I’ve lost count of the atrocities committed by the United States in the past month. Of especial note are the kidnapping of Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, a natural-born U.S. Citizen, by ICE in defiance of clear evidence of live U.S. birth; the recent war on Venezuela, which precipitated the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and is best described as an oversized act of piracy; and apparently an ICE murder of a civilian this morning.
Zohran Mamdani is now in office, and being accused of antisemitism by Israel, but a line in one of his executive orders seems to be following through on an implied comment by a local rabbi that he was open to restricting protests around synagogues. Speaking as a Jewish man who, although an atheist, is rather sensitive to targeting Jewish religious and cultural venues over a fundamentally nationalist question, I cannot agree with this move. The protests it is trying to curtail seem, according to what I have read, targeted events designed to provide material support for Israel and therefore the genocide. The invited regulations would also criminalize, by definition, Jewish protest against Jewish institutions materially (not just rhetorically) promoting Zionism. This is, in a word, unconscionable.
Between Mamdani’s olive branch to the local Zionist leadership, and his willingness to kiss the ring of (or negotiate with, if you’re feeling charitable) Trump implies that we’re facing the hard limits of electoral politics as a vehicle for social change. I will be charitable and assume that Mamdani means every progressive utterance that flies from his lips, but I cannot draw flattering conclusions based upon that act of magnanimity. If he is indeed doing his best, and the best he can do under conditions of realpolitik is to make concessions to Trump (such as keeping the chief of police that he favors, or allowing certain ICE operations in New York) in order to retain federal funding and, therefore, a thriving New York City, then politics has failed. We need to increase our room to maneuver, not accept the limitations set by established power.
I find this situation strange, since I’m essentially a left-wing free speech absolutist. I find it both foolish and censorious that leftists continually refuse to engage in dialogue and debate with both political dissidents and our political enemies. If we really believe in a world based upon freedom and consent, persuasion and reason have to be our first and best weapons. A refusal to use them represents a refusal to prefigure the world we desire, and a sure sign that we are incompetent to build it and undeserving of living in it, to the detriment of future generations innocent of our cowardice. That’s to say nothing of signaling a lack of courage in our convictions, and an unwillingness to submit ourselves to scrutiny and accountability. The internal difficulties with incorporating disagreement and dissent within the left is a reflection of its cliquish and adolescent mentality when dealing with the mainstream and our opposition. However, that does not mean that we must, or should, negotiate with authoritarians. I’ll happily debate a Nazi past midnight, if I have the energy and inclination (which I did in fact have a few months back), but I won’t cede an inch of ground. I will not allow the defense of the truth to serve as a pretext to make anyone’s liberties a bargaining chip in an accord with power or prejudice. At the end of the day, you simply cannot negotiate with fascism. It must be brought to heel. Mamdani, a man sworn in by the patron saint of democratic socialism Bernie Sanders himself, has set the tone by negotiating with fascism from day one. The only difference between Mamdani’s actions, and the conciliatory mentality of, say, Ezra Klein, is one of aesthetics. It is clear that the progressive movement has failed, and we need something else.
It’s a challenge managing the psychology of life under such conditions. I’ve found it impossible to keep going without prioritizing my own goals and ambitions, which I would pursue irrespective of social conditions. Life goes on even if the world is burning, and even if the Nazis are marching. There’s no guarantee when or if a world benevolent to the pursuit of beauty, or love, or life itself will emerge, and so these things must persist even if danger lurks behind the next corner, even if disaster might strike with the next toll of the bell, and even if pain and suffering on distant shores (or a few blocks down) render the very idea of these things hollow and vain upon reflection. A failure to tend to these transcendent things is to hamstring the very engine that fuels resistance, which is the unique soul. To neglect one’s self in service of a cause is to at best engage in an act of lethal codependence, and such enmeshment renders movements toxic and abusive, not virtuous or effective. However, to retreat into solipsism, to contend that the suffering of others has nothing to do with you, is both foolish and cruel. It is cruel because those lives are no less important, no less worthy of beauty, love, wonder or liberation, and foolish because those forces which trample them underfoot will in time come round to you—if they haven’t begun pressing their boot upon your neck already.
