We are looking at January 20, 2021 as if it were a singular point, past which we either enter Dictatorship or Democracy. As if the entire fate of America swivels on one Great Wom/an.
That’s a terribly myopic vantage, reflective of a national consciousness steeped in the tints of binary media consumerism. Think tank talking points have displaced expressions of original and critical thought. Discourse is mere spectacle. Coherent political action is being replaced by apophenic role playing games for suggestible players. Effort posting tends to IRL violence.
The American Body is broken at every bone. It’s dysfunctional in every synaptic impulse. It’s a spiritually demented and schismatic collective, leaving only individual and micro-communal efforts the only options for effective mobilization, decision-making, and efficacy.
United States governance is a Capital-dominated bicameral system, in which Labor and human creativity are devalued, denigrated, and institutionally reviled. It’s a system which denies Americans the permission to cultivate and enjoy their innate gifts, desires, artistry, and capacities without suffering the lurking fear and existential distress of going hungry, unclothed, sick, and homeless.
The nation’s predominating default setting of its judicial, legislative, cultural, executive, and socioeconomic institutions is Americanized Eurocolonial supremacy.
Children are taught to save money, a value propounded at the expense of meaningful and lifelong resilience; teens are taught to choose careers or become losers; young adults are taught to get a job rather than encouraged to live a life of vitality – they are hoodwinked to enter debt to establish credit for its own sake; and grown adults live beyond their means, all the while programed for depression and self-blame when markets collapse in accordance with the internal logic of the impersonal algorithm of Capital’s world-ramifying morphology and accumulation. The self-esteem of the entire nation depends on misguided, manipulated, and ultimately childish ideologies.
All the while, Public Capital and Commons fund private enterprise. The public bears the cost of financial and empiric misadventures, while battered social welfare initiatives take all the blame.
Americans don’t even know how unfree they’ve become.
Americans have been trained to never openly entertain any alternative vision to the status quo. The only alternative to the system is more of itself in increasingly empowered iterations after each disaster.
Fifty years of rhetorical Pavlovian Conditioning have successfully implanted the association of any land outside the square box of the Market with regimes of genocide and totalitarianism.
2020 was a gift of light only in that it was an opportunity to see with perfect acuity America’s moral and structural rot to even the dimmest of idiots.
2021 will not offer such a gift. Socioeconomic Fascism has set in. Codified Fascism is only a few years ahead. No robust and swelling resistance has been born.
Liberals hate Trump because they are more uncomfortable with his invective and behaviors than they are with confronting the realities of systemic racism and working class disenfranchisement. In their view, once Trump vanishes all is back to normal – the very same normal that created Trump. Republicans have forever cucked themselves into their self-made paranoia, while the Democratic Party plays interference against on-the-ground progression. ‘Scratch a Neoliberal and a Fascist bleeds’ is more true than ever before.
We have long passed the stage in which collective re-configurating or recreating the nation could even be planned, let alone organized and implemented.
There is no Constitutional Fairy that will miraculously stave off the immediate or longer-term assaults against Constitutional defense mechanisms.
We live among despairing ghosts and cognitive dissonances, bound to succumb to either inaction or malice. Mental health is rare refuge.
The good news – for the time being – is that individuals and small groups still have opportunities to take their own steps and make their own paths, even as the forrest darkens. Good people can still join elbows.
Elbow room is still room.