Hey, y’all, before you fall TOO much in love with the whole “will of the people” thing, I want you to think about something.
A few years ago majority of people in multiple states voted in favor of amending their state constitutions to make gay marriage illegal.
It took the US Supreme Court to make that un-happen, and they did so in direct opposition to the express will of the people.
Sometimes the majority is WRONG, and that is why we live in a democratic REPUBLIC. “The will of the people” is of paramount, but not ultimate, priority. This nation was not built to be ruled by “the will of the people,” but by “the will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives who also have a moral and ethical duty to oppose that will when it’s harmful or destructive.”
That’s why our system is constructed the way it is – and I’ve wracked my brain trying to imagine a more effective set of mechanics that successfully balances all the necessary priorities of a free modern nation, and I couldn’t do it. And I’m a political scientist, so I’m definitely on the shortlist of people who should be able to, if one could.
The system works: when “the people” tried to put something over that sucked, the system said “no, we’re not doing that.”
We’ve completely forgotten that the purpose of government is not to make everyone happy, if we ever really grasped it in the first place. You don’t elect people to do “what you want,” any more than you hire a doctor to perform heart surgery to your specifications.
You elect people, which makes them accountable to your will but not bound by it, to do what’s right.
This silly fantasy people have of a perfect candidate is just that – a silly fantasy. I wouldn’t even agree with 100% of my own decisions if I was in office, and if I did I’d be worried about it.
The problem is, a whole lot of folks honestly don’t give the first drizzling shit about what’s “right,” they only care about what benefits them. They aren’t interested in electing someone who’s going to do the right thing; they’re only interested in electing someone who’s going to do the thing that’s beneficial to them.
Because those among us who are sane and reasonable don’t think in those terms, we haven’t taken the threat these folks represent seriously.
But the threat is very real, and it’s in your town. It’s running for school boards and library boards and county commissions and small-town mayoralities and sheriffs and judicial seats. It’s showing up at every public meeting to loudly browbeat local leadership into accepting or conceding to things they shouldn’t, just to make the bullies and aggressors shut up and go away.
It’s not that I’m saying “democracy is bad” or anything like that. But it’s a system that requires engagement to work. If people of conscience allow themselves to neglect their duties as citizens, then people without conscience can weaponize it against the rest of us, and that’s exactly what’s been happening for decades.
I really have to add here that this isn’t a secret or conspiracy. It’s been openly discussed since I was a kid in the late 70’s or early 80’s. Here’s a link to a google search. Once you get there by all means look at the raw web results but also check the news items. If you have access to a favored news or periodical archive like JSTOR check that for obvious keywords in content produced in the 70’s and 80’s. This is an ongoing thing, and it’s time we stopped kidding ourselves that it’ll just go away if we ignore it. It won’t go away. Every time we ignore it, every time we back down because it’s too much hassle to fight, they get stronger and sanity and reason get weaker.
That’s why we’re in this mess. The covid deniers, the trumpers, the white nationalists and neo-fascists like the Proud Boys and the Prayer Warriors and the Oath Keepers, this is where they came from. We thought we could live with it; we thought we could let it go and it would just fade on its own like any other bad idea.
But we can’t, and it won’t.
If you’re going to rely on “democracy,” then you have to be prepared to deal with the reality that democracy only functions properly in an educated and informed and engaged society. The entire 20th century of social philosophy revolved around the great truths of Orwell and Bernays: if you control the information you control EVERYTHING. You can wipe out the entire concept of freedom if you just have enough power over information.
The fascists and authoritarians and nazis and white nationalists of the world are absolutely willing to literally rewrite reality if they think it will benefit them materially, and we’ve been letting them gain the tools to do it for half a century.
It’s time to stand up and say no more, now. While we still can. Go to that school board meeting, that city commission meeting. Run for that uncontested office if you’re in any way qualified for it. Run even if it is contested. Run as a third-party candidate just so you can have some power to direct the narrative even if you lose…and you might not. If you can’t stand the idea of running yourself, find someone. You know somebody you think should be in office. Ask them to run. Get a bunch of mutual friends together and stage an intervention if necessary.
But act.
Because to the precise extent you don’t, you are abdicating your democracy.
America, we need to talk about this word “libertarian.”
If you live outside the US and are engaged enough to bother having a thought about it, you understand “libertarians” to be broadly defined as “the opposite of authoritarians on one axis of a multi-dimensional political-ideological grid.”
If you live inside the US, the word “libertarian” conjures a pretty specific set of images. What the marketing would like for you to think of is Rugged Individuals™ with Lots Of Large Guns™ living in The Big Open™ free from Government Tyranny™. What you actually should be thinking of is a collapsed ecosystem, maybe survivable by creating dome cities or something, but probably not, at the hands of rapacious and unregulated industrialists. Add to that the economy (for most of us), because the only ethic of business is profit, and without government acting in place of the conscience business doesn’t have to protect the interests of the public, business will destroy this planet all the way to the bank. Has done. Is doing.
Typically in discussions on the subject I’ll create a distinction between classical libertarianism and US-style libertarianism. We’ll examine that distinction, and how to make it when communicating, below. I’d also like to just look at the “brand” as it’s sold here. As a student of language, communication, and propaganda the phenomenon of the Libertarian Party in the United States absolutely fascinates me. Students of political science will be aware that there are many points of nomenclature where the US is significantly out of step with the rest of the world, but in my opinion there is none so glaringly obvious, egregiously contrary, and propagandized as the concept of libertarianism.
Putting Out The Gaslight
As one might expect from an organization whose core philosophy includes lying to people at will, there’s a well-developed series of gaslighting tactics employed by those trying to sell it, so let’s knock a few of those out right at the top and save my comment sections the abuse.
“Statist.” – Idiot. States are things, they’re always gonna be things, they’re not going away. Next.
Nanny state/big brother/bootlicker – meh. Barely worth responding to, for me; if that was me I wouldn’t be me. Wouldn’t be writing this article. Next.
Shill for [x] – yeah, that’s why I have to remind people almost daily that this is how I make my living and I need their support or I’ll be homeless and starve. Because I’m “shilling” for someone, and they pay me so well for it.
“You don’t get it.” – I’ve been getting it since the Libertarian Party hit me up to run for local office in 1990. When you have been an activist for thirty-five years and earned a minor in political science, you’re qualified to suggest I am missing something…and you’ll need to explain what, in detail, and be prepared to defend your position, ideally with citations and valid reasoning. Until then, it ain’t me that isn’t getting something here. This is an argument on the internet to you. It’s one of my professions – not because I watched a couple of YouTube videos and decided I was a political scientist, but because I put the time in both on the streets and in the classroom. The chances any given random person is qualified to tell me what I don’t get about any of this are very, very low. The chance that person is going to be a self-appointed expert whose entire political philosophy comes from old Ron Paul newsletters recycled fifty or sixty thousand times through internet comment sections? Zero. Sit.
“Fake two-party system” – It’s not fake, it’s math, and there’s pretty much no way around it. First see Duverger’s Law. I’m going to look at this in depth in a later article; I’ll try to remember to link it here when it’s up.
“Party loyalist” – I’ve never been registered as anything but independent. I did vote in the Democratic primary in 2020. For Bernie Sanders. I’ve never voted for a Republican that I know of; I have voted for Democrats multiple times, but have never considered myself a party member. My loyalty is not to a party or even a nation, but to the fundamental concepts that ensure the highest quality of life for the living, and thereby ensure the greatest possibility of the survival and propagation of the species, which is the whole point of everything ever.
Hate freedom, afraid of liberty, etc. – no, just noticed that unless it’s hookers, guns, or drugs, the only freedom the Libertarian Party cares about is the freedom of industrialists to unsustainably exploit natural resources for profit.
When those natural resources are human the exploitation is also invariably inhumane. This includes both employees and customers, groups which also typically have significant overlap.
That takes care of the broad classes of argument and establishing what the conversation’s about, so let’s move forward shall we?
