A Short Comment on the Protest of Tucker Carlson's House

            The protest of Tucker Carlson’s house on the evening of November 7^th created a sensation throughout the media. It was reported that a gang of anti-fa organizers protested the personal dwelling of the media personality in a manner that more resembled a home invasion than a traditional protest. Carlson’s wife reported an attempt to break into the house and the house was vandalized. Various media personalities across the political spectrum condemned this attack from Fox News to liberal figures such as Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert. 

            It was only after protestors responded to the media coverage days later that it became apparent how flawed the initial coverage of the protest was. Instead of a home invasion, the protestors were at the house for a matter of ten minutes, briefly knocking on the door, and taking part in a series of ordinary chants. Far from being a danger, the march and protest was substantially monitored by the police and the protestors had no real interest in much other than engaging in conventional protest action. There was an action of vandalism taken on by a masked individual, but that action wasn’t supported by the rest of the group. In effect, Carlson effectively was able to use this event to present himself as a victim, papering over his effective support for white nationalism over the past year.

            The question then becomes: how did this happen, and could it have been avoided? An initial criticism might be the chosen venue of the protestors. After all, pro choice activists did a pretty good job of making anti-choice activists look bad by exposing their protests of private homes. But to focus on this angle of the protest ignores some of the productive use of the protest of the private homes of individuals. The Detroit Newspaper strikers took their contract complaints to the Gross Pointe home of the owner of the papers in the mid-90’s and Anti-Racist Action activists successfully targeted a home of fascist activists in Minneapolis around the same time. So, targeting a private home doesn’t itself immediately lead to failure and there are moments where the tactic makes a lot of sense. After all, it makes sense to target the owner of a business to settle a strike and it makes a lot of sense to challenge the effort of Nazis to create a foothold in a neighborhood.

            But even more than these aspects, the largest difference between those protests and the Carlson protest was the existence of a set of focused and tangible goals and a real media strategy, both of which seemed to be missing in the Carlson protest. To point to a contrast, the far more militant protests of the Milo Yiannopoulos talk in Berkeley received far more positive attention in the press. Despite literally storming the venue with fireworks, the activists managed to get their point of view expressed across the media. The action itself was guaranteed to be controversial, but the logic of the protest was expressed to the media and there was far more sympathy with those actions despite their obviously controversial nature. In contrast, we only heard about the reality of the Carlson protest several days after the controversy erupted and after a media narrative had taken shape. It was clear that the protestors had not thought about the media.

            In a certain sense, the protest should be understood within the context of the series of protests that lead up to the action. For the past few months, individuals associated with the Trump Administration had been targeted for protest as they attended events or went to the restaurant. For the most part, these were protests of opportunity. Somebody saw that an official was at an event or a restaurant and there was an effort to get enough people together to embarrass them. As such, these events were spontaneous and there was little ability to put together a media plan. The Carlson protest felt very similar. However, there are a couple notable distinctions.  To begin, almost all the protests were in response to public officials who were directly responsible for very controversial and draconian public policy. In addition, there was no real ability to plan in those situations. Neither point was true in the case of Carlson, who certainly has expounded a white nationalist politic, but is not directly responsible. Also, Carlson’s house wasn’t in danger of moving any time soon.

            In effect, the protestors took a set of tactics that were applicable to a political conjuncture and applied them to one that did not fit the same criteria. By doing so, they allowed a political demagogue to define the narrative of the protest, a demagogue who was being protested for his manipulation of the news. They did so in a context where real planning was entirely possible. The results were unfortunately predictable and, to an extent, closed real possibilities of protest.  To be clear, these mistakes are not unique to the activists behind this protest. We have seen similar mistakes made frequently in the name of a ‘spontaneous’ framework protest, and to be clear, I have certainly been involved in some of those protests. Some of the choices to target the chancellor’s house in Berkeley during the tuition protests in 2009 and 2010 had a similar effect, for instance, and our protest of our own Chancellor at the UCI radio station had a similar backlash effect.

