The Democracy Vs. Oligarchy Showdown Is Here
We're in election season. It's both exciting and boring, because the main way to save the world is through lots of industrious organizing, fundraising, campaigning for electoral democracy and stuff like that that requires patience, even stubbornness, determination, perseverance. It asks for a lot of undramatic commitment unfolding over extended periods, a lot of acting without being sure of outcome and often without seeing any outcome at all for a long time, which is maybe another word for faith or acting on faith.
A lot of it looks like the same kind of work that people do for other reasons at desks, or like talking one-on-one to others, which is to say it is not at all like action movies. I've probably said here that action movies are part of the problem, in that one ubermensch singlehandedly saves the world through exciting telegenic violence, and we need more movies like Pride, about the slow building of collective power and solidarity, the slow shifting of worldviews and outcomes. Anyway a lot of winning is unexciting en route, and then comes the hold-your-breath excitement and then the joy and despair of outcomes – at the end of that long, slow slog. I'm so proud of all the people and organizations working hard to protect elections and turn out the vote.
Lately I've been thinking about the astonishing thing that happened on January 5, 2021. It got swept away by the news of January 6, 2021, but on the evening of the 5th, through the miracle of good organizing led in no small part by electioneering genius Stacey Abrams, Georgia elected two Democratic senators for the first time in forever, and great senators at that, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock.
One thing that still staggers me is: the undramatic slow painstaking action of getting voters to the polls had real consequences on January 5; it achieved its goal. And on January 6, all that mayhem and machismo of the attack on the capitol and the Constitution caused a lot of damage and harm and even trauma, but it didn't change the outcome of the election the way Georgia's GOTV did. The patient swarms of door-knockers succeeded where the furious mob of window-smashers failed. The action movies were wrong, but I suspect they had everything to do with the assumptions of the mob that stormed Congress to steal an election.
And those two Georgia senators gave the Democrats that thin majority in Congress that made bills like the Inflation Reduction Act possible; democracy was very good for the climate (and while Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin were the noxious senators who had to be cajoled and pressured into supporting the IRA, without Warnock and Ossoff in that eleventh-hour victory there would have been no possibility of passing bills like that). In the current election it looks very likely we'll gain not just a majority in the house but win back the senate, which will do a lot to rein in the lawlessness of the last two years. I dearly hope that Congress takes back the power of the purse. The Trump Administration has been illegally withhold and misallocating funds whose uses should be, says the Constitution, determined by Congress. These will be crucial years because we are in a global and national battle between oligarchy and democracy.
Here in Japan I felt sad and a little guilty I was missing No Kings, the nationwide and beyond demonstrations organized by Indivisible and others as a pro-democracy/get-out-the-vote action this Saturday. Then I realized I could organize the friends I'm traveling with here to do one, and with the help of artist Sydney Cooper, who painted the letters, we might have done the first No Kings demonstration of all, given that Japan is so far ahead of the USA when it comes to time zones. I sent out the photos taken by Flint Sparks and they got around a little.
Later I saw that Meta, the parent company of Facebook had blocked the Indivisible Instagram account on the morning of the 17th,. A staffer at Indivisible wrote, "At approximately 1:30 PM ET the main Instagram account for the No Kings coalition was frozen and taken completely offline. Our administrators, who use the account to share information, amplify events, and celebrate the strength of this movement of millions, were suddenly without access to one of our most vital communication tools during a moment of peak participation and public attention." There are many reasons to think it's other than accidental or technical.
One reason is that Meta is said to have meddled in the Brazilian election between the progressive current president Lula and the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right former president of Brazil currently in jail for staging a coup attempt. Reuters reported, "Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that the Instagram accounts of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were hindered by restrictions during the country's election, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday, citing messages it reviewed.The messages also acknowledged the platform recommended the profile of challenger Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his WhatsApp channel, according to the report."
In 2019, the New York Times reported in the wake of Jair Bolsonaro's , "Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine. New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil. A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life."
It's worth remembering that Bolsonaro senior, a relative unknown, rose to prominence and then the presidency because Google's Youtube algorithm prioritizes extremist content, reportedly because that's what keeps people engaged. So Youtube promoted Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro became president and immediately began to lay waste to the Amazon rainforest and to the rights and lives of the indigenous people who live there. This is the world big tech will build if we let it. We must not let it.
Why did so many thousands of acres of the Amazon, vital for the whole world, get destroyed? some of the blame can be laid at the foot of Alphabet, Google and Youtube's parent company. Incidentally Google cofounder and centibillionaire Sergey Brin has spent more than a hundred million dollars fighting the billionaire tax, Proposition 40, on the California ballot, which both proves that billionaires can well afford to pay it and that it's worth voting for by the rest of us. Billionaires also put two misleading propositions, 41 and 42, on the California ballot.
But also just as democracy gave us Warnock and Ossoff, who were instrumental in passing climate legislation, so anti-democracy was and is devastating for the climate and there's a whole realm to unpack there, starting with the fact that that surveys show most people on earth want climate legislation (but the oligarchs mostly want fossil fuel profits, rockets, and data centers, plus private islands to avoid the fate they're plotting for the rest of us).
Meanwhile it turns out that there's an organization that put $158 million into far-right senatorial candidate Ken Paxton's campaign and also received $158 million from Elon Musk, according to various sources, meaning that in a country where individual contributions are supposed to be limited to a few thousand dollars, the post-Citizens United loopholes, dodges, black holes, whatever you want to call them let oligarchs like Musk dump money at a whole different scale. Happily the huge amount Musk put into getting a right-wing judge elected in Wisconsin last year, including bribes to voters, netted him nothing; the progressive won.
But Musk has been using Twitter to promote right-wing causes, including white supremacy and anti-immigration positions (he's creditedTK with helping spur a violent anti-immigrant riot in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and is actively trying to influence UK politics too). His purchase of Twitter is sometimes seen as a feckless financial move, because it's lost a lot of advertisers, users, and value; sometimes seen as a canny political move because it's given him huge political influence, including in the US's 2024 election. In other words we have a money problem that is also an oligarchy problem that is an anti-democracy problem. Zuckerberg: Facebook; Musk: Twitter/X; Bezos: the Washington Post; David Ellison and his daddy: TikTok, the Warner-Paramount-CBS-CNN galaxy.
We're deciding now if and how to push back on the oligarchs who'd like to replace democracy, what Lincoln called a system "of the people, by the people, for the people," with one of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs. They're bad for everything, starting with themselves as they become hideous distortions of humanity or maybe sterling examples of inhumanity, and (with rare exceptions) absolutely monstrous when it comes to the climate, the big everything within which all known life exists.
p.s. The Guardian is producing an election newsletter you can sign up for here:
https://www.theguardian.com/hwwrs
and let me remind you that the Guardian has no paywall and is based in the UK, belongs to a trust, and is neither run by nor for the oligarchy but has a nice history (since 1821) of challenging elites, mostly through fearless reporting. (I have a piece about resistance to big tech in the first issue.)
