Confronting the Moment and Creating Through It

I’ve been trying to think through how to write this piece for a couple of weeks. You’ll understand why, because I’m going to get into the thinking process and the layers of difficulty as I go on.

Before I get into the more meta aspects of it all, though, I want to try and address the social / cultural / political moment more directly.

[A note on editing and length… I chose NOT to edit this because I felt I would struggle and spend days editing. I did ask a couple of people to read it before publishing and the one piece of feedback I got is that it’s very long, even by my standards. Rather than splitting it up though I’m publishing it as is, with an inline note about a good place to break and come back to it.]

The current state of affairs in America is reprehensible. Accurate words are important, and it is accurate to say that what we have at hand is a fascist regime which is directly attacking people and which is doing previously unfathomable damage to the country and its economy. If foreign agents had infiltrated American government and were doing their utmost to attack the fabric of American society, it would look a lot like what we have happening. The damage being done to American prestige overseas, and the damage being inflicted to the American character domestically, cannot possibly be conceived as being done in any way to make America “great”.

Nevertheless we need to understand something very important about the moment at hand: according to traditional economic benchmarks, the economy is “great” indeed. And much of what is being done is very baldly for the purposes of advancing white supremacy, and the nexus of this is that as bad as things are overall, the agony of the moment is being aimed primarily at the poor, the young, the non-white. The way to understand it, I think, is that they feel like they can keep getting away with all of the thievery and destruction if they just make sure that older white Americans don’t personally feel like they’ve been too ripped off, and through literally decades of hatred and lies about immigrants taking people’s jobs or whatever, and through policies which if nothing else at least keep housing prices propped up (which is good for homeowners - who are of course wildly disproportionately older and whiter)… well, add all this together and we can understand (up to a point) how they’ve managed to get away with so much of what they’ve gotten away with. (There are of course a host of other reasons as well, including government not working very well for the people regardless of who has held the reins of power, leaving people feeling even more helpless.)

My point in all this is twofold. The more direct point is that we should not hide from calling this regime what it is: a bunch of fascists, criminals, kleptocrats, and white supremacists, who should be enjoying the support of absolutely nobody except for other fascists, criminals, kleptocrats, and white supremacists.

But the second point is the harder one: There are reasons why these fascists continue to get tacit and even explicit support, and three of the biggest reasons are that so many people have been relentlessly groomed toward this end for so long; that so many people (think especially certain prominent politicians and businessmen) are terribly afraid that if they step out of line they themselves will be crushed; and, related to these but I think notably different, it is just excrutiatingly difficult for human beings to confront the idea that there is something fundamentally terrible about “their side”.

All of these things must be confronted, but of course none of this is easy and overarching all of this is a collective sense of powerlessness in the face of what’s happening.

For various reasons when offering these three major reasons for ongoing support for a fascist regime, I want to avoid dwelling too much on the first (call it a subject for another time). I also don’t want to spend a lot of time on the second, as I think that the public way of addressing the second tends to require addressing the third.

What I’m getting at here is what I’ve frequently referred to as the enormous human capacity for dissonance. Most people who continue to support this regime are going to cite some sort of moral rationale, but of course the regime is thoroughly immoral, and it is obvious to so many other people how wildly inconsistent the line of thought can seem. But inconsistency of thought is a hallmark of the human condition!

The thing I’ve been mulling over is the idea of dissonance as self-protection, that while there may be layers of inconsistent thought, it might truly be crushing on a personal and moral basis to have to accept the reality that something one believes so intently that it is core to their identity may be wrong. And when I say wrong I don’t mean some sort of universal / biblical wrong, I mean wrong to them.

To use a very direct example, it may be a core personal belief that white people are inherently better than others. Certainly this has been a core personal belief on the part of a great many people over time. Imagine a person who has believed this and for whom it is core to their identity. How crushing might it be for this belief to be eviscerated? More to the point, how crushing might it seem that it might be to the dissonant mind that is trying to protect the ego of the belief holder? I’m not a psychologist and I don’t claim to have the right language to describe this but it’s easy for me to imagine how and why it might be so brutally difficult for someone to be able to internalize beliefs contrary to those core to their own identity.

Five years ago there was a lot of talk about how irreconcilable people found trying to deal with others who had voted a different way, how this was damaging to interpersonal relationships in a way that voting had perhaps never been before. It’s interesting how we don’t talk about this quite so much anymore. It’s as those we’ve accepted, on some level, the idea that what is irreconcilable is truly irreconcilable.