            My point isn’t that any of those events were irredeemable failures or that they fully destroyed the ability for movements to flourish, but that they were avoidable. Confrontational politics are both necessary and productive, but they also required some basic planning, most notably to challenge the inevitable narratives created by the dominant media and to plan for likely contingencies. I really don’t get the sense that the organizers took the time to think through the goals of the protest or the possible problems that could have occurred as a result of such a protest. To be clear, I don’t think that the protestors could have planned in a manner that could have stopped the act of vandalism, but they could have planned in a manner that got their point of view across to the media, even if it was the alternative media. They could have provided a real dossier of the affect of the kind of journalism embodied by Carlson and they could have provided a narrative of the event that was playful and joyful, rather than confrontational, a frankly more accurate portrayal of the event.

            I’m not interested in condemning the activists who organized the failed Carlson protest. I respect and admire the effort despite the problems. Instead, I want to use the moment to reflect on the practices of organizing and more significantly our efforts to critically assess our own actions. Organizers and activists inevitably fail. We fail a lot. Some of those failures have little to no impact. Some of those failures are immensely destructive. It would be a mistake to try to create organizing efforts without failure because it would result in no action at all, but we can do a lot more to identify and learn from our failures. More significantly, to treat those failures as an ordinary part of discussion. We should do so not to avoid failure per se, but to avoid falling into precisely the same kind of failures and to fail in more interesting and productive ways.

Looking from the sidelines: my shifting views on anti-fascist organizing

It might make sense to open this conversation by looking at the remarks of a number of protesters who attempted to use civil disobedience tactics to oppose fascism and white supremacy during the recent events in Charlottesville.  The first night of the fascist incursion into the city occurred on the campus of the University of Virginia in the form of a torchlight march.  In opposition to that march, a small group of clergy and others decided to protest the fascists and the Confederate memorials that they were attempting to defend.  The small group was very quickly surrounded by the fascists, and only the group of anti-fascists were willing to intervene to defend the group from the fascists.  The police, who they were looking to be arrested by, simply looked on.  The group found themselves in the position where they were defended by a group of activists that have a very different perspective on tactics and strategy. 

The responses on the part of the group in a variety of formats are instructive.  Most noted that the experience of facing the fascist mob was remarkably different than their what they previously experienced at demonstrations.  They also noted that the training they went through did not prepare them for this situation.  Most acknowledged the debt they owed to the group of anti-fascist activists.  It's a remarkable set of documents as a whole.  Some of these individuals had been involved in thousands of protests and some had only been involved in a few, but there is a consistent thread through the responses, an acknowledgement that the set of assumptions that they came in with did not correspond with the situation.  The tactics that they set out to use, which I want to add are part of a time honored and powerful tradition within activism in the country and around the globe, did not make sense here.  The group did something that we so often avoid; they acknowledged that they did not understand the conditions that they were entering into and that the tactics they used were not adequate to the situation because of that. 

It's an intellectual honesty that we admire and all too often eschew in our own practices.  However, for the purpose of this essay, I want to emphasize this quality of not knowing as one common among us who have not had significant experience confronting fascist groups.

My own experience began in that ignorance.  I entered into the world of politics through the punk scene in the Twin Cities in the early 1990's.  What I didn't know at the time is that a significant change had occurred in that scene before I entered it.  In the late 1980's a group of skinheads calling themselves the Baldies had come together to drive out the white supremacists from the Twin Cities punk subculture.  By the time I had entered the scene, this group, now reformed as the Anti-Racist Action network had driven the active white supremacist elements out of the scene and into the underground.  This meant that I could enjoy going to shows without having to worry about the kind of violence that Nazis have brought to the punk subculture, and I could enjoy participating in that community without the worry that so many have had to take on.  It's something that I took for granted at the time, but it's something that I'm profoundly grateful looking back at the situation.

