Democracy requires underlying values and commitments

Thomas Zimmer yesterday:

"One prominent voice in the camp of those who opposed what they diagnosed as liberal or leftwing “alarmism” has been Shadi Hamid: After the 2022 midterm elections, he successfully leveraged his reflexive anti-“alarmism” into a position as a columnist and a member of the Editorial Board at the Washington Post. Hamid declared that liberals should finally stop indulging the “great moral panic” of pretending that democracy was under assault from the MAGA Right. He offered what he called “democratic minimalism” as an alternative framework. “Democracy,” Hamid argued, “is a mechanism for regulating conflict through elections. It requires no commitment to specific substantive ends.” It should therefore be “de-coupled from the liberal and progressive outcomes that liberals and progressives think it should produce,” and instead conceptualized as “a system and means of governing and rotating power with no prejudice to substantive ideological outcomes.”

In essence, Hamid demanded we regard democracy as just a set of procedures, not as something that entails any substantive commitments. In practical terms, this would reduce democracy to, first and foremost, elections – and since there are, in this understanding, by definition no bad outcomes resulting from democratic procedures, any election result would therefore also have to be considered good from a democratic point of view. Put differently, if Americans make Trump president via an election or Germans put the AfD in charge of a state government, then that is not only something all (small-d) democrats need to accept, but they ought to consider it a normatively positive democratic outcome."

However, he says, democracy involves underlying values, not just a procedure that looks like you're taking a vote. (bolding mine)

"Democracy does not just mean elections. In today’s widely accepted parlance, this means a system of equality before the law, in which all citizens have a right to participate in the political process as equals; a system playing by majoritarian principles, in which all sides clearly renounce violence and agree to respecting the rules as laid out in the constitution; a pluralistic system seeking negotiation and compromise between differing interests in which the status of the individual is not determined by what they look like, what they identify as, who they pray to, who their parents were, or how much wealth they have accumulated. An election outcome that threatens that system – because it empowers forces that are explicitly vowing to undermine it, that are at war with the very idea of a pluralistic society of equals and instead committed to a vision of a hierarchical ethnostate – is therefore very much not good for democracy. Can we please refuse to play willfully naïve?"

— Thomas Zimmer, Warnings and Lessons from the Struggle Against Trumpism, Democracy Americana, September 5, 2026

Valuing, sorting, stopping, taking

Book description of The Long Heat by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton:

"The world is crossing the 1.5°C global warming limit, perhaps exceeding 2°C soon after. What is to be done when these boundaries, set by the Paris Agreement, have been passed? In the overshoot era, schemes proliferate for muscular adaptation or for new technologies to turn the heat down at a later date by removing CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. Such technologies are by no means safe; they come with immense risks and provide an excuse for those who would prefer to avoid limiting emissions in the present. But do they also hold out some potential? Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to once it is a fact? Or will any such roundabout measures simply make things worse?"

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"We are in a state of proleptic mourning for the planet," Kyla Wazana Tompkins wrote. Her book is Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. I read it last year.

She says in Chapter 4:

"The photography that caught me posed natural objects in illuminated white light and made deities of them. It preserved them in time and against time forever. And I felt intuitively that this could only be about the deep feeling lying underneath and between us all, that our ecologies were in peril and the reality of that was something that could not yet be believed. ... I think that, on the one hand, the West's unconscious is preparing itself for a time when there may not be anything left and all we have is pictures of what those things were. ... But at the same time, because capitalism, that vampire machine, is always ahead of us ... [it's] a way of making sure that what we crave, because and before it is going to disappear, has even more of an elevated exchange value."
Chapter 4, "Rot." p. 134.

Tompkins mentions Sylvia Wynter's essay "Rethinking 'Aesthetics'," which describes aesthetics as an instruction for perceiving people and objects — especially in a context of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism — and thus how to classify people and what people produce. Structurally, people often withdraw aesthetics from the spaces where others will be left to wither or actively exterminated.

"And I, like many of us following behind the steps of the Black radical tradition — and here I am learning from Cedric Robinson, Rod Ferguson, Grace Hong, Eric Williams, and Sylvia Wynter — see capitalism as fundamentally intertwined with the sorting of humans, matter, objects, spaces, language, and nonhuman species into the social and animacy hierarchies and cross-species assemblages from which, in Neel Ahuja's terms, the idea of the human would be abstracted. ... I also want to be attentive to the idea that the taxonomizing of humans ... are not outside this history [of how Western social values are organized] but are in fact central to it — as the colonial history of science shows us."
Chapter 4, "Rot." p. 132.

Valuing, sorting...

I saved those passages a year ago, and I remember them today, reading Sarah Kendzior's new essay ("The Shutdown"). She's writing from Missouri during the longest full federal government shutdown ever.

