During first Trump presidency, a column entitled, “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” went viral. I’m excited to reveal that recent events have, finally, revealed the solution to this age-old problem.
I do know how to explain to you that you should care about other people: make it illegal not to.
Some recent examples:
- As soon as Roe v Wade was overturned, half of the U.S. states made abortion illegal.
- Every time the Supreme Court has overturned a piece of the Voting Rights Act, half of the states have immediately used the newly created gap to disenfranchise more voters.
- As soon as the government stopped requiring or recommending public COVID precautions, the vast majority of public facilities–schools, hospitals, entertainment venues, etc.–stopped taking any precautions whatsoever to make it safe for immunocompromised and otherwise medically at-risk people to use their facilities.
- Every single court decision that has weakened protections for trans people has increased their discriminatory and oppressive treatment.
- Rather than standing up for their trans patients, hospitals and doctors all over the country threw in the towel and stopped offering gender-affirming care within days of Trump’s first horrifically transphobic executive order.
- In response other Trump executive orders, many corporations and educational institutions have moved with lightning speed to dismantle their DEI initiatives, almost as if they were never actually serious about them and appreciate no longer having to pretend they were.
Here’s the thing… Although there are certainly many good, kind, generous, smart people in the world, the reality is that ¾ of us are stupid and/or assholes, and as a result, any large society naturally tends toward selfishness and hate. The only thing that has ever been able to keep that in check for any large society is the force of the state.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Hold on a minute. Hasn’t the state force also been used to perpetrate unspeakable evil? How can you say that the state is a force for good?” Ah, but I didn’t say every state is a force for good, I said that the state can be a force for good, and that it’s the only thing that has any chance of doing it at the societal level for any significant length of time.
But, of course, there’s a catch: the state only succeeds at being a source for good if good, smart people exercise constant vigilance to ensure it. Otherwise, this sequence of events plays out over and over:
- Bad people use the government to do bad things that hurt people.
- The people rise up.
- Smart, good people set up a system of government so that it is at least trying to be good.
- Things get better.
- Over time, step 1 fades into people’s memories, as does the importance of protecting the system of government from bad people who want to do bad things.
- Cracks start to form.
- Smart, bad people pry open the cracks and corrupt the government while convincing the stupid people that they’re the ones doing the right thing.
- Repeat from step 1.
We’re at step 7 right now in the US, rapidly rounding the turn toward step 1.
As the Nazi fascists continue to use the US government to hurt people, you’re going to see more and more people saying big government is the problem, if we didn’t have big government the fascists wouldn’t be able to leverage it to do bad, etc. These people are clowns and you should not listen to them. The problem is that too many good people took their eye off the ball and let the bad people pry open the cracks.
We’re on defense right now. We need to actively resist, and we need to demand from our leaders who aren’t fascists that they actively resist. And when we get through this, we need to fix the cracks that allowed it and do everything we can to pass on our wisdom to future generations so that maybe, just maybe, they will remember better than we did why our system of government needs to be protected.
(Stay tuned for our next episode, “Why anarchism isn’t the answer”, coming soon to a station near you.)
