The Ones Thrown Under the Bus

Yesterday, “No Kings” protests were held in about 2,000 cities and towns across the US. Some of these were probably useful occasions for people to connect, to express their despair, fear, and resilience with a collective voice, and even to learn how to take over the streets.

I don’t want to negate any of that. What I want to focus on, though, is the role of the Democrats in orchestrating the nationwide protests through connected organizations like the ACLU, MoveOn, and Indivisible.

The massive wave of revolt in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in May, 2020, caught both parties by surprise. The Democrats did a fairly effective job playing catch up and pacifying the revolt by calling for protests (often indirectly, through affiliated organizations, non-profits, and professional activists), keeping those protests peaceful by collaborating with the pigs, and re-directing the movement towards reformist goals, banking on people forgetting what became of the hundreds of reforms on police authority, use of force, and racism that have already been passed over the last century. They’re also banking on people not knowing the origins of the police, and the State itself. These institutions co-evolved with white supremacy and colonialism.

Since the elections last November, the No Kings protests are at least the second coordinated attempt by the Democrats to get out ahead of the resistance, pacify it and confound it in advance, playing the counterinsurgency role that the Left is meant to play, part of the same dance as the brutish, terrifying assaults of the Right.

In other words, Trump’s military parade and deportations, and the Left’s peaceful pickets with witty signs about orange monarchs or protecting democracy constitute the right hand and the left hand of a Leviathan that always has been and always will be exploitive, ecocidal, white supremacist, colonial, and patriarchal.

Between my landscaping job (12 hour mulching shifts are exhausting!), continued economic and health problems (nothing to worry about, but still a huge limitation), and just life doing it’s thing, I still haven’t been able to finish up the essay about the current dangers presented by the Right or another piece about how believing in democracy puts our movements for liberation at such a huge disadvantage.

If you want, though, there’s plenty of lessons