A thing that seems historically demonstrable: this current wave of fascist creep and repression of civil liberties will not last forever
A corresponding historically demonstrable fear: the currently-rising order seems likely to do catastrophic harm to bodies and to communities, and to take a lot (A LOT) of lives between this moment and whenever a widely-shared peace and expanding context of collective well being next takes hold
I am not convinced that people did not resist Hitler early, given what I see these days. I imagine that the (early, non catastrophic) resistance stories simply got lost to time and to the real and widespread catastrophe that followed. It seems very likely that people noticed, spoke out, took risks, said and did what they could.
We assume that everyone was all in because thinking of Germans and then the world as dupes simplifies things vs. assuming there was a struggle, which lost.
I have come to believe that the biggest enemy to meaningful resistance within liberal civil society is the discomfort (and thus the unappealingness) of cognitive dissonance combined with 'peaceful relations' as a personal and collective value.
Cognitive dissonance arises when what we know is irresolvably out of sync with what we see, what we hear, what we are told. From climate change to conservatism being hijacked by a dangerous far-right fringe, most people 'know.' But our society isn't designed with emergency stop levers; in fact, it's structured to prevent their deployment at all costs.
I was at a clergy gathering this past week and watched my colleagues, most of whom are quite intelligent and a few of whom are brilliant, simply not be able to acknowledge to themselves or each other the level of threat that the US is facing in this coming year. We pick conference topics 2 years ahead, running a gathering once every 6 months; we are scheduled to talk about 'the health of democracy' one month AFTER the US election.
People very simply cannot deal. And if they can't, no one can.
Obviously, I don't LITERALLY mean NO ONE. Resistance is creative and bold and sometimes effective, both at holding the line and at winning some gains. People continue to fight, and will continue to. And we will lose less, including less hope and less life, because of it.
But I understand in a more frank way that there is simply no stopping so much of this at this point. And we can blame people, our friends, our families, ourselves, each other, but it's the containers as much as anything.
People would have to collectively BREAK what they love, or think they do, about liberal society in order to mount an effective emergency resistance to what's happening now.
@jordinn salient observations, thank you. it’s almost like one of those finger trap toys that squeezes your fingers harder the more you try to pull them apart. the more unstable things get around us, the harder people cling to liberalism as a container, not realizing that the set of idealized social processes that form liberalism must be in many cases wholly discarded in order to address the threats we now face…
@jordinn For me it’s fun to think beyond borders and the nation state, meritocracies, and private property. but for many it’s stressful to have to consider that the society in which we live has failed, and that most of its pillars that we were raised to take as fact and reality were themselves false or deeply flawed — honestly people need to do more mushrooms lol
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