WE'RE DOOMED!!! Pick up our latest issue on the newsstand to find out why!
Well.
Yesterday, The Atlantic had a piece out detailing why 1/6/21 was practice, and how we're doomed and a fascist autocracy is our future. Unless you read their article. Which says we're doomed no matter what, but at least you'll be informed.
(I won't link to the article, or to tweets, because fuck them.)
I harken back to the halcyon days during the Trump regime, when we were all "resisters" and fighting "the Man." We flipped seats in 2017. We flipped the House in 2018. Nothing could stop us!
And now, eleven months into the Biden Administration, and all you see is an assembly line of doom.
What? Did they think that electing Joe Biden would solve everything? Just like they thought electing Barack Obama would? Of course they did.
The problem with our vaunted influential liberals is that, even after all this time, they don't grok that a war of attrition isn't won by a single victory. This isn't Middle-Earth. There's no Ringbearer throwing the power of evil into a volcanic furnace which destroys it. This is no epic poem. It's a quotidian, day-to-day struggle. And to expect that one election will do away decades of fuckery is not only asinine, by naïve in a very dangerous manner. Dangerous because it posits just that doom scenario: Nothing you do matters. Things aren't made glorious immediately, so evil will creep back and win and establish eternal dominance.
Needless to say, this is unhelpful. Every criticism of the Biden administration for not using the tools of the enemy against the enemy—and thus proving itself to be weak and not interested in stopping fascism—helps fascism. After the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rounded up everyone expeditiously, incarcerating them for years without trial. Extraditing whom he perceived as his chief rival in exile is what landed Michael Flynn in hot water. Our Twitterati would be well-pleased if Pres. Biden emulated Erdogan. But Erdogan is an autocrat, focused solely on his own power, not on the good of the nation and its institutions.
Many on the so-called left are fine with autocracy, as long as it's left-liberal. The calls for "just arrest them" are part of this. It's not that they have no understanding of this country and what makes it work; it's that they think that the edifice of our democracy is unfit for the times. We must destroy norms just as much as the right wing does in order to preserve democracy.
What we learned over the past four years is that many of the norms which bind us together were just that: agreements. They were unwritten, uncodified. So, obviously, they were not fit for purpose. But these norms have contributed to every social and political advance for the past five decades. Those crying out about imminent doom want no truck with these norms. They want revenge, much like the other side. And once you get into revenge versus justice, well, there goes the ballgame.
But, as the title of this piece hints, there's a pecuniary element to this. People make good bank being Cassandras. They sell books, they get on talk shows, they go on speaking tours. All while saying that these activities will be banned when the inevitable fascist dictatorship descends. Instead of sober assessments and possible countermeasures, they wear sandwich boards. But, they make money in the meantime, and build a cultish following of like-minded nihilists.
If America means anything, is that all are equal before and subject to the law. And rounding up political opponents just for kicks is anathema to that. I have no doubt that Merrick Garland's Department of Justice will do its job. Those who inveigh the most against him and the department are those who want perp walks without solid cases behind them. We might agree with their politics, but their preferred methods are no different.
Of course we're at a point in our democracy every bit as perilous as in 1860. Using the enemy's methods is not the way forward. Principle matters, or nothing matters. Republicans have managed to sully principles for decades in pursuit of absolute power. Adopting those methods will not bring in a new breath of freedom, but continue the descent. Those who traffic in despair are just as guilty in their way for the degradation of our politics as the coup plotters. A liberal autocrat may not turn out to be what you wanted, when all is said and done.