November 7, 2024

Before We Come Together, Acknowledging Broken Trust

With my work since 2021, I have been saying there is a place for Tarot readers (and astrologers, witches, animists, etc.) on the political left.

I have been saying to Tarot readers: you ARE political, and I can help you be more confident in articulating and practicing a politics of liberation in your Tarot sphere of influence, and beyond.

I have been saying to leftists: you are missing out when you exclude and dismiss people because of their mysticism. Let's come together, and take real action together.

I wrote in my book, 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World, that my dream is to see autonomous groups like our Solidarity Tarot group in Baltimore forming everywhere (pg. 66).

I said in multiple interviews that it is never too early to start gathering together and building trust in a group setting, even if you don't yet have a plan for taking political action. There is no quick, emergency shortcut to building trust. But a solid group with strong relationships is well positioned to meet the moment with whatever action is needed.

Trust is key, and it's getting broken all over the place right now.

The left needs the skills that Tarot readers have developed. The white left especially is notoriously bad at interpersonal connection and intuition, relying on a mechanical understanding of history and theory. We can be emotionally insensitive, lecturing and self-centering.

However, just like history, theory, and organizing skills can fall short without spiritual and interpersonal connection and developed intuition, the latter skills also fall short without a political education.

Just caring is not enough. With love, just "talking to your neighbors" is not enough. It is necessary, and a bare minimum starting place, but it is not sufficient. What you will decide to do together depends very much on your politics. Neighborhood associations are more known for their racist profiling than for their collective power to meet people's needs. Liberalism and leftism are fundamentally opposed, but liberals don't see it that way and don't understand why or how they've broken people's trust.

I'm seeing a lot of "let's come together" language lately, and it's hard hearing it from people who have shown themselves to definitively not to be on the side of liberation. Liberals betrayed the left by abandoning Palestine to campaign for Harris, something Black radicals absolutely did not do, as they maintained an anticapitalist and anticolonial stance, drawing on deep historical roots in Black and Palestinian solidarity. It's unfair to generalize and say "Black people" sold out Palestine when it was liberals across the board. Some liberals are also spouting anti-Arab, anti-Latino and anti-immigrant bigotry, misplacing blame on them for Harris's loss.

At the same time, many leftists have resorted to disgusting misogynoir to explain the supposed failure of the Harris campaign, even when they are correct that a Harris presidency would not have helped Black people any more than Obama's did.

The people and systems in power have continually identified solidarity between oppressed people as their greatest threat and have always put enormous resources and effort into ensuring that we fight each other and/or entice one group to sell out to win favor over the other. It's heartbreaking to see people willingly take on the work that COINTELPRO used to need agents to do for them.

I don't trust anyone who says "just vote" without saying anything about their politics, as if voting itself, no matter for who or why, is a moral good. And in a similar way, "seek community" also rings hollow right now. All the time, people do seek others who are like-minded, who feel familiar and look and act like them, and say what they want to hear – and there's nothing inherent to "being together" in that way which necessarily challenges oppressive systems of power. We can characterize right wingers as socially inept hyper individualists all we want, but they do have community and look out for each other and maintain their echo chambers. Liberals and leftists are not immune to the same insularity problems "in community."

To come together, liberals would have to admit that Harris is ideologically opposed to their professed progressive values and that the Democratic Party will never put the needs of working class people above corporate donors or choose to end or even curb Israel's settler colonial violence. They would have to break up with the notion of strengthening the systems that they claim to want to dismantle from within.

Leftists would have to admit that Harris is the smartest and most competent presidential candidate we've ever seen, as is typical of Black women who have to be at least twice as adept as their white counterparts to reach the same positions, and understand that she's very likely laughing at all their reasoning for why she lost, because she's playing chess while they're playing checkers; the goal wasn't to win this election. Neither party wants to be the one in charge and taking the blame, having their name associated with what's coming (in a Nine Year) when the logical consequences of Democratic policies over the years of Covid public health failures and genocide come to fruition. In a game of "not it," to see who can remain untarnished in these coming years of turmoil and deepening economic depression, Democrats definitively won.

It's an Eight/Strength Year, and one of my readings of that card at the start of this year was "losing to win." (The clearly more powerful lion is submitting to the person on the card – but why? We usually credit the person's gentleness but there could be a reading where it's the lion's strategy.) I believe Dems got the outcome they wanted for this election, losing to ensure a longer-term win for the preservation of the Democratic Party, but playing with fire and putting many people's lives at risk to do so by squashing the left and allowing the right to run rampant in order to scare people into staying loyal to the Democratic Party.

