Raging into the dark night
on watching the January 6th hearing, protesting the revoking of Roe, dying liberal illusions, & scrambling for hope
I have been avoiding the January 6th hearings. Mostly because of my mental health.
Not that I don’t care, but the thing that matters most to me about all of it would be to see that DJT 45 & their inner circle experience some consequences. Sure, prison time might provide you some quick emotional vindication, but I would settle for banning them from running for President in 2024.
Let us visualize this: ban Trump from running in 2024. Incarcerating rich white people isn’t really our thing in America, & as someone who has recently spent time studying the system here that cages humans, I cannot really be a staunch advocate for jailing anybody, even this toxic temper tantrum of a failed politician.
I have been avoiding the January 6th hearings, but yesterday I watched, because people on my socials were screaming that this is finally it. They got him now. This is the death knell for the MAGA movement.
Oh my fellow snowflake siblings of the better world, if only. If only.
Yes, it’s important that all this comes out. Yes, it’s important there are some forms of so-called accountability for violent fascist terrorist white supremacist religious zealots who just think they can get away with killing cops when they are the people who invented the Blue Lives Matter movement or the thin blue line flag. I get why liberal Americans are glued to their televisions begging for some kind of transparent reckoning for the worst of the red-hat skull-mask super villains. I get it. I get the facepalming, the incessant tweeting to God, the universe, anyone, I get the “it’s worse than Watergate,” I get the schadenfreude.
But the MAGA movement is not over. Worse yet, they don’t really care about any of this serious daytime drama of hearings & hand-wringing. They are about naked authoritarian power cloaked in apocalyptic patriarchal racist religion. In many states like mine, they are firmly entrenched in the halls of power. They have no plans to relinquish the reins to this runaway train in the perpetual train wreck they quaintly describe as “making America great.”
So as plain as I can say it, I have no stomach for making heroes out of Trump’s more civil supporters & former friends or no-longer close colleagues who simply did the minimal right thing at the absolute last minute to save their own tails from potential legal consequences. Don’t get me wrong, some of them have some kind of a conscience, are not total sociopaths. Any time a human leans into their better humanity, we can breathe some relief. But no, sorry, not sorry, Liz Cheney, Mike Pence, Betsy DeVos, & on & on, not even brave & badass Cassidy Hutchinson are not our heroes or our friends. Full stop. I also have no stomach for empty platitudes of our sacred democracy. Liberal nationalism is as distasteful to me as right-wing nationalism, maybe more so, since liberals are often my adjacent advocates & co-laborers in grassroots movements. But nation states are not sacred in my world, & we have never been a fully functioning democracy.
Narcissist tyrants like DJT 45 have survived or thrived on a nation of enablers. Even you have neighbors or family members or associates who voted again for him in 2020, & if their faction regains power, they understand the time could come when they will be required by their loyalty to the MAGA movement to throw all of the people like us into jail or worse.
Any illusion about any of this being over should be staring you down on your local ballot. Not everywhere, thank goodness, but somewhere (like on my small city council ballot), there are hardline MAGA January 6 mobsters running for local, state, regional, or federal office. Don’t think for a minute that with some voters their participation in the coup is an asset.
While the authoritarian coup to overturn the 2020 election by fear, by force, by conspiracy, may have failed due to some incompetence in its execution, they got away with a lot. Too many of its tacit supporters or even participants will never face any tangible consequences for their participation. Now, the coup continues in plans to steal key seats in the 2022 midterms, with the 2024 presidential election not too far on the horizon.
Worse still, the continuing fascist coup has found an unelected force for pure evil in the rogue & right-wing Supreme Court, which has issued a flurry of fascist decisions that signal the end of liberal America, whatever was left of it or ever existed. Sorry, not sorry, but these are “activist judges” who have gone full fascist & are acting on orders from their interpretation of God. They are acting as if they are accountable to nobody except a harsh, punishing version of the Always Masculine Sky God that contradicts the underlying emphasis on human love & compassion in all sacred traditions. The renunciation of Roe versus Wade is the most vulgar, murderous, hateful of their recent decisions, but the movement is the total erosion of any semblance of liberal democracy.
Let me say it: other than sending you robo-texts to raise funds for more mediocre middle-of-the-road corporate Democrats, the party currently in power is acting powerless. They have had 18 months to enact small portions of progressive reform, but have failed on most of the major agenda items that would provide tangible relief to the masses of people struggling to make ends meet.
