An inspiring, and very dubious, idea - and an update

The nonsensitive-time piece below I wrote roughly within a day before accumlating episodes of clinical depression settled within me in one continuous, venomous stream of crippling debility. A week ago I began a wide-spectrum regimen of pharmaceuticals which had some rather undesirable effects. Another consult later today. Its outcome could not possibly be worse, so I'm hopeful that I'll be back on my feet in the foreseeable future — that, in itself, a promising ideation. I apologize for the interruption; I'd have given anything to elude it, but Mother Nature can be a real bitch at times. On the other hand, what ails me is not even remotely as devastating as what ails tens of millions of my fellow brothers and sisters around the globe. For that, I am thankful, as I am for your understanding. Next up, the long-delayed, prewar column —PMC

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I hope Robert Reich and David Brooks' "vision thing," as Daddy Bush was accustomed to calling aspirational foresight, is abnormally clear and prospectively possible. The former's latest Substack column is titled "What we must do now." His prescription: "We stand up to it. We resist it. We denounce it. We boldly and fearlessly reject it —regardless of the cost, regardless of the threats." Specifically, Reich continues, what this country needs is a good "general strike — a strike in which tens of millions of Americans refuse to work, refuse to buy, refuse to engage in anything other than a mass demonstration against the regime."

To understate matters, Reich's vision is ambitious. People would line up to say it's too ambitious — and I'd be among them, which I'll expand on momentarily. Reich can at least claim the support of an improbable ally, writing "I'm hardly in the habit of quoting David Brooks." But we all have our first time, and for Reich, this passage from the NY Times columnist was definitely, memorably his first:

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Until I read Brooks' column in full, I didn't know his "consciousness" had been raised to such an astonishing level. Never would I have guessed that someday he'd be closely and sympathetically paraphrasing Karl Marx. A national civic uprising is needed, wrote Brooks, because "Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains" (emphasis mine). In a stand-up routine, with that a comic would do a mic-drop.

Reich urges us "to start preparing" for general strikes. He suggests that for now we visit this site. It's operated by an organization, of sorts, calling for the strike that Reich calls for. I don't know when this undertaking was launched, but I hope it was recently, very recently, since the folks behind the movement say they need 11 million people to sign up before a nationwide general strike can take place. As of this morning they had 340,250 sign-ups, leaving a human deficit of 10,659,750.

At this rate, they might have 11,000,000 able bodies willing to protest (in the form of a general strike) the innumerable abominations of Trumpism somewhere in its eponymous leader's fourth or maybe fifth term. How proud Americans would be with a president for life based not on Jamaes Madison's but Xi Jingping's example.

I have other doubts quite aside from what would seem to be a too ambitious sign-up objective (a number they say is based on "successful" strikes in the world's recent past). My doubts are more like deep reservations. For one, the movement's organizers say "We are not one singular organization.... We are committed to a decentralized model of organizing."

While the group's "decentralized model" worked well for the feminist and gay rights movements — each pursuing a single goal — it is distubingly questionable whether the model could work for them.

As the organizers put it, "Specific demands will come from the leaders and experts of our various existing fights for racial, economic, gender and environmental justice." That model is complex. Giving each "fight" — one for racial justice, another for economic justice and so on — an equal and unifying voice will be nearly impossible to achieve, especially since the leaderless organization will call on leaders to speak for each. Once they're in the trenches, I can almost guarantee that each leader would see his or her cause as supreme — nasty infighting to follow.

What's more, the group appears to assume that America has something along the lines of "class consciousness" — the downtrodden battling the billionaire oligarchs and their führer. If my assumption of their assumption is accurate, they'll be disappointed. Historically we have held onto the myth that America is unburdened by Old World evils like Europe's class heirarchy; that here there exists the leveling, democratized system of one-person, one-vote, that we're all born equal, thus our politics have mirrored the socially democratic system in which there is no Old World aristocracy.

I certainly can't pinpoint the the percentage of Americans who cling to such beliefs, but it's certain the percentage is substantial. Just look at the number of voters who buy into the ahistorical bullshit as spread around by demagogues like Trump: that once upon a time America had a golden age — retrievable, but only by the bullshitters. (The best work on this peculiar political tradition is Alan Brinkley's Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & the Great Depression.)

I would leave this for Messers. Reich and Brooks and the general-strike organizers. In October 2011, assistant professor of sociology Heather Gautney wrote an op-ed for The Wasington Post in praise of Occupy Wall Street: "This is a leaderless movement.... In the Occupy movement, We are all leaders." The month of Professor Gautney's opinion piece is important to note. A month later, the "occupation" died.