"I’m old enough to remember seasons. The way colorful leaves crunched under my feet: the satisfying sound of the reliable march of time. Autumn leaves scattered like crumpled drafts of a chapter near completion. They were absorbed into the soil, and in a few months’ time, earth’s story would begin anew.

Green leaves on the ground are empty pages. They did not get the chance to dazzle and die. They were shut down, like Congress.

I look at the leaves and resent the stolen season: resent it like my generation’s stolen social security and stolen retirement and litany of impending thefts. Stolen country, stolen time. The taking tree.

I look at the leaves and wonder what could have been. I don’t wonder that about Congress. The answer is nothing. When you decide to be nothing, to do nothing, to change nothing, you become nothing. You take everything and you are nothing.

Congress takes bribes, they take vacations, they take offense — they take everything but the heat. They save that for us, so it can scramble our seasons and kill our trees. The heat makes leaves fall too early and ignites fear for our children’s future: This is as much as you will see, this is as far as you will go."

Stopping, taking...

Time as a 'living field'

Ixchel Lunar wites in The Clock Is Cracking. Your confusion makes sense. (Dec 14, 2025):

"I keep coming back to modernity and how it taught us to experience time as a straight line instead of a living field. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures) names this so clearly. She talks about modernity as a project that fractures our relationship with time, land, ancestors, and continuity. A project that keeps people in a state of permanent insufficiency. Always behind. Always catching up. Always oriented toward a future that never quite arrives."

I feel that in my body when planning starts to feel impossible. When even imagining a few months ahead carries a subtle sense of failure, as if whatever I choose will already be wrong somehow. Too late somehow.

In that framework, colonial time stops being something you belong to. It becomes something you manage. Something you race. Something you lose.

That’s why, when the official story insists everything is stable while lived experience says otherwise, the rupture doesn’t show up first in data. It quietly shows up in your senses, registering as something else, in physical tension and sleep disturbance. Or that constant low-level alertness people carry. That split does real harm over time.

It erodes trust in the perception of what our bodies are experiencing. Frantz Fanon wrote about this under colonial rule. He traced how domination works by destabilizing perception, training people to doubt what they see, feel, and know. That doubt doesn’t stay external. It moves inward. People start second-guessing their own reality. Their own timing. Their own sense of what’s happening.

I feel like a lot of people are living inside that fracture right now. The training never ended. It scaled. It normalized. It got called resilience."

There's a part that reminds me of the novel I wrote, Most Famous Short Film of All Time. It reminds me of what I was trying to say about "the moment" or "the event" when everything becomes revealed and the character has to change his life.

"I think this is part of what makes this moment so disorienting for a lot of white and otherwise privileged people. There’s a sense of shock. Of betrayal. Like the ground rules changed without warning. Like time stopped behaving the way it was supposed to. And I feel like what’s actually happening is that the protections that once made colonial time feel abstract are thinning.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira talks about this as the loss of innocence that modernity depends on. The moment when the stories of progress, control, and inevitability stop working in the body. She’s clear that this is not shared suffering. It’s initiation without preparation. A reckoning with limits that other people were never allowed to forget."

Developing mutual aid: What do we want? What do we need? What new things can we perceive?

"We must reconsider what it is that we want and what it is that we need. Our perception must shift. Our value is not tied to our careers or our earnings. It is intrinsic to our very being. That feeling we carry, that inner-critic that tells us we aren’t good enough or we aren’t successful enough, that we’ll feel whole if only we get that raise, that promotion, that financial success, is the voice of abusive capitalism driving us to work harder, work more, to sacrifice more and more of ourselves. We must set aside our culture of self-service and band together with our neighbors and friends and families and create the kind of mutual aid that will weather whatever is to come and craft the framework that will deliver a better future beyond this abominable system."
The Game They Make Us Play: Capitalism as a Ticking Time-Bomb We're standing at the end of a disastrous cycle that has played out time and time again. Jared Yates Sexton, Dispatches From a Collapsing State, Nov 26, 2025

Asking different questions

"Richard Rohr, an American Franciscan priest who has written eloquently about consciousness in the modern world, wrote in the late-1990s about the idea of a "critical alternate consciousness" that emerges when power structures become stale or when political and cultural norms are perceived as overbearing – intolerable, even. The zoomers might call this a "vibe shift."

"Once we have an establishment, we will eventually have a dis-establishment," said Rohr, a longtime advocate for orthopraxy, or the belief that lifestyle and practice are more important than mere verbal orthodoxy. "When some have all the power, those who don't have power ask very different questions and the pendulum swings back again – eventually. That has been the story of most of history and the sequencing of most revolutions."

— Denny Carter, This Vibe Shift Is Not Happening By Accident: A critical alternate consciousness is manifesting in myriad ways. It's a hopeful development in a hopeless time. Bad Faith Times, May 12, 2025

A book on Panama Canal history

Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal by Marixa Lasso is about the legacies of a U.S. view of the world “in terms of tropicality, Western Civilization, and Progressive Era ideas of social improvement.”