History of Libertarianism
First we have to discuss the distinction between “true” libertarian philosophy and what travels under that label in the US. In writing, I’ve come to refer to this as “Libertarianism™,” and defining that term is why I’ve included this post in the Lexicon. To understand what separates the two, how it happened, why, and why it matters, some background is in order
In the video that you’ll see either linked or embedded above (depending on YouTube’s mood at the moment), noted linguist and highly regarded writer and speaker on broader social and political issues Noam Chomsky refers to the original libertarian movement as “the anti-state wing of the Socialist movement,” which is as good a frame as any, particularly because it brings one part of the current conflict into focus: socialism is broadly understood to be a “state-run” system, so how do you have anti-state socialism?
This comes from the mentality of separation between government and governed; that “the government” is some far-off, detached, separate entity that has power over the governed. In western democracies this is nothing but a socio-psychological hangover from long-dead systems like monarchy; by definition in a democracy there is no separation between “the government” and “the governed,” as President Biden quite ably pointed out in his first address to Congress:
Our Constitution opens with the words, “We the People”. It’s time we remembered that We the People are the government. You and I. Not some force in a distant capital. Not some powerful force we have no control over. It’s us. It’s “We the people.”
President Joe Biden, April 28, 2021 Address to Congress
So the early libertarians were not trying to “dismantle the welfare state,” they were fully supportive of the notion. What they weren’t supportive of was the authoritarian state. Unfortunately the two can be confused, and sometimes that confusion is intentional, leading to an artificial sense of obligation to show obedience or agreement toward an invalid authority or one that abuses their power. My own dad had a big streak of this type of libertarianism; he refused to accept even his veterans’ benefits because he figured then he’d owe somebody something, and by his reckoning him and the US government were even when he served four years in the Marines and they paid him for it. To his way of thinking – and I understand the logic, whether I agree with it or not – to “take” anything from “the government” was to give “the government” power over you beyond what they deserved or could be trusted not to abuse.
This, fundamentally, is the root of libertarianism; keeping “the government” out of the affairs of private individuals so long as the conduct of those affairs doesn’t cause harm. When one extends this to business and industry, the same statement is true, it’s just been manipulated in the US.
If that was where things stayed here in the US, I’d be the biggest flag-waving card-carrying Libertarian you know but it didn’t.
Here in the US, Libertarianism™ began in Colorado in 1971, and from the beginning it was deeply flawed and divergent from the core principles of libertarianism. Born in the midst of Nixon and Vietnam, amid rational concerns about the draft and less rational concerns about the final separation of the US dollar from the “gold standard,” organized “Libertarianism” in the US has always been its own animal with primary focus of “liberty” concerns for the individual focusing on the recreational use of drugs and the use and ownership of firearms, and a great lot of misinformed babbling about economics, a lot of hypocrisy toward their own authoritarianism, and a deliberately contrived blind eye to the ability of capital to both hold and abuse power.
Ironically the party’s membership model itself immediately betrays the fundamentally fascist nature of its strange interpretation of the “libertarian” idea – to join the party, you have to pay. To have a voice in the party, to participate in governance decisions, you have to be a “bylaw-sustaining member,” according to their rulebook.
So from the very start, this “libertarian” party is demonstrably a plutocracy. And it doesn’t stop there. Within a decade of the Party’s foundation, it had been basically overtaken by David Koch, who saw in the party’s misguided interpretation of “liberty” as “corporations can do anything they want” an opportunity to mainstream and strengthen ideas and concepts beneficial to the business interests of David and his brother Charles, and as collateral damage also beneficial to other industrialist and capitalist interests when those interests benefit from doing harm to the general public.
By 1980, the misguided distrust of “fiat money” and the overwhelming influence of literally one of the world’s richest men had entirely stripped away any vestige of “socialism” from the original “anarcho-socialism” that is the root of libertarianism, and turned it instead to an advertising vehicle by which fascists and plutocrats advertise and perpetuate themselves to “those of like minds” by wrapping themselves up in a nice, if thin, facade of “you’re not the boss of me” and “the man’s not gonna stop me from getting high.”
To present, the Libertarian Party appeals primarily to college age white men who are usually affluent or at least semi-affluent, middle-aged white men who like guns and hate Washington (but love America), and a disjointed smattering of genuinely libertarian folks across the social spectrum who are new to the party and haven’t caught on yet but love the anti-authoritarianism thing.
The influence of Koch and through him economist Milton Friedman (the fundamental architect of the whole “money = political power and that’s just fine” philosophy) not only stripped the US Libertarian Party of any credible claim they had to genuine libertarianism, it set the stage for a cascading series of bone-headed political decisions that are crippling political processes in the US to this moment: without the Libertarian Party’s efforts to demonize government and propagandize capitalist greed as rightfully earned political power, Citizens United would never have been granted cert by the Supreme Court, nevermind decided in favor of plutocracy.
The US Libertarian Party is fundamentally a capitalist-industrialist-authoritarian-plutocrat party disingenuously selling itself on “liberty” when the only liberty it really cares about is the liberty to let you be stupid enough to die early (yeah, let’s make cocaine and heroin not just legal but unregulated, let’s see how “free” those folks feel after a couple of years) and to let giant corporations crap all over the planet until we’re all dead, except for them because they’ll be able to afford the escape pods. Meanwhile the morons who sold those newly-minded monkey-tenders out don’t realize they’ve got a much bigger jones called “money,” and it’s just as destructive, leads to just as much crappy and selfish decision-making, and hurts just as much people when you let it get hold of you. Ahem, Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos, Mr. Zuckerberg, et. al.
What US-style Libertarianism misses is two key features that prevent it from being libertarian at all. First, they leave out (reject, with hostility!) the socialism – the notion that all of this is for the collective good of all of us – and second they ignore the part about “not harming anyone.”
Determining if harm was done, if that’s in dispute, and how to correct that harm both through reparation to the harmed and legislation to ensure everybody knows going forward that this thing isn’t cool, is one of the key jobs of government, which the Libertarian Party seeks to undermine or eliminate. This is the process by which an insoluble conflict is solved; the facts of the conflict are presented to the people, represented by the judge and jury. The people hear and contemplate the facts from as many angles as they can find, and arrive at a conclusion hopefully based on best public interest, best moral and ethical practice, and best human inclination regarding if this conflict created harm, if that harm is worthy of recompense, how that compensation should be communicated, and whether there need be a written rule to forestall this sort of conflict in the future and, in the event it arises again, make the resolving of it much more efficient because now there’s precedent and rules to look at.
This is a process the Libertarian Party wants to break beyond recognition or destroy completely. They focus on legitimate complaints about the “broken system” but then they recognize that they tend to benefit greatly from that “broken system,” so they keep us focused on fixing “the system” and not fixing the people running it, i.e. not electing fascists, making sure people are educated and as capable as their natural ability can make them of clear critical thought, etc. Because “the system” isn’t the problem, the people running it are, and fundamentally the Libertarian Party is a part of people running the systems. They want government out of the way the same reason a cheating husband wants his wife out of the way – so they don’t get caught and held accountable.
The second key function of government is to act in place of the conscience that business does not have. What we call “conscience” is the series of ideas we’ve constructed to support the universal ethic – the perpetuation and propagation of life. The universal ethic of business is not life but profit – more and more, all the time, ad inifnitum, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead. This creates an obvious conflict; the perfect world for business is an unimaginable hell for human beings and ultimately isn’t even self-sustaining because it kills its own consumers, upon whom it relies for those ever-increasing profits.
It is government’s job as the voice of the people to step in and say no you can’t destroy that river, no you can’t pollute the air, no you can’t refuse or fail to protect your employees from known job risks like inhaling poisonous vapors or cutting their arms off, no you can’t hire nine year olds to mine coal, etc. Because demonstrably and consistently, business and industry – more to the point the broken humans who run them and hide behind the notion that a business isn’t just a collection of human beings making decisions – will decide in favor of profit without regard to public impact or even the long-term damage it does to itself.
