No One Is Going To Save Us

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.