by Jean Allen
A few weeks ago on Chapo Trap House (#1051), the hosts interviewed Tim from the podcast All Lawyers Are Bastards, and his conclusion was notable in how often I’ve heard permutations of it:
“It’s very hard for me to envision right now without a really severe legislative reform, a Congress in the next 8 to 10 years that’s really capable of doing anything of note, right? And that’s one of the ways the Supreme Court’s able to kind of create this space for themselves is they just kick things over to Congress and say, ‘it’s Congress’ responsibility to do this, not us, right?’ And so that’s when they decide not to act. But that does mean that Congress is probably not going to be able to create new federal legislation that carves themselves out a unique role, right? And if they do that, they’re probably not going to be able to effectively craft legislation that actually curtails those rights. So I think working in local municipalities and states can be one area where I think you can see a little more change.”
This is the logic that I have seen consistently throughout my life (that it is not realistic for any systemic change to happen), but it is rare to see it all laid out like this. My parents’ generation loved the bumper sticker slogan – “think global, act local.” Yes there are big global problems that we are increasingly connected to, but really, you have the most power locally. Like everything in our postmodern world, this is a strategy that is always new, always obvious, but it can never be said to have been tried and failed. By my sister’s apartment there is a dangerous intersection. After almost a decade of organizing, it finally has a stop sign. That is the “stuff” you get done at the local level if your goals are in any way opposed or even orthogonal to capital. I know people who have spent their whole political lives defending a few acres of wetlands, or trying to get speed bumps installed on one residential street, or trying to get the police of a village to be marginally more accountable. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has made 998 billion dollars, reactionary politics have been on the rise everywhere, hot wars are returning to global life, and the world seems destined to careen towards an unmanageable level of heating. “Act locally” has failed as a project.
I do not mean to diminish this kind of work. “Act locally” is a truism for a reason. But I want to focus on the elision here. An elision is a linguistic term for the omission of a syllable in speech, like saying you’re ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to’. There is an elision between ‘think global’ and ‘act local’ – don’t waste your time on any kind of big demands. We are totally, abjectly powerless at the systemic level. In Rochester a 75-25 vote in support of the Police Accountability Board in our 2019 referendum has been eaten, slowly, by the court system. A half decade earlier, the insurgent mayorship of Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, MI, tried to raise local minimum wages, only to have that power stripped from him by the state legislature. Any success at any point within our system requires the acceptance of the whole rest of it, requires super-majorities and the base for sustained legal fights; because the government that we have been taught is meant to serve us, is actually tremendously stacked against the empowerment of the working class.
That system has not served any of us in the whole of our political adulthoods. And just as ‘Capitalist Realism’ accepts that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”, there is an American Realism which accepts, to a greater or lesser degree, the perfection/permanence of the US constitution, and restricts its political project to fit itself within the disciplinary grounds of that system.
I said this in June’s newsletter reviewing a folk album: ‘domination has a blast radius’. Constantly elliding over our total powerlessness at the level of the system is bad for us. Watching 17 years of protest movements be responded to with total indifference from the government which ‘serves us’ is not just a rational problem – it’s something that fucks up our ability to feel empowered in the rest of our lives. That’s to say nothing for the twisted kind of person who really gets into this. There is a kind of attitude developed within our schools and ‘intelligencia’ which says: any call for systemic change, any focus on how unrepresentative our government is, can be seen as the product of a lack of civics education. This person has come to love our system, which gives so many opportunities to explain the suffering it doles out, because obviously anyone with an issue simply does not have enough education to know that their suffering is actually justifiable, is actually fine.
There is a popular tendency on the left right now that holds that this is only a problem of will – that if we win hard enough, this all goes away. To that perspective this is all nonsense, since nobody cares about our system of government anyways. I get this perspective, but even while we fight for bread and butter demands, I think it’s important that we say the thing the rest of our political punditry, including many of our comrades, elide:
“The government we have been taught is meant to serve us, actually disempowers working-class people, and that is wrong, and the world does not have to be this way.”
This is argued in DSA’s new program, which says our enemy is “not just this or that cop, judge, or president, but the entire anti-democratic structure of our society. We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” I think this is important, because the first part of empowering ourselves is recognizing that we have been disempowered, and training ourselves to see the disempowerment of ourselves and our fellow workers as a moral outrage rather than something to be ideologically explained. Because at the end of the conversation the Chapos had with Tim, Will spelled out what this perspective really means:
“[The] best you can hope for [is the] complete collapse of the United States, both as a government, and a country. So maybe some sort of natural disaster, or [something].”
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of America’s undemocratic institutions. But accepting these premises only leads to doomerism, rather than action. In order to fight for stop signs, and speed bumps, and wetlands, we need to clear the anti-democratic road blocks.