My involvement with the punk scene gradually receded as I got involved in the Emma Center and other activist spaces, which led to me having different priorities.  As that shift occurred, I became aware of the Anti-Racist Action network. I was initially made aware of the network when a professor passed on some information about an ARA activist who was being charged with assault because of a confrontation with a Nazi skinhead, and I gradually became aware about community debates about the situation.  I eventually attended an ARA meeting with a friend, which translated into my initial aversion towards the group.  At that meeting, a young man showed up to the meeting looking for support from the network.  He had returned to his old neighborhood, looking to catch up with some friends, and found himself being recruited by the head of the National Socialist Movement, Jeff Schoep.  In response, he had panicked and hit Schoep on the head and stole his car, along with all the literature in that car.  The group understandably immediately set out to support the individual, who had responded to a dangerous situation as best he could.

But I had no understanding of the danger the individual was in that situation, and the reasons for his response, and I was appalled.  Rather than trying to understand why the individual or the network responded in the way they did, I dismissed them and looked to other places to be involved in activism.  I reasoned at the time that one should be opposed to such individuals but that the actions of the individual and the network were unacceptable in the face of free speech activity.  I didn't understand that fascist organizing almost always involved violence as a means and an ends in that organizing and that allowing such activities to occur creates the conditions for those groups to take over those spaces.  To put another way, fascist organizing isn't simply a matter of unpleasant speech acts but the active creation of violent and authoritarian social spaces.  Perhaps, more significantly, I had no conception of the threat posed to the young man who was being recruited and the legitimacy of his fear and vulnerability in the face of this recruitment.  The only reason I don't look back at this situation without much embarrassment is that I at least had the good sense to shut my yap and listen, rather than intervene.

From there, I got more and more involved in the activist projects of the Twin Cities.  My involvement in the Progressive Student Organization led to my participation in the anti-sanctions campaign and the broader network of radical activists in the Twin Cities.  The conflicts that eventually tore apart the PSO brought me in contact with the anarchist sections of that movement, which gradually drew me into the anti-globalization movement that was effectively brought to the attention of the world by the anti-WTO protests in Seattle.  I didn't participate in that protest, but I was at later protests in Washington D.C. and Quebec City, along with a series of confrontational protests in the Twin Cities, from the Mayday protests to the ill-advise ISAAG protests.  Those experiences drastically changed my world view and what kinds of activities should and could occur during protest.  I went from viewing Black Bloc tactics as being ill advised and unpleasant to being involved in a number of Black Bloc formations, and embraced the increasingly confrontational ethos of the times.  Perhaps more significantly,  I experienced confrontation in a variety of ways that were only previously abstractions.

These experiences led to a small group of us deciding to organize a small militant response to the upcoming KKK rally that occurred shortly after the initial boom in anti-globalization protest.  We managed to both organize a concert in opposition to the fascists and contributed a core of protesters to a small group that confronted the small group of Klan supporters within the larger opposition to the group.  At the ground level, both our activities and the larger structures of the protest were deeply problematic in ways that I can't touch on within the aegis of this essay, but the experience itself was significant.  One of the things you learn in the process of engaging in these conflicts is that the process is a lot messier than at least I initially expected.  Most of it was a lot of yelling, but there were some kicks and shoves as well.  Outsiders want conflict to be neat and easy, but never is.  Conflicts with fascists are going to messy, and if you snap the picture at the right time, the detached image can tell a damning and misleading story.  Just as significantly, we were far from the most militant group in the protest.  We went as far as to kick a fascist in the butt as he crossed the police line, but a sizable group of the counter-protesters who didn't typically attend rallies greeted the Klan supporters with rocks and fists.  The intensity of the response got to the point where anti-Klan organizers stepped in to protect the children of the supporters, although not the supporters themselves.

