Backfill: Taking for Granted

A deepish cut on why I do these Trickle-Down Explainers

So Facebook is a desert.

But this popped up in my memories, as Dobbs’ anniversary rolls around, as Red Fern Booksellers hosts Benjamin Teitelbaum talking about his new book War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers in a couple of hours, but I’ll be cleaning toilets then, so I’ll miss it and I won’t even be able to continue reading John Ganz’s just-out When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, which I’ve anticipated for six months, but I did get to listen to Ganz rap with Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell on Know Your Enemy about that whole decade and the sociological twistedness it birthed, so I’m mildly sated.

Anyway, since a lot of what I throw down here can be classified as TDEs—trickle-down explainers, i.e., me trying to pass along stuff I scrounge from far smarter people to the valiant souls who indulge me for reasons best left to them and their therapists—this seemed apt for today…

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From June 25, 2022:

If we agree that fascism is the enemy, or at least a big perennial one, then we need to talk about this.

Lots of folks lay claim to the attitude of "live and let live," but you can't say that about fascists in a democratizing nation. When the law says you can't discriminate (...you can't treat folks as less-than, you must "let live") they think they're oppressed, they hold a grudge, they get resentful, and they start plotting long games to reverse the laws.

Now maybe, before mass media, before social media, before the nationalization of all politics, the fascist impulse remained in its nascent form (i.e., "conservatism") and eventually got over itself in the individual or died of old age.

Because, for the most part, the world moved on. The new norms got mostly assimilated over time. The mass of people adjusted, adapted, got on with their lives, saw that the world didn't end, went on. Folks still obsessed with, oh, Brown v. Board, just started looking like, oh, your racist uncle.

But the folks who run the "conservative" party did some Deep Evil Therapy (I dunno, they probably screamed the n-word into a pillow while a horned Tony Robbins character didn't let them pee) and realized Who They Were Deep Down.

Thanks to some Really Rich racist uncles who happened to own vertically integrated industries and media corporations and political offices, they pooled resources and ideas, declared enough truces to get along to go along, and decided to reverse the natural order: old guys who couldn't get over progress and who got consigned to the racist uncle pile would now be regenerated and re-energized, reproduced and replicated through ceaseless relitigation of the most taken-for-granted advances in the journey of civilization.

And that's the rub. The taken-for-granted part.

See, people who really believe in "live and let live" tend to take shit for granted. They don't hold grudges when folks gain some ground to have marginally better lives. They're usually pretty happy about it. They might get irked in the moment because they have to adapt and use a new pronoun or something, but they get over that after a while and just...go on with their lives. They don’t obsessively collect all the small concessions progress has asked of them since, say, the creation of the income tax, and hot glue them all into some cosplay of personal identity.

But that's precisely what fascism has taught "conservatives" to do, and now they hold Evil Comic Cons at every gathering, large and small.

Let's get really sci-fi here and assume we live through this era. What should we learn from this time to better prevent it from recurring?

Well, stop taking shit for granted.

I know it sucks. Oh, how it sucks! But it's a big part of how we got here. Because taking shit for granted creates complacency.

We score a win. Like Brown v. Board (although there are some issues with that one). Live Loving. Like Roe. Like Lawrence. Like Obergefell. Like the Clean Water Act. Like some politician you like getting elected. So we all celebrate and go on with our lives. Because that's what "live and let live" means, right?

But in the process, we stop watching and fighting. We forget that the other side holds grudges, and the natural order of racist uncles fading away into embarrassing irrelevance has been flipped, and now we've got a massive industry pumping out newly minted racist uncles and aunts and nieces and nephews by the truckload. And this massive industry is constantly downloading software updates to them that teach them to relitigate and de-understand what we have so long taken for granted.

And since we've taken it for granted for so long, our ability to explain and defend the "obvious" and the "self-evident" and the "established precedent" has grown flabby, because "who on earth could possibly disagree...?"

Them. They could. And they do. And will do so all the more.

Because they have their own Highlights For Evil Man-Children shipped to them every month to give them primers on exactly how to do this. Their leaders don't even deny this. They even spell it out brazenly for all the world to see. Shameless because you can't shame a fascist.

