The power of such a broad-based movement could draw inspiration from the historically relevant anti-war, anti-racist, and civil rights movements of the sixties and the ACT UP movement of the late eighties. At the same time, current social movements such as Podemos in Spain also offer the possibility of creating new political formations that are anti-fascist and fiercely determined to both challenge authoritarian regimes such as the Trump regime and dismantle the economic, ideological, and cultural structures that produce them. What all of these movements revealed was that diverse issues ranging from the war abroad to the racist and homophobic wars at home were symptomatic of a more profound illness and deeper malady that demanded a new understanding of theory, politics, and oppression.
There is certainly something to be learned from older proven tactics such as using education to create a revolution in consciousness and values along with broad-based alliances to create the conditions for mass disruptions such as the use of the general strike. Such tactics combine theory, consciousness and practice as part of a strategy to paralyze the working of this death dealing machinery of casino capitalism and its recent incarnation in the Trump administration.
One of the most powerful tools of oppression is convincing people that the conditions of oppression they experienced are both normal and cannot be changed. At the same time, this oppressive ideology of normalization prevents any understanding of the larger systemic forces of oppression by insisting that all problems are individually based and ultimately a matter of individual character and responsibility. Dominant ideology spread its message through a range of cultural apparatuses extending from the schools to the mainstream media. The message was generally the same in that it insisted that there are no structures of domination only flawed individuals solely responsible for the problems they experience and that the system of capitalism as a whole was organized for their own good. The sixties produced a range of critical thinkers who challenged this central element of oppression, and included Herbert Marcuse, Malcom X, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Robin Morgan, and Susan Willis to brilliant theorists such as Stanley Aronowitz, Mary Daly, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and many others. For them structures of domination were rooted in both subjectivity itself as well as in larger economic apparatuses.
Those who believe in a radical democracy have got to find a way to make this regime ungovernable. Planting seeds and local actions are important, but there is a more urgent need to educate and mobilize through a comprehensive vision and politics that is capable of generating massive teach-ins all over the United States so as to enable a collective struggle aimed at producing powerful events such as a nation-wide boycott, sit-ins, and a general strike in order to bring the country to a halt.
The promise of such resistance must be rooted in the creation of a new political party of democratic socialists, one whose power is rooted in the organization of unions, educators, workers, young people, religious groups, and others who constitute a popular progressive base. There will be no resistance without a vision of a new society and new mechanisms of resistance. In this instance, resistance registers as a form of total paralysis for the financial elite, religious fundamentalists, and neo-conservative warmongers. In doing so, it gives birth to what we might term a politics of ungovernability.
America now chokes on its claim to innocence. Up until now, it has been successful in both evading that fact and covering up its lies--lies about its history, about social mobility, about freedom, about justice, about the end of racism, about the value of meritocracy, about spreading democracy abroad, and so it goes. The era of hiding behind this mythical innocence has passed. In the age of Trump, the raw brutality of casino capitalism, with its highly visible acts of violence against all aspects of ethical and political decency, is enacted without apology.
A moral political coma now drives an authoritarian society that embraces greed, racism, hatred, inequality, stupidity, disposability, and lawlessness, all of which are celebrated as national virtues. The dark present is now the endpoint of a history of violence and barbarism that can no longer be camouflaged, in part, because it is unapologetic about the viciousness of its practices and the savagery of its effects. I want to hope that this moment of unmitigated violence, this period of punitiveness, and era of unimaginable cruelty will provoke people to wake up from the nightmare that has befallen the American public. Hopefully, in that wakefulness, in a resurgent act of witnessing and moral outrage will grow and provide the basis for a new kind of politics, a fierce wind of resistance, and a struggle too powerful to be defeated.
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