Number 45 - Lest we regress.
I.
I write this on Friday, November 11th 2016, three days after Donald J. Trump has won the presidential election in the United States on what feels like the third day of mourning in a four-year advent calendar of garbage. (Leonard Cohen died on the 7th but we only found out today, and it’s almost a relief knowing that he’d left us before the results of this particularly dark election were known.) What poetry it is, this strike against justice, on the romantic ideals of informed participatory democracy within only months of losing visionaries like Percy Sledge, Oliver Sacks and Leonard Cohen, those we may have relied on to offer perspectives that could make the ways we’re feeling more poignant or understood.
In the last 72 hours we have seen a public blame-game by disheartened citizens and accompanied pleas for sensibility – or for a time machine that doesn’t exist. Around the world frustration has boiled over, condemning third-party voters, shrieking over the nearly 100 million voters who didn’t/couldn’t show up, but mostly, for the progressive-left, a condemnation of those who not only enjoyed watching what could have been politically repugnant performance art, but who chose to elect an unqualified crook to office.
If not a philistine personality, Donald Trump is at best nauseating, and we’ve all tuned in to watch as he joins the long list of international figureheads who have gained traction through racist, sexist and generally gross and demeaning rhetoric. A really puffed-up club re-discovering their relevance in this era of unpalatable neo-conservativism. These leaders are exploiting the tension we all feel in the face of uncertainty and their circular arguments are pretty much all the same. They've started working their way into the cobwebbed corners of our collective psyche and I think a lot of us are itching to show an enlightened reaction to their new and ugly political landscape.
The only reason we can even identify this rise in global fascism is because we read our 5th grade history books, yet - just as those history books chose to exclude truths that may have been unflattering (you know, the colonial delusions that leave out troubling details like, genocide, the installation of dictatorships, the theft of land from Native Americans etc…) So we can identify fascism, but somewhere along the line we chose to subscribe to an assumption that has crippled us, that assumption being that progress towards justice moves linearly away from some other time, or some other place. It was some other then and there that was riddled with authoritarianism, coups and state-violence, surely not here and now?
With capitalism holding a veil thinly between our perceptions and reality - we feel strained and confused to make an analysis of the world we live in. We would rather deny that fascism exists in ‘our’ political systems, and instead see the prospect of democracy as redeeming us in someway from the suppression brought on by the advent of dictatorships. That’s why this moment feels so scary. We're now forced to look at a future that might contain the same violent qualities found during history's most traumatic eras as the decorated novelties of liberalism are unveiled, revealing the hyper-collision of dangerous realities that are more polarized than they have ever been in the past.
II. 1.
Trumpism isn’t an isolated or “shocking” incident in itself, but it is forcing us to stand at the precipice on the cliff of our imagined future. Standing there alone feels forsaken, now we've got to look around for company. As we know, November 9th indicated a far greater and more dangerous backlash happening around the world in places that promote the idea of democracy, while practicing politics of exclusion. But it also showed us that we are by no means alone in our concern. These political rifts did not emerge yesterday, nor did they emerge because of Donald Trump. It would be ill-advised to give someone as boorish and crass as Trump even the tiniest bit of credit for having orchestrated one detail in the gnarled political system as it exists today (I don't even think he can spell properly.) The credit goes instead to well-disguised thugs who have consistently held racist, sexist and generally exploitative practices as a manufactured necessity for the development project, and economic growth. This applies to Republicans and Democrats alike, with the stage set through a slave-era electoral college, and where parties cling to policy innovations that were initially ushered in with liberalization that are now being used to legitimize the violation of citizenry-as-members. And then, for the rest of us who at one point or another began to accept these extractionist philosophies as somehow protecting our privileges, the onus of responsibility shifts. All of this has been widely held as an acceptable model for decades, if not over centuries of white, European colonialism.
The shock felt in the United States that Donald Trump could be put into office is being treated as a national tragedy, but electoral reform for better representation begins by accepting the fact that America's “model democracy” was eroded even before its constitution was signed. It started when violent, colonial, European swindlers granted themselves the rights to Native land that was never theirs, raping Indigenous culture and parceling up the land through tactical violence. Those same exact powers established what is now the skeleton of our modern economic system, one based on the free-labour provided by kidnapped and enslaved African men and women, and through great use of force now extends to a marauding model of global development. Powerful nations led by manipulative individuals have managed to embed legitimate fear in the people who oppose them. So, where are we now? In the US, the same schemes are used to justify mass incarceration, a privatized social welfare model, health burdens on environmental justice communities and intentional obstacles standing in the way of voters rights. By twisting different amendments from an outdated constitution the most powerful nation on earth has paved the way for the increased concentration of wealth and power as we know it today. So now, once we ("we" because these are intrinsically-linked global phenomena) get past the initial reactions to this un-welcomed new president, our disbelief and horror won’t be about the fact that Donald-“You’re Fired”-Trump could run for, and actually become the president elect in a pseudo-democratic political system, but the shock of having underestimated the appeal his schismatic, hateful campaign has had for cognizant adult people living in 2016.