That is what actual libertarianism looks like – and we have a phrase for it in the US, it’s called “democratic socialism.” Not “you’re free to get hooked on deadly drugs we can profit from, you’re free to die of environmental poisoning because being careful is expensive, you’re free to live at the wrong end of the biggest barrel held by the biggest psycho.” We the people are free from being told what we can do as long as we’re not inflicting harm; profiteers are prevented by legislation and enforcement from inflicting harm. Remember what I said at the beginning? It’s still the same thing, the US people who bought the label just twisted it all out of shape to benefit the wealthy industrialists and keep the rest of us stoned enough to not notice.
This is also part of what the US Libertarian Party wants to break. Fundamentally, before anything else, it’s about deregulation. Abolish the IRS, abolish the EPA, etc. and everyone will just be good and all the corporations will naturally start acting in a forthright, sustainable way. Which, of course, is pure nonsense that flies in the face of literally every possible example of an attempt that you can find anywhere in history…and it’s the entire purpose of the US Libertarian Party. Not to create liberty for individuals, but to ensure that they are holding the chains and keys in which those individuals live; to entice them, through mostly baseless appeals to ego and fun and greed, to do the very labor of forging their own shackles, with a smile.
I don’t know what the current state of the party’s inner core is nor how possible it would be to take it over, but I frankly doubt it’s super vulnerable. A lot of money went into it, and a lot of money goes in to protecting it. Maybe it could happen, maybe not. It would be neat to see an actual leftist libertarian presence in American politics since that’s generally where people in this country fall on an objective political spectrum.
As things stand now, though, it absolutely must be said: if you’re a libertarian, a Libertarian™ is the last thing you want to be.
This video is pretty special to me for a number of reasons. First, it’s the first really decent thing I did in Adobe Premiere, even though now, sixteen years later, it doesn’t look all that decent.
Second, this video was created as part of my daughter’s summer project for one of her classes in high school. We went to see the film Fahrenheit 9/11, and put together a presentation about eight minutes long. Unfortunately the first four minutes were lost, but what remains is good enough that I’ve considered recreating it just because I like it that much.
She got a 99 on the project – in part because she proved that she actually participated in it and it wasn’t just “dad’s project” – and the whole experience is definitely among my more cherished memories of fatherhood.
As I write this in 2021, I’ve cycled through a lot of “new audiences” who don’t realize that I’m not new at this. It’s nice to have artifacts.
Every six months or so, there’s another wave of clickbait and memes talking about “restore the Fairness Doctrine.” From this, one can reasonably conclude that there’s widespread support for this doctrine, and the public believes it should be “restored.” Even opportunistic politicians who know better will jump on this to give the impression they’re on the side of the people.
The public is wrong, and today we’re going to explore why.
“Wait,” some of you are thinking, “how can you possibly be against fairness?” That’s not what this is about, at all. Indeed, it’s the inherent lack of fairness that caused the thing to stop being enforced in the first place.
From the earliest days of broadcast media in the US, the FCC has had control over the “public airwaves,” ostensibly in the public interest. As part of this control, they developed and implemented the Fairness Doctrine. The airwaves were seen as a public resource, and the legal logic determined that the federal government, acting as the defender of the people’s interests, therefore had a right to regulate the content broadcast on those airwaves.
The wikipedia entry on FD summarizes it as well as I could: by the time it was implemented as a formal doctrine by the FCC in 1949, FD was “a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC’s view—honest, equitable, and balanced.”
The important phrase in that summary is “holders of broadcast licenses.” In the pre-cable era, all radio and television stations as well as the three major TV networks were required to purchase a license allowing them to broadcast on a given frequency. Adherence to FD was a contingency of that license, and if a broadcaster violated FD they were at risk of losing their broadcast license.
In the modern era, however, the majority of media is satellite radio, and cable and satellite television, and broadband internet. These media do not hold FCC broadcast licenses. You can’t revoke Fox News’ broadcast license (another empty pseudo-activist cry you’ll often see on social media), because they don’t have one. Instead they literally purchase specific bandwidth from the federal government, and they are then considered the owners of that bandwidth. It’s no longer “public airwaves,” but privately owned. This is more obvious in the case of cable television, but does also apply to satellite service – indeed, it’s probably fair to say that from a legal standpoint there’s no difference between the two, assuming both are privately owned rather than being owned and/or operated by the government (i.e. publicly).
Consequently, the FCC has exactly zero direct regulatory over content on these privately owned networks, and you do not want them to have that control. This concept is why you can see nudity on HBO, why you can order pornography from your local cable station, and why you can see other forms of “adult content,” be it sexually explicit or explicit violence, on your cable TV channels. It’s also what prevents the government from deciding that a Michael Moore documentary or a satire depicting national leaders in a bad light or a production of “1984” can’t be broadcast.
Digging Deeper: Why & How
The idea of protecting the “public airwaves” is based on the idea that, because that space is “public,” anyone with an operating receiver can access it, including children, with no further payment or access mechanism needed. The idea of not protecting private media in this way is based on the simple reality that you have to make a deliberate effort, and usually pay money, to access that content; your ten year old is not going to “accidentally” run into pornos on terrestrial radio or traditional television. Once you’ve paid for the service, the thinking goes, it’s up to you – not the service provider – to take the steps to ensure your kids (or you, or whomever) can’t access objectionable content. As an adult, you can choose to avoid that content; as a parent, you can employ an endless range of techniques to prevent your children from doing so.
It’s also well worth pointing out that the illegality of, for instance, child pornography or “snuff films” is not a function of FCC regulation but rather of other, existing laws. Those things are illegal outside the jurisdiction of the federal communication commission, therefore there’s no need for the FCC to create additional regulation forbidding them.
The FCC has no power at all to regulate the content on privately owned networks. They can’t tell HBO to not show boobs, they can’t tell your cable operator they’re not allowed to offer you “Resperm Of The Jedi.” That would be an egregious violation of the First Amendment; constitutionally, you have a right to create that content, and to view it, whether anyone else thinks it’s worthwhile or not, as long as other laws aren’t being violated in the process.
This brings us to the difficult reality of fairness doctrine: if you give the federal government the power to say Fox News can’t lie, you’re also giving them the power to say HBO can’t show nudity, or that I can’t criticize them on this website. Constitutionally there’s no way to have one regulation without making the other possible.
While we’re shutting down misunderstandings, the Fairness Doctrine was not “repealed by Reagan.” The FCC stopped enforcing it during the Reagan administration because it was patently unfair to terrestrial broadcasters; their ability to speak would be limited, but someone with enough money to make their own cable TV station (like Ted Turner and his then-emerging CNN) wouldn’t. Now you’ve created a money = freedom paradigm, and that can’t work in a free country. Any FCC rule created to regulate political speech would only apply to broadcast media – terrestrial radio and television, and the three “real” networks who actually own stations and distribute content to them. It would remain a free-for-all for everyone else.
The Fairness Doctrine was formally repealed by the Obama administration, because it was archaic, useless, and out of date.
If Not The Fairness Doctrine, Then What?
The solution is making the personal effort to become genuinely literate in media and information; to equip yourself with the tools to “think back” at misinformation and disinformation, to train your own mind not to simply accept a statement as true because it appeals to your biases, nor to reject it simply because it doesn’t.
Until we get our public education system back in working order so that this vital life skill is taught to all of us from the earliest age possible (for instance, we could start by teaching kids how to resist all the advertising aimed at them), the burden of that education is on each of us as individuals, and that can be a daunting task. It means breaking ourselves of the habit of trying to find push-button solutions to complex and difficult problems. It means admitting our fallibility and doing the hard work of setting aside our egos and pride, and it means spending a lot of time unlearning old falsehoods and re-learning some of the things we missed.
