Hey fam: I’m back. I’ll do a little personal catchup / beach postcard for you in #3.
1. Andry
The only news I paid attention to last week was Tim’s conversation with Andry Hernández Romero.
I took three things from it.
(1) Andry is an extraordinary soul. He’s a walking advertisement for why America needs immigrants: We were enriched by having this man in our country.
(2) Being loud matters. Andry. Mahmoud Khalil. Rümeysa Öztürk. The Trump administration is doing terrible things to innocent people and we should assume that for every case we hear about there are hundreds (thousands?) that are obscured from us.
But when we see these crimes taking place and we’re loud about it, good things can happen.
Andry, Khalil, and Öztürk have all been released. I doubt that they would have been without the public outcry on their behalf. They will get due process now—but only because people were loud about it.
Ever since Cory Booker’s filibuster I’ve been thinking about John Lewis and the idea of “good trouble.” Here’s Lewis talking about it in 2019, at a tribute to Rosa Parks:
Rosa Parks inspired us to get in trouble. And I’ve been getting in trouble ever since. She inspired us to find a way, to get in the way, to get in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. . . . She kept on saying to each one of us, you too can do something. And for people if you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, do something. We cannot afford to be quiet.
The most frequent criticism I get is that I’m all diagnosis and no prescription. And my response is always the same: If I knew how to fix this thing, I’d tell you.
It’s not like I’m holding back on the solution just to keep you reading. I promise.
I don’t know how to stop creeping fascism. No one does. That’s because these systems are too big, too complex to either be fully understood or consciously “fixed.”
The best we can do is:
Be clear-eyed about reality.
Analyze the problems and understand them as fully as possible.
When we see opportunities to push back against fascism, take them.
Refuse to be quiet.
Hope that the accumulated weight of millions of people making good trouble eventually causes the authoritarian attempt to tip over.
I understand that this is not a satisfying answer.1
(3) Being organized is powerful.
The civil rights struggle might be the best analogy for the fight against Trumpism. There was no “solution” for Jim Crow. There were just millions of people resisting individually—and then collectively.
At its heart, that’s what I think The Bulwark is about, actually. This is a media company producing a metric ton of #content every day. But why? Because this content brought together a huge audience.
That audience then became a community.
And together, this community is powerful.
Tim wouldn’t want me saying this, but I don’t think Andry gets out of CECOT without Tim in his corner.
Tim got loud on Andry’s behalf. He stayed on the case for months. He helped raise money for Andry’s defense. And he brought this community into battle with him.
So there’s no fix. There’s no solution. There’s just all of us, here together, rallying around each other, staying engaged, and using our leverage opportunistically. Helping where we can. Saving who we can. Making good trouble.
Which is why I’m always exhorting you guys to join Bulwark+ and go deeper with us. It’s not the money—if you can’t afford a membership just hit reply to this email and I’ll take care of you. Really. We do that for people All. The. Time.
But being part of this community is one way we get organized. Getting organized is how we make good trouble. And the more we grow, the more powerful we get.
Then maybe something good happens.
I wish I could promise you more, but there are no guarantees. All we can do is refuse to be quiet.
2. Russia
Just a quick preview/warning—we’re going to talk about Russia and Ukraine tomorrow at some length. Here’s the tease:
Trump fancies himself a realist, but he’s making a category error in understanding Russia’s war on Ukraine, because it is not the case of two nations being at war with one another.
Ukraine is at war, as a nation; Russia is not. Only Putin is at war.
Think about it this way: If Volodymyr Zelensky were to announce a “peace” agreement tomorrow in which Ukraine traded away substantial territory for a temporary pause to hostilities, would Ukrainians stop fighting? I don’t think so. The Ukrainian army might. And a large part of the Ukrainian population, recent polling suggests, is exhausted by the years of bloodshed and will accept a high price for peace. But partisan rebel groups would likely form and continue the fight.
On the other hand, if Putin pulled the plug on his war tomorrow, would there be any agitation among Russians to keep fighting?
I very much doubt it.
Trump believes that all countries are embodied as servents to their dear leaders, because that it how he views America. He does not see himself as a temporary leader of the American state, but believes that he is the state. This is why he identifies with autocrats and disparages his democratically elected peers.
