Dunkirk

How We Fight Back

A lot of people would like to know why people are not more outraged right now, why they are not fighting back like they should. By fighting back, they mostly seem to mean increased outrage: a circular strategy which hasn’t worked for the last nine years and seems unlikely to work now.

This is not the time for shouting. We need to get calm and focus our efforts, because we don’t have a lot of resources right now and we need to deploy them carefully.

US military fighting doctrine rests on the assumption that we will always outnumber the enemy 3:1. Liberals have operated on a similar assumption for a long time, and for a while it was true. Corporations started celebrating Pride Month and greenwashing because the vast majority of consumers either believed LGBT+ acceptance is good and that climate change is a problem or didn’t care enough to make a stink about it. North Carolina’s first trans bathroom bill attempt resulted in so many corporate boycotts that they had to walk it back; those corporations did not boycott out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they didn’t want to take a financial hit.

That pendulum has swung. Zuck kisses the ring. Target pulls its pride displays. Disney eliminates a trans character from one of their shows. Elon Musk makes a gesture that sure looks like a textbook Nazi salute, twice, and NBC Chicago edits it out of their coverage. We are stuck with a conservative Supreme Court for the forseeable future. We are, institutionally speaking, outnumbered.

Liberal cultural dominance insulated the left, but the 3:1 buffer is gone now. Conservatives complaining about Pride displays and setting their Nikes on fire are a lot less dangerous to the left than conservatives signing an executive order that denies trans people exist.

Shame will not work. Outrage will not work. This is Dunkirk. We have suffered a decisive loss and lost a lot of ground, we are in retreat and confusion, we are pressed against the beachhead. We need to fall back, regroup, and prepare for the blitz.

Trump’s greatest talent is getting his enemies to shout theselves hoarse about some outrageous Scandal Of The Week while he pushes his real agenda through, which both diffuses effort and exhausts people. Constant outrage didn’t work in 2016 and it’s not going to work now with even fewer resources. We must concentrate our limited energy on the things that matter most and leave the rest for later.

Two priorities stand out to me:

1. Basic Human Rights

Trans rights are under direct attack. This must be our first priority because we have to draw a line in the fucking sand here. If we become the kind of people who are willing to sacrifice others to survive, we have already lost.

The rights of undocumented people are also about to be under direct attack. We need to concentrate on demands for due process and humane conditions within detention centers. I want more roads to legal immigration. Basic human rights are more pressing, and our limited resources should go there for now.

2. Communicating With MAGA

When life gets bad — and thanks to tarrifs, tech bro oligarchy, and mass deportations, it’s going to — we need to point out the ways Trump has lied to and used his supporters. We need to open the door to dialogue, set aside bitterness, and invite them in.

As always: this strategy is not about finding allies or compromising our positions (see #1). This strategy is about persuasuion and recruitment. The beginning of my personal shift from right to left was "wow, I've been lied to about Afghanistan. I wonder what else I've been lied to about.” One crack is often all it takes.

If the idea of associating with or welcoming in someone who voted for Trump in the past sounds vile and also impossible, may I suggest finding religion and leaving divine judgment to God. Or find some other way to work through it, because we don't have time for that shit. We never did, and now we really don't. Our actual enemies are the people who are lying, not the people who bought those lies.

There are no solutions to this mess that do not involve making inroads into the 77 million people who voted for Trump. Some of those people cannot be reached, but a lot of people voted for Trump because they wanted grocery prices to go down and to have enough money to raise a family. People were sick of the status quo, they wanted something different, and that’s a pretty decent starting point for a discussion. We are about to have an unprecedented opportunity to reach out to those people and say hey, Trump lied to you about prosperity. Would you like to hear about some of the other lies the oligarchy has told you?

We've lost more than an election here. We need to look that in the face, accept it, and change our strategy accordingly. And honestly, it’s about time. The 3:1 doctrine has lost every war since WWII, and it lost this battle as well. As dark as things are about to get, as dark as they have already become, we have an opportunity to emerge stronger from this fight. It will likely take years, and they will be ugly years. But nature abhors a vacuum and, as the Democrats prove themselves terminally useless and the Republicans immiserate their constituents to enrich their oligarch friends, there will be space for the first robust left-wing movement America’s had in years.

Near-term? I’m terrified. Long-term, I’m actually pretty hopeful. Dunkirk was supposed to be the beginning of the end for England, but was actually the beginning of the end for Germany. They took it for granted that the UK was done and turned their attention to Russia, they spread themselves thin and created an opportunity for the allied forces to break them. We don’t know what the future holds, but if we hold the line and hold on, we have a chance to forge a better world from the scrap heap of the old one.