(~4 minutes reading time)
I apologize in advance for this departure from my usual personal essay. Going straight for politics today, despite having nothing original to say. I just want to bang a drum here.
It’s one day past MLK Day, when all sorts of people and corporations post his most anodyne quotes and conveniently forget that Dr. King was considered a despicable rabble-rouser and militant before being assassinated by a white supremacist whose name I don’t need to repeat here.
Democracy has never been popular. It is in retreat now all over the globe, as autocrats make use of wealth inequality and age-old scapegoating techniques to grab power inside and beyond their borders. Human beings throughout history have defaulted to monarchs, tyrants, strongmen, theocrats. We love our bullies as long as they’re our bullies and will allow them all manner of excess, greed, depredation, and violence as long as they keep us safe from the other bullies out there. That’s the story, anyway. Like the spouses of undocumented American residents who were shocked, shocked when the Trump administration began ripping their beloveds out of their homes to send them “back” to countries they barely knew, we hold out foolish hope that the same forces we love when trained on our “enemies” will never change course and decide “we” are the real problem.
I think many of us, especially those born past World War II in the USA, have trouble accepting the reality of worldwide democratic recession, or even the plain fact that our own country experienced its very first violent rather than peaceful transition of power just twelve months ago. We’re blinkered by our myths. But as economist Paul Krugman put it shortly after 9/11, we’ve been so busy trying to avoid the world’s bad neighborhoods we forgot that we live in one, too.
With all due respect to MLK, I dislike hearing people today quote his bit about the arc of moral history bending toward justice. I find it hard to reckon this fundamentally religious notion with facts on the ground. In the philosophy business, this kind of thinking is called teleology: a belief system in which today’s struggles lead inevitably to progress. It’s a dangerous habit of mind. Democratic progress—or even survival— is not assured to any nation.
I understand that in the fight for freedom, justice, fairness, and human rights, it’s critically important to believe in some form of transcendence, to keep one’s eyes on the prize. But let’s not gloss over the exact nature of the problem: people with enormous power will stop at nothing to keep and expand it, or grab it back when they feel it slipping. I’ve been watching the Neo-Confederacy “win the peace” my entire life, beginning most glaringly when Ronald Reagan chose a county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town where Civil Rights activists Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered by the KKK just 16 years earlier—to stump on behalf of state’s rights. It was 1980, I was 15 and part of a highly politically aware social clique in an excellent private high school, and I understood immediately what Reagan’s dog whistle meant. More so than plenty of adults I knew.
As many a professional pundit has now noted, today’s Trumpers/GOP extremists don’t need Reaganesque dog whistles; they will openly admit that universal enfranchisement means Republicans of an extremist nature, i.e. pretty much all of them today, will not win elections. That’s because we are not, despite the seeming evidence, a far-right or theocratic nation, not by population numbers. We are an under-educated, terribly propagandized, myopic nation with more or less progressive ideals, held hostage by religious zealots, white supremacists, bad laws or good ones unenforced, and insanely wealthy celebrity CEOs.
Today, with neither the Senate nor the Supreme Court fully willing to uphold, protect, and enshrine voting for all Americans, especially our long-disenfranchised black and brown citizens; with our federal legal and legislative systems unable to wrap their arms fully around the violent insurrection attempt a year ago; with a level of uncontainable wealth- and power-hoarding by a few hundred families…it is hard to imagine a deep and genuine democratic revival.
(For a bit more information on this, see this recent Rolling Stone article about the doomed Voting Rights Act.)
I’m sorry for this bummer of a message. I’m refusing to sugarcoat it because this year, 2022, is an election year. There’s no waiting for 2024. Turnout in non-presidential years tends to be abysmal, and low turnout favors the retrograde forces that would make us over into a theocratic corporatocracy for good. The belief that only presidential elections matter is not democratic thinking, it’s a reversion to the ancient habit of believing that One Man will save and protect us. It is quasi-religion, it is celebrity worship, and it will never take the place of the boring, messy, slow work of democratic participation. Yes, we need ethical, effective, and visionary leaders. But they need us, too.
Forget about 2024. Start paying attention now.
I will funnel as much practical information this way as I can.