This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
You can't make this stuff up. Yes, this is exceedingly alarming. Thankfully, the Granbury district attorney threw out this case as he found the investigation to be without merit.
The best source for this saga is this NBCNews story authored on July 25, 2024, by Mike Hixenbaugh, Tyler Kingkade, Scott Friedman, and Eva Parks titled, "Inside the two-year fight to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas." Spanning a two-year time period, this appears to be the most extensive investigation against librarians, nationally, who were ultimately not charged of any crimes. Here is where we can appreciate the importance of legal cases like these as they establish precedents that can be taken up later by attorneys in future cases, should they be necessary—and we certainly hope this kind of prosecutorial animus against librarians does not continue.
Many states, including Missouri, Arkansas, and Indiana, are currently considering legislation "to make it easier to prosecute librarians." (Hixenbaugh, Kingkade, Friedman, & Parks, 2024, July 25).
When we speak of authoritarian regimes and fascism, this is one big way that it manifests, by controlling what we read, and thusly controlling what we teach and think. Most generally, fascist authoritarian regimes are the antithesis of democracy.
This is the kind of America Trump and his friends want. I really encourage folks to read Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise to get a complete sense of what their dystopian nightmare for America means. Not for the Billionaire class, of course, but for everybody else.
The best way to say "no to fascism" is to register to vote and then vote. Get your friends and family out to vote, too.
Glad this ordeal is over for these librarians who did not deserve this.
-Angela Valenzuela
#Project2025 #vote2024 #SayNoToFascism #Fascism
Shocking: Texas Librarian Faces Arrest for Checking Out Toni Morrison Book
Imagine showing up for your shift one day, ready to arrest murderers and pedophiles, and your superior officer informs you that your assignment for the day is to go investigate and arrest a librarian for loaning out a book about civil rights.
Fight for Civil Rights and Understanding
It all started when the librarian, checked out a book by the esteemed civil rights icon and author, Toni Morrison. Morrison, a Nobel Prize-winning author, is celebrated for her profound contributions to literature and her powerful exploration of African American history and identity. Her books have long been a cornerstone in the fight for civil rights and understanding.
Lack of Evidence
The police officer attempted to interview the librarians, but they refused to talk without an attorney present. After two years and an 824-page investigative file, the district attorney decided not to press charges. citing lack of evidence. What an awesome use of our tax dollars, right?
This entire piece is worth reading considering that it focuses on Latinos who are drawn to the far right with a growing list of names like Afro-Cuban Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, who was recently found guilty for "sedition conspiracy" for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In particular, read Dr. Cristina Beltran's analysis below of how this has evolved over time, pointing to a dynamic that she terms, “multiracial whiteness” that helps capture much of what is playing out currently with far-right men of color. While provocative, we shouldn't at all be surprised about this since we've always had language for this, including "internalized oppression" and "internalized racism." Simply expressed, multiracial white people adopt the dominant group's pejorative perspective of their own group.
Clearly, Latinos and other communities are on the receiving end of a continuous "complex and contradictory cocktail of misinformation." This is exactly what helps create space for these far-right identities.
Relatedly, what is not at all addressed is the vacuum in identity that is engineered by a white chauvinist K-12, and to a great extent, higher education, curriculum that systematically excludes the knowledges, histories, stories, identities, languages, as well as prior and ongoing contributions made by our nation's Black and Brown, minoritized communities.
I've always said and it's worth mentioning anew: The antidote to extremism is an Ethnic Studies curriculum—in both K-12 and higher education institutions—that provides the conceptual tools and frameworks needed to understand self in relation to family, community and society. Plus, rather than victimization or victimology, Ethnic Studies—along with gender and ability studies—empowers our youth, beginning with an enhanced sense of self that is pro-social, pro-community, pro-democratic, and an important avenue through which to perfect the union.
A white supremacist ideology would appear to be antithetical to people of color, but there’s a perverse logic at play when they join extremist groups
While investigators search for a motive behind a Texas man’s mass killing of eight people at an outlet mall near Dallas earlier this month, they and groups such as the Anti-Defamation League believe they have uncovered social media posts in which he spewed white supremacist, misogynist and antisemitic rhetoric.
