Breaking Bread Together to Defeat Fascism
We Are What, Why, and Where We Eat
Somewhere in the last decade there was a San Diego event where Lorena Gonzalez (back in her labor council days) and others invited community activists to mingle with labor activists. What I remember more than the content of any workshop (I was involved with one on alt media) was lunch.
There were burritos of various flavors provided via some locals who were connected to Gonzalez, and I have no recollection of what type I ended up with, though I was largely carnivorous back in those days.
As was true in the various elementary school cafeterias I visited as a Navy brat, the food served as a socializing mechanism. Although I am mostly a hermit since the pandemic, many of the activists I remain in digital contact with were people I met over lunch that day.
I had some personal interests in attending that event. Back in the early days of the revived San Diego Free Press I entertained the fantasy about developing a specialty as a lefty writer focused on organized labor.
It was my belief that if I could play some small role in penetrating those information silos, it could be a win-win for everybody. Little did I know that organized labor had long ago put up a shield protecting their internal affairs from outsiders; some of the time this isolation was a good and necessary mechanism.
You can take your pick of those reasons, ranging from maintaining an image clear of radical radicals, backroom deals made with the local landed gentry, back burners chock full of corruption and bad behavior, and, above all, not letting outsiders get in the way of union activity.
My entreaties during this time period to a few union officials subsequently landed me a tour of the Labor Council offices in Mission Valley along with tickets to a Padres game. Then the Labor Council blew up due to the bad behavior and self-dealing of a high profile leader (Mickey Kasparian).
My SDFP co-editor Brent Beltran was in the thick of it, standing up to defend the women who’d been victimized, and agitating for new leadership. And there ended my not-very-thought-out aspirations of specialization as a writer. (I still think that learning about organized labor is an important element of my personal and political development.)
Those burritos and that lunch have stuck with me all these years. And this memory is where that experience intersects with the what-must-be-done phase progressive activists are currently experiencing.
Two articles I read this week stoked that memory. Let me share a couple of snippets…
The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself by Pete Davis at The Nation.
Americans are living in a civic desert. Much of the social trust and many of the entities that once cultivated it have withered away—and we are left with an often barren public life. And, for good and for ill, the politicians who speak to the fears and despairs that arise in the civic desert are resonating more than the ones who speak as if we still live in last century’s high-trust, high engagement society.
In the short run, we need to do better at speaking to life in the desert. But in the long run, what can distinguish Democrats is that we could actually lay out a vision for a civic reforestation project—a vision for how civic life could be repopulated, for how social and institutional trust (and trustworthiness) could be rebuilt, and for how our nation’s cities, workplaces, and institutions could be better organized to invite more Americans to cocreate them (and, in turn, be better served by them).
Put simply, we could lay out a vision for rejuvenating our party’s namesake: democracy. And not just the democracy of elections—the democracy of everyday life, where we routinely and communally participate in power. But this vision will ring hollow until we embody it ourselves.
And (Yes, I know I mentioned this article yesterday, but it’s important)
The Party Should Throw Them a Party - A proposal for how to build a more durable Democratic coalition by Neil Resnikoff on the Beehive Platform
In my previous career as a journalist, I sat on the organizing committees for two separate unionization efforts in two separate (now extinct) newsrooms; these experiences gave me both a healthy respect for the power of organizing and for the sweat, intelligence and sensitivity required to do it correctly. Today, organizing is critical—perhaps more critical than at any point since the Civil Rights movement, now that we need grassroots strength to prevent the overthrow of American democracy.
But we should not fetishize organizing, as sometimes happens on the left. Not everyone in a shared community of interest can be converted into an activist; some potentially reliable votes in a unionized workplace come from people who have neither the time nor the desire to attend after-hours meetings. The majority of voters, including most reliably partisan voters, are people who just want to earn a living, spend time with their family, and fill their leisure hours with non-political pursuits. A strategy that depends on mobilizing all of them into a vast cadre of politicized subjects isn’t going to work.
What I propose is that liberals and the left organize those who can be organized, and then direct those grassroots foot soldiers toward the goal of establishing a larger social formation: one that has a low barrier to entry but that is also connected by longer-lasting bonds than GOTV.
I’ve also been reading again on the rise of fascism, especially in light of the normalization of Trump’s victory in mass media. Hitler was elected, too, y’know.
It’s going to be a challenge to keep from burning out in the coming Tsunami of authoritarian actions, as David Remnick of The New Yorker suggests in his autopsy of the 2024 election:
Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are. Rueful musings like Obama’s in 2016—What if we were wrong?—hardly did the job then and will not suffice now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, the Democrats need to assess how to regain the inclusive kind of coalition that F.D.R. built in the teeth of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father, not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.
