Fighting In The Dark

Sometimes words fail. This will probably be one of those times. Here goes anyway.

There are so many beautiful and diverse things and so many beautiful and diverse people in the world, and I can't fathom what makes so many hate and fear all that beauty and want to destroy it, or what makes them desire to use it to the satisfaction of their own greed or their desire to dominate. The world could be so much better, and so many seem to want to keep it bad and make it worse.

A new thing has been having an untidy birth over the last decades or centuries; it's the idea that we actually might actually become a nation of equality for all, one that actually is welcome to all, and actually does seek justice for all. It's the idea that women are people, that Black people are people, that sick and disabled people are people, that people in poverty are people, that foreigners are people, that all people are people, that being a person is not a matter of being able to afford it or earn it, and that everyone has earned life already.

But as you may have heard, a few days ago, for reasons everyone is arguing over, we re-elected a gang of fascist christian bigots who really have done nothing over the last many years but promise to kill the lovely thing that's being born—I suppose because they think that killing it will stave off the inevitable death of the unsustainable old thing they're clinging to, which is the mandate of their own blamelessness and supremacy.

I think of all the things they've promised to do, either directly or indirectly. To pass a national abortion ban. To send gangs of brute squads to round up people and send them to camps. To dissolve gay marriages. To punish and imprison their political enemies. To shatter what is left of democracy and freedom of assembly and freedom of speech and freedom of religious expression. Based on their own words, I fully expect them to come after contraception and IVF and interracial marriage and the right of women to vote and exist in public spaces. What else might they do? Restore chattel slavery? I think they want to. They celebrate the Confederacy, that gang of traitors who murdered hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens in order to preserve and expand that evil institution. One of these creepy religious zealots said they intend to "repeal the 20th century," and I think that's what they meant. The traditional American spirit is a supremacist spirit that desires genocide and slavery, as I think we can see.

And they plan to stuff the Supreme Court with even more insane christian zealots, who are selected by insane christian billionaires who want to bring about some sort of prophesied apocalypse. These are people who have long ago made themselves very comfortable (we might say eager) with the prospect of everyone else facing eternal conscious torment in a fire that never goes out, which means that they aren't just opposed to preventing climate catastrophe, but actually in favor of accelerating it. Life isn't on the table. Mercy isn't on the table.

And they're going to try to ransack social security and repeal Medicare, and demolish our systems of education and public health and consumer protections and environmental protections and any other regulatory protection, and then give all the money they stole from us to people who already have more money than they could ever spend. For anyone who isn't a billionaire, this will create severe economic hardship, which I mention mostly because according to people who voted for this promised severe economic hardship, the economy was the most important thing to them—so important, in fact, that they never bothered to learn basic things about it, like what tariffs are or what they do.

I don't know what else the fascists will do. New grim possibilities occur to me every few minutes, and the thief comes only to kill and steal and destroy—their God told them that. I don't think their God meant for them to emulate the thief, but apparently they disagree with their God on that one.

Fascism is, it turns out, very popular. It won on Tuesday, seemingly without even having to try. The side that won barely campaigned. Everything they did was a shitshow and all of it was washed in threats of brutality and malicious lies and promises of retribution and revenge and destruction, none of it offered any solutions that didn't involve hurting lots of people, all its proponents went out of their way to disparage any fine aspiration or principal that anybody, including themselves, has ever claimed to hold. Their standard bearer is a criminal and a rapist. And he won.

Somebody will tell me many of those who voted for it didn't know what they were voting for, and I imagine that's true. I have to say, though, that the ignorance and complacency demonstrated by Republicans and their allies is an ignorance and a complacency so vast and unfeeling that it must be taken as interchangeable with malice. When somebody is killing you, at some point during the act it stops making much difference—from the point of the victim anyway—whether they are killing you because they hate you or because they just don't care enough about you to know it.

I think about what might prevent them from doing what they say they intend to do. It won't be our institutions, which are all either capitulant like our media or captured like our courts or inherently corrupt like our police. It sure doesn't seem like it will be the Democratic Party, who are behaving as if this is just another normal election, and ignoring the very real fact that no transfer of power to fascists can ever be a peaceful transfer of power. I think at last there are two things that can stop the fascists. The first is their own vast incompetence. The second is all of us. I think I'd rather count on the second than the first.

I feel really bad that this is the country where my children live.

