RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 312 Life With and After Trump
Episode 312 of RevolutionZ: I wanted to change topic but couldn't. Like it or not, Trump and Trumpism matter. They are our present and they must be stopped lest they become our future. We take up five compelling reasons to stand firm against Trump from preventing harm to fostering hope and community. To not give up. To not back down. To not stick to old ways. To find new ways. We address the logic and the dangers posed by Trump's appointees. We highlight the need to raise social costs for Trump and his elite supporters, not to change their minds, but to force them to change their agenda. We consider the role of envisioning a future that transcends pre-Trump normalcy. And we address the role of the Democratic Party, Harris's voters, Trump's voters, non voters, and left activists. Forget placing blame. Figure how to win against Trump and then beyond Trump.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 312th consecutive episode. It is a bit hard to believe and I've been wondering to what extent they are getting repetitive. You can help with that by talking new folks into connecting with it, and if you are yourself new, well, most old episodes really almost all of them, most old episodes, really almost all of them could be done now and be fine, could be listened to now and be fine, because they are so often about vision and strategy and not solely journalistic. They are not time-bound, but that doesn't prevent their becoming redundant. So I have been thinking I might have to diversify the focus, some the topics, but not yet. These times are too damn pressing. So the title this time is Life With and Life After Trump, and of course I hope we can get past the with part and getting started on the after part as soon as possible. At any rate, to get into it, how does one take seriously having a vaccine denier in charge of public health? How about having the world's richest corporate owner in charge of cutting regulatory agencies? Or how about having the other foxes that are in the henhouse, much less oval-officing the degenerate ringmaster himself. I would guess all who will hear this episode are already outraged and horrified beyond comprehension, but also more than a little scared. This episode comes from an article, but it's going to go well beyond the article, with many additions. We'll see as we go along. The article with many additions. We'll see as we go along.
Speaker 1:Do you go to bed at night or get up in the morning with thoughts, fears and dread that you want to jettison? Turn off the news. Turn it off. Turn it off Enough already. Set aside the articles, stop the flow. Netflix calls A novel, beckons for attention. Go for a walk, get some fresh air, maybe have a drink or ten, perhaps throw a fit or maybe just snarl a lot. I get all that and I am not going to tell you that going to meetings or attending them, online reading or writing calls to action. Thinking about what to do and how to do it, and urging friends, neighbors, workmates and family to join you in all that will banish the nightmares and bring on only joyous dreams. To fight the power can certainly have inspiring, energizing and joyous moments, but it will also have plenty of frustrations, strains, drains and flat-out boring moments. It is, however, the only thing that can lead to better days.
Speaker 1:In that context, as dreadful as things may now feel, as immobilizing as Trump's barbarity may feel, the current humane, radical and or revolutionary task is to block near-term Trumpian successes while preparing to pursue longer-term positive campaigns and agendas. Why? Well, I think about five reasons. One, to prevent continued and new Trump-inspired damage at home and abroad. This is not a small thing. This is at the heart of it. Trump is going to do things which hurt people, large numbers of people, if he isn't stopped. So stopping that pain, preventing that pain, is a reason to try to stop Trump. Two, to show that Trump is beatable. He is not someone to start supporting or to double down in support of. He is someone to usher into ignominy. I think this is actually quite important. I think that if Trump has a bunch of successes in his first months let's say his first six months it's going to add to his support. People will feel like there's no alternative to this guy, this guy's fucking God. This guy is going to do whatever he wants. So I better get on board. I better be part of the winning team. It's essential to show that Trump is beatable, and that's why our battle against Trump's administration has to begin immediately.
Speaker 1:Three, to prevent structural changes we would have to later roll back. The idea here is simple enough. If we were starting right now with the government and with various agencies and everything else as they are, and, let's say, with Harris as president, that would be one situation that we would be confronting and we would be fighting for better, for improvements, for gains and ultimately for a new system for a year or four years rolls back and reconstructs various features of government and probably other aspects of life also. Then we have to start there. So it's better to prevent those structural changes that we would have to later roll back. Fourth, to develop vision we truly desire and means to win it and not just to survive. You know, for people who listen to Revolution Z, this is one of those redundant parts. I think we need vision to inspire us, to generate hope, to orient our actions so that they lead where we want to go, even to better understand the present, in contrast to what we desire. We aren't just about survival, we're about winning better, winning a better world. Five, to contribute to and, yes, to enjoy emergent hope and community. Fighting for a new world is not a panacea. Fighting for a new world is not a panacea. It doesn't remove all frustration, all boredom, all pain, but it is one part of living better, even in the present, and so we do it also for that reason. All right.
