Election Day

It's finally here. Tomorrow, some things will be different. At the very least, we won't be bombarded with political ads, we'll stop having pundits in every single news outlet trying to interpret polls, and so on. Chances are good we'll have some idea who our next president is going to be, come this time tomorrow. 

It looks very much like Joe Biden is going to be our next president. I'm going to continue, as if Joe Biden is going to win, because if Joe Biden doesn't win, our best hope as a nation is what amounts to a general strike. A massive campaign of civil disobedience and non-compliance would be our best way forward. I don't have much hope this would happen in the case of Donald Trump being legally afforded another four years in The Oval Office. There is nothing, at all positive or hopeful in the short to medium term, if Donald Trump legally wins the election, so for today, I'm going to act as if there is some room for the hope we still have some room to fight for decency, humanity and a future better than the one we're currently on course for. A Joe Biden win does mean we have to fight for all of these things. We're going to have to fight Joe Biden and the majority of the nations power structure for them. Biden and the majority of the Democratic Party, not just limited to the Party leadership and apparatchiks and including it's average voters, want everything to go back to normal. Unfortunately, a large portion of the country hasn't come to understand "going back to normal" guarantees the fascist movement, having finally overtaken the conservative movement it has gestating within for forty years, gains further power. 

This fascist movement grew, coalesced and became strong enough to take power, while the people for whom the "normal" was relatively comfortable, were going about the "normal." If you count the two years of the presidential campaign cycle, it's already taken about four years and six months for the majority of the people for whom the "normal" was very comfortable to come around to admitting the Trump cult, is in fact a fascist movement. The majority of those comfortable in the "norm" still won't admit it has wholly overtaken the conservative movement. They are holding fast to the hope the "Never Trump" conservatives will be able to salvage it. In the meantime, they're assuring a further rightward move of the Democratic Party by celebrating the people who helped tend the ground, plant the seed and grow monster which got out of their control to become this fascist movement. The "Never Trump" conservatives and Republicans are angry because the movement they have spent their lives giving intellectual cover for it's racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and so on, has told them to take their intellectual cover and shove it. These things have been implicit in conservatism and the Republican Party, for decades. Starting in the 1990's, with the surge of conservative talk radio, and leading right into the coalescence of the Tea Party, the appetite for explicit bigotry and sexism of many forms became paramount. 

All of this brings us here...

I've already started seeing some version of this sentiment on social media. Let me be clear here, what I'm going to say is in no way advocating anyone gloat over a Joe Biden win, for all the reasons I mentioned already. Biden is indeed, the lesser evil. Gloating over the fact that you have two evil choices, both of which are more or less guaranteed to act in service of the the nations hierarchy of disposability or to advance it, is an evil itself. Let me also be very clear, I will be very happy to know the nation didn't basically just shrug and say, "Sure, let's go with the full out, unimpeded fascism!" It should be clear norms and traditions aren't enough to prevent a fascist from dismantling the safeguards helping keep the nation from falling into authoritarianism. Personally, I'd rather not spend much time worrying about whether this Patreon is going to land me in a detention center somewhere, and as oligarchic, and authoritarian as the centrist perspective is, this kind of aggressive authoritarianism offends their sensibilities, so we still have more breathing room in the fight to dismantle the hierarchies of disposability. Leaving out the blatant rounding up of dissent gives centrists more room to continue in the fantasy we have a healthy democracy. 

One of the few near guarantees we have in this carnival sideshow, is a Biden win will guarantee we are going to experience an onslaught of being implored to "move forward and look to the future." The sentiment will be raining on anyone giving time to political media like a monsoon. We will be told it's time to "heal the nations divides." We will be hearing this from Republicans and Democrats. Democratic Party pundits, political operatives and the like will be saying it non-stop. 

Republican and conservative people we know will be turning to this kind of sentiment. Republican Party leadership will be saying it's up to the president to bring the country together, while doing everything possible to inflame white fear and anxiety to a fever pitch. Conservatives and Republicans are nothing if not reliably repugnant. 

Among the things which needs to be said, straightforwardly, is the fascist movement in this country understands the weaknesses of liberalism and democracy. They understand the centrist and moderate will go to great lengths to prove themselves "the bigger person" or "the adult in the room." They are going to exploit this. It's what fascism does. It exploits the sentiments of liberalism, to undermine them. They are going to use it to advance their cause, undoubtedly. The problem being, to understand this and to believe it, one has to admit we have a fascist movement, which the elixir of American Exceptionalism prevents in centrists and moderates. "Oh, they're just poseurs, nothing to really worry about," despite the sharp rates of increase in fascist violence in the last decade. 