She summarizes:

“Global trade and global labor had been at the center of Panama’s economy since the sixteenth century. Spanish ships and galleons brought European merchandise and Andean silver to its ports, and African slaves transported them across the isthmus. In the 1850s, American capital and West Indian and Chinese labor built the first transcontinental railroad in the Americas, and Panama’s ports were serviced by steamships, railroad, and telegraph lines — the latest in nineteenth-century transport technology.”

The opening sentences of the book:

“My earliest memories of the Zone are as a child looking out the window of my father’s car. It was the 1970s, and the Zone — a ten-mile strip of land, five miles on either side of the canal — belonged to the United States, which had acquired it through the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903. The treaty gave the United States the right to build and control the canal and to rule over the Zone as if it were a sovereign. Running down the middle of the Republic of Panama, the Zone bordered Panama City and divided the country in two…”

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Yesterday I wrote: A Few Drops of Context: On Snatching the Panama Canal: And why Trump is talking about trans people too. It's a 6-min read on Medium.

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See this video (1:23): ‘Gross ignorance’: Panamanians react to Trump’s threats to retake canal

On Christmas Day, Trump announced Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera as his pick for U.S. ambassador to Panama.

Rosa Luxemburg on revolution

"the work of Rosa Luxemburg [1871–1919], which theorizes, among other things, the alchemical process which transforms local disruptions into a revolutionary crisis" — Aparna Gopalan, news editor for Jewish Currents, Sept 20, 2024

In Kate Evans's book, Red Rosa, Gopalan says,

"We see Rosa growing up as a Jewish, disabled girl in Tsarist Poland, reading Marx as a teenager, and quickly coming to situate her own experiences of discrimination inside a grander narrative of global racial-capitalist exploitation ('I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch . . . I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears'). We see her break gender barriers to study in Zurich; fall in revolutionary love; speak at the Socialist International; publish both propaganda newspapers and a dissertation on Polish industrialization; and eventually, move to Berlin and join the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, whose trajectory she quickly influenced with her writing and speeches."

Aziz Rana on Republicans' constitutional control

Constitutional scholar Aziz Rana talked to The Ink. Rana is author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (2024). You can subscribe to the Ink if you like this stuff — in fact, now's the time.

Rana says there were

"specific dynamics in the mid-20th century. From the New Deal to World War II, through the Cold War and decolonization, that created the conditions for political agreement rather than anything that's there in the text of the Constitution. And now all of that has gone away. I worry that liberals oftentimes invoke that broken set of agreements whenever you see even more brazen acts of misbehavior by either the Court or political actors like Trump. And I just don't know that that's going to work going forward."

That agreement "defined politics in the mid-20th century." It was a time when "there was some degree of center-right, center-left consensus around the terms of the institutions, how folks operated with respect to each other, which types of discretionary misbehavior were out of bounds, and which kinds of discretionary misbehavior would be papered over." But now, it has broken down. We have "nostalgia" for it, but that doesn't help. The breakdown explains why "we're in this moment."

Some liberals appeal to what the Constitution supposedly really says or should mean, at least on a symbolic level if not with any real-world political force that they could leverage to promote their ideas. Although "Constitutional veneration...can provide some constraints," in the long term it may be unhelpful, as it legitimizes the whole system that lets certain people get away with bad behavior.

More specifically:

"The problem, in my view, is that the long-term trajectory of American power and the centrality of the presidential office to the national security state and the national security apparatus have over the long term overwhelmed these proceduralist constraints such that the War Powers Resolution is deeply ineffective.

The courts overwhelmingly ended up deferring to presidential authority. And I'd say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a validation of not just the American Cold War project but specifically the belligerent, aggressive Reaganite approach to the Cold War. That was very closely tied to market fundamentalism, to a kind of belligerent posture towards the world, to unilateralism globally.

And all of this got built into the cultural politics of the country, and made it very, very difficult, in Congress and certainly in the courts, to constrain the presidency. And we saw this dynamic play out again in the War on Terror."

Sure, "use whatever constitutional devices that are available to try to hold Trump accountable," but recognize "why those devices fail time and time again."

With Republicans in control of the Supreme Court,

"the internal disagreements of the right — how much immunity is too much immunity, how much of the administrative state to gut, whether or not to completely get rid of the right to abortion or just to functionally get rid of it by systematically undermining the checks on laws that would constrain reproductive rights — that is the sum total of the legal universe. And that means that the rest of us are effectively now just subject to their internal disagreements."

Democrats and journalists still imagine an "ideological spectrum" that used to exist in the Supreme Court but no longer does. The justices will only agree to hear cases on things they care about ("affirmative action, abortion, Trump's immunity, the nature of the administrative state"), and they'll debate the answers from their own perspectives. Issues that matter to many Americans today — "the carceral state," "a fundamental right to education" — are never going to be taken up by the court.

