Good evening, Americans.
An explicitly fascist movement has been democratically elected into power over all branches of the U.S. government. The explicit plan of this movement is to destroy those already embarrassingly shallow “democratic processes” that brought it to power, to strip women of bodily autonomy, to criminalize dissent, to attack and degrade LGBTQ people, to demolish social services, to enrich the obscenely rich, to scapegoat and deport our people.
In just over 70 days, they will have at their disposal the most sophisticated and extensive policing, surveillance, prison, and military system in the history of the world. They will immediately begin consolidating their power by borrowing tactics from Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary, and Xi’s China. These are not parties that get voted out of power.
In the coming weeks and months, everything will conspire to encourage you to hide from these facts. You’ll be told the only reasonable response is to wait and see. People will suddenly beg for more nuanced, hair-splitting takes about the meaning of “fascism.” You’ll be told that the only way to be loyal to democratic ideals is to respect the results of the election. It‘s already started. Unless we begin building a movement from this moment of clarity, it will become harder and harder to hold on to the truth of what has happened. We’ll be caught in the current and lose sight of the shore. This is why we are writing.
Some of us are responding to this moment with a kind of numbness, a fatigue from too much world history intruding into our lives. Too many apocalypses on too many fronts. Numbness is how we hold back the process of mourning. With all respect to Joe Hill, from whom we have much to learn, his famous line — “don’t mourn, organize” — is hazardous advice. Organizers who don’t mourn, who don’t move through their grief and allow it to wash away their illusions, succumb to compulsive activism. Mourners who don’t organize, who don’t find deep within themselves the need to build new relationships with others, have stopped the lessons of grieving before the course is finished. Grieving is an intimate, personal movement of the soul, or the body, or your neural connections, or however you like to talk about the part of you that is capable of maturity. A social movement is organized grieving. It is a process of collective maturation, of finding each other in our pain and striving to become capable of preventing its cause. Because if such an event were to become normal, it would result in a moral universe we cannot permit.
The past few days have felt like those early weeks of the pandemic, the weeks before the government acknowledged it, as most people were going on like normal, as if nothing big was coming that would require their lives to change. The people that were taking it seriously had this feeling: am I overreacting? Am I paranoid? I must be. The voices of alarm were at the margins, laying out their arguments and their evidence, their stories from overseas. But it felt unreal and inconceivable. You remember.
And maybe you remember, like I do, having to tell someone you love that you were sorry, but it was real. You were sorry, but no, we can’t do that and we have to start doing this. You were sorry, but our lives have to change. We have to do different things and become, for a time, different people. No, I don’t know how long. Maybe forever. We have to become the kind of people who can survive this, yes. But more, we have to become the kind of people who aren’t endangering others. The kind of people who are making the world of life and care go around, and not the kind of people that are making the economy go around. You remember.
Now, again, it’s time for real talk. It is time to look your loved ones, your neighbors, the coworkers you trust in the eye. It is time to listen to what they are saying, and to what they won’t say, the conclusions they are resisting. It is time to look in the mirror at the person you are, and ask the mysteries behind your eyes about the person you are capable of becoming.
Quickly, in the spring and the summer of 2020, many of us became so different. Ironically, for many, the social distancing led to a social intensification — conversations with old friends and relatives, neighbors and people who you knew were going to need extra help. Organizing is no mystery; it involves simple skills that one can practice. Listening, sharing, and making plans together. This is organizing in its essence. There was an explosion of organizing in the early weeks, a transformation of our lives to center around caring for each other and keeping each other safe in a new and confusing circumstance, one where no one knew quite what would happen. This outpouring of social love among a wide portion of the country in the spring of 2020 just might have had something to do with the outrage and capacity for the largest protest movement in U.S. history to emerge as Spring turned to Summer.
Remember? Yeah, you remember.
Creating a movement capable of defeating the plans of a fascist government will require something bigger, something difficult to imagine right now. But there is no other choice.
Big things grow from small things when the conditions are right. Now is the time to meet your neighbors, to reach out to your organizer friends, to speak honestly with your co-workers or running buddy or whoever. Seek out simple, low-risk, easily accomplished plans that can send a signal to others — anything from a group dinner where people drop the bullshit and speak honestly to posters to protests. Start small and encourage others. Momentum is built by small successes.
Maybe its better to say this: the skills of organizing are no mystery. But what emerges from organizing is like what emerges from the courage to feel our grief and mourn, both in solitude and in company. And that process of emergence is all mystery. It sets us toward the unknown, toward something beyond the rules of how we think things are supposed to work. It is the faith in feeling your way through the darkness until, in a flash, feeling births insight, revelation, new perspective.
Which is exactly what is required now that, it must be repeated, all branches of the U.S. government will soon be under the control of a democratically elected fascist movement, whose stated aim is to crush that democratic process and weaponize the law.
– more to come –