Turns out we need each other
Right now more than ever
Something is brewing. If you’ve seen the visceral anger at town halls, the escalating Tesla protests, the rage spilling out of people around the country you know something is happening. You can see the backlash against Musk and Trump and DOGE building everywhere. There are sign in red states, blue states, and everywhere in between that the oligarchs are overstepping, stripping the country for parts too fast and stunning even their supporters.
I wouldn’t call myself optimistic about the mounting wave of resistance, yet, but there’s a seed of hope here amid the devastation. Before we can dive into that hope, however, we have to confront the brutal reality of the Democratic Party going missing in action and rolling over for the GOP. After Dems in the House held the line, with only one defection, the funding bill that hands Musk and Trump the keys to the kingdom, ceding far too much power of the purse to the executive, came to the Senate. It’s hard to imagine much that sounds worse at this stage than letting the co-presidents have even more power over government funding. They’ve loudly declared their intent to dismantle everything worthwhile the United States does, and we know they plan to privatize as many public goods as possible.
But in comes Chuck Schumer, the leader Senate Democrats have chosen for nearly a decade, downplaying the severity of this resolution and claiming that shutting down the government would be worse than handing over funding power to the fascist billionaire co-presidents. Specifically, he claimed that in a shutdown Musk and Trump would “destroy vital government services faster.” But he never spelled out how that would happen, and now we’ll never know. What we do know is that the continuing resolution hands them the power of the purse, the keys to the kingdom, and that Trump has now sent out an executive order which, you guessed it, attempts to completely strip funding from multiple federal agencies.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just Chuck. If it had been, the GOP’s poison pill wouldn’t have passed. But nine others joined him in this weak, feckless, appeasing approach. As Adam Serwer says, “If Senate Dems really wanted to replace Schumer they could, but I suspect his aversion to confrontation reflects the actual prevailing sentiment in the rest of the caucus, they don't want something different.” Confrontation is difficult. Confrontation puts a target on your back. Confrontation here would mean millionaire Senators, many on the cusp of retirement, ending a cushy business-as-usual arrangement and getting into some down and dirty fights. The appetite just doesn’t seem to be there. If they replace Schumer now, as they should, I’ll take back these words. But if I were you I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Here’s the thing. While Chuck and his accomplices accelerated the fascist onslaught, we were always going to need each other. We were always going to have to build something better than the hollowed out shell of a democracy that got us to this point. The supposed opposition party has never mustered a strong fight against fascism. Securing a better future, one free of the far-right, was always going to require the people organizing and fighting and building something better.
And there’s an unprecedented readiness to fight out there. Veterans are being escorted out of Republican town halls by cops for giving Congressmen a piece of their minds. Thousands of people are protesting Tesla, going after the world’s richest man for dismantling public services. There are protests at Chuck Schumer’s house, massive rallies against ICE, and countless people getting into the political arena for the first time because they know this is a fight like no other.
It’s important, now, to pinpoint what has activated masses of people who have typically stayed out of politics. And the single biggest mobilizer has been the vicious attack on public goods and public services. The Musk-led assault on everything from public education to the VA to Social Security is enraging millions of people, and now we must ensure that what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning.
If it’s darkest before the dawn, we’re somewhere past midnight. But in their attempt to strip the copper from the walls of this country, the fascists moved too fast. They pretend they have a mandate, but nothing will convince people that the money they paid into Social Security shouldn’t come back to them. Nothing will convince people that the post office should no longer deliver to their house. Nothing will convince people that the public goods we’ve benefited from our whole lives should suddenly disappear.
And this is self-interest, pure and simple. At least, that’s the starting point. We won’t just accept our lives suddenly getting worse. If there’s such a thing as human nature, that quality is probably somewhere in there. But, in this moment, we need to go further. We need to see past ourselves, and we need to see that while the destruction and privatization of public goods will undoubtedly hurt us, it’ll take a different sort of thinking to beat back Robber Barons and their fascist onslaught.
Individualized thinking won’t save us here. It can be the catalyst, outrage at what you personally lose can get you into motion, but it won’t see us through. The problem we face is systemic. It now has clear faces in the form of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Chuck Schumer, but it’s much bigger than these little men. We’re up against the neoliberal capitalist hollowing out of public goods, we’re up against a fascist movement that fuses the interests of oligarchs with the power of the state, and we’re up against systematized greed and oppression.
The desire of the richest man on Earth to kill everything good in our government, everything that helps working-class people, is the expansion of a decades-long process of hollowing out state capacity. Decades of privatization have meant not only the hollowing out of our government but the hollowing out of society, the hollowing out of our ability to care for one another, because what public goods really are is the formalizing and systematizing of our desire to care for one another, and for ourselves.
