Gum up the works!
Fascism relies on a myth of its own inevitability. Blessed are those who puncture that myth.
Top notes:
You’re getting a second (Friday) edition this week, though you likely won’t get anything next week. The reason? I’m on spring break with my kids, but I had one last thing to say before closing up shop. No extra song of the week in this issue, but you can (of course) always check out the collected song of the week playlist on Apple Music or Spotify.
I am able to be on vacation next week because this is my job (and, in turn, because I have wonderful readers who support it being able to be a job, so thank you). Here’s some more context on why I ask for your support. The short version is that The White Pages is one offering to our collective efforts to build a better world, and I think all of that work is worth supporting. Thanks in advance for considering joining the very lovely 7% of White Pages readers who enable this little essay-writing engine to keep chugging.
My friends, I have a hunch that you may have felt dispirited lately. That’s a pretty good assumption most days, I suppose, but especially right now, especially for those of you who live in the U.S. and most especially for those of you who live here and who dream of our country being kinder and less cruel.
There are a lot of good reasons for you to be dispirited, of course. We live in the Country Where Kids Are Killed At School And We Do Nothing About It, after all. We live in the Country Where The Ex-President Who Loves Doing Crimes Is Finally Held Accountable For One Crime (Sort Of) But He Still Gets To Actively Campaign? And Complain About George Soros? How Does That Work? We live in a country that too frequently resembles one of those Berenstain Bears books where the bear siblings get sick from gorging on candy, except the candy is current events. The Residents of The United States and Too Much Unmetabolizable Tragedy.
I have a hunch, though, that at least one of the reasons why you might feel as if your back is up against the wall is that there is currently a well-coordinated, multi-state, proudly minoritarian legislative strategy designed to make you feel that way.
You know that, I assume? That there’s a reason why it feels like every time you check the news you’re hearing about another atrocious bill being introduced or passed in one deep red state or another? That it’s not an accident that each bill seems crueler than the last, that you fear that one day you’ll wake up and read something like “Indiana passes law requiring every teen in the Hoosier State to personally have their pronouns approved by Mike Pence?” You know that there are think tanks churning out inhumane legislation by the ream, as well as high paid consultants rubbing their hands together with glee, delighted in their Machiavellian fiendishness? Even if you didn’t know that, I can’t imagine you’re surprised.
I don’t need to list all the evil bills specifically. You know the ones. The bills that turn doctors and abortion seekers into criminals. The bills that attack not just trans kids, but any adults who dare support them. The bills that “allow” tweens (especially Black and Brown immigrant tweens) to work slaughterhouse graveyard shifts but that don’t give them school lunch. The bills that bludgeon public education from every conceivable angle. We hear about these bills and we nod to our left-liberal friends and say “the cruelty is the point” and they nod back and mutter “how can they be so heartless?”
We get sad about those bills, and then we get sad about a whole different theoretical slate of good bills (like ones that might protect children from being murdered with guns, for example) that have no hope of becoming law, and we spend an afternoon or two trying to remember which state legislature to call about which crime of omission or commission, and then we get overwhelmed and give up. “The cruelty is the point,” we say again.
But that’s not really true! Very few things are solely about cruelty for cruelty’s sake. That’s just the thing we tell ourselves when, in the midst of our hopelessness, we yearn for the quick fix of self-righteousness. These bills are about the construction and maintenance of autocracy— about the ways in which politicians who hold niche, reactionary worldviews use the performance of legislative power to make you believe that they will always win and you will always lose. All of the pieces of legislation being ramrodded through America’s state houses—bills demolishing public schools, attacking our trans neighbors, allowing abortion seekers to die rather than receive care, treating children like cattle— are deeply unpopular. They represent a worldview that goes against our best instincts as human beings. And the autocrats know it. They’re not trying to win hearts and minds. They’re trying to execute One Cool Trick to amass power and grind down opposition.
The trick in question works by flooding the zone in the specific parts of the country where (through a combination of gerrymandering, the false promise of White supremacy as a protective shield rather than a corrosive poison, and the Democratic Party’s multi-generational unwillingness to truly counter-organize in rural America) conservatives hold deep (but socially constructed) structural advantages. The theory of change is simple. The autocrats push through so much blood-curdling legislation in so many places that the myth becomes reality: We the autocrats, the minoritarians, the fascists who don’t believe in democracy… we are strong, actually. We can’t be defeated. If you’re on our side, you should work harder and vote more fervently because victory will soon be ours and we are the only ones who can protect you. If you’re on the other side, you might as well give up.
If you— the earnest, progressive, current-events-follower— have witnessed all this with a debilitating sense of overwhelm, if you have wailed at how there is so much evil legislation in so many different states…. than the trick is working. The autocrats want to speed run through democracy as quickly as possible. Their One Cool Trick is that the rest of us mistake their blistering pace for efficacy and skill at governance.
