Why?

Our society is founded on moral failure. The wealthy have bought the government, created their oligarchy, and structured our economic system in order to keep the common people in a constant state of fear—threatening our health, our access to food and clean water, our housing, the education of our children—so that we cannot hope for a better world. To lose hope is to die. Our society is a society of the rich and the dead.

Yet, the dead can dream—dream of a world with security, comfort, and community; of a world where the incentives which divide us are dismantled; of a world without the illiberal influence of wealth and force. Any society in which money can buy power is not a democratic society. We do not live in a democracy.

This precarity which we are made to live under is precisely what gives rise to the fascist movement gripping our country. People correctly fear for their way of life, but they aim this fear at all the wrong people: at immigrants, at LGBT people, at Black people, and so on. It may be the case that Trump falls and the MAGA movement with him, but the conditions which created him and his followers have not been dealt with, and in time we would have to face another would-be dictator, another fascist cult. But we can change that.

If we deal with the precarity which puts people in this fearful position, we can achieve a stable democracy without oligarchs, without monopolies, without overlords and mass surveilance. But to do so we have to get out from under this lie which the powerful have put in our heads: that we need them more than they need us. Around the world and throughout history, societies have functioned via direct democracy; instead, we have been taught that we must choose this candidate or that candidate to represent us, most of whom have no concept of the actual struggles we face in our day-to-day lives. The powerful have structured government so that we are forced to pick from among their ranks, forced to choose a “representative” who in no way actually represents us. We must organize amongst ourselves; we must organize locally; we must not fall into the trap of trying to play the game by their rules but instead act directly: overhaul our education system, reimagine our criminal justice, ensure healthcare and shelter for all, tear down these landlords and technocrats and the monopolies which own every part of our lives, redistribute the riches of the ultra-wealthy to ensure a good for all people in this country. Many of these things are already widely popular, but we lack them only because they are not in the interest of the rich and the powerful.

Right now, the wealthy are simply above the law. They have engaged in mass rape and pedophilia, as seen in the Epstein Case; they have threatened to invade our allies, in Greenland; and they have murdered countless of our own citizens, not to mention their military actions in foreign countries. They are throwing our neighbors in concentration camps. They have committed crimes against humanity at every level, yet continue to insist that everything will change if we have just one good election. It won’t. The Democrats could rule for the next twenty years, and things would not fundamentally change. You would still live in fear of losing your healthcare, your job, your housing. They want to keep you under their thumb.

America is realizing, slowly now and quickly soon, that democracy is not a spirit floating over its institutions like the mandate of heaven but a system maintained (and now dismantled) by force. The government has become so corrupt that it is foolish to believe it can be fixed from within: the congresspeople and senators who get rich off this system would never willingly change the policies that put them in power. Instead, it is the responsibility of us as human beings to come together in common pursuit of justice and dignity in order to create a better world.

How?

How can we achieve this better world? It seems like an impossible task. The oligarchy has the control of the economy, the legal system, and the military—forces that seem undefeatable. Yet, they have been defeated, time and time again, by popular movements across history. We are hardly the first (and we will not be the last) to deal with such a corrupt system.

A coalition of diverse organizations engaging in mass protest and physically impeding the functioning of the corrupted government, demanding the dissolution of these undemocratic systems and holding those in power accountable for their crimes is the necessary path to true freedom—I mean literally standing in the halls of government, stopping their corrupt machine from functioning, literally occupying their offices and demanding the freedom that is our fundamental human right.

We cannot fall for the cheap promises of mega-wealthy, geriatric Democrats. True freedom doesn’t come with one election and disappear with another. It is built into the fabric of society so that it can never be taken away.

It is not enough to simply stand on a sidewalk with a sign. It is not enough to put all our hope foolishly on one election. This is a lie which imagines our problems as the result of individual bad actors rather than as systemic issues. We must demand fundamental change and work together as a community in order to secure it. Clearly, in Minneapolis, we have seen how the minions of the ultra-wealthy cannot stand up against a city working towards collective freedom. Go out and march, enter the halls of your legislature, tell them that the gears of their bloody machine will not turn so long as they continue to destroy the lives of innocent people, continue to rob us of our dignity, continue to fill the pockets of the 1% with the wealth that rightly belongs to everyone.

It is terrifying. I won’t deny it. But any authoritarian society is kept in power by the fear and inaction of the common person. Tyranny reigns when good people do nothing. We have an obligation to one another, to our communities, to our fellow human beings, to do what is right even when it is hard. We wonder how the average German could have allowed the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps to occur, but I’m telling you: we are doing it now. If we do not want history to remember us as cowards, if we want to secure a joyful and free life for our children and all future generations, then we must act, swift and decisive, to seize power from the few and give it to the people.