I Swear This Isn’t Like All The Other “What Is To Be Done” Essays, Part One

(By which I mean it's really good!)

Less than a week after the big disaster, I’ve been seeing a lot of What Is To Be Done essays. I don’t mean I’ve been reading them. Sometimes I look at the lede, and sometime a couple of paragraphs; if there are bullet points I may scan them. But I gotta say, apart from a couple of really hard, clear-eyed articles — like this one from a beehiiv site (!) previously unknown to me — they’ve all been kind of a drag and who needs it.

I mean the authors’ hearts are in the right place, which is something you have to expect from liberals and leftists, bless them/us; on the other side this quality is entirely missing. But there’s generally something amiss. In some cases it’s a form of wishful thinking, or wishcasting as the kids say, about how the fascists and the dumb Americans who voted for them will be sorry when the consequences of their actions catch up with them (the leopards-eating-face fallacy, I think Bertrand Russell called it).

In some cases it’s a version of main-character syndrome, in which the author imagines him- or herself a political consultant (some of them actually are political consultants, more’s the pity) with a lot of advice for the Democratic Party, which absolutely does not give a shit.

I was leaning toward not doing my own version of this but, here’s the thing: Though I have written a few things in my life that I was embarrassed about later, I have never been ashamed of anything I’ve written because I write in good faith, always. I don’t believe there is any percentage in writing at all unless you’re trying to find and/or tell the truth.  (That’s why propagandists piss me off so much.)

So if I offer you some bullet points about what I think is going on and mmmmmaybe some ideas (I’m not vain enough to call it advice) about what to think about during this trying time, I hope you understand it’s sincere at least and mostly not bullshit. I mean I freestyled that thing last week about education as a hedge against fascism and, looking back at it, I think it was pretty much dead on. So the odds are in my favor!

Here it is — Part One in a planned series of Two (who knows, though, I’m on a roll):

Congratulations, you were right — they’re fascists! A little self-congratulation is in order. I’ve been saying and some of you have also been saying that these guys are fascists for years, and that as of this year they’re not even subtle about it, while all the alleged smart guys were saying “oh ho ho no that’s going way too far, no wonder I’m wearing a nice suit on a big Sunday morning TV show while you are a bum in rags.” A few of them, you may have noticed, started to tentatively pronounce the f-word in the last few weeks of the campaign (“ffffff… ffffffffff”), but they’re mainly keeping mum about it now.

But anyone with eyes and ears sees Tubby coming right out of the gate, not with promises of bread and roses for his suckers, but with promises to definitely throw millions of immigrants into concentration camps and then into the sea, and his factota like prospective Attorney General Mike Davis are threatening to throw his enemies in prison. And then there’s the straight-outta-Hitler garish pseudo-patriotic New Nurembergs.

Yet you still have rightwing dipshits going “oh ho ho no” like Nicole Russell, an idiot previously unknown to me, who at USA Today literally says “we should know by now that he often doesn't mean what he says,” which of course is part of the fascist fun and games — Russell hasn’t read Sartre (“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies… they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly”), but she probably knows Salena Zito’s “take him seriously but not literally,” which is like the Sartre quote restated from the fascist perspective; and when Trump starts (as, again, he is telling us he will do) seizing people who are or appear to be immigrants, she will tell us, well, actually, people get arrested all the time; and when the camps appear she’ll tell us, well, FDR made concentration camps too, and when the white native low-income workers who are supposed to replace the displaced don’t materialize she’ll tell us it's the fault of trans people or college professors, and when they get hauled in she’ll tell us, well, actually, people get arrested all the time…

This is of course terrible, but there is a silver lining: You weren’t fooled. I don’t mean it’s good in terms of bragging rights. (Though it is!) I mean it shows you’re clued in, so when people around you have a thousand different ways of interpreting what’s happening, while some people may mistrust their own instincts, you have good reason to trust you own.

Don’t get too cocky, alright, but at least on this very important matter you’re one up on the dummies.

Don’t fantasize that they’ll be sorry. I’ve seen a lot of liberals talking, sometimes in the form of anecdotes, about undocumented immigrants who voted for Trump who believe he won’t deport them because they’re One Of The Good Ones, or young women who voted for Trump who think he’ll protect abortion rights, or how people mad about the price of eggs think Trump’s 100% tariffs will make eggs and everything else cheap. The implication is usually that such people will face a rude awakening and see the error of their ways,

It’s gotten so I’m disinclined to believe their stories, the way I disbelieved the New York Times focus group chucklefucks who claimed they bought a McDonald’s Happy Meal in Joe Biden’s America and it cost them $100 or some shit.

Clearly I think a lot of people made an erroneous cost-benefit calculation with their vote. And maybe some of them had reasoning processes as ridiculous as has been portrayed. But, don’t forget, most people don’t think very much or very hard about politics. They may not have thought it through. They may have seen the gazillion Trump ads in their market and thought, well, guess it’s Trump.  

But sure, a lot of them, among the elites as well as among the rabble, are looking forward to the violence Trump suggested he would visit on their enemies. I understand why the notion that such people will wind up hoisted on their own petards is comforting to a lot of liberals. Hell, I like the idea of people who think they’re going to hurt me hurting themselves instead, too. It’s just about the least evil way of taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.

But it’s a comfort that’s bound to backfire on you. I say this not from the social-media-amateur-political-consultant perspective, in which you scold liberals for thinking anything bad about the poor salt-of-the-earth lambkins who visited Fat Hitler on the world and tell them that is (retroactively) why you lost the election.  I don’t even say it as a moralist. I say this as an observer of human nature who recognizes it as wishful thinking, which always has a low probability of coming true.

As previously mentioned, part of the fun for fascists is that they don’t have to be consistent. The current era is not like the days of President George Herbert Walker Bush, where he said “Read my lips, no new taxes,” and then he raised taxes and everyone laughed at what a hypocrite he was and he lost an election. Trump literally does something more hypocritical than that (or absurd, or insane) every damn day and no one cares.

So the people who are down with the program are beyond the reach of comeuppance. If something bad happens as a result of their own actions, they’ll just blame some out-group they haven’t yet blamed for that thing in particular. And as for the less-engaged voters, well, they probably don’t even know what they voted for.

The improbability of making them see what a mistake they’ve made is not as important as the emotional and political hygiene of forgetting all about trying to make them feel bad for it. If you and I and the good people within our reach want to talk about what was wrong with the other side’s choice, we will, for the time being, be talking among ourselves. Which is fine, because it dispels the despairing idea that nothing matters, not even a better future for us all. It strengthens our certainty and our arguments for such time as we have to sell an alternative.

But right now we’re not selling any alternatives to these people that they’re inclined to hear. They simply do not give a shit. Treat the truth as a shield until such time as it can be useful a sword.  

Part Two tomorrow!