America Goes to Its Death

Fostering community, care, and vigilance

I know this is two days in a row, which I swore I’d never do, but I think you know why, so bear with me:

Real quick, real frank. There is the United States, a country, and then there is America, an ideal. The former has elected a fascist; because of this, the latter will soon cease to exist.

Living in an idea, a myth, is of course only half of what living is. I’m thinking of a distinction that David Graeber and David Wengrow make in their study of human history, The Dawn of Everything. What makes society possible, they argue, is our ability to “exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories.” Riffing on “Dunbar’s number” — that we can only know 150 people or so before we “max out” — they approach the formation of society, which requires relations of some kind with far more than 150 individuals, as an act of the imagination:

It’s precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from that of other primates. Apes may vie for affection or dominance, but any victory is temporary and open to being renegotiated. Nothing is imagined as eternal. Nothing is really imagined at all. Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150-odd people they know personally, and inside imaginary structures shared by perhaps millions or even billions of other humans.

This is what made the earliest cities possible. A large settlement, divided into various zones of ongoing human activity, “was a structure raised primarily in the human imagination, which allowed for the possibility of amicable relations with people they had never met.”

If the United States is the physical reality, America was our cognitive country. “We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will never probably never meet,” as Graeber and Wengrow put it; and in America that binding was what “we” value, what “we” believe, what “we” agree is right and wrong. It’s America itself that makes “we” possible, and this morning over 71 million people have made it clearer to me than ever that there is no “we” on a national level, and there won’t be anytime soon.

But if America is dead, our communities survive. This national transformation, from democracy to fascism,¹ should dispel us forever of the idea that our national politics still serves a social function and is not pure theater, pure entertainment. Which means that politics, for the foreseeable future, is closer to home: your state and city governments, your city councils, your county commissioners, your neighborhood organizations, and of course your neighbors. Speaking from personal experience, this is the level where you have a voice, where you can actually effect change.

I don’t mean to dissuade anyone from protesting. If democracy has collapsed, our military nonetheless controls the rest of the world, which comes with a certain responsibility. Choke the streets, scream at senators in public, chain yourselves to government buildings, read How to Blow Up a Pipeline, learn self-defense, practice discretion. Above all, prepare yourselves for violence because violence is fascism’s reality. But the Democratic Party is finished; don’t let them fool you into donating more money, into stanning their politicians, into berating your friends and family to vote. Don’t let them say this is all “just politics” as their colleagues loot the nation. This is all part of the theater, or the sport; this is all part of what got us where we are. Don’t let them say, “Next time, we’ll fight”; there won’t be a next time.

Part of what’s intrigued me, over the years, in thinking about social media, entertainment, and corporate influence, is how agency sits at the heart of it all. Twitter and Instagram make you passive, even if you try to subvert them. Television has pacified viewers for over 75 years. TikTok might be the most pacifying force ever created, outside of literal opiates. Cable news networks, pundits’ blogs, the New York Times — this isn’t news so much as entertainment, a pacifying media. It’s obvious why these platforms and channels exist; it’s obvious why a small group of men spent decades and billions turning politics² into theater, into a sport, into entertainment. For 335 million people to relinquish their political right in exchange for the right to self-expression and consumer choice is to turn 335 million people into financial data for a handful of billionaires to exploit. But for 335 million people to recognize their agency, which is to say their power — that would be something else entirely.

Eight years ago I despaired. I panicked. I grieved. I binged the news and waited for something to happen, for someone to stop it. This morning, I woke up ready to act. This isn’t to condemn or belittle grieving, nor panic nor despair. But I do hope, after you take the time you need, that you find it in your heart to shut off the stream, to go out into your community, to find out what people need, and to do whatever you can.

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1. And it is happening. I hope no one, or at least no one who isn’t on the opinion payroll of a major newspaper, is still out there wasting ink and kilobytes on the idea that Trump and his party are anything but fascists

2. Which I’ll define here as the shared, equitable discussion of how to shape our society.