Experts say Mauricio Garcia’s apparent expression of hate-filled rhetoric fits into a modest but increasingly alarming pattern of largely men of color drawn to far-right communities. Since the election of Donald Trump, they say, more men of color have taken on leadership roles in far-right and militia groups and participated, and in some cases led, violent protests, most notably during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
For people of Latino descent like Garcia, who self-identified as Hispanic, the allure of rightwing proto-fascist politics comes from a complex and contradictory cocktail of misinformation within Latino communities, the presence of authoritarian influences from their countries of origin, and a proximity to whiteness in the US that relies more on dominance over people than one’s skin color. In this world, violence is an apt political response to threats to such dominance.
“Part of what we’re seeing – not just in the militia groups, but all across, including a clear upsurge of people of color voting Republican party – is that there’s not a necessary connection between racial identity and your beliefs,” Daniel HoSang, professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University, says.
He added: “It is complicated. It means disentangling your presumptions around race and political identity. We had an entire civil rights movement that was grounded on combating laws that were racially segregative. Now, we’re at a moment where it’s a bit more muddy and requires more nuance.”
Garcia, who was killed by police, wore a patch on his chest that read “RWDS”, which stands for “Right Wing Death Squad”, a nod to glorifying violence and an allusion popular among far-right and extremist groups to violence by Central and South American paramilitary groups against communists and what they saw enemies on the political left from as far back as the 1970s, the Associated Press reported.
The Anti-Defamation League found posts on Russian social media of Garcia with neo-Nazi tattoos and misogynist language, including those used by “incels”, a subculture of men who blame women and society for their inability to form romantic connections, a phenomenon that federal law enforcement sees as a rising threat that could escalate to violence, often against women.
“White supremacy itself is not just about membership, about who is and isn’t white,” says HoSang, co-author of the 2019 book Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. “It comes with a politics and ideology of division … It’s also their beliefs about the nation and of the role of violence in enforcing that hierarchy.”
Unlike the white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville in 2017, men of color attracted to white supremacist ideologies believe less in a white ethnostate and more that the state has failed them in the past and it will take violence to suppress threats and restore their perceived sense of order, HoSang says. Scholars have described their connection to these extremists as the “multiracial far right”
Cecilia Márquez, a history professor at Duke University, was less surprised than others when it was revealed the Texas mass shooter was Latino and had peddled white supremacist views. She has tracked the involvement of Latino people on the white nationalist website Stormfront, particularly since the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, whose mother was Peruvian.
Márquez had seen a small but rising number of Latino men, and men of color broadly, being drawn into white nationalist forums and becoming radicalized. Márquez, whose research has found Latino participation in white supremacist groups as far back as the 1980s, described how Latinos on the website would identify as the heirs to the Spanish conquest in similar ways to how white supremacists would relate to Norse or Viking mythology.
She added that the internet “made it possible for white supremacists throughout the Americas to be able to talk to each other” in ways that were not possible before, noting that that communication through messaging apps like WhatsApp had “accelerated” not just the spread of misinformation but also of “information designed to radicalize people”.
“It felt really, really scary,” Márquez said. The Texas shooter, she added, was “not a single actor. He’s not by himself. He’s part of a growing community of people who are engaged in this kind of thinking, and increasingly this kind of violence.”
She emphasized, however, that Garcia’s views represented a fraction of this small population and fixating on him missed the larger story of how Latinos in the US have largely consolidated around Democratic political views. Still, experts say, Garcia represents a paradox of squaring away one’s racial identity with one’s political identity.
Like others, Cristina Beltrán, an associate professor who studies race and the right at New York University, emphasized that the experiences and views of Latino communities in the US are not monolithic, and being Latino is one part of a person’s identity.
“We know that experience alone doesn’t produce an identity. That is how you interpret your experiences,” Beltrán says.