Speaker 1:Trump's appointments aim to establish a police state. Please hear that again. That is our immediate setting. Trump's opponents aim to establish a police state. It is not rhetoric, it is not hyperbole. His appointments will seek to trash democracy and participation and increase corporate control and Trump's control. They will try to normalize my way or the highway rule. Trump's appointments are not only unqualified and even anti-qualified, they are also shock and awe provocations. They are bludgeons to rob our initiative. But each is also smartly attuned to Trump's perverse homicidal aims.
Speaker 1:Trump himself is simultaneously a nightmare and a sick joke. As a wannabe dictator, he seeks dominance. As a degenerate clown, he cataralls toward history's garbage bin. Which persona will predominate as Trump tries to dramatically change society from its horrendously flawed present into a drastically worse future? I believe more than enough people will extricate themselves from his lies, see through his false promises and overcome their understandable fear and depression to resist both Trump and his appointees. Enough people will resist his border deportation, spying, coercing, impoverishing, repressing, sickness-inducing, militaristic, misogynistic, racist and corporatist agendas to scuttle his aims.
Speaker 1:We can't deny he wants all that, but we can scuttle all that. Indeed, resistance is already surfacing, but resistance doesn't automatically succeed. To win, resistance must become a persistent, continuous and unified force. It must attract and retain steadily more public participation. It must manifest increasingly more mutual aid and solidarity. It must raise social costs that elites do not wish to meet. Is that possible? We are not about acting and going home. We are about acting and growing. We are not about acting and atomizing. We are about acting and unifying.
Speaker 1:So again, is it possible, before Trump solidifies his support and transforms institutions to his specifications, to set Trump aside? To set Trump aside, most of Trump's voters mainly supported what they thought was a positive possibility, that he would shake things up so that they might benefit. They wanted change and rightly thought he would cause change. That they wanted it totally justified that they thought he would cause change. Well, it turns out that's justified too. He is going to try to make major changes. That they thought that it would benefit them. Well, that wasn't justified. That was an error. He successfully deflected people realizing it would be a change for the worse. Trump's voters secondarily supported prospects of his overcoming problems that don't exist or are greatly exaggerated, but which he will only make worse. And finally, trump's voters thought he would protect old ways of living against new, disorienting trends. I think there's some truth to that truth, to the feeling that they had. But once again, his trends would make ways of living worse than before. They would not ward off problems that are emerging in ways of living levels of alienation, levels of dismissing of one's life. He would not ward all that off. He would change ways of living all right, but he would change them into even worse outcomes.
Speaker 1:So how do we raise social costs for Trump and more so for elites that support or simply put up with Trump's aims? What is this social costs thing? When you want to win change, what are you doing? Are you trying to convince Trump that he's wrong? Are you trying to convince the head of General Motors that he's wrong and you want higher wages? Or you want better conditions? Are you trying to convince the beneficiaries of and the implementers of what you're trying to get rid of that they should understand it as you understand it? My answer to all that is no. That is not what we are trying to do. What we are trying to do when we are trying to win changes is to raise social costs for the advocates and the beneficiaries and the implementers of the things we want to change, such that they decide they have to give in. We're trying to force an outcome. So raising social costs for Trump, and even more so for the elites that support or simply put up with his aims, is how we force different aims, how we force different outcomes, first stopping his agenda and then moving forward.