I feel really bad that this is the country where anybody's children live.

I think about trans people. Gay people. Disabled people. Black people. People marginalized because of their appearance or ethnicity or religion everywhere. In my more enlightened moments I even think of all the people who voted for this, many of whom are going to get smashed themselves, because a machine built to devour people won't stop until it runs out of people to devour. A majority of voters asked for it, and it sure looks like we're all going to get it, but those who already have it bad are going to get it worst.

The Republicans promised us very clearly and very loudly that if they won, we would all grow old in a fascist dictatorship led by the worst person in the world, run by creepy religious bigots in an apocalyptic death cult. And here we are.

So much beauty, and so many who only want to see it removed or smashed—or who don't care if it all gets destroyed, if you find that a meaningful distinction.

It's still there, I notice: the beauty.

Everywhere I look, it's still there.

The thing that's being born is still alive, too. It's in us—any of us who believe in it.

I think we ought to fight for it.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you subscribe to independent journalists and writers instead. For a second week I'm suggesting Pro Publica. They do the important work of real journalism without being beholden to billionaire interests.

(If you also want to support The Reframe, there are buttons to do so all over the place and whatnot.)

That's enough doom and dread. This essay isn't about that, and frankly you can get plenty of that everywhere else. I began by looking this thing square in the face because we are people of awareness, you and I, and we need to acknowledge that the nightmare is real, and the fear and anger and grief we're feeling are appropriate human reactions to such a catastrophic betrayal of our shared humanity. But after that, if we are to survive in whatever this new version of America will be, we have to move past the doom into action.

So this isn't a doom post. It's not going to be an election postmortem either. I'm disinterested in the usual circular firing squad. What I know is that the Democrats lost. They did so by employing their standard strategy, tacking right to look for votes in the center-right, trying to appeal to Republicans, who tend to vote for Republicans, rather than energizing their base, who would rather not vote for Republicans. Some will tell me this was still the best strategy. Maybe so. It failed. There weren't enough good Republicans, if there were any.

I mention it not because I want to litigate the strategy, but because I am pondering the power of differentiation. I sincerely hope that the Democrats realize that the territory they keep wandering into appears to be an electoral desert, and try to differentiate themselves from their opposition rather than trying to find points of similarity. It doesn't look super promising right now, I'm afraid. I've seen some decide the reason for the Democrat's loss is that they over-coddled the "far left," which is something they did not do at all, and conclude that they now need to become a lot less accommodating to trans people, which is something they weren't doing this election cycle very much at all. Again I am not a big election expert guy, but it occurs to me there's already a very popular party for people who hate the left and trans people and so on, so it seems to me that trying to make as much differentiation as possible might be the thing to attempt now, rather than trying to become closer to the diet version of a popular flavor.

Anyway, actions. Advice. What to do.

Unfortunately I'm a bit of a fool. You have know idea how sorry I am about that, and you'd think I'd have mentioned that before you got a couple thousand words deep. Nevertheless I will bring what I have, and I do have a few simple ideas for this moment. I think the answer can be found in this thing I hope the Democrats will engage in, which is differentiation.

First, I'm aware that responsibility for this falls upon different people differently. These are ideas most applicable to people like me, upon whom the fascist threat only touches generally and glancingly. For those in groups directly targeted for fascist hatred, these may be useful ideas at times, but sometimes the goal will simply be getting to safety or staying alive another day, or putting one foot in front of the other.

Let me suggest three simple and broadly applicable precepts of differentiation.

As much as possible, we should do things fascists cannot do.

As much as possible, we should not do things fascists want us to do and we should do things fascists don't want us to do.

Never accept the fascist offer.

I'd like to talk about each of these briefly.

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As much as possible, we should do things fascists cannot do.

Fascists believe that if they brutalize and punish people enough, they can do anything, but that's not true. For example, fascists cannot accept blame or accountability for what they have done, or admit their complicity in what has been done on their behalf. And, because fascists hold themselves to be blameless and exceptional, they cannot admit that they are improvable, so for fascists the idea of truth and repair and restoration are treated as attacks and threats. For this reason I think fascists struggle to repair things that are broken, or enter into awareness of reality as it is. They cling instead to their alternative fantasy of their own supremacy, and this makes them as vulnerable to reality as they are brutal with it.

