An Essay for The Fourth of July
Fascism is ascendent in America, racism remains not woven into the cloth of this Country, but its very thread, and with the six “Conservative” justices having done exactly what they were installed to do this past week: to breathlessly gut as many human rights as possible in the window of time available to them, we now find ourselves with a lot less rights on the eve of the Fourth of July.
I wrote a poem just prior to the Fourth in 2020 when we were just at the beginning of quarantine ((https://medium.com/@markedwardgallagher17/4th-aa632c972417) in which I tried to explore the depths of my ambivalence about celebrating this holiday at all, beyond listening to “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? “
or revisiting “Fourth of July” by Aimee Mann and it’s forever sobering line “And when they light up our town. I just think what a waste of gunpowder and sky.”
In my privileged childhood, the Fourth of July might have been considered the end of the Summer by my beloved Scottish Great Uncle, but it was a joyous and introspection free event on my end, highlighted by sweet corn, beach games and fireworks.
That Summer of 2020, coming on the heel of mass protest against police brutality and racial inequality, it felt slightly possible that America might finally start to reckon with itself, even as Covid-19 was raging unchecked. That we might have found ourselves in a place to imagine a better future if we could survive the present plague.
And then the reactionary right made masks and vaccines a political cudgel, ensuring that Covid would continue to mutate all the way up to the present moment, convinced their voters that the far and away mostly peaceful demonstrations for racial justice had been riots, thus necessitating escalated policing, and then on top of that managed to push moderate, mainstream Democrats into panic mode, who then began over correcting on policing, not just by *not* pushing for defunding of the police, but by actually joining the Republicans in pushing for *more* funding of the police.
It seems there is no moment of moral clarity that we as a Country cannot squander, but unfortunately, since this regression, in spite of Trump’s coup failing and the Democrats holding the White House and both the pre-existing legislative branches that were provided for in the Constitution, the Federalist Six have found the opportunity in their majority to make the Judiciary branch a third legislative body, to which they unfortunately hold lifetime appointment.
The fascists among us have made it pretty clear what they want, and now they have an activist Supreme Court in their pocket as well.
So what does this mean? Ariana Debose said it best on The Tonight show when she said this: "I'm Black, I'm Afro-Latina, I'm a woman and I'm queer. My country is at war with me, and that's hard."
When you are one of the open targets of rising fascism you aren’t really given a choice as to whether or not you need to educate yourself on your enemies. The reactionary right has kicked off a multi-pronged “shock and awe” campaign, and it’s not just about the deployment of Proud Boys and Patriot Front fascists as American “brown shirts” or the naked power grab at the Supreme Court, or reactionary preachers who relish in being given permission, in this current cultural moment, to say gay people should be rounded up and shot. It’s a coordinated package deal, but the “intellectual”laundering of Fascist ideas is also required.
When Critical Race Theory became a right wing scapegoat, I assumed that no one involved had ever heard of the late Dr. Derrick Bell. Any mention of “race” has always been contentious in this Country and we white folks take criticism, especially around race, poorly in general. So the fact that it became a National talking point so quickly made sense, insofar as people very much like to have their racial innocence and preexisting societal conceptions validated.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered “rebel without a cause” Christopher Rufo knew exactly what CRT was and correctly gambled that even though it has never been taught below the Graduate level, it would set White conservatives to frothing if they were given cause to imagine that it were.
His Twitter feed has the feel of an eight year old boy thinking out loud, except he’s not asking “Wow! What if we put a Dinosaur on top of a spaceship” but rather, things along the line of “Wow! What if we aggressively foment a moral panic around the lavender menace?”
That is him appealing to the lower-educated masses, and that is him on Tucker Carlson. A provocateur, an alarmist, a mercenary for clicks and donations.
But unlike other provocateurs of his genre, people so brazenly stupid they would be comical if they hadn’t gained political power, like Lauren Boebert, in print this reactionary bigot actually possesses a high level of rhetorical prowess with a certain casuistical bent, and while he is capable of a certain circumspection around being a White Nationalist, he is very not circumspect about wanting to realize a Christo-fascist Authoritarian regime, and profit personally from that regime at the expense of everyone not white, male, straight and Christian in this Country.
A recent Newsweek Op-Ed by a rather less gifted writer, Matt Hammer, had this extraordinary caveat at its end:
This is the current reactionary impulse on brazen display. This is why charges of hypocrisy don’t land on the Conservative Right—they’re not saying *they* shouldn’t have full bodily autonomy, the freedom to live as they see fit, or even the right to get their mistress a late-term abortion so their helpmeet doesn’t blow a gasket—it’s just that we, the other people who actually make up the majority of the Country, just shouldn’t be able to. It’s not just agency, but agency to subjugate. The incel impulse, but totalized.
It’s a rather puerile idea of utopia, but power-hungry bigoted white boys grow up to be power-hungry bigoted white men.
And the mainstream media and social media companies don’t want to acknowledge the clear and present danger of this incipient fascism, because they clearly think they’ll still make money in an authoritarian America and the rise in engagement and clicks and subscriptions during the Trump era doesn’t really present an argument against that stance.
Imagine if Twitter merely took down “Libs of Tik-Tok?” She is the online hate dispatcher who inspired the Patriot Front to plan their failed Pride Parade massacre in Coeur d'Alene and has directed the Proud Boys to terrorize children at Drag Queen story hours. It seems engagement is more important to Twitter than my community’s basic safety, and we weren’t safe to begin with.
So, on the eve of “Independence” Day, Roe v. Wade has been struck down, the power of the EPA to prevent our living in a smog-filled hellscape has been curtailed, and the husband of a Capitol insurrectionist has signaled the rest of the privacy provisions are up for elimination next.
We don’t have much to celebrate, but given that those of us who at least might have been lucky enough to quarantine are right squarely back in the rat race, give yourself the day.
Celebrate the Americans who loved this Country and strove to better it in spite of the odds we now face again. Blast some Aretha Franklin. Eat some corn. Drink some beer if that’s your thing.
And then next week? Get to work. Treat this threat as what it is. I don’t think the Supreme Court majority would have gone so rogue, so fast, if they weren’t even just a little afraid of the majority of the Country not accepting their Judicial overreach without putting up a fight against it. I intend to. Otherwise, a lot of us won’t be around to celebrate with you in the coming years, because in this particular moment in our Nation’s history, inaction is literally deadly.