At The Hinge

Trump Train Violence; Responding Tomorrow; Conceding Elections

Happy election. 

Donald Trump used to warn us about caravans. Now we know what he really meant. 

In the days before the election, there have been newly aggressive and even violent incidents where Trump supporters (in the main) have tried to alter politics with brute force. 

From the beginning, I have focussed this newsletter on the role of violence in politics, which I covered abroad, and now see at home. We are at a hinge. This country, and this column, will begin to change tomorrow. 

Please buy a subscription, so I can continue to track authoritarianism in this country as it regroups for another try. 

Paid subscribers will get a behind-the-scenes video tomorrow, on my literary method, and a recent antifascist patrol I undertook. (Wink). 

THE CAR AS WEAPON

Two days ago a Biden-Harris campaign bus was almost forced off the road in Texas; voters are being harassed and yelled at, sometimes by armed men; blockades are appearing like this one above, a brief shut-down of the main bridge across the Hudson river in Tarreytown, New York. 

No wonder they are desperate—New York and New Jersey are the two states where Trump is losing worse than anywhere else in America, and he is losing badly. 

Is it any wonder that American authoritarians would adopt the car as a weapon, second only to the gun? Trump supporters tap into the dark aspects of the automobile, with their Fuck-You sized vehicles that embody their climate denial. Car attacks on BLM protestors have been a signature since Charlottesville, and there were many close calls in Portland this summer. 

The authoritarian wants something from his automobile: black and dangerous, with mass, power, and noise, the ability to threaten and belittle others while behind the wheel. It can be the obese SUV, the revving muscle car that menaces protestors, or the Manly Man pickup truck hauling nothing but flags. The MAGA-mobile is big, overpowered, a gas guzzler that threatens the safety and visibility of others, hurts the atmosphere, but comes with lots of cup holders and status.

The Trump caravan in the photo above is blocking the Mario Cuomo bridge. Their Shut-it-Down behavior, designed to make others suffer, reminds me of dysfunctional Argentina more than anything I remember in the US. 

And two days ago that Trump caravan harassed, threatened, and collided with a Biden-Harris bus and support vehicles driving in Texas. 

Don Trump Jr. ignited the tinder this time, encouraging a Twitter posse to chase after the bus. “It would be great if you guys would all get together, head down to McAllen, and give Kamala Harris a nice Trump Train welcome,” he said, addressing supporters in Laredo.

They did. First they took pictures of themselves holding rifles. Then a couple dozen MAGA-mobiles shadowed the bus, tried to force it off the road, and deliberately collided with a car trying to guard the bus. Harris was not on board. No one was hurt. 

The Democrats cancelled two events in Texas for safety reasons, including one featuring a Texas representative, and the mayor of Austin. This is flat-out voter intimidation. When you prevent people from holding meetings, you are trashing the Constitution. 

You know what Donald Trump Sr. did: he praised the caravan. “Anybody see the picture of their crazy bus driving down the highway, they are surrounded by hundreds of cars, they are all Trump flags all over the place,” Mr. Trump said. What fun.  

Guns for Kamala, road justice for the traitors who deny Trump. Violent politics is here.

ANSWER VIOLENCE WITH NON VIOLENCE 

What to do? A friend recommended I get a gun. I don’t agree. 

Non-violence is our most powerful weapon. If the vote count is shut down or Trump refuses to leave, use non-violent protest. Do it immediately. Call five people and go together. Don’t wait for orders, or permission, or a movement. In fact, many authorities and leaders will tell you to stay home, to wait. Be like water.  Self organize, spontaneously. Use American symbols. 

THE FUTURE

Who are we? 

Some Americans recently organized protests outside Attorney General Barr’s house, in my home town, McLean, Virginia. 

But they were not there to protest against Barr, for putting kids in cages, or serving as Trump’s tool. They were Trump supporters, and #Qanon followers, there to protest against Barr for NOT serving as Trump’s complete tool. They were protesting that Barr has not already arrested Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden, and Hillary Clinton, and everyone else they accuse of being traitors. 

