Looking beyond the Democratic Party
Join something the autocrats really fear
We absolutely need more mass mobilizations and protests as the country goes down in flames — especially as America's own "Il Douchey" makes even more Mussolini moves, criminalizes anti-ICE and anti-genocide protests, violates the Posse Cometatus Act, stages self-congratulatory military parades like a North Korean despot, and as Congressional lackeys like Josh Hawley launch McCarthyite hearings of immigrant groups and the American Left.
I'm just not sure what to make of the "No Kings" events scheduled for June 14th.
No Kings is a project of Indivisible, which in turn is a project of Democratic operatives and former Democratic Congressional aides who decided (in typical Democrat fashion) that the Tea Party movement's successes could be mimicked. Only thing is, they do it half-heartedly, sporadically and unconvincingly, and they completely lack any program to truly fight back.
There is nothing inherently wrong with attending one of these feel-good events. I'm sure the mainstream press will report that X number of people showed up to protest Trump. But they won't be able to report on exactly what the organizers had planned – because there is no real plan.
How are Democrats going to challenge and thwart Trump and a MAGA Congress enjoying a temporary and only razor-thin majority? Where is the opposition?
Are any of "No King's" Democratic organizers about to challenge Chuck Schumer's increasingly out-of-touch and impotent sputtering and posturing or his go-along-to-get-along collaborationist “strategy”?
Do "No Kings" organizers want to replace the 95 fellow Democrats who sided with Republicans to "express gratitude" to ICE for "protecting" us from those evil gardeners, housekeepers, meat packers, textile workers, and roofers who pay into a system they will never benefit from yet lack the ability to switch borders on whim like Big Business routinely does?
Are "No Kings" organizers calling for a shakeup in their party's leadership or condemning party members who voted for the Laken Riley Act which actually authorized the crackdown that now these organizers and their duplicitous party claim to be protesting?
No, not for one damned millisecond. The Democratic Party they shill for demonstrates each time their representatives in Congress vote that its values are not substantially different from the Republicans'. At the end of the day, street theater like "No Kings" is nothing but a safety valve, a way to let off a little steam, a cynical mechanism to defuse the righteous anger of working people betrayed by both parties.
We'd all be better-served by not putting all of our eggs in the electoral basket. Neither party represents us in elections and a healthy amount of hell-raising must be done outside the electoral arena.
Join an organization with a real program, dare I say a socialist one. Consider working with the kind of organization that autocrats fear enough to launch witch hunts against. One that grasps better than the toothless, Janus-faced, war-mongering Democrats what the true objectives of America's lords and masters really are in dismantling every shred of democracy and governance, demonizing our "illegal" friends, coworkers, and neighbors, while rushing us headlong into war after war of aggression and genocide.
In short, if you really want change, friends, start looking beyond the Democratic Party.