Protest

One of my daughter's close friends, a 13 year old, is at the DAPL protest: her parent is volunteering there as a medic / healer. They arrived on the same day that water protectors tried to clear the highway and were attacked by various police and security forces with rubber bullets, concussion grenades, tear gas, and a fire hose wetting them down in below-zero weather. More than a hundred people were injured; one person had her arm severely injured by a grenade.

News reports called the person whose arm was injured an activist, a perfectly good word for what she was on that day. Around the same time, an article by Astra Taylor in _The Baffler_ informed people that "Activists are types who, by some quirk of personality, enjoy long meetings, shouting slogans, and spending a night or two in jail" and "Activists seem to relish their marginalization, interpreting their small numbers as evidence of their specialness."

When Trump started to win in the primaries, some people brought up violence against anti-Trump protestors at his rallies as unprecedented, as something that signaled a kind of proto-fascism that hadn't been seen in recent America. And they didn't want to hear about the end of Occupy, about the people arrested for wearing the wrong T-shirt at George W Bush rallies, about how almost every protest in America that ever made a difference has involved violence by security forces. That was official violence and, I guess, not as scary to some people as unofficial violence, even though official violence usually additionally results in the victim being arrested and charged.

People in America, in general, reflexively dislike protest and support authority. That's as true for most of the putative left as it is for the right. Liberals are already starting to denounce the anti-Trump protests as violent or just ill-mannered, old-style leftists are eager to denounce protest movements for "individualism", and the right is, of course, bringing out old standards about professional protestors.

The people injured in the #NoDAPL protests are not being injured by fascist brownshirts: they are being injured by traditional American use of state and local security forces. Those forces are just as unimpeded by Obama as they would be by Trump. Maybe Trump will be even worse. But what's happening at the DAPL protests is fully in keeping with American history, especially the history of what happens to native people when their land has some kind of resource.

Protest strategy in the Trump era is going to be difficult to work out. The people newly encouraging protests are the worst kind of fair weather friends: when someone like Jonathan Chait writes "The day after the election, protesters swarmed the streets of major cities shouting that Trump was 'not my president.' Good for them." you know that this good-for-them is going to last about a month before Chait gets alarmed and returns to form.

I'm not encouraged by the recent, brief upsurge in support for protest against Trump. It's not being generalized to cases like the DAPL protests where shocking abuses by security forces are ongoing, because that would involve condemning the system as a whole instead of just half of it. People are too eager to return the system to a nonexistent age in which stability and safety meant that protests really were bad for everybody.

Scott Eric Kaufman

Anyone who knew him will have heard the news already.

I really didn't know him. I only corresponded with him for a while.

I'm evidently going to have the Clash's Stay Free running through my head until I find some way to think about this, so here it is: I once, at his invitation, wrote an extended doggerel / drinking song about his death, adding on to an earlier one about the mishaps that he chronicled. That will have to be it.

[Begin chorus]

They tell of a man from Californiay

Who thought that his diss would be done some day

The Devil looked up, said "I'll make him pay"

So drink one for the troubles of SEK

[end chorus]

Now SEK's list of trials is long

And we'll see who's still standing after this song

He was beat up in high school, he didn't belong

But it was in grad school that things went wrong

[Chorus]

And when his thesis had just begun

He turned against Theory, said that wasn't fun

The New Historicism is the one

He's stuck reading and re-reading Jack London

[Chorus]

The doctor told him about his thyroid

He didn't want his wife to be annoyed

"If I hide it from everyone I'll stay employed"

So four months of concealment he enjoyed

[Chorus]

Now SEK came to his office door

And found two students going at it on the floor

"This will make a good story" he thought before

The Sexual Harassment Office sent letters galore

[Chorus]

And when he was down, and his thoughts were thick

His gloom was interrupted by Honda Civic

The car slammed into him and was gone in a lick

At least six months of rehab went by quick

[Chorus]

But the most annoying were Internet trolls

Threats of bodily harm will take their toll

They sent letters to his boss, and to every soul

They could find in the whole county's Email roll

[Chorus]

