03 Nov We Won’t Go Back!
Remember that brief shining moment when Kamala brought back the joy? Not Camelot, not theater, but real electoral joy? Fun, and excitement, and hope—oh dear god, hope. Before we got worn down again with anxiety and depression, barraged by propaganda, before the same old crap washed over us like waves rinsing away our trust. Trust in elections, trust in government, trust in the courts, trust in journalism. Trust in democracy.
Hold fast. It can come again.
But first, freedom is the need to tell the truth. Here are 5 truths.
1. The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times editorial boards both endorsed Kamala Harris.
It’s not true that the papers didn’t endorse, although that’s how it’s being reported by other news organizations owned by other billionaire oligarchs. Owners of the Post and LA Times did not allow the papers to publish the endorsement. That’s what happened. That’s fascism. Three days later, Post and Blue Origin owner billionaire Jeff Bezos (founder and CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing company) published a disingenuous op-ed claiming contradictorily that since Americans no longer trusted the free press there was no point in taking any principled stand. (Honest to god, he wrote this!) He admitted that it would be easy to blame others for the Post‘s fall in credibility, but “a victim mentality will not help” (well, gee, I guess that’s that). He confessed that the timing was “unfortunate” while noting that one of his companies’ executives had in fact met that very day with Donald Trump—although of course there was no quid pro quo. That, my friends, is fascism, despite the 200,000 subscription cancelations. Democracy dies in Amazon.
2. We’ve been here before. We won’t go back.
There was a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York last week on October 27th. Rerun the speeches to hear them, or read them online. This wasn’t fascism approaching, this was fascism arrived. I will not repeat here the filthy sexism and racism that was masquerading as “just jokes.” This time it staggered even Republican apologists. To date, no one has apologized. Meanwhile, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk (he, Bezos, and Facebook/Meta techno-oligarch Mark Zuckerberg jockey for the title) is literally paying people in Pennsylvania to vote for Donald Trump. He doesn’t even have to pretend otherwise; he can afford not to. When Trump says just vote for me this one more time I promise you won’t ever have to vote again, he means that! Nor is there anywhere else to go. We are forced to promote these words, this very commentary, on Facebook because there is no alternative except to live in solitude with no ways to reach anyone.
We need to get serious about trust so that these companies are broken up the way they were 100 years ago. Amazon, Meta, X, and the rest. We’ve been here before. We need a new leader like FDR all over again, one with overwhelming mandates who was able to accomplish such muckraking. Perhaps the first woman in this country’s history will not only win the presidency, although it’s one hell of a start, but also win the House and keep the Senate, or at least begin the process of peeling off fascism.
3. “I am not a fascist.” —Donald Trump, 2024. “I am not a crook.” —Richard Nixon, 1997.
We’ve been here before. We won’t go back. Fascism is the byproduct of fear. Fear gets defined as multiple while power is defined as singular: we speak often of having fears, but rarely of having powers. Possibly the most pernicious use of power is to convince us of its singularity. Yet we manufacture it faster than any other emotion, while fear longs to be dissolved. Oblique brilliance, this ugliest and coldest of energies annunciates itself in the negative, by absences: absence of trust, absence of light, of love. Fear requires consequent force. Here, Trump has been useful to the techno-oligarchs; otherwise, he’s ultimately unimportant to them, merely a tin-soldier distraction along with the 75 million people in his cult who voted for him and have by now completely forgotten any trust they may have once had in any of their own institutions.
4. But we’ve been here before, and fascism ultimately does not prevail.
Why? Because it is brittle, unnatural, imposed. Fascism is patriarchy at its essence. It requires the monopolizing of power, which in turn requires the defining of power as a static and singular object, the better to monopolize it. This is why tyrants always yearn for more power, more, more. Fluid, multiple, scintillant powers cannot be employed to such an end, because they are uncontrollable and spontaneous—like laughter; because the more powers that exist the more likely they are to be distributed via many vehicles and channels, and the more channels, the less likely it is that consciousness can be destroyed. Recognizing these qualities of power—diverse, multiple, active—is a political act.
For instance, fame is a sort of power, but power is not necessarily a sort of fame. Wealth is a form of power, but power isn’t necessarily a form of wealth. Youth and age are types of power, but power isn’t a quality of age. The more powerful you become, the more rigid and abstract are the laws you forged and follow. The more powerless you are, the more fluid yet specific are your realities. The specific inevitably leads to an awareness of the unique and a respect for difference. It is the opposite of control. Control becomes fascism’s imperative so that we believe they are winning. They are not.
5. We are winning.
In this specific electoral case, Republicans are the losers and fascists the biggest losers of all. When Republicans lose the electoral college this year, they will have done so four times out of the last five (2008, 2012, 2020, 2024). And when they lose the popular vote, they’ll have done so eight times out of the last nine (1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024).
The country is not with them. The populace is staunchly opposed to them on abortion, on social security, on expanding healthcare, on education, on the basic issues we care so passionately about. Don’t fall for the lies. Carry yourselves like winners, women, because you are.
Early voting numbers are off the charts because people are getting used to voting earlier and because Democrats usually vote early. Republicans were encouraged not to vote early but then their leaders flipped them, and proclaimed wow go vote early! We don’t know whether they are secretly voting for Kamala or even for Nikki Haley, but it’s always better for America when more people vote, and voting is up across the entire electorate, specifically early voting is astronomical in two states—Georgia and North Carolina ( close to 40% of the electorate in Georgia has already voted). That’s astonishing. That’s women, voting on Reproductive Freedom, it’s women, Black and White and all pigmentations—and it’s men of color, too, folks. Plus, the youth vote always comes in late—and it’s huge this year.
So don’t believe everything The Washington Post refuses to tell you. Remember Hannah Arendt’s words:
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
—Hannah Arendt
Then go out there and do anything and everything you can to save an idea: that this Republic shall not perish from the earth.