Posted by
Rude One
After Donald Trump was inaugurated, I heard dozens of predictions about
how soon he would fall and be forced out of the
residency. I talked to
people In The Know or people who would mention a friend who's an
intelligence agent, and they all knew, with near certainty, that we were
mere months from the wheels of justice and the righteous government of
the United States rejecting Trump like he was a dog's arm grafted onto
our precious human bodies. I was told it would be October 2017, November
2017, "by Christmas" 2017, and then it was several times throughout
2018. "You see, they'd say, "the spooks are gonna take him down. The
career officers, they know that he's up to his neck in money-laundering"
or "child sex trafficking" or simply "Russia." These savior spies never
appeared.
But we, oh, we hoped, god, how we hoped, listening to every confident
conspiracy-spinner on MSNBC, just believing that, at any second, a
thread would be pulled, the wrong Jenga piece would be moved, and
everything would finally fall apart for Trump. We moved on to the
investigation of Robert Mueller, and we thought that here, finally,
would be the back-breaking straw. And while we have not fully grappled
with what was actually in the report Mueller and his team produced,
while the number of times Trump clearly obstructed justice is
overwhelming and the associations with the Russian government are
damning, still, it didn't shake the foundation of this administration in
any permanent way.
Because we are such hopeful creatures, we liberals, we keep believing
that some cataclysm will break this dark fever. Some of us even thought
that the horrors that would be revealed in the indictment of child
rapist Jeffrey Epstein might be awful revelations about Trump that led
to his comeuppance. That case is still in its early stages, and this is
not to mention what Mueller might say when he testifies next week, but
stop, just stop.
No one is going to save us. It's just that simple. While there have been
and may still be a couple of Supreme Court decisions that don't gut
democracy and civil rights, no one is going to save us from the
depravity of this administration, from its extravagant flouting of rules
and laws meant to prevent corruption of public officials to its
enraging, inhumane mistreatment of migrants to its utter incompetence in
just about every area that requires a rational federal government to
its abandonment of any policy that would mitigate the speeding train of
the climate crisis that is going to wreck us.
There is no political Santa Claus. There will be no insurgency by angry
intelligence agents. There is no ninth-dimensional plan that Speaker of
the House Nancy Pelosi has as to why she's not calling for an
impeachment inquiry. She has no secret information that Trump is going
down for some other crime. And while I could spend the rest of this post
on the boggling refusal of Pelosi to impeach while she has the House
pass meaningless bill after meaningless bill, I don't want to just focus
on her failure in this pivotal historical moment.
We are seeing the result of decades of conservative planning to get the
public to the moment where they no longer believe in anyone but the
right's own media, where plain facts don't matter, where images of
strength are far, far more important than actual strength. And, as Ryan
Grim
demonstrated
in a great piece, we are dealing with a Democratic leadership group
that has never gotten over its post-Reagan stress disorder. Democrats
never learned to fight Republicans. We thought winning elections would
be enough. We thought that the factual reality of more people having
access to health care would be enough. We thought that things that
polled well, like abortion rights, like stricter gun laws, like action
on climate change, would be enough. We thought that Trump being a damned
embarrassment every time he opens his mouth would be enough. We thought
that going high when they went low would be enough.
It's not. It never was.
Republican learned back when Reagan was calling the news the "liberal
media" on a regular basis, when they impeached Bill Clinton because it
made the evangelicals and Clinton haters happy, when they hammered every
minor thing, like a flag-burning case, into a national crisis, that the
fight is all there is. They relish the fight, they live for the fight,
and they can't wait for the next chance to fight, even if they have to
manufacture it. They don't care about rules, they don't care about
pissing off their opponents, and that's why Trump will end up appointing
nearly a third of all federal judges by the end of his first term.
That's why Republicans will end up contorting our voting rights until
only white conservative men get a say.
And while a whole lot of us on the left, many of us who call ourselves
"Democrats," have fought like hell, and while Democratic leaders may
want to fight on issues, they hate it when the fight becomes personal.
Sure, some Democrats will call out particular Republicans on their
awfulness, but the goal is to try to shame a shameless person like Mitch
McConnell. When Republicans go after someone, the goal is to destroy
them and create a new identity for the person. Look at what they did
with the Clintons. Look at what they're doing with Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez. Republicans do this because it works. Democrats won't.
They flinch and shy away, as if it's just too unseemly.
What do I mean by that? President Obama should have had Democrats go on
the warpath over McConnell's refusal to consider the Supreme Court
nomination of Merrick Garland. McConnell should have been turned into an
enemy of the nation. Instead, it was treated with the political
equivalent of an eye roll. Would it have worked? We'll never know.
You want something more recent? Trump was credibly accused of rape, with
activity that is of a piece with other behavior he's admitted to. It
should be something that Democrats say with outrage over and over, in
every discussion. And if Democrats can't take the head of Labor
Secretary Alex
Acosta, who helped get a sweetheart deal for child rapist Epstein, then they have no business in modern politics.