We need "systematic changes to constitutional structure, including some very fundamental reforms to the structure of the Supreme Court itself." More justices on the court, term limits for them, and better procedures to amend the Constitution.

Rana's book:

2026 addendum

"It does not matter, in practical terms, whether ICE’s actions are legal. In mafia states, legal is a malleable notion. What matters is that they are wrong. What matters is how they can be stopped." Sarah Kendzior, January 15, 2026

Rebecca Latimer Felton speaks on video (1929)

A video interview with Rebecca Ann Felton (née Latimer; 1835–1930), the year before her death. For one day in 1922, at age 87, she served as a U.S. Senator from Georgia, making her the first woman to serve as U.S. Senator and the last former enslaver to do so.

A book about women who legally owned people:

Leni Riefenstahl's 'Olympia - Festival of Nations' (1936)

A video of the 1936 Olympics, which were held in Berlin when Hitler was in power. Leni Riefenstahl made it. It's meant to make Germany look good.

Watch it free on YouTube: 1 hour 55 minutes.

Read about the 1936 Olympics:

What it looks like to interrupt a Nazi rally ('A Night at the Garden')

Marshall Curry's 7-minute documentary short, "A Night at the Garden," is on YouTube.

YouTube has age-restricted it, so you may need to go to YouTube to acknowledge the age-restriction before you can view it.

It shows a Jewish man interrupting a Nazi rally in New York's Madison Square Garden in 1939.

Learn more at anightatthegarden.com

By the way... "Who Paid For Millions of Fascist Pamphlets in the US in 1940?" Nazi Germany did, explained in ‘Prequel’ by Rachel Maddow. It's a 7-minute read on Medium. I've unpaywalled the link for you.

"Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz sought to link Donald Trump's Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City to a pro-Nazi gathering at the arena in 1939, suggesting the former president knows 'exactly what they’re doing there.'" — CNN www.cnn.com/politics/liv... [1/3]

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— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 2:54 PM

Walz is talking about this: tuckerlieberman.medium.com/ten-past-noo... [2/3]

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— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 2:55 PM

Today is a GREAT day to check out Marshall Curry's 7-minute documentary short, "A Night at the Garden," in which a Jewish man interrupts a Nazi rally in New York's Madison Square Garden in 1939. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9gF... Learn more at: www.anightatthegarden.com [3/3]

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— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 2:58 PM

Sartre's review of that rally:

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— L O L G O P (@lolgop.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 6:30 AM

Keep reading

This is all nasty shit but also a pretty clear sign that these people have no moves left. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

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— Drew Magary (@drewmagary.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 4:58 PM

Might be useful to remember that Miller was previously caught in leaked emails urging people to read “The Camp of Saints,” which is basically “The Turner Diaries” for the racist anti-immigrant right. Miller is a certified eugenicist piece of shit & his views are now mainstream Republican politics.

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— Dell Cameron 🦇 (@dell.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 6:18 PM

Miller presence aligns this entire procession with ideals firmly held by what used to be a fringe neo-Nazi element within the GOP. This is a Nazi rally.

— Dell Cameron 🦇 (@dell.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 6:23 PM

It’s just frankly not an exaggeration anymore. People really need to get over it. This is happening. www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-m...

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— Dell Cameron 🦇 (@dell.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 6:35 PM

They are staging a fascist rally in Madison Square Garden. This is not a drill. Do not sit out this election. The result of the election is absolutely consequential and will affect so many lives for generations.

— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 5:47 PM

"It's just this amorphous group of people ... they are indeed the enemy from within" -- Trump is indulging in Infowars-level conspiracism

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 6:56 PM

USA Today headline doesn't reflect how racist this rally is. (Bluesky comment)

Could someone face consequences? (Bluesky comment)

One of the speakers, an apparently white man named David Rem, was arrested 33 years ago for riding a train with a suitcase with 40 pounds of cocaine, to which he pled guilty and for which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He claimed to be Trump's childhood friend; it seems he is not, but that doesn't stop the Trump campaign from lying about the friendship too. See:
The strange history behind Trump's “childhood friend” David Rem is speaking at the MSG rally. But how do they know each other? Marisa Kabas, October 27, 2024

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe Performs Wildly Racist Set At Trump Rally In New York City Hinchcliffe made a series of vile comments about Latinos, Jews and Black people during Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden. Christopher Mathias, HuffPost, Oct 27, 2024

Vivian Jenna Wilson, the daughter Musk considers 'dead' just for being trans, has a few thoughts about that rally he was at.

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— Alex Andreou (@sturdyalex.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 6:30 AM

The best take I've seen on Trump's Nazi rally is that it wasn't intended to win anyone's vote but was an attempt by a candidate who knows he will lose to marshall his base for insurrection and violence. www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump...