Modern Monetary Theory provides an excellent example for illustration. Most of us learned in middle school that Congress appropriates funding for all federal spending, but the reality that reveals went right past us. We still think of federal spending in terms of “my tax dollars,” but federal tax revenue doesn’t fund federal spending. Congress does. We know this, but we’re taught to avoid putting the pieces together to make a whole picture. We want to think of “our tax dollars” because we’re taught to believe that’s what gives us agency in government; that if we don’t pay taxes, we have no right to a voice. Problem is, that’s not true. Not only isn’t that true, but nothing that flows from that basic “spending my tax dollars” thinking is true. It’s not necessary to lay a heavy tax on the ultra-wealthy “to pay for” anything; the reason for progressive taxation is to stop too much money, and the power that goes with it, into too few hands. It doesn’t pay for anything; things are paid for when Congress says “pay for this,” and then the proper keystrokes are entered into the proper spreadsheets to create the dollars to “pay for this.”
It’s not the purpose of this article to get deep into MMT, but it does provide an example of the problems at hand, and their solutions. The primary problem at hand is we’ve been taught to think incorrectly; the primary solution at hand is to accept that reality and then do the work necessary to learn how to think correctly – to do the research, to be willing to admit to ourselves that we’ve been misled and misdirected, and to attain the knowledge necessary to fix it.
Fortunately, there are some excellent tools to help you achieve this. There are many, many books and websites out there dedicated to giving us those tools, but if I were to pick only one critical resource it would be a book by Robert Cialdini titled “Influence: Science and Practice. (disclosure: affiliate link)” This book not only gives an excellent foundation for identifying and neutralizing the compliance-gaining tactics employed by those who deliberately mislead, it’s also well-written to appeal to the casual reader as well as the academic, and the citations contained therein will take you through other important writing and writers like Korzybski’s theories of general semantics (a separate thing from basic semantics, the “meaning of meaning”), the theory of linguistic relativity (“communication creates reality”), and the work of philosophers and influencers like Edward Bernays (aka “the father of public relations.”)
If you visit and make studied use of the links in the above paragraph, you will develop the tools necessary to successfully resist attempts to disinform and misinform you, not in the sense that so many internet know-it-alls who get sucked in to ridiculous nonsense like QAnon and other conspiracy theories, but in a genuine, powerful way that will have a profound positive impact on how you process the information you consume.
That’s the solution to all of this, and it’s in your hands. Use it, and you’ll quickly stop relying on empty and unworkable but seductive “quick fix” ideas like restoring the fairness doctrine, and start vaccinating yourself against the overwhelming flow of disinformation that surrounds us all in the modern world.
Everybody wants the rewards of hard work and due diligence, but most people only want the rewards, without doing the hard work and due diligence.
This is reflected in non-solutions to political problems like term limits (it’s called VOTING; term limits only serve to ensure that if you do get a decent person in office they can’t stay there long enough to get much done), and specious “solutions” to avoidable problems, like expanding the Supreme Court to counter-act the impact of a bad appointment. The proper way to have dealt with that was years ago, by not electing someone who’s going to make bad appointments. The proper way to have dealt with THAT was to not put up with the so-called Democratic party shoving a status quo token candidate down our throats in the face of overwhelming support for a progressive reformist platform. That means you stop jumping on the bandwagon you’re told and worrying about whose “turn” it is, and start taking issue with your “democracy” being dictated from the top down.
America has a bad habit of not bothering to try to do things right and then complaining and trying to find shortcut solutions when things go wrong, and that never has worked and never will. We have proven once that “just do what you’re told or else the eviler will win” ends up with the eviler winning anyway, and I have a bad feeling we’re about to do it again. I hope not, but I suspect this race is going to be close enough for Trump to try to throw it to the Supremes, counting on the result being in his favor because he’s effectively turned the Supreme Court into a partisan weapon. And still, you hear “but Hillary won by three million votes.” Horse hockey. She lost. She and her team know how the electoral college works just like Trump and his team did, and she got cocky and arrogant and so did a whole lot of her voters, who were expecting a coronation and got a coup. Ralph Malph could have beat Trump by three million votes; the spread should have been five times that at least, and you should have had an energized, progressive ticket all the way down to your county commissioners and mayoralities.
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I’m sorry that’s not an easy pill to swallow, but this nonsense of waiting to get angry and do something until the damage has already happened is just that, nonsense. Hillary Clinton was a lazy, arrogant candidate who assumed right up until the returns started coming in on election night that she had everything in the bag, and that’s what cost her the election. Many of us KNEW that’s how it would play out, but the majority just did what they were told, didn’t ask questions when the primary was obviously rigged and public opinion manipulated to gain post-hoc validation for the DNC-sponsored pillory of Sanders, the more popular candidate *by far*. They deliberately disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of people, telegraphed far ahead of time that they were going to do what they wanted so there was no point in voting anyway, and then blamed the very people whose voices they silenced for their own incompetence, ineptitude, and hubris.
We let them do the same in 2020, and it’ll be nothing but a miracle if things don’t play out more or less the same way, handing the country over to Trump for another four years, and thereby effectively ending American Democracy.
We have got to learn to stand up when it matters. Why do black people have to die before the masses listen to what many of us have been saying for decades about the militarization and authoritarian over-reach of local police? Why do we have to wait until millions are facing eviction before we start railing against the whole stupid system that’s created six times as many empty houses as homeless people but we still find a way to convince ourselves the homeless deserve it? Why do we have to wait until millions are infected with a deadly and crippling virus before we get serious about reforming our broken, cruel, and ineffective for-profit health care system?
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We humans love our comfort, and our addiction to it – to the point that we’ve damn near sacrificed our very existence just for the illusion of comfort – is killing us. That is how we got to the point that a single 87 year old woman is nearly all that stands between us and totalitarianism.
That is why I’m not always polite and smooth-talking about these things. My readers are unquestionably of a higher intellectual and ethical caliber than the majority, but it’s still up to you guys to keep the word spreading, to take the chance on hurting your nazi grandma’s feelings or telling your drunk Uncle Bob who thinks OAN is a news source to shut the hell up, and to make the realities unavoidably clear to those who continue trying to avoid them.
Lately it seems like I’ve been on a bit of a tear, as they say. There’s been some status messages, and even a short video, all coming back to the core idea we’ve got to stop explaining basic things to people who completely understand them but pretend not to because the pretense allows them to continue engaging in unacceptable behavior.
I don’t mean to ever discourage reading or genuine intellectual curiosity. I absolutely believe that understanding what the facts are is critically important, and that of necessity that means understanding what a fact is, is pretty important too.
I’m just over the constant going back and forth with people who act like they don’t get it.
It sucks up too much energy.
Explaining why black lives matter and what that phrase means when it’s been under public discussion since 2013 is waste of time, as is arguing back and forth over what groups where and why “own” what “interest” in whatever related commercial trademarks there may be and how they’re used and why. First and foremost the conversation must begin with the basic understanding that black lives matter. Full stop. Anything beyond that is nonsense and argument, because anything beyond that means on some level and to some degree you are willing enough to compromise that basic idea to bother arguing about it.
Same thing with explaining why Confederate statues don’t have any place in the United States, same thing with explaining people why they should wear a mask in the midst of an ongoing deadly pandemic, on and on. We just expend so much time and energy on people not to educate them but to chip away at the idea that their position has some social acceptability, that we can’t ever move forward because these sandbaggers keep siphoning all our energy into just not going backwards any faster.
Manners?
The darker colors have smaller gaps; the darkest, the *smallest* gap is about 10% (women make a little over 90% what men do), and the lightest – in Utah, women make less than 70% of men on average.
Meanwhile women are still making 70 or 80 cents on the dollar, black people are still getting shot by cops on an almost daily basis if not more than daily, there are still thousands of kids in cages in the middle of a global pandemic and we’re doing worse than nothing to help them including losing them entirely.
I’m really not trying to be rude about it, but at this point who’s more rude here? The person who is continuing to act as though they don’t understand the arguments why human beings should be human beings and we shouldn’t put up statues to people who bought and sold human beings and fought against the interests of human freedom because that is neither honorable nor laudable? Or the person who says “enough, we’re moving on now?”
