What Could’ve Been

Merrick Garland is highly concerned that he should have done anything about this.

Politically right now things are looking really bad, which is especially interesting if you cast your mind back five years. 2020 saw massive protests against racist policing and systemic racism in general, with statues of Confederate generals being torn down and a prevailing spirit that we as a society were going to do some root and branch changes. Trump was voted out of office, and when he tried to overthrow the government in January of 2021, the public responded with an overwhelming wave of opposition and disgust. Major League Baseball players, not known for being progressive, got the All-Star Game moved from Atlanta after that state passed voter restrictions.

There seemed to be a real feeling that certain bigoted ideas were finally getting weeded out of American life. Biological racism was banished while gender was widely being understood as a social as opposed to biological category. Supply-side and austerity economics both looked defeated by the successful Keynesian response to the pandemic economic crisis. Right-wing populism looked like a dead end. This feeling carried on for awhile, with Barbie, a movie drenched in feminist consciousness, becaming the biggest grosser of 2023.

Now four years after 1/6, Trump is in office and trying to destroy every official acknowledgement of gender, race and racism that exists in the country, on down to scrubbing Harriet Tubman from a website on the Underground Railroad. He is actively punishing universities, extorting liberal law firms, dissolving HUD and the Department of Education, and sending immigrants to detention for their opinions or to a gulag in El Salvador on dubious or even mistaken grounds. Misogyny is cool again, openly expressed in private and public forums.

This change gives me whiplash. It’s what happens when you go after malevolent political forces but don’t finish the job. If you come at the devil, you best not miss. Because 2020-2021 was the turning point that failed to turn, the reactionaries got the chance to strike back harder than ever.

What makes me angry rather than sad is that it did not have to be like this. Trump should have been removed when he was impeached in January of 2021. Republicans scuttled that, but Democrats should immediately have had Trump prosecuted for his crimes, but they didn’t. They should have made sure Biden was a caretaker president and elevated a younger party member, but didn’t. In their complacency they thought the evil witch was dead and that they didn’t have to do anything else. As all of the current collaboration shows us, our elites are very good at climbing the greasy pole of success, and will throw their souls in the gutter in order to stay on top of it.

It’s not a surprise that the Democrats have been feckless and lazy, but what about the street movements? Because the 2020 protests, like Occupy, followed the “leaderless movements” template there was no organizational structure created to follow up on it. We are faced with a horrible political situation, but few leaders or organizations that can get people on the march. It’s so bad that I’ve often wondered if the “leaderless movements” was planted by an FBI informant to undermine social movements a la COINTELPRO.

Well, preach it brother about bullshit horizontal leadership ideas that lead to nothing at all ever sustaining itself. But also, let’s not forget just how bad the Biden administration blew any chance of solidifying what had happened in 2020. Biden never could get his head around the seriousness of the problem. He found Trump disgusting of course, but he clearly also thought his election was a repudiation of Trump, which it was not. It’s one thing to have picked Merrick Garland as AG, but to stick with him for 4 years of doing absolutely nothing. He then misread the politics of Covid big time, seriously underestimating both the stupidity and selfishness of the American people.

Now we are in the joys of counterrevolution, where even a pretty anodyne political critique provided by Barbie seems outright impossible.

Someday, this war will end….