That's all blind hope, the same kind of blind hope that made us think
that some bit of scandal magic would take down Trump. Sorry. No one is
going to save us. We're on our own. So we damn well better save
ourselves.
...So We Have to Save Ourselves (Part 2)
Last week, I wrote that the opposition to Donald Trump and his supporters, apostles, and enablers needs to get its head
around
the idea that no one person or thing is going to save us from Trumpism.
Not the Mueller Report, not a secret cabal of intelligence agents
(hell, I guess you could call it the "Deep State"), not the hidden
child-fucking files of Jeffrey Epstein. And, as if on cue, the U.S.
Attorney of the Southern District of New York released a statement that
it was
ending
its investigation into the hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels
by Michael Cohen under the direction of Donald Trump without indicting
anyone else. As the conservative toxic waste dump RedState
crowed,
"The SDNY Just Crushed One Of The Left’s Biggest Dreams," which was
that the honorable, dogged New York office would bring down Trump.
Except everyone kind of forgot that the U.S. Attorney works for the
Justice Department, which is under the Attorney General, who is William
Barr, who is a lawless sow fucker. So now we've moved on to the next
dream, that something something Mueller hearing something something will
happen.
Except it won't. And the House still won't open an impeachment inquiry,
not even after this past week's descent into racist nationalism.
So we have to figure out how to save ourselves from the fascistic threat
of Trumpism, in ways that make real change and in ways that demonstrate
to those in power that they are facing a greater wave of people than
the human hemorrhoids in the chanting MAGA crowds. We have to face the
fact that there is a political race war that
needs to happen, and it's time to get the troops ready for battle.
I have two suggestions. Neither of them is particularly new (hell, I've
talked about one of 'em before), but place them into the new, urgent
context in which we find ourselves.
First, fuck the white working class. Fuck Trump voters. Fuck their
votes. Fuck their beliefs. Fuck everything about them. Democrats and the
left attempting to appeal to Trump supporters, as if better angels
exist in their cesspool, is like a wounded gazelle attempting to reason
with hyenas. They're gonna eat you; you just look like an idiot for
thinking you could convince them otherwise.
The emphasis for the 2020 election has to be on those who didn't vote in 2016 and 2018. This ain't about voter
enthusiasm.
Jesus, if anti-Trump voters aren't fired up, then Democrats should just
go beat off in a corner for the duration. Voter registration has to be
the top priority, especially in targeting non-white people of voting
age. (Remember: We're in a political race war.) Republicans have a
massive effort
under way to get more voters. Right now, there are lower-key efforts, like Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow PUSH organization
trying to register 100,000 new voters in South Carolina.
Sure, there are great local movements, like Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength in
Michigan.
But MOSES and other organizations aside, we need to have a national
effort, perhaps led by groups with a national status, like
Indivisible or
Swing Left,
which actually has a voter registration strategy but needs some big
time boosting. We need to head to the swing states and find the voters
who have sat out. And we need lots of volunteers who are willing to help
people negotiate the bullshit, byzantine new voter laws in those
states.
The other suggestion is way more radical and way more dangerous from a
messaging position: a general strike, with the kinds of protests we're
seeing in Hong Kong and (closer to home) Puerto Rico. As Will Bunch
put it last
year, "A general strike or even massive protests are well outside of
the normal comfort zone for a majority of Americans. But the question we
need to ask ourselves is this...
how comfortable are we with Donald
Trump spending even one more night in the White House?"
A general strike can bring together liberal causes across the board,
from Black Lives Matter to the Women's March to gun laws to immigration
reform to the climate crisis and more. And it strikes at the heart of
the capitalist enterprise in a way that a well-ordered, well-permitted
protest march never can. Right now, we have a government that is
unresponsive to what the vast majority of Americans want. Our fucked up
electoral system means that not only can a president win without a
majority of the popular vote, the House and Senate can be controlled by a
party that didn't receive the most votes. So the voice of the people
needs to made front and center again because our alleged representative
democracy isn't representing us in a fair, realistic way.
The protests in Hong Kong were particularly
stunning
because it was essentially a movement without a central leader.
Instead, a coalition of pro-democracy groups worked together, with
several members, like Bonnie Leung and Jimmy Sham, taking on different
roles in getting the message out there and getting the people in the
streets. The progressive movement in the United States has that same
kind of possibility of coalition with conveners providing guidance and
direction. Of course, it's something that would need community support
as people missed work for what might be a lengthy strike with a goal of
forcing the resignation of Trump and his administration.
It's a pie in the sky idea, yeah, I know. There's a good chance that it
would fall apart quickly, faced with a public that doesn't want to hang
in there, with a media that might be dismissive and, in the case of Fox
"news," derisive, with an apathetic lump of shit in the White House
going golfing during the whole thing, with corporate and business
leaders and Republicans declaring it a "socialist revolution" or some
such shit.
Yeah, the good guys might not win, but even when they fail, at least
they can say they gave it a shot. At least they found some way to find
meaning and community in a time of cruelty and division. At least they
laid a foundation for some future action.
Or we can all go back to where we came from.
