It's The Fascism, Stupid

We're going to have to be our own leaders now. The ones we hired are broken.

This essay is cross-posted on Substack. Visit The Reframe to see it on the main site.

Hello, cousins. This one is going to be a ramble I think. Travel this week has put me behind the 8-ball so I'm just going to take the main thing on my mind, let her rip, and hit send when I'm done, so let's see how it goes.

As I said, I was traveling this week. In fact, the first thing I learned when my flight landed a few days ago was that there had been a fatal accident in Washington, DC involving an American Airlines jet and a Black Hawk helicopter at Ronald Reagan International Airport. Now, "Ronald Regan" is a former president belonging to what is now our Nazi Party, and he is the spiritual father of what the Party has become, having convinced much of the country that the idea of shared society is a foolish myth and that any government that attempts to organize our shared life together for the benefit of the humans who live in our society is a fearful danger. It's the sort of malicious lie that inevitably ends in corruption and slavery and genocide, as we can now see. And yes, he's revered these days by his own party, but also by the opposition party, the Democrats, and by most of our institutions, and so this monster of our recent history gets to have an airport named after him in our nation's capital.

The last thing I learned before turning in that same day was that our unbelievable piss-head of a President—a man who had just maliciously and illegally shut down the government body responsible for air traffic safety, by way of maliciously and illegally shutting down the entire government—had decided to blame this tragedy not on his deliberate sabotage of air traffic control, but on the existence of people in air traffic jobs who are not white males—as naked an expression as can be imagined of the white supremacy that makes up the core of his appeal, and which is the exact quality that makes him so beloved of white evangelicals and Republicans everywhere.

Somewhere in there, the First Buddy, a Nazi apartheid billionaire/corruption mogul whose name means Flair Odor, who was not elected to anything at all, seized control of our federal infrastructure and gave himself (and apparently a bunch of his unvetted corporate interns?) access to the federal Treasury and the federal payment structure. Has he helped himself to our Social Security fund? Who's to say? What is he going to do with everyone's data? Who is he sharing it with? Nobody seems to know. Those who want to know can't find out. Those who could find out don't seem to give a shit about trying.

And every single piece of news I hear is either consistent with either: 1) a gang of fascist billionairist thugs deliberately trying to demolish every aspect of our shared society because doing so will make it easy for them to gather all the loot, in the same way that a bank is easier to rob if you've torn off the back wall; 2) a gang of fascist billionairist thugs attempting to seize ownership of every aspect of our lives and bodies so that they can enslave as many of us as possible; 3) a gang of fascist Christian billionairist thugs attempting to harm everyone who is not a white Christian man in order to satisfy their own loathsome bigotries; or 4) a gang of fascist Christian billionairist thugs attempting to burn the world to a crisp because they believe that the destruction of the world means that their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will return to give them what they know they deserve (which is an eternal gated community with an omnipotent HOA) and to give all the other billions of humans on the planet, who these Christians hate, what they all deserve (which is an eternity of conscious excruciating torture).

To put it mildly, these are repugnant human beings with vicious and cruel intentions toward their fellow humans, moving ruthlessly through our society like a scythe through wheat, energized by hatred and greed, made gleeful by malice and cruelty and comfortable by the pain of others, who literally see the end of human existence and the destruction of a habitable planet as goals to pursue, not a fate to avoid.

And I ask myself: Who does this? What sort of person wants this? What sort of person supports it? And then I answer myself: Tens of millions of normal-seeming people, that's who.

It's tough to sit in the knowledge that tens of millions of our neighbors are evil, so eager to demolish our society, so eager to cause others pain and suffering, so eager to jump right into the Nazi pool before it's even all the way full and splash around. I know some will point out that they aren't evil people, they just support evil, or they're ignorant about the fact that what they support is evil; they're bamboozled by bullshit, turned around by trickery, flummoxed by flim-flam. I myself usually frame it as an evil spiritual alignment rather than people being evil. I don't have a lot of energy for these fine distinctions today. This shit is so flagrantly evil that missing it must take some act of will. I'm not issuing any moral hall passes today. We must take sides, as the man said.

Let's see what our elected leaders are doing to take sides.

Well Republicans are in lockstep in favor of it with almost no exceptions whatsoever. They know their brand, which is corruption and cruelty and greed, and they fight for that sort of thing, and that makes them very popular with people who want that sort of thing.

Luckily there is another party. Let's see what they're up to.

Oh dear.

