You Are With Resistance Politics Or You Are Against Resistance Politics
Opposing fascism isn't going to make you feel cool. Get over it.
Excuses. That's all I can think about when I come across any pundit or analyst or academic or, as my dad used to call them, people who like to talk, running down the reasons why not everyone gets to have a good life.
More precisely, these are usually bullshit excuses. And more damningly, a mass fraud is being perpetrated. That’s because – and this is a fact – everything's been figured out. The food supplies, the medical procedures, the undeniable virtues of tolerance and inclusion, the protection from harm, the capacity for healing. We have it all, pretty much.
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We didn't have it as recently as, say, one hundred years ago. Certainly not five hundred, or one thousand years ago. But we’ve evolved quite decently in fact. Over the generations human beings have cultivated opportunities and understandings so that everyone – literally everyone – can be well, and can be treated well.
So when there is deprivation – whether of rights or good will, sustenance or housing, security or comfort – it's because we, or really, some criminal subset of us, have chosen it. It is desired. And when we, or rather some misguided subset of us, talk about the unfortunate reasons this deprivation is so, or must be so, we are making excuses. Bullshit excuses. Bullshit excuses that bloom into mass fraud.
Denny Carter
And damn do we make them. There's practically an Excuses Industrial Complex (see the field of economics). We’ve made so many excuses for keeping things on the wrong side of fair, generous and kind, that we’re annihilating the boundaries of reality with some of them.
Suddenly, we’re well past a crisis of legitimacy. There is no crisis. There is no legitimacy.
How can there be when the transmissions that keep going out and into our poor, addled minds during this second miserable Trump term are some variation of: Woke became too cringe so Americans have no choice but to embrace fascism, as a recent New York Times piece (strongly) implied in a conversation between three people who seem to oppose the Trump regime but would prefer the opposition to Trump to be cooler and edgier, to be far less earnest in their approach to the whole resistance thing.
This arrangement of words – "woke became too cringe" – is an insult, not an idea; a facile fabrication of a commentariat that is all hedge masquerading as edge. There’s not even a lie here. It’s nonsense as a first principle.
What was ever even true about “woke” as illuminated by our morally limited establishment, in this time and place, by these people, in this manner? I don’t think anything. So then, what could “too woke” possibly mean? And how could this thing, “too woke,” which does not exist, catalyze so much agita? Especially in an environment in which people are battling for justice, fairness, prosperity and kindness (right?); especially as those things are being ripped away from us.
The New York Times exists in service of these things, right? Or at least to truth, which these things flow from. They’re getting to the truth of matters, yes?
Ok, you’ve read it, and perhaps the NYT piece it’s pulled from; now forget about it. Because you’ll find these words, and these thoughts, these deep dives into pools filled with concrete bullshit that should kill thoughts on impact, everywhere, all over, ad nauseam.
I don’t want to overstate things, but to circle back, it all reeks of fraud. What follows the but in “I’m generally supportive of resistance politics but…” is almost always some concoction meant to drain true grievances of their spirit, in favor of a politics of grievance that keeps things at a fascist status quo. If sympathy for a politics of resistance is genuine, then one’s expression of support cannot incorporate – even if the topic of discussion is designed this way – rumination on the perceived misfires and misdeeds of woke-ism, or well-meaning progressive politics seen as deeply uncool by the Cool Kids online.
Because that stuff is nonsense. Those intellectually trafficking in the foibles of the so-called woke movement are playing an ill-considered, juvenile and fraudulent hand. More so, there’s a certain obscenity to it. Because I’m going to offer the presumption of good faith to the people who like to talk when they say “resistance politics,” and credit them with meaning the politics of justice, of consequences for moral failures, of the extension of humanity to everyone. But when I do that, when I give you, the commentator, that sort of credit, and you end up participating in some pontificating that is totally frivolous at best and fraudulent at worst, on the many misdemeanors of woke-ism, some truly gross priorities and perspectives are laid bare.
Denny Carter
Actual resistance politics includes things legacy institutions likely haven’t spent any time caring about (maybe thinking about, and even reporting on, but not caring about). Resistance politics is illegally detained U.S. citizens going on hunger strike in illegally constructed concentration camps; it's regular folks keeping immigrants safe from the president's secret police; it’s workers struggling for humane treatment at jobs that demand and extract their force of being; it’s communities providing mutual aid, registering voters, stitching together pieces of their often difficult, often dangerous lives to feed those who need feeding, to nurture what needs nurturing.
But one couldn’t possibly be thinking of these things when they utter the words: “I distance myself from the woke of five years ago.”
I don’t know how to read this and not feel like I’m sinking. Or maybe suffocating. This isn’t real, but I’m being swallowed by it. Or I’m choking on it. It’s impossible to tell, because it isn’t real!
This stuff is maddening. My point is, if you’re supportive of resistance politics, of releasing one and all from the toil of an unnecessarily and illegitimately oppressive existence, but pivoting to the cringe of it all, and how the aesthetics are a block for you and your support, well damn then, no, you’re not supportive of resistance politics. Support of something so crucial – opposing and resisting fascism – doesn’t get sidetracked by things so trivial. Or, as I keep mentioning, things that don’t exist, like woke-ism poisoning. You don't hedge on countering fascism because it makes you feel insufficiently cool.
What we’re being presented with, in The New York Times and in so many other chatty corners, under the guise of figuring out how to make life work, and how to give life worth, are in fact discussions about things that get under the skin of people, a random and careless crew who happens to matter in this moment. These discussions take place and are given space because the Times wants these frivolities, these frauds, to get under your skin. Not because they have any relevance to anything, but because suddenly you’re scratching an itch that isn’t even there, and the matters of resistance politics – that justice, kindness, and prosperity we’re all behind, right? – grow neglected, and the moral imagination quietly and quickly atrophies.
We don’t have time or space for this. If the Republican Party was a person, and you gave them truth serum, and asked, would you be fine enslaving and murdering everyone who doesn’t look like Chip Roy?, they’d likely answer yes. These silly, crazy, dastardly fucks are getting rich and staying alive by mining your wealth and health. Right now, a good life for all feels like reaching for the moon, but we’re buried sixty feet underground, and when we resurface, it’s the year 5 BC. If you really care about achieving this – a good life for one, for all, for yourself – the point of resistance politics – we must reject the excuses, the bullshit, and the bullshit excuses.
We must stop falling for these frauds.
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