What could also draw young men of color to the far right extends beyond perceived views of racial superiority. Beltrán argued that they could also be drawn to the practice of “domination” that is tied to American history and the subjugation of other groups such as women, noting that it was part of a “history of being able to feel free because some groups are below you”.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Beltrán, author of Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy, also wrote that the rise of Donald Trump offered this form of what she called “multiracial whiteness” to far-right men of color like Enrique Tarrio, an Afro-Cuban former leader of the Proud Boys who was recently found guilty of seditious conspiracy in relation to the January 6 insurrection. Márquez and Beltrán both questioned whether those views opened pathways for men of color into more extremist ideology.
What’s more, Beltrán argues that the expansion of jobs within the US security and carceral apparatus in the past few decades have both inspired movements to dismantle those systems and reinforced the perception of a nation under threat, as people from communities of color both fill those jobs and are disproportionately affected by the prison system .
She added that those communities have certain views on how to resolve problems and are skewed to conservatism.
Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, wearing a shirt proclaiming support for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
“In Texas, you have a lot of migrants who are being brutalized by our really terrible immigration and border policy. But you also have over half of the border patrol being Latino,” Beltrán says. “They’re employed and being socialized into a brutal regime that is very dehumanizing to migrants.”
Within the histories of their countries of origin are moments of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous sentiment, as well as reactionary politics that led to the violent suppression of progressive views by dictators.
Beltrán says that within Texas, where the shooting took place, Latinos, particularly people of Mexican descent, have a complicated history as both having a proximity to whiteness and being subjected to lynching and brutalization by the Texas rangers.
“Latinos have always existed as a population that’s both been under assault, and also been brought into practices of racial domination,” Beltrán says.
In Garcia, Márquez saw a difficult tension: Garcia’s hate-filled views rest on the extreme end of a spectrum of conservatism that separates one’s connection to their racial and ethnic identity and one’s political views. She added that his hateful views, shared by an increasingly visible minority of people, were not representative but also should not be discounted.
Experts have pointed to Latino Republicans who have touted their own identities on the campaign trails while they supported former president Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies.
“Maybe not everyone has a swastika on their body. But many of us have aunts and uncles who say inappropriate things at the table, or have someone who voted for Trump or doesn’t want to live in communities with other people,” Márquez says.
“Seeing [Garcia] as part of this spectrum is important. Yes, he is aberrant in so many ways – in so many ways. But to look away from him and eschew him from our community gets us off the hook because there is a lot of racism within the community and anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous sentiment that we have to reckon with.”
Much wisdom here from economist, journalist Umair Haque on Medium.com as folks head to the polls. You must first know that the British economy is currently in crisis, some of which you can read about here in this piece titled, "EXPLAINER: What caused UK’s economic crisis and what’s next?" He makes a connection to our midterm elections that folks should care deeply about. For example, he states herein:
"The midterms are...not just about moral objections to fascism — ideal-state of democracy stuff, or even January 6th-was-a-coup. All true, and that all matters intensely. They’re also about, though, the central truth fascism confronts us with. It’s a vicious cycle that does something paradoxical, strange, weird — it at once accelerates itself, sustains itself, by never solving the problems it purports to solve. It claims to end economic stagnation and decline — but all it really does is accelerate them. And by doing so, its fire keeps raging hotter and hotter. Britain exemplifies all that perfectly, and it’s not even fascist — just ultra nationalist. Where it ends up though, is anybody’s guess. America shouldn’t want to find out. It should learn the lesson of Britain in time for the midterms — and run away screaming from becoming a failed state like that, one that puts xenophobically finding someone new to hate every month, day, hour, a little more obsessively, over actually being a functioning modern society."
In short, we're not going to hate our own Black and Brown community, women, transgender kids, and immigrants—to prosperity. It simply doesn't work that way. The opposite is what is predictable, meaning ever more hatred and violence motivates a downward economic spiral where Medicare and social security are at significant risk, as President Biden recently expressed.
No, the British case fully exemplifies a very real possibility of a downward economic spiral with austerity becoming the norm. It becomes a state that hollows itself out for survival while unjustifiably lashing out against vulnerable people. Forget about a state that seeks to invest in affordable health care, clean energy, college for all, and other progressive policies that put people over profits.