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The first thing I learned Saturday morning was that Senator Amy Klobuchar had, for no good reason, decided to make herself the face of complicity. I don't want it to seem like I'm singling Klobuchar out, because she's certainly not alone in the Democratic Party in her viewpoints, but I do think she ought to be highlighted, because her comms team did the best job of getting her out there as the voice of Team Still Open for Business by landing her a prominent spot in the paper of record. She gave a genuinely upsetting interview, every bit of which conveyed the message "everything is normal and we are going to keep doing what we're doing" which is great to hear from a floor manager of Best Buy and you've fallen 8 percent behind your third quarter projections on service membership upsells, but not so great to hear from say a fire chief when your house is presently being doused by for example flamethrowers wielded by for example neo-Nazis. During this interview Klobuchar didn't even mention trans people currently being erased from public life (or if she did it didn't make the edit), but she did say this:

It is very clear that, if there is a middle of all of this hot mess of division, Americans want [Democrats and Republicans] to work together when we can and find common ground.

To risk impoliteness: the fuck I do, and the fuck anyone I talk to does. I don't know anyone who in this environment wants such a fool thing, but whoever they are they ought to be sealed into a large Jello mold to avoid harming themselves and others. It is, to say the least, an absolutely insane thing to say as an empowered member of the Senate at a time when fascists are seizing power and moving with an astonishing lack of ruth, enabled specifically because one's own party has spent the last half-century finding ways to work with people expressing their desire to demolish society to satisfy their bigotries and their greed, particularly when the party that just demolished you in the recent election did so specifically by spending decades promising to never work with you and to oppose you at every turn and then keeping that promise.

Speaking of insane things to say, here's the Democratic Party’s newly elected chair, Ken Martin: “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”

Now, this is a wild thing to say at a time when money in politics has hollowed out our democracy to the point that a handful of billionaires now control a majority of the world's resources and are using their vast wealth as leverage to steal all the rest, during a fractured time when anti-billionairism actually might be the only issue that enjoys bipartisan support, when one of the billionaires who was formerly deemed 'good' is literally looting the public safe in front of our very eyes. It does illustrate the Democratic leadership's dilemma, though: They still think there are good billionaires, because they are invested in protecting the Billionaire System, and so they seem incapable of even thinking about dismantling it, which is a problem, to say the least, given that dismantling the Billionaire System is what we need to do.

I know who is in the market for the American-Nazi-party-slash-the-American-Corruption-Party; it's people who are deeply excited about the harm that's coming because they've been assured those they hate will be harmed first and worst; it's those who notice that they are favorably positioned next to the blood chute, and assume the fascist billionaire slaughter of everyone else is going to deliver enough runoff that they'll get to feed, too. I'm not sure who is in the market for a party of people who plan to work with the gang expressing a desire to slaughter our shared life together and then rob the corpse. Those who are excited about the prospect of atrocity and corruption already have a party that has proved that it will fight for atrocities, and it has got no appetite for and no need of partners. The rest of us would like somebody brave enough to fight for us, or at least aware enough to know that's what's needed.

Back in the 90s a centrist Democratic hack came up with a message: IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID. It was successful for a time; successful enough that everyone has spent the last 30 years treating him as if he is smart no matter how many times his subsequent centrist proclamations proved wrong. Today's message couldn't be clearer. It's the fascism, stupid. It's the billionaires, stupid. It's the people who told us they want to kill public life so they can control and enslave us, who we know will lie about almost anything but were clearly not lying about that, because—look, look, fucking look!—they are doing it.

Chuck Schumer, who is the longstanding leader of Senate Democrats, and whose caucus keeps voting to approve Trump's nominees and agenda, spent the day of the hostile seizure of the federal Treasury making a series of snarky social media posts about the price of eggs and tomatoes. Good for you, buddy. That'll do it.

Hakeem Jefferies assured us that no matter what happened God was on his throne, and good for God I suppose, but you Hakeem Jefferies are the leader of Democrats in the House. What seat are you in, buddy? Have you noticed? God on her throne is probably wondering what the fuck you intend to do with your own position. When Republicans are in this position they shut everything the fuck down until somebody is willing to agree to do something structurally racist or sexist, or to kill a bunch of homeless people, or whatever the hell else it is that makes Republicans cheer.

I sense no appetite for a "works with fascists and billionaires" message. I sense a desperate thirst for a "fights fascists and billionaires" message. If you sense something different, I don't know what to tell you and I have no idea what you're going to be able to tell me. Yet the message from highly placed Democrats is pretty clear: Yes, we'll be working with the fascists and the billionaires, even now, even now. We're going to be treating even this as normal. You're on your own on this one.

