Creating A First Step

A pivot into thinking about the most effective way forward

This 👆

A Note To Readers:

In the wake of the 2024 election and the post-inauguration launch of a new, anti-governance autogolpe by a politician only interested in exploiting the systemic legal protections for his own criminality, destroying the global political order to both serve his masters and pathetically emulate their imperial expansionism, and luxuriating in the opulent trappings and signifiers of the office that belongs to the people of the nation, I have been doing a lot of thinking about how to move forward with this site. But I just can’t keep my mouth shut, so I hope you’ll bear with me as I pivot now and then into our shared experience of governance, as well as a new series I hope to launch soon that explores films that speak to and grapple with our shared dilemma¹ and how we might think about it, by exploring what we can learn from the cinema and art made by those who have endured such things before us.

Please consider this a prelude, if you will, or a note on where I am and will be coming from. I have my own experience, ideas, and references, and so I hope that you will join me by giving a read, and sharing your own ideas as we find common cause in restoring the pluralistic values of human progress to our nation.

None of this is anything new, but I think I find it clarifying to say it anyway.

Thanks for your understanding.

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“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”- Lao Tzu

In order for us to take our first step forward, it is, I think, very important to understand where we might go. And so, I want to offer a few thoughts I have on political action and how, I believe, there is a path for those of us who are looking to change the political conditions in our country.

Let’s start here:

Every political movement, and by that I mean political movements that operate primarily outside of official party, government “politics”,² should be driven by specific, clearly defined goals. Goals are the measurable outcomes of all political work—systems that acknowledge and guarantee social equality, for example. Or new access to resources that provide life saving medicine and care. What we will call “Movement Goals” are tangible political objectives that are driven by movements operating outside of government systems.

Movement Goals are achieved through political actions, let’s call them “Movement Actions” to distinguish them from official, political government actions like, say, legislation.

Movement Actions are defined by tactics, so let’s label them “Movement Tactics” to distinguish them from government tactics like, say, executing a filibuster to delay the passage of a piece of legislation. Or, say, I dunno, refusing to hold hearings to confirm a Supreme Court nominee despite it being the President’s Constitutional right to nominate one and have them go through the confirmation process. For example³.

For brevity, I’m going to stop modifying the words goals, actions, and tactics with the word “movement” because from here on in, those are the only goals, actions, and tactics I am going to be talking about.

TL;DR— political movements are built around goals, which are achieved by actions, which are defined by tactics.

In order to build a sustainable movement, goals must be achievable, and actions (and therefore tactics) must be aligned specifically toward the achievement of the goal. If a political movement does not properly define its goals (or has unachievable goals⁴) or has actions that are not aligned with achieving its goals or if the movement’s tactics create actions that do not support the goal, the movement will fail.

Every successful political movement, from the Civil Rights Movement to ACT-UP, has demonstrated a strong, structural understanding of the importance of connecting goals with actions and actions with tactics.

While many say there is no such thing as a bad protest, or meaningless resistance, I agree in principle, but there are disorganized protests and disorganized acts of resistance that do not meet goals. And while these actions may bring personal satisfaction and a sense of “doing something” (and hopefully catharsis) to those individuals who undertake them, they also tend to be ineffective, lead to burn out and the collapse of change movements that never succeed. One of the reasons, in my opinion, that recent protest movements have failed is because they come from a disorganized albeit authentic sense of a shared need for political change without achievable goals that were supported by aligned action and tactics.

For example—

What was the movement goal of Occupy Wall St.? The stated goal was something like “uniting the 99%” but in action, it appeared the goal was to build a single protest community that shared a sense of general dissatisfaction with capitalist systems, and to demonstrate an alternative form of community to the world. But there was no specific, winnable political goal, and so Wall St. was soon “unoccupied” and the tactic of occupying a park as an experiment in living collapsed because that contained tactic did not materially impact Wall St. or capitalism— the action was a way of living, the tactic was the occupation of a single park, and while ideas were disseminated, those actions and tactics failed to achieve what was an ambiguous, unachievable goal. I don’t blame the movement, and I understand its value as an expression of energy and consensus building, but Occupy Wall St. was not built to win the massive structural changes it sought. Look around—the 1% endure, more 1% than ever.

For example.

Passion, Energy, Big Ideas, and Community… And No Specified, Achievable Goal

If we’re going to ask people to put their comfort and safety on the line, we need to set an achievable goal that has appeal to a broad coalition, serving the interests of multiple constituencies at once, and with actions and tactics that will be effective. Success builds movements, moral clarity builds movements, organization builds movements.

So, as we collectively confront a wide range of structural attacks on the social and moral values we have built over the past century of political movement victories, it seems hard to know where to begin, how to align, how to set goals. Indeed, we’re confronted with Trumpism— the political equivalent of a Jackson Pollack knockoff created from pure bullshit.

But we cannot grant this form of governance any more credibility and power than it seeks to claim for itself. We can’t accommodate it with language, despite the best attempts of our press institutions or the try-hard efforts of America’s favorite Stenographer of Our New, Fascist Regime. No normalization, no amplification, no engagement with the disinformation campaign and its terms and framing. We must refuse to engage on these terms.

So, I am not scared, it is not shocking— we knew it was coming, we were told so. There is no awe— instead, there is anger and the determination to act. And despite the sense of helplessness and powerlessness many are experiencing as we watch literal unaccountable villains working around the clock to dismantle 21st century society without anyone willing to stop them, I think there is, in fact, a singular, unifying goal that has emerged from the chaos, and if we can build a movement to achieve that goal through actions and meaningful tactics, there is a window of change and empowerment available to us that could build a sustainable movement to do even more.