Who’s being more disrespectful, the person who refuses to wear a simple facemask, repeatedly demonstrated to have zero to negligible ill effects, in the middle of a deadly global pandemic that’s already killed at least – depending on your source – 125-130-ish thousand people just in the United States at the time I’m writing this, and probably many more? Or is the person who firmly insists we’re done arguing about it now and have the best guidance possible, and that’s WEAR A MASK WHEN YOU GO OUT, being rude by their firm insistence? Who dies in which direction? How many cases are there, EVER, of people dying because they were wearing a mask? Right. Wear the damn thing. If you’ve got reason beyond selfish and spurious hypochondria not to, you really WILL have the advice of a doctor because you’ve already got other serious problems.
In the vast majority of cases that first person is simply not being honest. It’s silly that we keep having to say the same things over and over as if each individual person is always hearing it for the first time. For instance I’m quite sure that my friend’s friend, whose remark started the comment that became this article, has heard all of these arguments before. He just doesn’t want to accept them. He can’t find a reasoned basis in objective fact and ethical behavior to support his position so he just pretends not to understand the arguments against it. Maybe that’s a conscious decision, maybe it’s not, I don’t know the man well enough to say. But that’s what’s happening.
At some level that stops even being about questions of racism or sexism or xenophobia or bigotry, and just starts being about personal character and integrity. I know people are going to find that offensive and outrageous and insulting, but it’s more offensive and outrageous and insulting to continue to insist that we don’t understand the basic realities of life whenever they’re inconvenient for us.
Consequences
Worse, it’s deadly.
This whole “I don’t get it” game is half the problem in a lot of places right now, where you’re talking about coronavirus or gender issues or racial issues or economic disparity issues or any of it. Half of any of those problems at least is people who just insist on pretending not to get it because if they admit they understand the arguments they have to admit that they’ve been wrong. Nobody likes to do that, so we’ve developed this elaborate set of communications to justify not doing it.
That has to stop now. That’s really what all of this is teaching us.
In another example, there’s a big kerfuffle up the road from me in Allendale, Michigan over the removal of a “confederate statue,” arguably more a civil war memorial featuring a generic confederate soldier.
That statue, though, was placed in 1998. It’s less historically relevant than The Simpsons, Nirvana, or Baywatch. And, it’s in Michigan. Nobody from this state fought for the breakaway traitorous republic; the statue doesn’t represent anyone who has any sort of tie here.
But obviously it must be important, after all apparently nobody in that town heard about the Civil War until 133 years after it was over and that’s why we’ve got to keep the statue!
Top feature of Allendale MI civil war memorial statue. Statue photos courtesy reddit.com user u/resister_sister
No more of that nonsense. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time, and it’s a bunch of dishonest and disingenuous people complaining about things that don’t even have the slightest significance to them other than having something to complain about.
In the greater part, right now especially, they are complaining simply because other people whose oppression these people have benefited from for centuries are demanding an end to that oppression. The loudest subgroup of those voices, those with legitimate grievances that remain ignored, are those who descended from or look like the people who have been largely enslaved and dehumanized throughout the entire history of this country. And those people are saying “you see this? This is what we’re talking about!”
That scares people whose current state of privileged comfort is in some way is a product of their privilege and social standing they were born to and other irrelevancies like their gender or the color of their skin. They are facing the reality that pretty much their entire way of thinking is wrong and cruel and intolerable and it must stop. They’ve lived so long with privilege, they think they’re entitled to it. They’re afraid they can’t compete without the advantages privilege brings, against those who have historically been denied those privileges. So when the oppressed rise up and say “you see this?” the response of the oppressors is “I don’t know what you mean,” and they keep right on going.
Solutions
So the privileged are scared again because their privilege is threatened and they imagine that’s a threat to their comfort. That’s where all this comes from, right, is this stupid zero-sum thinking where in order for me to have, you have to do without. Some people, most of them simply mislead and others deliberately misleading, push that way of thinking to rationalize their own greed or self-interest above and beyond others. It’s uncomfortable for people who have defined themselves around a core creed to realize that it’s cruel and harmful, not only to those against whom it is directed but also against those who create it and perpetuate it. They don’t want to change because it’s not comfortable and they think it means they’ll lose something.
That, my friends, is just too bad. Those privileged folks are just gonna have to handle themselves, because if they continue behaving that way and treating the problem that way, they may just end up right. Problem is, so will we all, again, and that crap has to end or we’re going to end. So the traditionally privileged can just go find find those bootstraps they’re always telling the oppressed to pull themselves up by. Because the world is moving on, with them or without them.
The truly stupid thing is, it’s not even really “taking away” anything; it’s just making sure other people have access to the same opportunities and “rights” even if they’re *not* born into privilege &c.
Those people who are afraid they can’t compete on a level playing field rely on the power of their privilege to continuing to sabotage the game.
All of this is to say nothing of the fact that the statue itself perpetuates the idea that freedom of black Americans is a gift from white men rather than their right as human beings.
The problem is – and this is why I’ve been saying for years that “kumbaya liberalism is dead” – those same people have learned that they can manipulate the good nature of people who are decent. They can claim injury where there is none, or ignorance that is really saccharine stupidity, and rely on The Good Guys™ to continue being gentle.
It’s time we faced the difficult reality that the long term result of that has been a lot of good, dead people and a lot of live crappy ones, and it’s quickly becoming an existential threat to the species.
As I’ve paraphrased Heinlein so many times: survival and propagation of the species is the only universal morality. Ultimately, as a totality of human consciousness and existence, anything threatening that single universal morality will be eliminated, one way or another, just as happens with Darwinian selection for any other species, to the greatest extent that can possibly be exerted by that totality.
What makes that humane and ethically acceptable – or what defines the point at which it becomes so – is the effect of individual human will. At some level, all else being equal, we can each choose to act in ways that benefit or detract from the universal morality. “Lower” life forms don’t always have a choice about that.
In the US and other nations we’ve built entire systems that detract from the sole universal human morality, and we’ve insisted on treating the very things about those systems which detract from that fundamental drive to survive as though they are themselves required for our survival.
We have, rather than elevating and empowering human life, chosen to subjugate and restrict it for our own material benefit.
That has to stop, and we can either choose to stop it or the greater will of the collective species will absolutely act to stop it one way or another.
Conclusions
When our self-serving idiocy begins to work against the universal morality of other species and we refuse to put an end to it ourselves, those species do their best to fight back.
When we act against the universal morality of great numbers of species, we act against the universal morality of all life, and all life will work together to ensure we can’t keep doing that.
This is how all of this crap keeps going on, every bit of it. Including coronavirus, even including an alarming percentage of seismic activity in the last fifty years, to say nothing of the natural disasters that are made worse by our destruction of the environment, and it just keeps going and it all starts with individuals thinking clearly and ethically. Individuals who make a deliberate choice to refuse to at least make the genuine effort to *try* to do either one of those things are making a deliberate choice to die.
We no longer have the option of first considering the hurt feelings of the privileged. Especially when it’s mostly adults acting like little kids, being afraid to remove a band-aid and see the healing where a wound used to be. None of this is really going to “hurt” anybody, beyond the blow to their ego in finding out they’ve got to actually start living up to their own self-image, they’re not allowed to keep faking it anymore.
The coddling of these egos has to stop, and it has to stop now. It’s killing us, in very large numbers, and those numbers are going to get larger still before they start shrinking. Aside from basic human selfishness in the immediate sense, what mostly keeps this going is that arguing over these things is a multibillion dollar industry, and in spite of the generalized damage is inflicts on society as a whole, it props up the power and lifestyles of the ownership class.
But if we don’t change what we’re doing, NOW, they’re not going to start shrinking until so many people have died that the human population is no longer a threat to the rest of the world or itself.
