Don’t you know
They’re talkin ‘bout a revolution?
(It sounds like a whisper).
On the morning of November 5th, 2024, while I was still feeling optimistic, I began to write out what I was planning to post immediately following a Harris victory: A list of complaints about mainstream Democratic Party positions.
I wasn’t writing this to be some sort of eternal complainer. Instead, I was hoping that a resounding victory would allow us to finally open up our conversation to debate again. Because since Trump’s victory in 2016, our large coalition — which under Kamala Harris stretched ideologically all the way from Dick Cheney to Bernie Sanders — has been afraid of internal debate, as if any public crack in our solidarity would be the opening “they” would need to win. And so we held strong in public, limiting our internal dissent to (mostly) private spaces.
I was hoping that the Israel-Hamas conflict would finally break this pattern, since there are staunch Democrats on both sides of the issue. Instead, I saw the consequence of a generation coming of age without learning how to debate, only how to insist on their righteousness. Pro-Israel Democrats doubled down, completely dismissing the concerns of those advocating for Palestinian lives, while pro-Palestine Democrats did their best to “cancel” anyone who had a good, or really even neutral, word to say about Israel. And with no sense of how to talk to one another, how to compromise, how to engage with those who don’t agree to every dogmatic tenet of our Party, we fractured, we faltered, and we lost.
I’m not blaming the defeat, at all, on that particular issue; I’m only noting how fragile our coalition has been since 2016. And really, that is where this nightmare began, and that is where we must go back, at first, to examine and to correct the root of this disaster.
And it is a disaster. The more I read conservative voices, the more I engage with conservative individuals, the more I’m struck by the bizarre idea that millions of people seem to have voted for Trump, not in spite of his reputation as a pathological liar, but because of it: because they seem to have believed, right up through Election Day, that he has no intention of following through on any of his more horrific policies — such as purging the nation of what he refers to as “vermin,” and so forth. And yet, just over a week after his election, all signs point to the shocking reality that Donald J. Trump is an honest man, and means to do every Fascist thing that he said he would do. And while we may mitigate some of the damage, there is no question about it: We are entering a dark period. Trump, in the words of the Vice President-Elect, is indeed “America’s Hitler.”
Trump has been a reckoning for the Republican Party. At first, all of the “mainstream” Republican voices attempted to unify to stop him. But as it turned out, the number of actual voters who supported the Romney-McCain-Bush-etc. wing of the party was very, very small. All of those millions of votes against Obama went only reluctantly to centrist Republicans. They went eagerly to the Tea Party and to the Alt-Right and to Trump. All that he did was reveal that. And we now see this reality at its starkest: Almost all of those center-right Republicans publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, and they seem to have collectively brought with them across the aisle … zero votes. Hooray. Now the zero people who actually liked Dick Cheney are on our side.
The thing is, if you go back to 2016, the Democrats were on the verge of learning the same lesson. Bernie Sanders, a Socialist, a non-Democrat, was very close to winning the nomination. He was running against a woman who had convinced virtually the entire Democratic Party to step down and let her win this time. If Bernie had sewn up the nomination, then we would have seen the simultaneous death of both decrepit American political parties, and we would have had a real election to resolve our ideological divide. Having collectively realized that the neoliberal and neoconservative attempts to prop up our failing, backwards system had utterly failed us, we would have decided as a country whether to lurch right, or left, in addressing our issues.
Instead, the Party circled its wagons, anointed Clinton, and lost. Then four years later, facing the same threat from the Left, they once again circled their wagons, endorsed Biden in unison, and eked out a victory. And now here we are, this time without even the pretense of a primary election, having anointed a Party candidate, and having been humiliated by the American electorate.
And I am part of the problem. I voted for Hilary Clinton, because I was afraid of Fascism. I voted for Joe Biden, who spent his political career fighting against Affirmative Action and for credit card companies, because I was afraid of Fascism. And although I really did and do like Kamala Harris, I agreed with almost none of her stated policies. Even without her even paying lip service to things like universal healthcare or student loan relief or regulating the financial sector or reforming criminal justice or raising the minimum wage or really doing anything, anything, anything at all to help the working class, I voted for Harris because I was afraid of Fascism. And my reward for this cowardly thinking? That’s right: Fascism.
I am sorry. In the words of our greatest living poet, It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.
Let’s go back even further, though. Let’s go back to 2004. Bush was in the White House, conducting a brutal campaign of completely unwarranted murder against a country that had never attacked us (by the way, this is something Trump has not done, and I don’t think is likely to do; he hates the military and seems to truly hate war, although not for any of the reasons I do). Kerry was running against him on the platform of “send in more troops to do more murdering.” I was 20 years old and it was my first opportunity to vote. Which warmonger does one choose? Well, I will tell you what I did: I did not vote. And in retrospect, I was right. At least in that particular year, I was not the problem.