It’s a shame that it takes someone like Donald Trump to enter the room before we see the value and necessity of responding more radically. And maybe that's where we ought to be looking to for answers; times of social change brought on through direct action and resistance.
Like Lewis Feuer said:
“We should distinguish between disobedience and resistance. The first is limited to dramatizing a particular issue; it retains a faith in representative democracy, and takes for granted that once the facts are known, and the people’s sense of responsibility awakened, the necessary reforms will be made. Civil disobedience is justified when an oppressed group finds itself deprived of lawful channels for remedying its conditions because of an arbitrary obstruction in the democratic workings.”
I like that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The majority of voters are in this case the oppressed group "deprived of lawful channels", many of whom felt they didn't have a place in this election. That, and a shitload of disinformation and unfair precedence to secure a nomination for Clinton in the first place. The DNC knows it shot itself in the foot. Clinton was so overqualified as an establishment politician that she gave voters, and the rest of the world deja-vu – when what they wanted was transformation.
(Now don't get me wrong, there's a chance Hillary may have even been pushed further to the left at some point in her presidency as a result of Sanders’ campaign, potentially swaying her on policies of political transparency, on the environment and on her legacy of hawkish diplomacy. But Hillary Clinton isn’t what the misunderstood majority needed, even if she would have given us relative stability compared to Trump,
And, enough has been said on this, but the DNC will have to rebuild before 2020, or else they could see a near-total lose of their base. It can only do this if Democrats choose to address the literal criminality of favouritism within their own party and more broadly in the way it promoted disinformation and distracted it's voter base throughout the entire primary session. This elitist posturing has become inherent to a two-party system that moves its sliding scale closer and closer to the far-right with each election. Making it more and more difficult for the majority to seek proper representation is as arbitrary an obstruction to the democratic workings as any. I'm not saying Bernie or Bust, I'm not saying Trump deserved his win, I'm just saying that the world looks on in such disappointment because we watched the lead-up together and had hoped that the American people who need their voices heard would have an honest political vehicle there to help them. They called it a ‘working-democracy’ after all…
Deborah Wasserman-Schultz has since resigned, and the story of a truly anti-establishment candidate like Bernie Sanders, someone with both the political experience and legislative know-how to get real change enacted (a skill set that seemed to be attributed solely to Hillary Clinton at the end of the nomination process, which is so far from reality), split the centrist-right Clinton platform down the middle and lead to a breakdown of the democratic ideals that encourage people to vote at all. Now, what we’re left with is a feeling that the United States doesn’t get to benefit from any of the positive implications from that sliding scale of values. We will neither witness Sanders’ political revolution nor the broken glass ceiling of America’s first female president, and definitely no trace from a desperately needed Green party to address climate change and ecological collapse (I kind of think Jil Stein is a bit of a kook, but that's not the point).
Instead, what we’ve got is a depraved man heading into office with supremacists and fools to be appointed as his cronies. The KKK endorsement of Donald Trump and the “whitelash” against empowered movements like Black Lives Matter are hallmarks of chauvinistic jingoism, and mark my words, they will only get worse.
III.
If the natural response to great injustice has historically been the birth of social justice movements, there might be some hope in this dark hour. The continued injustices of displacement, racism, callous mistreatment of the poor, inequitable access to basic social goods and services, homophobia, pollutants in our environments etc. etc. etc. have, in the past been met with civil backlash and lead to great moments of social change. That is the human immune system at play. But it can only work when there is a mass rejection of a political conscription that favours the most fortunate members of society while forcing the least fortunate to bear the burden of responsibility for a litany of social plights that they didn’t cause.
In 2016 we find ourselves taking deep breaths through what feels like a mass existential trip. We are trying to wrap our heads around the very real consequences of poverty, of job-loss, violent conflicts, migration and systemic racism while coming to terms with an all-encompassing climate crisis that will exacerbate all of the above issues in unprecedented ways. The militarization and use of force against disobedient movements seeking to protect basic systems of survival consistently knocks the wind out of the progressive political spirit and then relays to the public that: activism is dead. It tells us instead to vote with our dollar, or to wait until an election to hope for change.
IV.
We've gotten used to watching as the militarization of resource conflicts increases, and it becomes much easier to watch if we think these conflicts emerge out of religious or cultural friction and not from our grabby, interventionist systems. The racist, othering nonsense that spews from this logic is truly nuts. We know the story well from ongoing conflicts throughout the Americas and the Middle-East. Step 1. Install market-democracies in unstable regions because we practice these systems so well at home. Step. 2. Keep mumbling that “Trading nations do not fight”, steps 3 onward define how we see ourselves as exceptional when compared with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately for hierarchal elites is that through new means of communication (puppeteered as they may be), the whole world can tell that the US and much of the developed world isn't practicing democracy all that well at home. How do our police forces respond to free protest? How do industrial powers lobby their interests and continue deregulating? We see the militarization of peaceful uprisings in America and Canada, and this is hugely de-legitimizing, de-stabilizing and very tough on our North Americans-will-save-the-day reputation. If the politics are rotten then maybe the neo-liberal market-fundamentalism and white supremacy that has made securing “other world” resources and stealing land from Indigenous people rotten too? Nah... We couldn’t possibly trust all those Muslims, or Black people or Native people, to control their own resources could we?
