This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
Well, last week was the 2024 US election and it appears that American voters overwhelmingly chose fascism. I do touch on politics often on this channel but usually it’s with a fairly direct correction of misinformation or tie to scientific research–this video will be a little different. Before I go back to making my usual videos, I need to sit down with you all and get this off my chest. This video will have much more opinion than fact, so I understand if you’d prefer to give it a skip. That said, I think my opinion is based upon hard evidence. Everyone thinks that, obviously. I’ll leave it to you to judge.
Careful returning viewers probably figured out my opinions prior to this but let me just lay out what I think of this whole thing: as a progressive, I had hoped that Joe Biden would keep his 2020 promise to be a one-term president; to guide us through the pandemic and then hand the reins over to someone with a more energetic outlook for a better future. I was glad when he finally stepped down because his public decline was horrifying, but I knew that at that point the only person who could run was Kamala Harris, who was too conservative for my liking and would also face really obvious problems with misogynistic and racist voters.
I was briefly relieved when she chose a relatively progressive governor as her running mate, but within weeks I was no longer seeing Tim Walz talking about feeding hungry kids and calling Republicans weird. Instead, Harris chose to spend all of October campaigning with Liz Cheney, a woman who Donald Trump rightly pointed out is a neoconservative warmongering monster. It was honestly really difficult to watch liberals claim that Trump was calling for Cheney to be put in front of a firing squad. He wasn’t. He was making the same argument progressives made in the early 2000s: the Republicans who marched us to war in Iraq and Afghanistan would never do it if they had to go on the front lines themselves, or to send their children.
Harris continued to punt on the issue of the Israeli genocide, which honestly I understood as a political tactic but was disappointed as someone who, you know, dislikes genocides.
The Democrats had no success pushing rightward with Hilary Clinton, but I still had hope that a majority of voters would understand the threat that Donald Trump posed to our very democracy. With Harris, we had an opportunity to lobby and push her administration left, but Trump was open about his plans. Project 2025 was published in full. He admitted that he would dissolve, defund, and defang institutions that make life better for all Americans, like the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. He would further restrict women’s bodily autonomy. He would deport millions of immigrants, documented or undocumented, and strip others of their citizenship. He would appoint more rightwing Supreme Court Justices, meaning decades more of this conservative stranglehold. And he will do everything he can to remain in power as long as possible. We know that that’s not an open question: he already did an insurrection. There’s no reason to assume he will give up power in four years, assuming he’s still alive and his younger, even more weaselly VP doesn’t pick up the autocratic mantle.
I hoped that a majority of Americans would reject all that, and I was wrong. I, like the Republican Party, assumed Trump’s policies were unpopular and that since they were made plain, people would reject them. I was wrong. I assumed that if Trump won, that it would be because of gerrymandering, because of the electoral college, and I was wrong. He won the popular vote.
Donald Trump won this election because the majority of American adults, including women, do not think women’s lives matter enough. The majority of American adults, including Latino men, do not think immigrants’ lives matter enough. The majority of American adults do not think LGBTQ lives matter enough. The majority of American adults do not think democracy matters enough. The only gender or racial categories to vote to save us, to save democracy, were Black men and Black women.
So while I do think that the Democrats made some horrible decisions during this campaign, and while I also think the mainstream media did too much covering for Trump, and I think that there were damaging disinformation campaigns that fooled a lot of people, I ALSO think that this election was a sad indictment on what American values are right now. The majority of Americans are obviously deeply misinformed, and bigoted to a point where they have voted against themselves. And make no mistake, with the cuts to education and consumer protections, plus the looming price increases that will come from deporting so many workers and taxpayers without even considering Trump’s proposed tariffs, they’ve voted to make themselves stupider and more prone to misinformation. And we have to contend with that if we’re going to move forward.
I try to make sure all my beliefs are based on strong evidence, but there is one belief I hold onto at all costs, in the face of all contrary data: I believe that humanity is essentially good. I believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said. Progress is not a straight line, but when we look back we can say, “Yes, humanity is better in concrete ways compared to 100, 400, 1,000 years ago. And so, we move forward.
What does that look like? Well, for me, my focus for 2025 is going to be community. One of the first things I did Wednesday morning was to check in with my neighbors. We’re pretty tight knit, and it felt good to connect and confirm that we still have each other’s back. It was grounding. And so as I thought through how to move forward, I wanted to extend that feeling and spread it to others.
Back in August, I talked about how workers at the EPA were preparing for the possibility of another Trump presidency: to recap, Trump’s Project 2025 includes plans to fire a bunch more scientists (he already cleared house in 2016) and other skilled government employees and replace them with his own lackeys. Every new administration has certain roles it fills with new people, but in the past most positions continue on through new administrations because they aren’t overtly political and need to be done by someone with experience. That is all going bye bye.
But this past summer, the EPA employees managed to secure a 4-year contract that requires an independent audit before any of them can be fired for suspected politically motivated reasons.
They secured that protection thanks to the fact that they are unionized. Unions protect workers from companies and institutions that will happily exploit them. The Biden administration was more pro-union than any other in recent memory, which led to workers securing wins across the country in various industries. Workers at places like Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Apple, and Chipotle voted to unionize. Unions get workers higher pay, more flexible work hours, healthcare benefits, and more, all thanks to collective action. For instance, in 2022, rail workers got a 7% raise with “another 8.5% over the next two years, plus cash bonuses every year,” and food service workers at SFO got a THIRTY PERCENT raise.