The solution? Everybody must get out and vote. Doing nothing WILL make it worse. Do read the piece. Haque breaks it all down in simple terms.
Why British Collapse Should Be a Warning to Americans to Vote Like Hell in the Midterms
by Umair Haque | Medium.com | Nov. 2, 2022
If you want to know why the next six days of American democracy matter so much, well…just look at Britain. Americans of a certain kind — educated, civilized, cultured — are used to thinking of Britain as a wiser, genteel older brother, more European, less brutish, cloddish, more sophisticated and thoughtful. But now? Three letters sum it up: “LOL.”
The midterms are coming up. And on one level, Americans have begun to understand — thankfully, despite huge resistance from the very institutions which should have warned of it, like the media, news, intellectuals — that what’s at stake really is fascism versus democracy. But that distinction goes much deeper still than even those Americans, rightly fired up, yet think. And what’s become of Britain — it’s stunning descent into global laughingstock, pariah, and failed state — is probably a very good analogue for what could become of America if Republicans take over.
Let me explain, but first you have to clear your head of the notion that Britain’s the land of 007 and Mary Poppins and Harry Potter. Britain does a sterling job of public relations, with such cultural fictions — but the dismal fact is that today’s Britain is a far-right wing failed state. I’ll come back to that. First let’s talk about fascism — which is what America faces.
What is fascism, really? Where does it come from? The sadistic wish to annihilate — where does it even come from? Normal people don’t have one after all — they don’t want to break anyone’s kneecaps and torture them — but fascists do.
Fascism is ultimately a way to ration economic decline.This is going to be important, and it matters that Americans understand it. When does fascism occur? When times are good? When economies are booming? Of course not — when economies stagnate and decline to a certain critical point:middle and working classes implode. When that line is crossed, expect fascism. It happened in Weimar Germany — and it happened in America, too, around 2010 or so, hence figures like me and Sarah Kendzior began to predict a wave of real-deal fascism.
You should know this by now, but let quickly recap it. As working and middle classes plunge into despair — which really happened, and is happening in America, not to mention Europe, Britain, and even places like South Korea — they look for someone to blame. And demagogues, seizing the moment, point the finger at scapegoats. On and on it goes. Now. What does this vicious cycle mean fascism is?
Fascism is a system that can’t solve the very problems which give rise to it. In other words, it’s a vicious spiral. I don’t know if Americans really get that yet. So let me make it crystal clear. Fascists come along when times are bad — during Great Depressions and historic Stagnations and so forth. They point the finger at already marginalized groups, and say, if we just hate them enough to annihilate them, cleanse our society of them, all our problems will be fixed.
Which problems? Problems like falling real incomes, like a lack of savings, like a loss of optimism in the future, collapsing trust in institutions to provide one, widespread poverty, downward mobility. Fascism’s central claim is that it can fix those problems. Through the mechanism of just hating enough — to the point of very real violence, like torturing hated figures, breaking their kneecaps.
The real problem, though, is, that none of this works. Just hating some poor marginalized group — what does it fix? Does it create jobs for anyone? Lift incomes? Produce upwards mobility? Does it repair decrepit infrastructure or build schools and universities and factories? Of course not.
So stagnation only deepens, and decline only accelerates.
After being of the opinion that Trumpists had already taken off their masks of white supremacy and racial hatred, Umair Haque makes an excellent point of how their new terrain is the scapegoating "democracy" itself. The problem never has been democracy at all. I quote the famous and beloved educator and author, Deborah Meier, who once said
"If there is a problem with democracy, we don't need less democracy. We need more democracy."
To make democracy the culprit is to indeed invite fascist neoliberalism that is the economic system that is already tearing into the heart of our country given the widening inequality. What we are seeing happening right now on the extreme right of a quintessential power grab where republicans are fully about preserving rights for themselves to exploit others and robbing the rest of us any right, including to existence, that these folks see as threatening of their power.
