A little solidarity for your complicity.
“Not in my name” is a popular phrase now, given the Trump administration’s near-daily ventures beyond the pale. When children die in federal custody and families are forcibly separated as a matter of policy, we have to ask what kind of actions absolve us of the kind of complicity that, seen in retrospect, looks damning. For all their stylishness, the Duchess and Duke of Windsor will be Nazi sympathizers forever. The architect Philip Johnson never managed to outrun his own dalliance, despite a Nixonian effort to do so. But here we are.
Beside Trump and Pence in the White House, and Mitch McConnell in the Senate, we have a regional economy dominated by our homegrown, Ayn Rand-devoted tech industry. As I wrote earlier, it has features of an oligarchy. At minimum, its presence has skewed things by layering our core urban areas with cohorts of mega-wealth and not-quite-so-mega-wealth. But these skews are accentuated by decades of underinvestment or outright neglect of public goods: education, healthcare, housing, and transit. These basics are missing.
One of my graduate school professors at U.C. Berkeley, Horst Rittel, said that we face two sorts of problems, tame and wicked. We’ve tended to lump the basics in the latter category. Part of his definition of wicked problems is that they’re always symptoms of a larger problem. In that sense, I agree: that these goods are missing reflects decades of terrible public policy, and not just here.
That we’re complicit in this failure of social conscience and political will seems true but may be beside the point. As the Buddhists say, “Start where you are.” The consequences of our failure are now manifest, and the time may finally be ripe to change the situation. That we have democratic socialists now in national politics is an indicator that things are changing, Trump & company notwithstanding. But — looking ahead to 2020, an absolutely crucial election — I worry that we’re picking nits instead of pulling together to ditch them.
Political change is a process. We could say that Solidarity freed Poland only for its people to vote in right-wing, even retrograde governments, and yet Solidarity’s example remains — a more potent force than Occupy, because its leaders weren’t afraid to lead, to mobilize people to demand changes. Is this easier to do in Poland, because they’re all Poles? Even now, who is and isn’t Polish is in debate, just as Trump loves to question who’s American.
Our strength as a region is precisely our diversity, and the current oligarchy puts it at risk by making inequality worse and doing very little to solve our problems of underinvestment in public goods. When we quarrel with each other, attacking across instead of up, we only succeed in dividing ourselves. Nationally, in primary season, heated debate is appropriate, but when it’s over, we need similarly to come together and vote these weasels out. We have all the evidence we need that fundamental things aren’t working. Complicity is letting them slide on, demanding a perfection that politics never delivers.