I’m presently in a position of relative material and personal safety. But a year and a half back I was homeless. Two to three years prior I had no money to speak of and was homeless due to the refusal of my roommates to pay rent—a condition which local rental credit associations held me responsible for and made me ineligible even for affordable housing when I regained the ability to pay. I depend, and have depended for most of my adult life, on Social Security disability benefits to survive as compensation for what is best described within the medical establishment as complex post-traumatic stress. Those benefits were slashed by five hundred dollars this last month, for reasons I haven’t been able to discern. Preliminary investigations imply that Medicare premiums have increased significantly for people of lower income, meaning that there are those without the social advantages I’ve enjoyed (as an alumnus of a Stanford feeder school who briefly attended the most expensive college in the country on merit scholarship) who are getting boned even more brutally than I am. (And before you gripe about someone as privileged as myself complaining about the supposed consequences of my supposed bad decisions, remember: you’re not even reading the people you claim to be worthy of your own compassion. They’re less likely to be writing at all, and they don’t hold your interest. And even if you were, you’d just be finding other excuses to find them unworthy of anyone’s empathy.) Part of me is actually somewhat glad my benefits have gone down: I don’t like being an overgrown ward of the state, maintaining that status requires enduring humiliating rituals in which I must prove that I’m pathetic enough to deserve aid, and I’d much rather make a living off the value of my own labor.
However, such independence is not guaranteed in our society. There is no true right to property under capitalism: it is, despite its propaganda, a system of arbitrary confiscation in which we’re compelled to rent our bodies out to employers who then rent our lives right back to us. Being a writer, especially an independent one, usually requires access to significant material resources that only the wealthy or governments possess. Being declared a psychological invalid by the establishment, paradoxically, permits me a certain leeway insofar as I can secure a fraction of the capital I require (most of which goes to living expenses, and none of which can cover rent on its own) to actually achieve that independence. Nonetheless, it’s an insulting situation and a reduction in benefits serves both as a kick in the pants and a reminder that I, too, have skin in the game. However, that kick hits hard and does damage, and actively reduces my capacity to overcome the material and psychological circumstance that placed me here to begin with. It is by nature destructive, unjustified, and can only be overcome by guaranteeing that which has been conditionally granted me can be unconditionally guaranteed to everyone. Nor will I permit anyone to construe whatever good I try to make of a bad situation as accepting that a tyrannical government, or even society, has the right to discipline me into working on its terms. That is a slave mentality, all too often imposed by those who have accepted their servitude and, in utter cowardice, deflect their rage against their masters towards those, oppressed to an equal or greater extent, who dare aspire to something better than the debasement they have welcomed.
The point of this ramble, fuzzy as it might seem, is that I’m at a point where life will only get better if I engage in hard work under conditions that punish both hard work and assuming the inherent risks of any worthwhile endeavor. I need to focus on my own ability to enjoy life and to heal in defiance of the state of the world, but neither conscience nor necessity permit me to ignore it and that only magnifies the danger. As much as I do indeed like to feel that I’m a wholly unique and irreplicable individual (because I am), that experience is not unique to me, and is indeed shared by quite a few who have yet to become conscious of the dilemma. Most people are neither absolutely oppressed nor absolutely privileged, and so most of us are safe in ways certain others are not, but also in jeopardy in ways that others might not intuitively expect. And if one’s life conditions has suppressed that essential psychological process of individuation, then a noble action, taken at the wrong time and in excess of capacity, can have a fatal effect on the soul. One must, therefore, set priorities, and set them as egoistically as one sets them compassionately, and it is hard to find a balance that seems compassionate and not brutal.
One of those brutal truths I expect the movement as a whole will have to accept is that we do not, at this point, have the capacity to accept every battle the establishment begins with us. That day might come, but right now there’s too much being thrown at us to handle it all. I find myself contemplating what news, out of the array of travesties vomited from Washington every day, is actually important. From the list above, I expect there is little we can do at this moment to secure Maduro’s release, or to end the war in Venezuela. It would likely require the co-operation of Zohran Mamdani, in whose city he is being kept and tried and who might actually have the material power to secure his release.
Does he have the authority? Of course not, at least not formally. But he has over 30,000 police officers working for him, all of whom have guns, who can be equipped with better guns, I expect, in a pinch, and probably outnumber the Federal troops guarding Maduro. The question of whether or not Trump’s actions in Venezuela are a violation of international law is a subject of rigorous debate within the media. I’d tend to agree that it is. It’s also on shaky Constitutional ground, given that only Congress has the ability to declare war, and this latest operation, though framed as a police action, cannot reasonably be legally considered one without claiming that Venezuela is actually United States territory, and has been prior to the invasion.