He got pictures of the husband of his friend

Having sex with a horde; he thought that was the end

Should he tell her? He went and hit "send"

Now he can't go home, or with thugs he'll contend

[Chorus]

After all those troubles, he still wasn't drowned

Well, it was absurd, but this might be the crown

Overpayment of library fines will bring him down

He's no longer a student, just a proper noun

[Chorus]

He told us all this when he started a blog

And how fate or the Devil made him jump like a frog

The hiring committee looked on agog

If we hire him -- then our luck will fog

[Chorus]

The Devil looked up and laughed and laughed

The diss was done, SEK was on staff

His appointment wasn't tenure track

He'd be lecturing freshman till Hell and back

[Chorus]

The Devil liked what he did see

"I'll make SEK live eternally

He'll crush people's souls, and turn them to me

Academics will cry as I laugh with glee"

[Chorus]

When the Devil's plans caught up the poor sod

That brought the eye of an angry God

Volcanoes and plagues came down in turn

To stop the Devil, SEK must burn

[Chorus]

He looked at his smoldering car in despair

SEK looked up, shook his fist in the air

"I've survived again, and as you can see

There's nothing more you can do to me"

[Chorus]

As he raised his arm with a defiant shout

A massive lightning bolt snuffed him out

The electric charge was so whole-hog

A freak power surge erased his blog

[Chorus]

And that was the end of SEK

To his memory we drink today

Lest we get his luck, get squashed like a bug

The rest of the bottle we now will chug

Circular and literal firing squads

Liberals are worried, and the form of that worry is expressed as "we must all come together to fight Trump." So the trope of the circular firing squad comes out. If leftists criticize liberals for losing this election and not defeating Trump -- and for predictably leading us to more Trumps -- then they are forming a circular firing squad, metaphorically shooting at their friends, and so on.

So let's look at what's going on with Snowden. His existence is precarious, to say the least: he lives on Russia's sufferance, and if you believe that Russia wants to make nice with Trump, they could easily ship him off to America for trial, which would be a nice distraction for Trump and would get him some credits with the security state. How would that trial go? Well, Trump's pick for CIA head thinks that Snowden should be executed as a traitor. So we're talking literal firing squads, or some other method of execution.

Needless to say, Snowden is important to the left, for obvious reasons. You would think that he'd be important to people who are interested in encouraging resistance to Trump. After all, we're going to need both Snowden's past information about the security state and the future information of any new whistleblowers in Trump's Presidency who may be either encouraged or frightened by what happens to Snowden.

Obama has the power to stop this. The President can pardon anyone, for any reason, for anything. Obama has said that he doesn't want to and brought up something about Snowden not having presented himself for trial, but Snowden doesn't have to: a Presidential pardon would work anyways. But Obama is not going to, and moreover, I haven't heard anything from the people freaking out about Trump saying that he should.

We aren't allies. People on the left may defend the system, but the system will not defend them in turn. I think that this is a critical realization for everyone to have in the next few months. Keep this in mind as liberals denounce protest, as they are already doing.

Time to work for what you actually believe in

As I mention in comments to the post below, we may be nearing the end of the Sixth Party System in the U.S. The mathematics of how U.S. elections are set up create a two-party stable system, but those parties can be replaced. The same factors that make a third party challenge unviable unforgivingly destroy a second party that falls.

People have been talking about the supposed crash of the GOP for a while, but in a two-party system that is so evenly balanced, it doesn't seem very likely that one could fall and the other remain steady. Really both parties are in horrible shape, and either one of them could go, or both -- transmuted into something else with the same name or outright replaced. This raises the specter of fascism, but it's also the only chance for a sea change in left politics that I've seen in my lifetime.

What are the Democrats preparing to do? They've lost so much power that the GOP is approaching Constitutional Convention levels of possible control. At this critical moment the most visible and outspoken leader, Sanders, has gone back to the Senate as an independent -- he's no longer in the Democratic Party -- internal party politics seems to have shifted to what I think is an inconsequential contest between Keith Ellison and Howard Dean for DNC chair, and David Brock is talking about raising money from billionaires to fight Trump. Yes, the same Brock who spent millions on his organization Correct the Record to scold Sanders supporters on Twitter. Otherwise, the Democratic Party is exhausted, not even capable of thinking about what went wrong.

