I read interviews and stories on Democracy News once or twice a week. This week, this final, parting statement and historical memory from M. Gessen, interviewed yesterday morning by Nermeen Sheikh and Amy Goodman, portends to what’s ahead:
Where autocratic attempts have been reversed, it has been by bringing together a coalition of people who don’t have a political agenda in common, but who are equally outraged by having their freedoms taken away…. a broad coalition of conservatives and liberals in Ukraine, Western-oriented people and nationalists, coming together and saying, “You can’t take this away from us. We have sacrificed too much to live in a democratic country.” I don’t know if this can happen in the United States, but that’s probably our best hope.
This is an expression of political action, a possibility if there widespread, coordinated and diffuse collective action humans.
In 2024, I stated repeatedly how I felt more compassion for a MAGA voter last year than at any point in the previous decade. The options at the top of the ballot — side-steppin’ Biden with Alzheimer’s followed by G.I. Joe Harris — were so lackluster, mediocre, and revolting that I increasingly understood that people were choosing what they perceived as the better of two shit options. My preferred metaphor was that for the election day potluck or buffet, the Democrats brought a casserole. It was revolting. So people picked the Trump/MAGA dish, because it didn’t stink or look as off-putting as what the Harris-Walz meal was. Striving to be the successors the Biden administration, and the descendants of the Obama and Clinton White House legacies, the Dems were mealy-mouthed, pathetic, groveling at home and filled with braggadocio when it came to talking tough about China, Gaza, Mexico, Venezuela or the U.N. That is, they were pathetic while smug that so many would choose them just cuz Kamala could be the first.
There was a few weeks in late July and early August when Tim Walz was balls-to-the-walls. But the idiots at the highest levels — a pollster named Geoff Garin who then told the advisers, the speechwriters — of the Harris campaign (most of whom were just Biden people who didn’t go anywhere, they just substituted Kamala for decrepit Dark Brandon) to refrain from name-calling a bunch of misogynist, rape-apologists as weirdos. So, they went back to mediocre campaigning that’s afflicted Joe Biden since he ran for president in tye ‘90s and 2000s. All those years that he ran and won as many votes as Dick Gephardt and Mike Gravel.
There is a chance that people will resist the federal government, defy the executive orders, the FBI. But it’s not a given.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 