Speaker 1:If we uncompromisingly reach out to many of Trump's voters while we and Trump's own actions reveal Trump's true aims, and if we do so while Trump is restrained by fierce resistance, many and we should hope most of his voters will reject what they come to see as Trump's negative effects. That claim on my part is not accepted by everyone. Let me do it again, compromisingly reach out to many of Trump's voters while we and Trump's own actions reveal Trump's true aims, and do so while Trump is restrained from winning many victories by fierce resistance, many and we should hope most of his voters will reject what they come to see as Trump's negative effects. If you see that as some kind of noise of some kind of rhetoric that has nothing to do with the reality of Trump's voters. Think again. It means writing off a large proportion of the working class. To say that is impossible. Think again, we don't win without them is impossible. Think again, we don't win without them, we are them.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, if we do not reach out to Trump's voters and if we do not block Trump in coming months so that even his weakly supportive voters instead his by weakly, I mean not strong his weak supportive voters or his not very committed supportive voters instead see Trump pull off one programmatic step after another, each of which he celebrates as serving their interests, as freeing them and as punishing their enemies, then their tenuous support for him may become deeper and more intense. People who voted for him but voted down ballots for the likes of AOC or for reproductive rights or for a higher minimum wage, or who voted for Trump but would have preferred to vote for the likes of Bernie Sanders, may fall deeper and more intensely enthralled to him. To prevent that is essential, so to prevent his early victories is essential. Activism to block Trump's agenda needs to welcome and to provide supportive opportunities for participation and leadership to voters for Harris, as well as to non-voters and indeed to anyone who is already horrified by the specter of a Trump-defined future, but who lacks prior experience of active dissent and is thus not already plugged in and really doesn't know how to get plugged in. Activism should welcome all, but offer suitably different strokes for different folks.
Speaker 1:We can't stop Trump, much less move on to win positive change without greater numbers. That's true enough, you might agree, but you may nonetheless have doubts about succeeding, and I get that. Things look grim. But does anyone need that point repeated over and over again? To say it will be hard to block Trump and to reverse MAGA and to finally fully rebut fascism's morbidity is true, but to say that it won't happen, or at any rate that it won't happen for years and years, is self-proclaiming unwarranted defeatism. We have to face facts, yes, but not spin them into worse than they are. Defeatism feeds fascism. Okay, you may feel. But why is defeatism unwarranted? Yeah, it's bad, but what if it's warranted? Trump won a big battle, true, but we won many progressive referendums for increased minimum wages, reproductive whites, labor gains and other progressive results, including in red states.
Speaker 1:Still, trump, claiming a mandate, will certainly try to parlay his narrow electoral victory of between 1 and 2 percent into some immediate Trumpist gains. He will try to bludgeon or shock passive acceptance. He will point to whatever early reactionary Trumpian gains he enacts to try to galvanize support for more reactionary steps. If, in response, we move quietly aside or even jeer in righteous anger while we predict our own coming defeat, we will indeed be defeated. To resist Trump's every effort to start to reverse them and to tirelessly tatter his aura of invulnerability to reduce rather than ratify people's fear of him and to interrupt and then hack away at his level of support and build sufficient active, unified resistance to finally replace him is all mandatory and it will happen. But how fast it will happen, which includes with how little human and social loss along the way, that's going to depend mainly on two things First, trump's overreach and rate of personal unraveling and second, the pace with which resistance spreads, becomes holistic rather than atomistic and reaches out to inspire ever wider activist rejection of Trump's agenda.
Speaker 1:Trump's agenda. What is this about? Trump's overreach? Well, if Trump pursues his administration, pursues his agenda in a manner which takes weak targets first, which manages to gain or to avoid great resistance because it isn't yet incredibly provocative, but in so doing piles up bunches of gains, bunches of accomplishments. That's bad. Every accomplishment, says to the public. This guy's here with us forever and we have to succumb to what's coming or we will just be miserable. That's not good. So his approach is going to matter. Is he really competent in what he's doing or is he a bit wild and incompetent and bringing on himself and his administration more immediate resistance than it needed to have? I mean, it's annoying, but we have to hope that he behaves in the latter fashion, or at least that's my opinion.
