Sounds like Orwell
Where does the time go when a neighbor retired from the NIH is telling you about more staff cuts on the way (and the fate of friends) at his agency? So this will be brief.
James Greenberg summarizes the decades-long campaign to destroy iour democracy. He begins:
Democracies don’t collapse in silence. They collapse in stories—told over decades, repeated until they feel like common sense. In the United States, the Far-right didn’t just attack public institutions. They replaced the very idea of the public with a narrative of betrayal.
The Far-right didn’t just defund, deregulate, and dismantle. They redefined legitimacy. What they couldn’t capture, they undermined. What they couldn’t dismantle, they discredited. And they always gave people a story.
And hoo-boy, this sounds like Orwell:
The story they told was simple: the real America—the hard-working, God-fearing, taxpaying heartland—was being stolen. Government no longer served the people, but elites, foreigners, and freeloaders. Public schools indoctrinated. Taxes funded tyranny. Regulation strangled freedom. Elections were rigged. Only a strongman could set things right.
Truth was beside the point. Familiarity gave the story power. For decades, right-wing media had laid the groundwork—portraying public workers as parasites, government as wasteful, and collective programs as theft. What began as neoliberal suspicion of the state became a populist assault on the very idea of the common good. Public discourse turned performative. Trust became weakness. Outrage became truth.
Ignorance is Strength, of course, and they bred it in Petri dishes of right-wing think tanks, talk radio, and Murdoch media.
The capital-L left needs the tell a better story. And as my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio insists, “If you want people to come to your party, you gotta throw a better party.”
Here’s her take on that:
The next piece of advice is to wear your beliefs. Get yourself a “Fabulously Fighting Fascism” t-shirt. One of the things that is most important to the right and to any authoritarian force is to suck our joy, is to suck our uniqueness, is to suck our our being. I say all the time, put up a billboard in the middle of nowhere that shows people across the gender spectrum just having themselves the best possible time, and say “Fabulously fighting fascism.”
You will get so much local media and local attention, even if it’s in the middle of nowhere because it is a saucy message. Show, not tell that you do not agree with this, that you refuse it.
So I think the name of the game is really resistance. refusal, and ridicule.
I don’t have a tee shirt. I’m going kinetic at another of our weekly drive-time sign protests tomorrow. My signs are 3’x1′, Freeway Blogger style, printed in big, black letters meant to be read not just seen. I rotate them overhead so drivers coming from each direction can see each side. Drivers honk, wave, give thumbs-up, and feel a sense that they are not alone. We’re out there having a party they might want to join. Some do. Get out from behind your keyboards some, okay?
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