The way the political world in the United States is now constituted, power is a zero sum game. There is no compromise. One side will act and exist, the other will fail to act and disappear. We must act or we don't exist.
Until we do the good things the Republicans want to stop, and until we stop the bad things Republicans want to do, the existence of the Democratic Party is purely theoretical. If we don't do it now, the party and the republic will be merely historical.
Reposting this from June of 2022. Inspired by A.R. Moxon
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat writes the independent publication The Reframe. He's a wonderful, sharp writer and you should check out his work if you're not already familiar with it. His latest, "Lying to Fascists," discusses the trend of American fascists publicly rejecting democracy and law and declaring their vision for the future of the country.
Using examples from Harrison Butker's Handmaid's Tale medley of nostalgic misogyny and racism, to Texas governor Greg Abbott's big heart for the right kind of murderers, to Supreme Court Justice(?!) Sam Alito finally coming out of the MAGA closet, Moxon makes the case that, with the threat level hovering somewhere between SEVERE and CRITICAL, now might be a good time to stop giving "[t]hese Americans who want to kill Americans" all this quaint credit for good faith and the benefit of the doubt.
Instead, he warns (emphasis mine):
Either they get their way, and society is no longer accessible to most of us, or they don't, and everyone including them gets to access society. Therefore, I think they shouldn't get their way or be treated as if they should. These are people who intend to destroy whatever they need to in order to rule over our lives to secure their own personal enrichment and comfort, and are so confident in their success that they announce their intent. They do not care about you, and they certainly do not care about your good faith efforts beyond the extent to which they make it easier for them to seize control. They will never give you credit for working to find their rationales reasonable. They will never return the benefit of the doubt you extend. Our mission is not finding ways to work with them. Our mission is finding ways to sabotage their efforts and to keep their targets as safe from them as we can.
It should be clear by now that the fascists will do anything to achieve their aim of power and control. There is no limit. And they will not stop. They can only be stopped, but only if we have the awareness and the willingness to do what needs to be done.
Moxon's piece is a good one and offers some principles and specific strategies for how we might go about saving the Republic. I encourage you to read it.
When I did, it inspired me and reminded me of this one of mine from June of '22.
"This time, it's political."
This is going to be part rant, part call for help, and it's going to be long. If you want, you can tune back in next week for a regularly scheduled post on charter schools. But if we don't deal with this it won't even matter.
I try not to write explicitly about politics in this blog. It's probably a holdover from my teaching days when I avoided sharing my politics with students. I was trying to teach them to think for themselves, after all.
So when a student would ask who I supported or voted for, I would often just give them what I stood for and let them figure it out.
"I'm for high taxes on the rich, assistance for the poor, less funding for the police and military and more funding for schools and libraries and parks and transit. I support DREAM, DACA, amnesty, and a path to citizenship for anybody who wants it. I'm against putting kids in cages. I'm for clean energy and at least trying to save our lives on this planet."
That usually did the trick. They got the picture.
I don't have students to worry about anymore, and I've changed my mind about this blog--at least for now. I need to talk to you about politics.
The school battles we're fighting today, over "CRT," LGBTQ+ rights, identity inclusiveness and trans kids, "parent rights" and banned books and school "choice" and school funding and teachers unions and whether to do anything about what-the-fuck actual murders of school children are, of course, fundamentally political. And, fundamentally, they are part of the same big war we're fighting over voting rights and police reform and climate change. It's a war that has only two sides.
The Republican Party, one of the two major political parties operating in the United States is despicable, and the people who love them and work for them are despicable, too. Some of my friends say they're crazy but they are not crazy. Their fans may be nuts, but the Republican Party and the apparatchiks who do damage on a national-now-global scale are perfectly rational.
Their actions serve a strategic purpose: holding on to power. In their drive for political power, Republicans and their media cheerleaders have cultivated a constituency addicted to conspiracy and grievance and the taste of blood. The party is now completely devoted to supplying their acolytes with enough rage to keep them coming back for more.
On the other hand, the Democratic Party is in love with its own virtue. It's dedicated to preserving a romantic narrative of democracy and bipartisanship, and the fiction that if only we make the best argument in a nice way we will persuade our adversaries (don't say enemies) and win the day. Or maybe there's nothing we can do because the Senate. Or maybe the Constitution.
This will not last forever. We will either become all one thing, or all the other.
In order to survive, we have to act, and our first act has to be telling the truth about Republicans. Every time we or our elected leaders (Senator Schumer? Mr. President?) make believe that Republicans are like us, that they care about the country or *regular folks* or anything in the universe except power, we lose a battle and they win one.
