[Only in the U.S.A. does a large section of the population think
owning an assault weapon is a sacred right, but wearing a mask in a
pandemic is a restriction on liberty. ] [[link removed]]

GUNS? YES. MASKS? NO. AND GESTAPO IN PORTLAND.  
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Max Elbaum
July 22, 2020
Organizing Upgrade
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_ Only in the U.S.A. does a large section of the population think
owning an assault weapon is a sacred right, but wearing a mask in a
pandemic is a restriction on liberty. _

, John Rudoff/streetroots.org

 

_This is the 15th installment of Organizing Upgrade’s “2020: This
Is Not a Drill” column. You can find the full collection, along with
all related “This Is Not a Drill Live” video conversations __here_
[[link removed]]_._

Only in the U.S.A. does a large section of the population think owning
an assault weapon is a sacred right, but wearing a mask in a pandemic
is a restriction on liberty.

It’s no accident that – besides the Coronavirus – the QAnon
conspiracy theory is spreading among the disdain-for-facts-and-science
sector of the U.S. people. According to QAnon, a cabal of
Satan-worshiping pedophiles rule the world and are only prevented from
consolidating total control by the heroic efforts of Donald Trump.

Trump re-tweets QAnon fantasies alongside his standard lie that more
testing is the reason for the rise of COVID-19 cases. Still, 30% of
Americans
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think the President is honest. Another 10% don’t agree but approve
of his performance in office anyway.

Meanwhile in the real world, COVID-19 cases and deaths are rising and
hospitals in southern and western states are overwhelmed and short of
protective equipment. Millions across the U.S may be just weeks away
from food insecurity and homelessness when crucial federal benefits
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and numerous state and local eviction moratoria
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are set to run out beginning at the end of this month.

The administration’s response is to demand billions of dollars be
cut from COVID-19 testing allocations, stonewall renewal of the
unemployment and other benefits, and pledge to take the gestapo
tactics
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being used by camouflaged federal agents in Portland to Chicago,
Detroit and other large cities
[[link removed]].
 That’s Trumpism with all its COVID-19 denialist, authoritarian and
racist flags flying.

It is also simultaneously a Trump re-election tactic (and signal of
what to expect if he loses November 3) and the desperate agenda of an
empire in decline.

How did we get this point? What are prospects of preventing further
descent into death-cult territory? Can we assemble enough force to
push the country in a totally opposite direction?

IT’S NOT NEW

The pathologies afflicting the U.S. body politic today may be shocking
in the shameless way they are expressed, but their existence should be
no surprise. They have deep roots in the history and underlying
structure of the country.

Take the worship of individual gun ownership as a sacred right.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ meticulously researched book Loaded: A
Disarming History of the Second Amendment
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reality behind this fetish: Gun love in this country has always been
bound up with white Europeans’ drive to take and keep control of
land and labor in North America. In the process of genocide,
enslavement and the enforcement of Jim Crow, gun wielding by
individual whites was a mainstay of, and thoroughly intertwined with,
the violence inflicted by armies, militias, slave patrols and police.

Indian-killing militias, for example, were often collections of
individually armed whites
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“deputized” by colonial or state authorities. Likewise, organized
slave patrols often grew out of measures undertaken by informal groups
of white enslavers. And in the Jim Crow era, the boundary between the
“work” of police, the Klan, or armed lynch mobs was all but
non-existent.

Further, the “sacred right” of individual whites became embedded
in a broader culture that defined freedom overwhelmingly in terms of
defending the liberty of each individual white male to do whatever he
pleased without reference to any common good. The material basis for
this was the immense amount of stolen Indian land made available to
whites searching for “economic opportunity”; the system of white
supremacy which forced African Americans and other peoples of color to
perform the most difficult and dangerous work necessary for capitalist
profit; and the relations of patriarchy which pervaded U.S (and most
other) societies in the 19th century.

The resulting extreme individualism of U.S., (white) culture was noted
early in the nation’s history by the keen-eyed Alexis de
Tocqueville. He observed
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that led “each citizen to isolate himself from his fellows” and
which sapped the “virtues of public life.” The very phrase
typifying this ideology – “free white and 21” – originated
about the same time (1828). It went into the law books in 1898, when
Louisiana put forward its racist grandfather clause
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(allowing whites to vote while excluding Blacks) and the judge ruled
that this was simply a way of maintaining the “right of manhood,”
deserved of all men “free, white, and twenty-one.”

Conspiracy theories, and their connection to racist and reactionary
movements, also have a long history in America: the Salem Witch
trials; 19th and 20th century movements
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believing that Masons, “Papists” or Jews were secretly
infiltrating the government; McCarthyite witch-hunts justified by
claims of an international communist conspiracy.

