if the numbers were power, we wouldn’t be here right now

To con­tin­ue a thought from Emily’s post yes­ter­day, every­one in Amer­i­ca al­ways ig­nores pow­er in their larg­er as­sess­ments of the po­lit­i­cal land­scape be­cause we were raised on con­cepts of egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, in­di­vid­u­al­ism, and democ­ra­cy which dis­tort our un­der­stand­ing of pow­er and leaves us vul­ner­a­ble to trap­pings that put the onus on individuals.

I also think that as­sum­ing the next gen­er­a­tions are all left-lean­ing ig­nores the bow­els of Red­dit and 4Chan where nov­el forms of right wing fas­cism are com­ing to life. 

It’s main­ly the youths who make up the alt-right, MRA/incels, and iden­ti­tar­i­ans, etc. These ide­olo­gies are just as ter­ri­fy­ing – if not more – than any­thing the Boomers have believed. 

We are in for a long hard fight. More im­por­tant­ly, even though, yes, these right lean­ing fas­cist youths are still the mi­nor­i­ty, this has nev­er been about the numbers. 

The num­bers are not pow­er. Pow­er is power.

The oth­er prob­lem with the Amer­i­can Left is we lack real lead­er­ship. And we didn’t always. 

I think a lot about AOC call­ing out the con­cen­tra­tion camps on the bor­der. Yeah, she took the lead on cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fy­ing the na­ture of the hu­man rights vi­o­la­tions, how­ev­er she didn’t call for boy­cotts and walk­outs of the com­pa­nies mak­ing mon­ey of this sys­tem, she didn’t tell us to take to the streets and ral­ly, she didn’t tell us what the fuck do to about it. 

I’m not say­ing any of this to be crit­i­cal of her specif­i­cal­ly, how­ev­er it’s an easy ex­am­ple of where we lose time and time again in this country.
 
 

—na­tal­ie michelle

Flom­mist Na­tal­ie Michelle does­n’t have a bio. She just rants. Copy­right © 2019 Na­tal­ie Michelle. Hed­line by Emi­ly Duchaine. Pic­tured: mor An­i­mal Farm (1954).

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

READ SOME  RELATED  DER TUNG  POSTS  :

get the hell out of our society y’all ready? i’ll make pasta this is america straight up the quite ob­vi­ous cher­nobyl analogy ‘he gave her wa­ter. she taught him how to love.’ been want­i­ng to talk about this for awhile now and here’s a per­fect example re­gard­ing pow­er: na­tion­al­ism is terrifying