So at this point people on the left who are interested in electoral politics have pretty much two basic choices. They can dig in to defend the Democrats as the Democratic leadership doesn't defend them, and helplessly accept that GOP control over Supreme Court appointments means control over the law for the next couple of decades. Or they can try to change the system. That means either recapture of the Democratic Party, an institution that was already shown in this election to stack the deck against left challengers, or try to go en masse over to a third party and make it the second.

I think that it's the Green Party's time. Some people are talking about traditional socialist parties, but they aren't horizontalist and have no core commitment to ecological issues, the most important issues of our time. The Green Party also has at least minimal political infrastructure in place that no traditional socialist party has.

But really, this is a rare time when the lesser evil has dropped out and it's possible for people to make a real decision, at least for themselves. What do you actually believe in? You no longer need to give that up in favor of something practical, because the lesser evil has failed. When I write "futility is freedom", people think that it's nihilism or it's a joke, and it's at least partially a joke. But it's partially true. People now have the responsibility not of gritting their teeth and doing the responsible thing, but of deciding what they want and working with other people to bring that about, even if the chances of success are no better than they ever actually were.

Edited to add: the Intercept. I'm not impressed by the GOP's willingness to examine its errors: they ended up winning for following none of their own recommendations. Really the two parties are flailing around within a dysfunctional system.

Ignore all of the people who guided you to this point

I've been reading liberal blogs and articles, and the foolishness from all sides is too much to bear without comment. I'll go over some of the supposed solutions:

1. "Let's get rid of the Electoral College!"

Really -- how? Let's wait until the electoral left is at its lowest point of power, having lost the Presidency, Senate, House, and Supreme Court, and then push through massive changes to the political system. Maybe we could do this if there really was bipartisan agreement. Just writing that sentence makes it clear how ridiculous this is: it's the Grand Compromise all over again. Included in this category are all similar large-scale official structural solutions.

2. "It's time for us all to work together against Trump!"

Really? Why should people on the left want to work with neoliberals who through their actions created the opportunity for Trump to arise? How are we allies?

People are pointing out the horrors of an autocrat with access to mass surveillance, Presidential powers, the politicized security state, official torture, the prison system, the INS, etc. Liberals were fine with all of that as long as Obama was doing it. They have no principled objection and no real interest in removing these state structures: they only want them to be used by their side, and they were demonstrably ineffectual at doing anything about them when they were in power. Well, if liberals want to work together, maybe they can work on the left's projects, but that's difficult because the left really is not vanguardist and has no way of keeping liberals from guiding these projects back into the same tired failure.

3. "Let's do lots of small scale, virtuous things."

No -- this isn't the time to let political action be diverted into the usual personal virtue signaling and meaningless volunteerism for small scale solutions to problems that are large scale. If there was any time to turn back to large-scale politics, it's now. It doesn't really matter which American political party is the one to crack up: moving politics forwards requires that one of them does. The largest danger at the moment is that the Democratic Party gets reconstituted just as it was and then gets the inevitable win that will happen when the GOP flares out. If you're into electoral politics, join the Green Party or make a socialist one. If you're not, join 350.org or the local chapter of BLM or something else. Stop putting your personal energy into organizations that will disempower you and start putting them into ones in which your allies are your actual allies.

4. "Let's double down on scolding people."

If you spent the political season talking about the deplorables or the horrible Bernie Bro left, then you are part of the problem. Please break yourself of this before you go out into the political arena again. Do you need someone's help with something? Then don't start out by saying that they suck. You don't think that you need their help? But really you do, it turns out, if you want to do something like win an election.

I realize that there is tension between these points, of course. Figure out those contradictions for yourself. So many of our political problems are problems of scale and of choosing the right scale for organizations and efforts: what works at one scale will not if you go higher or lower. I'll write about this more later on.

Edited to add: more here.