One of the other malicious things about this "move forward" sentiment is the kernel of truth it holds. We must deal with the schisms currently creating fears of violent unrest and are also helping keep the fascist movement alive. We don't do this by "moving forward" in the way we historically have, which is through an avalanche of platitudes and rhetorical devices, allowing us to once again fall into the Somatic slumber with dreams of American Exceptionalism. This isn't healing our divides. It's erecting rickety, gated bridges across them which Donald Trump has made clear are built of extremely flammable frames, and covered in combustibles, with rivers of lava rising under them. We've not done well at responsibly addressing our schisms. 

Another malicious truth about this kind of "move forward/forgive and forget/we've all been through a lot" rhetoric is it puts the impetus to heal those divides on the people who have spent the last five years being daily confronted with the truth of a society which deems them disposable. The people for whom the entrance of a true, blatant fascist movement into the political mainstream is simply a matter of having been made morally uncomfortable or for whom it has been a disturbance to their delicate sensibilities, instead of a threat to their material well being, are the only ones who could even begin to consider "moving forward" as simply a matter of forgiveness, letting bygones be bygones, and not recognizing as central to the nation those people who have faced genuine material threat and fear. For many of us, the last five years have meant being plainly told our lives don't matter, and any inconvenience or intrusion into the comfort of the lives of the people who believe our lives shouldn't matter, should be met with violence. We've watched the celebrations of that violence. Phrases like "All Lives Matter" are a rhetorical device meant to simply convey the message, "We don't care what kind of preventable death you experience, stop inconveniencing us with a demand to have your humanity recognized. We have better things to do." 

Of course there's no shortage of people who will want to begin to attempt to gaslight the rest of us and act as if this is hyperbole, let me point you to the number of dead from a disease whose spread could have been prevented, and for which the preparative measures had been dismantled ahead of time. 230,000 dead. Research says 130,000 more could be prevented with a simple mask mandate. Do you remember the number of assault rifle toting "anti-mask" protests there were this summer? Do you not remember the number of conservative pundits publicly ruminating about who was expendable? How about Puerto Rico? If we start to drill down, the list of people who are disposable and expendable grows, quickly. 

As uncomfortable as it may be, we can't ignore the hierarchy of disposability as one of the foundations from which this fascist movement has grown, and we have to honestly acknowledge the real meaning behind All Lives Matter and its other rhetorical kin is Only Fascist Lives Matter. Fascist lives matter because they overtly adhere to and support the existence of the hierarchy of disposability. We have such a hard time defining fascism because it is essentially so simple, we look right past it. Fascism is the belief in the hierarchy of disposability as fundamental, essential, natural and inescapable, with the willingness to adhere to whatever set of beliefs is necessary to establish an internal logic that enables it to be carried out and celebrated with the requisite pageantry and sadism, for the culture in which the particular fascist movement grows. 

People support the hierarchy of disposability because they believe they reside somewhere in it which makes them among the least likely to become immediately disposable. It's how we find deep strains of racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and classism invading liberation, justice and equity movements. We talk about privilege, and often it's a very complicated topic when we begin to examine the privilege of different identities in contrast, but ultimately, privilege is society caring more about whether or not you die unnecessarily and preventably, and how much suffering you encounter in life. The higher up you reside on the hierarchy, the more society cares. Everyone who finds themselves in a position where our lives matter less, owe a debt to Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi for bringing this reality to the foreground, and we pay it by being the allies and accomplices Black Lives Matter needs. 

I'm a white, heterosexual, cisgender, male who is not physically disabled. It affords me a great deal of privilege to walk through the world this way. It's equally true that as a person with a severe mental illness, there is factual evidence which says society believes I am more disposable than someone who doesn't live with a severe mental illness. I wrote about this recently, after seeing the news of the murder of Walter Wallace Jr. by police. Even as I am privileged in many ways, the hierarchy of disposability effects a good deal of that privilege because it devalues the lives of people with severe mental illness. 

When they tell us, "it's time to move on," or "it's time to try to bring the country together," we have to ask what they've done to change the reality that so many lives matter less. A not insignificant portion of this country (roughly 40%) have spent the last five years gleefully expressing to the rest of us how little our lives and well being matter. They have invented entirely new slogans to tell Black Americans their lives don't matter. They've gleefully insulted rape and sexual abuse survivors for deigning to suggest we might possibly shouldn't have a president or a Supreme Court Justice credibly accused of rape. I mean... These are people who have consistently decided they'd rather be on the side of Nazis (and we're talking about people carrying swastikas and giving the Roman salute, self avowed Nazis) than they would with Jews and other people Nazis always target. 

