Posted on 10th Nov, 2024 in Uncategorised
Eight years ago, I watched in horror as the pundits began calling states for a former reality TV star turned presidential candidate. As the night wore on, I was shocked, appalled, dismayed, and dumbfounded. How could this happen? Am I going insane? How can anyone else not see the mistake we’re about to make? For the days that followed I was fearful and despondent. I just couldn’t understand how we wound up electing Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.
8 years, 2 failed impeachments, 1 insurrection attempt, and a pandemic later… the nation once again faces a familiar outcome. In May 2016 I saw the writing on the wall predicting a Trump win. This time it caught me off guard, leaving my personal predictions to age like spoiled milk. Yet this time I’m not in shock or disbelief. Instead, I’m absolutely furious.
Donald Trump tried to overthrow our democracy when he lost the election in 2020. He stiffs his business partners, sexually assaults and harasses women, cozies up to authoritarians, and considers white supremacists to be some "very fine people". He wants to ban abortion, outlaw gender affirming care, impose absurdly high tariffs on anything made overseas (effectively everything), gut the Affordable Care Act, break up unions, further deregulate the food industry, deport over 10 million people (including US citizens), and cut taxes for his rich buddies yet again. All this while stripping the Federal government for parts and selling them to the highest bidder to line his pockets.
Knowing all, or even any of this, why the fuck would anyone vote for him? The people who voted for this either saw the last 8 years of Trump’s antics and decided they liked them or are too ignorant to be exercising their right to vote in the first place. Perhaps, they're just the kind of people who just want to watch the world burn. Personally, I don't have a single shit to give about their reasoning. Those who supported Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic stances from the get go and continue to do so, the cultists who worship him as some sort of orange Jesus figure; they were fascists from the start. Those who switched over to support him after all that, perhaps in the hope that he’ll lower the price of eggs or "drain the swamp", those assuming that they’re white-passing and/or rich enough to not be affected by an ascendant authoritarian, are just as much fascists as the bigots. How stupid and selfish do you have to be to decide to ditch democracy and send your fellow countrymen to the camps just for cheaper gasoline?!
The media and the Democratic Party’s consultants will spend the next several weeks trying to find someone to blame for this outcome. They’ll point out the usual suspects: "Leftists", white women who vote against their own interests, young men who watch YouTube, low voter turnout, conservative shifts among Latinos and Blacks, and "economic anxiety". At the end of the day though, it is their failure that brought us to this point. They had a set of charismatic candidates in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and one of the strongest economic come backs in US history thanks to Biden. How did they use this to energize voters to get them to the polls? They didn’t. Instead, they decided to court Republicans who unsurprisingly didn’t switch sides. They ditched their successes in lowering inflation, bolstering labor unions, and fighting corporate monopolies; in order to take up right wing positions on immigration, while pal-ing around with the Cheneys. On top of that, they then raised $1 billion dollars in campaign donations only to lose the election with $20 million in debt.
No wonder Democrats didn’t show up to the polls. You’ve alienated your core supporters assuming Republicans would pick a diet Republican candidate when they have the real thing right there!
What fools we are!
It appears that what can be is in fact burdened by what has been. So where do we go from here?
For starters we grieve.
We grieve for the loss of our freedoms, for the years we’ll lose to fighting tyranny and for the people we certainly will lose along the way. We grieve for those overseas who already have the boot of American imperialism upon their necks and know that it will only stomp down harder from here on out. We grieve for the future victims of emboldened fascists and the decades of societal progress that we will have to reclaim once this is all said and done.
Then, once we’re done, we fight.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a grand work of fiction where good always triumphs over evil and superheroes save the world just in the nick of time. Our institutions have been captured. The Department of Justice isn’t going to save us. Joe Biden isn’t going to save us. The Democrats aren’t going to save us. We are going to have to save ourselves and the only way to do that is to be defiant.
Defiance in the face of fascism takes many forms. It can look like petitioning your leaders and attempting to litigate for justice. It can be acts of protest and civil disobedience. It may even look like acts of sabotage and insurrection if it really comes down to it. However, our defiance cannot just be limited to "hot" action. To be defiant in the face of oppression is not just to survive and fight but to continue to live and love in spite of all that.
If we want to realize a more free and just world, we must do the things that the fascists do not want us to do and do the things that they are incapable of. We must not tune out what’s happening, yet not give in to fear or despair. We must continue to dream. We must continue to tell stories and create art and sing songs. We must also carry the memories of those that we will regrettably lose along the way. Should we stop doing these things we will have truly lost.
At the end of the day all of us are worth more than those who seek to oppress the marginalized and rob them of their rights. We are worth more than the white supremacists, the ethnonationalists, the homophobes, the transphobes, and the christofascists. We are worth more than would-be oligarchs who seek only to pad their bank accounts with the crushed bodies of the working class. So look out for one and other. Treat yourself right and remember to rest when you can. Keep on living and loving. Never let them take our joy and our humanity from us. Stay defiant.
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