Four Things you Should Scream at Every Liberal you Know.
#1: There’s no such thing as a good Republican.
On January 6th, 2021, as Congress was in the process of certifying Republican President Donald Trump’s defeat, thousands of Republicans attacked the capital resulting in a lockdown, delay, and four deaths.
For months prior to this, Republican politicians openly supported the idea of contesting the election results to prevent Trump from leaving office, while dozens of Republican attorneys, legislators, and donors actively campaigned to change the outcome of the election.
For decades prior to this, Republicans have courted white supremacy, adopted fascist foreign policy programs, and worked to undermine democracy. In 2000, Republican President Bush came to power on a wave of fascist riots seeking to prevent a full and fair vote count and used his term in office to grow the movement of white conservative evangelicals who attempted a coup on January 6th. Bush also packed the courts with racist, anti-democratic judges while his party pushed for policies of voter disenfranchisement.
Every day, Republicans like Mitt Romney wake up, look at President Trump, the KKK, and all the other detestable fascists in their party and actively choose to remain Republicans. They have decided that, whatever their aesthetic objections to fascism may be, their commitment to homicidal austerity programs and an unjust status quo is greater than their dislike of fascism.
While Democratic leaders and voters repeat the myth of the “principled Republican,” the Republican party demands and wins greater power, all the while enabling the most radical, furthest right members of their party. In 2021, it is naive to the point of homicidal incompetence to believe that any Republican is a good person.
#2: Not all violence is bad.
When faced with horrors like the coup attempt, liberal pundits and politicians respond by unilaterally condemning all political violence as illegitimate and unacceptable. Not only is this incredibly hypocritical (liberals support police crushing protests, invasions of foreign countries, and preventable poverty, all of which are forms of political violence), it also enables fascist politicians.
Rather than forcing Republican leaders to explain and take a position on the ideological foundation of the coup attempt, hyper-focusing on the violence (rather than the fascism) as the unacceptable part gives Republicans license to make vague platitudes which equate last summer’s Black Lives Matter with Trump’s seditionists — it gives them license to equate uprisings against state-sponsored racism with an attempt enforce state sponsored racism. Even worse, mainstream media outlets spent the night of the coup repeating this plainly dangerous idea.
“All violence is bad” is a thought-killing slogan designed to blind us to the violence of the status quo, the violence that all progress requires, and equate those fighting oppression with its perpetrators.
#3: Leftists exist and they aren’t “the same” as fascists.
If you are a liberal and clicked this article, there’s a decent chance that you thought it would be written by some mouth-breathing conservative trying to spin their attempted coup into something else altogether. Instead, you’ve encountered a pissed off leftist whose primary objection to your belief system is its utter failure to combat or defeat fascism.
It is, in fact, possible to criticize Democrats from the left. It should not, in fact, be seen as seditious, false-flag attacks on behalf of Republicans, or as a childish delusion. Democratic leaders have known Republicans are a danger to democracy for at least two decades. Nancy Pelosi herself has repeatedly pointed to how dangerous Trump is — and yet she, and other Democratic Party leaders, voted to fund Trump’s military, Trump’s border wall, and Trump’s concentration camps. Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden have both sworn to pursue bipartisanship and openly hope for the “party of Reagan” to return — (and, for the record, Reagan ordered war crimes abroad while commiting a genocide against the gay community at home).
Democratic leadership utterly failed to prevent Trump’s election. They failed to maintain Obama’s majority, they failed to stop voter disenfranchisement, they failed to stop or overturn citizens united, they failed to defend the courts, and they failed to pre-empt the most foreseeable coup attempt in history. If you’re not criticizing Democrats from the left, you are handing the country to the Right.
#4: It doesn’t have to be this way.
America is not a country doomed by its history, population, or by the nature of human beings. It is entirely possible to build a world where our adult literacy is as high as Cuba’s (99.9%), where our healthcare is free, where we can respond to pandemics and economic crashes with more than $600 and a slap on the back. There are systems on Earth, systems that already exist and are already successful, which make people happier, healthier, and better informed.
America is collapsing because of specific policy choices that specific people made. Those choices can be unmade and those people can be disempowered. The Republican party and its enablers are relying on you to believe that nothing can get better and to pre-emptively surrender to the worst imaginable policies because you presume defeat. Do not meet that expectation.
Voting for the most “realistic” policies is a self-defeating strategy which has utterly failed to improve Americans’ lives while allowing the Republican party to pass increasingly unrealistic and cartoonishly evil policies.
If you enjoyed this essay and would like to be notified when I publish anything new, please sign up for my mailing list or follow me on Twitter!
