Every counter-revolution is a throw of the dice
The Supreme Court has officially thrown their lot in with a fascist coup. They have indicated their absolute willingness, indeed excitement, indeed collective engorgement for the fascist power grab. In the last seven days they legalized bribery, then said that January 6th was cool and good, then made it impossible for anyone except the now-bribable court to regulate corporations, then said that the president is indeed above the law.
In their Solomonic jurisprudence regulating pollution even if you do so legally through the EPA is in fact illegal and the EPA needs to offer an alternative solution to the poor repressed polluters, while not having housing is a crime and the state doesn't need to offer an alternative solution in shelter beds or programs to punish you.
Each of these decisions would have been reason enough to [redacted] these [redacted] lampposts, but as a barrage of decisions within a week it has been wildly demoralizing, even destabilizing. On social media there has been significant and understandable gnashing of teeth and renting of garments, particularly among left-liberal lawyers, politicos and court watchers and among the non-profit workers in regulation, public health and environmental organization threatened indelibly by Chevron.
Watching these folks, often pretty cynical and pessimistic but ultimately confident about the possibility of working within the system, be finally confronted with the fact that no one is going to save them, that the law is no more bulwark against the fascist creep than any other part of the state, indeed it is one of the leading edges of the fascist putsch, has been as hard as it has been to watch every group of (predominantly white) folks that has had to go through this over the last ten years.
To be clear, this sympathy is not for the true ghouls who have cheered for police bashing our heads in, the Atlantic columnists and MSNBC contributors and substack stars who pretend outrage when this happens but turn around and call us uncivil and crazy for protesting, fuck those people, they also [redacted].
No, I'm referring to the folks who are in or aligned with the movement, but can't quite accept this requires the total destruction of the USA. The people who show up for the big marches but usually aren't there for the spiciest days or the small direct actions. The politically engaged but not quite revolutionarily committed. The desire for schadenfreude, for told-you-sos and knowing jokes, well, it's understandable. But that desire reflects that inside me, inside most of us I imagine, there is still a piece, however small, that hopes that maybe someone is going to stop this, or at least slow it down. The piece that wants good things to happen without us having to make it happen. The exhausted, frightened parts of us that need rest, and care, and love, that don't want to have to fight for every inch and still mostly lose.
The Democrats have been doing what they can to let us know that they will not save us. After eight and a half months of telling us to shut the fuck up and stop talking shit about Biden as he abetted and committed a genocide that will see him go down as one of history's truly evil men, they suddenly panicked when he proved to be bad at doing live TV and are now demanding he step down, in June, when it is actually too late for such a process to happen with anything like democratic and popular appeal.
This strikes me as refracted guilt for their part in participating in the genocide, for propping up Biden and his policies, for defending the Democratic party and screaming vote blue no matter who while Gazans cried for help and democrats replied with billions and billions more dollars worth of bombs. As they can't admit to their blood lust and their fascistic order-following, they are only able to express their revulsion and horror with themselves through a projective ageism and ableism by which Biden is unworthy not because of what he and his administration has done, but because he quite clearly can't function cognitively as he once could.
(For the media there is another self-interest functioning here, of course. The major papers, particularly the New York Times, want Trump desperately to win. The skeleton crews left at the rags are all bootlickers who, no matter personal preferences, have tied themselves to the masts of their sinking ships. They believe (wrongly) that Trump will make traffic, attention and relevance return like he did in 2015/16. They want to be the vanguard of the #resistance again, and if they need to fluff the god-emperor to be so, well, sobeit.)
But presidents are already de facto immune from criminal prosecution, and have been ever since Nixon was pardoned, which is why W is a meme painter and not in long term detention at the Hague. It's not just presidents: immune too are the bureaucrats at FEMA who intervene in disasters by arresting looters and shutting down mutual aid projects, the Bureau of Prisons workers who keep millions of people in concentration camps across the country, the border guards who destroy water deposits left in the desert so that migrants crossing on foot will die of heat and dehydration, the police who murder people extrajudicially on the street every day, the SSI and insurance adjusters who deny coverage and kick people off the insurance rolls and out of hospitals and programs on technicalities. All of them operate within the broad protection of the law, and, unless they are spectacularly corrupt, blatant, or unlucky, will never face punishment from the system. Sure, technically they're not immune from prosecution, but come the fuck on. They get a paycheck for doing it.
Ditto Grants Pass, the decision which makes it legal for cities to criminalize sleeping outside even if they don't have shelter beds available. For those of us who have been fighting and organizing alongside our unhoused comrades, we know that this is already the law of the land. Even when shelter beds are technically "available," they are so restrictive, shitty and temporary as to be more or less useless. Being unhoused always already opens you up to harassment, arrest, displacement and state violence. All the decision does is close down a laughably narrow avenue of redress available through the courts. It shuts down the hope that change might come.
With the exception of Chevron, which effects federal agencies, a group of people unfortunately willing to follow the Supreme Court, and which empowers corporations, actors malicious and powerful enough to have an enforcement mechanism, nothing has fundamentally changed from these decisions. These decisions are less legal changes than political ones. They close off hope for redress through the legal system, they shut the door on a particular avenue of change. The Supreme Court has indicated that not only does the judicial branch not offer a bulwark against government overreach, but it is willing and able to overrule any changes it and its Federalist Society handlers and corporate gratuity providers don't like. The court has said, once and for all, that reform is impossible as long as they have their say, they are the ultimate deciders.