Glad to be an anarchist today

There's really one main argument for the U.S. Democratic Party: pragmatism. The lesser evil is still evil, but it is supposed to have the counterbalancing advantage that it can win, and therefore displace even worse results. Without victory, it is nothing. No large constituency loves free trade agreements, "humanitarian" wars, mass surveillance and an economy for the elites. People do have critical interests in reproductive rights, anti-racism, and feminism, but those themselves have been demoted to lesser-evil status -- no one was promising a bold new advance in reforming medical care, the prisons, immigration, or the police, but only to hold back the worst.

And now it hasn't won. On the contrary, it has lost so completely as to make it obvious that engagement with it is futile. Sanders tried what people are always (patronizingly) told to do: run within the system, pull the party to the left. He was predictably defeated by a corrupt party apparatus, and I don't see how his run is going to make any lasting difference. The groundwork for this election was laid in every respect by Obama's Presidential failure (ACA's meltdown, no good economic recovery, no pulling the bandaid off the global warming crisis quickly, no prosecutions of bankers or other action against the financial industry) and now the result is here. But of course the problem goes beyond Obama to the Democratic Party's entire political class.

I invite people to reconsider anarchism. Not because there is supposed to be some kind of blueprint for the future waiting in some dusty file somewhere. But because most peoples' thinking is wrong, and they could stand to give up on their current certainties. The left makes many errors, and has had many failures, but one thing that it generally can't do and remain the left is to dismiss large segments of the populace as racists and sexists who have to be suppressed and who have no real grievances. Try relating to people as if you are yourself and they are themselves, rather than identifying yourself with a state or a party, and then think about what this suppression really involves, who you are really trying to convince, and how. How do you get allies? What would one of the Rust Belt voters who Trump won over take from what you're saying?

The need for a left that is against all the hierarchies of unjust power is as great as ever. But the pragmatic solution of going along with the lesser evil is not actually pragmatic. It's time to toss it and go on. Political action is going to be necessary now more than ever, but people can't let that action go within the channels of a system that's failed.

Edited to add some links (not anarchist ones): Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair. Anarchism doesn't really have the temperament or resources for instant pundit reactions, but these will do.

The Russians Are Coming

"the companies think it's time we all sit down, have a serious get-together- And start another war” * When I went walking, the world to see, five people came to talk with me. The first was a boy who was missing a nose. He said that the good that we do only grows. The next was a man without any hands "Hell, Afghanistan's no fun So whadya say? We don't even have to win this war.” * "We had Libya all ready to go and Colonel Khadafy's hit squad didn't even show up. I tell ya That man is unreliable.“ * "He died knowing that even his soul was not safe from the hell-blade borne by the wolf-faced albino.” * "But none of that helps now that the UK army can barely deploy a brigade of infantry, or field a working aircraft carrier, or prevent Russian war planes buzzing Dorset.” * Who said that simple joys make no demands. The third was Even though a loop can go on endlessly, and you can see another column right there, you'll never get there. Not in 30 years. Or maybe it's a Mobius strip and you'll get there no matter what "Doing homework?” "No, writing a poem”

growing up you think of your mental background as songs but write enough and there comes a time when your mental soundtrack is primarily things you've written and read "Are you believing the morning papers? War is coming back in style There's generals here, advisors there And Russians nibbling everywhere” * "In the name of world peace In the name of world profits America pumps up our secret police America wants fuel To get it, it needs puppets So what's ten million dead? If it's keeping out the Russians” * "On its cover, repeatedly displayed on the TV screens of TVO’s viewers, is the Symbol of Chaos —Dugin’s no less malevolent version of the swastika.” * "You want me to explain to you how Europe’s Gaslighting Abusive Boyfriend is a threat to the country I happen to live in?” * When people dream beauty, and decide to write, they write trees in glory, trees in the day. But I find my dreaming slipping away to trees in the fog and mysterious night I lie to her too. I tell her that everything is basically going OK // postmodernism can be a jumble of quotes from low culture sources and some self reference My friends laughed when I listened to the Dead Kennedys in 1985 it was supposed to be my youth not 2015