Do read this great analysis and critique of neoliberal, capitalist patriarchy by Umair Haque that I mostly think signify the dying breaths of white supremacy. We always knew it would be violent and reactionary.
We could not be treading as a polity more dangerous waters. The immediate solution is to get out and vote.
Oct 5 is the deadline to register to vote for November Elections
Sept. 20 is National Voter Registration Day. #Vote2022
They’re getting crazier, more spiteful, bolder, and more violent by the day. The GOP, of course, the Trumpists. It’s worth taking a moment to pause and ask: what do they even want at this point?
They keep outdoing themselves in terms of ignorance, hostility, and sheer idiocy. Every time you think “they can’t possibly get any worse”…they do. Now, they’re explicitly against…democracy. As in, overtly.
Lately, if you’re keeping watch, a new form of ignorance has arisen. It’s not totally new — like so many of the beliefs radicalizing this social group and political wing, it’s a fringe belief making its way into the mainstream. Now you can hear it out in the open, amongst those aspiring to office — or worse, holding it.
“We’re not a democracy — we’re a republic!” Whew. Take a second to parse the irony of office-holders in a democracy saying…it’s not one. Then take a moment to chew on the fact that apparently, Trumpists have all become Plato’s progeny, and are now deep thinkers on matters of the body politic. I kid. The Republic, this isn’t.
“I want to address something that’s bugging me for a long time,” Bliss said. “And that’s the history and the sacredness of our Constitution and what our founding fathers meant.… We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word ‘democracy.’ When I hear the word ‘democracy,’ I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s not us.”
“Sperry, the activist sitting in the audience, had posted on Facebook a few months before: “Please strike the word democracy from your vocabulary! WE ARE A REPUBLIC!!!”
What do these ninnies mean by this line that once used to be a fringe belief but is now going full-on mainstream — “We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” How do you even begin to square that with, well, the Constitution, which, as flawed as it is, at least aspires to democratic ideals of truth, justice, equality, freedom for all?
It all goes back to the fundamental question: what do these lunatics even want?
The best explanation of this line comes from one of them themselves: “Well to me, what a democracy is, is like 51 percent of the people can decide that they want my property, and they can take it. Where a constitutional republic is: No, you can’t do that.”
Like I said, Plato and Thomas Paine are rolling over in their graves, clutching their tummies with morbid laughter. A constitutional republic is…”no, you can’t do that”?
And yet here’s the explanation not even hidden in plain sight, but loudly proclaimed. The reason that these fanatics don’t want a democracy — explicitly — is to protect private property rights. In other words, they want a kind of libertarian utopia, where there are no public goods — no public schools, systems, water mains, anything. “Freedom” is being able to choose your own — even if it means, of course, not having any. Democracy, because it insists on public goods — after all, that’s what education, health, longevity, really are — is anathema to this conception of what a society should be.
This has deep and sinister roots in America, the choice of a fanatical focus on private property, at the expense of public goods.Where does it come from? Sadly, slavery, of course. The Souths’ justification for slavery was bound up in “property rights,” only over people. The problem was that since people were property — the most valuable form of it, free labour that made the economy go — the central focus of society had to become protecting those “private property rights.” Hence, the Fugitive Slave Act empowered anyone to become a deputy chasing down a runaway slave, since they were just “property.”
If all that sounds, well, proto-fascist to you, it should. The Nazis were fascinated by America, and studied it intently, modeling their odious laws to repress and then annihilate Jews and all other kinds of minorities, on Southern ones. And it doesn’t take a genius to think too hard about just why some people would be able to become other people’s property — they must be subhumans, only good for menial labour, disposable commodities, only fit to be traded. How horrific.
This history poisons America to this very day. When Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic,” it’s not because they’ve suddenly become political science scholars. It’s because they mean “the protection of private property rights,” which in America has long been code for proto-fascism. We’ll send our kids to our schools, we’ll shop at our stores, we’ll sit on our buses — and you don’t belong here, except as property. In other words, “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic” is thinly veiled code for supremacy.
