Politics is a direction, not a destination

Ten years ago, precisely, I was organizing against police brutality in St. Louis. A group called Students in Solidarity had emerged in the wake of the Ferguson uprising, with members from multiple schools in the area. We protested St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch, we disrupted events, and we tried to build power among students in the city who wanted to end police brutality. And, ultimately, we didn’t really know what we were doing.

Looking back, we were just kids struggling to fight back against police murders. And we were doing our very best, putting in long hours at meetings, planning actions, and stumbling forward step by step. We desperately wanted change, but many of us didn’t have the frameworks, or the experience. The defund concept hadn’t been popularized, abolition was a distant horizon at best, and we were just college students. Most of us wanted reforms that wouldn’t come, wanted checks on an immensely violent police force, and wanted to change a legal system that refused to cede an inch. We didn’t know what we were up against, or what we were doing. And, ultimately, that was okay — we were going in the right direction.

Photo by Cody Board on Unsplash

One of the cardinal, colossal missteps of the United States is thinking that any political system could be fixed in place for eternity. We teach our kids that we did it, the founding fathers created the perfect system, we’re all set here. We teach our kids that America has the perfect checks and balances, our democracy is infallible, you can vote every two or four years and things will just keep humming along. For all I know kids in fifth grade are still learning that same curriculum right now, even as our government is assaulted and crumbles.

The truth, we learn too late, is that we had it all wrong. There is no perfect political system. The founding fathers didn’t set up an infallible government. Politics isn’t setting up checks and balances and then checking out. We had it all wrong.

It turns out that politics is about power, and although certain structures can help negate the over-concentration of power, politics means endless contestation. Those who seek power and wealth will never rest. The balance of power, both out in the world and within any government, is always changing. The structures we were taught are eternal have in actuality always been shifting because they’re sites of constant struggle. People jockey for power and influence and control, as those who aren’t satisfied with their station or the state of society have always done.

Politics does not end. Many of its formal manifestations, like elections, have dates, winners, and endpoints. But outside of the arenas we tend to think of as politics, other actors, like the wealthiest among us, never rest; their willingness to fight for money and power is limitless. They union bust and create organizations to advance their aims and build power relentlessly. So politics is never finalized, it’s rarely even stagnant. The ruling class is always scheming and the oppressed are always struggling, sometimes in formal organizations like unions and sometimes in quiet acts of resistance or refusal.

In the United States, as with so many countries around the world, we see the catastrophic effects of the right and the rich refusing to rest. Conservatives, as they claim to uphold the perfection of the American political system, have actually pushed relentlessly to increase the power of the President. It hasn’t just been Republicans, but as Julian Zelizer writes, “During the past three and a half decades, a growing number of conservatives have embraced the presidency and have come to privilege this branch of government. While conservatives have traditionally justified their position by arguing that the presidency is often the best agent for achieving smaller and more accountable government, they have also recently relied on an aggressive and centralized presidency to advance their agenda.”

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

We are now at the culmination of these decades. The Trump administration is openly and brazenly advocating for “unitary executive theory,” which makes the claim that “the Constitution gives the president sole control over the executive branch of government.” This deliberately ignores that only Congress can legally create or disband federal departments, and has control over the funding of these departments.

And it’s tempting to simply argue that the law says Trump is wrong. When Trump ordered the elimination of the Department of Education the other day many correctly said that he has no legal authority to do that. But does he have the power, the raw power? His Secretary of Education says he does, and although court cases are sure to follow this crucial federal department will suffer in the meantime. We can’t know how this whole painful saga will end, but we’re getting a devastating lesson in how those who see politics and government as malleable have the upper hand when fighting those who think all that is established is permanent.

In this particular struggle you might compare the Democrats to the Maginot Line, useless in the face of the fascist blitzkrieg. But the truth is that, rapid as this all might feel, the right’s attack has been built and developed over years and years. It hasn’t just been their insistence on the power of the President, they’ve also created pipelines to move people against their own interests for a long time. Writing about this pipeline from mundane internet consumption to fascist extremism, Aaliyah Guzman breaks it down in a simple and helpful way:

The pipeline often works through a progression of influencers:

1. Mainstream figures like Rogan serve as gateway content, encouraging viewers to question conventional narratives.

2. Self-help and masculinity influencers like Jordan Peterson offer pseudo-intellectual frameworks for understanding social issues.

3. More overtly political commentators begin introducing explicit ideological content.

4. Figures like Tate present radical views packaged with lifestyle aspirations.

5. Finally, viewers may engage with explicit extremist content and communities.

Just as political systems are sites of contention, so are people. The right has embraced the fact that many Americans don’t hold fixed political ideas, and has invested in this pipeline to provide people with a whole bunch of those ideas. More than that, they’ve realized that getting someone moving in a direction is easier than getting them to hold a specific opinion. Of course fascists believe in horrendous and repugnant ideas, but the power of the right-wing pipeline has largely been in launching people, typically young men, in a rightward direction rather than getting them to land on one precise spot. And now we have hoards of men moving steadily to the right.

All of politics becomes directional when you know nothing is stagnant. What direction are you moving in, what direction is your government moving in, what direction is your movement moving in? Ursula K. Le Guin has a quote I think about often: “The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.” And there is no end. There is no final destination in politics, no final form society takes. The direction we’re moving in is as important as the systems we’ve built, and the existing political structures must be maintained and defended, changed and improved. Nothing is permanent.

Those kids organizing in St. Louis a decade ago learned and grew. We didn’t get everything right back then, but our organizing moved us toward systemic change, abolition, and radicality. Not all of us, of course, but many are organizers now, some are educators, some write. The fact that we hadn’t landed on the perfect answers ten years ago didn’t stop us from moving in the right direction. In fact it was getting in motion, getting into action, learning from one another and from veteran organizers that set us on our paths. We didn’t know exactly what we were doing back then, but our politics wasn’t fixed, wasn’t stagnant, and over time we’ve grown and changed.

So what would it look like to focus more on what direction we move in, and on helping others move in that direction, than on getting people to hold the perfect opinion? What would it look like if we knew that systems of governance are always changing rather than fixed in place? How are you moving folks in the direction we need millions of people to be moving in right now? We need to close the gap between what’s necessary and what’s possible, so we’re called to do everything we can to move ourselves and others in the direction of engaging in this class war, in the direction of radical change, and in the direction of organizing and fighting back.

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If you’re unsure where to get started when it comes to organizing, my last several pieces at jphilll.com each have considerable lists of organizing resources at the end.