence. His response to George Floyd protests was to ask states to help out in DC by sending in their national guards, which led to the third amendment being invoked by the mayor of DC because the Utah National Guard was staying at a DC hotel.
But, just because it’s now easy to say Donald Trump is a fascist due to military presence and force being used on American citizens, it does not mean it didn’t exist before. People like me have been desperately warning anyone and everyone they know about fascism in America for so long now. Because when we heard that he wanted to build a wall to keep Mexicans out, we understood what that entailed. And when we saw those same Mexicans and others be put in concentration camps and inhumanely treated as if they were animals, it was impossible to feel anything but immense sadness and think that that might be us very soon in that same position, regardless of whether we are American citizens. Anyways, remember the Muslim travel ban from 2017?
Fascism is also a society sitting quietly watching as this happens, and doing nothing about it. And fascists love that because they wiggle their way for an inch and take a mile. That’s not just pointing the blame at Republicans for staying in line with Trump. It’s also Democrats funding these same concentration camps. It’s also everyone who might have seen a tweet or headline, felt uncomfortable and mad for a second, and then moved onto a cute video or picture because the weight wasn’t easy to sit with for too long. I will come back around to this when I talk about the George Floyd protests.
Think about where we were in 2015 in our discourse. “He’s not REALLY going to build a wall.” To 2020, “He’s not REALLY going to deploy the military and have them attack citizens.” Do you see how that happened over time?
So, when we have stressed for the last 4+ years that Donald Trump is a fascist, we were trying to stop it from ever getting to this point and having to ask any of these questions because these are very dark thoughts. It’s not all of a sudden that fascism arose. And now that we are here, it is deeply embedded in our institutions. Think of how Bill Barr was the one to call for the military and his unidentified mercenaries, who supposedly report to the Department of Justice, to attack American citizens just so Donald Trump could have a photo op in front of a church.
For people of color, think about what that experience is like? It means your concerns and fears not being validated until a white person experiences that same fear and pain. That you are seen as crazy and overreacting. It’s as if you are just a weaker person for experiencing those things earlier than others, and that white people don’t want to confront an issue because it would mean reflecting on something difficult, or a consequence of their actions. Or, why else would they be ok with letting any of this happen?
OK. So now that you understand that America is fascist, what does that mean for you? It means the loss of human potential, it means losing the ability to love, it means losing your freedom, and many other things. Why is that exactly? Well, think about what you’re going through right now. How can you focus on anything at all and go about living your life the way you did in December or January when you’re feeling so sad, anxious, uncertain, and scared all the time? Why does that happen? Well, think about how much hate there is in our society right now. I think about UAB shutting down at the threat of a hate group assembling after the Birmingham mayor took down a confederate monument. Do you see how the hate thwarted collective productivity for an entire city? For a whole day, we were frantically checking to see what was happening trying to make sense of all that was happening so we could understand what it meant for our own safety and what we needed to do to protect ourselves.
When fascism arises, in particular in America due to stagnating wages for the last 50 years and a middle class implosion, you can’t just ignore it and push it away. This is how life will be until this is resolved. All that’s happening right now is the logical conclusion.
It is important to understand that this is the thread weaving through all of our current issues. Because when COVID-19 arose, the fascists weren’t all of a sudden going to change their ways. They were going to double down. The people that didn’t stand with them deserved death and suffering, and anyone who dissented from the dear leader didn’t deserve any help because they made the fascist look and feel bad. Think of states like California, New York, or Michigan and how they were treated, and then how many people died as a result. And if that still doesn’t ring, please consider how fast police budgets were organized due to protests compared to how fast public health budgets and resources were organized due to COVID-19.
How COVID-19 created chaos in warp speed
When we say we face a global, unprecedented pandemic, what do we really mean? When we say “We’re all in this together,” who all is we, and what exactly are we together on? This is not a cynical thought, it’s an exercise in understanding and grasping the depths of the issues we face now and that we’ll be facing for many years to come.
