Pirate energy
Rachel Maddow gave an impassioned speech after the election last week. This is what I needed to hear and what many of use need to hear, internalize and act on. Let's go, pirate energy!
"If you are an American citizen who does not want to ash can the American system of government, who doesn't want a strongman, authoritarian system where the whole government is one guy and everything else just exists to serve him—if that is not the kind of country that you want—then yesterday's election means you have more to do for your country than you have ever done before.
Because now is when the rubber really hits the road, right? We don’t just flip a switch, and the American system of government is gone. Democracy is gone. It doesn’t work like that. I mean, not to be boring here for a second, but just getting very real.
We are now just another one in the list of countries that has decided to, you know, hey, what the heck, let’s try the strongman thing. Let’s let democracy go. Let’s put in an all-powerful guy instead and see how it goes. There are many more countries in the world governed by that kind of a system than there are governed by ours.
We are the only 248-year-old, multiracial, pluralistic democracy in the world. And shall we keep it? A lot of our fellow Americans say we shouldn’t. Now we know. Now we know for sure. But a lot of Americans, tens of millions of Americans, say we should keep that system—which means it’s time to fight for it.
And yes, Americans did fight for it by working on this election, by trying to get the candidate elected who was both the Democrat and the small-d democrat. She didn’t win. The strongman candidate won instead. But now history doesn’t end. Time doesn’t stop. Now, we have the benefit of knowing, you know, how this has gone in every other country that has been through a democracy-to-authoritarian transition. And sadly, there are a lot of them. We have the benefit of seeing what’s happened in those other countries though. And what we know is that the more ground the authoritarian takes, the harder it is to ever get that ground back.
And so the first order of business is to stop them from taking any uncontested ground, right from the outset when it comes to what our system of government is and what our democracy is, right? We know from other countries' experiences that, quickly—I mean, now, in the next few weeks, if not the next few days—they are going to start pushing to see how far the country is going to let them go without pushback, without protest. And part of this is because it’s just psychologically advantageous for them to do this now, right?
They’re counting on the half of the country that voted against them, the half of the country that doesn’t want to give up our system of government. They’re counting on all those tens of millions of Americans to be despondent, to feel powerless, to check out—which, of course, would mean letting them do what they want, letting them run the table.
What they really don’t want is for the half of the country that voted against them, the half of the country that wants to keep our democracy. What they really don’t want is for those tens of millions of Americans to wake up tomorrow feeling scrappy as hell.
Feeling sure, regretful about the election outcome, but also, frankly, freed up from having to spend all of our time working on the election. So now we can work full time on being frickin’ pirates, on being a thorn in the side of anyone who now intends to try to turn this country into some tin-pot tyranny. What they want least of all is to realize that half the country went to bed sad tonight but then woke up tomorrow fired up with a new sense of purpose, knowing that apparently this is what we’re on this earth to do as American citizens in this generation.
Because history did not just end. Time did not just stop. We just got marching orders from the universe and the Electoral College that, as of today, American citizens who do want to hold on to democracy, we know exactly what we’re going to be spending the next days and weeks, and likely years, of our lives working on.
And the strategic first moves come into focus quickly when you think about what other countries have shown us about how hard it is to regain democratic ground once an authoritarian leader has taken that ground. And the work has to be done now. The work that has to be done now—it has to happen in sort of every aspect, every corner of our society.
The U.S. military needs to give the American people binding assurances that they will not deploy U.S. military force against the civilian population in this country. They can give those assurances, and now they should.
The free press needs to give the people of this country assurances that they will not become state TV, that they will stand and fight together. They will put aside rivalries and petty professional differences. They will stand and fight together as the free press, as the fourth estate, as an institution that is a pillar of our democracy as these guys on the other side inevitably start picking off individual journalists, individual publishers, individual news organizations to try ultimately to turn us all into some American-accented version of RT.
If the Democratic Party takes the House, expect Article I of the Constitution to come under attack—by which I mean, expect efforts to hollow out the power of Congress, to make Congress a just-for-show institution, right? There’s a reason actions of the Russian Duma never make news, right?
