A more expansive freedom

From Kamala Harris for President

We Concede Everything that We Don’t Contest

I’ve felt a lot of anger, frustration, and sadness over the last ten years or so of political life – and those feelings always intensify during presidential election years. But I have yet to experience despair, or the sense of impotence that accompanies it. I understand if others have in light of, well, everything. Despair can be reasonable, but if I can help it, I try to reserve it for things that are actually inevitable. Oppressive systems tend to mythologize themselves as a fact of nature, as both obvious and necessary. It is part of their claim to supposed legitimacy. It’s never true.

No human-made structure, however sturdy, is permanent. Despair, and the fatalism from which it stems, can be just as delusional as the naive optimism that things will work themselves out. It’s hard out here, but I don’t write about, or organize around, anything that we ourselves cannot change. 

That said, election season is pretty damn depressing. In the United States, talks of democracy’s survival and civic duty are pegged entirely to the presidential election cycle. That likely indicates that we are wrong about both. The mainstream post-War American narrative about fascism centers on two false claims that undermine contemporary analysis and political activity: it claims that the rise of fascism was an aberration rather than endemic to Western life, and it conflates fascism with dictatorship.

One practical effect of this framing is that people demobilize once they have secured favorable election outcomes. Take, for example, the complete about-face on immigration that has happened under the Biden Administration. Far removed from the harrowing images of citizens packing airports to block the enactment of Trump’s Muslim ban, an April 2024 Axios/ Harris poll found that a slight majority of Americans now support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Biden himself has adopted Trump’s policy toward asylum-seekers at the border.

This shift underscores a political certainty: We concede everything that we don’t contest. 

We have to reject the silent concession demanded of us to engage in electoral politics: for a significant underclass of people in this country and for the residents of the global south, the outcome of the election does not matter. In light of that, my relationship to despair does not change because I have something to do: to work for new, better conditions for the communities I care for.

That is not to equivocate between the two parties. A win for Kamala Harris and a win for Donald Trump are not the same thing. Where they differ is the floor, not the ceiling. That distinction is strategically useful when we think of our tasks as advocates and organizers. Yet, it’s also morally abhorrent given the magnitude of our needs, the scope of American corporate and governmental power on the world stage, and the time constraints imposed on us by the climate crisis.

“Not as bad as them,” while true, isn’t a compelling basis for mass democratic politics. Disorganized people can be mobilized for anything. They get organized and stay engaged, however, for the ceiling: a constructive vision of what could be and a path for attaining it. The task of faith communities in this time of great human and ecological need, both during and after the election, is to articulate and fight for a more expansive freedom than either party offers.

The Call Is Coming from inside the House

Thinkers from colonized nations were immediately suspicious of the Western narrative that fascism was aberrant and located in the persons of Hitler or Mussolini. The idea only served to delude white colonizers into a sense of innocence. It could be seen as a blip on the moral, political, social, and even theological radar of the Western world if singular figures were fascism’s avatars. The very fact of colonial expropriation, and the violent infrastructure that facilitates it, belie this claim. The practices, institutions, and appetites for destruction were all honed in the colonies.

Radical black thinkers understood their domestic struggles in similar terms. How, they would ask, can we talk about fascism as a problem abroad, when Jim Crow exists here? America is still vulnerable to this critique because in many respects we still have, at best, a mid-twentieth century democracy.

Let’s take the persistence of segregation for example. The residential and school desegregation agendas of the Civil Rights Movement failed miserably at the level of implementation. White people’s appetites for keeping black and some brown people out of their communities has remained unchanged from the 1960s to now. In fact, it is getting worse. 

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that among the nation’s 100 largest school districts, economic and racial segregation have increased by 50 percent and 64 percent, respectively, in roughly the same 30-year period. We can’t take seriously the proposition that fascism will have been defeated when white people can head to the polls in their communities that have statutory “whites only” signs on them. 

Of course, it’s not just about race. The United States legitimizes the juridical and physical infrastructure needed to maintain a fascist state by using them both to dispose of its marginalized populations: internment camps for immigrants; prisons for the undeserving poor, black, Latino, and disabled people especially; anti-homeless and anti-protest laws that continue to proliferate across the nation, to name a few. The dominant way of thinking about democracy insists that we say, “But besides all that, the real threat to democracy is localized in one popular figure.”

Donald Trump might be the most acute threat to the health of our democracy, but these chronic evils will kill it, too. 

In solidarity,

Dwayne

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