They may have, in one fell swoop, destroyed the legal capacity of the non-profit sector and government agencies to even create the fantasy of possible change. They may, in other words, have destroyed what tiny scraps of power the Non-Profit Industrial Complex has managed to hold onto.
All of this is enough to despair, to put our heads down and our shoulders up, to shrug and say "whats done is done, good things can no longer happen, lets get ready for a Trump dictatorship". And while we should probably get ready for the possibility of a Trump dictatorship, I don't know that this looks significantly different from what we would do to get ready for a Biden reelection. Because the fact of the matter is, the only way any of this gets better is if we change it, and the way we change it is by building capacity where and how we can, to change the things that matter to us where we live and that affect us and our loved ones.
Fascism seduces its enemies by lulling them into resignation, by having them say "well, the fight is over, might as well admit defeat". The orgy of judicial violence of the last week sure wants you to think it's the end of the fight. But it's June, the election is still four months away. Some brave foolish soul could put a bullet in Trump or Biden, or a Covid infection could come and finish the job, as could a coronary or a blood clot. The economy could implode. The streets could fill with rioters once again.
Despite their confidence and their Project 2025 and their chest thumping and their Supreme Court, the MAGA movement is currently weak af. Trump's rallies are poorly attended and demotivating affairs. Eight years of political struggle have taken away his entertainer's gift for insult comedy, rascally implication and broad appeal. His rants are increasingly incoherent, angry and peppered with reference entirely internal to the shrinking MAGA world. The vast majority of small donors have been bled dry by the ecosystem of scammers and hustlers the grew fungally in Trump's shadow. Exhausted by false prophets like Q and maimed by long covid, all-meat diets, colloidal silver, hydroxychloroquine and supplement stacks, aging out of political relevance, they are more isolated then ever from family, friends and communities that once held them. This makes them perfect marks for fascism, but incredibly vulnerable and disorganized political actors.
The Supreme Court decision and Biden debate response has surely put a pep in his step, but the fact is, this movement is sloppy. These naked power grabs, these declarations that presidents are kings and bribery is legal, these are the kind of things you're supposed to do AFTER you're indelibly in control. Trump's campaign and his allies openly calling for concentration camps for migrants and imprisonment of his personal enemies is not, in fact, how you win power. Of course, they're planning on stealing the election anyway, of having a coup. But the more and more openly they reveal their coup, the more likely they are to face opposition. Coups work on the element of surprise, conspiracy and speed, and besides some incredibly gullible beltway pundits, there is no one left to be surprised.
By attempting to dictatorially strip away what few paths of reform and change lead through the system, they may have ripped the very pillars on which they stand out from underneath them. They have removed the mask of liberal democracy, the polite mask of liberalism, consensus and popular sovereignty. They may quickly discover why so many fought so hard to keep that mask in place.
The proposal of Trump and his movement is to roll back both Reconstructions. (I join many historians who refer to the civil rights movement of the 50s through the 70s as a "second Reconstruction"). Lacking the political power to reinstitute the world of plantations and Jim Crow beyond the prison walls through the liberal system, they are willing to eject everyone except their chosen friends from whiteness, to define whiteness down to its most ideologically committed rump, and to give up the pretenses of systemic order and social peace.
As George Jackson, Huey Newton, Assata and the BPP all argued and demonstrated, Black folks in America have always lived under fascism. And the indigenous populations of this continent have lived under five centuries of war and occupation. There has never been anything to save here--everything is stolen, even the founding traditions of freedom, democracy and equality before the law. It can be taken back.
There is a lot of wealth concentrated in the city centers. There are a lot of nice buildings with loads of climate controlled space. Huge warehouses full of goods, food, everything we need in the suburbs and the box stores and the Amazon dispatch centers.
Where are the solar panels warehoused? Where are the food stockpiles? Do you know the local RX distribution centers that deliver to the compounding pharmacies?
How can we meet each others needs when we don't have cash to give to the mutual aid funds or a big enough online presence to fundraise? If you were suddenly able to move about where you live with full freedom of action, if anything was possible within the current arrangement of infrastructures, where would you go first? What would you do?
Imagine if all your friends didn't have to pay rent and work: what projects would they pursue? What world would they build? What steps can we take toward that world now?
The point is not to pretend we don't need to solve the problems of the coup, the move is not to retreat into fantasy. It is an exercise to re-engage desire in the face of despair, and to begin building through and toward that desire, rather than reactively against our enemies. They will have to be pushed aside and destroyed, and it will be a huge effort, but that is the ugliest, least pleasant of our tasks, and we will find the best most joyous ways to do it on the path to a better world.
It's important to feel your feelings and not repress them. But rather than make plans in reaction to the court's latest outrage, build the desire for freedom and flourishing in your heart, and imagine what the first step you can reasonably take toward that freedom is. Gather your friends and your comrades around you and find people who share that dream. Then take that first step, and see how the world looks from there. Then take another, and look around again. The thing is to start.