|
 |
Thank you for subscribing to Off Message. This is a public post, available to all so please share it widely. If you enjoy this newsletter, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription, for access to everything we do.
Alternatively, if you don’t want a Substack account, you can keep Off Message going with a donation. All support is appreciated, but donations of $75 or larger come with a comped annual subscription—all content unlocked and emailed to the address provided.
You make Off Message possible. Thanks again.
 |
It is the official position of the White House, per press secretary Karoline Leavitt, that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
This is more than just casual slander. She wasn’t talking specifically about Saturday’s No King’s protests, but her comments dovetailed with ongoing, orchestrated GOP efforts to smear the pro-democracy protest movement in America. They call it a “hate America” movement. Antifa. Pro-Hamas.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent endorsed this view, calling No Kings a multi-state assemblage of the “most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” In a different forum, he also noted that the Trump administration has begun “compil[ing] lists” of “groups” and “networks” to avenge “a domestic 9/11”—that is to say, the killing of Charlie Kirk.
These people sound unhinged because they, or whoever told them to speak this way, are desperate. They also have all the tools they need to violate the constitutional rights of protest organizers and activist groups in uncomfortable ways, with near impunity.
This is why I wrote last week that resistance figures should be more tightly and formally linked, condensing operations to fend off whatever Bessent et al are cooking up.
But whatever discomfort awaits, the public will not be impressed. Trump pretends now to have opposed the Bush administration’s response to the actual 9/11 terrorist attacks. But at some level he believes the country grew tired of every aspect of post-9/11 politics except the McCarthyism.
That is an error: None of it was popular by the end, and even at the outset it required a national trauma and fervor to rally around the president. This is not post-9/11 America, and No Kings is not International ANSWER, let alone al Qaeda.
The post-9/11 antiwar movement was ultimately vindicated, but it was up at first against a supermajority of the American public. It was opposed to war, and war was popular.
No Kings is opposed to Donald Trump, who is very unpopular, and it stands on the right and winning side of Trump’s depravities: For free speech, but against monarchical tariffs, and fabricated revenge prosecutions, and the highjacking of the budget, and the repurposing of the federal government to menace and harass citizens.
It’s also, to my mind, the most urgent calling of our lives. The stakes are nothing less than whether the most militarily powerful nation in the history of the planet becomes a rogue dictatorship.
Where in the world will be lastingly safe if authoritarian kleptocrats carve the globe into spheres of influence? Even if regional superpowers never went to war over boundaries, as they did in the past, humanity would still be divided between dominators and vassals. Do Argentinians feel particularly sovereign at the moment? Brazilians? Europe would become the last bastion of liberal democracy, but how well and long would it hold up, sandwiched between nightmare America and irredentist Russia?
If you see the challenge as existentially as I do, you’re probably just as disdainful as I am of the endless effort poured into ignoring reality. The non-sequitur politics. The uncanny opposition to the modern Enabling Act on the grounds that it doesn’t contain people’s health-care costs well enough. Why, instead of addressing the menace directly, are our elected representatives asking for a concession that would tend to make Trump more popular relative to the the alternative?
There are many reasons they do this, but the one they proffer follows a pseudo-logical chain: Power = elections = policy. They (along with no small number of voters) are schooled in all the familiar cliches: you can’t beat something with nothing; politics is about the future; Democrats need a positive vision.
Maybe so, maybe not. I personally think a vision of saving the United States from fascism is pretty positive—it’s something most people in the world would be grateful to see; something those who did the work would look back on with pride. But even I’m wrong, the cliches and the fixation on the next election feed conceptual confusion. They raise strange questions like: How can we connect the collapse of democracy to health care in voters’ minds? How can we reduce the moral dimensions of corruption and lawbreaking to pocketbook concerns?
A more coherent positive vision has been staring us in the face all along. What’s the opposite of being a subject? It’s being free.
Without Googling, guess who spoke each of these quotations:
“It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. It’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies. And it sure as hell isn’t freedom to say you can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner. That’s not freedom…. "[We believe in] the kind of real freedom that comes when that child has a great public school with an awesome teacher because we believe in her future. Real freedom that comes when we invest in the police and in the community so that child can walk to and from school safely and get home to her mama. Real freedom that comes when she can join a union, marry who she loves, start a family on her own terms, breathe clean air and drink pure water, worship how she wants, and live a life of purpose where she’s respected for who she is.”
“Once we have fought back fascism, one we have protected our democracy, once we have protected our rights and our freedoms, it needs to be a different kind of freedom. Not just a romantic freedom, not a freedom of talking about rights we must defend, but a material freedom. The freedom to have time and energy to live a life of dignity and joy. The freedom to be able to put your energy back into your neighbors and your community, not just scraping by so you can afford a roof over your ahead. That’s not freedom. Struggling, existing, not being able to follow your dreams, that is not freedom. Freedom is having the time and the money to raise a family, to spend time in your community, to build things, to create things, to build things, to take risks, to start businesses, to fall in love. That is freedom. And the future that we have to build, it needs to be building towards that kind of freedom for all Americans.”
We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.
The only clue I’ll provide is that they do not all represent the same faction of the Democratic Party. Everyone at each other’s throats, and everyone floundering in Democratic politics can hold this common ground—can be for something—while marching in the here and now against kings.
See you tomorrow.
| ||||||||||
