The People Want Music

I have some free advice to anyone trying to organize a memorable protest or a successful social movement.

I'm not keeping track of a lot of trends up close and in detail, but as an artist with an explicitly political orientation and a presence on Spotify et al, there are certain trends that are hard to ignore, even if I were trying to remain ignorant.

Although a lot of what goes on with these platforms is very opaque, there are some trends that are pretty easy to correlate.

One is that the people want music, and when people are mobilized, angry, scared, or otherwise engaged with the sort of issues artists like me write a lot of songs about, they seek out, listen to, and share music that is related to their concerns. 

Many of the various factors that drive these things are a black box with an algorithm inside, but to the best of my ability to parse the available statistics on my artist dashboard on Spotify (the biggest platform), here are the two trends that have been particularly noticeable:  my active listenership increased by around 50% during the first few months of Israel's genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza.  Over time the numbers declined, back to what they had been.  And then after Trump was inaugurated and the Trump 2.0 shit show began in earnest, the same thing happened, but more dramatically, with no sign of slowing down in the daily upward trajectory of the numbers.

There are other trends that happen that are easy to see, like the temporary increase in monthly listeners you tend to get when you release a new album or do a big concert tour, or when December rolls around, if Christmas songs happen to be your niche.  But neither of the dramatic upswings in listeners I'm talking about seem to have anything to do with those or other factors.

Before sitting down to write these words, I took a very informal poll via text message with some of the best protest singers I know in this country, to see how many protests they've been singing at lately.  I wasn't surprised to hear that the numbers have been very low, across the nation, aside from in Washington, DC.

There is a longstanding disconnect here, which I think is really crucial to highlight.  For years now, there has been so little music, especially live music, at protests, and this has been true, by my estimation, across the US, and to a lesser extent, in some other countries as well.

I haven't sung at a single protest in Portland or anywhere else since Trump's inauguration, but it's pretty clear from the numbers, and from messages I receive from random people around the US, that people who are going to those protests are listening to a lot more of my songs on Spotify lately.

These numbers on Spotify are international, and can be viewed by country, by city, by age, gender, and other filters.  So while I haven't had an invitation to play a gig in Germany for years now, since Israel's genocide began and many of my songs became illegal under German law, what is unmistakable is my listenership in Germany has surged and ebbed as the global and concurrent national crises have unfolded.

My biggest numbers of listeners are, in order, located in the US, Germany, and the UK, which together make up about two-thirds of my global audience online.  These trends happened or are happening in all three countries.  With the UK, the tour I'm working on booking is coming along more slowly than ever, but the numbers of people in that country listening to me on Spotify this month has never been higher, and the same is true for the US and Germany.

The purpose of me presenting this information to the public is not to impress anyone by my arrival in the dubiously illustrious top 3% of Spotify artists thanks to genocide in Gaza, DOGE's mass firings, the rise of the AfD, and the rise of Reform UK, but to make the correlation for anyone who is interested, and to communicate to anyone involved with organizing protests or organizing any kind of social movement response to all of what's going on, that you should clearly be having live music at your events.  

The people are hungry for it.  People are fundamentally musical creatures.  We turn to music when we're happy and we turn to music when we're angry.  We turn to music when we need hope.  The evidence is overwhelming, without looking any further than my artist dashboard on Spotify.

Whatever the reasons for not having music at protests anymore, they don't make any sense.  Let's reverse that trend, and perhaps in the process begin to reverse other trends as well, such as the trend, in all three countries and others, towards authoritarianism.

Jury Duty

The American legal system, I can now say from first-hand participation in it, is a lot like sausage, in the sense that if you're a fan of either fair trials or good sausage, you'd best not watch either of them in the process of production.

I have just been a cog in the American justice system, and I feel dirty, and a bit sick.  I'm not trying to make you feel dirty or sick, but I'll tell you about my experience anyway, because it was also very interesting, to me, at least.

There were hundreds of people standing in line in the rain outside of the Multnomah County Courthouse, most of them there reporting for jury duty.  It's a brand-new building on the Willamette River in downtown Portland, with big windows on every floor featuring magnificent views of the cityscape, and the mountains beyond it.

Having been to the old courthouse, it occurred to me that this one was better, if only because judges and juries who are deciding the fate of their fellow human beings should do so in a comfortable room with a nice view, so they might stand a chance of not being in too miserable a mood while making decisions that will likely change people's lives in all kinds of ways.

The building and the jury selection process struck me as well-designed, except for the part about hundreds of people having to stand outside in the rain in order to slowly trickle into the building, since everyone has to go through a security screening, like at the airport -- and except for the cafe in the big beautiful building having abominable coffee.

We were herded up to a large room on the third floor where an engaging and entertaining woman with a fairly thick Japanese accent spoke at the lectern and gave us the run-down as far as what to expect from the jury duty experience.  She showed us some videos about how jury deliberations work, and another video about subconscious bias.  She told a story about the couple that first met as fellow jurors, and eventually got married in the same courtroom.

A judge gave a speech to us all about the importance of jury duty to the functioning of our society.  He talked about the pandemic, and how there weren't such gatherings like these happening then, and therefore justice wasn't being done.

Reflecting on that at the time, I assumed he was suggesting that because jury trials weren't happening, and judges were dismissing all kinds of charges because people couldn't be afforded their rights to a jury trial, justice wasn't getting done.  People who committed crimes were often not being convicted for them, as I recall, because of this problem.

I wondered at that moment as I do at this moment, whether justice was served better or worse with all these cases having to be dismissed during the pandemic.  I really don't know.

You have to be a US citizen over the age of 18 and a few other qualifications, in order to be on a jury.  I assume there are hundreds of thousands of residents of this county who would qualify, so it was a bit surprising to hear from this judge in his speech that there are only 38,000 people in the county who respond to the summons for jury duty.  To quote the Japanese lady, this crowd gets recycled often.

A musician who has recorded on several albums with me at Big Red Studio was there in the line when I was, and he was directed to his jury room just before I was sent off to mine.

Prior to that, although most everyone was sitting in seats, rather than wandering around the room, I had to wander around the room.  All the really comfortable seats were taken, for one thing, with just the more stiff-backed chairs left available.  But mainly I just wanted to get some impression of who was in there with me.

I knew it would be skewing in the direction of US citizens, rather than just Green Card holders and such.  And I knew it would be skewing in the direction of people who could afford to or otherwise manage to take a couple days off from work or whatever they do, on a weekday.

As I discovered over the years living here in Portland, it's exceedingly easy to get out of doing jury duty if you don't want to do it.  In the past, I got one of these summonses, and I just told them I was on tour at the time they wanted me in, which was true, and that was it.  Another time I answered the summons and didn't get picked to serve on a jury.

Looking around the room what I saw appeared to be a pretty good cross-section of Portlanders, of the sort who are citizens and have stable housing, with an address at which to receive a summons.  The crowd was fairly diverse, ethnically, but severely lacking in Black people.  One of the few Black people in the room was the judge who gave the inspiring speech about the importance of juries during our orientation.

I was taken to the courtroom of the judge who would be presiding over the case for which I had been selected as a potential juror.  They take 40 people at first, then ask us all kinds of personal questions, so the lawyers could choose who to reject and who to accept as jurors.

I answered the summons in the first place because I was interested in experiencing the process, of being on a jury, having never done this before.  I figured if someone's going to do it, it might as well be a nice, conscientious, considerate, anti-racist person like me.