It appears we're going to have to be our own leaders. Most of the ones we hired are broken.

I'd like to think about how.

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I just have a few ideas today about being our own leaders. First let's get the foundation right. Let's play the right game. Let's do what fascists can't do. Let's pay attention to direction. Let's let these basic tenets of alignment help assure us that we are actually working for antifascism, and identify who is actually aligned with us. It won't do if we start with a determination to find common ground with those who despise common ground. It won't do if we start by abandoning others to the fascist offer to spare ourselves by looking the other way and pretending it won't be our turn eventually. It won't do if we fail to recognize that those who insist on being our enemies are not our friends. It won't do if we treat unacceptable things as if they are acceptable.

From that solid ground, I think we have a lot of options.

I think we should do the easiest things. This includes voting for the best available option every single time, I think. I can understand why this might engender some derision—JUST VOTE has become a sort of a shibboleth of lazy detachment—but democratic elections are the existing apparatus. If you doubt me, realize that consistently voting for the best (read the cruelest and most corrupt) available option is how the current gang grabbed power over the last few decades. Even if the current gang wants to demolish the entire democratic structure we'd better operate as if the apparatus is still going to be there—if only because that makes the job of destroying it more difficult for these anti-democracy supremacist thugs. Another thing I hear we should do is call your elected leaders, and I think we all should, actually, because it is relatively simple, and it often seems to work. Meanwhile we should start thinking about how to get leaders who lead, who don't need us to call every day to explain to them the extreme basics of their jobs. Which leads me to ...

I think we should do the harder things. (I'm speaking to myself more than anyone else). Voting is an occasional thing and, while it has been made artificially difficult for many, takes minutes or hours for most. Calling your reps to beg them to show up for us takes jus a minute. Finding and building community is harder, and messier. Changing spending habits and lifestyle is harder. Organizing your life to accommodate marches or strikes or local board meetings is transformative. This can all be daunting, and if you try to contemplate it all at once you (read: I) might decide to never get off the couch. It makes me think of when I first started to run. For the first weeks all I did was run to the end of the street and back. After a while of this, the habit was strong enough that I went around the block. Then I went around two blocks. Before long, I was stronger, and I would go a mile, then two. Eventually my usual daily runs were either 5k and 10k. Eventually I ran in 25k races, and half-marathons, and it was at those lengths, my friends, that I found my limits. In the same way, it strikes me the best way to start doing the harder things is to start small. So the question I have for mostly myself this morning is: What's at the end of my block?

By the way, the daunting challenge of the harder things is why I began by recommending the easy things. Easy things when practiced can lead to harder things. I'm skeptical that anyone who has decided that doing the easy things every so often is too hard is going to do the harder things.

I don't think we have time to spend on agreeing on just one method of opposition for us all to employ. We all have many different ideas about how to go about opposing fascism and demolishing the Billionaire System, and I don't think there's much use in spending any time arguing with other people who also want to oppose fascists about which is best, and I certainly don't see the use in arguing with people who don't want to stop fascists; there's just not much time for that even if it was a good use of energy, which it appears not to be. Take for example the idea of how best to politically organize. Some, like me, will want to try to take over the existing apparatus of the Democratic Party, replacing those who are there now. Others may want to try to organize a new party, or work outside of the party structure. That's just the question of organizational method within an electoral setting, to say nothing of all the different things we might protest, ways we might do so, programs we might start, groups we might form, issues we might focus on.

This lack of agreement can be distressing to me, because I think a totally unified method may have the best chance of success. It certainly has worked for our American fascists. However, I can't help but notice those of us that are unified around the idea that what we're facing is absolutely unacceptable, and must be opposed, simply are not unified around method, and the years of arguing about it haven't changed that. Ask yourself: Do you want to spend your time arguing for your specific method until everyone is with you, or would you rather go to work on the idea you align with, and meet the people who already are with you, and join with them around that mission?

Every time somebody expresses an idea, I've noticed somebody else immediately rushes in to explain why that isn't the best thing, and why another idea would be far more effective, and then both argue over it, and others join in, and before I know it we're all yelling at each other and in most cases I can't help but notice that there is literally no reason we can't do both ideas. There are a lot of us. Let's just do both.

There are those who think we just need to work with the existing Democrats in power and hope for the best. Maybe so—they're right there after all, and good for you if you want to do that and I wish you all the success in the world. Because of how that has worked so far, I'm probably going to take a different approach, but what I've lost the appetite for is explaining why. I'd rather just work at what I think will be more successful, and I'd rather you leave me to that work.

