#failureofimagination

There are great days and terrible days in history, days a nation or world changed, that you remember forever. For me that's the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the days of Occupy and BLM, and it's Friday in Minneapolis, when the power of love proved stronger than the power of fear and hate and brutality and strong enough for tens of thousands of people to head out into bitterly cold weather, for businesses around the city to close for the day, for a thousand clergy from many denominations and faiths to show up from around the country, many of them committing civil resistance and being arrested. The passionate commitment it takes to go outside on a day of sub-freezing temperatures while also risking state violence and arrest is important to recognize.

That day stands in opposition to yesterday in much the way January 5, 2021 – when nonviolent organizing won back the senate for the Democrats with the election of Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff – stands in contrast with January 6, 2021, when Trump sent his gangster army to violently disrupt the certification of the election he lost by a landslide. Because yesterday Trump's secret police executed nurse Alex Pretti after he attempted to aid a woman who had been pepper-sprayed and shoved to the ground by some of the faceless soldiers. They pepper-sprayed and shoved him, too, to the ground, and when he was fully subdued shot him in the back repeatedly. (The fact that he had a gun he never drew is immaterial; the videos show that they attacked him before they knew it; they murdered him after they confiscated it.) Then they attempted to murder his reputation as they did with Renee Good's, blaming him, portraying him as an aggressor, calling him a terrorist, with various top administration officials lying on various networks about what had happened and who he was. Minneapolitans responded differently that evening, with candlelit memorials and songs. Veterans Administration intensive care nurse Alex Pretti's name, true nature, and death at 37 will not be forgotten.

The powerful nationwide and beyond opposition to Trump and his authoritarian power grabs has come as a surprise to him and his gang. They believe devoutly in the power of violence and do not comprehend the power of nonviolence. They understand the power that the state has but do not understand the power that civil society has. They understand their own motives--greed, a lust for power, an intolerance of difference--and are baffled or uncomprehending about generosity, the desires for democracy and equality that are about wanting to share rather than hoard power, the tolerance and more than tolerance of difference. Tolerance is such a mediocre word; I recently saw Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi speak about her early days in the house — she entered Congress in 1987 – when she would be told "oh, you tolerate gay people in San Francisco" to which, she says, she would reply, "We don't tolerate them; we take pride in them." On the other hand,"I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength," said the dumbest and most unqualified Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, last February. Some of us take pride in the diversity of our cities and country; some of us care about people who are supposed to be divided from us by category but can be united with us by care.

For many in the Trump regime it seems incomprehensible or a scam of sorts that those not categorically under attack by ICE are so committed to solidarity with their neighbors who are, and thereby to universal human rights, to standing up on principle, and since ICE's murder of Renee Good, will risk their lives to do so. The estimable writer and political analyst Jeff Sharlet reports on BlueSky that he came across "breathless reports on Twitter from Project Veritas & fellow creeps of infiltrating ICE watch signals." Project Veritas is the scammy right-wing outlet that uses deceptively edited gotcha videos to attack progressive organizations. They think they've discovered a conspiracy, Sharlet continues, but "the 'conspiracy' is that many people volunteer, take turns on shifts, and train at nonviolence. [Project Veritas founder and head] James O'Keefe says he's never seen anything so organized as the anti-ICE movement, observers – he seems to think this term is code – everywhere he goes. Who is paying for it??? he demands to know. It's like he can't even imagine people caring for one another."

Apparently can't imagine altruism, solidarity, idealism, care that crosses racial lines, interest that is not narrow self-interest, because that is what is behind the way people are showing up for each other in this crisis. You could argue that racism is a border patrol that says your care, your empathy, your relationships must not cross this line across racial difference, that it must be limited and contained. It's an instruction to shrink your heart, to limit your humanity by dehumanizing most of the rest of humanity and numbing your capacity to care for them. This seems to be bolstered by an inability to understand people who have not done so.

The poet W.H. Auden wrote in a review of the final book in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, "Evil, that is, has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil – hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring – but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom." You can see the attempt to consolidate power in the president, as supported by the conservative six on the Supreme Court, and by the surrender of Congress's powers by the Republican majority, as an attempt to create a one-ring level of power in radical opposition to the checks and balances and ideals of democracy and accountability that have been central to this nation's official ideology, however imperfectly realized.

This is one of our strategic advantages: they routinely fail to comprehend motives that are not selfish, so the idealism, the altruism, the commitment to ideals and principles, that motivates the resistance is seen as a cover-up for the real motives, which helps them cast progressives as criminal or delusional. Empathy is itself an act of imagination, that begins with attention and care: what is it like to be this other being, what are they feeling, what do they need. It arises from and reinforces a sense of non-separation, a sense that we're all in this together, that everyone is your neighbor and no one is a stranger. There is a strong religious admonition to be this way, to see each other this way, in "love thy neighbor" from the Gospel of Mark (which has been inscribed on at least one Minneapolis sign I've seen) or Leviticus's " the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself," in Buddhism's compassion for all beings, in the Islamic commitment to alms for the poor.

That inseparability is echoed by modern science, notably climate science that recognizes we are all beneficiaries of a biosphere shaped by all our actions when it comes to the climate and thereby makes us all responsible for preserving it; as I've often noted, this interconnectedness and responsibility is intolerable to those worship the isolated individual and his infinite freedom and deny this connectedness. (Like tolerance, responsibility is a dismal word; indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer's term reciprocity is a better one, recognizing that if we give, we are giving back to the nature from which we have received so much, including life itself.)

One of the striking developments about the extremism of Trumpian violence, lying, and abuse of power is its recruitment power – but for the opposition. A lot of mild-mannered moderates are now ferociously against ICE, the attack on immigrants, and in some cases the whole Trump Administration. Each attack of a constituency is a recruitment drive – against the administration, both by those in the constituency and those who care about its members, be it women serving in the military, or federal workers trying to do their job ethically, or medical professionals, or scientists, or educators. Bill Kristol, once famously arch-conservative, has himself said, "abolish ICE."

Of course the Epstein files were a bridge too far for many right-wing former Trump supporters and that too is in part about empathy and decency, since those files are about vicious abuse by the most privileged and the institutional corruption and social inequalities that allowed it to go on for so long. It seems more and more that Trumpists live in a bubble they've created among themselves and with the help of online influencers and social media. It's a bubble in which coexistence with difference is intolerable, cruelty is to be admired and snickered about, racism and misogyny likewise smiled upon, and lies the currency of people who scorn the obligation to others, institutions, justice, and the public record that underlies telling the truth. In which a minority matters infinitely and a majority not at all. Sometimes when they speak publicly, they seem clueless that the rest of us see things so differently, or think that it doesn't matter that we loathe them.

They have made a massive gamble, and I believe they are losing that gamble. One part of it is as I have written before about the nature of power itself: that they have most or all of it, because they do not understand the powers of civil society and the power of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation. Another part is about human nature; they seem to assume that most of us are selfish and timid and will not resist once we see their capacity to dominate and do violence, that we do not care about anything much beyond our individual selves, or that we will see them as winners and admire winning so much we'll come on over. Like Sauron they suffer from failure of imagination. The thing they cannot imagine is us.