It was again noticeable, thinking about the whole "jury of your peers" concept, that once again there were no visibly Black Americans in the room, although, as we'd soon find out, the defendant was a young Black man.

As the questioning went on it became very clear that of the forty potential jurors in the room with me, most people had a strong interest in the idea of a fair trial, and in the idea of civic engagement.  Other things that I found of interest was how many people answered affirmatively to the question of whether they had any close friends or relatives who were cops.  It was about 10 of us, which seems high.  Two of us had been mugged at gunpoint (me being one of them).  About 10 of us had never been the victim of a crime.

Having not only been mugged at gunpoint, but having had my housemate killed by gun violence, having had a car stolen, cars broken into multiple times, one home destroyed by arson, another broken into by thieves, my identity stolen once, and surely other things I'm forgetting, I found it shocking to hear fellow Americans saying they had never been the victim of a crime.

After admitting to having been mugged at gunpoint I figured that was it, the defense was going to reject me.  But maybe the defense lawyer liked my IWW hoodie, or my answer to another question, about what I thought of the US criminal justice system.  In any case, I was one of the 12 chosen for the jury.

It was 13 at first, but then they eliminated one of us, apparently at random, because the 13th is just to make sure there are enough jurors so they don't have to drop or delay the trial, in case one of them doesn't show up for deliberations.

This was a domestic violence case.  I learned the acronym, "DV," this week, which apparently everyone who watches crime shows is already familiar with.  There were a lot of fans of crime shows in that crowd of 40.

The defense and the prosecution lawyers made their cases to the 13 of us, presented evidence methodically, interviewed the woman who wanted to press charges against the guy in the first place.  She had called the cops, reluctantly, in fear for what might happen next in the unwelcome saga with the guy she met on a dating app who wouldn't leave her house and constantly carried around a gun.

The next morning, the 12 of us remaining met in our jury room.  We were on the tenth floor of this building, with a view of the buildings and streets beneath us, including the parking garage where you could see the cars of some of the jurors, including mine, parked on the roof.

Around the big table in the room were two doctors, two school teachers, a social worker, someone who worked in a warehouse, a USPS letter carrier, a musician (me), and a project manager who had a lot of experience running meetings, so when I nominated her to be the head juror, everyone readily agreed that this was a good plan.

What went on in that room for a bit less than two hours was very serious, intense but respectful discussion.  Everyone clearly felt the weight of the situation.  We were deciding someone's fate, based on the evidence and testimony we had seen, and the instructions we were given.

It was truly a discussion like no other I had ever engaged in.  There was not unanimity at the beginning.  It seemed clear to me, and still does, that although both lawyers made their cases reasonably eloquently and engagingly, in a case that relied on a jury deciding whether they trusted the testimony of someone who claimed to have had her life threatened by her gun-toting boyfriend, neither side presented any witnesses who could vouch for the character of either of the main people involved with this case.

For the prosecution, this was perhaps because they didn't really need any more evidence.  There was video evidence, and it was incredibly damning.  So at least for that particular count of threatening with a deadly weapon, if we could infer that that's what he indeed had in his hand in the video, that was pretty clear.

For the other charges it was about whether we trusted what the woman claimed had happened.  But if the testimony of a witness under oath is part of the evidence to be considered, as the judge explained, then in the complete absence of any evidence to the contrary, like anyone having anything nice to say about the defendant, if there was any reason to question the preponderance of evidence we were being presented with, we didn't have it.

The idea that there was "reasonable doubt" that she wasn't telling the truth about having been threatened by him while brandishing a firearm the month prior to the time he did that on video just didn't seem convincing, under the circumstances.  So he was found guilty not only of the incident caught on the video, but on the other gun-threatening incident as well, along with the other charges, all of which involved clear physical evidence.

What if the guy had been rich?  Then, I'd guess, he'd have witnesses to vouch for how wonderful he is, and how untrustworthy his ex is.  He'd have a more evolved strategy to convince us that the gun the cops found with him when they arrested him was not the same gun he had in the video, which, perhaps, was actually an airsoft gun or a BB gun.

But no, although his lawyer did make that argument, no one was convinced by it in the jury room.

What if there was a single journalist in the room, or friends of either the perpetrator or the victim, or witnesses aside from cops, and one guy who seemed to barely know the defendant?  Plus a woman who came with him -- the two of which made up the small, lonely audience for this trial, who wasn't being paid to sit there in a police uniform.  Who knows, maybe more witnesses testifying could have changed the whole picture.

There were all sorts of factors we weren't supposed to consider in the case, but that concept is very much like ignoring the elephants in the living room.  The defendant had a tear drop tattoo beneath his eye.  This is a tattoo people sometimes get in prison.  Sometimes they get one teardrop for each year they spend behind bars.

There was incriminating evidence presented which had obviously come from phone calls recorded while he was in prison.  You could hear the sounds of other prisoners talking in the background.  If you had had conversations with prisoners who were talking on phones in the general population section of a prison, it was that kind of echo and background conversation, very recognizable.

The second day the defendant came into the courtroom, he had a patch over the eye that had the teardrop tattoo on it, so the tattoo was covered.  Had something happened to his eye, or had he hoped we'd have more sympathy for him if we didn't know he had spent years in prison?

It might have been better for him if he had worn that patch the other day, too, rather than just on one of the days.  I learned after our deliberations, though, that apparently some of the folks in the jury had not cottoned on to any of that until I mentioned it to them.  Others had.  I wonder if there was evidence we didn't get to look at that might have made the defendant look any better, or only evidence that stood to make him look worse?

In any case, now one more very troubled woman may feel slightly less endangered, living in the city of Portland, at least for a while longer.  And one very troubled man will spend yet more time in an American prison, likely emerging even more troubled when he gets out.

Has justice been served?  I certainly don't think so.

I spoke at length with one of my fellow jurors, who had also parked on the roof of the nearby parking garage.  Like me, he had a penchant for parking on the roofs of these structures.  Like me, he was originally from Connecticut.  Like me, he and his family were renting their home in Portland, watching the housing crisis lay waste to the nation.  It was quickly apparent he was just as much of an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist sort as me.  We exchanged phone numbers before parting.

I suspect there were others among the dozen of us who might have shared the sort of worldview that I seemed to share with this one.  Which altogether just seems like even more evidence of a decrepit justice system.  It didn't matter what civic-minded, anti-racist, do-gooder, radicals any of us might have been.  The options were all bad ones, and in the end, we picked one of them.

"What do you mean you haven't seen the new Dylan movie?!"

"What do you mean you haven't seen the new Dylan movie?!"

My friend was incredulous, and understandably so.  If anyone had seen this movie, I might seem like the kind of person who would have done that.  And actually I think of myself as the kind of person who would have done that, too, but I haven't. 

I just smiled, and had no verbal response to my friend's outburst, when he learned that I hadn't seen it yet.  I probably will get around to seeing it.  But, at the risk of coming off as a complete narcissist, my avoidance of this movie -- and to be sure, that's what it is -- seems worth exploring a bit.

Having had a night to sleep on this question, why haven't I seen this new movie about this artist I love that has been so widely praised, this morning when I asked it to myself, the immediate response that sprang from my head was this is like asking a Christian why they haven't seen the new movie about Jesus.