Administrations that don’t give a damn about public health and use
gestapo tactics are no aberration either. For Andrew Jackson (Trump
has hung his picture in his office), ethnic cleansing was the
preferred and practiced solution to the “Indian Question.” Woodrow
Wilson, foreshadowing Trump, acted like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic
would just disappear.

NEW FUEL: AN EMPIRE IN DECLINE

Today’s explosion of social pathologies is fueled by an additional
factor. Added to settler colonial racism and extreme individualism is
the fact that the U.S. settler state, which for 50-some years
dominated the globe, has reached the stage of imperial decline
[[link removed]]. It is
exhibiting the same traits that have accompanied previous empires in
the time before their fall:

Leadership decadence? Check. It’s become a mainstream trope to
compare Trump’s golfing during the pandemic with Nero fiddling while
Rome burned.

Loss of the ability to project an image of invulnerability? Check.
World leaders and the global public know the U.S. still has immense
military power, but seeing Washington’s worst-in-the-world response
to COVID-19 and its general incompetence has made the U.S. a global
laughingstock
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Inability to provide even the most basic public services? Check. The
pandemic has revealed the massive holes – and racial disparities –
in every field of public provision from health care to education and
transportation to worker safety. Even before the pandemic hit, more
than 60 million people in the U.S. did not have access to safe
drinking water
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Rise of mass-based movements seeking to “restore lost glory”?
Check. That’s what Make (white) America Great Again is all about.

This last phenomenon is especially important. The home bases of
empires in decline have historically been far more prone to produce
reactionary chauvinist upsurges than progressive and internationalist
insurgencies. Populations who have been shielded from the worst
violence and abuse of imperial elites and fed a steady diet of “you
are superior to the foreign barbarians” have proved fertile soil for
authoritarianism and backwardness. When mass-based emancipatory
projects have arisen, they have tended to be rooted among peoples
outside the “mother country” who have suffered under an imperial
yoke and see a chance to break free.

THIS EMPIRE’S GRAVEDIGGERS ARE INSIDE THE GATES

For the declining empire we are in battle with today, this precedent
may not hold.

An enslaved African American workforce within the U.S. itself was
central to the development of U.S. capitalism. This unique history set
a pattern for the treatment of peoples racialized as Asians or Latinx
who also have played key roles within the “home country” labor
force. The fights for racial justice which flow from this necessarily
intersect with the struggles of all U.S. workers and affect the
thinking and action of everyone in the country with democratic
sentiments.

The result is that there is a large (and growing!) portion of the U.S.
population that is treated as “outsiders” to the “real
America”, providing a big incentive to rebel; yet this constituency
is positioned _inside_ of U.S. borders and is in fact central to key
sectors of the country’s economic structure. Further, because of
racial and national oppression that transcends borders, many in this
sector have an organic connection to a global majority that has
suffered under the same imperial yoke. (Hence the term popular on the
left in the 1960s and for some time after – the “Third World
Within.”)

The combination translates into a sector with immense potential social
power, including the capacity to morally and politically influence
people, especially youth, of all racial backgrounds.

The clout, breadth and depth of the still-evolving uprising to defend
Black lives – the largest mass movement
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in U.S history – gives us a glimpse of this power in action. The
uprising challenges the forces of reaction – those gathered under
the banner of Trumpism – on the core point used to galvanize their
social base, anti-Blackness, and the overall reinforcement of racism.
And rather than narrow anyone’s political focus, in spotlighting
police murders that are integral to guarding disparities across the
color line in every aspect of U.S. life, it pushes people toward a
vision that critiques every aspect of an unjust social system.

No surprise then that the platform
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organized force in this huge and diverse movement – the Movement for
Black Lives (M4BL) – is a comprehensive agenda for radical change.

TOPPLE RACISM’S COMMAND POST

Turning potential power into actual power, though, is far from simple.

The toxic mix of valuing gun ownership over protecting public health,
conspiracism, and reactionary movements glued together by white
supremacy and national chauvinism are too deeply rooted to be ended
any time soon. The process of changing minds, and more importantly of
changing the socio-economic and political structures that underlie
such pathologies, will take decades even if social justice movements
acquire much more influence than we have today. Certainly, they will
persist – in Trumpist or some other form – long after this
November.

But whether the command post of racism and reaction occupies the White
House and has the power to deploy federal agents to occupy U.S. cities
makes a huge difference in how this long-term battle will unfold. And
that issue is one that can be decided in the next five months.

An electoral defeat of Donald Trump – combined with successful
defense of that result in the courts, legislatures, and streets –
will strip away a big chunk of the Trumpist Right’s current power.
Accomplishing this is both urgent and possible. And victory will give
us far more favorable circumstances for the next stage of the fight
against Trumpism, and the even longer one to end the system that
produces it.

_Max Elbaum has been active in peace, anti-racist and radical
movements since the 1960s. He is an editor of Organizing Upgrade and
the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin,
Mao and Che (Verso Books, Third Edition, 2018). _

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