Calm Down, Freak Out
What the Fuck Just Happened?
By Matthew Vernon Whalan
On election night, upon the news that Donald Trump was projected to win the presidential elections, at least hundreds of protesters from UC Irvine, UCLA, and Northern California quickly took to the streets, chanting “Never Trump!” and “Fuck Donald Trump!” The demonstrations took many forms in many streets across the country for the rest of the week, and this is what we should all be doing.
If there will be one good thing about a Trump presidency and the fact that the Republican Party — the most dangerous organization in the world — now has virtually full control over legislation, it is that at least now we know what we should be doing with ourselves. It’s time to hit the streets. Under Obama, and hypothetically under Clinton, liberal citizens have remained complicit in ecocide, the nuclear weapons buildup and our perpetual wars, and the financial recklessness that spawned the legitimate rage of the Trump constituency.
The Hillary Clinton campaign, instead of trying to absorb the Bernie Sanders constituency, relied on stealing votes from Donald Trump via the moderate right to make up the difference; the Democratic party showed itself willing to risk the fate of humanity just to hang onto the kind of corporate power they enjoy. They preferred moving further toward the weak center to execute this strategy over making the concessions that the Sanders campaign pressured them to champion.
There is no left-wing in mainstream American electoral politics anymore, and for this, the corporate body of the Democratic party — mostly made up of lawyers and business people — must beg for our forgiveness and accept that they will never receive it.
If you are patting yourself on the back on the morning of November 9th for having supported Hillary Clinton, you are part of the problem. Yes, Trump is an arrogant, bombastic imbecile. But do not be surprised. This is how societies in rapid decline and tailspin behave. The Democratic party has accelerated us down that path as much as the Republicans. Trump is the kind of figure that rises out of a bankrupt establishment that will risk anything — even handing over the reins to a complete dumbass like him — to cling to its power.
Thomas Frank wrote a piece for The Guardian, “Donald Trump is Moving to the White House, and Liberals Put Him There,” the morning after the elections, a first rate analysis which deserves to be quoted at length. First, Frank acknowledges that Hillary Clinton was just about the worst possible choice the Democrats could have picked for “[…] this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A techno-crat who offered fine tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.” Further down, he notes, of Sanders and Biden as opposed to Clinton, “Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders,” and finally, on the topic of how sickeningly presumptuous, patronizing, and enslaved by the status quo the Democratic party was, Frank writes,
[…] but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:
Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren’t real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.
Frank is rightly pointing out that these were all arrogant and disrespectful lies of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. Frank concludes with the understanding that the Democrats lost the election that was handed to them on a silver platter, not only because they wanted the gold platter all to themselves, but because “They chose insulting the other side instead of trying to understand what motivated them,” and further down, “Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.”
In the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s, two political movements rose up just about simultaneously: the fascists and the anarcho-syndicalists. The anarcho-syndicalists created worker collectives, solidarity movements and public education outlets — largely through their alternative media outlets — and brought together a strong wave of effective work and visionary practice. The Communist Party, then in power, found it necessary to crush this movement as swiftly as it could. Indeed, the anarcho-syndicalists were seen by the population and the Communist Party as more of a threat to the establishment than the fascists, because the Communists knew that the anarchists offered a more attractive alternative to the fascists than the Communists themselves could. The Communists knew they needed the anarchists out of their way if they were going to be the alternative to the fascists, if they were going to hang onto power. The Communists succeeded in making themselves the only alternative to the fascists in a desperate attempt to hang onto power by crushing the solidarity movement of the anarchists, and the population quickly turned to fascism as the only alternative to the Communist Party (see Noam Chomsky’s essay, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship.”)
If we compare this scenario to our current situation, the Clinton camp is to the Sanders movement what the Communists were to the anarchists. (Note, the anarchists went a lot further than Sanders, but in sentiment the scenario is quite similar.) The polls still show that in a hypothetical scenario in which Sanders is running against Trump, Sanders wins by eleven points, and if you are a liberal who accepted the narrative that supporting Clinton was necessary to beat Trump as the primary races were ending, that number should make you throw up in your mouth. There was never a point when Clinton did as well in the polls against Trump as Sanders did. Not even yesterday. There was an alternative to supporting Hillary after Sanders dropped out, and there still is, and that alternative remains now what it was then: nonviolent open class warfare and open rebellion. If it was not clear then, it could not be clearer now.
If you are afraid, calm down. You are not trapped. There is a way out and it is this: start freaking out. I assure you, our leaders are like dogs: they are dangerous and capable of hurting you, but ultimately, they are more afraid of you than you are of them, and that is why they are willing to hurt you.
We are not stuck with Trump. Trump is stuck with us.
Before I lay out the ways in which we can effectively and productively organize to “freak out,” let us take a moment to examine how we got here.