But it leaves him with a blind spot: Trump believes that Russia will defeat Ukraine because Russia is a bigger, more powerful nation.
But Ukraine doesn’t have to defeat Russia. They just have to outlast Vladimir Putin.
Anyway, we’re going to talk about this at some length tomorrow.
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3. Vacation and K-Pop
Honestly, the best part of vacation was not thinking about any of this for a week. I went seven days without reading a single piece of news; without knowing anything about what Donald Trump was doing or saying. It was great.
The problem was that in the back of my mind I knew that I was taking a vacation from reality.
Denying reality doesn’t make it go away. If you stop testing for a virus during a pandemic, people still get sick. If you cook the unemployment numbers, people still lose their jobs. Averting my eyes from the news didn’t stop the news. It just made me feel a little bit better.
But here’s the thing: When I came up for reentry and saw everything that happened, the shock of reality was bracing. The president destroying the integrity of government economic reports? Welcoming a war criminal to U.S. soil as his guest? Sending the National Guard into another American city and urging on police brutality?
This is fascism. It just is.
In a way, staying with the news every day can numb you to this truth and make you think that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Only after a break does the full-force of reality hit you.
You guys asked for a shot of K-Pop, the family cat, in his backpack. Here you go:
He did not love the backpack, but it turned out to be useful, since there was a fire alarm and we had to get him out of the condo for a bit with us. We have not taken him to the beach yet. He’s been very happy exploring the new space. The kids have been thrilled to have him with us.
They even put a mermaid tail on him and got him to do the Little Mermaid pose.
All I could think about was Derek Zoolander.
So JVL you’re telling us that the best we can do is constantly enumerate the ways in which we’re fucked, complain about the bad guys, and hope that it all works out in the end?
I mean, that’s not the most generous way of putting it. But kind of?
Sometimes I think we are in danger of minimize the effort that went into the Civil Rights Movement and how victory was a game of inches. I mean, it gets condensed down to five pages in a U.S History book or a two hour movie.
It took dedication, endurance, wisdom, and patience. In between were crushing defeats and pain of all kinds.
Showing up, getting loud, being organized, and bringing people into the fold is how we can win. We gotta be ready for it too. So when the winds change in our favor, we will be able to capitalize on it.
"So JVL you’re telling us that the best we can do is constantly enumerate the ways in which we’re fucked, complain about the bad guys, and hope that it all works out in the end?"
I don't think that's the best we can do, necessarily, but I think that a refusal to do this is a big reason why we're here right now.
Tom Nichols talked a lot about the 'constitutional bouncy house' - the belief that these matters were settled, that history was over, that people had decided that democracy, and not fascism was the way that governments were going to rule from now on. This does not appear to have been the case. Fascism has a constituency in early 21st-century America the same way it had a constituency in early 20th-century Italy, Germany, Spain, and Japan.
Within that constitutional bouncy house, conservatives like Tom Nichols and leftists believed it was safe to attack the hypocrisies and the failings of liberal governments. It's perfectly safe to demand the abolition of the university as a part of the maximalist demands your protest movement presents to the university president; that makes you seem real cool to the other protestors, after all. And it's perfectly safe to have someone who grouses about how there are too many black people on TV and it's all a liberal conspiracy; he votes for you and maybe it would be better if Murphy Brown was married after all.
But these people never went away. They were always there, always hungry. Trump showed them that the liberal order was no longer defended by people willing to defend it from them; instead, they would try to accommodate and listen to their criticisms, even though they only criticism they truly have is 'I am not rewarded for being a straight white man, and I would like to be.' They pretend to have other criticisms, because they continue to accept that it's not allowed to say 'we should rob everyone in the country who doesn't look like me and give their stuff to people who do look like me'; but this is what they really want. This has always been what they really wanted.
For the first time in a long time, Trump looks like he's going to give it to them. We have to admit that, and we have to admit that this is why he's popular with them. They want this.
They want Trump not in spite of the fact that he's a massively corrupt, massively racist, massively violent authoritarian. They want him because of all of those things.