Beyond Moderation: for Interrupting Business as Usual to Defeat the Fascist State

Reflecting Back on Some Wise Words from Dr. King

Sparked by the noxious fascist Mein Trumpf’s removal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s bust from the Oval Office, I have been looking back at some of Dr. King’s essays and speeches. Below I reflect on three passages from King, saying why I think they merit close reading and reflection in relation to the grave menace of Trumpism-fascism 57 years after King’s assassination/execution…

1. While leading the Poor People’s Campaign shortly before his death in 1968, King warned that failure to overcome racism, militarism, and savage capitalist inequality and poverty would bring fascism to the US. “They’ll throw us into concentration camps,” King said. “The Wallaces and the Birchites will take over. The sick people and the fascists will be strengthened. They’ll cordon off the ghetto and issue passes for us to get in and out.” King warned of “a rightwing takeover and a fascist state that will destroy the soul of the nation. To prevent this,” he said, “we’re going to [have to] be militant.”

Nearly six decades later, following a long descent into a “neoliberal” capitalist era that deepened economic inequality and sustained racial oppression and imperial militarism alive while fueling a climate catastrophe and religious fundamentalism, the nightmare that King prophesied — and that Sinclair Lewis predicted in 1935 — has actually arrived: “the sick people and the fascists” have “take[n] over…a rightwing takeover and a fascist state [are now threatening to] destroy the soul of the nation. We’re going to have to be militant.” We are living under a fascist regime.

+2. From King’s justly famous April 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which King wrote eloquently about the lethal non-militancy of those who prefer “the absence of tension to a positive peace”:

‘I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ “Councilor” or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direst action” who paternistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.’

Over ten years of the Trump phenomenon, now including a second fascist Trump regime that is now bidding to consolidate and cement fascist rule, the main obstacle within the US population to the restoration of sanity and decency and the defeat of the Amerikaner fascism that Lewis and King warned us about has not been the deranged fascist Trump base, who make up less than a third of the country. It has been the moderation and passivity of the many millions in “the decent country” that hates what Trump is doing. Too many “decent” folks are attached to a negative peace that leaves fascism in place. Too many “decent” Americans prefer an “absence of tension,” personal comfort, safety, and “order” over militant, risky, and passionate confrontation with genuine evil. Too many of them fall prey to the drug of normalization. Too many of them remain dully addicted to the savagely time-staggered quicksand of the suffocating bourgeois election cycles. Too many fail to grasp what King called “the fierce urgency of now,” seriously believing that we can wait until 2029 to stop the supreme existential damage that the exterminist Trump fascist regime poses to everything we hold dear and indeed to life itself. Too many are mired in “the myth[s] of time,” as in “time heals all wounds,” “this too shall pass,” “well we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

So much of the struggle (now in year nine for me) to get decent folks (including a ridiculous number of “leftists”) to even acknowledge what has been staring us in the face clear as day — Amerikaner FASCISM — is about this frankly suicidal and morally vapid preference for comfort, safety, normality, passivity, retreat, and order over tension, risk, solidarity, passion, and militancy. If it’s fascism, and it is, you have to get up off your ass and do serious and difficult things with others on a sustained basis.

3. In his book Trumpet of Conscience (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) – a compilation of five lectures King gave over the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) during November and December of 1967 — King said that “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both White and Negro…must organize a revolution against [societal] injustice.” Such a revolution. King said, would require “more than a statement to the larger society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There must,” he added, “be a force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key point.” That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force” by “dislocate[ing] the functioning of a society.”

There’s a lot to say about this passage. King was right to call for a people’s revolution, even if his Christian anti-communism got in the way of him going full bore with that call like Fred Hampton (executed by agents of King’s imagined coming fascist police state in December of 1969) and other Black Panthers did for a time. The fascism that King warned about was and is significantly rooted in the societal oppression and exploitation structures that he opposed in his own ways: racism, capitalism, and imperial militarism (though we need to add patriarchy, xenophobic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and ecocide to Dr. King’s list of the “triple evils that are interrelated” and to our understanding of the underlying forces that fuel Trumpism-fascism).

That all aside - no small matters! — the main thing I want to highlight here is King’s call for more than periodic protests and marches and for militant actions including “mass civil disobedience” that “interrupts” and “dislocates” the “functioning of society.”

We’ve had two big and one arguably giant national protest days under Trump47. You may have noticed that they did not remotely halt or alter the lethal momentum, speed, and direction of Trumpism-fascism (please review my recent posts here, especially this one and this one.).

Don’t get me wrong: it’s good and important, even essential for masses of people to see themselves in motion, chanting and singing and holding signs and banners, fists raised, at big periodic rallies and marches. But we must not fall prey to the notion that we “had our say and input” by going to a big march on April 5 and another one on June 14 and another one in seven days any more than we “have had our say and input” during the savagely time-staggered, money-drenched, corporate-media-ted and candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas our masters stage for us once over four years. You don’t bring down fascist and other authoritarian regimes by holding big marches and rallies once every one or two months. You need a regular and sustained presence — a rolling and many-sided uprising that says, “no more acceptance of this shit as normal.” This “dislocating” and “interrupting” force must disrupt and suspend business, work, and school as usual. Think of it as a continuing and developing general societal strike telling the masters in no uncertain terms that their society will not continue to function as long as that regime remains in power.

No, that’s not a revolution and, yes, we need a revolution — a society without exploitation, oppression, and masters, a whole new way of living down to how we produce our material existence and back up and down again. But getting rid of Trump this way — the way tyrants have been separated from power in many different times and places — would be a necessary start in that direction.

Why not here? Why not now? Do we think we are too nationally “exceptional” for such an uprising? Really? Gosh, weren’t we told we were too “exceptional” to hatch a FASCIST government/regime? Guess what, my fellow Americans: we weren’t too exceptional for that, so why the Hell should we think we are too exceptional for a serious and sustained mass movement to remove Trump from power, for starters.

Good news: Refuse Fascism’ (RF) has a new and updated website. Check it out here.