We live in a transactional society, and America in particular consumes far more than any other nation. COVID-19 has significantly impacted that in a matter of months. So swiftly has the world been crippled by this, and all of our consumption habits altered drastically. NYU Professor and Economist Nouriel Roubini notes in an interview that people in a country like Germany, which reopened stores a month ago and where unemployment is up by only 1%, are not buying anything. Because people are uncertain about the future and are unsure of what might happen to their jobs, assets, savings, health, sustenance, etc. consumption and spending habits won’t be as they were just a few months ago.
What does that mean exactly?
For international businesses, it impacts them significantly if the U.S. isn’t spending because things are so tailored to our consumption habits (think China and India providing us goods and services so items in the marketplace get cheaper and cheaper). For the U.S. in general, the economy literally does not know what to do with us stopping spending altogether. To give you perspective on that, consider that after the 2008 crisis, the last decade saw 22 million jobs created. In the last 3 months, 40+ million jobs were lost. For businesses in the U.S., we very well know small businesses can only stand for so long without support. With no support, they likely have 2–3 months at most before their owners close their doors and start the bankruptcy/liquidation process. Come August 1st, PPP and unemployment will come to an end, and then come September we’ll have another wave and cycle of unemployment, and more people being unable to pay their bills. Except this time, it won’t just be mom-and-pop store owners, it will be people we look at as wealthy being unable to afford their nice, comfortable, lavish lifestyles propped up on a monthly basis.
For mega-corporations like Amazon, this presents an opportunity of further exploitation of labor. Because demand for jobs will be low as people are automated out of their roles and CEOs keep it that way to prove quarterly growth and for profits from stocks, but people applying for jobs will be high. So the benefits that need to be offered to people through employment? Non-existent.
Because the federal government has been a major mess in their support of the nation, thinking a one-time $1200 check was sufficient, people of course responded by going back to work as soon as they could to keep a roof over their head and food on their table. So not only did people not feel supported, they felt an anxiety of having to go to work to live, and also to spend sparingly not knowing when they would get their next check because of furloughs or temporary layoffs.
This is AFTER seeing 100,000+ people die because of COVID-19. People were willing to continue on with their lives at the risk of testing positive and potentially dying because they wouldn’t be able to support themselves otherwise. It is a massive systemic failure on the federal government’s part to not have given people the means upfront to prevent chaos (fascism certainly benefits from chaos). Canada is a positive example of this, where there’s an implicit societal understanding that people will be taken care of in the immediate term but be taxed later when solutions are in place for society to continue as normal. So if people don’t feel supported by their own institutions, what does that do? It breaks apart a society where individuals are focused on themselves and their own needs. Can you imagine America agreeing to be heavily taxed at a later time if it meant they’d get funding now to stay at home? No, and it’s also because those institutions providing goods and basic needs to everyone have been gutted over a long period of time.
Now, let’s talk about over 100,000 Americans dying due to COVID-19. I have been outraged by the amount of excuses I’ve heard be made trying to reason with this. People caring more about the economy than they have at even the thought of 10 people dying from COVID-19. What that signifies to me is a loss of collective consciousness as a nation, of empathy, of any sort of feeling at all. It’s whataboutism at its worst. We are so filled with hate and wanting to not look weak that we seem to have lost this ability to relate to people feeling pain unless it directly impacts us. We are so busy trying to make ends meet that we are unable to participate in making our lives better through policies. We’ve become numb to this entirely. How is it that we can feel more pain watching our favorite football team lose a game, but not feel any sort of pain seeing an entire STADIUM full of people dying nationwide? We see it and think, well that’s unfortunate but I have to get back to what I was doing now since I just don’t have the time or energy for others.
My office had us start working from home the third week of March. March 11th is the moment the nation stopped as Rudy Gobert tested positive. Consider that 85–90% of deaths could have been prevented if we had acted two weeks earlier than we did. And then think about how many more deaths could have been prevented if we closed down in November or December, which… global intelligence was aware of this in October or November, and it is with a lot of likelihood that Donald Trump’s visit to Walter Reed in November was because of COVID-19. On the other end of the spectrum, New Zealand handled this head on and is now on the other side of quarantine, with 21 total deaths and a total 1,504 cases in a nation of around 4.917 million. Our neighbor to our north in Canada has 95,947 cases with 7,778 deaths with 37.74 million people. The U.S.? An astounding 1,897,838 cases and 109,143 deaths and growing rapidly with 330.15 million people.
