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Time to Stop Playing by the Rules When the Game is Rigged [1]

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Date: 2022-07-29

An op-ed in this morning’s NYT got me to thinking: Women, the Game Is Rigged. It’s Time We Stop Playing by the Rules.

Women may be represented in Congress and on the Supreme Court in record numbers, but we still lost the constitutional right to abortion. . . . Perhaps the fault isn’t in ourselves but in our strategy. Fundamentally, empowerment feminism requires a system that’s operating in good faith, one that rewards our hustle, respects our confidence and values honesty and truth. In a rigged system — one that attempts to discredit women and girls, that forces us to jump through unnecessary hoops and is more interested in discouraging us than in listening to what we have to say — working within the system no longer makes sense. We can’t power-pose our way to a safe abortion in Texas. So what’s the point of playing by the rules when it feels like they are written to ensure we wind up losing?

The point that the author, Lux Alptraum, is making centers around abortion and women’s rights to their own bodies, and she argues for what she calls “disempowerment”:

What if, instead of empowerment feminism, we embraced a feminism of disempowerment? Rather than seeking the approval and validation of an unjust system, what if we rejected the system’s legitimacy and worked from there? What strengths might we be able to tap in to if we recognized that the game is rigged and gave up on trying to “win” it?

In particular, she cites loud protests, civil disobedience, sneaking pills to women in need, and so on. Some of these come with legal risks, but that has always been the case when taking on a rigged game.

Alptraum’s op-ed is important in its own right for the fight to preserve women’s status as full and equal human beings. But I want to expand on her argument to look at our country in general. For far too long, Democrats, liberals, progressives, and moderates have insisted on playing by the rules while Republicans, conservatives, Christian nationalists and White supremacists have gleefully rigged the game. I won’t belabor the point with a full list — this is a diary, not a book — but consider just a few recent examples:

Trump tried to steal the election, not caring what laws he broke while doing so.

Alito and his colleagues overthrew Roe, not caring about precedent or Supreme Court traditions, nor about they had all sworn to the Senate that they acknowledged Roe as settled law, nor for that matter paying the slightest heed to the dictates of history and the rules of logic.

Two of those justices are on the Supreme Court because McConnell played fast and loose with Senate rules in opposite directions when it suited his purposes. And smiled when called on it.

Continuing to play by rules our opponents bother to acknowledge only when think we might be bending or breaking is a fool’s gambit.

There are signs we are catching on and catching up. Schumer and Manchin’s manipulation of the Senate to get the chips bill passed and then put up the climate relief package McConnell had been holding the chips bill hostage to was a maneuver worthy of McConnell at his worst. (Well, not quite his worst, call it his usual.) Fetterman’s trolling of Oz is masterful. I’m sure you can think of other examples (and please post them!).

My real concern, however, is that this “disempowerment,” to use Alptraum’s word, is both a symptom and an aggravation of an existential crisis: the rigged game itself. Our democracy has never been ideal; read our history and you’ll find many examples of game-rigging. Even the Constitution was rigged in favor of the slave states and is now rigged in favor of the rural conservative states.

However, previous examples of successful game-rigging had primarily political motives. The current players are driven by religious ones (and political, too). This poses a different level of threat, because politicians can be made to accept compromise, but religious fanatics cannot. To them, compromise is an offense against the will of God. Political violence is sanctioned in God’s name, as is deception and dissembling done in the name of the Lord.

In my studies of religious history, I find that fanaticism eventually wears itself out, whether because the fanatics age and die, or run up against too much opposition, or simply realized that in order to govern they have to tone things down. The trouble is, it often takes generations to reach that point, and often some new fanatic group will step in, certain that this time God will make sure they prevail.

Playing a political rigged game is hard enough, but there is still enough residual respect for rules that we can win by bending them. Winning against a religiously rigged game requires breaking the old rules, since the other side has no respect for them and despises anyone who follows them as weak and unfit to be soldiers for God.

Where does that leave us? I don’t have a full answer, and I suspect that several answers will be required in combination. GOTV is absolutely one answer, since the opposition has not (yet) rigged the election process so that they win even when they lose. (Many of the candidates they are putting up this cycle are planning to do just that, so this may be our last chance to stop them.) Another is to use their own weapons against them, as Schumer/Manchin just did — while keeping a very close eye out for further attacks and betrayals. (Looking at you, Sinema.)

But we also have to keep in mind the possibility, even the probability, that ultimately we may have to just call it quits and refuse to participate in a game designed so that there is no way we can win. It is easier — though hardly easy — for women needing abortions to do this, as Alptraum advocates. But it is a strategy we need to consider and plan for while we still have the resources to do so. It may take any tactical form from withholding taxes to leaving altogether. In all events, we need to be prepared to exercise disempowerment.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/29/2113392/-Time-to-Stop-Playing-by-the-Rules-When-the-Game-is-Rigged

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