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— Bryan Edward Stone (שָׁלוֹם) (@bestonetx.bsky.social) October 28, 2024 at 7:24 AM

NAACP Absolutely Slams Dr. Phil’s ‘Hard Work’ Claim At Trump MSG Rally: The civil rights organization called on the TV personality to “tell the WHOLE story” after his talk of America’s origins. Ben Blanchet, HuffPost, Oct 28, 2024

Authoritarianism Expert Breaks Down Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally: Ruth Ben-Ghiat also exposed the real purpose of one claim that was repeatedly made at the event. Lee Moran, HuffPost, Oct 28, 2024

Take a minute to read this excellent piece by @jamellebouie.net Gift link: That Revolting Rally Was a Sign of Weakness www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/o...

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— Kelly Barnhill (@kellybarnhill.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 8:15 AM

www.jta.org/2024/10/30/u...

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— Ron Kampeas (@kampeas.bsky.social) October 30, 2024 at 8:46 AM

Regarding what was said about Puerto Rico:

This “Island of Garbage” comment isn’t an isolated incident, and it goes beyond simple racism. Trump’s circle inherently does not consider islanders, those living outside the US Mainland, as real people. Anyone from Puerto Rico, Hawaii or US Pacific Island territories has seen this over and over.

— Robert Rath (@robertrath.bsky.social) October 28, 2024 at 9:25 PM

Note that in the very same rally, Tucker Carlson called Kamala Harris “Samoan-Malaysian.” That’s bizarre until you remember that American Samoa is—like Puerto Rico—a US territory. Many on the right fundamentally believe islanders, even in the State of Hawaii, aren’t “real” Americans.

— Robert Rath (@robertrath.bsky.social) October 28, 2024 at 9:31 PM

“Go back”: How Trump’s media allies have dismissed or denigrated “third world country” Puerto Rico www.mediamatters.org/diversity-di...

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— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 8:14 AM

A.R. Moxon:

...a speaker who I suppose we must refer to as a 'comedian' referred to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage."

This was, in the eyes of those who control the platforms of communication, and in the halls of power, and in the minds of many comfortable and privileged people, beyond the pale in a way that none of the other things I listed apparently were. I find it interesting to ponder why. You might think that it was seen as beyond the pale because it was racist, but the entire Trump movement has been drenched in the most blatant racism from its inception. You might think that it was seen as offensive because Puerto Rico is a part of the United States, but everyone who was attacked from that stage represents some part of the United States. I think it was seen as offensive because there are a lot of voting Puerto Rican citizens living in swing states, so this particular instance of racist hate disrupted the one thing the press actually seems to think matters: the horse race of the election. It's not that it was racist or hateful or prefigured violence and death for real people—these sort of things are just business as usual—no, it's that it might actually swing the race, which means it was a gaffe.

All over the place, Republicans and journalists scrambled to walk it back and restore balance to the Force. When a Democrat makes a gaffe, the thing to do is report on it for several weeks in massive fonts. When a Republican makes a gaffe, the thing to do is to find a Democratic gaffe to counter it, and if one can't be procured, to make one up."

— A.R. Moxon, Apology Not Accepted, The Reframe, Nov 3, 2024

See also: Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally Was Even Worse Than You Think Social media posts from Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist, gave a behind-the-scenes look at Trump’s big rally. Christopher Mathias, HuffPost, Oct 30, 2024

Jack Posobiec explicitly says that "Antifa" dates back to the Weimar Republic, explicitly acknowledging that this administration is opposed to those who resisted the arrival of Adolf Hitler in Power.

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— CrimethInc. Ex-Workers' Collective (@crimethinc.com) October 8, 2025 at 3:10 PM

Psst — see this photo on Bluesky, February 2026. A large banner of Trump's face drapes over the outside of the RFK building housing the Department of Justice while masked military police patrol the street.

"Why would the state protect Jews (the default assumption here is “white Jews”) if it doesn’t protect Black people (some of whom are Jews) or working people (some of whom are Jews) or trans people (some of whom are Jews)?

It won’t."

“Give Me the Names of All Your Jews” Is this a prelude to asking for the names of all Black people on campus who could have experienced or witnessed racism in the workplace? Or all women, queers, or trans people? Probably not – that would be woke DEI and critical race theory stuff. Daniel Spector, Portside.org, April 8, 2026

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This, from The Check-In with Danielle Moodie and Jared Yates Sexton, Jun 10, 2026:

Why does someone always have to be at the center?

Today I learned from sahibzada mayed's post on LinkedIn:

"Merely replacing who or what is at the center refuses to uproot the underlying colonial logics of centralization.

As Frederick van Amstel writes in his brilliant article on decolonizing whatever-centered-design:"

"Those who lived their entire lives at the margin, never being seriously considered by the center, are suddenly invited to participate in a central project, to make decisions, and, in some rare cases, benefit from its results. Nothing substantial changes in the spatial practice. When the project ends, the participant returns to the periphery with fewer advantages than those earned by the center. The periphery does not develop, as it still depends on the center."