It's the exact same strategy that Zionists use, suppressing true antifascists (who fight all forms of supremacist ethno states including Israel) and allowing neo-Nazis to thrive all over the world so that the argument that Jews can only be safe in Israel seems credible. I shared this analysis in my chapter on The World card. Israel relies on fascist movements, and the Democratic Party (our whole 2-party system) does as well. But these right wing movements aren't under their direct control, and can easily get "out of hand." It's dangerous, no matter who is president.

There is a wealth of knowledge available to us from radical organizers, activists, and freedom fighters all over the globe. Many of us who have been studying and practicing radical politics steered clear of the Uncommitted Movement because we are all too familiar with the Democratic Party's strategies to detour grassroots movements into uncritical support for a candidate only to lose to the far right. I presented this exact lesson in my chapter on The Tower, describing how Democrats siphoned off the 2011 protests in Madison, WI in order to try to redirect them into defeating the Tea Party Movement through elections, and lost.

The far left is always pressed into service and submission to the center, while the far right is allowed to let it rip, by both political parties. There is no elected official who represents any form of leftism – they are there to preserve the current system and their careers, even if they "care" and hope to help some people in the process.

Radical left politics is fundamentally different from liberalism and reformism, in theory and in practice. And if you don't have a basic understanding of how leftism differs from liberalism, you will not be able to make politically strategic choices that further our collective liberation based on just vibes and intuition. Discernment develops from experiential and factual knowledge, and conceptual understanding.

I'm not condescending to you to say "read a book," and I'm not trying to sell you MY book, although of course I think it's a very solid jumping off point if you are just beginning your radical political education; that's why I wrote it. In 2020, a whole lot of white people claimed to read a book that enlightened them on racial injustice, and it did absolutely nothing to reduce the overall commitment to white supremacy in this country, as we can see in the results of the 2024 election. Just reading a book isn't going to do it.

I wrote my book partially out of frustration with people going back to brunch after the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020 and the backlash to it, and in some ways it feels like we're in a similar place again that we were then, now. The lessons I have embedded in the book are very pointed ones addressing these exact issues, based on radical traditions developed and led by Black and non-Black POC. It is essential to follow lineages, traditions and principles of resistance rather than choosing an individual to follow and going by whatever they do and say.

That includes me – don't just adopt whatever I tell you without thinking critically and seeing whether it actually aligns with what you believe about how power should be used (your politics). For example, I will always be influenced by the radical writing of Angela Davis, but that doesn't mean I put Angela Davis the real and fallible person on a pedestal and do whatever she does. Of course she has my respect, and at the same time, I used my own judgment when I respectfully disagreed that her endorsement of Harris aligned with her history of Black radicalism or with what many Black radicals today are doing and saying.

By using my own discernment I am taking responsibility for my own choices instead of saying "I follow what Black women tell me to do." Ericka Hart had excellent analysis of this election that was recognizeably squarely in the tradition of Black-Palestinian solidarity AND Black women's reproductive justice (which I associated with the Justice card in my book, and it's at the center for a reason). She may not be as well known as Angela Davis but that doesn't make her views as a radical Black woman any less valid. And it's simply not true, this narrative emerging that Black people in general all supported Harris and white leftists didn't because we're racist. That narrative is another attempt to drown out Black radical voices and split apart Black and Palestinian solidarity in the interest of a white supremacist capitalist ruling class, of which Harris is a part. That's not to say that the display of racism inherent to Trump winning the popular vote isn't very painful! Nobody wants to be lectured while they're grieving. What's really weird is when white people make a big display of grief over something that will affect us the least. I may not succeed but I’m trying to strike a balance, explaining what feels painful to me without either lecturing or over-emoting.

What I'm saying is that platitudes about being "in this together" ring false to those of us who understand what it means to be on the same side politically, and who have experienced so many betrayals and breaches of trust over the last year alone, just in terms of people soft-peddling Zionism and refusing to mask to protect our communities from an ongoing pandemic. It hurts in a very real and personal way.

Please do reach out to people, make connections, find community, and organize – but also please get clarity on your politics so that you can be honest rather than just adopting radical language when it's popular, and that way we can all be discerning about who to trust and who to be in community with.