We’ve been taught that kind people care for others, that generous neighbors and our family are the people who care for us when we need it. We’ve also been taught that we need to take care of ourselves. And all that’s true, to some degree, but a healthy society institutes systems of care, massively expanding our ability to look out for one another. A healthy society has universal health care, public transportation, a safety net that prevents the violence of poverty and cares for the elderly. Some of this we’ve never had here, and the rest is under attack by billionaire fascists.
We’re up against people who have everything, still want more, and are wrecking our government to get it. They’ve able to achieve far more than they should’ve been able to because we’ve been persuaded to see ourselves as individuals, and our society has been shaped in such a way that we’re isolated and cut off from our collective power. All resistance must be informed by this knowledge. The fight against fascism must unite millions of people and build and rebuild systems that allow us to care for one another, and for ourselves. Self-preservation might get us into this fight, but we must wage it resisting the billionaire lie that we don’t need one another.
The alarms are already loud enough for millions to get into motion, but for those who still think they can sit back and weather the storm a blaring warning sign is flashing in Argentina. Musk’s favorite world leader is Javier Milei, Argentina‘s President. And as we speak mass protests are rocking Buenos Aires, with masses of people taking to the streets to fight back against the regime of austerity and pension cuts for retirees. In a shocking display, police attacked and bloodied older folks who were demanding that the pensions they worked for their entire lives remain in place. As the Associated Press reports: “Surrounded by police, protesters chanted, ‘Don’t touch the elderly.’ A man draped in the Argentine flag held a sign that read ‘Help me fight. You’ll be the next elderly person.’
Young people, many of them soccer fans organized into militant organizations opposed to the regime, joined the retirees in the latest protest against Milei’s cuts. Their chants compared his rule to the military dictatorship of decades past as riot police cracked heads and threw tear gas. Milei calls himself an “anarcho-capitalist,” but it’s glaringly obvious that he’s a fascist who wants to privatize all public goods. This is the man Elon Musk was imitating when he came on stage with a chainsaw at CPAC. He was, in classic Musk fashion, copying someone else. This time it was Milei, who campaigned with a chainsaw, saying he’d take it to the government if elected.
And that’s what he’s done, cutting services across Argentina and sending the poverty rate soaring up over 50%. This is Musk’s vision. Stealing from Social Security, hurting retirees, driving up poverty, privatizing any and every public good. You might‘ve once thought it can’t really happen here, but by now we should all see very clearly that it could, that it is. Trump and Musk have just been handed more power. They’re kidnapping dissidents, declaring their intention to imprison political opponents as terrorists, and stripping the country for parts. The only thing that stands between the fascist regime in the White House and free fall is us. We’re all we got, and we need each other more than ever.
To move from isolation and individualism to knowing we need each other is the first step. Knowing that we need to build with each other and foster organizations and institutions that can take society towards collectively providing for one another is the second. Millions of people are taking these steps right now, even if they don’t always realize it. What they might experience, initially, is raw anger at having something taken away. Our job is to bring these folks along, to help them see that so much of the good in society comes from taking the care we have for one another and making it structural, making it manifest in systems instead of just acts of charity or moments of generosity.
This is what the fascist billionaires hate, these systems and organizations of care that ice them out and don’t leave room for profit to be extracted. So that’s exactly what we must defend and create, both to beat fascism and to build a society that outlasts billionaires, a society worth fighting for and living in. No one is coming to do this for us — we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Let’s get organized:
Join DSA: https://www.dsausa.org/get-involved/
Unionize your workplace: https://workerorganizing.org/
Talk to your neighbors and form a tenant union: https://tenantfederation.org/tenant-unions/
Federal workers (and others) check out the federal unionists network: https://www.federalunionists.net/
Organize against the war machine: https://wearedissenters.org/
Fight the coup: https://indivisible.org/coup
Take Down Tesla: https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/teslatakedown
People Over Profit: https://linktr.ee/putplanetoverprofit
Check out Dream Defenders: https://www.dreamdefenders.org/
Join the Debt Collective: https://debtcollective.org/
You’ve done great job of articulating points that are difficult to explain without assorted obscenities and spittle being thrown (at least in my case).
My college age daughter and I were discussing the potential for a rebound “empathy enhanced” economic and political model to reclaim some of the soil salted by Musk and Trump’s fascist Ayn Rand-ian snark. I feel that we are well beyond any rhetorical “crossroads” analyses offered by the CNN types. It’s difficult to explain the gravity of the current situation to a generation that has only the absurd reference points of perpetual war, pandemics, and mind altering tech devices to fall back upon. The more I find myself referencing (for her) history in the form of the rise of fascism in pre-war Europe, the internment camps for Japanese Americans, etc., the more I frighten myself with my own arguments.
Thanks again for your efforts, Well done.
Joshua, this is what the USA needs, and what the rest of the western world needs. We're all in these hollowed out neoliberal so-called democracies, and until we face this fact and get organized, it's only going to get worse.
I'd like to see us organize on a global scale.