And yet though all this has deep roots in American history, it’s still a quantum leap into the abyss. How so?
Trumpism, like so many demagogic movements, works by scapegoating. And scapegoating evolves. First it was “just” Muslims, then it was Mexicans, then it was Mexican babies, then it was all Latino families, who had to be “separated,” then it was everyday “real” American kids, even white ones, who might say the word “gay,” and then it was women, all of them, from whom rights of privacy, expression, and association were taken by a rogue Supreme Court. Scapegoating evolves and grows as demagogic movements do — and it’s a key mechanism of social collapse, because the bigger the scapegoats get, the bigger the Big Lies do, and the more damage has to be done to society, the more overt and explicit and intense and far-reaching the violence, brutality, and hate.
Now. What’s really going on when Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic!” They are reaching the outer limits of scapegoating. The scapegoat? This time, it’s democracy itself.
Who’s responsible for the woes of the “real” American? Why did their lives fall apart, generations plunging into downward mobility and penury, the elderly never retiring? Who ripped the heart out of all those Rust Belt towns? Who kicked the legs out from under the working class? Think of that sequence of scapegoats above — they’ve all been blamed for it, in sequential order, Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, gay people, their kids, their families, then everyone’s kids, and finally now women. Where do you go from there?
You see, you have to go somewhere, and always find a new scapegoat, in a demagogic movement and politics. Because of course just finding targets to pick on doesn’t solve the actual problem. You could “separate” literally every single Latino family in existence — and it wouldn’t do a thing to solve the problem of the white American working class falling apart, or Americans not having much of a future. The same was true, of course, of Nazis, Jews, and Germans. Scapegoating is so poisonous because it’s a vicious cycle: since it doesn’t work, a bigger scapegoat always has to be found.
Until, at least, you reach the end. And there’s nowhere left to go.
What’s happening now is that Trumpists are being offered a new scapegoat for their woes. Hey, old lady, why didn’t you ever retire? Hey, kid, why can’t you get a job? Hey, middle-aged guy, why is your life worse than your parents? Scapegoating is like a spell — it wears off. The old scapegoats don’t work that much anymore. Say Muslims, Mexicans, to the fanatics in America — and they’ll shrug. They need fresh meat, to really whet their appetities. The new scapegoat being offered to America’s fanatics is democracy itself.
You didn’t get the life you expected, wanted, felt entitled to…because democracy. Democracy’s the problem. Sure, “democracy” here is a code-word — rights for anyone else but us. Us — the pure of faith and true of blood. We’re the only people in society who deserve rights like speech, expression, association, privacy. The rest? They’re subhumans. Because they’re not pious enough of faith, or they’re not pure enough of blood. They don’t deserve power.
And that is what all this is really about. Power. When Trumpists cry “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic,” it’s not because they’re debating the ghost of Winston Churchill, and winning — it’s because for them, it’s a way to claim absolute power. It means: nobody else is to have any real rights, which amount to powers. Powers of self-determination, sovereignty, even existence.
Let me make that crystal clear, in case it’s not. In a “republic,” the Trumpists believe that what the minority says can and should go. And because the minority wants it badly enough, hard enough, is willing to be more brutal and violent than the majority, that bestows a kind of moral right to power, alongside the natural, divine right that comes from purity of faith and blood. So in said “republic,” gay people aren’t to exist, women aren’t to have rights, kids are to be taught what fundamentalists want, church is to supersede state, even if not everyone’s church, since it’s not everyone’s state anymore. The minority is now to have absolute power, and define society’s hierarchies their way.
You get this much respect, money, property, power — because this is where you fit in the hierarchy now. Pure of faith, true of blood, a man? Great, you’re at the top, where you belong. A woman, but willing to submit? OK, we’ll let you have a place, a rung. Minority? Woman not willing to submit? Hmm, sounds like trouble — you’re below the dividing line between “person” and “property,” you’re not to have the same rights as people.