The biggest reasons I haven't seen the movie yet are probably the least relevant and the most mundane.  Nobody invited me to go see it with them, and left to my own devices, I tend to just spend another evening hanging out with my kids when I'm home.  When I'm on tour, I'm often too busy to see movies.

Another big one that has to do with movies about musicians generally, rather than about this one in particular, is every one of them that I've ever seen tends to have lots of snippets of songs along the way, almost none of which are ever played to completion.  When I'm hearing a song I love that's often being rendered brilliantly by some great musicians playing it in the course of one of these movies, the last thing I want is for it to get cut off, but that's all they do in these films.  They're never about the experience of the entire song.

But even as I'm thinking about these excuses for not seeing the movie, I can feel how my reticence is about so much more than that, while at the same time not necessarily being about anything in particular.  This is definitely not a review of a movie which I haven't seen, but I'll explore these feelings a bit anyway.

Anyone who has ever been part of a real grassroots mass movement will tell you that music is the beating heart of any social movement.  This was most definitely the case with the overlapping Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's, and for so many people who were active during that period, Dylan's music was at the center of that beating heart.

Folks I've known who were active during that period (and I know a lot of them) are often easily able to quote Dylan lines that are relevant to any number of topics we may be talking about.  If someone says something that inadvertently includes a Dylan quote (whether or not they know it), these people will recognize the song it's from, as a matter of course.  For a lot of people, Dylan's poetry narrated the period they were living through, particularly at that time, in the 1960's.

Although all of this is very much true, at the same time, the musical/social movement scene that Dylan was immersed in from a very early age -- that the teenage Dylan grew up in, came out of, lived within -- tended to claim him as their own.  Not exactly in the possessive sense, but in the sense that there was a widespread recognition that Dylan and other brilliant musicians active during the time were as good as they were because they were in every important way informed by the waters they were swimming in.  They and their music were viewed as part of a greater whole.

This may very well all be part of the movie's plotline, for all I know.  And whether it is or not, any storyteller, be they a filmmaker or another kind, naturally has to choose a focus.  You can't just do a film about everything.  But Dylan came out of a time and a scene, and any movie about Dylan would probably need to focus more on that than on the individual artist, if the actual relevance of the artist is to be truly understood.

Looking back at the period from the present-day perspective I think it's very hard for many people to grok the reality of the time -- a time during which the word "grok" was very popular.  If you were part of the scene, you drank of it and you were part of it, and in the thinking of many self-described "freaks" of the period, there was in important ways no real separation between the artists and the audience, or what we today might call the content creators and the content consumers.

Maybe that idea was a big part of the movie, but most movies that focus on a particular artist just focus a lot on the artist, and give the impression that what was most important about them was them, rather than the world they emerged from.

What happened with Dylan was just an exceptionally successful rendition of what happens generally in the music industry, since its inception.  The star-making machinery went into operation and turned this brilliant artist into a global phenomenon.

When this happens to an artist it has all kinds of impacts, of course, aside from lots of radioplay.  Other brilliant artists who were Dylan's contemporaries and were overlooked for stardom, to one degree or another, spent their careers in Dylan's shadow.  Which wasn't Dylan's fault, but the reality of Dylan's rise also involved so many other artists coming to terms with so many hard truths.

It's entirely possible that I'm sort of handicapped as an artist, and unable to just appreciate a lot of things because of that.  For example, many people tell me how much they enjoyed the movie called Once, about two musicians in Ireland falling in love and playing music together.  I did enjoy it, but not as much as they did, because I found the scenes where things happen that just would never happen with normal musicians or in a real recording studio to be distracting.  Like when the engineer started acting like a producer, which engineers tend not to do, and told the artists to listen to the click track, which didn't seem to exist.

If you're another artist, in order to enjoy a movie like that, you have to be able to suspend your disbelief, which can be very hard to do.

I can deeply appreciate Dylan's brilliance, his songs, the lyrics, the storytelling, the metaphors, but at the same time, if I'm not taking in a song, but thinking about the man's artistic career, and his launch to stardom from the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, then thinking about his meteoric rise tends to remind me of the career trajectory that Phil Ochs never experienced.  A career trajectory for which Bob Dylan was most certainly not responsible.  But that's where my thoughts go -- not necessarily when I hear Dylan's wonderful songs, but when I think about the idea of making another movie about one of the most famous people who ever lived.

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but there are inevitably other die-hard Phil Ochs aficionados whose minds wander in this direction when they think about Dylan's rise to fame.  It's a phenomenon emblematic of the music industry, and far bigger and more impactful than any individual artists.  If you can hear the bitterness seeping through my words, my apologies.

Especially at the time that Dylan began to become a huge phenomenon, so early in his career, during a very brief window of time when the biggest record labels of the day had decided to embrace politically-outspoken music, he was writing what we later learned were to be called "protest songs."  They were some of the best of that or any other time -- "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Masters of War," "Only a Pawn in Their Game," and so many more.

We live in the world we live in, with the past it's had.  In this reality, it's easy to imagine Dylan being tremendously famous, and it's even easy to imagine a songwriter receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature -- now that these things have happened.  It's hard to imagine an alternative reality where someone like Phil Ochs had instead been adopted and invested in massively by the major-label star-making machinery.

The reason this is hard to imagine, I surmise, is because the music industry has so rarely taken an artist who consistently writes very specifically topical songs about the world around us, and made them famous.  There are only a certain number of artists who the industry determines to occupy a certain genre who the industry wants to promote at a given time, for optimal return on their investments.  That being the case, along with whatever other, more political factors, if the industry invests their vast resources in a political artist, they will generally be an artist on the vague end of political commentary, whose songs are more open to interpretation, and less confronting.

Could songs like "Is There Anybody Here," "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" or "One More Parade" have become as ubiquitous as so many Dylan songs became?  We'll never know, because we don't live in that world.  We live in this one.  I'm glad it has Bob Dylan in it.  I'll probably watch this movie, too, eventually.

Punishment and Appeasement

"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."  Albert Einstein 

What scares me about as much as the new administration in the US is the way people around the world are reacting to it online.  What with the threats to Greenland, Canada, and Panama, the plan to annex the Gaza Strip, and so much more, it's perfectly understandable.  I'm reminded of the collective revulsion you could easily find all over the internet towards the Russian government three years ago. 

That people are horrified by so much of what's going on is not the scary part -- there's so much to be horrified by.  It's the way the debate seems to settle into a question of "appeasement" vs. "punishment" so quickly that I find the most disquieting. 

There's no question that the debate will tend to become so binary when it's being carried out on our dominant platforms for communication in the world today.  I don't know to what extent the atmosphere on social media determines policies anywhere, but to have a real discussion on social media reminds me of what Einstein said about the power of the atom so long ago.  With this as the dominant means of communication on Earth today, humanity is even less prepared to change our modes of thinking.  The same may of course be said about corporate and state media of all kinds, which has been true since long before the existence of Facebook.

The internet seems to be verily buzzing with an uneasy mix of sentiments.  There are those who are somewhere between openly enthusiastic and guardedly optimistic about the shift towards the far right in the US, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, which many supporters of this shift do not characterize as far right.  And there are those, more numerous in my circles, who are petrified by these developments, and the new dawn of 21st-century fascism that they presage.

Among this crowd that is freaking out about the rise of the far right, those who are trying to address the  question of what is to be done are talking a lot about "appeasement" and "sanctions" as well as forming "united fronts."  Many are the same folks who would have been calling for the sanctions on Russia three years ago, others are a whole new bunch.