They weaponize our credulousness as proof of our impotence and they are not wrong. And when they do, their numbers grow and a few more of us give up and stay home, convinced our leaders don't see what we see or know what we know.
The president, the vice, from the White House podium, on national tv, they need to say it, out loud and every time. Every member of Congress, every governor, state legislator, city council and school board member at every rally, in every interview, needs to tell the truth:
As long as Republicans believe that people who disagree with them are illegitimate, that guns > children's lives, that elections they lose are fraudulent, that crimes they commit are not crimes, that climate change is a hoax, or that history ought to be a soft pillow for racists and the truth is a matter of opinion, there are no good Republicans.
For those of you thinking, "Bullshit. I'm a Republican and I don't believe those things," you are deluding yourselves and you should stop. Tell the truth: Either you do believe those things, in which case you're a terrible person and fuck you, or you are no longer a Republican. Congratulations.
Telling the truth is not easy and getting people to listen is ten times harder in this putrid media backwash where corporations whose mission should be to inform us have defaulted to predetermined narratives; faulty assumptions; and timid, shrugging commentary when they aren't snickering and rolling their eyes.
The media--both Big and Social--take for granted that Republicans will obstruct. What did you expect? The reporters bat their eyes and swoon over the big, strong Rs who never give an inch while shaking their heads and snickering at the "we wanted to" Ds for even trying. Silly geese. More on this to come.
So what can we do? We need the news. Democrats need networks to interview us and invite us on shows and ask us questions and cover campaigns and spotlight our issues. We know we can't depend on the media to be fair or shrewd, and we can't count on them to rise above their both-sides horse race "journalism." Still, facts do not speak for themselves. Facts have to be spoken by someone.
So when the media fails and falls back on their assumptions and tired tropes, we need to push back. For most of us, that might look like the simple civic engagement that almost nobody does. For example, every time we see a ridiculous, mis-framed article in The New York Times or a vapid false equivalency on MSNBC or CNN, you and I can write letters (does anyone still?) and send emails and call our media faves to hold them to account. We can call out our local papers and radio stations. We can complain louder and louder until they hear us or hang up. We can cancel subscriptions.
Every time one of our representatives in government does an interview where the news personality starts with "Why can't Democrats..." they need to confront that reporter and challenge the premise of the question. Everybody on the planet should understand the formula by now. We need to push back on the notion that it's our job to make the Republicans better people. We just need to beat them.
Every time Democrats tell the truth about Republicans instead of pretending they are like us, we win. We need to support candidates who will tell the truth in the White House and in Congress, but also for city council and school board where we need to show up to meetings and tell the truth ourselves. All of us can tell the truth in posts online and we can follow other people who do. We can tell our friends and our families (ouch!) the truth about Republicans especially if they are Republicans. Remember when your racist buddy used to send you racist shit about Obama? We can make our friends crazy with the actual truth.
Honesty is an act of war. Each moment of truth is an attack on the life of the liars. Words alone won't stop the Republicans, but the truth is a prerequisite for victory.
Now some really bad news. It's not just politics anymore. Republicans today are not only bent on the elimination of all opposition political-cultural-historical-pastoral, they and their party are armed and aimed at the entire tragically incomplete American project. All of their power-- cultural, economical, policial/judicial, as well as political-- is threatened by the prospect of an equitable, multi-racial democracy, and they mean to kill it.
The Republican Party is a black hole at the center of our democracy. Built out of paranoia and anger, it depends for its survival on its ability to block light from getting through. Gun safety? Blocked. Voting rights? Blocked. Environmental protection? Renewable energy? Blocked. Police reform? Racial equity? Blocked. Economic justice, reproductive rights, workers rights, civil rights, business regulation, consumer protection, free and fair elections, the fucking post office? Forget about it.
Obstruction works. It's how Medicare for All, Merrick Garland, and two impeachments were blocked. It's how George W. Bush became president, for fuck's sake. It's how eighteen-year-olds are able to buy weapons of war. Obstruction, blocking the aspirations of their foes is fundamental. It's the very core of minority power.
Republican ideas, such as they are, are racist and hateful and generally unpopular, so the party only exists today as a nullifying force, material only to the extent it can stop progress and "own the libs." Which it does. Brilliantly.
Under these circumstances, Republicans' refusal to compromise becomes existential. When Democrats pursue it we look weak and when we inevitably settle for a deal on their terms, we are the ones compromised. Look at the gun proposal that Senator Murphy and others had to beg for. I'm smart enough and old enough to know that something is better than nothing. But everyone knows that even if it ever gets written and if it ever gets passed, it won't be nearly adequate.