Given these factors, Mamdani need only declare that holding Maduro is a violation of both international law and the Constitution, that he has a right and a responsibility to refuse to aid and abet such violations to ensure the legitimacy of his own mayorship, and then arrest everyone holding Maduro hostage. He can then remit Maduro to the United Nations (who are headquartered in New York in part—convenient!), requesting both asylum from a friendly nation and insisting that Donald Trump be brought up on charges for violating international rules of war and that Congress immediately draft a war powers resolution that reverses the entire Venezuelan coup.
Afraid the U.N. won’t agree? The United Nations relies on a mutual agreement with local law enforcement to maintain its peace and, I presume, its other emergency services. Wouldn’t it be a pity if Mamdani decided to cancel that agreement? Afraid that Trump would just send in the National Guard? New York City is one of the two most interconnected nodes in the global economy. It is the only Alpha++ city on U.S. soil. Any action which damages New York City will irrevocably damage the American economy and American global standing. It would be impossible for Trump to take action, especially in favor of a historically unpopular invasion, without causing critical damage to his personal and national power at best. At worst, he incites a civil war, and the whole system comes crumbling down.
Would this be a massive risk? Of course. But if one thinks that Trump is truly an existential risk to Americans and to humanity (and he is), and if one thinks that the invasion is unacceptable and simply a taste of the tyranny to come (and it is), this is exactly the sort of risk we need to be willing to take. But Mamdani isn’t willing to take it. He wouldn’t do such a thing unless he were compelled to by a mass movement, and the movement doesn’t have the chutzpah to even imagine it, let alone twist Mamdani’s arm into executing such a gambit. The alternative then, regarding Venezuela, is to wholly shut down the American war machine via direct action. We’re not at the point where we can reliably do that, which means we must take the long view regarding that priority.
That means our immediate priority must be Dulce Morales, and others like her. If a natural-born American citizen can be fingered for deportation, then any American citizen can be so deported and denaturalized. And any half-measure, any widespread protest movement without sufficient demands, sufficient objectives, and sufficient will to achieve its goals, will be targeted by those mechanisms. They will be framed as agents of foreign terrorism, and as agents of foreign terrorism not truly American, and as not true Americans not real citizens, and as not real citizens not possessing the right to remain within U.S. territory. They will be deported to work camps in foreign countries, probably Venezuela, and form the new backbone of American manufacturing. Or, more precisely, they will, along with the broader black, brown, and queer community, embody a very old and still existent legacy of American slavery, but rendered ever more brutal and efficient. The cars of ten years from now bearing American imprints won’t be wheeled into service from unionized GM plants, but death camps in the wreckage of Venezuela and whatever other countries the United States has seen fit to conquer.
Take my word for it. This has happened before. My people are still two million short of our pre-World War II population thanks to this dreadful enterprise. Our only hope is to forcibly eliminate Donald Trump’s, or his successors’, capacity to enact this policy. That means drawing a line in the sand. That means making it clear that deporting a single American citizen will result in insurmountable disruption. We must ultimately prevent ICE from deporting anyone—yes, even criminals, because, objections to incarceration itself aside, it’s not as if immigrants are magically immune to domestic jails. Deportation rests on the fundamental logic that people are the property of their nations, and if we accept that logic we’re all dead. But we have to start somewhere. We have to halt the advance before we turn it back.
Even this goal requires considerable action, but less than that necessary to stop the entire war machine. One simply need examine the structure of the American deportation machine to find a soft and unprotected limb to bleed, then attack it relentlessly with a clear and unwavering objective on which no compromise will find quarter.
Despite my vivid language, I do not promote violence against the state or against capital in pursuing this goal. Donald Trump and his ilk are doing that for me. I simply contend that targeted and coordinated non-cooperation with the intent of securing the release and repatriation of Dulce Morales and any who suffered her fate, along with suitable damages paid for the violation of their rights, has a high chance of success and, barring a plan to compel Mamdani to haul the idea of “political revolution” out of the haze of cotton-candy rhetoric and into the realm of fact, it stands as our highest priority if we are to secure the freedom to exist and, through existing, to rebel.
Such are my thoughts this dreary and lazy Wednesday. I expect I’ll be on a terrorist watch list if I’m not already. I can live with that. I could use the web traffic anyway.