Anyone can get it, of course, this is not hard.  If a country invades another country or their leaders threaten to do so, this invites harsh responses of all kinds.

But at least as far as trying to come to terms with the new geopolitical realities we're all faced with now, if we try to ask not just what is ethical, but ask what are we actually hoping to accomplish with our response to the situation, then we may find that the best response is nowhere on the appeasement/punishment spectrum.

We could first take stock and ask ourselves, what does the rise of the far right in the US, Germany, Italy, India and other countries signify?  Many things, to be sure.  But history indicates that what the populist form of authoritarianism that we're faced with now feeds off of -- what gives it life and meaning -- is the failure or corruption of democratic rule, the inability of the people and systems espousing things like equality of opportunity and the welfare state to successfully make their case in the electoral arena, which often stems from the inability of bourgeois democracy, social democracy, social market economy, or whatever we're calling it, to meet the basic needs of the people in a given country.

The only effective response to the rise of the far right, at least according to my reading of how things have played out in the past, has been a society, government, or social movement that actually does a better job of running things in a way that meets the needs of the people than the alternative the far right is offering would seem to do.

Ineffective responses to the rise of the far right have included both appeasement and sanctions, along with both sectarian violence as well as what we might call "united front" thinking, in the way it tends to manifest in reality, dominated by business interests.  It would have been best if all of these ideas, in the context of the rise of the far right in major countries, in particular, had vanished with the onset of the nuclear age, if not long before then, in my humble opinion.

One prominent and current example of a failed effort against authoritarianism has been the western world's sanctions on Russia.  Regardless of whether you think Russia's invasion  of Ukraine was provoked by NATO expansionism and would never have happened without it, or if you have a different view of the roots of the ongoing war in that region, and regardless of the motives of the Trump administration with regards to Russia and Ukraine, what have the sanctions on Russia accomplished?

The war goes on, with untold numbers of Russians and Ukrainians killed.  Industries in countries that produce the same things that Russia produces, like in the US, have made record profits.  Poorer countries in the world have been especially destabilized, with a rise in conflicts of all kinds, as well as a rise in poverty, hunger, and the occurrence of famines.

In Europe, drastically higher energy prices have also caused political destabilization and helped increase the popularity of the parties characterized as far right that are calling for peace negotiations.  

In other words, sanctions on Russia have achieved worse than nothing, as many people would see it -- unless increasing profits in the energy sector and helping the rise of the far right in the west were the goals in the first place, in which case the sanctions are working very well.

I don't know what the big agenda of the Trump administration may be with concern to international relations, and I'm not particularly hopeful.  But now, those who supported the sanctions on Russia are calling Trump, Vance, Hegseth, et al, "appeasers" for the current initiative towards ending the war there.

If we overlook the specifics and just assume that any peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine that involves Ukraine losing territory or not being able to join NATO counts as "appeasement" of Russia, one main argument of those condemning the appeasers is that if appeased this way, Putin's next move will be to invade Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and perhaps Poland.

The logic in favor of this position, as far as I can tell, is that Putin equals Hitler, and this is what Hitler would have done.  We should act now to contain Putin, the way countries should have acted when Hitler annexed Sudetenland.

There are a lot of problems with this argument, aside from Putin being a different person than Hitler.

The reality with NATO, here in the nuclear age, as well as Russia in the 21st century rather than Germany in the 20th, makes the entire situation completely different.  The assumption that Russia is going to invade a NATO member country because it invaded Ukraine may be a good one if you're a military strategist coming up with possible scenarios to consider, but the idea that it's likely, let alone some kind of inevitability, as it is often portrayed, makes very little sense, in the age of Mutually Assured Destruction, which explicitly protects NATO countries, not non-NATO ones.  And implicitly protects any country or alliance of countries with access to a massive nuclear arsenal.

But we have so many people online who are ready to shout "No Pasaran!  No appeasing Putin!"  And now, "No appeasing Trump!"  It feels like many of them are following the dictats of a pamphlet which is derived from a playbook that most of them may not have read, but it's one based on events mostly of the pre-nuclear age that took place between the 1920's and the 1940's.

For anyone that knows about the tens of millions killed in the course of that period, from the late 1930's to the mid-1940's in so much of Europe and Asia in particular, things did not go well for humanity overall back then.  We can sing songs about the incredible heroism of the struggle against fascism in its many forms, and we should -- but at the end of the war, the biggest victor was death itself.

To the extent that fascism was a global movement that was also popular in the United States, while it was increasing in popularity in so many countries and taking over some of them, with the New Deal defining life for so many millions of Americans for most of the 1930's, the popularity of fascism withered, as the popularity of socialism, and the approximation of some of its principles within the programs of the Roosevelt administration, soared.  The nationwide programs that represented a viable way out of the Great Depression ended up making the idea of socialism much more popular on the American streets, farms, and forests than fascism was, along with other factors.

In the countries where fascism had taken hold, deflating the movement's popularity by creating a viable alternative model was no longer an avenue available to the opposition, and very difficult to impose from outside.  The efforts that were made by other nations hoping to keep fascist powers at bay in one way or another, including appeasement and sanctions, failed spectacularly.  In the end it was only after a war that took the lives of tens of millions of people that fascism in Germany, and the Japanese Empire, was brought to heel.  And then over time the same "united front" orientation that ultimately defeated fascism in a broad coalition of nations is, in its state of servility to business interests and empire, giving rise to the new fascist movement.

We can dismiss the sanctions efforts of the US in the "Pacific Theater" in one sentence.  When the US decided not only to stop trading with the Japanese Empire, but to try to impose a naval blockade and prevent Japan from importing oil from Indonesia, the Japanese response was the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

With concern to Germany, the persistent mythology surrounds policies towards that country during the period after Hitler came to power, while Germany's remilitarization took place, when the fascist bush might have been nipped in the bud.  A question often asked is what if decisive military action were taken as soon as Germany broke the Treaty of Versailles with regards to developing its Air Force and Navy beyond the point stipulated in the agreement?

In theory it's a good question, but with the incredible bloodbath that was World War 1 still very much in the recent past, in the midst of the Great Depression, with fascism experiencing growing popularity in many countries outside of Germany, there was no stomach for that sort of action in the halls of power in Paris or London.

After that, efforts on the part of the Neville Chamberlain delegation to recognize Germany's annexation of parts of neighboring countries certainly didn't stop Hitler's next round of invasions, or the Nazis' concentration camp industrial slaughter operations.

If these efforts at appeasement had not been made, and the war between Germany and Britain had begun a little sooner than it did, would this have changed the course of history?  There's no solid reason to believe this might be the case.

Prior to the failed policies of both appeasement and sanctions against the rising fascist powers of the day, in Germany the rise to power of the Nazis came hand in hand with an atmosphere on the German streets that was characterized by sectarian divisions and violence between fascists, communists, and social democrats.  Communists were following received wisdom approved by Moscow, that the social democrats and the fascists were not to be tolerated.

This atmosphere of violence and intolerance is often celebrated, from the 1930's to the present, as the kind of militant resistance to fascism that was really exemplary -- the "Cable Street" attitude, as it might popularly be remembered in London, when local Jews and trade unionists and communists banned together and beat up the British fascists and drove them off the streets, repeating a scene that was at that time playing out on the streets of Germany regularly, but to deadlier effect.