But we can do these things, and we should. We can enter awareness. We can witness to the truths we see. We can name fascism for what it is, and explain why it is unacceptable.

We can admit our own blame and culpability, and we should. We can seek out spaces where people have already organized and built support, and if we do, we will encounter many people who have lived for a long time under the traditional threat of American christian patriarchal supremacy. In these moments, we can leave space for the very natural resentment that may arise that it has taken us this long to find them, and the very well-earned suspicion that our allegiance will prove undependable, and we can receive it without petitioning for our own blamelessness.

We can reject supremacy in ourselves, and we should. When we encounter these people who have lived for a long time under the traditional threat of American christian patriarchal supremacy, we should realize that the grim threatening America we are now entering is one they have lived in their whole lives. We can realize that they know this territory far better than us, and realize too that we are not co-explorers here, but rather they are our guides who we can follow and obey and learn from, if they will let us. And when others, privileged like us, arrive into awareness a little behind us, we can refuse to hold ourselves superior to them for arriving a minute earlier, but welcome them into that awareness, because we celebrate awareness wherever it dawns. These are not things fascists are capable of doing, and will differentiate us.

We can become people of repair, if we find something near us that is broken and fix it. We can become people of healing, if we seek somebody who is in a worse state than ourselves, and offer what we have to give; talent, money, food, space, care, or just our presence—and I suspect that if we do so, we will receive the same back a hundredfold. These are not things fascists are capable of doing, and this will differentiate us.

We can make and enjoy art, and we should. I suppose we must admit that fascists have some appreciation for art, but I notice that their admiration always seems to strike the surface and bounce off; they cheer for the villain, or else fail to see themselves in the villainy, or they misunderstand the point completely. As with reality itself, they enjoy the form but avoid the meaning, and most artists who fascists admire, if living, repudiate the fascists' enjoyment, so I suppose it must be said that while fascists enjoy art, art does not enjoy them. In any case I suspect art is where we can hide truths where fascists cannot find them, as artists have always done. And creativity is a celebration of humanity, which is another thing fascists refuse to do.

Most of all, we can value other human beings simply for being human. We can care for others without a question of what is deserved, and we can care for ourselves, and try to make space for our own health and restoration.

The list of things that fascists cannot do is vast; every one of their malicious intentions reveals another fine thing they despise too much to value. We can value education. We can value science rather than fraud. We can value diversity rather than conformity. We can value correction rather than punishment. We can value justice rather than corruption. We can value critical thinking rather than propaganda. We can value truth rather than lies, and journalism rather than conspiracy. We can value peace rather than violence. We can value true friendship rather than domination and solidarity rather than brutality. We can value kindness rather than bullying.

When we do things fascists cannot, we differentiate ourselves, and we attack their great weakness, their dominance, a weakness they in their grotesque ignorance believe is their great strength, having failed to realize that their refusal to recognize the humanity of others leaves them unable to access their own.

I think it's important to note that the things that fascists cannot do are not things that they are incapable of; they are simply things that, the more a person did them, the more that person would cease being fascist and would start becoming something better. If we do these things ourselves, it creates a new atmosphere, which makes it more possible (if still unlikely) that others might leave fascism's grim picture and enter a new and better frame.

They can leave fascism, you know. It's possible. A lot of people are going to be terribly harmed by this thing they voted for, and a lot of them did it out of ignorance, which is easier to escape than indifference; and even indifference is easier to escape than active malice. Because we are committed to seeing things as they are, we must to maintain boundaries away from fascists, for our own safety and that of others—not because we are interested in isolation and shunning, but because a space cannot be safe if it admits a person who means to bring harm.

And because we are committed to seeing things as they are, we must admit that fascists are unlikely to change no matter how badly they are harmed, because they would then have to lose supremacy's unnatural advantages, and pay the costs of knowing what they have been and the consequences of what they have done. But they can change; in fact, people change all the time. Once upon a time, I began to leave ignorance and complacency, for example; maybe at some point you did, too. If any do start to move back toward our shared humanity, we should be ready to do another thing fascists cannot, which is to recognize positive progress and celebrate it.

And we can show how it is done by doing it ourselves.

As much as possible, we should not do things fascists want us to do and we should do things fascists don't want us to do.