My experiences within that situation were fragmentary and short lived in contrast to many of the experiences of other, more serious anti-fascist protesters and I don't think they translate into any kind of expertise.  Instead, my main understanding of these situations comes from the conversations I wound up having with committed anti-fascist activists, when I eventually joined the Anti-Racist Action in 2001 or 2002.  The reasons I got involved in the network aren't terribly relevant to the discussion, but I got involved in the Minneapolis group for reasons that had more to do with my trust and affection for the members of the group and its commitment to a feminist politics than it had to do with anti-fascism.  At the same time, my involvement put me in touch with a whole range of activists that had been involved in the fight for a lot longer, and I did something that I should have done earlier, I listened and asked questions.  I heard a lot about the messy conflicts that occur within these situations, why people got involved, and the self-critical analysis of such activists.  Perhaps, most significantly, I remember talking to a group of anti-fascist activists in a small city in what I think was Indiana.  They talked about their vulnerability in the face of a town in which fascists were allowed to run free.  They couldn't go to shows or go to a bar to get a drink without the very real threat of violence.  It made me understand the conflict in a way that I previously didn't understand.  There are very real criticisms that one can make of the network, but I learned a lot from it and it's unfortunate that it doesn't still exist.

As an end-note to that experience, I should perhaps pass on one last experience that I had while a participant in the group.  We didn't have a lot of direct confrontations with the fascists, while I was in the group, but one exception was a labor organized, immigrants rights rally that the National Socialist Movement decided to protest.  Involved in the protest was the same Jeff Schoep discussed above.  Our engagement with the group was non-confrontational.  We watched them and they watched us.  It let the far more important event go on.  However, at the beginning of the event, we were approached by Keith Ellison, who was at that point, a state legislator.  Ellison had defended the young man discussed above as a lawyer and had gotten him off many if not all the charges laid against him.  He had worked with a number of ARA activists over the years and was at that time, an ally.  He had helped both Anti-Racist Action and the Arise! collective when they were bizarrely accused of terrorism by a cynical and opportunist sheriff's department after 9-11.  Ellison's response on seeing the NSM was to suggest in a deadpan voice that perhaps he could hit them with a tire iron this time and that we could defend him. With a change in perspective through a long education, an incident that was so shocking and outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior at the time became something that was so easily understood it could be easily passed off as an amusing anecdote.

It's been a while since I've been within those circles, but they deeply shaped my views on the subject, and I've continued to listen to those involved in these fights, particularly in the recent moment, where I have been on the sidelines because of a combination of health and employment issues.  I do still find myself in debates over the tactics though.  When I find myself in debates over these tactics, I find myself confronting a set of assumptions held by my opponents that I frequently held many years ago, and like many converts, I find myself somewhat less than patient with the views that I once held.  I suppose it's a common bad habit of the convert. One one hand, I should probably be more patient with people who I once resembled.  On the other hand, its frustrating to hear argumentation that is so fraught with unwarranted assumptions and badly thought out premises.  For instance, there is a tendency to collapse militant anti-fascism with Black Bloc tactics, transforming those transitory groupings put together in response to particular emergencies into a sort of homogeneous, organized group.  Such tactics have been recently embraced by a lot of militant anti-fascist groups, but they weren't a dominant tactic within ARA organizing, and don't represent the sole militant strain of action against fascists in the present.  Just as significantly, we can see in the case of the major protests that the groups that have embraced these tactics have taken different approaches in different situations.  We're discussing networks and an umbrella of tactics, and critiques need to deal with that reality.

Much of this debate is driven by the representation of these protests by the dominant media. We frequently immediately link violence against fascists to those engaged in Black Bloc tactics or militant anti-fascists in opposition to a group of peaceful protesters, but a lot of people really don't like these groups and will throw down against them in ways that get erased in that sort of narrative.  Certainly, this was the case in the way the dominant media talked about the confrontations at the protest against Milo Yiannopoulis in Berkeley.  Most of the activists who were on the ground for that protest talked about the forms of cooperation that occurred between those participating in the Black Bloc and other protesters against fascist provocateurs, but this aspect of the protests was utterly effaced by the media who presented a far different story, one that transformed fascists looking for a fight into peaceful protesters assaulted by a mob that had infiltrated an otherwise peaceful protest.  Images taken out of context created this narrative and there was no effort to put those images into any real context. Like myself several years previously, those reporters made no effort to understand the context of the situation or the nature of the groups that they were writing about.  They assumed that they were a group of individuals engaged in unpleasant speech acts rather than what they were, an authoritarian mob seeking to create a racist and authoritarian society.