But the thing is that it very much does matter that public opinion continue to shift. There is a difference between the regime having support from 35% of the populace versus having support from 29% of the populace, and that difference manifests in my larger second point above: there is a legitimate tipping point at which certain people - think about certain federal and state legislators - have more immediately to fear from the voters than from the regime. Imagine a “safe district” where a legislator won the last election with 57% of the vote. Well, there is a tipping point, and even with all the gerrymandering out there, a lot of people are feeling that heat. And more need to feel that heat.

The fact is that America needs a lot of “conservative” voters to speak up and say:

• What is happening in America right now is not right.

• What is happening needs to end.

• The people responsible for what is happening must be held accountable.

Most true “conservatives” should be able to find their voice and say these things because these are entirely consistent with the classic conservative viewpoint that government should be less obtrusive, that freedom of speech is sacrosanct, that the rule of law matters.

To frame it another way, rather than appealing to people to accept that there is something “wrong” with their core values, appeal to the portions of their core values that have been exploited and abused over time, but which still provide at least a semi-coherent moral framework. Try to focus what they self-identify with away from the regime itself or its rhetoric, and focus on those values which the regime is clearly violating. Try to get them to understand that they too are victims of this regime.

Nothing I’m saying is easy and it’s understandable if a lot of people don’t have the energy for this. Nevertheless this is all very important for getting past the current moment. The 2026 elections have to affect profound change, and the unfortunate reality is that the current regime is pulling out every stop it can to try and steal the election. (I’m not going to belabor all of the examples here, but there are so many methods of voter suppression and outright election fraud going on all at once… the reality is that the Democrats will need on the order of 55% of the vote to “win” when it’s all said and done.)

This is a long piece already though and here I want to jump to a related topic, that of “victims of the regime”, and how we’re all victims of the regime on some level, and what we ought to do about this.

[Note: This is the best place to break if you want to split the piece up.]

A major part of the current playbook is to so thoroughly overwhelm people with information and misinformation and new information that people cannot possibly keep up and therefore we are just left feeling helpless and powerless.

Another key element of it all is that, absurdly, even though all of this is dominating the news cycle every say, we are somehow not supposed to talk about it, either out of a perception of self-sanity, or because of nonsensical quasi-rules that so many places should be “safe” spaces. While I think it’s important that people do have safe spaces, this idea has been extended to the point of being weaponized. ICE agents murdering people, that’s not a “partisan issue”. The way the economy is being ransacked, that’s not a “partisan issue”. This idea that everything political is “partisan” and therefore somehow verboten in public discourse… imagine a legislator taking millions of dollars from a developer and then his supporters saying that you can’t talk about that at work because you’re being “partisan”. That’s bullshit, that’s a fake rule imposed to stifle speech and democracy.

What comes out of all of this is a broad collective state of paralysis. That paralysis can take seemingly opposite forms: imagine the person who feels like they need to try and stay on top of the news cycle and stay on top of social media and the utter impossibility of being able to do that; now imagine the person who refuses to engage with the news cycle for whatever reason and who can’t handle anything more than pure escapism. We all know people in both camps. We’re all on some level trying to protect ourselves. And yet the thing is that the paralysis manifests in other ways.

For a very thin but pertinent example, consider this very post. It has taken me two weeks to figure out how I want to try and get at things I want to try and get at. Even as I write this I’m very uncertain I’m saying everything correctly. I’m horribly concerned that any small thing I get wrong in one person’s eyes will overwhelm anything positive that I might be able to impart to anyone else. Not all of this can be put on the current regime, of course; these are greivously nerve-racking times in general because of the speed and volume of things. But my inability to figure out exactly how to put together what I wanted to has delayed and delayed my thoughts. And in the process other things I had intended to write about got sidetracked.

I’m a poor example, though, because… I did write this. So many other people don’t get this far, whatever exactly it might mean to get this far. So many other people who for whatever reasons feel less comfortable, feel like they have less space, feel even more overwhelmed… they are pummeled with self-doubt and external fear over being able to engage with others. This is how the regime wants it. Fascism is about suppression, and suppression takes a great many forms.

