Tipping Point, Part III:
These Crazy Times Will Be Our Defining Moment
If you ever wished you’d been able to march with Martin Luther King Jr. or with the suffragettes, or if you ever wondered what you might’ve done to fight fascism in the 1930s and 40s then you’re in luck, because we are the ones who are being called upon to do it all again. Now.
The monsters are not coming, they’re already here. Will you join the fight against them, or will you run and hide and hope they eat someone else first? Or will you join them, hoping for scraps from their bloody feast? You can hide or try to join them if you want, but the thing about monsters is they’re always hungry - that’s why we call them monsters - and to them you will always look like food. Eventually, they’re gonna show up at your door and when they do they’ll still be hungry, even if they’ve eaten everyone else along the way. In the end - if you don’t want to be monster kibble - you’re gonna have to fight them, but if you wait too long you’re gonna have to fight them all by yourself.
These crazy times that none of us wished for - this week, this month, this year and the next - will be the defining moments of our lives. As history judged the people of Germany and Italy for the evil that grew among them during the 1930s, so shall we be judged for what we allow to grow here in America in our own time. In the current struggle, what we choose to do - or choose not to do - in defense of truth, democracy and equality is how we will be remembered and how we will be judged by those who come after us.
It’s time to choose a side.
The last 125 years of American history have included enormous progressive victories. At the turn of the twentieth century, Teddy Roosevelt took on the monopolies and the oligarchs and reduced the grotesque inequality of our previous Gilded Age. In the decades that followed women got the vote, we built the modern safety net of the New Deal, we defeated fascism in Europe and Asia, and we achieved massive advances in public health, public education, human rights, civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian and trans rights, and enacted far-reaching labor and environmental protections. Progressives have won every single one of these fundamental battles, and every single day all of these accumulated victories have made all of our lives almost unimaginably better - in the form of clean air, clean water, access to healthcare and knowledge, and the fundamental freedoms, opportunities and equality that our ancestors 125 years ago could only dream of. All of this progress, every one of these victories, is now on the line, because the oligarchs have returned, bigger and greedier than ever. Donald and Elon and the rest are trying to undo all the progress we’ve made since we drove them off the last time, and they’re trying to destroy the power of the state - which is how we beat them the last time and how we protect ourselves from this kind of predator. They’re doing all this in order to return us all to the position of helpless and obedient servants and underlings, too busy scrambling to survive to be able to pose any threat to their corrupt and ever-increasing power.
This is obviously not good news.
On the other hand, If you ever wished you’d been able to march with Martin Luther King Jr. or with the suffragettes, or if you ever wondered what you might’ve done to fight fascism in the 1930s and 40s then you’re in luck, because we are the ones who are being called upon to do it all again. Now. By rising against the depraved, insane and increasingly illegal wrecking ball that is the Donald and his minions we take our place alongside the ancestors who fought these battles the first time around. If we win now, we become the great protectors and we join the honored ranks of those who won all the great victories that came before. If we lose now, then we will be remembered - if we’re remembered at all - as those who stood quietly and watched while our great inheritance and our children’s futures were destroyed by predators and opportunists and fools.
And I get it, taking a strong political position can be complicated and inconvenient and uncomfortable, even if that position is in support of things as previously uncontroversial as truth, democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. Finding the resolve to stand for something that’s under threat - and to stand for it now, as opposed to standing for it at some point in the theoretical future - takes time and energy and focus we may not feel we can spare in the rush of our daily lives, especially now when everything feels as crazy as it does. That said, the failure to rise - and to rise soon - in defense of these American treasures and traditions will make our lives almost inconceivably MORE complicated, MORE inconvenient and MORE uncomfortable than those of us who’ve been raised in democracies and in peacetime can possibly imagine. And while we dawdle, MAGA has been destroying as much as they can as fast as they can. MAGA is behaving like they’re in the playoffs, swinging for the fences and running up the score, while we in the resistance are acting like the preseason hasn’t started yet, and for the most part we aren’t even on the field. We’re still dusting off our equipment and putting on our cleats. We’re squinting at the sky and wondering about the weather and trying to decide if today is the right day to come down out of the bleachers and actually join the game. Our hesitation and uncertainty is exactly what the Donald and his henchmen are counting on.