All this is about power. Absolute power. To define other people’s lives. You see, in a democracy — and this is what makes democracy so, so different from all the other political-social forms which preceded it — we don’t do that. Each person gets to decide their own life, fate, existence. At least that’s the ideal, even if progress towards it has been slow, especially for women, gays, minorities. Still, the ideal remains: in a democracy, freedom is two things — self-determination, at the individual level, supported by self-governance, at the group level, nurtured by shared investment, at the collective level. We all need things like schools and hospitals and roads and books, in order to fulfill our own potential, and in a democracy, we support each other with those, and then let everyone decide their lives on their own.
It’s a good thing.
The Trumpists are saying no to all of that in their new insane form of ignorance — “this is a republic, not a democracy!” They’re saying that people shouldn’t have the right of self-determination. The minority will decide how everyone will live — and they’re already doing it to women, and next up gay people. They’re saying that because people don’t have the right of self-determination, self-governance, as in, we all consent to govern ourselves, doesn’t matter, either. If you don’t consent to being governed by the minority, too bad, shrug. They’ll do it with guns, anyways — why do you think they brandish them so openly now? And they’re saying that because self-determination and self-governance shouldn’t exist, there’s no need for shared systems of public goods that nurture everyone. What’s there to nurture, in all those hated subhumans, Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, gays, women, anyways? Maybe women can be made to forcibly give birth — but that’s about it. Everyone has their place in this hierarchy — and yours is below ours.
That is how all this is a quantum leap into the abyss. It’s a very, very dangerous step for a society to take when one major political bloc begins to explicitly demonize democracy. To scapegoat it as the Big Scapegoat for the pure of blood’s and true of faith’s woes. Because of course the answer is then clear: tear down this Great Wicker Man called democracy. Burn him!! And set yourselves free! Even if it means burning the village down right alongside it.
This is how scapegoating plays out, in collapsing societies. First the scapegoats are ethnic groups, already low on the hierarchy of power, long hated. Then they expand to include those further up it. Then scapegoating expands further, to include even the faithless and heretical and impure among even the “real” people — women with the wrong attitudes, kids who display the wrong tendencies, teachers, doctors, journalists, intellectuals, anyone who doesn’t fit into the by-now fascist project of total conformity to a homogenized, cleansed ideal of purity and blood and virtue. And finally, when even all this doesn’t work to solve the problem of the declining living standards of the “real” people — a last scapegoat must be found. Democracy itself.
Where else have we seen exactly this process? In nearly every society which has completed the process of social collapse is the grim answer. This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. Germans — at least enough of them — accepted Hitler as their glorious, all-powerful thousand-year Fuhrer precisely because democracy itself was scapegoated for their woes. We’ve seen this play out in the Muslim world, too, and in Africa, time after time, democracy itself blamed for people’s misfortunes and struggles, as religious zealots and warlords took power. And of course this, too, was the central rationale of the terrible disaster communism ended in — democracy itself was scapegoated as being critical of the Party, hence, dictators like Stalin emerged, rose, and were glorified.
The Trumpists are finally taking their masks off. And what’s underneath is the face of a monster, rotting, squirming, snarling, sneering, baying. It’s the face of all the lunacy and idiocy and monstrosity in history, from fascism to theocracy to supremacy, through the dark ages, through war, hate, brutality, atrocity, right back to the Stone Age, where power is violence, and violence is the way of the tribe.
Imagine accepting someone as your Fuhrer. Really imagine it. Think about what it takes to go there, because that’s what Trumpists are basically saying now. Right out in the open. And that’s not all. In the last few weeks, they’ve proclaimed they were willing to die for Trump — remember their insane, violent reaction to the FBI raid on Trump’s tacky, lurid mansion?
When a political bloc and social group reaches this point — demagogues are scapegoating democracy itself, their masses are thrilled by that, slavering over it, calling for its end, willing to die for their demagogues, accepting them as their Fuhrer…it’s in an incredibly bad place. It is reaching terminal velocity of collapse, and is mere inches away from the hard, cold ground. Yes, the fall can still be broken. But first, a society has to figure out just how hard and fast it’s really falling. And that, too often, is the hardest part.
