SELF-AWARENESS IS NOT THE WOKESTERS' STRONG SUIT.

James "Long Emergency" Kunstler notes, "You might have noticed by now that the most hysterical voices crying about 'fascism' are exactly the people who yearn to push everybody else around, tell them what to think, run your life, wreck every institution and relationship in society, and take all your stuff. The Left never notices how all that resembles their notion of what fascism is."

Case in point, Phil Wilson in (where else?) Common Dreams.  "Do members of the educated professional class remain faithful to the corporate Democratic Party, or do they form a new connection with the starving victims of US fascism?"  Strong the urge to wreck is in him.

We have two colliding forces—“end-of-the-world fascism”, or EWF, and mass civil disobedience. Clearly, one will defeat the other. Right now the odds favor EWF—the fascist home team has a superior gerrymandering game; oil industry, tech, and armaments cash piled up to the peak of Mount Everest and beyond; control of the means of incarceration; and a huge project of global concentration camps. The EWF also has control of the federal budget which they have resolutely employed to assemble a Gestapo-like army to terrorize state enemies on a whim and shape the ethnic character of the entire nation to match the paranoid nightmares of President Donald Trump’s MAGA base.

EWF has a fetish for violence, both as a means to terrorize scapegoats and political opponents, and as the cornerstone for theatrical entertainment. The MAGA base has a craving for vicarious blood and guts.

Steve Scalise is still in rehab and Charlie Kirk is dead, but let us enjoy the rant.

The forces of US resistance have historically ebbed and flowed. Movements have been co-opted by seductive schemes. US resistance now drags the half dead corpse of the Democratic Party on our backs. Protesters have a collective mindset burdened with the habits of denial, and a lingering delusion that we live in a nation with a noble history of justice and progress. The protesters also suffer from a nearly unbreakable condition of self-imposed isolation that makes us unaware of the key to victory. The EWF fascist support base is comparatively small compared with the alienated, impoverished masses: 35% of eligible US voters don’t vote, and this includes most poor people who inhabit section eight and public housing, or who double up with family or peers in overcrowded apartments with the omnipresent likelihood of harassment from public bureaucracies and landlords that enforce lease violations. Most protesters have little sense that an ocean of allies exists just beyond the horizon of social stratification. A connection between the educated Democratic Party base and the poorest US citizens would create a cosmic political shift, but we have long been blind to that possibility.

The self-styled revolutionaries vacillate between capturing the Democrats, arguing with its leaders and then voting for its nominees as the lesser evil, or going their own way.  That "cosmic political shift?"  Hasn't the party he'd like to capture long been a coalition of gentry liberals and welfare recipients, with a manifesto that well might push potential voters to that "fascist support base?"

That's not enough for Mr Wilson.

Democratic voters, for example, enjoy a feel good sense of their party’s devotion to social justice issues so long as we do not question the ideals of capitalism. This class undergoes the most intensive brain washing of any—the legacy media, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc. all promote a particular vision of social progress without ever threatening the structures of profit. The manner in which the liberal media curates a popular narrative for the educated class assures that most members of the Democratic Party base lean toward the center.

The Atlantic, for example, will almost never publish pieces that unequivocally condemn US and Israeli militarism, but will happily post piece after piece decrying the gutting of abortion rights. Powerful lobbyists and military contractors have financial interests in shaping military narratives, but the so called pro-life movement is little more than a convenience for opportunistic right-wing politicians. While anti-abortion pregnancy centers may have revenues well over a billion annually, this money pales in comparison with the US trillion dollar plus military spending. If you want to understand the positions promoted for the Democratic Party base, follow the money.

While the ruling class has buried their tentacles deeply into the psychological sediments of Republican and Democratic Party faithful, there is one social class that remains nearly invisible to the ruling class—the “abandoned working class.” The very poor do not generally vote, do not typically organize, nor do they engage in political activism, and their well-being barely registers in the priorities of elected officials. Issues like low-cost childcare, low-income housing, and the nature of the “social safety net” have little resonance in our political dialogue.

That is not to say that the poorest people exist as an island apart from other social classes—people from every social niche lose their toeholds and tumble to the bottom.

That is to say, the tussle between the communist and corporatist wings of the Democrat coalition, which Kevin D. Williamson called the "freakshow party and the pillage party," where right now the pillage faction is working to keep the freakshow faction on board with the continuing fiction that subsidizing health insurance premiums keeps "health care" affordable.  Meanwhile, those journals of opinion are objects of Mr Wilson's scorn and Pajamas Media contributors' mockery.

I ask, "Isn't there an easy splitting the difference: if there are 'good faith arguments' for keeping Democrats from holding power and for keeping Trumpians from holding power, is there not some way of assembling a majority behind the proposition that individual autonomy, rather than government power, matters more?"  There are a number of dimensions of Trumpian populism on which I am willing to dicker, for whatever good that might do.

That doesn't interest Mr Wilson.

Do members of the educated professional class remain faithful to the corporate Democratic Party, or do they form a new connection with the starving victims of US fascism? That is how I believe we should understand the looming end to food assistance—this is an audition for those formerly complacent rank-and-file Democrats to understand their newly apparent historical role. Do the 7 million No Kings Day protesters lock arms with the 42 million victims of US fascist cruelty? Hungry people will be in the streets in a few days; how do those of us who currently have been consigned to be bystanders respond?

No Kings Day was a party, but now the stakes are raised. Do those casual protesters have the inner resolve to take the next steps? When SNAP ends do the No Kings Day protesters see their unique chance to cut ties with corporate puppet masters and align their fate with the abandoned victims of corporatism? We need voices on the left to make this narrative clear.

Undoubtedly, Mr Wilson envisions himself yelling "Hands behind your back there!" rather than hearing it as he steps into a gulag of his making but not his management.