Sure, we have 10x more people than Canada, and New Zealand’s population is tiny compared to us. Still, in the instances of Canada and New Zealand, both nations had plans and a cohesiveness in their execution of handling COVID-19. The U.S. had no plan, and continues to have no plan. Our economy was re-opened when we were still averaging 1,000+ deaths a day, and our current projections show ~187k deaths nationwide by September. This projection doesn’t consider the potential surge in cases with mass gatherings due to protest.
For some reason, the U.S. refuses to look at its situations with any sort of criticality and admit what’s happening. Facing reality is much more difficult and offensive than acting like it doesn’t exist. This is a depression, through and through. And because of the lack of an adequate federal response, thousands and thousands of people needlessly died on top of it. COVID led to our society doubling down on our old ways instead of thinking of wholesale change, and the depression and mass death resulted.
The Death of George Floyd
I’m not going to go into police brutality here because if that wasn’t clear from the basis of fascism, then you have a lot of catching up to do. This isn’t just racism. What type of society attacks its own minority citizens in such horrific manner, not feeling any sort of conscience when taking someone’s life? It’s the same one that can watch 100,000 people die from COVID-19 and think it has to move on as normal.
What I will instead spend this section talking about is why George Floyd’s death has had a sustained length in protests. Consider that many black people have died at the hands of police brutality, even this year, and people did not care anywhere near as much.
Because of COVID-19, everyone has been impacted. Where fascism initially came for people of color as easy targets for demagoguery, a pandemic saw no color or status. So now, it’s not just minorities who are majorly suffering. It’s everyone. There was no finger pointing possible for everyone’s suffering.
However, the way the protests are going, many people think that the issue is solely about George Floyd’s death, or about supporting racial equality. That is one aspect of it, but what colored people are asking is, “If that is so, why didn’t you care so much before?”
Do you see where that cynicism stems from? It’s not that black people don’t welcome the support, but they are skeptical. How long will this support last for? Now that white people have done one thing of recognizing that we live in a racist society filled with hate, and are saying they are in support of racial equality, it’s as if they’ve done enough. But for people of color, that’s not enough.
But at the same time for people of color, we know how much it is to ask a white person to consider this for more than a day. It is something we live with EVERY day. We don’t have a choice to stop being hated on like the flip of a light switch. Just to get white people to care for even a moment feels like a major win, and for white people it feels like a major step. It is exhausting for white people because dealing with this for people of color is exhausting every day of their lives. I think of how Barack Obama explained that when a person of color is in a position of power, they are implicitly expected not to ruffle the status quo too much.
So yes, you can post a black square on social media in solidarity, and yes you can post PR statements in solidarity too, but what that comes off as to people of color is ONE admittance of white guilt, and still comes across as white saviorism. Just because it is now ok for white people to say they stand in solidarity with black people, what will you do when this passes? What change will we really see?
So, what people of color are asking for right now is for white people to stop talking and actually listen. And not just make a PR statement saying they acknowledge black lives matter and that they’ll listen, but actually DO something about it. This will take WORK. It will take UNLEARNING. Everything you’ve learned about in your life has been built on perpetuated beliefs which are filled with hate and projection, or glossing over the brutal truth. And that discomfort is something you’ll have to sit with in order to actually solve the problems.
What are those problems?
When the Civil Rights Movement happened, and black people couldn’t be exploited anymore, who was instead exploited? Everyone. Look at how wages have stagnated since the 1970s. That was never addressed because of institutional racism. A hate so strong that people would rather not have public goods for themselves so minorities wouldn’t get them either.
What is essentially happening is that white people are now impacted by COVID-19. Where before all problems were projected onto minorities as things that happen to them, it is now happening to everyone. And it’s not the fault of anyone, but of all of us being impacted by a virus that sees no color or status. That anxiety and uncertainty you feel, the franticness of figuring out what you’re going to do now? People of color live through that every day. Constantly on edge, maybe being ok because you just get used to it and can manage it well.