That's why Democrats have to come out right now and say loudly and unambiguously that this is just a first step, that we are going to keep working for expanded background checks and a ban on the sale of war weapons. And I don't mean just the tens of thousands of us who marched yesterday, I mean Chris Murphy and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden--the people who actually have a say in what we settle for.
Otherwise, even before the game plays out where McConnell waits for things to cool off and for another story to dominate the news squirrel! and for Democratic leaders to give up, Rank-and-file Democrats are already disappointed and discouraged, largely because we don't have confidence that our reps will continue to fight for what we actually need.
Meanwhile, Republicans are gleeful that we have given them the opportunity to appear reasonable to The New York Times, while at the same time they are winking reassurances to the gun fetishists that nothing is going to change. Which gives them the chance to say they tried but We told you gun regulation wouldn't work.
There will never be genuine compromise from the Republicans because if the Republican Party were to allow actual, real progress, if even a little bit of light pierced the umbra, its structural integrity would fail and it would collapse.
And don't even kid yourself: It's foolish to look for individual members to break free and "vote their consciences" or "do the right thing." Even setting aside the twin deviants Cheney and Kinsinger (Update: *Kinzinger), who in spite of their atrocious voting records have stood against their party (and been bounced as a result), the occasional unicorn won't overcome the filibuster, and where are we? No, their unity is essential to their power, and power is the only reason they exist.
The Democratic Party is all that stands between the Republicans and the ending of American Democracy. And no matter how damaged and defective we are, what comes next is worse. We can't afford to waste our time taking each other apart. I know there's a fight among Democrats over whether our leaders are doing enough to earn the votes of would-be supporters. I get it. I've been in that fight, too. But, at least for now, it's the wrong fight.
I voted for Al Gore. People who voted for Ralph Nader were wrong. I voted for Hillary Clinton. People who voted for Jill Stein and that Johnson guy were idiots. I voted for Biden. I wanted Warren. Others wanted Bernie--twice. People who didn't vote because they wanted somebody else don't understand how elections work.
We shouldn't be accused of treason every time we criticize the party, but there are only two sides in this fight. If the people we elected to fight for us are not prepared to do that, we'll get new ones. But we can't afford to sit it out.
Our only hope, and the only hope for the country, is to defeat all Republicans, and I don't just mean elect more Democrats. Obviously we need to do that; anyone who thinks the gun bill wouldn't be better if we had ten more Democrats in the Senate is deluded or trolling. But simply electing more Democrats is not enough if the ones we elect fail to act, even with the future of the country hanging in the balance.
When I say Democrats need to defeat Republicans, I mean we need to destroy them. We have to smash them and their loathsome ideology. They are fascists. They are powerful and intensely committed. They will not quit. They will not be defeated by good intentions.
Democrats need to do things. Being right, being the good guys, is not enough. People want wins. The Democratic Party needs to deliver. Every action we complete is a battle won. Every time we actually do something Republicans want to stop, or stop something they want to do, they lose a battle and a piece of their power.
Democrats don't need our elected leaders to deliver everything right now. We need our leaders to fight for everything, all the time. We need better gun safety measures. Fight for them. We need voter protections. You need to fight for them. We need legislation to save our lives on this planet. Fight! Sometimes it feels like you don't even think these things are important.
And don't hand us the bullshit "can't do it alone" and "we need more dems" excuses. We know that. We're voting for that. If you want people to keep fighting for you, if you want us to make calls, knock on doors, "chip in$10," if you want us to join, stand up together, resist, and March For Our Lives, you have to fight for us.
Every bill passed, debated or even introduced (Schumer!), every executive order signed (Biden! Defense Production Act! State of Emergency over firearms!), every postmaster general replaced (Mr. President, how in the hell can we not get this done?), every court case won, every seat flipped, every time we Run for Something and every time we win -- every righteous thing we DO, is a tiny little Gettysburg or Yorktown. Every time we "wanted to" or "wish we could have," or piss our "what if they do it back to us / they'll just undo it anyway" pants, the opposite is true. Right now we are losing the war.
The way the political world in the United States is now constituted, power is a zero sum game. There is no compromise. One side will act and exist, the other will fail to act and disappear. We must act or we don't exist.
And all the fights over schools and libraries will be over. All the other fights, too.
Until we do the good things the Republicans want to stop and stop the bad things Republicans want to do, the existence of the Democratic Party is purely theoretical. If we don't do them soon, that existence will be merely allegorical.