We can no longer, as a matter of that universal human morality I keep talking about, continue to be polite to the stupid. Yes, there are going to be people who genuinely don’t get it, but that’s what education is for. That’s ignorance and it can be fixed. I’m talking about stupidity, which is willful ignorance or pretense to it. There are many more people who get it just fine and pretend not to – they play stupid – like the people who get a fake “emotional support animal” just because they notice people with real ones and are pissed off that someone is getting something “special” and they’re not.
The protection of these people’s feelings has to end, or it’s going to end us. It sounds cruel, but it isn’t. What’s cruel is the price everyone has to pay to keep propping all this BS up.
What happens when you try to turn ownership of human beings into a “state’s right.”
In this time of rapidly changing social conditions and a somewhat painful removal of our self-comforting delusions of morality, it’s time we start talking seriously about how we misuse words.
One of the most abused and misused phrases in modern American conversation is “states’ rights.” The civil war wasn’t about slavery, it was about “states’ rights.” It was the War of Northern Aggression, how dare those Washington Bigshots tell us fine, genteel people how to live our lives. Every time the Confederate Flag, or the civil war, or slavery is mentioned, at some point someone will try to cloak themselves in the ostensibly noble trappings of “defending states’ rights.”
Advocates of this argument, however, never seem to want to discuss the marked tendency of “states’ rights” arguments to fall on the side of “let states oppress people however they want, and make sure the federal government doesn’t have the teeth to stop them,” since that was after all the original point?
Why is it when people want to own other people, keep some people from attending public school, force women to be brood mares, declare certain types of consensual adult non-commercial sex illegal, or teach religious myths as science, it’s suddenly about “states’ rights?”
I notice nobody was hollering about “States’ rights” when the PATRIOT act was passed.
Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument about allowing abortions beyond the guidelines established at the federal level.
Never heard anyone suggest that regulating social behavior under the glare of a deadly global pandemic was a “state’s right,” even though the feds have completely blown every single chance they had to work the bully pulpit and explain to people why it’s so important.
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Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument favoring gay marriage even though that’s precisely what that issue has come down to.
Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument that states be allowed to demand that only science – rather than religious myths – be taught in public school science classes.
Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument favoring strong social welfare programs.
Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument favoring a higher minimum wage (although, again, that’s precisely what it’s come down to).
Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument favoring strong environmental protection.
Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument about abolishing the death penalty.
Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument against media consolidation.
Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument supporting polygamy – indeed, for Utah to even *become* a state they had to explicitly outlaw that practice.
Never heard anyone argue for a state’s right to refuse to privatize their prison systems. It’s been done – again, Utah for one – but nobody used that argument to rationalize it.
Never heard anyone argue for a state’s right to forbid charter schools.
Never heard anyone argue for a state’s right to do a whole lot of really good, positive things…just for a state’s right to screw average people in favor of profit for the elite.
About the only positive states’ rights arguments I’ve ever heard in my life – a long life full of political awareness – have been in favor of legalizing cannabis.
Meanwhile, where were the moderate conservative voices leading up to the Iraq war?
Where are the moderate conservative voices in the gay marriage debate?
Where are the moderate conservative voices in the cannabis legalization debate?
Where are the moderate conservative voices curtailing the Texas board of education’s headlong rush into theocracy?
Where are the moderate conservative voices calling for the US to catch up to the rest of the civilized world in terms of health care or education or criminal justice?
Where are the moderate conservative voices opposing unjustified war-making?
Where are moderate conservative voices favoring penal code reform, ending discriminatory law enforcement practices, ending employment discrimination and wage disparity, ending the enslavement and oppression that results from people not having access to health care?
Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting arts education and public broadcasting?
Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting organized labor?
Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to carry a pregnancy to term?
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Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting the right of gay people to marry?
Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting environmental regulation?
Where are the moderate conservative voices opposing wealth disparity?
Where are the moderate conservative voices opposing wage disparity based on gender and race?
Where are the moderate conservative voices that recognize the vested interest of government in preventing parents from destroying the minds of their children with corporal punishment and religious indoctrination?
Where are the moderate conservatives supporting OSHA and FEMA and the CDC and the Department of Education? These are all well-established institutions; conservatives should be working to preserve and protect them, but it seems like all they’re interested in protecting is dog-whistle statues honoring bigots, claiming the Confederacy as their “heritage” in spite of the reality that most of the people making that claim had nothing to do with the Confederacy, nor did their forebears.
Where are the moderate conservatives who can respect and address a topic at hand rather than flying off on a self-indulgent pity party about how unfair it is that they’re labeled as conservatives at all, yet failing to recognize that they’re openly admitting that being called conservative is an egregious insult these days?
Even those conservatives who seem less obnoxious and more willing to take a principled stand on important issues in opposition to their home-field narrative aren’t particularly moderate – people like John McCain or Mitt Romney – aren’t really all that moderate; they’re just not frothing xenophobic whackjobs 24/7 so they look moderate in comparison to the mainstream right.
We’d love to think the US Army had these confederate soldiers buried by black men just to piss off the bigots that were left alive, but it’s probably just another case of giving black people the job white people don’t want.
The reality that these self-described moderate conservatives are overlooking is simply this: conservatism as it is currently defined in this country can not be moderate and is not conservative. There’s simply nothing moderate about imposing theocracy, creating or enforcing laws that define people as second-class citizens based on their sexuality, sanctioning murder under the guise of vengeance pretending to be justice, forcing women to carry the pregnancies caused by their rapists to term, prosecuting war for profit, spending half the GDP on the military, giving business and industry carte blanche to convert the republic into a feudal state, or indoctrinating children to be consumers first and citizens last.
The last moderate conservative to actually win an election was Barack Obama…and of course, rather than being properly labeled as a moderate conservative – which he unquestionably is, ever major decision by his administration supports that and he’s defined himself that way more than once – he’s a “radical socialist liberal.”
Maybe if this mass of moderate conservatives who only seem to have something to say when they want to complain about how conservatism has branded itself for the last thirty years would speak up about anything other than having their feelings hurt by generalities about the right wing, I’d have more sympathy. Maybe if the “states’ rights” argument was ever used to justify doing the right thing, it would have more legitimacy.
Nazi rally of SS and SA troops in Nuremberg, Germany, 1935. Image public domain via US National Archives & Wikimedia Commons.
In my last article I discussed some broad generalities that empower and normalize the slow-motion fascist occupation of the United States Government. Now, let’s start talking about solutions.
I’ve asserted that this occupation exists and is actively working to reshape our nation.
Based on the feedback, that’s not a real hopeful message, and it wasn’t intended to be. It’s not happy news, and we all need a swift kick in the butt for letting things get this far.
Beating ourselves up even more, however, isn’t going to solve the problem. Feeling hopeless…well, it sure isn’t my goal to make people feel that way, at the same time I’m forced to think that it’s not a bad thing. There are millions of people in this country who feel, and have felt, that hopelessness every single day of our lives, and maybe it’s not a bad thing for the shoe to be on the other foot, so to speak. In spite of that, though, wallowing in self-recrimination (or inducing you to do so) isn’t my purpose in writing.
Now is the time to stop wallowing in it and start looking within ourselves and at the greater society as a whole and decide what we’re going to do about it, what we need to do about it, if we intend to have hope at all, let alone successfully end the occupation.
Step one is always: look in the mirror. Look at the accouterments of your life. Look at your own behavior. Do you sit and say nothing when the drunk uncle starts preaching MAGA at the family reunion? If you’re white, do you just sort of laugh uncomfortably when your white friends tell “n****r” jokes? That’s a surface thing, right there. A glaring, enormous bit of personal behavior you can change to help undermine all of the thought and behavior patterns that empower and normalize fascist thinking. Stop flinching. We all own this, and we’re all going to have to take these steps one way or another.