The idea, as I understand it, having also read some of the comments on LinkedIn: the people at "the center" have power. Power always wants to reproduce and reinforce itself in the hands of the people who currently hold it; it does not genuinely intend to share itself. Sometimes people at the center say let's "center" these other people for a moment in this discussion, but if the people who are briefly centered (i.e., allowed to raise their hands and speak and give useful information) and then sent back to the margins, all that's happened is that knowledge, resources, and work-product have been extracted from them. The power balance hasn't actually changed, even if you call the process "[X]-centered."

What needs to be challenged, mayed argues, are society's "spatial practices" — the idea that someone always has to be at the center. Why can't interactions be decentralized, as "relationships and ecosystems" already function in reality? Arguing with centralized power systems "is unsettling work, and requires disruption." mayed also recommends to us the work of Aníbal Quijano on the "coloniality of power."

You can also see what Sabrina Meherally at Pause and Effect posted recently on LinkedIn on this topic, saying: "this practice has been informed through an Indigenist philosophy."

And see Farzin Farzad on LinkedIn: What's needed is "better governance and regulatory structures that work for all." We have to "change our systems to reflect what the purpose of society is in the first place" and "work for the collective well-being." Diverse hiring is "a modest compromise to provide incremental gains" and tends to backfire by "giving people access to the positions of power to oppress their own." We're stuck in cycles of "progress and reactionary backlash...unless we develop real methods to divest."

And see Puneet Singh Singhal on LinkedIn, posting about Disability Pride Month: We must not merely include people, but value them too. We must understand lived experiences as a source of knowledge.

On backlash:

"One of the nastiest consequences of the success of the backlash is that politicians have been scared by it. Even when taking steps in our support, their enthusiasm will be tempered by the realization that a lot of people really don’t give a damn about LGBTQ+ rights or welfare. So they will seek compromise, and implement half-measures that will extend the life of the backlash even as it weakens. We can see an example of this sort of reaction in the recent proposal of the Biden Education Department regarding transgender athletes in schools, which, while it presents itself as supportive of transgender participation in athletics, in fact provides validation to the idea that it is really okay to discriminate against transgender people if cisgender people really want to and are willing to take a bit of trouble to say so."
— Alyssa Ferguson, "A Meditation on the LGBTQ+ Backlash, a Glimpse of Better Times Ahead," Prism & Pen, May 10, 2023

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If you become a member of Medium, you can read my essays there.

See especially: "Re-Envisioning Environment". It's an 8-minute read on Medium.

On meritocracy and institutions

Four quotes:

"Institutions are formalized mind-sets. These too can be witnessed. To become aware of those sets but see right through them from outside is the most reliable way not to get stuck or burned out by them. We master the rules, but we don’t let them ultimately define us or narrow our field of perception. We encompass the craziness of the situation, so we can be skillful within it or playful when there’s nothing to do but ride through the contradictions. Then we share a sense of the absurd with whoever else is inclined to see it that way. Whoever feels a little lost can find relief in our presence, in our tent, around our desk.
None of this means that we just suspend judgment forever. We observe...but there is action to be taken too. If we are serious in our criticisms of the practices and habits of helping organizations, however, we’ve got to be light, free, and sufficiently above it all to see where we can untangle the knots and bring about change. Everything is always changing anyway. With the perspective of the Witness, we can see just which pressures, applied with the precision of a judo chop, can move the mass."
Ram Dass and Paul Gorman. How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflection on Service. (1985) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. p. 199-200.

“I think that any form or any way in which you’re not productive is disruption. Anything that takes you out of the system where you are producing something — I don’t mean creating, I don’t mean the things that nurture you and serve you and are generative for you — but when you drop out of the system and you are not productive, it will have consequences. But those consequences are part of the imagination of this system that says that we have to be producing and we have to be making something happen in order for us to have value, in order to effectively know who we are.”
Rev. angel Kyodo williams, in a dialogue in “Radical Dharma: Love.” Printed in Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation. Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2016. p. 140.

"Many people, liberal and conservative alike, are deeply offended by critiques of compulsory schooling. Every day we’re told that schools hold the key to equalizing opportunity, that the proper credentials will allow poor and marginalized people to participate fully in society, and that education provides the only legitimate path out of poverty. The question is a difficult one. Are schools social levelers or do they reinforce the class pyramid by tracking and sorting children from a young age? Presumably they do both."
“Unschooling: Trusting our kids to be curious.” Astra Taylor. Originally in n+1. Reprinted in Utne Reader, Nov-Dec 2013, p. 47.