We need to accept that “normal” is over. We need to recognize the depravity and the severity of what is happening all around us. If Rumeysa Ozturk and others like her can be deprived of their liberty because of some non-violent thing thing they said or wrote in defense of the civil liberties of others; if hundreds of our neighbors can be deported to some nightmarish foreign gulag without due process because the government is afraid of them (or afraid of their tattoos); if Renee Good can be shot and killed in broad daylight - and in front of multiple video cameras - without any federal accountability or even investigation then it becomes clear that our world has changed. It becomes clear that the United States is no longer what it once was. It starts to feel less and less like we’re fighting against the possibility of some future American dictatorship, and more like we’re fighting against a rising American dictatorship that already exists, that has declared itself and that is at this moment striving to extend and solidify its control over all of our lives. The Donald has clear and obvious intent - he’s not even trying to hide it - and he has immense power. All that remains to be seen is whether we will choose to stop him, and whether we will make that choice while there is still time.
Those of us who are now adults grew up in an America where the concepts of truth, democracy, the rule of law, and the supremacy of the Constitution were overwhelmingly accepted and actively - if imperfectly - defended. That world - the world we grew up in - is already gone. We can rebuild it, even better than it was, but first we need to recognize what’s already been lost and the atrocious and existential nature of the choice before us. We can acknowledge the loss and the escalating danger and we can choose to fight back. Or we can ignore the growing threat and choose instead a life of complicity and collapse and endless retreat, every day less equal and less free, until our children face the same crappy prospects and brutal limitations that our ancestors fought to overcome so long ago, or worse.
On a personal level, it’s true that there’s a risk in publicly opposing a would-be dictator. How big a risk mostly depends on how many of us choose to take it: more of us coming out loudly in opposition makes all of us safer. For myself, in making the decision to publicly oppose our ridiculous orange wannabe king, I accept that there may be negative consequences for me personally. I also accept that it’s possible - likely even - that few people will read anything I write or hear anything I say, that those who do may not care and that my efforts may not provoke any significant change in the wider world that I ever encounter. That said, openly taking the side of equality and democracy and truth will make all the difference in my own life because it aligns me with what is good and what is real and what is worth fighting for. Because it allows me to look my 12-year-old daughter in the eye knowing I’m doing the right thing: because I will not have squandered the precious and unexpected gift of living in such crazy times, when our words and our actions might make such an enormous difference; because I’m doing what I can - as I must - to bring about the best possible world for her generation, and for all the generations that follow… Your mileage may vary. I can’t tell you how to make your choice, or how to determine which risks are worth taking given the specific details of your life, but I can tell you - definitively - that now is the time and that, in the end, silence and complicity will not protect you or your loved ones.
An imperfect metaphor: Think back to how the pandemic appeared out of nowhere and quickly came to dominate and disrupt almost every aspect of our lives, especially all those parts that were lived out in the world and with other people. And this happened whether we wanted to acknowledge the pandemic or not: even those Americans who didn’t believe the virus was real still died in their hundreds of thousands, and those who tried to ignore it and survived still had to navigate the severe limitations and constrictions of a world that had profoundly changed almost overnight. If we let a fascist dictatorship take hold here in America then the horrors and isolation of fascism will make COVID look like nothing at all, like the sniffles - despite all the suffering and all the death - because the pandemic mostly passed in a few years and because there were steps you could take to reduce the risk to you and your family. Because - unlike the pandemic - fascism will keep getting worse and worse over the course of decades, and because there is no way to reliably protect yourself and your loved ones from the arbitrary and unaccountable power of the dictator and the endless proliferation of shameless, idiot lackeys and goons who spring up around him like mushrooms… Because there is no good way to adapt to constant and increasing danger and corruption and incompetence and fear. It was unsettling to hear so many sirens during the pandemic, but most of those sirens represented an ambulance taking someone to get help. Under fascism, there will be less and less help to go around and - as time goes on - approaching sirens may come to trigger not relief but fear, they may come to signify not that help is on the way but that danger is creeping ever closer to you and your loved ones.
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When the story of our times is written, historians will record that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin rolled the dice - in Ukraine, in the Middle East and in his support of Donald Trump - in an improbable attempt to destabilize America and the West, and that he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Whether he wins or loses in the end is still very much up for grabs. The outcome depends almost entirely on whether we just sit and watch as he and his puppets burn down our world, or whether we rise in furious defense of our democracy, our rights and our lives. But as dangerous as it is, Putin’s Russia is just a shadow of the threat that was once posed by the Soviet Union. If the mighty Soviet Empire could collapse as quickly as it did, then we should take heart that Putin and his puppets - including Trump - may be more vulnerable than they seem, and that they too might soon be swept away. With this in mind, it’s worth revisiting some of the forces that led to the decline and the abrupt fall of the Soviet Union, in order to see how those forces might be relevant to our current task of hastening the decline and fall of the Donald and of his Spectacular Imploding MAGAverse.