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Maybe in your world, the aggressions aren’t so cut and dried. Maybe instead of wearing white hoods and talking about what has eight legs and says “Hodedo,” Uncle Bigot is more into the what-abouts. Like every time a cop kills a person who was no real threat to them, pulling out the ‘what about his criminal record’ and ‘why didn’t he cooperate’ and ‘black on black crime’ tropes. What are the assumptions in that thinking? Don’t we all, to some degree or another, find ourselves thinking in these terms? Even I, anti-authoritarian as I am, get a laugh out of Det. Olivia Benson illegally breaking in to a suspects apartment while they’re mid-coitus and making a joke about “exigent circmstances, I heard a woman scream,” or watching some doofus on COPS try to tell the officer arresting him that he hasn’t smoked pot while he’s got a joint behind his ear in plain sight of the camera.
I kind of hate to give up that guilty pleasure, that schadenfreude. We all do it, it’s just part of human nature to get a little personal lift out of going “look at that idiot!” But back to the mirror – how do these narratives normalize fascist authoritarianism? As others have pointed out, why are the internal affairs investigators in police procedurals always written as the “bad guys” who are just interfering in the ability of a “good cop who isn’t afraid to break the rules” to get his man? Why do police portrayals in general come down to either egregious violations of civil rights normalized under the guise of “justice,” or comically inept rubes who don’t know which end of the gun the bullets come out of?
Is it sinking in yet?
We’re gonna have to give some of these things up. Here’s another thought – why are our schoolchildren (and I’ll get you did it to) taught to pledge allegiance to a flag, before they’re taught how to uphold the values that flag ostensibly represents? Being the little social outcast I am, I stopped participating in like fourth grade, but this isn’t about me patting myself on the back for being so woke – there’s enough of that shallow, empty garbage on the internet. What I want to know is, what are you teaching your kids about that flag?
Because it’s parenting too, right? We thrive in this country on authoritarian parenting. While hard, recent data is difficult to come by, indications are that somewhere between 60 and 90% of parents still believe that spanking is an acceptable form of discipline (PDF), even though every serious study of the issue in the last fifty years has unambiguously said it’s not just ineffective but highly counter-effective.
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Yet we continue to do it, don’t we? We’ll say with a complete lack of self-awareness “my parents spanked me and I turned out fine,” even though we manifestly didn’t because we turned out to be someone who thinks hitting a child is okay, and it’s not.
We’ll argue back and forth all day long about teaching “respect,” but we’re not teaching respect; we’re teaching fear of authority and rule by force, aren’t we? Isn’t it true, and isn’t it time we accepted as true, that if we’re doing our jobs properly our kids are absolutely going to rebel against us and push back against our values and demand that we validate and justify those values whether doing so makes us comfortable or not? Are you a parent who falls back to “because I said so” and “as long as you live in my house,” instead of being able to admit and discuss our own flaws in thinking, or for that matter to effectively explore and explain our values?
How does that normalize unquestioning fealty to authority, and how does that empower and normalize what ultimately becomes fascism in our kids’ thinking? Have you really thought about that? Have you looked inside yourself and asked whether you, yourself, haven’t been normalized and acclimated to authoritarianism – which is the root of fascism – far more deeply than you realized? Or have you decided that it’s just “easier” to say “because I said so” rather than taking the chance of having to defend your position and coming to the realization that you can’t?
Nobody said this was going to be easy. In fact I’m trying to make clear that it’s very much going to be hard. Even those of us who have been going over these things in our minds and making adjustments for years still have plenty of work to do. What I’ve written here isn’t an all-encompassing plan of action; it’s a start. The point I’m making – or trying to, in my clumsy way – is that it starts with us. You, me, your crazy aunt, your kindly old gramma who keeps making the snide remarks about der Schwarze.
Your kindly old gramma does that because when you don’t ask her to stop, that makes it okay for her. Your crazy uncle probably cares a whole lot less about worshiping Trump than he does about gaining attention and feeling like people think he’s smart, because nobody’s bothered telling him that they really don’t. Your drunk brother-in-law yammers on about “the antifa terrorists” because nobody around him has bothered standing up to that ignorance, or even pointing out the basic linguistic reality that “opposing anti-fascism” is “fascism.”
These are tough conversations to have. They may cost you relationships and friendships that you’d rather not lose. This process is not painless…but getting here wasn’t painless for millions of disenfranchised, marginalized, and oppressed people, whether that’s a race, a sexual identity, or just being someone like me who doesn’t fit comfortably into other people’s pigeonholes.
While I can’t really make it easy for you, perhaps these thoughts will help. I’ve gone through these processes myself many times, and continue to do so daily. Just try to remember; for every dominant social group you’re a member of, there are thousands of people who have been hurt by our passive-aggressive refusal to stand up against the status quo of nationalism, xenophobia, othering, and so forth.
You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the culture in which you were raised. In accepting that responsibility and living up to it, you become part of the improvement of the culture as a whole.
A little cognitive dissonance experienced in the process of trying to grow to be better people really isn’t that much to ask. Is it?
There is a fascist occupation happening in our country.
The United States of America is currently occupied by fascists, up to and including the President.
That’s not hyperbole. I wish it were. Frankly, I’ve been saying that we’re in a state of coup for years now, but it’s finally to the point where no reasonable person can deny it.
You need to understand that this did not happen overnight, nor by accident. For forty years, fascists – calling themselves “constitutional republicans,” “christian fundamentalists,” and other dishonest labels – have been deliberately occupying every level of government in this country. It’s part of their strategy, and it’s been widely reported since at least the late 1980’s, and we all just ignored it because “it can’t happen here” and “we’re better than that.”
In 2016, they took the White House…or so you’d think, but the reality is that happened in 1980 and we didn’t notice.
None of this is an accident. It’s planned, it’s been planned, and it’s been a long time coming, and we didn’t just let it happen, we helped it happen. We helped it happen by getting gung-ho and enlisting after 9-11, we helped it happen by allowing the military-industrial complex to not just eat up a sizeable portion of our GDP but to entangle itself in the profit margins of the elite, so as to ensure they too would help advance the coup.
We helped it by deifying Ronald Reagan, who was a really terrible human being, a white supremacist, anti-environmentalist, homophobe, bigot, and misogynist…but he was so darned polite and well-spoken and affable while he did it, and it made us feel all warm and fuzzy about hating the mythic “welfare queens” and ignoring the AIDS crisis because it was a “gay disease.”
This is starting to make you angry, reading this article. You’re thinking to yourself “hey wait a minute now, I’m not part of this, and attacking that nice old man Reagan is just a step too far!”
But I could literally hyperlinkeverywordinthisarticletoadifferent story about how this has been happening for decades, and some of the articles are decades old. We didn’t listen.
Military contractors, police contractors, and yes even the people who produce cop shows, wittingly or unwittingly, have all been footsoldiers and communication directors for the slow rolling conversion of this nation into a fascist state.
They’ve done it through propaganda, they’ve done it through appealing to venal material greed, they’ve done it through appealing to our egos, they’ve done it through programming the very same young men and women who sign up to defend this nation to feel their fealty to a flag, a political party, icons, and symbols while slowly fading out even the most basic notions of common decency and social contract from education under the rubric of “fighting socialism.”
We haven’t just been had, we’ve been taken. I’ve got my own responsibility to bear in that – I should have been screaming this much more loudly from the rooftops decades ago, but like a fascist occupant of a group that thinks it’s a manners and common ground organization is so good at arguing, you’ve got to make the message palatable, right? Because politics done right is politics that destroys a democracy without the democracy realizing who’s firing on it. Because the only thing Occupy Democrats is occupying is their own material greed. Because people of no ethics and fewer morals can push people like me right out of a potentially good organization with manipulative claptrap like being “cognizant of my agenda,” an agenda that didn’t exist and an accusation that I should have punched in the mouth when it was made.
We’re all guilty on this one, or at least most of us, even if only by virtue of having bought in to any number of tropes and propaganda narratives designed to make us doubt the strength of our SYSTEMS when it’s not the systems but the PEOPLE who are the problem.
If we’re lucky, it’s gonna be a long ride.