Rather than preventing Hitler's rise to power, the widespread violence became an easy pretext to facilitate it.  This tactic also failed.

Tactics of violence and exclusion on the streets, and international policies of both appeasement and sanctions, all have a proven record of failure.

Sectarian violence not only has a record of failing to achieve its goals, but of achieving their opposite, provoking the success of enemies rather than suppressing them, and getting people like Adolf Hitler elected to power, in that particularly notable historical instance.

Similarly, people in the area of Portland, Oregon and other cities will tell you that the atmosphere cultivated on the streets by elements of the anti-Trump "resistance" since his first term have largely served to increase, rather than decrease, Trump's popularity.

The best tactic history provides for us in terms of successful antifascism is setting the example for how a society can work that gives life meaning and allows people to prosper.  The New Deal, with all its imperfections, succeeded in deflating the energy of a fascist movement in the US, whereas sectarian violence and appeasement in Europe, and sanctions on Japan, all just led to hardening lines and the wars between the nations that took the lives of tens of millions of people.

When I see all the comments from people on the left in Europe expressing horror at what's going on in the US, at Trump's incendiary statements and threats, or at Vance's strange speeches about new world orders, I see a lot of highfalutin talk about not appeasing Trump, and how the US is now Europe's enemy and there should be campaigns to sanction the US for its crimes.

It's cathartic talk rooted in a sense of what's right and wrong, and I understand completely.  But presumably while we're boycotting the US, we should continue to boycott and sanction Russia for their wars of aggression, and perhaps China as well for their treatment of minorities, and when AfD wins in Germany, we boycott the biggest economy in the EU as well.

While the sentiment is all very understandable, emotionally, it's one with a very tragic history.  Look at what sanctions on Russia have accomplished (or failed to accomplish).  What would sanctions on the other major producer of oil, gas, wheat, corn, and fertilizer do to the hungry people of the world?  How would such hostility be processed by the nationalist media machines?  Would this help prevent or bring us closer to World War 3?

The talk about working up different policies for "red" vs. "blue" states in the US is also worrisome, in terms of what it communicates.  The last thing we need is for it to become commonplace to assume that because someone lives in a given state or a given country, they believe in the rhetoric of their "elected" officials.  As if somehow once there's a bona fide fascist in office somewhere, and they appear to have been democratically elected, we just assume that this is in fact the case, and now we overlook the totally corrupt nature of American auction-block democracy in order to vilify populations for their rightwing degeneracy.

We can't stamp out politically undesirable people from society through sectarian violence, and we can't go on pretending we can just impose sanctions on major countries that are integral to the global economy and then just ignore the devastating consequences, just because it suits the bravado of some, and the pocketbooks of others.

Saying "whatever you do, comply or resist, the consequences will be devastating," seems like especially unhelpful advice to people in a country that's been invaded, or colonized, or people who are living under authoritarian rule.

That being the case, I would still suggest that somehow what we really need to be doing a lot more of on this planet is setting the example for how to organize a society in a way that makes it the envy of the world because it's so egalitarian and prosperous.  Providing this kind of beacon has a record of effectiveness.  Sectarianism, sanctions, and appeasement all have a pretty solid record of failure.  This is extremely frustrating for anyone who wants justice now, since setting a good example and being a beacon of egalitarianism is a long-term project, unlike shouting insults, starting trade wars, or launching missiles.

In my wildest fantasies of solidarity, people in countries not overtaken by some form of fascism would look at those living in the countries that have been overtaken with sympathy, as victims in need of assistance, and we might get a whole lot of outside agitators here among us to help us with this mess.  But I know that's not very realistic, and also not nearly as satisfying as talk about fighting fire with fire.  And more importantly, in most of the countries, outside of this one, where people are freaking out about the rise of Trump, that kind of fantastical solidarity would be hard to produce, because they, too, are facing a rising tide of the far right, once again echoing how it went before.

If we follow the same pattern we've followed before -- societies devastated by misrule and war give rise to a fascist leader who seeks to dominate the world, the world responds, tens of millions of people die and the whole thing ends with the first nuclear attacks on cities full of human beings ever -- then the next time we follow this playbook, the way it ends could be far worse.  If there's another way forward, now would be a good time to find it.

Remembering Joan S. Livingston

I just learned belatedly that the wonderful and brilliant woman on the left of this photo, Joan S. Livingston, died last month, at the age of 70. This photo is from December 1st, 2024, last time I was in Boston, playing at the Community Church of Boston, where I had seen her so many times before.

Many people knew Joan far better than me, and for much longer.  Her involvement with antiwar organizing and other such pursuits goes way back.

I hesitate to even write this because it seems a bit self-indulgent.  I did know Joan in three dimensions, and saw her in person on most of my annual pilgrimages to Boston over the past more than a decade.  But Joan was probably my biggest fan on Facebook.  She was very active on the platform, and that is really mainly how I knew her.

It was through this medium that I had by far the most contact with her, through this medium that I received the most praise, and on this medium that I was regularly quoted, in reference to news of the day.

It was also on this medium that Joan engaged in the most arguments with those who didn't share her positions on US imperialism, Jill Stein's presidential campaigns, or programming decisions at the church.

Somewhere along the line I learned that when someone tags you on Facebook, you have control over whether their post shows up on your page and might theoretically be more likely to be seen by your friends and followers.  I found that function to come in handy in relation to Joan's tags; although she was often sharing interesting insights, history, as well as praise, it regularly came together with digs at people I didn't necessarily want to be associated with publicly insulting.

Particularly in these latter days of this platform you can see that the links Joan was sharing on Facebook were getting no engagement -- hardly anyone was seeing them, by all appearances.  But just following the timeline of posts Joan made where she tagged me is a fascinating and poignant walk down memory lane.   The first was in the fall of 2011, when she appears to have discovered my music via the song I wrote for Occupy Wall Street.  The last was the morning of the day she died, commenting about peace in Gaza on January 15th, 2025.

Joan and I shared almost 300 friends in common on Facebook, including many of the most impressive organizers, whistleblowers, writers, musicians -- the usual suspects, in other words.  But one of the most impressive cross-sections of them of anyone on the platform that I've known.  One of the few where there are even more friends in common is with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Counterpunch, which Joan appears to have read regularly.

The past ten years have featured a lot of time spent on social media for a lot of people around the world, and Joan was most definitely one of them.  I'm sure in her case being in and out of the hospital with a chronic illness much of that time, unable to get around easily, made sure she'd spend a lot of time online.

Just from the occasions when she tagged me over these years I can confidently tell you some things about Joan's interests and passions.

She had a lot to say about Syria and all the various global powers involved with the civil war there.  The song of mine that she posted most often in relation to Syria was probably "Good Kurds, Bad Kurds."

She was very critical of both Democrats and Republicans and denounced them all frequently as war criminals.  She loved my songs denouncing the Democrats, and she shared my critique of our corrupt pseudo-democracy completely.  The song she pointed to most often regarding this conversation was probably "Jill Stein," who she supported with vigor and eloquence.

She was horrified by Israeli apartheid and Israel's wars on Gaza, and frequently shared songs about that over the years.  She supported Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and all the other whistle-blowers.

She knew a lot about a lot of history.  She didn't believe the official story about the JFK assassination, nor did she believe that Dag Hammarskjold's death was accidental.

