I have struggled a bit to find anything of even marginal usefulness that I might have to say about current events. There are many threads to pursue. For future contemplation:
This feels like a wake-up call for the Zoomers and, if they have the backbone, Millenials. As much as the threat of this and other draconian measures have floated over the last five years, this is the first time it will actually materially impact the lives of most Americans. And it’s absurdly unpopular, something like 80% of Americans support abortion access in some form.
As someone who spent my twenties protesting the Iraq War in an atmosphere of almost uniform braindead jingoism, I was bred for that sort of undemocratic absurdity. But for those who came of age in the Obama years, there may still be some delusions to strip away about what exactly Amerikakaka is. This is good news, though – ditching the delusions we’re fed about our country can be incredibly energizing, and most of all clarifying. It makes it possible to understand so much that is incomprehensible when you patly accept that we live in a functioning democracy.
This is the culmination of an American antidemocratic project that has broadened steadily from a foundation, ultimately, in slavery and slave economies. The end of Reconstruction, the Southern Strategy of the sixties and seventies, and deceptively packing the court with people who lied about their own beliefs are of a single piece.
This may also be the twilight of the antidemocrats. Their last gasp for power has been almost entirely procedural and built on a decided minority of voters. Despite the mainstream media’s slightly-too-upbeat fascination with a new generation of far-right activists, the rise of something like the Hipster Fascist Club of Downtown Manhattan is bleak, but I’m not certain it’s all that meaningful. An actual willingness to fight back against this stuff in a coordinated way while offering a meaningful and articulate alternative would destroy it in a matter of weeks. There’s just nobody offering that kind of leadership, because while the far right has been building institutions like Heritage for decades, there are few if any equivalents that actually work to articulate what Americans mostly already believe in - tolerance, diversity, and community.
The Republicans are now a full-blown fascist party, made clear by the imposition of laws in places like Texas that implicitly forgive rape and incest, which have fewer accommodations for mothers than the harshest Islamic Sharia law, and which completely ignore groups like Jews for whom abortion access is a religious mandate. There is no longer a ‘conservative’ party in the U.S., if we take that to mean an actual belief in limited government. This is catastrophic.
The Democratic party in its current form has, equally, proven itself to be a dead end. This is a failure made over years, perhaps decades, of general spinelessness, weak proceduralism, and above all, a commitment to capital over people. The consequence has been a multi-decade failure to actually explain a legislative agenda that might really help anyone. Somehow, the policies the party nominally supports have enjoyed persistent popularity DESPITE the uselessness of the Dems, but that’s not enough anymore.
Two other things are worth noting. First, a lot of people really DO believe in banning abortion on religious grounds. It is simultaneously true that there’s no explicit comment on abortion in the Christian scriptures. One reason this is so little contested is because Christian religiosity in white America has been wholesale subverted into a mix of prosperity-gospel heresy and utterly repellent christofascism.
Of course, this itself is nothing new since, again, American religious values were permanently and deeply broken by their centuries-long accommodation to slavery. Once you’ve bent a religion of peace and generosity to fit the contours of a rigid caste system, it isn’t going to neatly snap back into place, even leaving aside all the other unresolved sicknesses slavery inflicted on the masters.
Second and perhaps most important, this is the break in our long moment of tension. The deep (if ultimately manufactured) divisions between Americans are no longer immanent, but have become manifest. And this means we will continue to accelerate towards more and more open conflict. We will see more and more horrific mass murders committed in the name of God and Country, because at root this is all about exerting brute force.
That force has cannily and patiently been cultivated within the political system by the “respectable” vanguards of the Deconstruction, but that is now more clearly than ever backed by the implicit threat of paramilitary violence. This is the structure of a fascist state and it is how oppositional voices are cowed and silenced. We’ve enjoyed two decades now of, for instance, Pride parades that felt like genuine celebrations of victory. That’s over now – these people want us dead, which has been true for years but is now undeniable. Pride and other similar events have already been battlegrounds, and that will only accelerate.
This is, ironically, the result of decades of liberal political elites “turning the other cheek.” This particular Christian parable is spectacularly ill-understood. As no less an idolater than Slavoj Zizek was left to point out in his 2007 book Violence, the injunction to turn the other cheek is not a mandate to passivity, but to a deeper, more meaningful kind of force. To turn the other cheek is not simply to prepare for more abuse, it is to shame the violator while asserting your own dignity. It’s not so different from Baudrillard’s much more extreme declaration that taking your own life is the only true rebellion against totalitarian capitalism.
This philosophical rhetoric does begin to seem a bit distasteful when we’re talking about a policy that will literally and directly lead real women to their deaths. And of course that reality drives home the deeper problem with turning the other cheek, whether in the feckless Democratic Party sense or the more assertive Christian sense. Both implicitly rely on some underlying sense of decency on the part of the attacker, and there’s never been any reason to offer that assumption to the American right, a group of carefully cultivated small minds who get their rocks off on hatred and violence instead of love and community.
Even the Eisenhower conservatives who once seemingly roamed the land may only ever have been a contingent bit of caping, the convenient bridge between an era of outright Jim Crow and the more bizarre but no less degraded vision of America we now live with. If there were any shared ideals, they’re gone. It’s nothing but power now, yet power cannot provide a resolution.