Who the Fuck Are We?
Let’s begin with some basic comparisons between Donald Trump and Charlie Sheen, with the commentary on Charlie Sheen being in the context of his public meltdown of a few years ago.
They both come from families of wealth while they pride themselves for their individuality. They share very complicated, predatory, and hyper-masculine values and experiences around sex. They are both deeply obsessed — again, in a hyper-masculine way — with so-called “winning,” going so far as to tout their greatest failures as their greatest victories. Much of the public saw both of them, for a long time, primarily as sources of humor. The media, as it propped them up as sources of humor, also speculated a great deal about both of them struggling with mental illness. They both claimed their hatred was a form of “passion” (See this interview with Sheen). They were both in the news 24/7. And the more the news paid attention to them, the more they both glorified their own antics. They are both racist (though Trump is more racist, if such a scale even exists). And, finally, perhaps the most telling parallel, Charlie Sheen said at the end of his Comedy Central roast, in defense of a racial slur he made to his boss at CBS, “I did the one thing in America everyone really wishes they could do: I told my boss to f*ck off,” and he was right. That is what everyone in America wishes they could do. And that is what many Americans think they just did to their establishment bosses by electing Donald Trump as president.
In fact, the only real difference between Donald Trump and Charlie Sheen is that, sometimes, Sheen can string an interesting and eloquent sentence together.
When I think back to the Sheen fiasco, and when I reflect on what just happened with Donald Trump, the important question, which most liberals fail to understand, is not “what are these figures doing to our society?” or “how are these figures shaping our society?” but rather, how is our society shaping these figures? They do not create us. We create them — by not offering, as the Democratic Party did not, a powerful, creative, and constructive alternative to the powerful and destructive one as a reaction to the forces arrayed against us — forces of which the illusions that entertain us are mirrors.
If you are looking for someone to blame for the rise of Donald Trump, look no further than these three groups of people: those who supported Donald Trump, those who supported Hillary Clinton, and all of us, myself included, who do not devote every day we live to tearing down the corporate, militaristic, ecocidal narrative that tells the story of our lives.
Are these figures, Trump and Sheen, really surprising? Are they really entertaining? Is it really a mystery what their relation is to us? Consider the rhetoric of this US Army commercial as compared to Sheen and Trump’s obsessive language about “winning:” “We operate in a complex world,” the commercial brags, “with one simple mission: win.” Democrats and Republicans alike stand by this message, as do those of us who do not live every moment in stark opposition to it. Charlie Sheen and Donald Trump are our children. They are the logical conclusion to our illogical narrative.
What the Fuck are we going to do?
While we do have to imagine and visualize a better future — a task integral to all important political rebellions in history — we do not have to imagine the solutions and mechanisms by which we may move toward this vision. Those solutions and mechanisms already exist. We merely have to join them. As many days of the week as we can, it is incumbent upon us to grow these political spaces, to hit the streets, to educate ourselves and one another, to unleash a storm of righteous indignation so eloquent and enormous as to surround and frighten the corporate establishment and its idols bearing down upon our future. It is not that complicated. You just have to know where to go. We do know where the most important places to go to engage in this battle for the good exist, for nothing short of the survival of the human species — if we are willing to accept the reality of climate change and nuclear weapons (see my last piece, “We got Next”).
Millions upon millions of seats just opened up in the rebellion. It is a moral obligation for us to take them.
In the words of Arundhati Roy in her great essay, “Confronting Empire” in her book War Talk,
Our strategy should not be only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’ve been brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We may be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Below is a list of what I’m calling the “political spaces” that we must enter. Learn about them. Join them. Every day that you can. Tell your communities about them. Donate money to them. Put your body in the streets and on the pipelines with them. Bring them up in as many of your conversations as you can. Think of them not as movements, which have an arch and fall, but as ways of life, to be passed down from generation to generation. The solutions do exist. We can join them or we can be complicit in crushing them, and along with them, ourselves and our children. It is that dire. We are this at risk. We can accept the realities of perpetual — and possibly nuclear — war, ecocide, and economic instability as emergencies that must be addressed immediately, as many days, months, years and centuries as we are able to address them. Or we can accept these realities as our fate. There is no longer any time for incrementalism.
Black Lives Matter
Veterans for Peace
Boycott Divest Sanctions
The Green Party
The alternative journalism wave (Counterpunch, Truth-out, Truthdig, Democracy Now!, The Intercept, The Young Turks, Tom Dispatch, Common Dreams, and others like them.)
Green Peace
Permaculture farming and production
Anti-drilling and anti-fracking
The revitalization of Occupy
Democracy Spring
…and many, many, many more.
When you enter these political spaces, you will be led to and will create more and more of them. This is a moral act. It is also — maybe more so — a practical one.