The Solidarność trade union became the heart of resistance to Soviet power in Poland. It was an inspiration to opposition groups throughout Eastern Europe, and a pivotal factor in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The union’s name means “solidarity” in English. Solidarity was established in 1980, and it grew on the foundation of a slightly earlier and less well-known group called the Workers’ Defense Committee whose networking innovations and pragmatic idealism made possible the almost unimaginable change that followed.
The power and the apparent legitimacy of any oppressive regime is based on the fear and the silent obedience it inspires in its citizens. Out of fear, individuals silence and isolate themselves, because speaking out is dangerous and because you don’t know who you can trust. This communal silence and disconnection becomes the seemingly receptive void into which the regime broadcasts its constant lies and distractions. When we choose to set aside our fear we short-circuit the government’s mechanisms of control, which rely fundamentally on us silencing and separating ourselves in ways that the government simply can’t manage on its own. By setting aside our fear we reclaim our ability to speak and act in ways that are truthful and authentic, and we reclaim our power. By setting aside our fear we make it possible to rebuild the social connections that the regime has deliberately destroyed. One voice speaking truth in a desert of lies can remind us that we’re not crazy and that we’re not alone. Multiple voices can quickly join to become a chorus that drowns out the government’s lies and its appearance of legitimacy.
In 1976 the Polish government brutally cracked down on workers who were protesting against steep increases in food prices. Shortly after the crackdown, the Workers’ Defense Committee was formed by Polish intellectuals in order to provide legal and material support to the effected workers and their families. Forming a committee in support of people who are being actively beaten, persecuted, imprisoned and harassed by a totalitarian government is not an obvious, un-dangerous or even sensible thing to do. There was worry at the time that the government would use the establishment of the committee as an excuse for an even worse crackdown, and also that the government would discover the identity of the members of the committee and throw them all in jail or threaten their safety. Faced with these very real and immediate dangers, the founders of the Workers’ Defense Committee made a profoundly unexpected and seemingly insane decision. In late September of ’76, the Workers’ Defense Committee publicly declared its existence by publishing it’s “Appeal to Society and the Authorities of the Polish People’s Republic”. In the Appeal, they stated their belief that “Legal, financial, and medical aid is needed. Equally important is full information about the persecutions. We are convinced that only public presentations of the actions of the authorities can constitute an effective defense.” All of this is obviously relevant and true in our time as well. At the bottom of the Appeal - in a move whose boldness and transformational power is difficult to overstate - fourteen of the founding members of the Workers Defense Committee signed their full names.
By so publicly setting aside their fear, by refusing to hide from the government while at the same time openly supporting those who the government was attacking, the organizers of the Workers’ Defense Committee performed a contagious act of defiance and fearlessness and solidarity that shook the foundations of the seemingly indestructible Soviet Empire and helped bring about its abrupt and almost entirely unexpected collapse.
Adam Michnik was one of the important early members of the Workers’ Defense Committee. He went on to become a leading member of Solidarity. In explaining the principles that guide him, he wrote -
“Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.”
“Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.”
Michnik’s deceptively simple words are more relevant now than they’ve ever been to the survival of democracy and civil society here in the United States. The fearless solidarity that helped bring down the long-established dictatorship of the Soviet Union thirty-five years ago may well be key to defeating the Donald’s rising dictatorship today, and to disassembling the clown car of incompetent fascist enablers who’ve come along with him for the ride. As explained in detail in Part I and Part II of this series, Rumeysa Ozturk was detained by the US government because of her politely-stated and respectful opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. Kseniia Petrova was held in US custody for more than sixteen weeks, apparently - at least in part - because of her protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both of these detentions could be considered an act of solidarity by the Donald towards the uncivil societies favored by Putin and Netanyahu. Put more simply, the performative arrest and detainment of these two accomplished young women - and of thousands and thousands and thousands of others - is an attempt to scare the rest of us into silence and obedience and isolation. This should just make us louder, more defiant, and more relentless in our solidarity.
{{We’ll return to Solidarity and the Workers’ Defense Committee briefly in the sixth and final part of this series.}}
[This essay was 99% finished back in June of last year when I got flattened by Long Covid. Apologies for the long silence. I’m glad to be back. More soon.]