It’s not quite been a week since the election in the US. Some I know wanted to stay up to see the result in; I had a suspicion that a few more hours of ignorance-in-bliss might be best. There was no joy in being right.
Neither, I have to admit, was I ever particularly excited by Harris. That’s not her fault – she was thrown into the race too late by a man who should have known better than to try to carry on. But I never felt that she was going to be the kind of President that the US – and the world that is so, sadly, impacted by its choices – needed. I didn’t see strong action on Gaza. I didn’t see a bold agenda on the climate catastrophe. The world would have been better without Trump, but – on the detail of her political record – that didn’t mean that Harris was necessarily more than, to put it mathematically, (Trump)’ .
Still… the deep, deep sorrow that this is the man who didn’t just scrape into power but strode boldly, carried by more than 50% of US voters. Really? This guy? This felon? This women-hater? This misogynist? This tyrant? What more would someone have to do beyond inciting a violent crowd to storm the centre of political power to stop people then voting this person back into power?
The words that have stayed with me since the result were written by Aldous Huxley in 1937:
‘So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.’
This idea of President as Potent…. one that Trump and the other fascists love. What do we do in response to his victory? My hunch is that we need to find ways to disempower him, and them.
How?
It perhaps begins with stepping away from the hope that any president, or PM, or Pope, or some other ‘big daddy’ can save us/them/The Planet.
We need to remove our hope in the Caesars, in the Powerful Men and the promises they make to save us, to deliver us into some kind of Elysian field.
This is the political heart of a radical theology. One that affirms that ‘we are the body of Christ’… that devolved, viral, invisible, greater power of resistance, one that begins at the death of Mighty God – and the death of that idea of the saving power of a ‘Big Other’… and is reborn, in silent flame, in a Spirit, in an outrageous collective…
I’ll hope on that for now. Perhaps that is what is needed in a Democratic party in some disarray: democracy. Demos. People power. Harris should have had the chance to be selected. But, more importantly, now there needs to be a true gathering of people on the ground. People who will work for a free Palestine and a free Ukraine, whatever the bag of wind in the White House says. People who will work for a transformed, carbon-free economy, even as the fool declares ‘drill, drill, drill.’
The Caesars have made us miserable. F*** ’em. Time to turn away, and root our hope in one another.
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