And I remember well what I used to say to people about voting in America: We all feel anger and frustration at things that are unfair. At our corrupt government, at our greedy corporations, at racism and sexism and millions of microaggressions against living a life with dignity, whether social or economic. And we know that, given the Electoral College and our gerrymandered legislatures, most of our votes don’t matter at all. So we take this anger, this frustration, this justifiable sense of impotence and near-despair, and we … purge ourselves of it, once every four years, in the completely empty experience of voting for President. It’s an action that does literally nothing, and yet it makes us feel like we’ve Done Something. Then the tension is released, the anger subsides (when we win), and you feel the good endorphins return to dominance in your mind. Gone is the frustration and sense of impotence; you did your part, your civic duty. The urge to do something is gone, wasted on the floor. It is, in a word, masturbatory.
Voting is masturbation. It is what you do instead of action. I want you to think back on your heroes, your real heroes, in history, whoever they are. Make a list of 5 or 10 of them. Then ask yourself: How much good did they accomplish by a) voting, or b) being voted for? Then tell me again how you thought that voting, in your Blue state, for Kamala Harris, a nice centrist pro-Wall Street Democrat, has anything to do with fighting Fascism.
“If you don’t vote you don’t have a right to complain,” people would tell me. No, I would say, it is the opposite: if you do vote, then you’ve already pre-agreed to abide by the decision, whatever it is. You don’t have the right to complain, because you’re perfectly fine with this absurd system. By refusing to vote, I’m reserving my right to continue to fight the system, regardless of which corporate stooge is placed on the Iron Throne.
In a way, this conflict between participation and resistance has been percolating for a while, except I’ve seen it happening in right-wing spaces. The simplest distillation was this: During Covid, the right wing glommed on to a 1991 Rage Against The Machine song entitled “Killing In The Name,” whose coda included the shouted repetition of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” They meant it, of course, in reference to mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and so forth. I last saw this song performed by the supergroup-cover-band Prophets of Rage, in August of 2016, in a concert vehemently opposed to Trump, where I bought a red cap that said “MAKE AMERICA RAGE AGAIN” (I can never wear the hat in public, because by design it looks… like it looks). And so there was a bit of an online kerfuffle when conservatives were shocked — shocked! — to discover that their new anthem was actually a liberal anthem. “When did Rage go woke?” they asked, to the mockery of all the smug liberals who reminded them that Rage were always “woke”.
And yet, the conservatives had a point. Rage Against The Machine, like all protest music, shared very little of the corporate messaging of the Democratic Party. They literally burned an American flag on stage. Would liberals in the 2020s be comfortable with that? Like it or not, all of that protest energy, all of that vitriol and outrage, has migrated to the Right. “Be polite,” we say. Love America, honor our institutions. Support the FBI in their investigations, believe in the Constitution, don’t speak out against the status quo. We, in our cultural dominance, have become the voices of restraint, of small-c conservatism. And they, on the Right, have co-opted all of the language, all of the energy, all of the power of protest, of civil disobedience, of rage.
There are other examples. In 2023, Ron DeSantis went after Disney, trying to punish them for speaking out against his fascist policies. And Disney fought back, defending its right to own the corporate town it was based in. Now, I obviously despite DeSantis and his policies, but since when did we on the Left want a situation in which a private corporation could defy state law, could maintain ownership over a town? How does it serve our interests for a mega-corporation to be more powerful than a government? And yet most “liberal” publications happily chose Disney’s side, because apparently it’s better to live in a Disnified world than a Fascist one. And yes, I guess it is, but… maybe we shouldn’t consider either option acceptable.
And then there is January 6th. We watched horrified as ordinary Americans stormed Congress and threatened the lives of our elected representatives. And why was it horrifying? Because we don’t want an angry mob overrunning Congress, or because we didn’t want the specific ideology that that particular mob represented? I wrote then and will repeat now: If the election were actually stolen, the right thing to do, as Americans, is to storm and occupy Congress. That is the most American thing possible! The sin was not in the riot, but in the lie, told by people none of whom were ever charged with a crime. And right there is enough evidence to know that the truly powerful were never at risk, no matter who won any of these elections. They riled up one half of this country to fight the other half, and we have convinced ourselves that the means of that fight were somehow the problem. We fell into our protective echo chambers and prayed for the institutions of America to save us, those same institutions that have spent centuries oppressing us. Because we, in our fear of Trump, had forgotten what it actually means to protest, to disobey, to rage.
So I am going back. I am going back to a time when I had the courage to say that change will not come at the ballot box: it will come in our communities, in our school boards, in our streets. Change is when you collect together your neighbors and allies, locally and in person — not online where you don’t know who is joining or who is watching — and you discuss how we, as communities, are going to resist what’s coming.
You think the Constitution will protect you? It wasn’t designed to. The Scripture you revere was written by a bunch of old rich men who were raping their underaged slaves. They wrote it so that they could protect their private property, their Feudal plantations. Unless you own a plantation, the Constitution was not written to protect you.