Speaker 1:But then resistance spreading. Why does it need to become holistic rather than atomistic? Because holistic, by that I mean that the different components of it, the component addressing immigration, say with sanctuaries, the component addressing the economic situation with demonstrations and demands, and then maybe strikes and further actions, and the component of it addressing genocide, addressing the continuation of what's going on in the Mideast with, let's say, encampments, demonstrations, disruptions, all these things can each operate in isolation from the rest, atomistically, or they can operate in support of the rest, with each lending its lessons and even its strength to the others, so that all of them become stronger. Holistic. And the extent to which we reach out ever more widely, which also strengthens what we're doing, enables us to raise more effective social costs for the elites that will ultimately make the decision to set aside Donald Trump, then we just need to set them aside too. It all sounds nice, you might think, but is it real? What about the people who voted Democrat and beyond them? What about the Democratic Party itself? Won't they, you might think, be a dead weight of passive resignation? Or won't they, however well-meaning, drag growing opposition to Trump into Democratic Party let's-get-back-to-business-as-usualism? Just as Trump's voters are not peas in a pod, so too for Harris's voters.
Speaker 1:Some Harris voters will abstain from resisting Trump. Perhaps they are too comfortable, too scared, too convinced it is futile, or sometimes, maybe they'll even don a red hat. Some will resist Trump with the expressed intention of returning to fondly remembered business as usual. Some will begin to resist, including people at higher and higher levels of income and influence, but only the more they feel that Trump's actions are generating resistance. That may come for them next, not praiseworthy, but relevant and already happening. Some will want to return to pre-Trump stability, but also to enact some serious and meaningful gains for various constituencies and even regarding sustainability for all of humanity. That is also already happening. It's praiseworthy, but it's not yet profound, and some will want to move past all of that to prepare the way to win fundamentally new economic, political and social relations. That is praiseworthy and it's also profound, but very far from predominant. How many people will move toward which new posture will not depend exclusively on people's genes or even their personalities, nor will it depend only on their incomes or their identities. It will depend somewhat on all of that, but also, and crucially more, on what they encounter in coming weeks and months, including on our words and the scope and effectivity of our resistance and how welcoming our efforts are to new participants. The Democratic Party will, of course, reject fundamental change and, for the most part, it will even reject meaningful gains whenever it feels they might expand beyond meaningful to fundamental.
Speaker 1:The avalanche of essays, interviews and talks that have recently railed at the Democratic Party as an agent of oppressive hierarchies and injustices are correct. It is, Then again. Such observations have been correct even in just my own experience, ever since the mid-1960s and from still earlier, way earlier, for people even older, for people who are long gone. I tend to wonder, therefore, when I read such observations, especially in progressive and seriously leftist venues, who are they written for? Once or twice, as a kind of gentle, here's what we all know reminder I might understand, but over and over in such venues with left readers, as if only the author knows, as if it is some kind of newly discovered wisdom, it seems to me that the people who read these essays in progressive outlets already know what they are being told.
Speaker 1:So what is the editorial point? Let me just add it's a little like telling hungry people that poverty is bad, bombed people that war is bad, repressed people that repression is bad. The Democratic Party is part and parcel of all that, and people know it. I think virtually everybody knows it, but let's set that aside as my unusual view. Certainly it's the case that people who read progressive media, which is where these articles that I'm talking about appear they know it. And if they don't know it, then there's something wrong with what we in those media are doing. But that's another issue. So again, what is the editorial point?
Speaker 1:The real world truth is that a very large component of resistance to Trump is going to come from organizations and also spontaneous projects with considerable history and even deep roots in Democratic Party activities. If this is not the case, our prospects for preventing full-on fascism will be nil. So, rather than disparaging such efforts, it seems to me that trying to discern, describe and debate what to do next, along with, but not literally melting into, such efforts would be more helpful. When some left-righters seem to dismiss every elected or appointed Democrat, much less every voter for Harris, as abettors of genocide, misogyny, racism and corporate domination, they are wrong, in the same way as when some left-righters write off all of Trump's voters as lunatic fascists. These narratives not only ridicule and reject people who are needed for resistance to win, but even people who are already hell-bent on resisting.
Speaker 1:So, yes, the Democratic Party is part of the repressive, oppressive society that has spawned Trump, produced Trump's voters' warranted alienation and anger and also manipulated and distorted some of the perceptions of Trump's and indeed of all voters. So of course, we don't want to swear allegiance to the Democratic Party. We even want to keep it in our minds and not forget that it is, as a whole, very much not our ally, but the opposite. But at the same time, to prevent Trump implementing gain after gain and increasing his support by himself touting his. Every gain will depend in large part on how many Harris voters resist and indeed on how many Democratic Party-affiliated actors and organizations resist.