Here is how I see it:

The onslaught of Executive Actions we are enduring relies on the well-documented/ “made up bullshit” theory of the “Unitary Executive” coupled with a sense of personal invulnerability created by the Supreme Court’s outrageously partisan decision in the case Trump v Unites States in 2024, which granted the President immunity for all “official acts”. There is no doubt that sitting in the Oval Office and scribbling your signature on Executive Orders with your big boy sharpie counts as an official act, so why not just claim as much power from the Legislative and Judicial branches as you can? Maybe you can retcon the entire history of progressive politics while you’re at it?

As part of your autogolpe, why not create an unaccountable technical coup, run by an unelected billionaire who inhabits a liminal position in the government that you just made up out of thin air to at once protect him from oversight but also protect him from civil lawsuits, leading a group that you say is seeking fraud and waste, but which might be rewiring the administrative departments of the Executive Branch to ensure that control⁵, oversight, and the ability to leverage our private data as a political weapon are placed in the same, sweet immune hands that are wielding that cool pen that creates the squiggly orders⁶.

Orders seeking to eliminate trans people from public life, migrants from the United States, women and people of color from employment protections and opportunity, federal employees from their roles in administering government programs, oversight and inspection to prevent corruption, Educational access for people with disabilities, and more.

You know the list.

This is how power works. It’s easy for a know-nothing to pour himself into a nice leather chair behind a desk, stroke a pen, and pretend to have a vision for America while creating cover for his own venal self-interest. It’s not so easy for the rest of us.

And so, in order to begin the process of fighting back, instead of drinking from the firehose or splintering into isolated fights on individual issues, we should be organizing to disrupt the source of all of this: we need to act to restore the traditional function of representative government itself by setting goals that challenge the legitimacy and power of the President to legislate by fiat.

At the top of this post is a photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Congresswomen from New York City, speaking to a group of unionized Federal Workers. I put it there for a reason— For me, organizing resistance actions among unionized Federal employees is the absolutely correct first step.

These unions should be joined in action by all citizens seeking to build a movement that challenges unaccountable Executive power across the system by using legal tactics that prevent the unchallenged functioning of the Executive Branch. If the Executive has decided to make us all pay a price in order to accommodate the President’s self-interested power, we have to reciprocate. Crucially, this also allows the movement to establish a series of smaller goals that can seek to cover the areas of focus of the Executive actions, and thus, a coalition can be built that dramatically expands the collective impact available to the movement.

Here, I am inspired again by the historic victories of ACT UP⁷, who strategically went after their goals with incredibly empowering and effective actions and tactics that made change happen.

In their successful fight to transform the impact of AIDS in the United States, ACT UP set achievable goals and created organized subcommittees for each goal. For example, the Treatment Action Group (TAG) was charged with learning the science behind AIDS, and ended up partnering with the research community, both private and public, to get AIDS drugs fast tracked, to get people who were dying on the list for test groups, and ultimately, supported the development of new drugs and treatment cocktails that have saved countless lives and made AIDS a survivable disease.

But in parallel, they needed to pressure the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Center for Disease Control (CDC) for not acting with the necessary urgency, so they took over buildings, did direct action protests, die-ins, and more to shut down business as usual. They even made it personal, because it absolutely was.

In parallel, they fought New York City government leadership to implement AIDS prevention measures, demanded that hospitals accept and provide quality care for AIDS patients, demanded that the Catholic Church to stop blaming and shaming gay men, and they had actions and tactics for each one of these goals, escalating them to continue fighting on all fronts at once. They had both leadership and a participatory structure where people could get involved and help make decisions. They set the agenda, made demands, and fought hard.

ACT UP fights back

This is the way.

Ending governance by fiat from a “Unitary Executive” (who legislates with a pen, undermining the checks and balances of our Constitutional order while sabotaging the functions of the state) is an achievable goal, requiring a coalition of actors impacted by these orders and their allies that can begin this movement now. This will require direct actions across a myriad of possible targets, using new and dynamic tactics to directly stop the implementation of the unconscionable actions taken to end representative democracy in America.

I am not sure I’ve ever experienced an American administration as it declared war on its own nation. But hey, they keep fucking around. Let’s find out.

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Next time, we’ll get back to film, launching a series that explores cinematic ideas that help us describe and understand the experience of life under authoritarian regimes past. More soon.

1. Which is new for us, but not new at all in the world, lending our plight a disgraceful, tragic obviousness that makes it even more humiliating to endure.

2. Despite the fact that movement goals may depend on government action or may seek to influence government policy or law or may have allied government officials who share the goals of the movement acting in official capacities…

3. *screams into the void*

4. By achievable, I do not mean they will be achieved— it just means that it is possible to put together actions and tactics that can achieve them. Movements can and do fail despite having achievable goals. That said, huge, systemic goals like “destroy capitalism” are likely going to end in failure unless the actions and tactics scale up to support it.

5. Probably theft?

6. It is easy to get distracted by Elon Musk. IMO, don’t. Your focus is the source of whatever power he has. His boss is the one to focus on and who is ultimately responsible for Musk’s involvement.

7. For me, the greatest, most effective social justice movement of my lifetime. More on them soon.