Good evening, Americans.
Last night, we witnessed the electoral victory of an explicitly fascist political movement in our country. Not only Donald Trump, but the man who stands behind him, the funders standing behind both of them, the functionaries and strategists behind them all, and the armed paramilitary groups backing them all up. Through the democratic process, they have won full control of every branch of the U.S. Government. They will have free reign to pass whatever legislation pleases them, including dismantling what remains of the democratic process. They will have control over the most sophisticated military, policing, and surveillance system the world has ever seen, which they will use to force their will down our throats. We are heading for the worst-case scenario of climate chaos, the end of what we had called democracy, the brutal force of an empire turned against a perpetual list of internal enemies, the reshaping of life in total service to billionaire overlords. This is the road ahead. We are expected to start marching down it.
Lets be clear about how we are expected to do this: we are expected to make whatever excuses we need to in order to accommodate ourselves to the new circumstances. We are expected to take the art of looking away from injustice to a new level. We are expected to think about our careers. We are expected to tell ourselves we have “a strategy.” We are expected to think of our personal responsibilities to our families, to our own self-care, to our little gardens. We are expected to degrade our own expectations and adapt to a new reality. We are expected, in short, to cover over the truth we are experiencing today with “hope for the future,” “faith” that things will somehow get better. Maybe the Democrats will sweep the midterms? Maybe good people will stop the worst of it?
Fascist regimes do not get voted out of power. They endure and make their populations complicit in their evil, or they are prevented from functioning by their own people.
The hardest and most necessary truth we need to grapple with today, in the rawness of our pain, is this: we have to abandon false hope. False hope that somehow things will work out is an excuse for accepting the unacceptable. Real hope, the only hope worth having, cannot refer to the future. It must be a way of acting in the now. It must be a faith that we can act, right now, together, to stop what is coming. This is the only way to open up another possible future.
The need to take immediate action to prevent an unacceptable future is burdened by a paradox that we are already familiar with in regard to climate change:
– If we do act based on our educated guesses, and we succeed in avoiding the worst-case scenario, we will never know if the worst-case scenario would have really come to pass;
– If we delay action and wait to see if the worst-case scenario arrives, it will be too late to prevent it.
This dilemma has hung over our lives for the last few decades, whether or not it has been explicitly stated. We are now presented with an acute, immediate, political version of it:
All signs point to genuine fascism. If we wait to see if it emerges, it will be too late. If we act now and succeed in avoiding it, we won’t know if it would have emerged.
The most common response to this paradox is to delay; the only morally defensible response to this paradox is to act, because we cannot allow the chance that the unacceptable may happen.
In our case, the path is clear, however frightening its implications may be. We cannot wait to see what Trump will do on January 21st. We cannot allow fascist power to consolidate itself. We must break the tools our elected masters will use to build their new house. Since it is still November 6, we have 77 days to pull the emergency brake on this train before it reaches the cliff. We have 77 days to open up another future.
That is plenty of time. When millions of people lose their hope in the future, and throw their fates into the now, we are capable of anything. This is what hope in the now means.
The first step is to gather those who feel the weight of this moment. Call for meetings. Share a realistic understanding of what a fascist movement will mean: full control of the U.S. government by those bent on deporting migrants, ignoring climate science, imposing their idea of ‘traditional’ gender roles, empowering police and far right militia terror, destroying the tattered social safety net, engorging the wealthy, and reshaping the legal terrain to ensure their capacity to do this without meaningful challenge from the defeated political party of the Democrats. Share your understanding of the situation ask each other: are you willing to accept this future? If the answer is yes, bid them farewell and tell them they can come back when they are not willing to accept it. If the answer is no, ask: are you willing to wait and see, even if waiting risks making it inevitable? If the answer is yes, bid them farewell and tell them to come back when they have waited and seen. If the answer is no, turn to practical matters of how to bring the economy and political system to a halt.
No other political affinity is required. All concerns about who we are or what we believe or where we come from are irrelevant at the moment, except in so far as they provide practical insights into how to stop the gears of the machine.
Call yourself Americans fighting for the tradition of freedom on this continent or say to hell with America, we’re earthlings or humans or whatever; call yourselves Christians or Jews or Muslims or Pagans or atheists fighting for the will of God or the gods or truth or science; call yourselves Democrats or democrats or communists or anarchists or classical conservatives or libertarians or humanists; call yourselves whatever or don’t speak at all. On a sinking ship, identities only matter to the monsters who are deciding whose lives matter more. We are the people who grab anything we can to make life rafts and hold tight to everyone and anyone in arms reach. Catastrophe makes kin of us all, and it has arrived.
Don’t waste time on discussing what comes next. The task right now is to say “no” together and to build the power to mean it. Only when we have begun to succeed in that task, which is demanded of us by justice, by love, by the earth, by any God worthy of worship, only once we have found each other beyond hope and in the now, will we be able to perceive new roads ahead.
– more to come –