A People With Nowhere Else To Turn

As conditions worsen, people are grappling with the stark realization that those in charge are either powerless or unconcerned with their plights. This reckoning will determine everything

On Sunday night, a crowd of protesters gathered outside the homes of Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito. By all accounts, the protest was peaceful, save for a weaponized rumor that Alito and his family were so “threatened” that they were whisked away to an undisclosed location. Right Wing personalities and even Fox News were quick to jump on the lie, using it to build a frame narrative that pro-choice Americans - accounting for roughly 70% of the population - were potentially dangerous should the expected overturn of Roe V. Wade occur.

Totally predictable stuff, and yet another instance of an incredible ability by conservatives to take any situation, even those in which they are actively stealing the rights of others, and turning it into a narrative where they are somehow the victims. Surely, this is the beginning of a defense of the ruling and the strategy by which the reactionary action will be handled. Status-quo liberals and moderates in newspapers, magazines, and on cable news networks - always concerned first and foremost with property and “decorum” - will wring their hands and more or less tut-tut the entire scenario into existence as women and people of color and the poor continually feel more and more of the power of the state and have their very lives threatened.

It’s a repulsive moment in repulsive times. The impromptu protest is a brief shining light in a forest of dark and muck and filth. That people would rally together in solidarity to voice opposition to something that is not only fundamentally wrong but aggressively punitive strikes a cord of hope. After all, we are the only shot we actually have to stop this authoritarian project from coming into being.

That regular citizens came together, and are coming together around the country, to call this cruelty out for what it is, exposes a larger problem and the origins of how this came to being in the first place. Since the leak of Alito’s memo to Politico, responses on a political level have been depressingly lacking. President Joe Biden has said little on the subject and provided even less in terms of direction. The Democratic Party was able to muster an embarrassing “attempt” at a bill to codify the right to reproductive choice, but the bill was dead on arrival. Some voices are loud and angry while others are muted and dripping of calculation.

We’ve been left, for all intents and purposes, on our own by a government that has been systematically bought and sold by the wealthy and powerful, its processes corrupted in order to privilege an economic system tuned to the desires of a minuscule population of the elite, and every issue, no matter how dire or pressing, reduced to little more than an opportunity for a press-release and some noxious fundraising.

The feeling of white hot panic that many are registering for, perhaps, the first time, is a realization of conditions that have been formulating and present for the majority of our lives. These systems of power are not only corrupted, but incapable of handling the issues of our time. They are buckling by the moment, and the answers we seek in remedy will determine largely the future of this world. While the Right Wing is answering the question by forming a symbiotic, ideological bond with international illiberalism and authoritarian structures, the rest of us face a startling choice.

Either join together and demand something better, saner, and fairer, or stand on our own while the dark wave washes over us.

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2022 has been a year of almost endless frustrations. The narrative that many Americans harbored following the Election of 2020 that Biden’s victory might usher in a new era of sense, order, and possibly even renewed bipartisanship disappeared almost as quickly as the hangovers from the copious bottles of champagne imbibed in celebration. Despite promises that Biden, as an old lion of the Senate, could restore order and bring Republicans back from the brink, the GOP has only grown more extreme and more captured by authoritarians. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, his entire agenda has been stalled by members of the Democratic Party.

Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema - the former having voted against the lackluster attempt to codify Roe - are, sadly enough, perfect avatars of this maddening moment. Feasting on donations from special interests and the wealthy, they, along with other Democrats who hide behind their performances, exist as a check on the federal government doing almost anything beyond passing tax cuts and continuing the corporate welfare state. Anything else remains unachievable, including address a myriad crises and the declining nature of rights and material conditions.

In this, the wealthy have effectively, over the course of decades, been successful in completely kneecapping the federal government. This has been the dream since the New Deal era of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the subsequent progress regarding regulatory bodies and an emphasis on civil liberties. Now, power resides with the states, where gleeful authoritarians like Governor Ron DeSantis are cutting their teeth on a new power base ready for the taking.

Regular Americans are now stuck between two bodies. A Republican Party that is fully embracing minority-led authoritarianism in the name of establishing an evangelical, patriarchal state in league with grossly wealthy oligarchs. And a Democratic Party that is fundamentally powerless to do much of anything besides perform rituals that reaffirm a sense that something is definitely wrong but also communicating that not much can be done about any of it.

As things get worse at almost every level, whether it be the pandemic and its aftermath, the crisis of global climate change, or even declining material conditions, the options are stunningly few in number. The GOP offers an answer, albeit a horrifying one: join a totalitarian movement and revel in cruelty and power as a weapon. The Democrats lack much in the way of a plan or a narrative that can either diagnose the problem or attempt anything even approaching a solution. Their ties to concentrated wealth and neoliberalism as an operating system almost completely keep them from even so much as whispering how we have arrived at this terrible point.

These are conditions that resemble past moments and crossroads where the very existence of liberal democracy and representative government were endangered and, for a period, replaced by totalitarian concepts and death cults. The lack of answers or solutions, after all, necessitates someone providing answers and solutions. And the resounding, crushing silence only invites the most dangerous among us to step up to the bar.

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For many, the pandemic was a moment of awakening. Watching the government fail, both intentionally and unintentionally, to curb the loss of life and suffering served as a wake-up call to those who expected this system to continue on unabated or, somehow, serve in our interests. Instead, concentrated capital maintained its stranglehold over our political processes, ensuring that our fates were completely eclipsed by the need to serve businesses and the wealthy. As we struggled, they profited.

Another aspect of this moment we shouldn’t soon forget was the alarm of empty shelves in our stores. Supply-chain issues. A healthcare system so overwhelmed that its workers were forced to wear garbage bags, go without necessary protective gear, and turn people away because of overcrowding. The very nature of our existence has been so thoroughly determined by the wealthy that any disruption or fluctuation is an invitation for disaster.

Now, even as we pretend the pandemic is over and largely ignore it as many did previously during the administration of President Donald Trump, other cracks are rippling through. Parts and items are becoming unattainable. Even baby formula is becoming scarce. The idea that a free-market society predicated on profit and exploitation is the only and best means of ordering life is becoming undeniably a laughable proposition.

Again, it is these moments, where the worlds we thought we lived in begin to fade, that authoritarianism is most prevalent and dangerous. People are frustrated, even those who pay little attention to the workings or intricacies of government or politics. Those cracks that are starting to show lead to questions about that ordering and the systems. And authoritarians feed on just that.

Grassroots organizing and solidarity are essential should we manage our way out of this. The Democratic Party will not change should it continue to feel comfortable without reform. Stalwarts know that voters will continue to pull the lever when faced with the choice between them and Republicans who are actively overreaching and dangerous. Having those votes in their pockets, they always turn to the mythical “independent voters,” or, rather, a white person with no interest in these cultural issues. It guides the party continually toward the Right, especially as the GOP grows more and more extreme.

On the issue of abortion, if left at this pace, Democratic leaders will perform outrage and then immediately fundraise off the developing fear. Then, undoubtedly, the tide will continue going forth, taking gay marriage equality and all of the reform and progress of the previous century. We’ll live in a brutal and violent society without anything approaching an alternative.

Now is the time to find something better. We have to reverse course, reject this neoliberal, free-market obsessed system because it is not only exploitative and intentionally unequal but also because it does not work. The space we have to foster that movement, to find an alternative, to battle our way out of this corner, is closing by the second.

There is a yawning vacuum of power in this society. Someone will fill it. The only question now is who.