She loved music, for music's sake, but also as a vehicle for communicating the messages she desperately wanted the world to hear, and to internalize, and act upon, about the bipartisan American empire of death and destruction that she spoke out against daily online, as well as in the real world on regular occasions, particularly before she got sick.

She had a deep affection for so many of the same contemporaries I admire, all Facebook friends of both of ours, who received Joan's praise in some of the same posts where she shared my songs -- people like Ray McGovern, Margaret Flowers, the late Glen Ford, the late Kevin Zeese.

When I first met Joan she mentioned something about brain cancer and how she didn't expect to live very long.  So I was always extra happy to see her turn up at the next show, whenever I was in Boston again.

There were at least a couple of occasions when I got word from her or from someone else that she wasn't well, and had to stay home or in the hospital on the night of my show.  (You can find these posts in her timeline as well, where she's apologizing to her comrades for not going to my show, but encouraging them to go anyway.)  Then the next time I'd come to Boston, she'd be there, looking a bit more frail than the last time, but still standing.

Until she's not -- following in the same footsteps the rest of us will be walking in, with far too many of us meeting our ends well before we reach the average age for this eventuality.  And on that cheery note, here's to Joan.

As for Facebook, the one person on the platform who could be relied on to point out if there's a Rovics song related to a current news event will no longer be posting, and what was already a moribund platform will now be a bit more so -- though it will also be a nominally calmer one, with slightly fewer arguments about Syrian politics getting certain people riled up.

Immigration: Myths and Realities, "The Economy," and What Happened in 2006

With Trump's new round of immigration raids, detention centers, and protests against them, I'm remembering two decades ago.

As a musician, I have never had as many monthly listeners on Spotify as I do right now.  The last time I had almost this many listeners on that dominant streaming platform was in January, 2024, when my first album about Israel's genocidal war in Gaza appeared on the platform.

Therefore I conclude that Trump's election, and genocide, are good for the economy.  Is my logic flawed?

No more or less flawed than the pundits on TV talking about something they call "the economy," in reference to the percentage of the workforce that is employed, from which they draw all sorts of nonsense conclusions.

In reality, as any real economist will tell you, there are many economies, not just one.  When the pundits talk about "the economy" they're generally talking about what's good for Wall Street -- what's good for corporate profits and for the stock market.  Wars, fires, and floods can be very good for the economy, by this measure, as long as there's enough of a society still standing afterwards to finance reconstruction.

Wars, fires, and floods are good for the economy.  That's not fake news, is it?  It's just looking at the numbers.

When cities need to be rebuilt after they're destroyed, assuming the financing exists, who's going to do the work?  If we have lots of immigration, then mostly immigrants will do the work.  If there are lots of undocumented immigrants, the workforce will likely be full of undocumented workers.

Why is this the case?  Because it's more profitable to pay workers less money to do more work.  Therefore immigrants, and especially undocumented immigrants, are preferable to other workers, since they have every reason to be working harder, while getting half the pay a citizen would be able to demand.  This means more people to build more houses for less money -- a much better bang for the buck for all the investors and homeowners alike!  Good for the economy, right?

That's what they tell me on TV.  "Our economy" depends on immigration, especially the illegal kind, because otherwise there wouldn't be enough workers in many industries, because citizens won't do those jobs.

You can hear this kind of talk on mainstream corporate and "public" media every day, of various political persuasions, including the ones positioning themselves as "objective."

It's all demonstrably nonsense, however, of the sort that gets a lot of people really upset, and has folks yelling at their TV.

Luckily, there's a world beyond the United States, so we don't need to guess in order to draw conclusions about some of these things.  In countries, such as the ones I go to frequently, where they don't have a big economy consisting of undocumented workers, you will daily see sights that, to an American, seem almost shocking.  In countries like Denmark, you will regularly see white Danish people pushing mops, picking up trash, changing the sheets in the hotels, working construction, repairing cars, and so on.  And they're getting paid well, they're in labor unions, they have months of paid vacation time every year, etc.

Is it possible to get citizens to do this kind of work?  Yes.  But isn't that bad for the economy?

Well, again looking at Denmark, it's one of the most egalitarian and prosperous societies on Earth.  How's their economy doing?

It all depends on which economy we're talking about.

The economy of the regular people and the economy of the corporate elite are related, but not in some kind of predictable way.  It all depends on how things are managed, by entities like governments, labor unions, cooperatives, social movements, etc.

We can be building lots of houses at a very low cost, but if the houses are all mansions, and the workers aren't making enough money to save up to buy their own houses while they're building other people's houses, then this is a situation that might conceivably benefit a significant portion of the society, but at the same time it maintains a severe state of ever-worsening inequality between those who can afford to buy the mansions, and everybody else.

Wouldn't it be much better for the economy of those of us who don't own mansions if we were all getting paid good wages with good benefits, and had access to actually affordable housing, like how it is in so many other countries still today that I visit regularly?

If we're together on the logic up to this point, that "the economy" for mansion-owners is different than "the economy" for people trying to rent an apartment on the rental market and work in the construction industry or work in a restaurant or in a retirement home, then this is where things tend to go different ways in terms of the question of what is to be done about this situation of severe and quickly-worsening inequality, and for so many millions, real desperation.

History, and the world around us today, is full of examples of the two main kinds of responses societies can have to this kind of situation, which is one that has repeated itself over and over again around the world in so many different ways for millennia.

Whatever their views of what good immigration policies would look like, or what kinds of political leaders they might like to see, when people see an untenable situation, with insufficient affordable housing, too much profiteering of the limited supply, too few jobs that pay well enough to cover life's expenses, and so many people -- including many immigrants -- competing for that housing and for those jobs, at some point people often will adopt one of two basic outlooks on how to deal with reality.

One way is to seek to work together with the people around you, and stand up as a class for our collective class interests, as workers, renters, regardless of immigration status or any other demographic factor, to fight for a society where everyone has a good union job and no one has any incentive to undermine the good union jobs by taking half the money for the same job, for example.

The other way is to exclude a significant element of society, which historically in the US has involved making laws against all kinds of different immigrant groups and other groups, sometimes specifically targeting Blacks or Asians, other times specifically targeting eastern and southern Europeans.

Now I'm almost getting to where I want to talk about the Aughts.  I'm trying to set the stage, because I think if we want to understand what happened then, we need to get past the fake duality we hear constantly on the corporate media, especially on the liberal end of it these days, about how you can either be in favor of a "growing economy" and pro-immigration, or you can be a regressive, xenophobic racist who doesn't understand how immigration is good for "the economy" and wants to live in some version of the Middle Ages.

There are other options, which bear much more resemblance to the real world.  Such as the immigrant rights movement of the Bush years, that culminated in the absolutely massive demonstrations in the spring of 2006.

From my vantage point as a participant-observer at the time, what distinguished this movement, aside from its massive size and very broad participation among so much of the Latin American immigrant communities across the US, was that it was not trying to pose the question of criminalizing undocumented workers, which the Bush administration was seeking to do, as a moral one, nor were they taking any position like millions of undocumented workers were good for "the economy" in the way that agribusiness would define it.

The orientation of the movement was one familiar to anyone who has spent time in places with a strong labor movement.

We have relatively few people in the US organized into unions, so many people aren't familiar with the culture of labor unions that you'll find in places that have them, but in a good union, the organizers and union officials are doing everything they can to make sure immigrants and other potentially marginalized demographics are included in the union wherever they're part of the workforce, because of the basic, practical reality that if everyone's in the union, no one will want to be a scab.  If you don't have strikebreakers messing things up, and the solidarity holds, then the union can demand good wages and working conditions.  Otherwise we're divided and conquered.