Faith in progress and the arc of history bending toward justice is adorable, and it may be justified, but only if it is grounded on a faith in people constantly striving to stay vigilant, to play whack-a-mole against resurgent threats to victories won, to stay capable of articulating why progress is progress and right is right and why there should be no turning back.

Faith in progress absolutely entails demanding that a win be consolidated and institutionalized, bulwarked, shored up. Which is why it's goddamn shameful that in over 50 years, we never codified Roe into law and simply trusted stare decisis and the personal integrity of nine unelecteds to protect the bodily autonomy of over half our population.

Faith in progress means never shying away from a defense of a win, even if that win is "divisive" or "controversial." It was just a few years ago that our local Dems were all huffy that some of us weren't too jazzed about Josh Svaty's pro-choice bona fides. It was pretty clear Josh didn't want to talk about the issue much. That's the problem.

One side has been ceaselessly talking about how our "wins" are horrible, and there's nobody ceaselessly taking the other side. That cedes the field and lets ignorance and lies run unimpeded. Let that happen for 4-5 decades, and eventually the other side scores a reversal.

Remember all those years in the '80s and '90s when you just avoided abortion discussions? Those were probably really good years to actually have those discussions because the weaponization of ignorant grievance hadn't been completed yet, and it was maybe still possible to reason with people. Maybe just plant a seed. Back then, the time investment was probably worth it a lot of the time. But it was considered "tacky."

A lot of that "tacky" was just folks who'd taken it for granted so much that they'd really lost their skills at thinking through why bodily autonomy was a good thing to have, so it's Bender getting a reality check from Andrew in The Breakfast Club...

Bender: I don't wanna get into this with you man.

Andrew: Why not?

Bender: Cause I'd kill you. It's real simple, I'd kill you and your fucking parents would sue me and it'd be a big mess and I don't care enough about you to bother.

Andrew: Chickenshit.

Andrew was right. A lot of us were chickenshit, and we sensed it, but because we had a big old SCOTUS precedent on our side, we could just blow off the blustery right-wing whackos and ignore their decades of swinging for the fences. I mean, what were they gonna do?

They were gonna hold grudges and keep throwing money at gaining power.

And our institutions were chickenshit, too, not just the biggies like the national Dems who fundraised off perpetually-imperiled Roe for 50 years without codifying, not just the influence groups who preserve access without applying actual pressure. We see it in lowly institutions like schools.

What do I mean? Well, Roe was 15 years enshrined by the time I was a high school senior, and I can recall learning absolutely zilch about the ideas or ethics behind that decision in class. The best chance I had was in debate class, but only if the topic had leaned that way, and this was prior to the sorts of arguments that would have allowed it to. So I was just as much a take-it-for-granted well-educated kid as anybody.

Why didn't schools talk about Roe? Because it was "controversial." No, sorry. It was a SCOTUS decision almost as old as we were. It directly impacted our lives, at least potentially. It had inherent interest draw. But it might trigger the parents. It might ruffle feathers. It might get teachers in trouble.

I'm sorry, if public institutions cannot—or more realistically do not—discuss and delve into the hows, whys, implications, and ramifications of something like Roe...or Obergefell...or Lawrence...or Miranda...or any of the stuff that we take for granted, then we end up with teaching both sides of the Holocaust or banning some figment called CRT in K-12 such that we can't even talk about what's actually happened in US history.

So yeah, it sucks having to explain things. It sucks having to explain why wrong things are wrong. But if we don't do it when progress actually happens; if we don't do it promptly, thoroughly, critically, completely, honestly; if we shy away from it because we don't want to seem like we're rubbing people's noses in it; if we're afraid of stirring up trouble...well, we are guaranteed to fail to build a foundation for future consensus that progress is progress, that old Racist Uncles really should be ignored and relegated to the attic like nature intended, and we'll have to relitigate everything as we lose what we gained.

Fascism is astonishingly easy to cultivate if you don't weed that shit out. As sucky as it is, you take a break and unplug? It comes back and takes over.