"Your academic degree and job title do a lot to shape your workplace identity. But you don’t let your fancy credentials go to your head and shape your self-identity. Whenever you have a choice in your interactions with coworkers and clients, and with people in your life outside the workplace, you downplay your formal education and your position within the system, recognizing that it would be elitist to imply that such credentials make you even a bit more deserving of respect than other people. When you identify yourself, you don’t adorn your name with titles such as “Dr.,” “PhD,” “Professor” or “Esq.”
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For if your own degree and job title lend validity to your conclusions, then the paper credentials and positions of your establishment-oriented colleagues lend validity to the opposite conclusions. And there are more of them than there are of you."
Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) Kindle Edition.

Who's leading the charge?

Yes, universities have always been elitist. But sometimes the accusation of elitism is made by someone who isn't qualified to make it or who is hypocritical, and is using it to discredit their political enemies while their intent is to gain power for themselves or their friends. Like U.S. Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska.

Bluesky

The issue, Foust continues, is that "this man has spearheaded a historic crackdown on liberty and speech, while demanding the public supply him with a luxurious lifestyle out of reach to his staff, and condemns other people of decadence. It’s foul that The Atlantic would solicit such a man for comment."

Foust provided these sources:

UF spending $300,000 on new pool for Dasburg home where incoming president Ben Sasse will reside. Emma Behrmann, The Gainesville Sun, January 11, 2023
In Florida’s Hot Political Climate, Some Faculty Have Had Enough. Liberal-leaning professors are leaving coveted jobs with tenure. And there are signs that recruiting scholars has become harder. New York Times. December 3, 2023.
University of Florida prohibits professors from testifying. Mike Schneider, Associated Press, October 30, 2021.
Florida students and professors say a new law censors academic freedom. They’re suing to stop it. Mike Schneider. Associated Press. August 15, 2023

Tom Pepinsky on Bluesky: "You have to read this at the same time that you read about our oligarchs' demands that universities focus exclusively on truth, excellence, and meritocracy." He was referring to this article: "Inventing the Perfect College Applicant: For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait." Caitlin Moscatello, NY Mag Intelligencer, January 29, 2024.

2024: In response to Matthew Yglesias's suggestion that Trump is "really smart and impressive" and is "actually playing" everyone around him who believes they're playing him, in other words, that there's some meritocracy playing out in Trump's orbit, Assigned Media says:

"There's a type of midwit liberal elite for whom meritocracy functions as the psychological justification for their entire existence and if you show those people evidence that some people rise to the top without possessing any merit, they reject it as an ego defense. (Bluesky)

Most of us can accept that, whatever our excellent (or terrible!) personal qualities, a lot of luck went into where we ended up.

But for many at the top that is such an unacceptable conclusion that they will believe literally anything that allows them to avoid confronting the fact. (Bluesky)

I think you can also go too far in the direction of fatalism, and conclude that hard work, passion, and a desire to improve is meaningless.

It's not meaningless, it's actually the primary source of meaning. It just doesn't ensure external success." (Bluesky)

2025: If Trump truly wanted meritocracy, then why did he sign a January 20 executive order that "reclassified potentially tens of thousands of 'policy-influencing' workers in the federal civil service from career jobs into roles where they could be replaced at will for political reasons"? Hmmm? (Trump's America Is in a Free Fall—Not a Slippery Slope—to Tyranny: He is instilling fear not just among lawmakers but every sector of society that dares to criticize him or hold him accountable Larry Diamond, The UnPopulist, Feb 20, 2025)

let me say that this is the classic “just asking questions” approach to delegitimizing the achievements of black people. and critically, you don’t even have to be a black person who talks about race. simply being black to these people means you are “obsessed with race.”

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 22, 2025 at 10:07 AM

Bethann Garramon Merkle writes: "For thousands of years, universities were vocational schools that first taught European and Middle Eastern elite men to become clergy (and later lawyers, doctors, etc.)." Then, around the 16th through 18th century, there was nepotistic hiring of poorly paid professors. Universities didn't do research. They were only involved in teaching, and governments decided what could be taught. Then some German philosophers in the mid-18th century, like Kant, got into the idea of "pure knowledge," and scholars began separating out their work into disciplines. Napoleon destroyed Prussian universities, and Prussia rebuilt them in the early 19th century.

Quote:

"By this point the Romantics’ call for research/learning for its own sake, and the expectation for specialized, original research, were driving the bus. In 1810, a new university was established in Berlin, and its function was — uniquely and novelly — to teach men to think critically and seek new knowledge (not “merely” prep for elite careers as was the case in the Enlightenment era and before). This is also when and where the first non-medical doctoral degrees were issued…in philosophy (as we still see for nearly all PhDs today).

There’s plenty more to say about all that. But that sequence then tees us up for the heyday of natural history in Europe, especially the UK. While there was an amateur boom that contributed substantially (e.g., Mary Anning’s fossils, etc.), at some point elite, White men deemed natural history too accessible. Wanting to gatekeep prestige and expertise, they did many things to make science more exclusive. One of these efforts was that they formalized how and where science was presented: in writing, with a supposedly neutral, “objective” tone, presented to exclusive, scientific societies with highly controlled membership. They entrenched the idea that research and methodically uncovered insights could only be valid if they were done and presented dispassionately — and the subtext was that only certain strata of society were capable of this objectivity."