Things are not going to get any better by just acting like this hasn't all happened. Things get better because we demand there is a more substantial legal and material safety net put between us and fascists who want to use government and the law to target everyone who is lower in the hierarchy of disposability than they perceive themselves to be. Things get better by removing the kinds of conditions which both allow and encourage fascism to grow. We institute universal healthcare, so no one, including fascists and would be fascists, has their entire lives destroyed by a single medical emergency or illness. We institute labor protections, a living wage and the rest of the basics the rest of the industrialized Western world have realized are essential parts of having a stable society. People who are not living on the precipice of ruin through one chance misfortune are not neurotic and anxious enough to be easily motivated to the kind of violence we've seen from the far right. It should be very clear, that comfortable people are much harder to radicalize. It is, after all, the most comfortable among us who are least willing to motivate to change the factors which are making radicalized motivation so easy. 

Things get better when we stop supporting the ideas and attitudes which uphold the hierarchy of disposability as well. One of the central barriers we've faced with this is the idea of every possible issue having two sides which are equal in intellectual weight or factual representation. Climate change has become the go to example here, but there are many others. It is factually incontrovertible that expanded access to the entire gamut of options related to reproduction and reproductive healthcare results in fewer abortions. There is no genuine controversy here. There is no reasonable perspective through which one can say they want to see fewer abortions or are against abortion, and support measures which remove barriers from women being able to make all of the choices about their reproductive health and decisions with their doctor, and their doctor alone. For media outlets to continue to represent this as a set of perspectives which have some equal weight is not only disingenuous, it's factually inaccurate. Continuing to portray this as anything other the religious beliefs of some people being levied against the ability of some women to have the autonomy follow their own consciences in relation to their own health and behavior, as a way to create political motivation among religious groups is irresponsible. 

When we say, "Defund the police is too hard for people to understand," it's being disingenuous. It's not too hard for people to understand. The basic premise is very simple to understand. There is a long list of the kinds of calls police are currently required to respond to which would be better served by people specially trained in other ways would be more well prepared to handle. If we take those responsibilities away from police, they don't need the same level of funding, and we can use that funding to create the other kinds of departments/agencies/units to respond to those calls. It's that simple. There is no reason to treat a majority of the criticisms against this approach, because they have little to no basis in reason or contact with factual reality. To be clear, as well, every disingenuous response to the idea of changing the fundamental way we provide emergency response when Black Lives Matter advocates propose them, is devaluing the lives of Black Americans, because of how disproportionately they are victims of police violence, and it's devaluing the lives of people with severe mental illness, because we are sixteen times more likely to be killed by police than people who don't live with severe mental illness. It's saying Black people deserve to be killed by police because they're Black and people with severe mental illness deserve to be killed because they are sick. 

These examples or any of the many other instances of people's lives being devalued in the hierarchy of disposability, get any better because we decide to "move forward." Just because we've moved forward, doesn't mean we've made progress, and progress is what undermines the ability of fascists to expand their numbers and gain power. Our nation's political life is essentially atrophied because so many of these other factors have created this environment where political involvement is a matter of necessity. Essentially, without the privilege of the time and resources to participate, one has to make sacrifices to other necessary, important parts of their lives in order be involved. This isn't an environment which makes things like purposeful and thoughtful self education, cooperative effort or any of the rest of the things which actually make for a healthy democracy available to the majority of Americans. 

Along those same lines, we need to take a very hard look at what law enforcement in this country is. Things like protest, assembly, the petition for redress of grievances are part of the democratic process. They may not be directly related to the electoral process, but we can look at our own history to see the electoral process is not the measure of how well we are tending and maintaining the democratic process. If this year has taught us nothing else, it's that policing as it is currently practiced and as an institution, is a fundamental barrier to a peaceful democracy. We need to start being very clear about what we value more, the convenience of violently enforced order to protect profit or the ability to live in a society and culture which has a number of built in immune responses to fascism, like a tolerance for and respect for the need to protest and petition for redress of grievances as a natural result of the shortcomings of democracy. We can't continue to have both. Policing, as an institution, is dangerously cozy with fascists. After this year, this can not be denied by any individual interested enough to educate themselves on the topic. In order for policing to change, we have to change what we expect of policing, and especially what we believe are the parameters of acceptable forms of protest. If these two things don't change in concert with each other, we will be a fascist nation, because fascists will continue to exploit these weaknesses, and eventually ride them into power, legally and legitimately or through violence. 

Biden may well likely win. It just means we have all the same work to do, instead of having to wait in horror for tomorrow's newly announced horrifying absurdity. Unfortunately, every person who expresses the "we need to forgive and move forward" without demanding something of actual material progress is telling us they are going to be part of the opposition to what needs to be done, specifically because they're going to be unconsciously aiding the fascist, by walking right into the manipulation of their arrogance the fascists have been demonstrating for a decade or better now. 

Don't let these fools tell you there is something wrong with you because you can't just write this all off as some kind of drunken party shenanigans or something. It's not up to you to take initiative to make this right, but it is up to us to put forth the effort to force them to making the changes which will help undermine the fascist movement and give all of us more material protection from the next phase of their attempted grab at power.