Reflections Against Death by Freezing
A week before election day, I published an op-ed predicting Trump’s win. In that article, I compared the efforts of the Democratic Party to keep Trump out of power with the French government’s Maginot Line. In the face of an opponent who had already beaten them once, and retained sufficient support to nearly overturn the 2020 election, it was folly to rely on the assumption he could not win again while polling well within the margin of error. Especially considering the consequences of his agenda. In the time since, I have written about what this means in the context of prison abolition and I have made my case for the urgent necessity of action in the face of a horrific deportation regime. From now until the inauguration, I intend to do all that remains possible to me for the protection of myself, my communities, and our allies. I urge you to do the same. We have only a short time to brace ourselves for impact. As soon as Trump is in office, we must anticipate he will be the dictator of his promises. Between a far-right activist Supreme Court and Congress, there remains no substantial check invested in his being otherwise.
By and large, we are attached to the notion of representation. I suspect that heightens the despair of this moment. The thought of Trump representing us is offensive. How can he be ours? Does he, somehow, reveal us—even those who opposed him? And how could so many vote for him? He may not be so much the representation of an anti-democratic authoritarianism as its becoming—the very last choice among binary options. I suspect it is psychologically healthier not to think of him as yours. But to think that thought, we have to think the critique of what has been to see its faults in what is now, which nostalgia for a receding ante-Trump past threatens to make impossible. What I mean is that we need to listen to the gap between ‘Representative,’ as a title, and ‘representative’ as a verb.
A ‘Representative,’ if we follow Arendt’s definition of politics as action, is someone who is political in our stead. We think of ourselves as living democratically, but it is more accurate to say that we are given a few options every so many years to contribute incrementally in the decision of who will do politics for us. They, in the halls of Congress or at the height of the Executive, debate and enact policy. Not us. Now, if you send them a letter—and during one of Trump’s impeachments I sent them a few—you will learn the size of that increment to which they represent you. Its detection generally requires a scanning electron microscope, but because bribery is legal, rest assured it grows exponentially into the macroscopic realm with the size of campaign contributions. So, your representative, typically, is not terribly representative of you. And the higher up you go, the more this is true. Trump isn’t yours, or even his voters’. He is the winning coalition of the selectorate’s, and we might further refine this statement by adding that even the most essential of his voters have less say than the party and donor machinery that supports him, especially the Heritage Foundation. Because even among the winning coalition of voters, the vote as a binary choice between options does not empower them to decide qualitatively what his mandate is. The individual voter is still too small for that.
Trump, much like any president, in being representative to no one voter, is representative of no one. And so what fills the gap are intermediary levels of, if not representation, then its potencia. The donor with a super PAC does not represent voters, but their support means them. The party, and its think tank associates, in the reality of all its machinery, which is still essential for the means of campaigning and governing, shapes the candidate’s decisions, even if only through their limitless enablement, in ways denied to mere voters and not necessarily correlative with its or the candidate’s fidelity to them. So any candidate, out of practicality, becomes representative more of their means than the votes those means achieve, which are only silent affirmations. Given that there are only two choices, the meaning of these affirmations can be none too precise. Trump’s voters endorsed him, but they were still alienated from his person. Recently, we have come to see this in the gap between the intent of their electoral decision and its consequences. His voters could, and did, imagine what they liked, even as his words and deeds proved many of them wrong. They were, and largely still are, attached to their fantasy of him. It proved more effective than the alternative fantasy, but it is necessary to see that the other option was just a fantasy too.
It is rapidly becoming essential to be non-attached—as Trump’s opponents—to the operation of the government. Not for a lack of care about the harms it causes, but because its behaviour is not something we can do much to change on the national scale, and fixation on the insoluble risks paralysis. Critical non-attachment is necessary to regaining the appropriate perception of the scale of agency. The experience of participating in elections trains us to encounter politics if not through an Archemedian Point, then a point nonetheless removed from the conditions of our embodiment. We often think as if we live in some kind of national pseudo-consciousness. From this scale, the actions of all but influential donors, celebrities, and major politicians appear meaningless. Choices, even as decisive as saving an individual’s life, seldom have legibility, unless granted some additional significance through their relational context, simply because they are too small to be consequential to everyone. (Imagine the difference, in news coverage, between saving an ordinary person and a representative.) But the events that do appear at this scale of experience usually aren’t experienced personally. (I know about the flooding in North Carolina, but haven’t seen it.) Although when they are, we are forced back into the significance of our direct encounter with them. (An abortion ban becomes the experience of personal suffering stemming from the denial of an abortion.) So when we approach a problem at the level we are trained to care about it—the national level—we are severed from our experience and disconnected from most contexts in which we have agency. This forces us into paralysis as we are confronted with the potential meaninglessness of our own actions against the scope of the problem. Absent agency over the government’s decisions, thinking like a state is paralyzing. We have to think as ourselves in our separation from agency over the enactment of government policy.
Thinking as ourselves means understanding the necessity of organizing. That’s because there is a real problem in the question: “what can I do?” I alone can do very little. The superheros we watch in movies fill us with individualist fantasies, imagining that the worth of our agency is that somehow we will be able to change everything, or—more accurately to the superhero genre—that we can reestablish the status quo on our own by virtue of individual merit. This is nonsense that any encounter with reality will convert into cynical disillusionment, and it forms the opposite pole of our political false consciousness in regards to our agency. From the perspective of attempting to achieve personal super-heroics, the failure of that attempt will make everything truly immovable. Here is a more realistic thought: “acting alone may fail, but I have some skills, and I know some people.” Any number of people together—however much information any one person may know—will have a greater sum of knowledge and capacities than any given individual. So when the individual’s vote has failed—and isn’t it curious how the vote has become the most individual of actions?—it is essential to stop thinking in terms of what is the most significant action for the individual and consider the real capabilities available through organizing.
What organizing can do depends on you. And I don’t know what you are willing or able to do. I don’t know your circumstances or capacities. These are dependent upon your knowledge, skills, abilities, community and connections. There are a few things, however, that, going into this period of danger, are essential. The first may well be knowing your rights and learning not to talk to cops. Automatic deference to authority is a dangerous trap in a repressive environment. Simply knowing this may be essential when ICE shows up in your neighborhood asking who might be an immigrant. In much the same vein, switching to secure, encrypted and disappearing communications, like Signal and Protonmail, is important. Exercising digital privacy is an everyday act of resisting mass surveillance. With these practices in hand, mutual aid projects like Food not Bombs and Food 4 Life form a great starting point. Their community survival programs expanded massively during the early pandemic and worked to feed an unknown number of people. Mutual aid has been an essential concept in the organization of protest movements. Even though it does not immediately present as a potent form of protest, it is an essential means for building activist communities and capacities for future action. Personally, I like to advocate for doing mutual aid outside of jails. It tends to be a rewarding experience. For further reading on all options for resistance, I highly recommend this article by Crimethinc.
I can tell you about Trump’s plans to use the military for mass deportations; threats against: trans existence, abortion access, the press, protestors, healthcare, and education; the ongoing terrors of police brutality, Trump’s proposed death squads, and prison mass incarceration; the willful exacerbation of existential climate change; and Project 2025’s efforts to establish partisan control over elections, multiplying the risk of a future January 6th. I hope this information makes obvious the necessity for action. It is essential now, in the face of these dangers, not to become frozen in place. Though fall is just now ending, this ought to be our spring. What we sow now we will reap later. All seeds, when held in the palm of one’s hand, feel like such small things.