One of the true crimes of Trump's campaign has been the fear mongering "skittle-argument" around refugees seeking asylum from armed conflicts started in part by the aforementioned structures of exploitation. Labelling families jihadist, terrorist migrants here to steal our jobs and rape our women is another attributable hallmark of the rise in neo-conservative fascism. Remember when Donald Trump wanted to bring back the death penalty for the Central Park Five? Or more recently that he thinks climate change is a hoax? He is openly stupid, AND a racist, AND a criminal, AND a rapist. The fight to address his malevolence starts with an appreciation for the resilience and resourcefulness it would take to cross borders in search of safety, to live as oppressed people under structural racism, or climate communities written off as collateral damage*. To fight him will be an act in uprooting our faith in a system that could elect him, and in honouring the legacy of trauma left on society and the planet because of the structures that are embodied in people like him.
V.
Not to trail off, but climate change has everything to do with a Trump future. When we talk about the changes felt today as a result of ecosystem collapse, we don’t have any idea how to imagine what circumstances most of the world already live in. The continued battle by Indigenous people in Dakota to protect their water and stop a pipeline through their ancestral lands has escalated into a militarized free-for-all at town, county and state level and stories about Wounded Knee pulsate in our minds. Pundits and news media will do anything to convince us that these social movements don’t show enough cohesion to be taken seriously, or are not worthy of attention. But our access to the live feeds coming out of Standing Rock tell us an entirely different movement is at play.
Herein lies the silver lining in a time of political grief. The claim that the civil rights movement died with Martin Luther King Jr. is one that is fundamentally untrue and can be propagated only by establishments who are fearful of direct civic action. In reality, civil rights activists today are about to push campaigns that are more modern, organized and energized because the concerns we have for our future are now globalized and interconnected. There is more to lose now than there was before, and ensuring the right to live free from fear, and in dignity are things that we are going to have to start fighting for if we haven't already.
What must be made very clear to anyone who’s tired of being disenfranchised or tired of not being heard - is that there are arenas in which anger over these issues can be transferred into direct action.
Choose a local non-profit, fight for reproductive rights, fight for the rights of Black and Indigenous people, fight for gender equality and LGBTQ communities. Fight to protect the environments you love, fight to ensure there is support for artistic expression, fight against climate change denialists, fight corrupt police forces, join BLM, work to enhance the living conditions of refugees. Whatever you choose, it's time to do something. And not on Facebook, IRL.
The only way to address the pathological populism that was made so obvious with the election of Donald-Voldemort-Trump is to join movements that promote love and seek justice. If you are a creative, make this fight explicit in your work so that people can see you, and join you. Civil invigoration is the only way social change has ever occurred and it’s time to pick our battles. This should get us stirred up and excited for the future we want to shape – it shouldn’t make us depressed or turn us into phlegmatic, sleepy dust bunnies.
We can heal the collective spirit and enhance the human condition through the assertion of our inalienable rights; the right to freedom by any man, woman and child to live, move and love in anyway they so choose as long as it does not harm others. The right to a healthy environment; to land, air, and water, regardless of the colour of your skin, or what religion you practice. The non-negotiable right to organize in peaceful acts of civil disobedience when injustice is grave and deplorable.
No celebrity con-man running on a platform of hate speech, misogyny, scientific denial and white supremacy can take those rights from any American. The danger in all that hate is that it has been able to convince out-of-touch Americans that they will benefit from stepping backwards in time – to a fictional era where (white) America was “Great” at all, because to make it great again is a hoax. The admirable qualities that have put America on an idolized stage have been the quality of expression by the people for the people - through art, through music and in most often during social movements that aim to overcome great oppression and injustice through resistance.
So, what now? What will hopefully be a short-lived Donald Trump presidency (let’s bet he gets impeached within his first term) is only the cherry on a top of this unsightly fondue of melting neo-colonial entities fighting to maintain relevance. If we don’t admit these structural inequalities first, then we can only expect to continue to see our civil liberties continue to vanish. I'll start...:
I - the privileged offspring of my oppressive forefathers - have benefited greatly from a system that systemically oppresses people. With this (white) privilege, it is my duty to serve alongside those who I am indebted to. With great regret for things I couldn't control I will not hand out empty apologies, but seek alliance through action in the fight for justice, for all people.
Fuck Trump and anyone who prescribes to his twisted version of reality. Fuck that guy and the political system that got him there. He’s no one’s president, not even the desperate, hateful tools who voted him in. All the signs have been clear leading up to what feels like an ideological hijacking of an already porous democracy, and now it’s time to show love, to get organized and get loud.
http://www.ifrc.org/syria-crisis
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/colonial-pipeline-explosion-dapl-protesters/
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/
https://www.aclu.org/issues/lgbt-rights
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/