That is one imperative. There is another. After the tens of millions of Americans who feared Trump’s return rise from the couch of gloom, it will be time to consider what must be done, assuming that Trump follows through on his most draconian pledges. One of the perils of life under authoritarian rule is that the leader seeks to drain people of their strength. A defeatism takes hold. There is an urge to pull back from civic life.
Kate Aronoff at The New Republic examined the testosterone-driven elements of the MAGA movement that have appealed to many young men.
Yet the popularity of the manosphere’s most noxious elements might better be understood less as a partisan communications challenge than a symptom of a broader social crisis worth dealing with in its own right. Labor force participation among 25- to 34-year-old men in the U.S. has dropped over the last 20 years, when men under 30 spent an hour more of their waking hours alone than women in the same age range. Those figures have climbed steadily over the last several years, and continued to swell even after Covid-19 lockdowns eased.
In 2019, young men spent 5.6 hours alone per day, according to the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, or AESG; in 2023, that had jumped to 6.6 hours per day. Two-thirds of men aged 18 to 30 surveyed by the nonprofit Equimundo reported feeling that “no one really knows me.” Roughly a quarter of unmarried men younger than 30 say they have no close friends.
I am totally not suggesting encounters where everybody sings kumbaya. I’m totally suggesting pot lucks, book clubs, or games.
There are local examples along the lines of offering a social and political purpose by a couple of groups working in specific areas. The YIMBYs, in San Diego and other areas, start their meetings with a happy hour. So do the people with CirculateSanDiego. And there’s an overlapping group of urbanists who gather regularly to just hang out.
The community of activists who have emerged from Change Begins with Me are worth joining or copying; they’re the best local example of how Indivisible has stayed alive.
I’ve attended a few of these gatherings and mostly observed what occurred. I met (or learned about in the flesh) people whom I only knew through social media. And now I pay extra attention to their postings when they come up.
I am a terrible example of how we should behave in this realm; my lack of a speaking voice limits participation to people watching. Few people can tolerate communicating with somebody writing on a white board for very long. I get it.
Oftentimes a group conversation has moved past a point that I wish to make, so when I do “say” something, it’s origin has been forgotten or pushed past. This feeling of being left out, the above quoted authors suggest, is more widespread than we/I could have ever imagined.
Yes, the personal IS political. I’m progressive because of the experiences I’ve had, starting with a church-sponsored “Urban Plunge” in Los Angeles back in the 1960s.
If we can find a way to create experiences that aren’t protesting, or canvassing, or quibbling over Robert’s Rules of Order involving contact with people, then when persuasion is warranted we’ll have people outside of personal silos to talk to.
“Family and friends” is the number one way non-aligned/nonpolitical people learn about the world.
Think about it. Talk to each other and open up the possibilities.
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Tuesday’s Other News to Think About
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The Anti-Trans Blame Game: Predictable, Wrong, and Fueling a Dangerous Agenda by Parker Molloy at The Present Age.
This isn’t about finding middle ground. There’s no compromise to be had when one side is advocating for the denial of fundamental rights and the other is supposedly committed to equality. Democrats need to wake up and realize that by not challenging these actions, they’re enabling them. Every silent response, every evasion, allows the GOP to push this moral line further, closer to a world where trans people’s rights are treated as expendable.
Trans rights are human rights, not political liabilities, because trans people are human beings. By stepping back, Democrats risk emboldening a movement bent on erasing an already vulnerable population from public life. What’s needed is not cautious evasion but full-throated defense of human dignity. Democrats must recognize that failing to counter this anti-trans crusade doesn’t keep the “middle ground” intact; it only shifts the political landscape further towards cruelty and exclusion. If we’re ever going to build a society that values equality, it’s time to make it clear that trans people’s rights aren’t up for debate—they’re fundamental, and they’re worth fighting for.
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So What Does That Mean in Practice? - Democrats ponder whether to do real or fake populism, by Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work.
One reason why these discussions spiral into uselessness is that the veneer of “nonpartisanship” in mainstream media which causes them to focus on horse race analytics rather than on interrogating the morality of policy questions has seeped into the mind of the general public and now causes a great deal of election analysis to be amateur message analysis rather than substantive discussions of what humans need from politicians.
If you find yourself thinking, “How should we change our messaging to win the next campaign?” I suggest you hit yourself hard on the head with a hammer a few times. That might knock you out of that frame. Recognize that the important question is what should be done to improve people’s lives, not what should be said.
I am not James Fucking Carville, thank god. You can indulge in the sport of picking your favorite messaging as a balm to the election loss if you want, but be aware that the more time you spend on that, the less time you are spending thinking about changing the policies that change the world that change lives, which is the point of politics in the first place. Messaging is easy if you have actually fixed people’s problems.
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November 11, 2024 by Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from an American
Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.
Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”
Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.