I’m in a twelve week course working through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. The subtitle is A Spirital Path to Higher Creativity and creativity is the overarching emphasis of the book and for me there are fascinating parallels between this and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals which is ostensibly about social organizing but wherein Alinsky posits the organizer as a creator and makes the argument that the act of creation is the closest humans get to imitating the Creator.

Cameron is largely focused on the idea that we all have the creative impulse but that for so many of us it is blocked by something. And I’m only through chapter four so I can’t go into everything from the book yet, but I can tell you how in chapter two she devotes a lot of time to discussing “crazymakers” (all of these are direct quotes of paragraph headings):

• Crazymakers break deals and destroy schedules.

• Crazymakers expect special treatment.

• Crazymakers discount your reality.

• Crazymakers spend your time and money.

• Crazymakers triangulate those they deal with.

• Crazymakers are expert blamers.

• Crazymakers create dramas - but seldom where they belong.

• Crazymakers hate schedules - except their own.

• Crazymakers hate order.

• Crazymakers deny that they are crazymakers.

Now, Cameron wrote all this in 1992. And yet… the ultimate crazymaker by these definitions is the person at the head of the current fascist regime. All of these levers are being pulled all the time, and it is all about distracting attention, draining focus, taking the air out of the room, almost a kinetic perpetuation of the special treatment embedded in all of it.

And it impacts all of us. Our time is robbed by the insanity of the news cycle. Our money isn’t going as far because of awful economic policies. The drama is endless. When our focus is shot, when our anxiety is spiked, we simply can’t be the creative humans that we otherwise have the power to be. And this too is how the regime wants it. They hate expressions of creativity, especially from people who are operating in forms which they want nothing to do with. This is why they attack things like funding for arts. And this is why it serves their purposes so well to keep so many people afraid of doing anything, afraid even of leaving their homes when the fascist korps shows up in their communities. Art in all of its forms has been used to combat authoritarianism. Art itself must be suppressed under the fascist regime.

Don’t let them do that to you. Don’t let them do that to others.

Find your voice, and champion the voices of others. It may not be possible to be expressive in all settings, but find a way to step outside of the noise and confusion and embrace the creativity within you. This is paramount for overcoming what we’re facing.

When speaking of the “fascist regime” we need to take a broader view of what that means and recognize that there are a lot of corporate adjacenies and they too are a huge part of the problem. Don’t let the worst corporate offenders have your money. Don’t let propagandist television have your attention. The point here isn’t that you need to be pure and that we ought to argue about purity - to hell with that - but rather that we need to uplift one another and that means frequenting the local businesses which are worth frequenting and that means being selective in where we order goods from and that means supporting artists of all types in any number of ways including attending concerts, buying merchandise, sharing recommendations, etc. It means talking more to one another instead of hiding because we feel like we’re not allowed to talk about big things and therefore must be reduced to only talk about the weather.

META-SPIEL here is but a very very very tiny part of all of this, but to the extent that I can do and be more to lift people up as a social, political, and human act, then I’m going to do it, and I want you all to join me. And joining me can truly be as simple as finding your own voice, even if it’s just to talk to people you feel safe around, because so many people simply don’t feel safe talking at all.

Along those lines one thing I am devoted to is that I will continue to write about whatever I damn well feel like and sometimes that will be heavy pieces like this and sometimes that will be questioning why all of these medieval heraldic symbols have such long tongues. It is my sincere hope that you enjoy all of it, but I know you’d have to be a real weird sort of person to deeply enjoy all of it, and that’s okay. In turn I hope you too will write something or record something or in some other way shape or form create something to share with me and share with your people. I would love to use this forum to take your creations which you’re not sure how to share and help spread them farther. We all need to uplift one another. It is through a countless number of small actions taken by a countless number of people whose names we will never know that we will not only overcome this fascist regime but also help rebuild from the damages inflicted upon our communities and institutions. And, yes, those communities and institutions include so many of those people whose politics we cannot fathom.

It is a mentally challenging task to put all of this together and so, as I noted at the top, I decided to send this out unedited, because I know if I try to go back and fine-tune it I will second-gues myself over and over and it will take more days to put it out and it will all be contrary to what I’m trying to get across. So if in trying to strike the right chords here I’ve erred, well, I apologize for the error, but I stand by the intent, and I will stand by your intent too. Don’t be afraid of fucking up. We all fuck up. We’re humans. We’re never going to be perfect. But let’s not let that reality stop us from coming together to be better.