I'm Saving All My Rage For You

It wasn’t PTSD when I looked at the polls and Trump was ahead early on. In 2016, everyone just said, well Florida comes in early and Georgia polls close the earliest. It’s insanity on our part to expect a different outcome.

The GOP is the Good Ol’ Party, and the Democrats are SOS, the Same Old Shit. We spent months and months of listening to Democrats gaslight and condescend to the Uncommitted Movement and anyone unsure of voting for the Same Old Shit packaged in a woman of color, telling us to trust them to address the changes we need once they got into office. I’ve watched them year after year try to win over the undecided (somehow not uncommitted) voter, this mythological working class person who can’t decide between fascism and democracy. This isn’t a democracy. This is a capitalist state where whomever makes the most white voters feel better, wins, while power and wealth continues to be consolidated to a few. Listening to a Democrat try to talk about working class issues when it’s crunch time, because that’s when they do it, is painful.

White People, let’s talk. We suck. There, I said it. Stop talking about where you’re going to move, there’s a lot of work to do. What’s the work? Well, it’s not feeling smug and superior for being a Democrat. That is not working. It’s not defining yourself in opposition to Trump voters. It’s not centering yourself, white women I’m talking to you, I’m talking to us, in the pain when abortion and democracy is on the line! I am not belittling the Dobbs decision and the devastation in its wake. All the fears Democrats talked about with a second Trump presidency are already the realities of many people, just not many white Democrats.

Filmmaker, musician and organizer Boots Riley is on the cover of the latest Believer magazine, he is interviewed. When asked about the election, how he feels about it and is engaging with it he answers:

I engage with it because the world is engaging with it. And I want to know what people are thinking, what they’re saying. What gets talked about so much is whether the swing voters in the middle of the Republicans or the Democrats are going to vote for this party or that one. But the reality is that most people have not voted, and I think the reason is that they’re to the left of the Democratic Party. They’re not even an organized left-they’re not DSA folks or part of a radical revolutionary parties. I think the average everyday person has views that are way to the left of the Democratic Party and so have not seen it as being something worth voting for. You know, in all the these places where the Democrats lost by sixty thousand votes, there were a million people who didn’t vote.

We know that the right-wing votes. So what that tells you is that the problems people are dealing with are ones that aren’t being solved under capitalism, and none of these candidates are even willing to address that. This is without even talking about Biden facilitating genocide. But when they called Obama a socialist and people thought he was going to have socialist policies, people came out to vote for him. And to the extent that they then voted against Bernie, and for Biden, if you look at the exit polls, they thought Biden was for universal health care. That’s because people lied to them.

Back to the old give me something to vote for, not against. Voting for the lesser of two evils has brought us here. This is the first time I’ve heard someone describe most people as left of left, but he’s right. I think people care about safety and security. We care about money, because we have to care about money so much all the time, and we care about housing because honestly once you lose it, it isn’t easy to get back, and we care about health insurance because pain and illness hurt and takes money away. This country only offers power as a solution. We don’t lean into the collective because that’s not what the terrorist white men who murdered and enslaved people wanted. When the Democrats talk about moving to the center, that center is located just left of murdering, raping, enslaving terrorists. Our forefathers.

In her last book, Doppleganger, Naomi Klein discusses how she keeps getting mistaken for Naomi Wolfe and her ideas as Wolfe’s ideology continues to move further to the right, having found that embracing the conspiracies about COVID granted her relevancy again. Wolfe published The Beauty Myth in the 1990, a book Gloria Steinem called “a smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom.” And now, Wolfe is a consistent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Klein writes

Steve Bannon, regardless of whatever else he may be, is first and foremost a strategist. And he has a knack for identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have neglected or betrayed, leaving themselves vulnerable to having parts of their base wooed away. This is what he helped Trump do in 2016. He knew that a large sector of unionized blue-collar workers felt betrayed by corporate Democrats who had signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures in the 1990s, and that their anger deepened when the party bailed out banks instead of workers and homeowners after the 2008 crash. He paid close attention to the ways Occupy Wall Street was dismissed and then crushed, and to how Bernie Sanders, whose left-populist 2016 presidential campaign grew out of that movement, faced all kinds of dirty tricks from the Democratic Party establishment as it closed ranks around Hillary Clinton. Bannon saw an opportunity to peel away a portion of the male unionized workforce that had always voted for Democrats-most of it white, but not all of it.

This is chilling because it is true. The Democrats are committed to their shitty ways, refusing to change the party’s liberal ways, because that’s not great for money. I’ll pull this old trope from college papers: Dictionary.com defines liberalism as “a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise.” Just because it’s called ‘free’ doesn’t mean we’re not paying for it. There is a haughtiness, an almost paternalistic view of what issues matter and what don’t. The genocide in Gaza is not a single issue, it encapsulates all of the issues. But look, last night Ilham Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the only Muslims in Congress, progressives critical of the genocide in Gaza and Israel, won their re-election campaigns by sizable margins.

What to do. What to do. Well, things are bad, and they were bad before today. Pick a problem. Grasp at straws. See what lands, see what fits. Drop off cookies and water at a trans youth center, write letters to people who are imprisoned, teach English to migrants, collect nice coats for unhoused people, volunteer somewhere. Make food, put it in a fridge. Put yourself in different spaces where people organize. Hold June Jordan’s words into your being- “Life is action. Inaction is death.” Commit to going to DC on Wednesday, December 4th at the Supreme Court when families and doctors are challenging the Tennessee ban for health care for trans youth. We have to start unraveling what we keep clinging to, it isn’t working. This isn’t about productivity or feeling good, this is about change. How we live, what we do, what we like, is in opposition to the values we care about, to human rights, equity, fairness and justice.

It must be understood that we may not see what we want to see in this country in our lifetime. White people need to understand this and still do the work, lord knows other groups of people have understood that in fighting for their rights. Being white means there is an immediacy to what we want, usually because we get what we want, that’s how we’ve organized the world through violence. We may not see abortion be protected federally in our lifetimes. Right now it feels like we may not see big enough change for it to be satisfying. Change isn’t something you buy, it is made. And the process of doing it is part of its creation.

I’m not going to say this second Trump presidency doesn’t gut me, but if Harris was elected, people would be intoxicated by the air of change that a Black, female president offers, placated by a gesture strong enough to seem transformative for this country. The Democrats embrace the status quo, they prove time and time again, that they are the status quo, and that is what got us here. There was no change. Fuck that. We have to make it.