I'm feeling a lot of fear right now, and with good reason. I doubt I'm alone. At times I remember that fear is exactly what fascists want me to feel. They're celebrating our fear right now, and they know that if we are fearful we will not oppose them. Then I remember that fear is the state that fascists want for me, and that lends me new bravery.

Or I can feel the temptation to sink into complacency, and with good reason. I doubt I'm alone. The cost of awareness and hope is high, and it's about to get higher. But then I remember that complacency is a state that fascists would like me to occupy, and that lends me refreshed conviction.

Or I can feel the temptation to sink into despair, and with good reason. I doubt I'm alone. Desperate times are ahead, I fear. But then I remember that despair is the state that fascists most want for me, and that lends me renewed resilience.

There is even the temptation to escape; to literally escape the country—a privileged option if ever there was one. It seems unwise to stay now, unsafe, and in truth on some level it probably is unsafe. There seems to be good reason to want to get out, ahead of the thing the fascists promise is coming. But then I remember that the retreat of all opposition is what fascists want, and I'm convicted to stay. The fascists think this is their country alone. I'd like to show them otherwise, and the best way to do that is not to give them what they want, but to stay right here and do things they don't want me to do.

We ought not to comply in advance, yes. But the far better thing is to never comply. Instead of escaping, we can be people who help others escape. To be the sand in the gears, the saboteur of hatred and the guts in the gears of their pain machine. To give them no information. To tell them falsehoods that make the enablement of their cruelty harder. To let them know nothing of our thoughts that would risk the safety of another.

Fascists love to tell us that their numbers are great, and we have to deal with them. They hate hearing that our numbers are vast, and they have to deal with us. They want us to think we have a them problem, and we do. But we should not forget to give them an us problem.

They want us afraid or ignorant or complacent or despairing or retreated completely because fascists are bullies and bullies hate a fight.

So we should give them one.

Never accept the fascist offer.

The fascist offer is an offer of false peace. It's an offer to us to join them, or at least to not oppose them, with the promise that if we do, it will go easier on us, and the implicit threat that if we do not accept the offer, it will go harder.

The fascist offer is the offer of false unity. It's an offer to align ourselves with fascist intent—not even necessarily by agreeing with them, but by agreeing that our disagreement over the people they intend to abuse and kill is not a disagreement worth sacrificing our friendship and goodwill. It's a framing that says, "we are people, you and I, but they are not, and wouldn't it be a shame if we people stopped being friends over a little thing like this?" The fascist offer is an offer to do what I see some Democrats already rushing to accept, to agree with fascist framing stating that the only unity allowable is unity with them, and suggesting that if we don't accept this unity then we are the ones to blame for what happens next, because in our divisiveness we forced them to do what they already have said they intend to do with or without us.

It's a trap. If you accept their frame, you'll be inside their picture.

The fascist offer is open only to some of us.

There are people to whom the fascist offer is not extended, and if you accept the fascist offer, then eventually, when all the rest are gone, one of those people will be you.

Again: There are people to whom the fascist offer is not extended, and if you accept the fascist offer, then eventually, when all the rest are gone, one of those people will be you.

There's even a famous poem about this. We all learned it. I swear we did.

So, even if we are only concerned with self-preservation, we must refuse the fascist offer. We must recognize that the rift between us is caused by abuse, and the abuse is the fault of the abuser, not the abused. We refuse the fascist offer of peace because there is no peace to be made that does not make war with all the other lovely human beings in our lives. We reject the fascist offer of unity because we are people of awareness, and we know we aren’t ending our relationship with fascists over politics; we're recognizing that fascists have already ended our relationship over politics, and we are simply living in that reality.

The beautiful thing that's being born is still being born, I think. If we keep it alive within all of our hearts, it won't die. The supremacist thing that's dying is still going to die, because it is death and always was, and because unsustainable things cannot sustain. The only question now is how many it will kill as it dies.

So let's do things that fascists can't do. Let's not do things fascists want us to do. And let's refuse the fascist offer.

Let's seek people whose lives are hard, and learn from them how to make it easier for them, and then do what we can to ease their hardship.

When you encounter people who have made their lives comfortable by making it hard for others, learn what makes them comfortable, and make it uncomfortable for them.

And let us hope, with a clear awareness of how grim things truly are, with a conviction that a better world is possible, and a determination to fight for it against those who wish to kill it.

There are dark times ahead.

But hope is a thing that fights in the dark.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. Dogs love him cause he's crazy sniffable.