The mainstream English-language press hardly covered the movement at all, as far as I recall.  Also there was very little non-Latino participation.  But it was still big, and then became gigantic, and then basically won, or at least managed to maintain the status quo, with the law Bush wanted to pass never getting through the Congress in the end.

I have a couple of especially vivid memories of the movement, which I think serve to illustrate the nature of it, why it clearly captured the hearts of millions of participants, and why it was successful, at least in a limited way.

On May 1st, 2000, I arrived in Manhattan to participate in a march.  I had come with a contingent of college students and assorted other folks from Connecticut.  I knew there was to be some kind of action on Wall Street at the end of the day, and in the meantime there was to be a march in support of undocumented workers.

I remembered Reagan's amnesty in 1986, and thought it seemed reasonable that the capitalists would want to do another one of those.  I assume they want to keep it at a certain level -- unless the capitalists are really not being at all strategic, which never seems like a good assumption.  Of course there would need to be marches to demand such an amnesty again, and I was glad to be participating in one, or so I thought.

What struck me when I got to Manhattan was not that there were only 200 or so people who seemed to have shown up for the action on Wall Street later in the day, but that there were at least 5,000 people from Latin America marching, and not one of them had a sign saying anything about amnesty for undocumented workers.

In fact, although maybe 98% of the people marching were undocumented workers who spoke either Spanish or an indigenous language as their first language, almost all the signs I remember seeing people carrying were repeating the same phrase, on home-made cardboard signs, in English:

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Aside from the 200 mostly white suburbanites who had arrived from out of town, the average height of the people on the march was around five feet.  This was made all the more obvious by the way the cops that were lining the entire route of the march towered menacingly above them.  

There were about as many cops as there were marchers.  The cops had arrived mostly by motorcycle, it seemed, and there were so many police motorcycles parked everywhere, the police were literally tripping over them.  Many of the marchers looked very understandably terrified, but they marched.

No one knows more profoundly than the undocumented workers how much the existence of this super-exploited element of society is a class issue, not just for the undocumented, but for everyone.  They all know that by taking half the wage of the citizens, they are bringing wages down for everyone.  They know this is how it works, and that this is their role, as a group, to take less money because they don't have papers.  They all know this.  It's the rest of society that often doesn't, or believes nonsense about "no one else would do that work if they didn't."

The events of spring, 2006 were remarkable for many reasons. 

One was the sheer magnitude of what was happening.  This was so much more than the activist core having a demonstration in front of City Hall.  This was a broad swath of society rising up everywhere -- though no one should be surprised if they never heard a thing about it.  If you weren't there, it didn't happen.

In the spring of 2006, Spanish-language radio was abuzz with Bush administration plans to make being undocumented a felony offense, and radio acted as one of the main conduits of information, from what I gathered at the time.  Millions protested in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and other cities.  Many large cities had the biggest protest they had ever had, before or since, hands down.

I was more or less based out of Houston in the spring of 2006, with a new baby, whose mother, Nathalie, lived there.  She knew the organizers of the protest, and I found myself singing songs of solidarity for the 50,000 people who gathered there on a Monday in April, which happened to be my 39th birthday.

The streets of Houston were completely full of people.  It's a flat city, and I never had a vantage point to get an impression of how many people there were -- but a whole lot.

It was an intensely musical movement, with mariachi bands figuring into the whole thing in a big way.  Every hundred feet or so along the march route, another mariachi band would be playing.

As we marched, truck drivers passing over the march on a variety of overpasses that can be found in downtown Houston were honking their horns in support, and it seemed to be all of the truck drivers doing that.

The lack of white, English-speaking Americans or other people not from somewhere in Latin America at this rally, as at the other one I mentioned, was depressing.  It's not that there were none -- it's just that they were the same 200 or so folks I would expect to see at an antiwar demo or a Jim Hightower event.  Those who poured out into the streets as an entire community, rather than as an activist core, were the Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and others from Central and South America.

There were other times in history in the US when there were mass expulsions of immigrants, and when laws were passed to drastically curtail immigration from parts of the world considered to be places where the undesirables originate.  There were also times when land and property was expropriated from immigrants.  There was the entire period of westward settlement, with land systematically taken from the Indians and distributed to those primarily white male US citizens who qualified to receive it under the Homestead Act.

After all of that theft and expropriation, all questions of fairness and morality aside, all blame of European refugees stuck in a cycle of violence and forced to go west aside, and all blame of people crossing the Rio Grande in the shadows aside as well, what kind of society have we gotten out of all that?

Certain people would, of course, say "the greatest country on Earth."  But anyone who's traveled knows that the US is a country full of desperate poverty and growing inequality, compared to other industrialized, modern countries.  It's not because we have too many people in this sparsely-populated continent.  And it's certainly not that we lack tremendous resources of all imaginable kinds, or because some group of people in society doesn't believe in hard work.

The main problem, as I see it, is both a current and historical one.  We are trying to have a society within an economic and political system that in so many ways is designed to be a funnel for the constant redistribution of wealth upwards, from the poor to the rich.  We have long been ruled by a system that is set up to generate profit off of our state of division -- profits which benefit millions of people, while serving to immiserate so many millions of others, thereby keeping us at each other's throats.  And now it seems all set to get so much worse.

"He's Copying Me": Making Sense of the Moment

Will the real populist please stand up?

Various liberals as well as conservatives are confused by what the media is calling this "populist" moment in Republican/MAGA/American politics.  People are genuinely stumped by what appear to be shifting alliances, as the Trump wing of the Republican party successfully recruits new people to their base of support, to the shock of the many pundits who were predicting only ten years ago that as demographics changed in the USA, the Republican Party would soon become irrelevant. 

Even as Trump 2.0 moves quickly in the direction of dictatorship, seizing all kinds of powers that either the Constitution or centuries of legal precedent say he doesn't have; even as he is throwing metaphorical grenades into various spheres including international relations between traditional allies, basic notions about how government departments and the line of command operate, basic understandings of what the executive branch can and can't do, there is a pretty minimal response to all these developments visible on the streets of the country, as far as I can tell.

The lack of response is about many things, I'm sure.  But part of that lack of response could be on account of the growing feeling among so many people in this country that is represented by the popular term, "politically homeless."  Polls not long ago indicated that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had a seriously overlapping base of support, when people were asked who they might hypothetically vote for in different circumstances.  The same kind of phenomenon can be found in other countries.

In my various social circles it ends up being the case that I know a lot of people I might characterize as political liberals who are completely appalled by Trump and everything he does or stands for, and have no idea why anyone keeps voting for him.

But I probably know at least as many people who are often struck by what appear to be shifting political alliances, who have become increasingly alienated by the rightward lurch of the Democratic Party leadership over the past many decades, who would once have described their politics as some form of leftwing, but who are now no longer comfortable with the term, as it increasingly seems to lose all association with the kinds of ideas once associated with it.

I thought it might be helpful to take a step back from the onslaught of news about the latest presidential decrees, and look at the different issues that are being brought to the fore in the process of Trump's efforts to consolidate his dictatorship, and possible reasons why they aren't inspiring the kind of street response we might expect.  I'll present the MAGA view first, then the DNC/NPR argument, then the sorts of views I hear among those who might describe themselves as some kind of leftist, of the "politically homeless" variety or not.