Despite the Democrats’ protecting and strengthening unions, the Teamsters and Firefighter unions didn’t endorse Kamala Harris and many of their members voted for Trump, who experts say will try to destroy protections that Biden secured.
But the experts also say that Trump might not be able to destroy the unions themselves: “A big part of what’s been going on is a demonstration effect — that this is something you can do — and that is independent of the legal environment,” said Barry Eidlin, a sociologist who studies labor at McGill University in Montreal.”
And once they do organize, there are ways to secure success despite a lack of legal protections: “For example,” Noam Scheiber writes in the New York Times, “graduate students at private universities, who have been unionizing in large numbers over the past few years, might stop filing paperwork to hold union elections under Mr. Trump. They could fear that his labor board would rule that they lacked a federally protected right to unionize, as previous Republican labor boards did.
“Instead, they might seek voluntary recognition from their universities, then protest and perhaps even strike until the universities grant it. “There are a lot more people who are going to be saying, ‘What do you mean you’re trying to prevent me from having a union?’” Dr. Eidlin said.
“Something similar could happen at companies, said Michael Lotito of Littler Mendelson, an expert on labor relations. He said that unions often pivoted to targeting a company’s reputation when the legal landscape became less favorable, and that these campaigns could be effective.”
So if you are not currently in a union, talk to your coworkers about organizing. The increase in wages will certainly help with the coming increase in prices.
But collective action is about more than “just” getting a fair shake at work. It’s also about agitating for your human rights. I’m currently reading “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” by Professor Erica Chenoweth, director of Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab, and Maria J. Stephan, Chief Organizer & Co-lead of The Horizons Project. If you want an overview of some of their findings, you can check out this excellent New Yorker article from 2020, but the spoiler alert is in the title: nonviolent civil resistance works. That’s right, I lied, this video is going to tie in to important scientific research.
Chenoweth and Stephan examined major revolutions around the world from 1900 to the present day in which a group or at least 1,000 people was attempting to overthrow a government in power or liberate an area. Despite a very restrictive criteria for inclusion that excluded the US Civil Rights Movement and Gandhi’s struggle for Indian independence, they found that nonviolent resistance succeeded more often that it failed, and that violent resistance failed more than it succeeded. Further, nonviolent resistance was more likely to lead to a more egalitarian government in charge.
They also identified the markers of a movement that will likely succeed, like engaging at least 3.5% of the population in the resistance. Most, though not all, historical movements that reached that tipping point were successful. Just 3.5%!
Successful campaigns also employed a diversity of strategy: not just marching in the streets, but weird and wild techniques like when dissidents in West Sahara, a region occupied by Morocco, responded to a law against flying their flag by attaching the flags to the tails of the area’s feral cats, forcing the authorities to either accept the flags or look idiotic chasing down a bunch of street cats.
Chenoweth notes that it seems like all revolutions are becoming a bit less successful over time, and posits that it may be because authoritarians are learning how to counter common actions. With that in mind, getting more creative is going to become more important.
The researchers also found that successful campaigns were more likely to be diverse, in that a wide variety of people from children to the elderly feel that they can contribute meaningfully to the revolution. And that’s where I want to pivot a bit and point out that when I say the answer is collective action, I’m not just talking about a union at work and I’m not even just talking about big political revolutions. I’m talking about you going next door to your neighbor’s place, ringing the doorbell, and introducing yourself. Because I know not everyone is as blessed with awesome neighbors as I am, but I guarantee you the awesome people are nearby. 72 million people voted against fascism in this election. One of them is probably one of your neighbors.
And if not one of your neighbors? Well, it’s someone at the local game store that does Magic the Gathering tournaments. Or somebody at the book club that meets up in the library once a month. Somebody in the local Bike Party. Somebody at the animal shelter. Somebody in the running club.
I’ve seen a lot of leftists talking about going out and buying a handgun, because that’s what they think the revolution is. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t. The Nazis see revolution as inherently violent and now they have control of the state’s ability to do violence, so they’re hoping they get to use it. But no, that’s not what the revolution is. The revolution is you meeting another progressive in the real world and teaming up. The revolution isn’t storming the capital on January 6th to stop Trump from taking office; instead, it’s joining your local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. It’s volunteering. It’s building skills. It’s sharing your strengths with others. It’s coming up with new and better ways to fuck up the system until the system gives us back our rights.
And yeah, don’t get it mixed up: nonviolent action doesn’t mean being nice to the fascists. It means being good to each other, and building our side up, but we should still treat them like the trash they are. Call out their shitty remarks and views. Stop helping them with rent or food. Block them on social media. Boycott their companies. Fuck up their fast food orders. Cut them out of your will. Stop inviting them to holidays. Or go the opposite way and be so annoying that they cut you out. Do absolutely anything and everything within your means to make their lives miserable. Legally. And nonviolently.
As for me, I am going to go back to my more science-heavy videos after this. But I’m also going to do my best to help foster community-building, both in real life and online. With that in mind, I’m committing myself to doing more livestreams over on my alt channel, where we can hang out and have fun and build friendships, which you can then carry over to my Patreon or my totally free Discord, where we already have nearly 1,000 like-minded friends.
Because hey, not everybody can get out there and connect in the real world. So don’t worry. We’re not going anywhere. And we’ve got a lot of work to do.