planting a tree as metaphor for long term organizing

    I recently read a most likely apocryphal story about Hegel during the period of the French Revolution.  The story isn't terribly complicated; Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling took the time from their studies to plant a tree of liberty.  Despite the very different directions the three thinkers took, the fictional act gestured towards a commitment to the radical possibilities embodied by the revolution.  The act of planting a tree doesn't strike me as the worst metaphor for a radical political project.  It gestures towards three substantial aspects of any political project committed to radical and systemic transformation, the fact that any such project will take time, the care that needs to be put into such  a project, and finally, the immense contingency implicit in such a project.

      Time:  The act of planting of tree implicitly has a fairly long period of time in mind.  It's going to take most trees at least twenty of thirty years to develop any significant growth, and even fast growing trees take a few years to take hold.   Most radical or progressive reformist groups work within a considerably shorter period of time, often only thinking about the next rally or, if the group is particularly ambitious, the next year long campaign.  Even NGOs tend to think within a shorter timeline, developing, at most, five year plans.  In this sense, we can think of the activities of most radical or reformist organizations as being profoundly opportunist in their organizational practices, if not their rhetoric, in the framework that is implicit in both the work of Paulo Virno and V.I. Lenin .  Within both thinkers' frameworks, opportunism operates on the premise of accepting the rules set of the existing system without challenging the rules and structures of that system.  By refusing to or perhaps more significantly being unable to create long term goals and projects, radical and reformist projects find themselves playing by the rules of the systems that they ostensibly oppose.  I think this opportunist framework is an effect, rather than a cause of the profound destruction of the counter-systemic movements of the second half of the twentieth century.  However, it's difficult to imagine escaping this situation without having the resources and foresight to begin the process of developing meaningfully long future projects.

      It's notable that the thirty year time period that it takes for a tree to grow is remarkably close the the medium time-frame that Immanuel Wallerstein posits as the length of the medium term project that is largely ignored by the counter-systemic movements of the present within the United States. Wallerstein opposes this medium time frame to a set of long term goals, which take the form of large, global projects that take the form of abstract concepts such as communism, the end of exploitation, etc.  Short term goals take the form of an organizing campaign such as organizing a workplace, a campaign to end a particular practice at an institution such as using sweat shop labor, or often in the case of subcultural activism, simply organizing a demonstration or an action.  This work involves immediate goals.  How do we get people to the rally?  Can we get media attention?  Can we disrupt the actions of decision makers in a way that causes them to change their behavior?  These are all important questions, but they don't lead to giving any meaningful thought to the larger goals that the movements ostensibly have.  Instead, their framework is largely negative.  How can we disrupt?  How can we translate that disruption into policy makers changing their actions?  I'm not saying that these are irrelevant questions, but they abandon the element of planning to the structures we ostensibly oppose.  They also abandon the question of how we form new forms of social structure and create new modes of governance within those forms of social structure, and what kinds of representation will define new forms of democratic practice.

