There’s this kind of frightening but flattering thing that happens when you do the work that I do, when you spend a lot of time writing and reading about and working against the forces undermining a better society, when your friends and loved ones are aware that you are hopelessly impaled upon a fascination with the beliefs and mechanisms which are constantly creating and destroying our world. People ask you questions they might not have ever asked out loud before. Questions like, “is it really as bad as it seems?” and “is there any way out of this?” and “for the love of god, what do we do?”
It’s flattering because of the idea that I might have the answers to these questions. It’s frightening because I usually don’t. And on the rare occasion that I do have an answer for these questions, it’s frightening as well, because those answers often take the form of “yes, it really is as bad as it seems,” or some other such confirmation of a bubble which I could tell the asker was hoping I would burst.
I spent a good chunk of last week and weekend in Woodland Park, Colorado, a charming small town in Teller County which I have documented in recent years as it has found itself at the often-uncomfortable center of national political machinations. Given that I have often traveled to Woodland Park to stand behind a podium and pontificate about politics and religion, my reputation as a purveyor of big questions is perhaps exaggerated in the town. As a result, I find myself encountering these kinds of existential questions more frequently when I am in Woodland Park than when I’m home in Denver. And, last week, one question came up over and over:
What do we do now?
The context spoke for itself. Trump. ICE. The escalating ethnic cleansing of the United States. The mass harassment and internment of anyone who fits the profile. Media moguls censoring speech and paying bribes to appease the president. The ongoing and deeply obvious cover-up of horrible crimes against children. The suicidal institutionalization of climate change denial. The do-nothing Democratic leadership in D.C. being steamrolled by all of it. The ever-darkening present reality. What do we do now?
I did my best to answer, to provide things which I know we can do now, things which I know won’t hurt our current situation, and might provide some relief. Don’t make yourself consume every last bit of news, I told some of them; attention is a resource, don’t let them burn you out, keep that flame burning for the issues you are really invested in, and really positioned to impact. Find ways to engage in mutual aid, I told others; it builds resilience before you need it, it knits communities together, and it’s good for the soul. Spend some time with yourself, find out what you really believe, and what it requires of you, I told the rest.
Each of these was an honest answer – but none of them sat right with me, because none of them struck me as a complete answer.
The fact is, we are a long way from the end of the United States’ current struggle. It does not end if Democrats win back the House or Senate next year. It does not end if Democrats win back the White House in 2028. You can tell because those things have already happened since this saga started some time around 2015, and it did not end then, either. Our current travails are not simply the result of Republican electoral successes, and they will not be ended by Democratic electoral successes. They are the result of a rotten, corrosive worldview which has gripped tens of millions of Americans – a worldview of fear and supremacy and hatred and insecurity which has simmered into an American-bred fascism – and this does not end until it lets a sizable chunk of those tens of millions out of its grip.
It’s a reality which makes living through this moment in history feel particularly daunting: our search for a way out is not about what levers can be pulled to make things right again, but about what will lead tens of millions of people to change their hearts. Historically, the answer has not been pretty. In Germany, or Italy, or Bosnia, or the other places where the 20th century unleashed violent ideologies to trample the countryside, the abandonment of dangerous worldviews only came en masse once their embrace became a sufficient threat to life and safety, often at the hands of occupying armies or aerial bombardment. The average Nazi did not “see the light” when Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin; he just got too scared to keep being a Nazi. If we are lucky, we will never have to see such things, the problematic worldview will abate via economic or social upheaval instead of via violence – the problem is that there’s honestly no way to tell at this point whether we will be lucky.
When we think about the lessons of history, we are biased towards thinking about the climaxes, the turning points. And yet we find ourselves living day to day not at the climax, not anywhere near a turning point, but in the long, drawn-out lead up to those events, whenever they may arrive and whatever shape they may take.
Truth be told, when people ask me that question – what do we do now? – I think the underlying assumption is sometimes wrong. They are often asking how do we solve this problem? It is an understandable question, but one which I fear is still before its time. I think a question with more near-term applicability would be how do we survive this problem, and how do we increase our odds of eventually securing a positive outcome? We are in the part of the story which takes up the fewest pages in the books, but lasts for long, slow years in real life. And that’s not easy.
The history books do contain lessons about the long, slow years, however few pages are dedicated to them, but they tend to be lessons of survival, not of solution. Lessons about how to survive under fascism, how to keep hope alive, and how to push back meaningfully when opportunities present themselves. However badly we might want to rush ahead to the turning point, those are the tasks which lie before us now.
I think often about historian Timothy Snyder’s “Twenty Lessons for Fighting Tyranny.” When I feel that ever-present need to do something, I’m inclined to look at Snyder’s list and consider which of them I can do at that moment. The list includes famous bits of advice like “don’t obey in advance,” but much of its day-to-day applicability comes in the less flashy recommendations, like “be courageous” and “stand out. Someone has to.” Snyder’s list is not a step-by-step plan for eliminating fascism, it’s a relentlessly empathetic and human guide to surviving it.
I also think about the Battle of Cable Street – a somewhat more visceral and less cerebral counterpart to Snyder’s advice, and a sterling example of ordinary citizens seizing a moment to draw a line in the sand. In October 1936, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists decided to don their black shirts and march through the heavily Jewish quarters of London’s East End as an act of intimidation. When the 3,000 or so fascists showed up (along with a sizable police escort) they encountered a force of more than 100,000 counter protestors from the Jewish community, labor unions, and left-wing political parties, who proceeded to whip the fascists so badly that they never tried to harass the neighborhood again. According to contemporaneous reports, women dumped chamber pots on the fascists from upper windows, which I’m sure was cathartic. (Mosley’s son, Max Mosley, went on to further disgrace the family name in 2008 with a scandal which is almost too on-the-nose).
Even as I write this, as I reflect on Snyder’s lessons for fighting tyranny, as I fondly imagine the looks on the faces of Mosley’s goons encountering a crowd thirty times its size, I’m struck by the same feeling I had when answering the question in Woodland Park last week: that these answers are incomplete.
To put it bluntly, we find ourselves in a moment in which voting is not enough, uprising is too much, and every hour brings a day’s worth of bad news. And while Snyder’s list might help us grin and bear it, and Cable Street might show us that resistance can matter, neither necessarily makes those hours more bearable in the meantime, or provides us with the feelings of progress or meaningful work which so many crave so badly.
And that’s why I want to have a conversation.
If you have made it this far, I want to hear from you. I want to know what you think we should do. I want to know how you’re getting by. Or, perhaps more importantly, I want to know what you are craving, what you are hoping to see. Do you disagree that voting is not enough, or that uprising is too much? Do you think mass protest is meaningful, or a waste of time – and, if it’s a waste of time, what should we be doing instead? Is a general strike plausible? I ask myself these questions constantly, but it’s a conversation which I believe there is merit in having more broadly.
In a few weeks, I’ll come back to this question – what do we do now? – with any answers you send in (you can email me at [email protected]). Maybe you have better answers than I provided either here or in Woodland Park. Maybe the thought bouncing around in your brain just happens to be exactly what someone else needs to hear.
Either way, a conversation will not hurt us, and it just might help. To discuss is to care, and caring is – at least – one step forward. As historian, political theorist, and committed antifascist Hannah Arendt said, “evil thrives on apathy, and cannot survive without it.”
So let’s care. Let’s talk about it. Let’s hear what you’ve got.