Expect efforts to attack Article I, to make it a just-for-show institution that has had its real powers taken over by the executive, by the dear leader. We are going to need a plan and some steel spine inserts among elected officials in Washington to head that off. We’re going to need the whole country to recognize that risk in advance, to call it what it is when they try it, and to actively resist it.
Depending on whether the courts can provide a check on this administration, expect Article III of the Constitution to come under attack as well. It is already a fetish and a laugh line on the right to brag about how court orders really mean nothing and physical force and violence is what ultimately really decides what’s allowed. Well, we have to decide if that laugh line from them is going to become our reality or whether we’re going to resist that.
We need a plan and some steel spine inserts among members of the judiciary to head that off. We’re going to need the whole country to recognize that risk in advance. We’re going to need every lawyer in the country to recognize it as their calling to fight it. We’re going to need to call it what it is when it inevitably happens. And we’re going to have to actively resist it.
And then there’s civil society. Is there a more boring term in the world that doesn’t include the word "committee" or "budget"? No, there isn’t. Civil society, though, is kind of where the rest of us are at, right? Civil society is one of the things that I think of as soft food for authoritarians. They often don’t even have to bite that hard to crush it. All the organizations, membership groups, advocacy groups, professional associations, every voluntary group of every kind in the country, everything in organized American life and culture that is not business and not the government either—that is civil society.
And authoritarians need to crush that because it’s not about them. Strongman leaders have a tendency to become not just leaders of the government, not just dictators, but totalitarians because they can’t have anything going on in the country that isn’t about them or for them. And a strong civil society, therefore, must be crushed, right? If you have a strong civil society, that gives people breathing room to think for themselves, to organize in their own interest, to speak with the power of more than just one person.
We need assurances from civil society leaders today that they’re not going anywhere and that they will fight for our democracy too.
And frankly, it’s not just the leaders. We all need to participate in more civil society things than we have before to make sure that we are taking up space that otherwise they’re going to try to take for the government and the dear leader. And what I mean by this in short is: join something. It doesn’t really matter what it is. But you want right now to be connected to other Americans and not isolated on your own.
So, deep breaths, hydrate, maybe time to get back in shape. Do you have any burned bridges in your past? Un-burn them. Reconnect with people, whether it’s your family or the people on your block or in your town, your old friends from school, that book club, that Indivisible group maybe. Reconnect or connect for the first time.
Join something, join something.
If this election was about one candidate who stood for the American form of government and another who stood for getting rid of that because America is a garbage can and "I alone can fix it, just give me all the power, and I’ll do it all." If that was the choice in this election, then the aftermath of the American people making the choice they did in this election is not just the end, right? It’s not just, oh, it’s over. It means we’re now entering into a contest.
It will now be an effort on his side to put that into practice, right? To put strongman, authoritarian government into practice. And it will be an effort on the other side, an ongoing, continuing, and now newly urgent effort on the other side to let him know that it’s not going to be easy.
These next few days and weeks, if they really are going to try to dismantle the American form of government, including firing all federal employees, right, including rounding up their enemies, including opening internment camps to hold millions of people, threatening military force against their perceived enemies—if they really are going to try to undermine the American system of government, which is what they’ve made this campaign about, then in the next days and weeks, they are going to be testing to see what they can get away with without pushback.
They are going to do the things they can do easily, and they will have to put off the things that turn out to be hard. So, what’s going to be hard for them? That’s where the American people come in. We do not only work for our country and for our democracy in elections; we work for our country and for our democracy against anyone, anywhere, anytime who seeks to do it harm. And so there’s, there’s a lot to do.
Time doesn’t stop. History doesn’t stop. We have stuff to do. Millions of Americans woke up today to the realization that, although you worked as hard as you could to try to bring about the election outcome you wanted, you did not get the election outcome you wanted. And so now what that means is that there is a whole new raft of stuff to do.
Hope you are feeling scrappy. Hope you are tapping into your inner pirate energy because it is one thing to be a defender of the realm. It is another thing to be in opposition. And opposition can be a lot of things. It can be dangerous. It can also be fun. It would have been nice to win the election. Didn’t. OK. Time to save the country."
Watch the video here:
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