Donald Trump is on a rampage and the colossal pistons of America's federal government machine seem to be his new favorite battering rams. Every problem, perceived or contrived, seems to require a bigger and bigger government solution. Things get a little lively at the border? Proclaim unsanctioned human movement to be a military invasion and send in the National Guard. Some locals get pissed about this bullshit in LA? Send in more fucking troops without even consulting local authorities. Too many trans kids? Fuck it, send the National Guard into the bathrooms for full cavity searches. Too many autistic kids? Proclaim their existence to be a national health crisis and put a Kennedy in charge of it....
....Liquidate the 14th Amendment, declare Jehovah's Witnesses to be "Alien Enemies", reignite the arms race and send it into outer space, annex Nova Scotia, put pedophiles in charge of Title 9, dust off a few more 300-year-old war powers and throw a North Korean-style military parade...
Governing is hard so use a fucking hammer. The national debt may continue to skyrocket but who needs fiscal responsibility when the power of White Christ compels you!
After forty years of wheeling and dealing and lobbying in the church place, the Evangelicals have finally finished their hostile takeover of the right in this country with a philandering orange Trojan horse and conservatism, in any meaningful sense of the word is their first casualty. Whereas the glutinous missile hockers in the old GOP used to at least pay lip service to notions of states' rights and fiscal responsibility, the Dutch elm disease infecting the Tree of Liberty known as Christian nationalism openly celebrates the use of sweeping executive powers to fortify our toxic union beneath a narrow interpretation of a million-year-old compilation of Middle Eastern fairy tales and even the Supreme Court seems to be in on the grift.
This may be a very right-wing problem but the left in this country have long sown the seeds for this infestation by building a state designed for imperialism to the size of a small planet. In fact, I would argue that MAGA and the Christian Nationalists behind it bare far more of a resemblance to America's turn-of-the-century coastal progressives than any school of actual conservatism and this isn't some kind of sick coincidence.
Early American progressivism was strongly informed by the puritanical pietism of the Protestant Reformation that sought to fuse church and state into a divine instrument to purify society of its sins. The progressives simply secularized this system of social engineering and used it to fuse big business, big government and big labor into a single bureaucratic Cthulhu. Once this massive overhaul was done, fascism became as easy to achieve as stacking the courts and rigging elections.
We saw a frighteningly similar narrative unfold in post-imperial Germany a few decades later. The Nazis, themselves fellow right-wing social engineers inspired by Protestant pietism and American progressivism, didn't take power, they were handed it on a silver platter by a bunch of assholes who called themselves social democrats. After selling out Red Rosa and the Spartacist Uprising, Germany's Social Democratic Party (or SPD) created the Weimar Republic for their right-wing co-conspirators in the Freikorps to hide behind.
This massive welfare cabaret included a spiffy new constitution which afforded the nation's president the ability to take measures without the consent of the Reichstag by using a provision known as Article 48. The SPD used these emergency decrees liking fucking crazy to consolidate their power only to have it used against them by Adolf Hitler to establish the Third Reich.
This is the danger inherent to any form of big government. The state is a tool designed to give a select few the power to do things that your average citizen would be jailed for doing, whether this means robbing the poor at gunpoint to build a bridge or throwing them into concentration camps for refusing to kick up their taxes. Regardless of what the intentions are of those who erect such systems, sooner or later, they will all be abused because they quite simply afford far too much power to far too few people.
And thus, the statist left has set the stage for another era of fascist plunder which may be why nobody really takes them seriously as a means to resist it. Germany's Social Democrats were the first people sent to the camps and even their own voters didn't get particularly shaken up by this turn of events because the SPD basically built them. But the statist left isn't the only left. It isn't even the first left.
Every wave of revolutionary upheaval that has ever rocked this nation has been led by men and women who considered themselves to be socialists but rejected the states' monopoly on grotesque behavior.
The Abolitionist Movement was led by free market socialists like Lysander Spooner, William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau, the latter's ideas on self-reliance and social ecology would also inform much of the modern-day environmental movement. The Women's Movement was led by female anarchists like Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons, who would set the stage for feminism. And nearly every labor right this nation has ever enjoyed was achieved through blood, sweat and gunpowder by syndicalists like those in the International Workers of the World.
Every single one of these movements was defined by decentralization, self-governance and militant opposition to both big government bureaucracy and the capitalist hierarchy this inevitably fosters (and vice versa) but sadly every single one of these movements was also done in by state infiltration.
Abe Lincoln turned the Abolitionist Movement into a bloody excuse to consolidate power in the hands of the Northern industrial elites who simply replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery. The Women's Movement was hijacked by progressive bats like Margaret Sanger who quickly converted it into a vehicle for compulsory temperance and population control. And the seemingly endless revolutionary potential of the Labor Movement was murdered by FDR's Mussolini-inspired New Deal which neutered wildcats into mobbed-up union fat cats.
But decentralization still remains the greatest defense against centralized authoritarianism in this country and it doesn't get much more centralized or authoritarian than the Donald's Satanic union of millenarian Jesus freaks, Zionist genocide junkies and Silicon Valley Übermenschen and some people on the left, including some people on the statist left, seem to have recognized the power of weaponized localism though few have taken it nearly far enough to reach its logical conclusions.
School choice is being used to protect young people from having their bodies policed by compulsory gender fascism with the creation of Queer-affirming public charter schools like Magic City in Alabama and the Uplift Education Network in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, but no system of schooling can truly be safe from authoritarianism unless they liberate themselves from the restraints of tax dollars and enforced curriculums. Paul Goodman had the right idea with the Free School Movement that sought to establish truly autonomous schools led by the consensus of the student body.
Community hospitals and free clinics are building underground railroads leading trans kids and those plagued by unwanted pregnancies to cities and localities that have established themselves as healthcare sanctuaries, but these well-intentioned professionals remain bound by a healthcare system centralized and policed by the blood and butter welfare state. As that state continues to be infiltrated and commandeered by Christian jihadists, these providers would be wise to embrace the kind of liberated grey market counter-economics envisioned by Samuel Edward Konkin III in order to defend their patients with the shield of agoraism.
Last but not least, sanctuary states of every kind remain the best defense for those being governed by a national regime they never consented to, but those governments must do more than just refuse to comply with fascism, they must actively obstruct it, and this must mean that the forbidden fruit of secession should at the very least remain on the table as a viable bargaining chip if not an outright solution to a nation clearly too big to fail without a goddamn apocalypse.
None other than one of America's leading abolitionists, Lysander Spooner, advocated nothing less, observing that the Constitution itself had no lasting authority as anything more than a contract between consenting parties and that any Supreme Court that does not keep its part of the contract must be seen as totally invalid.
Socialism works, it's just not compatible with any state that can't fit into your wallet. With the tools of the liberal-progressive welfare state being rapidly converted into weapons by an increasingly desperate and zealous police state, the left's only hope is to convert every village into a fortress against tyranny because the only way to take care of these fuckers is to take care of each other first and there is no state substitute for community.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post
* Where Eagle Dare by the Misfits
* Soon by My Bloody Valentine
* No Front Teeth by Perfume Genius
* Tuesday's Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd
* Bad Mouth by Fugazi
* Lasting Friend by Samia
* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers
* Bullet with Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins
* Karma Police by Radiohead
* Wreck by Neko Case
* Last Caress by the Misfits
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