Speaker 1:But in that case, a question arises as we fight to reveal and reject Trump. What do we who aren't about returning to business as usual seek instead? What do we desire for life after Trump? Is it premature to even ask that? After all, we know we have to remove Trump before we can construct better than what we had before Trump? Indeed, this was one of the costs of a Trump victory. If Harris had won, we would now be able to fight for positive and even fundamental change toward a much better future, with Trump having one. We have to fight against vicious, negative, fundamental changes that would impose a much worse future.
Speaker 1:It is also true that, on the road to life after Trump, republican majorities in the Senate and House will need to be erased, and then Republican ownership of the White House will need to be erased as well. That is another price of Harris losing. But that isn't our final goal, of course not. It is true that to work to remove Trump can tend toward, can welcome, can even celebrate and enforce business, government culture and households as they were before Trump, government, culture and households as they were before Trump, or it can begin to inspire desires for, and even develop means to win gains toward implementing vastly better relations that go fundamentally beyond yesterday's normal, for that matter. The wherewithal to resist fascism will thrive better if it is fueled and oriented, at least in part, by positive desires for more than restoring the conditions and circumstances that earlier led us toward fascism. We all know that, don't we? We all know that getting back to everyone being broken for us, but working fine to serve power and wealth is not our ultimate aim, don't we? But if the whole goal isn't only for Democrats to win midterm elections in two years so that the House and Senate become Democrat dominated, and only for Democrats to win the presidency in four years so a Democratic administration replaces Trump or Vance, then what do we want? If those interim steps are important but not defining, then what do we want for life after Trump? My answer is and I think everybody who listens to Revolution Z probably knows this, but I'll say it anyhow I want life after capitalism, after misogyny, after racism, after war, after ecological denial. But I am not delusional. We are not going to do all that in four years. What we can do, however, while we stop Trump, is to also think through our aims and methods and begin to implement new approaches able to keep going forward after Trump, even as they are also essential to defeating Trump.
Speaker 1:Sanders, aoc, michael Reich, maybe even Gavin Newsom and plenty of others whose work I don't know, are saying something halfway similar. They are saying that they and the Democratic Party need to jettison the practices and commitments that their party has been emphasizing for decades. Those folks are not revolutionaries the way I, for example, prefer, but the odd thing is that they do appear to be self-critical of their team. They are saying they have failed, but they are not saying they give up Trump wins. They are not saying to Trump go ahead and trample everything. They are not saying they will just try to survive until Trumpism runs out of energy. No, they are saying they are not only going to fight, they're going to change their ways, or at least try to. They are going to reach out more widely and more aggressively to people who work and not to people who own workplaces.
Speaker 1:Okay, I won't belabor that. Some of them yes, some of them in the Democratic Party, even if saddled by not yet fully rejecting such basics as private ownership and patriarchy, are sincerely taking stock and seeking to change their ways. Stock and seeking to change their ways. I will merely say we need that and should welcome that, not ridicule it and them and call it mere manipulation. And I will add can't we do as much regarding our team, our movements, our organizations, to blame Harris, democrats, mainstream media, social media, widespread ignorance, rampant apathy, malignant cynicism, all past American history and even, in some degree, the whole population, is all true enough. It may even be an important part of usefully understanding our context.
Speaker 1:But what about our own faults? What about the problems we have within our team? There is going to be resistance, hopefully probably a whole lot of resistance. What are some things we might want to consider about how our resistance unfolds? Maybe that growing in size and scope, and not in verbosity or outrage, is the primary measure of success. Maybe that each perspective welcomed as part of the whole needs to respect and welcome and even support and nurture, and certainly not rail at and reject every other perspective welcomed as part of the whole. Maybe that to tell ourselves things we already know is not near as important as to find ways to constructively communicate with those we don't know and don't yet agree with. Maybe that to raise social costs for elites is our only road to success and for that it needs to be all willing hands on deck and turn welcoming unwilling hands to. And that said, this is Michael Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.