Insurrection and Complacency: The Two Paths of Magical Thinking
If we fail to see the real disease poisoning us, we are paving the way for unstoppable fascism.
One thing is very clear about the insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol and state capitol buildings across the nation, along with the millions of people across the U.S. who cheered it on: They see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe. Let’s call it “magical thinking.”
It’s vital that we don’t do the same.
I see a lot of rage, misplaced blame, and desperation in the United States right now. And it’s not just coming from the political right wing. I see it on the left. I see it in poor and working-class communities, in the barely-holding-on middle class. I see it in those who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness and hunger. I see it in communities that have endured violence and discrimination for generations.
The pandemic has exacerbated this. Trump fueled it. But the unbearable pressures felt by a sizable portion of our people — a portion that grows year after year (and in 2020, month after month) — have been building for decades. For some, it’s been building for centuries.
We think of Trumpism as a disease. But it’s not. It is just one symptom of the disease — one symptom of many. And this disease is not like a virus or an infection. It’s poison. Different people call this poison different things — neoliberalism, corporatism, oligarchy, wealth inequality, systemic racism, patriarchy. But regardless of the name, it’s poison. The body of our nation is suffering myriad symptoms due to a system of economic and cultural poison.
And the data, the charts, the economic and historic experts — the WARNINGS — have been there all along. And they’ve been largely ignored for all that time too. We didn’t want the warnings to be true, so we pretended like everything was okay. We believed it wasn’t so bad.
To be clear: We can — and should — convict the people who took part in the insurrection at the US Capitol and capitol buildings across the country. We absolutely need to impeach Trump to protect our country from him in the future.
But if we stop there, it’s like treating the symptoms harming the skin on one arm of a sick body and thinking that’s the solution. Focusing only on this doesn’t address all the other symptoms that are slowly killing us, and it doesn’t stop the poison that is causing this sickness.
We must be willing to pull the curtain aside and point to the poison and demand that our elected officials remove it — get it away from us and destroy it. At this point, half-measures don’t solve the problem, and platitudes without policy only stoke the rising anger in our nation. We must call out our elected officials — no matter their political party, no matter their racial, gender, or sexual identity — and demand they do everything necessary to address what’s at the root of our scourge of problems.
If we think that any politician or party will be our savior, if we refuse to see when elected officials are not doing what’s necessary to stop the poison, we are participating in our own magical thinking. Just as Trump’s lies drove his supporters to participate in an insurrection, our willful blindness leads us down an equally destructive path: complacency.
This path paves the way for the next Trump, the next fascist leader who will likely be more charismatic, more intelligent, more polarizing — and more effective.
We can’t do that. We must see what’s really happening. We must name it. And we must stop it.
Demand that we change this inhumane system immediately. Build a better world, one that treats all people and our planet with dignity and respect and care. Accept nothing less.
