Demonstrations, Confrontations, and the Generation Gap
Getting to the change we need
I see a lot of jumping up and down about this scandal being the torpedo that finally sinks the MAGA ship. There is an insane amount of “is he or isn’t he” being asked. There is nobody calmly reflecting that this President recorded failure after failure to become “A great businessman”. That he has been convicted of fraud and his companies and charities have been convicted of fraud. That he has been recorded talking about assaulting women and found liable for assaulting women. That he has been impeached twice and charged with other serious crimes, and yet he is the President of the USA. He is in the Oval Office consolidating dictatorial powers, creating a paramilitary force answerable only to himself and building concentration camps as quickly as he can. Public opinion matters little to him at this point. To think that Congress or the SCOTUS would stand up and reign him in is laughable after the evidence of the first six months.
We the people must stand up to him and I’m not talking about more demonstrations where we all hold up our “fuck fascism” signs, hear a few speakers, sing a few songs, accept the sympathetic honking of passing cars, and then go home basking in the glow of having fulfilled our civic duty. I can accept that these are “building our community” events but without a long term strategy and a willingness to confront the regime it is meaningless.
The non-violence of Gandhi and King did not look like this. They did not hold rallies to let the government hear the peoples voice and there would not have been independence for India or Civil Rights progress in the U.S.A. if that is all they did. The movements led by these icons of non-violence were confrontational. Making homespun cloth and salt was a breaking of the law and a boycott of English products did more than say, “we are angry”. In the South the lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, and bus boycotts were confrontational. The marches were confrontations and not mere “making our voices heard”. The people participating in these actions knew that they would most likely be met by violence and arrested. When I join a demonstration, I’m more concerned with getting an airborne transmissible illness than I am in being arrested.
There is also the very big problem of where is everyone? The crowds at the demonstrations are overwhelmingly baby boomers and Gen X. There are hardly any Millennials or younger present. I have not seen others addressing this issue and only have a limited number of friends in this cohort to talk to. Some say that technology is to blame, that they are all too busy on their phones to come out in person. Or that they don’t pay any attention to news or politics. Every music festival of the last twenty years refutes the idea that the phone obsessed cannot come out of their parents basement long enough to interact in a mass event and if you look at the international responses to the political crisis in the world today you can also see that it is not technology specifically, or even generational (or their demonstrations would look like ours, and they don’t).
I’ve written quite a bit about technology and cultural shifts and I think that this cultural shift is a strictly American phenomenon. If you look at where the lines are drawn it becomes a little clearer. The Boomers came of age in the 60’s and 70’s and began to have children who reflected their values. But in the 80’s the majority of the Boomers began to shift from hippy mode to getting a job and earning money mode. They stopped demonstrating against the corporate world and became the corporate world. Their children adopted their parent’s environmentalism and progressive views on racism and social problems but they also adopted their parents focus on getting a good job as priority one. GenX are coming out to demonstrate, but just so long as it doesn’t interfere with their ability to get to work the next day. In the 80’s and 90’s the “government is bad” movement really took off and then the realization that our politics were being taken over by corporate interests became widespread. When the Millennials began growing up and voting it was common to have the view, “it doesn’t matter who I vote for. They are all corrupt and there is little difference.” Millennials and GenZ have never known a world where politics seemed to matter. There was a moment of hope that carried Obama into office but what the broken party politics made of his presidency was enough to extinguish any thought that simply voting for the right person could make a difference. Americans under the age of forty have never lived in a world where the political system seemed to be functioning. We have created a society that is mostly apathetic and apolitical.
We need to convince everyone that we can stand up together and confront the government and that we can reestablish a working democracy in the United States. We cannot hope to simply get them to vote to achieve this. The evidence of the efficacy of voting for change does not exist and we already know that this administration cares nothing for voting or the rule of law. The January 6 insurrection and attempt to steal the election with fraudulent state electors is ample evidence of that.
I have heard a few voices calling for general strikes and confrontation. We have witnessed people standing up to ICE in California and elsewhere. Governors like Newsom and Pritzker are defying the federal government. Individual members of Congress and even some justices of the Supreme Court are calling for the people to stand up. It is time for leaders to emerge and unify the resistance movement and organize actions that will confront the regime and lead to the beginning of the rebirth of democracy. Democracy must be reborn in a progressive image, stripped of the corrupting influence of money, gerrymandering, and career politicians. We need a new declaration of independence from politicians who represent only the interests of the wealthy and of themselves. Those who truly represent the interests of the vast majority of people in the United States must not be a small progressive minority. They must be the majority and be empowered to reinstate the checks and balances that are crucial to a functioning democracy. We must eliminate the perks that establish the political class as an American aristocracy and establish the House of Representatives and the Senate as chambers of the people. Finally, we must hold to account those who have violated oaths of office and participated in this assault on democracy.
The greatest generation stood up against Fascism and made the mistake of thinking that the job was done. They rebuilt a broken world that endured for forty years and then began to slide back into the conditions that led to fascism in the first place. It is now up to the Baby boomers and Millennials to stand up. It will be up to the next generations to create a society that is better able to carry democracy into the future. We are all the creators of history. Stand up and do your part. Encourage your children to stand up with you.