Joe Biden is the definition of a right-wing Democrat, a lifelong card-carrying inner-circle sellout thug whose sketchy record on basically every issue that leftist progressives care about preceded him. Joe Biden was the worst kind of hold-your-nose compromise candidate, & he is an even worse president, but even his tepid, status-quo style of ruling is too liberal for the Let’s Go Brandon crowd. Let’s not forget that Bernie Sanders was the clear Democratic front-runner at the beginning of the 2020 election cycle; Biden was flailing near the back of the pack. When Bernie’s path to the nomination became crystal clear to the establishment, Buttigieg, Warren, & Klobuchar were all too happy to immediately suspend their campaigns to defeat the only truly progressive candidate in the bunch.
In addition to Biden’s inability to deliver on the bread-and-butter social reforms desperately needed like massive student-debt relief, the $15 or $25 minimum wage, to genuinely fight climate change or otherwise help people or the planet (I could go on & on, but I won’t), he has us now caught up in a deadly continuation of the endless wars of the last thirty years. The failed withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban, now the grind of the ugly expensive bloody proxy war in Ukraine where Ukrainians are being sacrificed for some geopolitical imperial fantasy about weakening or destroying Russia. Anti-war voices in the Democratic Party have been completed bought, cajoled, or muted (where is Dennis Kucinich when you need him), making the uncomfortable situation where only a small faction of libertarians & far-right folks are the only establishment Americans criticizing the proxy war. At least on Twitter, I see a far-left that is having none of it. I have talked about this elsewhere, but Clare Daly, Irish representative in the European Union, speaks for me here:
https://www.facebook.com/ClareDalyMEP/videos/361032929388861
Let me say it: the liberal idea of America doesn’t really exist in practice. It probably never has. That is why all this roll-back has actually been thus far too easy for the far-right. The Bill Clinton or Barack Obama years were marked with some liberal swagger, hence the overblown right-wing outrage against them, but the policies were fundamentally neoliberal not liberal, anti-person & anti-planet, pro-war & pro-corporations. I am not saying we have not seen some incremental changes in some local contexts that have fundamentally improved our quality of life. I am not saying don’t vote Democrat in elections where those votes matter as a form of harm reduction. I’m not saying don’t run as a Democrat at the local level if you have the heart or stomach for it. But I am not a Democrat, & “electoralism or else” has not saved us. I am saying I am tired of seeing my most modest expectations devastated & gutted by spineless sellouts who will do nothing significantly to restrain the greater crimes of capitalism by universalizing free housing, healthcare, utilities, & guaranteeing universal basic income. As a chant emerged this past week: “Democrats we call your bluff, voting Blue is not enough.”
So please stop now with the delusions & illusions about our beloved democracy & start fighting for beloved community. Even here in the privileged bulwark of the so-called American dream, extreme income inequality & gregarious growthism rule the day. The attack on reproductive choice has always been about power, about control, about a superficial religious warrant for breeding more: more workers, more soldiers, more slaves of the carceral state.
When I was much younger, I remember writing screeching anarchist pacifist tree-hugger screeds about the right-wing authoritarianism of the Reagan-Bush 1 years. Every issue that we are dealing with now, from anti-racism to war to drug war to police brutality to pro-choice to homophobia & transphobia to queer liberation to overpopulation to ecological apocalypse, was on the horizon then.
For a short period during the Obama years, I remember looking back at the poems & prose I published then with just a little embarrassment. Why? I was middle-aged, newly sober, had a decent job, & Obama was in the White House. Maybe younger me had too little faith in the arc of the moral universe that MLK talked about. Maybe middle-aged me had too much faith that just because my life got better (thanks advanced education & white male privilege) I could pretend that the lives of the masses of people living paycheck-to-paycheck had got better. Was younger me just a wild histrionic hippypunk malcontent raging into the dark Detroit night? Were others like me just the same? Or were we early 90s radicals actually right, only except that things were actually much worse than we forecast?
But please don’t give up. There is always hope in an uprising, like we have seen this past week in response to the revocation of Roe versus Wade. Keep fighting. Seek our hope in decentralized & democratically-run mass nonviolent movements working outside the partisan politics charade, in democratic unionized workplaces, in direct action to defend the planet, & in sustainable, principled mutual aid counter-institutions that help vulnerable people directly.