But you see, that’s white people coming into a black lives matter protest and saying they’re in support of that cause, but really what they’re in support of is everyone’s suffering now that it is impacting them.
That is a different cause altogether, and funnily enough it goes right back to black people’s voices not being heard. Now the protesting has lost its message and is just general chaos. If these protests were truly about the death of George Floyd, wouldn’t they have stopped after the officers were charged? And they haven’t stopped.
Alas, we are all impacted by the effects of fascism. And if that’s what we’re fighting against, and that’s the change we want, that is what we need to protest against and make a demand on. Because if we’re continuing to protest on the death of George Floyd, those demands might get met, but the core problems not be solved.
For example, if Donald Trump is removed from office, will that end all of this? No. There will be more Donald Trumps that rise up. There is still an opposition of Democrats that appeases the fascists, and generally a society that’s scared to say what’s right for fear of offending someone and making them uncomfortable. What we need to be protesting to prevent the continuation of fascism is mass equality and social investment of basic human rights or social goods to create a stable middle class, which is in essence what everyone is protesting but the demands aren’t clear. Because many of us will be in a terrible financial situation come September, and we need changes and solutions now. If we don’t get those, it’ll be the super-rich vs. everyone else, and these protests will continue, and also with the pandemic there will be more deaths.
Moving Forward
Right now, we have a significant threat to our American democracy. We cannot think that we’ll just vote one person out in November. That is foolish. Do you see what happens in Russia, where there are elections but Vladimir Putin receives 90+% of the vote? Fascists haven’t stopped at crushing the rest of our society and institutions, so what makes you think we’re going to have an election, let alone a fair one? We need to stop this, immediately. Otherwise, we will be living in a fully fascist, failed state.
We need to be proactive, and not reactive. And we can’t use this pandemic to return to the normalcy of February 2020. No, we cannot wait any longer for things to pop up and for us to respond at that time, especially when fascists want to flood the zone with so many things all at once that we can’t even process one problem and solution before the next one comes up. We don’t have that luxury anymore. We have a democracy at stake, and all of our freedoms along with it.
What we need to do right now is overcome all of the hate that we have. What we need to do right now is acknowledge that we have a major, common enemy. We need solid plans and policies to be developed to address all of these issues while people are experiencing hardships so they can live decent lives and know they’ll still have a roof over their heads with food on the table for their families. And we need people to manage all of this right now effectively so we have central figures and places of trust.
It starts with addressing the core issue and protesting for basic human rights so the middle class of America can be strong again. We need wages to accurately reflect what is happening with the stock market and the GDP. And while we’re at it, maybe we need to re-envision what the GDP is because it doesn’t accurately portray just how healthy a society is. It should take out finance and advertising because those sectors re-allocate value, not create any value, as Simon Kuznets originally prescribed. The GDP should include aspects of climate in it so the success of exploitation isn’t inversely proportional to the decline of the actual earth we live on, including but not limited to the health of our forests and waters. And maybe the solution there is to shift our unemployed citizens towards the solutions of the future, such as taking care of our forests and waters, and the animals that reside in those areas so we can have a healthy climate and solve that problem too.
Do you see how exhausting all of this is? Do you get why all of this has been so hard to process, and is so exhausting to live through on a daily basis? This is what it will take to solve all of our problems right now. Because the interest on our problems accrued for so many years, and we never paid off those debts. John Maynard Keynes prescribed that the solution to surviving a depression was to stimulate. America has been stagnating for 50 years and that is how much we need to stimulate by. But particularly in 2020, due to COVID-19 coupled with loss of consumer confidence, we need a stimulus worth 1–2 years, or until systems and vaccines are in place for society to operate normally again. The longer we wait, the more it will cost to stimulate to provide America with the right needs.
And right now, we are at an impasse. If we don’t pay off those debts, including those of slavery and hate, then *poof* there goes our democracy. We will be a democracy by self-ascribed name only, not in reality. And every day will be just like the ones we are living in now, likely worse.
