(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
CALLING OUT TO ORGANIZERS [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-26
11/14/2016
(I PUBLISHED THIS ON DAILY KOS RIGHT AFTER TRUMP WAS ELECTED FOR THE FIRST TIME. I’M NOT SURE IT ALL HOLDS UP, BUT A LOT OF IT STILL DOES.)
***
Calling out to organizers...
I respect your media work, your movement history, and your insight. I believe you have the megaphone we need to begin preparing, right now, in the brief period before the inauguration on Jan 20, 2017, for worst-case scenarios.
No one is sure what will happen under Trump, but history tells us that repression is likely . I hope I'm wrong about this. Still, it is obvious that being TOO prepared for a dangerous crisis is better than not being prepared enough.
None of this is about the election itself, or about national political strategy, or fighting back in the Congress, or anything like that. It's all about dealing with the oncoming wave of repression.
I would like to suggest some tasks we should be working on right away, as organizations, communities, neighborhoods, families, and individuals, to prepare for that repression. This is based on study and on family experience. These are proposed items. I call on you to develop them, modify them based on your knowledge and experience, to quickly draw in as many collaborators and influential people who agree, and most important, to diffuse the resulting ideas quickly and broadly to every human being who finds her/himself in the US today.
Thank you.
HW
***
1. Organization: Everyone should be a member of an organization that shares many (perhaps not all) of their values and interests: political, economic, and cultural. The organization that you are in or that you join should "have your back." It should build trust and solidarity within, and project strength without. If we are attacked we will need these organizations to protect ourselves and each other. Movement groups, unions and workers' groups, anti-racist groups, feminist groups, religious groups, neighborhood groups, are some of the kinds of organizations I'm talking about.
2. Personal affinity: We need personal affinity groups. There is a common tendency for us all to associate mainly with people like ourselves, and that is probably the place to start. But we should also try to build ties with like-minded people across common lines of division: race/ethnicity (whites need to encounter their whiteness more consciously and critically), religion (Islamophobia and anti-semitism are real threats), gender (men need to become more feminist), sexual orientation (LGBT people are everywhere). If we are attacked we will need allies: people we know well whom we can call on and stand beside.
3. Race/gender/sexuality: Today in the US, race and gender "trump" class when we think of repression. I don't mean this in a big political way: obviously the 2016 election was decided by class questions as much as it was by race and gender ones. But for a variety of reasons we can discuss at another time, race and gender provide the main avenues down which authoritarian and anti-democratic forces drive. People of color are stigmatized and seen as undeserving. They're "takers" not "makers" and as Hochschild writes, they're seen as "cutting into line." They are portrayed as dangerous and disruptive to the (white ) social order, the "white republic." Therefore stop and frisk, Secure Communities, Joe Arpaio (good riddance at last!), and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke (a much bigger threat; way more political). The Black Lives Matter and substantial anti-prison movements in this country are crucial resources here. Although they will be targeted for repression, they have a mass base in the black and brown communities, and some serious allies among not only whites, but even white elites. We need more work and thought -- and action! -- about how black people can effectively stand up to repression yet again.
Women and LGBT people are threatened by repression in a variety of ways. Here the main problem is that women's bodies are targeted for rape and coercion; restriction of abortion and rape are the two most basic ways for structural sexism to capture and control women's bodies. And structural it is: men's objectification of women's bodies is utterly pervasive in the US (and around the world too). This is what hetero men's sexuality IS to a disturbingly large extent: Trump is just an outlandish case of the norm.
The threat presented by gays to the male supremacist gender order -- especially by gay men -- remains real, but it has diminished markedly over recent decades. Why is that? In my view because COMING OUT -- Harvey Milk's cry -- became a successful mass initiative, and because the recognition that "we are everywhere" diminished the power of homophobia. Many family members, many friends, turned out to be gay. The lavender threat is thus diminished, but it's still out there. Consider Pulse, consider Fred Phelps. Regarding trans people, there's clearly a "new" issue opening up there, with real violence and exclusion happening and real fears being stoked by McGrory et al. I don't have any big wisdom yet on where this is going.
But we can expect a renewed and more massive assault on Planned Parenthood, threats to abortion (already beleaguered), and increased violence toward women. How can we organize against this? PP will have to be defended by $, ever-present volunteers, and legal action. One strength that it has is that it is a very entrenched, very popular organization. On a deeper level, how can we defend women's bodies and queerness? The projected Million Woman March, and other mass actions, seem to hold promise here.