Trump has in fact said again and again, in public, that Biden and Harris should be arrested now, not after the election. The QAnon conspiracy theory also claims that mass arrests should have happened already—the entire movement was built years ago on the promise of a so-called Storm, in which tens of thousands of liberals, Democrats, media elite, and Hollywood stars would be jailed. Their supposed crimes would include, according to Q cultists, raping children, consuming their blood products, practicing Satanism, selling the US government to China, and defying the patriotic hero Donald Trump. 

After years of chanting “lock her up,” these people actually believe what they have been told by the President. So why aren’t the liberals all locked up? Why isn’t the Deep State in jail, and Tom Hanks arrested for pedophilia? Why is Barr refusing to do what Donal Trump says, and what their secret magical source, Q, claims is all planned out? 

It’s the end point of this particular cult. We’ve reached the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, and everything they believed is revealed as a lie. He wasn’t a genius billionaire, playing 5-dimensional chess to outwit secret villains hidden everywhere. There was no Storm. There was no Q. Miracle drugs don’t kill Covid, which didn’t go away. He didn’t build a a wall, and Mexico didn’t pay for it. There was no “Donald Trump” as they knew him.

Reality has come back around at last. 

But maybe just for a brief moment. The forces of Trumpism will regroup and rebrand, flinging accusations and updating their cult beliefs as needed.

CONCEDING ELECTIONS IS IMPORTANT…RIGHT?

I have been reading “The Assault in Reason” by Al Gore, and reflecting on his decision not to contest the 2000 election. 

I thought it was a terrible robbery when GOP lawyers and lobbyists forcibly stopped the Florida recount (in the infamous “Brooks Brothers Riot”). But once the Supreme Court ruled, I thought Gore was wise to concede. I was at the peak of my war exposure then, fresh from the battlefields of Colombia, Cambodia, and other places torn apart by civil war. The risk seemed too high to me, the tradition of accepting Supreme Court rulings too important. 

But we paid a heavy price. The unnecessary war in Iraq, two decades of GOP intransigence on fossil fuels and healthcare profiteering.

What did you think of Gore’s decision? 

His book is like the man: simultaneously wooden, but insightful; outdated even when published in 2007, yet relentlessly focused on the future. One minute he’s dishing neuroscience, another the lessons of Roman politics. It’s impressive and irritating. 

Most prescient is his central argument: decades of denialism and phony arguments have eroded our democracy, and we need to adapt it to the new technologies of...television advertising. 

You’d think he was writing about 1977, not 2007. Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” covered this ground perfectly back in the day. And I should say, Gore is right that entertainment values corrupted the news and politics, and that the problem is our biological need to glance at fast-moving objects—the “orientation effect.” 

TV/movies/webisodes/Patrick’s YouTube Chanel all rely on this effect, often stealing our attention as much as once a second. But he errs gravely in portraying the internet as a “one way” technology, a corporate megaphone akin to broadcast networks. (Kids, look it up). Maybe by 2007 he forgot the net was born of anarchist parents, and couldn’t foresee see the grandchildren would be Reddit /thedonald and #Qanon. Twitter was one year old when this book was published.

But his central claim holds: visual media are emotive, not reasoned, and if you can get away with denying reality, then politics has no consequences. 

And Gore is convincing that a democracy built on the reasoned process of reading and writing must adapt to preserve itself. We aren’t going back to the 19th Century.  We need a 21st Century republic. 

What is that future democracy? What do we change? Voting rights? Education? The Fairness Doctrine? The Supreme Court? The Facebook algorithm? Overseas wars? Or (my favorite) the minimum wage? 

Donald hacked our minds with his Tweetstorms, spewing chaos that confounds and occupies us, his own “orientation effect.” We have to un-hack our own algorithms.