Good Day.
I am reading Hal Draper’s history of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and in that text he uses a turn of phrase that is helpful to us: “possibilism” is what he uses to describe the delimiting, confining attitude towards politics when faced with people in power who repeatedly assert “no further discussion.” In the case of students and some faculty at Berkeley in 1964, possibilism was the advice to simply go along with an intransingent administration, despite the fact its initial rules for student tables and pamphlets, activists raising money for “off-campus” activities and so on, were constantly changing and arbitrarily applied. In our context, possibilism defines precisely the terms of the discussion about the current electoral contradiction: yes, it may be distasteful to vote for a party associated with the likes of Biden and Blinken, we are told, but we “have no choice” since the alternative in Trump is worse. As I argued last time, Democratic possibilists are correct in the sense that a Trump election would be very bad! In fact, I suggest Trump would unleash MAGA actors nationwide. The self-identified right-wing deplorables would receive signals both overt and covert that violent actions against antifascist enemies would go unpunished. These actions would probably be carried out with assistance from law enforcement and military.
As I asked in the last installment, does this vision of the near future sound naïve to anyone? It seems reasonable to imagine a very bad state of affairs, and yet to contend as well against the possibilists, that a “necessary” vote for the party of Biden and Blinken in fact remains impossible. In this case, the “is” of domestic repression does not lead to an “ought” of another four years of neoliberal revanchism.
In any case, it seems to me that the die is cast: the Democrats will lose in 2024 regardless of all the shaming and blaming we can expect from them. The most dire thing they could say — and we should expect this around the time of the DNC’s convention in late summer Chicago, when dissent will become explosive — is that centrist liberals will stand aside when the MAGA deluge happens. The content of the possibilist threat will be something like: We are warning you about Trump right now, and if he returns to power, we will do nothing to stand in the way of the MAGA thugs when they engage in stochastic terrorism against Left enemies. In fact, when they try to crush the antifascist resistance, some of us will say ‘you had it coming.’ Does anybody doubt that we will hear threats of this kind? Of course we know that they wouldn’t do anything even if we chose the allegedly inevitable, only “possible” option of support for Biden/Blinken’s Democratic Party. The Gaza genocide has made this clear.
A separate but related point: it seems to me that the longer the genocide in Gaza continues, the more opportunity MAGAs will have to develop their own visions of repressive violence against domestic enemies. Put differently: the US and Israel are both settler-colonial states, and a mimetic circuit already exists between them. In addition to the genocide in Gaza, there are of course the depredations of settlers in the West Bank: the image of the fascist rods unbound means that domestic MAGAs are right now studying the actions of Israeli settlers and already imagining a kind of equivalence. The viral images of Israeli impunity have to be feeding the right-wing appetite for vengeance here: no doubt we will start to hear dehumanizing rhetoric (e.g. ANTIFA = HAMAS). And as I said above, we can expect the liberal/centrist Democratic response to those speech-acts to be as impotent and/or ambivalent as its expressions of “sympathy for both sides” in the current moment. We will be on our own.