“that we are going to win”
Looking back through the archives, I’ve advised celebrating little victories again and again and again and again. Just not recently.
But over at The New Republic, Perry Bacon interviews Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, on keeping our eyes on the prize, as it were.
Táíwò began garnering attention last fall for saying repeatedly, “I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win.”
The point of hyper-violence, Táíwò tells Bacon, is to keep us back on our heels and “to keep us from realizing how much power we have to resist.”
But why this phrase and not “we are winning,” asks Bacon:
Táíwò: Yeah, I think that phrasing is important because one of the things that I alluded to when I first explained why I use that phrase is: what I’m not trying to do is look at these heinous murders, look at this mass campaign of ethnic cleansing, and say nothing bad is happening or “this is what victory looks like.”
That is absolutely not the impression that I’m trying to give. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Why I’m saying this is because things look so dire. And the ability of federal forces to concentrate on slivers of the country and generate these spectacles of hyper-violence is part and parcel of their political strategy to make it look like they have power that they don’t, in fact, have.
Donald Trump is a creature of reality TV. He’s about creating spectacle. Of course, he’s choosing cities he targets not only for maximum media coverage, but also for political payback. The strategy cannot work everywhere, Táíwò believes:
This is a massive country. They’re facing massive resistance even in the large cities that they target—and that resistance is effective, by the way. They can’t deploy this strategy everywhere, right? So they depend on generating these spectacles, generating a social media environment of fear and capitulation as a force multiplier.
If they can just harass and attack this many children, they think they can convince people that their victory is inevitable. And it is important now, more than ever, to remind people that’s not, in fact, true. The brave people risking their lives on the streets of Minnesota are in fact doing something that is effective; they are in fact doing something that we can and must learn from and are in fact doing something that can work at scale.
The more we pay attention to how they’re resisting, rather than just the evil they’re resisting, the likelier we are to realize that we can win, we must win—and we will.
Not unlike Donald Trump’s attempts as we speak to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the right has spent decades trying to reverse its “world-historical defeat of the politics of segregationism and apartheid.”
And this hysterical, comic-book villainy is their attempt to spectacle and meme and “earned media” their way out of the reality that no one likes what they stand for.
I’d quibble with that last bit, considering that, as I noted earlier, Americans as a people elected Trump not once but twice, the second time as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. Or perhaps a portion of his 2024 national majority know what he stands for and simply don’t care.
The rest is at TNR (subscription req’d), but the video above has it all.