If we’re not, pretty soon they’re just gonna stop even trying to pretend, and we’re going to be crushed. Including Mr. Cognizant Of Your Agenda and Mr. Occupy Democrats and Matthew “Addicting Info” Desmond and all the other accidental and deliberate double agents who have all contributed to the coup in their own way. Usually their own way is by trying to gain money and ego boosts by destroying political discourse with pandering and shallow sloganeering and refusal to stand up and speak truth without shame under the stupid, self-serving rubric of popular appeal and “growing the page” and “getting more likes.”
I have watched organizations not just abandon their principles but allow them to be turned into weapons – and some of those I *have* warned about in plain text, repeatedly, but still pulled my punches because I have friends whose feelings I didn’t want to hurt and whose friendship I didn’t want to lose who are major players in those organizations.
I don’t think most of those folks are wittingly working for the enemy, mind you. I think they’re well-intended and mostly just like me, trying to find the best way to avoid hurting people’s feelings.
We’ve allowed calls for civility and decorum to be weaponized, and our own best intentions turned into tools of treason against our country.
I should have stood up taller, spoken more loudly, but until now, nobody would have listened anyway.
I think some people – and some of you are reading this, or at least there’s no reason you shouldn’t be – are much more ready to listen now than they were six months ago, or five years ago, or ten, or twenty.
There’s still time to turn this around and be the nation we’ve been pretending to be…but it’s going to take work, and it’s going to cost some people some friendships, and maybe worse.
Suit up, kids. This really is the “moment” I’ve been telling you was coming for a long time, and it’s gonna get uglier before it gets better.
(Somewhat ironically, a technical error prevented me from getting an archive of the first night with the “new set.” I’ve embedded the livestream from Facebook here, but I’ve only got the last ten minutes locally and right now FB is not letting me download the video directly. If/when I can get this archived on YouTube, I will. For now, you can find it here: https://www.facebook.com/144898762238389/videos/496311224370776). Yes I know the audio’s out of sync.)
Why is Bernie running as a Democrat?
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders takes the stage on the first night of the second 2020 Democratic U.S. presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan, July 30, 2019. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
One of the most-often asked questions I see – or depending on who’s talking and what their purpose is, accusations – about Bernie Sanders is why he’s running on the Democratic ticket. There are a number of reasons, some easier to see and obvious, some not so much.
First and foremost, he’s running on the Democratic ticket because the two major parties have the process locked down and an independent candidate doesn’t have a chance in hell at winning.
Now maybe – MAYBE – if he finds a way to get on the national ticket without the democratic party at this point, if they decide to keep playing to power, depending on how things go over the next couple of months – after all this work and in this time of great crisis that screams out with the voice of millions that the things Sanders has worked for must be done now, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that he could win the electoral college as a write-in. He needs 270 votes. 9 states, for a total of 53 electors, don’t allow write-ins.
The rest – 483 – do, with various requirements. In Michigan, for instance, you have to file a letter of intent by the beginning of September and have a list of electors. Each of them must have been a resident of the congressional district for which they’re voting for one year, and a US citizen for ten. But right now I think the inclination of the campaign is to do everything possible to save the one remaining party structure that *could* be saved to energize a united President and Congress to get some things done. Certainly that’s not the Republicans, so the Dems are what’s left.
But in the end, Bernie’s allegiance is to this country, not a party. How that will lead him to decide the best way to pursue this situation, I don’t know. I think if he made sure to dot his I’s and cross his T’s he could be an eligible write-in candidate. Depending on how many districts in which he can win the popular vote at that point, he’s got a margin of 213 electoral votes to work with.
But in the end his allegiance is to doing the right thing for the people of this nation. He’s entirely uncorrupted by special interests.
That’s. Why. The. Party. Doesn’t. Want. Him. To. Win.
That’s why the power that props the party up, including all the media companies who make all the big campaign donations, do not want him to win.
That is why it does not require a conspiracy. The big money interests, including those who control most of the information you see, do not want a healthy, educated population. Having a healthy, educated population creates opportunity for you which means it creates competition for them in an “open market.”
This is not an open market. If this market was open, we’d all be making plenty. We’re not.
This is not a free country.
You are not free when you don’t have your health.
You are not free when you aren’t taught quality critical thinking skills. You can not be free if you can’t think clearly. You can’t think clearly if you’re surrounded by carefully crafted messaging with the direct purpose of keeping you stuck where you are and falling like you have been for decades.
It would be easy and poetic to say that we’ve become so advertising-besotted that we can’t tell a real message from an ad anymore, but sometimes poetry doesn’t tell the story. The reality is not that you are stupid.
The reality is that you have been kept ignorant. What you hear and see shapes what you believe, and no matter what your race, class, culture, identity, background, current status, that is the truth.
There is a very small group of people who control what you hear and see for their own interests. That is also the truth. In much the same way it does not require a formal conspiracy for like interests to pursue like ends, it does not require traditional authoritarianism to keep at least enough people at heel to discourage the rest who aren’t from rising up in protest.
One of the ways that works is through recursive authoritarianism. So and so has this going on at worked that could be improved or has ethical considerations that concern you, but it’s clear that your best interest, and the company’s, is to simply not acknowledge that out loud. So you agree to say nothing and now whatever your position, you have to use it to ensure nobody else does either. Authoritarianism.
You are constantly at risk of losing your livelihood if you do the right thing ethically when you’re doing business. I have been constantly paraphrasing a line from Robert Heinlein lately: the survival of the species is the only universal morality.
Willful ignorance – the selfish pretense to stupidity
A whole BUNCH of people are about to hit what a lot of people, including people like me, have lived with most or all of our lives. It is not going to be pretty.
And where we are mostly not prepared is in our own minds and hearts to just admit that we have been wrong, and do something about it.
You are watching everything change, right now. It is changing precisely because IT HAS TO.
It’ll happen the easy way with good leadership – leadership that has consistently stood *against* all these abuses of power and resources, who has consistently worked in the best interests of *the people* and *the nation* and long-term sustainability and health and education and all the other things that go along with REAL freedom.
This is not an acute problem. This is the predictable result of a systemic problem. We can face that, or we can KEEP trying to pretend “it can’t happen here, not to us, we’re good people, my deity wouldn’t do that to me, we’re just trying to [insert euphemism to rationalize all the ego-driven bullshit of this planet], we’re doing the right thing, all these people who want all these changes are just self-interested, I just want what’s best for me.”
What’s best for all of us is to start working together instead of against each other. Abundance is everywhere. We have everything we need. We just refuse to let go of the things we don’t, because they’re comfortable. Because of that, we’ve all become far LESS comfortable than if a few of us weren’t so obstinate about their comfort.
The future is scary. The unknown is scary. The future is unknown. What is known is that we are at a key point in human history when we can no longer continue to pretend and act at the game of political leadership. We must lead, individually starting with ourselves, and in the world starting with a capable, competent, non-nonsense president who walks into the office with zero allegiance to anyone but the people who elected him.
The global coronavirus pandemic absolutely must be dealt with in an immediate fashion, and it is – as much as the ham-handed boobs currently running the country can manage it. But we absolutely must not ignore the lessons it brings, because frankly there will be more if we don’t re-prioritize IMMEDIATELY. To simply deal with the immediate problem is to remain unprepared for the next one.
Bernie Sanders understands that and is doing his best with a system that has been corrupted almost beyond repair. Personally, I hope if he loses the Democratic nomination he chooses to move forward as a write-in candidate in any state where he can’t get on the ballot as an independent, immediately if he loses the Democratic primary, which *right now* it appears he may, but we’ll have to see what happens. The concept of faithless electors exists, too. We have no idea how the national conventions, which are traditionally where the nominations take place, will turn out yet. A lot can change between now and then. I think it would be a mistake to start running independently *before* the official things are officially official, unless they try to drag ass past the deadlines for indys or write-ins to get on ballots.
But if they officially reject Sanders as a nominee…boy. I just can’t see him as head of the Senate. That’s not his job. And the offer would have to be made – which would immediately break Biden’s campaign promise – and he’d have to accept, neither of which we know anything of right now.