Care:  To return to the metaphor of the tree, it takes quite a bit of care to get a tree to take root and adjust to the environment in which you have place it.  This is notably true for Southern California because of the lack of rain and its poor soil.  However, it's a metaphor that works elsewhere.  At the most obvious level, the creation of any social structure is dependent on formal and informal structures of social reproduction.  You need to not only bring new people into an organization or movement, but you need to create social spaces that cause those people to stay in those structures, to allow them a sense of meaning and participation in those organizations and movements, and to create structures of care.  These are questions that are taken quite seriously at the most immediate level by anarchists, particularly the focus on self care.  However, those same organizations have difficulty imagining how you might participate in these movements when you're thirty or forty, rather than twenty, or how to be a part of a movement when you have children or you have a disability.  I don't think these are problems that can be solved through a movement that continues to operate as a subculture, that is as a community largely produced through voluntary and informal labor.  It should be additionally noted that those informal structures tend to unduly burden women with the 'traditional' tasks of reproductive labor, leaving them unpaid and undervalued.  We need structures and institutions that we can plug into, and that is going to involve getting people money to do those jobs.  There's a real question of how we do this and continue to hold onto forms of democratic governance and representation, but refusing to pose those questions by refusing to create any kind of formal structure has clearly not translated into either sustainability or equality.

Contingency:  There is quite a bit of contingency implicit in the act of planting the tree.  The most obvious contingency is the fact that trees can die, even with all the care of the world that is put into the project.  Analogously, projects fail, even with the best intentions and plans.  However, at a more modest level, even when a tree lives and grows, it doesn't grow in precisely the way you plan it to grow.  That is to say, there is a need to recognize that as a plan develops and perhaps even progresses, the means and even the ends of that plan are going to change.  That doesn't mean that you don't plan, but that you recognize that your plans are going to change.  We're good at dealing with that kind of contingency at the level of the event, and even the campaign, but we don't spend a lot of time thinking beyond that. At the level of a lot of subcultural activism, we rarely even spend much time discussing what succeeded or failed within an individual event afterwards, often leaving events as isolated and unrelated events.  When criticism does occur, it often spirals out of control becoming a circle of mutual incrimination.  We lack the mechanisms for a form of collective and individual assessment that operates constructively, rather than disastrously destructively, a mechanism that would teach organizers better practices and encourage them to engage in those practices. At some level, we need forms of self-criticism primarily for organizations, but also for individuals, but in a manner that somehow escapes from the logic of the confessional within which that mode was initially created.  Just as significantly, we need forms of institutional knowledge that will preserve that knowledge to direct future campaigns and future actions, and we need to be able to think about what the successes and failures of those actions say about our longer term plans.

To draw off the example of an old friend, we might look at the anarchist project in Spain.  We think about the high point of anarchism in the mid to late 1930's, but in doing so, we miss out on the fact that it took decades of organizing, starting withing the middle part of the nineteenth century for this wave of militancy to occur.  It involved engaging in and creating institutional and educational structures, and involved creating forms of engagement that were not simply accessible to the young. When we simply look back nostalgically at the height of a moment of struggle without recognizing the conditions that produced that struggle, we're going to lack any ability of how to advance our own goals of creating similar or more successful movements.  We have to see those movements with the context of the long duree of time, and the day to day work that occurred in that time frame.  The question is how to return to that form of longer term thinking.

Reflection on what I learned from the Campaign against sanctions in Iraq

            Two relatively minor events marked the height of the campaign against the sanctions in Iraq in the 1990’s, a disruption of a televised town hall meeting in Ohio held by members of the Clinton administration and the disruption of a speech by UN ambassador Bill Richardson at the University of Minnesota.  The actions sank the impending plans on the part of the Clinton administration to increase the aerial assault on Iraq and possibly introduce troops on the ground, but did little to challenge the sanctions themselves and their destructive effects on Iraqi society.  Moreover, the small impact of the campaign disappeared with the election of the Bush administration in 2000 and the transformation of the destructive sanctions campaign into an even more destructive invasion of the country.  The campaign had very little impact and disappeared into the mists of time.  Unlike the protests around prisons or the anti-globalization campaigns that arose around the same time, it has very little impact on either the political imaginary of radical politics or much to do with the tactical or strategic aims of the formations that define that politics.