You think the Supreme Court will protect you? Let me give you a brief selective history of the Supreme Court: In 1803, they ruled that a law passed by Congress was invalid, because they said so, even though your vaunted Constitution did not give them any authority to make such a ruling. And they have used this self-granted power ever since to undermine so many democratically-enacted reforms, because they said so. In 1857, they ruled that even if Congress passed a law limiting slavery, that law was invalid, because they said so. In 1896, they ruled that an Amendment, passed by both Congress and the States, that was meant to prevent racist laws, actually didn’t, because they said so. In 1919, they ruled that the First Amendment didn’t apply while we were at war. In 1936, they ruled against a whole set of New Deal reforms that an overwhelmingly-popular FDR had put into place in the midst of the Great Depression. In 1944, they ruled that the President could put people in jail because of their race. In 2010, they ruled that Congress wasn’t allowed to pass campaign finance reform. And in 2024, they ruled that the laws in America don’t apply to you if you’re the President. And yes, you can point to some nice decisions like Miranda or Roe or Obergefell, but as we’ve seen, if our rights are dependent upon 9 clerics who have appointed themselves the arbiters of what laws do and don’t count, those rights can be taken away as easily as they were given. Not by a majority, not by a coup, but simply by the opinion of nine wealthy robed men and women. If you want to explain to me how that’s different from Iran’s Council of Guardians, I’ll wait (here’s a difference: their council has 12 members, so it’s actually better). The Supreme Court does not exist to protect you. It exists to prevent Democratically-enacted reforms from ever actually taking place. It exists to oppress you.
Bernie Sanders’s words on November 6th must be our mantra. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” Put this on your refrigerator, make it your phone background, recite it every morning like a catechism. Anytime you forget this, slap yourself in the face until you remember it. We want change. Kamala Harris did not run on a platform of change; she ran on a platform of preserving the American neoliberal status quo. Barack Obama did run on the word “change,” but changed almost nothing during his tenure in office: He followed up Bush’s bailouts with more bailouts, he allowed Bush’s tax cuts to stay in place, he continued Bush’s wars for 100% of the time he was President, he even kept Bush’s Secretary of Defense as his own first Secretary of Defense. He did everything he could to preserve the status quo. But the status quo is what is fucking us over.
Workers are paid almost 300 times less than what Executives are paid; in the Boomers’ day, we were paid 20 times less.
We cannot afford to buy homes, if there are even homes available for sale, and we are going to be in student loan debt until we die.
Our institutions don’t represent us, our democracy is broken, our voting power diluted to almost nothing. The vast majority of young Americans have never cast a single vote for an actually contested Federal seat. Calling this country a Democracy is so absurd that I can only presume you to be intellectually disabled if you think it.
We are abused left and right by insanely powerful and greedy corporations that steal from us and abuse us and belittle us every day. We lose $50 BILLION in wage theft every year to corporations that already own everything.
We have the largest prison population per capita in the world. We are the least free people on the planet.
Working class Americans of all races and all ages are brutalized, physically, emotionally, and economically, by a cruel and inhuman caste that we sometimes refer to as “the 1%”. And the Democratic Party is the Party of this 1%. And Trump, for all his many faults, is an outsider to that caste, even if he is economically a part of it. Precisely because he is so gross and stupid, they don’t let him into their club. And so he can run as an outsider, as a challenger, as an agent of change. And — to repeat — working class Americans want change, and they are right.
So whenever we regroup, we need to regroup around change. We are going to bring a message to the American working class about dignity. That we all deserve dignity, from the moment of birth. That our enemy is anyone who tries to rob another person of their dignity. And the primary way that we lose our dignity is when we are not paid fairly for our labor; when we work and we work and we still don’t have enough money to keep ourselves and our family safe and secure. We cannot live with Dignity until we demand it, at all times, in all jobs, in every moment of our lives.
I am not going back to the Democratic Party as it currently stands. I am not going back to compromises with the institutions that have mostly served to oppress ordinary Americans and enable billionaires to pillage our country. I am not going back to the echo chambers of spoiled, wealthy New York Democrats at the New York Times, who have never really been on the right side of history until it’s too late. I am not going back to our self-satisfied university culture that writes only for itself to read and offers nothing to the average American. I am not going back to the liberal Democratic Capitalism that was invented in the 18th Century by wealthy white men and has been mostly used by wealthy white men to murder brown and poor people for the past 250 years.
And in that sense, I am going forward. We are going forward, whether we like or not, into a fight like my generation has never seen. And we can look back into how change was made in the past: Not by polite demonstrations, petition signing, voting. We can look back at the heroes of our past who made change happen, who put their lives on the line for it, who weren’t such pussies.
If Trump’s victory has any silver lining, it’s to remind us all that you don’t have to be polite to be successful. We are done being pushovers. If you’re too scared, if you don’t want to fight, if you aren’t willing to stand up for what is right and do whatever it takes, then get the fuck out of the way and let the adults get to work.
Fight Fascism
Demand Dignity
Defy Dictatorship
Defend Democracy
Let’s get to work.
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I have also published this on my new substance at https://open.substack.com/pub/ephemery/p/going-back