4. Surveillance: No previous authoritarian regime has had the means of surveillance at its disposal that the repressive US state would have. Indeed it has already deployed massive surveillance capability -- domestically -- under the Obama administration. We have been less concerned than we should have been, because we "trusted" Obama. Our neglect of the threat posed by state surveillance has to be overcome, rapidly. To cite a few repressive threats:
The DHS has a list of some 1.4m DACA program applicants. There is also a DAPA list of unknown size.
Surveillance of mosques and Muslim organizations has been very extensive. Much of this surveillance was illegal; some was supposedly banned by court order. But it is safe to assume that a very extensive registry, and widespread actual monitoring as well, continues to operate across the US in respect to Muslim communities.
Use of the internet or a smartphone (almost everyone has one) creates virtually limitless avenues for surveillance: your current location, your communications, your financial ties, and your social relationships are all already known to authorities. This is perhaps the greatest vulnerability that we would have to a determined repressive regime. The Nazis had to comb through synagogue records and census data to determine who was a Jew and where they lived and worked. Once they did this, they could round up and ultimately exterminate millions of people, based only on their ethnicity. They also did this with gays, leftists, unionists, intellectuals, and so on, with great thoroughness and efficiency, even though their surveillance technology was very primitive. What would a present-day repressive regime be able to do accomplish with the combined resources of state and corporate surveillance technology?
We NEED the internet too. Social media is an invaluable political and personal resource for us. So we must learn to use it more securely: encryption is available on the web and in email. Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms all have their particular issues. But can we begin training ourselves to avoid surveillance? If it is too late for that, if roundups are going to happen, nothing else might matter.
5. Roundups: Speaking of which, some are asking if roundups will happen: of Muslims, of undocumented, of radicals... To ask IF is to betray a certain blissful ignorance of US history and also of the contemporary (pre-Trump) situation. I am not going to review all that stuff here, but think of white riots and nativism, the Palmer raids, the mass deportations in the Southwest in the 1930s, Executive Order 9066. Think of Obama's deportations over the past eight years, the roundups of Muslims after 9/11. Think of convict leasing, stop and frisk, the prison-industrial complex, vote caging... If roundups happen again (or on a grander scale), it will be important to have strategies of defense in place BEFORE they occur. Some of the strategies I'm thinking about are these:
Going more underground if you need to. If you are on the DACA list, for example, you might consider changing your address (that is, moving)
Developing safe houses. We are not the first people who have had to avoid political dragnets. This goes back to the Organization and Personal Affinity topics discussed before. People should think about who their allies would be if they were targeted for roundups. Immigrants rights organizations already have experience with this, but they -- and many others -- should be working on greater organizational depth in this area.
Sanctuary concepts. Trump and the rightwing are threatening to withhold federal funding from cities that declare themselves "Sanctuary Cities." How can we oppose this? More decentralized forms of sanctuary may be a way: protected spaces, maybe aboveground or underground, depending on the level of danger, with defenders on duty and networks of supporters available on short notice. Place of worship have some experience with this, as do universities. During the 1930s many urban areas had unemployed councils, local committees of working people (often organized by the Communist Party, but by others too) who prevented evictions by surrounding homes and apartments targeted by sheriffs with large numbers of people,
Universities. Speaking of universities, student activism will be very important there (of course, activism is important everywhere). The rightwing's hostility to the university, and to higher learning in general, responds to their recognition that this is the ONE major institution in US society that they have not been able to dominate. Police have to be kept off campus, students have to develop their organizations and affinity groups as discussed earlier.
6. Media: Corporate control of the major media in the US is an accomplished fact. Until now, there have been a few countervailing tendencies: (1) Within the corporate mediacracy, there have been competing tendencies: Fox v. MSNBC, Univision/Fusion, even Comedy Central and some Hollywood types; (2) There is a small but vibrant alternate media world: Pacifica primarily, lots of Web-based groups; (3) There is social media, counter-surveillance, stuff like that. What happens if these means of communication and political education are curtailed? Can we think about other ways to communicate? Presumably even a repressive regime in the US will not be able (or willing) to shut off all communication; such an approach connotes a "state of exception" (see Agamben's work) and negatively affects capitalism's operations. A more likely scenario would be internet censorship, as is practiced today in China and numerous other states.
OK, I'm going to stop there. I could obviously go on longer but the rap thus far serves my purpose: to launch this discussion. I hope you take it up and move it forward. I have a few more people I will send it to, but I wanted to start with you.
Good wishes and solidarity,
Howard Winant
Professor of Sociology, UCSB [I’m now retired]
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/26/2299359/-CALLING-OUT-TO-ORGANIZERS?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