            However, it was my first sustained entry into political activism, and has had a deep influence on my understanding of politics in this country.  In the early 90’s, the Bush administration was driven out of office by the Clinton administration, who promised a much more domestic focused national policy, and the situation in Iraq had been largely forgotten by public institutions, but the Clinton administration continued and in some cases even expanded the sanctions on Iraq started just before the Iraq war.  The sanctions covered anything with a conceivable military use, and therefore covered many of the necessary equipment needed to rebuild the war-torn country, and even affected items such as pencils and materials needed to clean and purify water.  The results on the country were devastating, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  Those deaths received only minor attention from the press and were of a concern of only a small number of activists.  Some officials from the UN protested the effects of the sanctions, but there was no opposition to the policies from Democratic politicians, even those who had opposed the war in 1991 or those who opposed the later invasion.

Although I would not want to dismiss the lessons in organizing that I learned from my fellow activists in the Progressive Student Organization, I think that seeing the collusion of the Democratic Party, even its left wing was the most significant lesson I learned from the campaign.  Because the campaign was directed against the actions of a relatively popular Democratic administration, it removed the illusions that the dominant system could offer a way out of the situation.  Just as significantly, I entered the practices of activism not in response to a state of emergency or a crisis of governance in the country, but in response to the immense violence that the United States government was capable of in ordinary times.  The United States government actively aided and abetted the death of hundreds of thousands and virtually destroyed a generation of Iraqis as a matter of every day policy, policy that was embraced by both parties and had no substantive official opposition. It operated in full legality, and was not the product of a subversion of either the constitution or ordinary forms of governance.  It was an ordinary form of that governance. 

The campaign itself lacked the enormous rallies that defined the two anti-war movements that bookended it.  The largest rallies involved hundreds, rather than thousands and lot of the events were small and often frigid affairs in front of the federal building.  Most of the work was rather thankless and was responded to by the larger public with indifference, contempt, and occasionally, hostility.  By the time we disrupted the speech of Bill Richardson, the core of the activists involved in the action had been to dozens of often small and ignored actions that preceded it.  Richardson represented a face of the awful activities that we had protested and attempted to educate the public about, and he had that anger directed at him in an hour-long event where he was unable to say anything more than a few syllables.  However, that brief triumphant moment was unique in our work, which was hidden from public view.  That work made me see the daily work of activism in non-spectacular terms, building small campaigns that often had very little in terms of immediate results or gratification, but were still attempting to challenge important issues. 

In this sense, I feel that my experience in this campaign put me in a far better position to understand the politics of the country than many of my counterparts who entered activism through the 2003 anti-war movement, a movement that was dismantled by the illusion that the Democratic Party was the answer.  This is not too say that the campaign was not without flaws.  Using a somewhat dated understanding of anti-imperialism, our organizations were far too reticent to acknowledge the real flaws of the Iraqi regime. At the time, I was deeply critical of this error, and it contributed to my participation in the huge and, retrospectively, somewhat mistaken factional fight that undermined the PSO in the mid-nineties.  But looking back, I don’t think that this error had any real substantive impact on the efficacy of the campaign.  Instead, we probably accomplished all that we could have accomplished within those structural limitations. Our ability to move beyond those limited accomplishments would have required actions and events that were substantially outside of our control.

It’s also a forgotten moment that is worth remembering at this moment.  We’re continually being told that the oppressive and destructive actions of the Trump administration are truly exceptional. It is challenging the constitutional limitations put upon it in a variety of ways, and is actively allied to fascist elements in a way that our government has not done for over a half a century.    In many ways, I don’t disagree with that assessment, but we also shouldn’t ignore the very unexceptional forms of violence that occur within the very ordinary governance of this country, a country that is desperately holding onto its position at the center of the capitalist world system, a system built on systemic dispossession and the theft and exploitation of labor. We shouldn’t allow the extraordinary actions of Trump to slip in the kinds of erasure that we saw with the anti-war movement, and we shouldn’t accept the current nostalgia for the immensely destructive Clinton administration.  (This essay doesn’t touch on this, but in many ways this narrative of exceptionalism is also challenged by the thread of white supremacy that defines our country’s history, which structures that dispossessio, theft, and exploitation.)