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podcast friday
Jan. 24th, 2025 08:14 amI have two very short ones for you today, both from It Could Happen Here, and both related to the Current Unpleasantness. Both deal with the fact that we don't have a model for fighting back, and that the lack of people in the streets suggests that most people already know that doing the same thing as in 2017 (marching around with signs) isn't going to stop fascism.
The first is "The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next," with Robert Evans. I know everyone reading already listens to these things or isn't going to, so if you're in the latter group, I have good news, which is that there's a written version of the podcast here. He talks a lot about overconfidence and how the fascists have won largely by trying different things until something stuck; how the left has lost primarily due to a lack of ideas.
It echoes the thing Billy Bragg says so well in "The Sleep Of Reason" (and that he, and many others have been saying for years): "The greatest threat faced by democracy isn't fascism or fanaticism / But our own complacency." It's something that, as a long-time Marcher In Circles, is actually a surprisingly hard pill to swallow, largely because its natural conclusion leads to. Well. The kinds of things that Robert talks about and has personally experienced in places like Rojava and Myanmar and that we all cheered on in New York.
The other one is Mia Wong's episode, "About That Nazi Salute." Which takes Elon's Nazi salute that you all saw with your own eyes and was definitely a Nazi salute and never let anyone tell you otherwise as a jumping-off point to discuss Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. She attempts to make sense of the firehose of bad shit in the past week and how everything in our culture has converged around interacting with images and symbols rather than material reality.
Neither of them have answers or recommendations (Robert said on the podcast yesterday that you should be very wary of anyone who claims that they do, and he's right) but I think both provide very good framing, and you can't solve a problem until you define the problem.
The first is "The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next," with Robert Evans. I know everyone reading already listens to these things or isn't going to, so if you're in the latter group, I have good news, which is that there's a written version of the podcast here. He talks a lot about overconfidence and how the fascists have won largely by trying different things until something stuck; how the left has lost primarily due to a lack of ideas.
The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them not out of enthusiastic consent but exhaustion, cowardice and above all a feeling that it didn’t really matter.
That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there’s no point in engaging or organizing- that is the most powerful weapon they have right now. Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them. From interrupting as they reach out, yet again, to take something you love or need.
It echoes the thing Billy Bragg says so well in "The Sleep Of Reason" (and that he, and many others have been saying for years): "The greatest threat faced by democracy isn't fascism or fanaticism / But our own complacency." It's something that, as a long-time Marcher In Circles, is actually a surprisingly hard pill to swallow, largely because its natural conclusion leads to. Well. The kinds of things that Robert talks about and has personally experienced in places like Rojava and Myanmar and that we all cheered on in New York.
The other one is Mia Wong's episode, "About That Nazi Salute." Which takes Elon's Nazi salute that you all saw with your own eyes and was definitely a Nazi salute and never let anyone tell you otherwise as a jumping-off point to discuss Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. She attempts to make sense of the firehose of bad shit in the past week and how everything in our culture has converged around interacting with images and symbols rather than material reality.
Neither of them have answers or recommendations (Robert said on the podcast yesterday that you should be very wary of anyone who claims that they do, and he's right) but I think both provide very good framing, and you can't solve a problem until you define the problem.