Pick your lane and work it. Work hard. At least we'll all be working against fascism. I think it will give us results better than what we have today.

We should actually believe that diversity is strength. It seems to me this would include a diversity of ideas and methods for opposing fascists. There's an obvious benefit to a unified approach to anti-fascism: If we're all pulling in the same lane then we achieve a scale that makes whatever method we choose more likely to succeed. But there's a disadvantage as well, in that we'll only be trying the one thing, and one thing can be easier to oppose than many things. To return to the example of political organizing, think of forming a new political party—a real one, from the ground up, competing at the local and state level, not the usual presidential-ticket-only projects that pop up every few years. Would that be the best way to organize to combat fascists and billionaires? I have reasons for thinking it wouldn't, but you know how we'll find out? If somebody actually tries it. You know how we won't find out? If nobody does. Maybe it really is useless to work with the current crop of elected Democrats, but you know what? I'm not sure what happens if everyone stopped doing that. Might be worse then what we have. Maybe we need those people who still have energy for the current Democrats. Maybe lots of people doing different things is the stronger option.

I notice all too often those of us aligned with anti-fascism and anti-billionairism believe that anyone focusing on anything other than what we ourselves are focusing on is getting distracted. I frequently feel that way. But it strikes me that what might be a distraction from my own chosen mission might, for another person, be the mission, and that what might fail in one place might succeed in another. I think its possible that worrying about others being distracted might itself be the ultimate distraction. I think it's possible that a diversity of antifascist methods and focus may uncover a diverse web of opposition that fascism, opposed to all human diversity, simply cannot wrap its head around, and will therefore have trouble countering, with its monomaniacal focus on brutality and corruption as the only solutions to all problems.

So work your lane and let others work theirs. Allow the diversity of method and focus. Even if what some are working on does turn out to be less effective than what others are working on, it will all still be opposition to fascism and billionaires, and it will still be better than what we have today.

We should notice what's working to diminish fascism, support it, and replicate it. To return to the example of political organization, I personally am of the opinion that seizing the apparatus of the Democratic Party away from centrist fascist collaborators and billionaire toadies is the most interesting one to pursue, mostly because the apparatus is already built and Republican fascists have proved that it can be done with their own gang of centrists. They voted for every Republican over every Democrat, pretty much every time, but between elections they also worked as hard as they could to drum out of their party anyone who was insufficiently supremacist, to ensure that their options kept getting as maximally supremacist as they always wanted, to ensure that their penchant for greed and bigotry was being fully accommodated. This makes me believe we could do the same to take the Democratic party apparatus away from the current leaders until almost no norms-worshiping fascist collaborationists and billionairists remain, allowing us to get down to the real and needed and transformative business of a Second Reconstruction and a Newer Deal.

But if other methods are successful I'm happy to notice. If a truly antifascist antibillionairist third party really can take shape then I'm there. Or, perhaps, those seizing the Democratic establishment can notice the places where a third party is actually gaining ground, and stay out of the way, while a third party could do the same where convincingly antifascist Democrats are running. Or maybe (stretch your imaginations) those working with existing Democrats might actually convince some of them to pursue an anti-billionaire reformation of the country. Maybe a real coalition could form.

And maybe you think that this wouldn't work, and maybe you have your reasons, and maybe those reasons are even good ones. OK, maybe so. The good news for you there is it won't work, so you won't have to worry about it happening, and people like me who might have gotten in your way might be otherwise occupied. You know what else won't work? Yelling at me about it to try to get me to join your project. You don't even want me on your project. Why would you? I don't think it will work. Work on what you think will work, and keep your head on a swivel for the chance that what somebody else is doing is actually very effective, so you can figure how to replicate it and work with it. For me, I'll hope that your project is very successful, so I can do the same. If your project is effective, it will convince me in a way that arguing simply won't.

This is probably the main trick, you know. Holding tight to principles of antifascism and anti-corruption; falling in love with solving the problem of the Billionaire Scam and our foundational supremacists lies; holding our preferred methods loosely even as we work at them with everything we have.

Those are my dumb thoughts today, and take them for whatever you think they are worth. Lead where our present leaders refuse to. Start with a foundation of solidarity and notice who doesn't work from that foundation. Work your lane and try to stay out of the way of what other people are trying in their lane. Embrace a diversity of methods in opposition. Notice when what others are doing works and move to join with that success.

As long as it's working to defeat our current gang of bigoted fascists and corrupt billionaires, it's already better than what we have.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He was dressing as Pirouette in white when a fatal vision gripped him tight.