What are we doing here?

Erik’s post yesterday about how “talking about Trump on this site or anywhere on the internet is worthless in creating change” coincided with my wife asking me a couple of times this week what the hell I think I’m doing blasting away on LGM about the Legend of St. Charlie, in a country where lots of people are getting fired for simply quoting Kirk’s words. (The Republican definition of defamation is quoting a Republican accurately and in context.)

It’s a good question, and I don’t have a good answer. The closest I have to one right now is that this is a moment where all forms of political action and protest against Trumpism feel like empty gestures, given that:

(a) As a formal matter, Republicans, meaning Trumpists, have full control of the federal government at all levels. Democrats can engage in a certain amount of obstruction, but even to the limited extent they can do so they seem ambivalent about it. The bipartisan fetish is so deeply engrained in people like Schumer and Jeffries that they continue to operate in a kind of dream world from the Before Time, despite everything that has happened and is happening. There’s more resistance at the state and local level, and maybe the energy and attention need to go more in that direction.

(b) The developments since Kirk’s murder make me very seriously skeptical of the assumption that we will have anything like free and fair elections next fall and in 2028. Our enemies — and that’s who they are, including your nice uncle who took you to your first baseball game, and that co-worker who has always been so helpful, etc. — are not behaving in any way like people who intend to allow The Violent Anti-American Left to seize power via something like democracy, which increasingly they don’t believe in even in theory, let alone practice.

This second point is something I have no idea what if anything anybody can do anything about, but I’m feeling it very strongly. Given what’s going on right now, it just seems the height of ingenuousness to think that what Trumpism has very clearly become can be removed by elections. Everyone in this country would laugh, I assume, at the notion that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping could be removed by the magical powers of the elections in their nations, although of course they have plenty of ballot casting in both places.

Yes, I realize I’m being hysterical. Like Connie in the last scene of The Godfather.

Maybe what we’re doing here is creating some sort of record, and trying to keep sane at the same time. Maybe that’s enough. But I have no illusions about the fact that at this point at least some of the front pagers are risking their jobs merely by writing what we write here. Whether what we’re doing here is worth it is something to which there isn’t an easy answer, just like all the other questions we’re asking about what to do next, given what’s coming.

ETA: Great comment thread. Some themes:

(1) Protest, especially collective protest, is itself a meaningful form of political action. Murc and some others point out that there’s a tendency on the left to fetishize direct political action as the only “real” politics, and this is wrong and counterproductive.

(2) Relatedly, an individual action, whether of a direct or expressive or symbolic kind, can always be seen as pointless when considered in isolation. But again that is the wrong way of thinking about it.

(3) Creating and maintaining a community of solidarity of like-minded people who are reminding each other that they are actually sane and it’s the broader political world that has gone insane is a very valuable thing.

(4) Fascism feeds on despair, and is always shocked at any sort of resistance. That LGM continues to exist is itself a testament that we are very much in the midst of this battle, and that the fascists haven’t won.

There are lots of other excellent observations but these are just a few that jump out at me.