It’s awful. All of it. It is so brazen, so uncaring, and most of all so frequently effective. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that like any well oiled machine, this one too will grind to a halt if you stick a wrench in its gears.
I am assuming you’ve heard about the viral Nebraska filibuster? The one started by State Senator Machaela Cavenaugh and later joined by Senator Megan Hunt? The one that, thus far, has been successful in preventing anti-trans bills from passing? It has been inspiring, though easily misunderstood as merely being one of those tiny, cool moments that temporarily distract from our despair. I mean, the ingredients are all there. There’s a fiery, no-nonsense speech. There’s a compelling, heartstrings-pulling personal story (Senator Hunt being a mother to a trans kid). There are college-educated White women protagonists who immediately track as relatable to other college-educated White people.
All that’s true. Those elements are in fact present. But none of that captures the immense power of what Cavanaugh and Hunt are doing. They didn’t just give a cool viral speech. They didn’t just “epically clap back” and earn themselves MSNBC talking head status. They didn’t merely provide so-many-Internet-browsing liberals with a temporary “hell yeah” moment to share in our group texts.
What have Cavanaugh and Hunt accomplished? They’ve gummed up the works. They’ve slowed down the pace of legislative inevitability. They’ve filed 742 literal motions on all the bills that their colleagues are attempting to debate as if business-as-usual is still possible. In doing so, they’ve revealed, at least for a moment, that the Emperor Has No Clothes, that fascism is not inevitable, after all.
Often times, gumming up the work doesn't win the day. Structural political advantages don’t disappear just because we’ve learned to slow them down. Republicans organized to build these advantages; we’ll have to organize over a long horizon to dismantle them. But that doesn’t mean that these tactics aren’t powerful and necessary. If the whole point of an autocratic speed run is to demoralize progressives and pump up the conservative home team, what Cavanaugh and Hunt are doing is the exact opposite. Their work inspires new coalitions and movements. It gives tired activists an extra energetic burst. It provides the moment of pause necessary for individuals on both sides of a “political divide” to have to actually think about what is being advanced in our name. In doing so, it gives us a fighting chance to build something better.
Speaking of building something better, there was another (decidedly less-viral) example of gumming up the works this week that you may have missed. In Idaho— home of one of the most conservative, democracy-loathing legislatures in the country— a group of ragtag populist organizers won their second major victory of this legislative cycle. Reclaim Idaho (the Gem State’s pre-eminent knock-every-door activists, whose underdog victories already include Medicaid expansion and an unprecedented increase in education funding), announced that both of their legislative priorities (stopping a school voucher bill as well as an anti-popular-referendum amendment) were successful. What’s particularly impressive is that those same bills have been passing easily in a number of other red states, often with very little fanfare.
Reclaim Idaho gummed up the works, though not in a single social media-friendly moment. They’ve been working for years to appeal directly to voters in the parts of their state that progressives have mostly learned to avoid. They talked to those voters about the kind of policies where the autocrats and the fascists were out-of-step with popular opinion. And because they have spent multiple years scouring every corner of the state, they’ve been able to knit those individual conversations into a formidable winning coalition. Their results are impressive, though not magical. The point is that any of us could do this too, in any of our communities.
I understand why it’s so tempting to fall into the cult of despair. I can already hear the counterpoints as to why these tactics won’t work everywhere. The Nebraska legislature allows filibustering in a way that other states don’t. Idaho has a robust citizen referendum process, whereas other places are solely dependent on the whims of their legislatures. And also, it’s not like Reclaim Idaho has transformed that state; that legislature may have been thwarted twice, but they still have passed so many other absolutely vile bills. There are always smart, well-argued counterpoints to hope.
But make no mistake about it. Despair and defeat aren’t our allies. Those emotions are exactly what the minoritarians want us to feel. They want you to believe that they have us on the ropes, that we’re overwhelmed by their piles and piles of identical, humanity-hating bills. And yes, we may have to figure out the tactics that work in all of our unique contexts. But if that’s the case, let’s get to imagining as quickly as possible. The gears of the machine are turning forward every day. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we all have one hand on the wrench that can grind those gears to a sudden, humanity-affirming stop.
So let’s do it! Gum up the works, my friends! Do it with joy, do it with friends old and new, do it with an outstretched hand! Let’s be clumsy and bad at it and still try again the next day! Let’s slow down the bad stuff and give the good stuff space and time to blossom! Let us keep our hands on the wrench, together, because the alternative is too much to bear.
Hi Garrett, My adult child — for whom I invented the word 'springling' — just shared your post with me with this message: this gave me chills in a good way and made me think of you!
You and I are working the same beat, and I couldn't be more pleased to see your work. So glad you are taking a vacation. It is difficult to sustain this work. - L
I think of myself and all the other volunteers with Reclaim Idaho as drops of rain and, over time, we can create the Grand Canyon.