Election Fraud

Trump complains of election fraud, while his people work hard to change laws all over the country to prevent his opponents from voting.  The DNC says US elections are free and fair.  But most of the people I know think the US democracy is totally corrupt and ruled by money, and the elections are therefore never fair.  We oppose Trump's blatantly anti-democratic efforts to suppress the Democratic vote, but we don't support a return to the status quo of a democracy that resembles an auction more than anything else.

The FBI

The new head of the FBI talks about closing the J Edgar Hoover Building and turning it into a Museum of the Deep State.  The mainstream liberal view coalesces around the prosecutions of January 6 defendants, and how the FBI stands up for law and order, rather than insurrections.  Most of the people I know think the FBI has been primarily on a mission to neutralize the American left since its formation as a national police force at the beginning of the twentieth century.  We don't want to see the FBI turned into Trump's private police force, but we have no interest in defending the FBI or its practices over the past century of suppressing the left.

USAID

They've shut down USAID for being "a viper's den of Marxists."  The liberals say USAID is so good because it provides lots of food and medicine and programs like that around the world.  Most of the people I know think USAID has been serving the agenda of American empire for generations, in how it defines things like human rights and democracy.  We don't want to see foreign aid stopped, but we're opposed to both "soft" forms of imperial power as well as "hard" ones.

Trade Wars

They want to put tariffs on everyone, because apparently everyone has treated the US unfairly in the course of global trade, which is supposedly why there's a trade deficit.  The liberals these days say free trade is good, except with Russia and their allies, and tariffs are bad, except in the case of China.  Most people I know were critics of the whole agenda of corporate globalization in the first place, with its accompanying outsourcing of US industry.  We would like to see all kinds of radical changes to trade policies, but not the ones either the Trumpists or the DNC support.

Tulsi Gabbard/NATO

The Trumpists are tired of footing the bill for NATO's collective defense, they say.  They've now got Tulsi Gabbard in a prominent position in the administration.  A prominent former Democratic Congresswoman and combat veteran, she has a record of criticizing US imperialism, and praising folks like Edward Snowden for revealing secret, illegal spying programs being conducted by the NSA.  The Democrats overwhelmingly seem to think NATO, US imperialism, and the NSA are all hunky dory, Edward Snowden is a traitor, and Tulsi Gabbard represents an existential threat to NATO and US imperialism.  Most people I know think that would be great, if it were true.  We wouldn't go out and protest in support of the US staying inside NATO.  We think NATO should have dissolved itself a long time ago.

RFK, Jr./CDC

Another prominent former Democrat, the Trumpists like him because he was critical of lots of different aspects of public health policy during the pandemic, and for entertaining Covid origin hypotheses that weren't the approved version of reality.  The liberals hate him for the same reasons the Trumpists now love him, as well as for other things.  Most of the people I know don't buy most of RFK, Jr's ideas, but a whole lot of people in the US were alienated by what struck many as authoritarian overreach and blatant social media censorship that authorities engaged in during the lockdown periods in particular, so they don't necessarily subscribe to DNC positions related to RFK, Jr, either.

Mass Deportations

Embracing a very old xenophobic trope, the Trumpists blame "illegal aliens" for crime and all sorts of other things, and they want to deport them all.  The liberals, whether or not they have a majority in both houses, are never able to figure out what to do with the undocumented, other than continuing with the status quo of having tens of millions of superexploited workers be a so-called "essential" part of the economy.  Most people I know are horrified by the mass deportations, but they're also horrified by the status quo of millions of super-exploited undocumented workers, and the race to the bottom involved with having a society in which those workers have to compete for jobs and housing with everybody else.

Anti-"Woke"

The Trumpists are sick and tired of hearing about marginalized people all the time.  All the Democrats to the right of Bernie Sanders abandoned working class politics long ago, so all they talk about are marginalized people, who are, collectively, the closest thing that passes for their base.  Most of the people I know are genuinely concerned about all kinds of marginalized groups, but they can see how the Democrats talk about marginalized groups because they have no class politics to stand on anymore, and they're sick of the way they think they can just continually keep us worried about marginalized groups, while the basic realities of life for the working class of all backgrounds continues to decline.  For a lot of actual radicals, rather than the kind that Trump says the Biden administration was full of, we're not pouring into the streets to defend DEI because DEI has never been more than what would once have been called tokenism.  We want the actual condition of real equality, not just equality of opportunity, or what Biden constantly referred to in one of his contrived efforts at colloquialisms as "a fair shot."

DOGE

The Trumpists claim that the Deep State permeates the federal bureaucracy, and regardless of who gets elected, the Deep State does what it does.  They also say there's a lot of money being wasted, and with the federal debt being what it is, radical measures are required.  The liberals think the government works fine when you don't destroy it, and the responsible thing to do as far as the debt goes is to continually increase the debt limit and pay ever more of our tax dollars to service the ever-mushrooming federal debt.  Most folks I know think the size of the debt is totally crazy, and we should be taxing the rich like we used to back when Eisenhower was president.  Once again, going into the streets to defend the status quo of a crushing debt administered government departments that are often designed to be ineffective and inept is not probably going to be a big movement-starter either.

Now, of course, the real reason the Trumpists obsess about election fraud is not because they're actually concerned with election fraud, but so that they have a good position from which to deny the outcome of an election that doesn't go their way.  The real reason they want to radically transform the FBI is not because it's been suppressing dissent for the past century, but because they want to use the secret police for their own particular purposes.  The reason they want to slash government departments and spending is not out of concern for efficiency, but in order to consolidate dictatorial powers by turning so many more government workers into political appointees.  The reason they just disappeared USAID from existence isn't because of opposition to it's promotion of "Woke" politics or opposition to imperialism, but because they want to weaponize foreign aid to work for their particular agenda, which differs from what used to be the bipartisan imperialist agenda -- there's a new variety of imperialism in town now.

The political position of the liberal mainstream on these and other issues is totally indefensible, nothing close to what is needed to inspire the kind of opposition that would be needed to meet our current moment, and this has been true for a very long time now.  The position of traditional Republican values of capitalism and imperialism are also indefensible, and hard to run a successful campaign on.

What the new Republicans have done under Trump, on each of the issues I've mentioned and with others, is to adopt a warped sort of doppelganger version of what might appear to be a popular radical position on very problematic institutions like the FBI, the NSA, NATO, USAID and others.

One well-documented and fairly well-understood tendency of fascists is to seek dictatorial control, unhindered by things like legislative oversight or special prosecutors or independent government departments abiding by longstanding rules.

But another well-documented tendency of fascists is to adopt the popular ideas of the left and warp them to serve their authoritarian agenda, and they're doing that.

For a long, long time in this country, it has been the liberals who have had politics that at least resembled a watered-down rendition of some left analysis.  In so many ways, such as those mentioned above, this is no longer the case.  It is now the Trump wing of the Republicans that has learned to deliver a twisted version of some left analysis, and they've learned to do this more convincingly than the modern Democrats.

Liberals can keep on asking despondently on every available forum how it could possibly be that anyone could vote against the status quo and vote for Trump and his nefarious agenda.  Spending another four years doing that again, rather than seeking to understand and respond to the appeal of the particularly doppelgangerish set of beliefs that drive his base of support, will go a long way to making a future JD Vance administration that much more predictable.