So:

"our book [Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-Based Approach] is meant to help scientists, who themselves were not trained to write (and largely aren’t trained to teach, either!!!), to:

1. build a vocabulary for talking about writing,
2. understand writing instruction and development as incremental and iterative, and
3. acknowledge and support the deeply emotional aspects of becoming a strong writer."

Amid reports of a long term affair with Corey Lewandowski, Noem thanks her husband for accompanying her to her hearing

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— Nikki McCann Ramírez (@nikkimcr.bsky.social) March 3, 2026 at 9:38 AM

Fascist time

On fascists' resistance of modernity, Shane Burley writes in the anti-fascist essay collection Why We Fight:

"Modernity is the center of the neo-fascist project, an identity set forward by Julius Evola's rejection of the 'modern world.' Evola's Traditionalism, building on the work of Rene Cuenon, posited a 'divine truth' in all spiritual paths, not just in their gods, but in their hierarchies and tyrannies. Using the Vedic Cycle of Ages, he argued that we have long slipped from the Golden Age and are now in the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, the time of dark passions and decadence. The modern world had rejected the racial purity, hierarchy, and spiritual transcendence that had existed naturally in previous generations. This modern world needed 'men against time,' as Aryan mystic Savitri Devi called them, to resist this modernity as spiritual warriors. Modernity is defined by its state of decline, a false consciousness obscuring the underlying Tradition that puts things in their place through some type of natural law. Fascism is then a distinctly modern concept, something that can only exist in this age of decadence in an effort to return to a fabled place of purity. Jeffrey Herf terms this 'reactionary modernism' the state of technological advancement, and attempts to return to the past of memory."

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"By supremacy I mean the spiritual alignment that some people matter, and others do not matter...And by fascism I mean a particular expression of supremacy: a popular political movement organized around an authoritarian cult of personality and privatization of the public good, mediated through an open and explicit reverence for violence as a redeeming force, and energized by a supremacist nationalist myth of purification." — A.R. Moxon, "Bully Tactics" (December 10, 2023)

If we perceive time as focused on past and future, we prioritize a power struggle over what can be made obsolete (e.g., "when faced with ideas we disagree with, we either assign them to the past or worry that they will assign our ideas to the past"), but if we perceive time as focused on what's happening right now, we prioritize coexistence. See: Where Have All the “Isms” Gone? or, Why We Don’t We Have Art Movements In The 21st Century, Mary Rose, Mar 6, 2024

Please also read "Why Fascists Target Gender Transition". It's a 3-minute read on Medium.

Will Bunch reminds us in the Philadelphia Inquirer ("Why we can’t allow Trump to ban that other f-word," October 5, 2025):

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

The Columbia University history professor and expert on World War II dictatorship Robert O. Paxson wrote that in his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, back in 2004, or 11 years before the president descended from the escalator at Trump Tower. But the hyperlinks are all from America’s dystopian present.

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A sense of the future:

"...what gets called executive dysfunction is not always a problem of organisation. Sometimes it is a problem of futurity. More precisely, it is what happens when the future stops feeling emotionally inhabitable—when later remains legible in theory but inaccessible in practice, because the self no longer experiences continuity with the life that “planning” presumes.

I am calling that collapse of futurity. Not as a diagnostic term, and not as a replacement for crisis language where crisis language is needed, but as a way of naming a broader autistic temporal condition that often sits underneath the visible failures of planning, budgeting, routine-building, and long-range life management. It is the loss of forwardness itself—the thinning or disappearance of the felt bridge between now and later. The future is not always rejected. Sometimes it is simply no longer reachable in the same way, no longer emotionally inhabited, no longer felt as a place the self can reliably extend into."

— When the Future Won’t Hold: On the Collapse of Futurity and the Quiet Disappearance of Forward: A shift of frame from “executive dysfunction” to a "collapse of futurity," Jaime Hoerricks, Apr 1, 2026

"When Aimé Césaire first described the “imperial boomerang” the three initial examples he used are a gestapo forming at home, prisons filling up, and the state suddenly having a torture apparatus. In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire explains how the West was shocked by Nazism, but how to him and others living in European colonies fascism looked simply like the violence Europe has inflicted on others turned inward."
J. P. Hill, The people of the United States yearn for democracy: Venezuela, Trump, and the Imperial Boomerang. New Means, 04 Jan 2026

"The decades from the outbreak of the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, was an Age of Catastrophe for this society. For forty years it stumbled from one calamity to another. There were times when even intelligent conservatives would not take bets on its survival. * * * While the economy tottered, the institutions of liberal democracy virtually disappeared between 1917 and 1942 from all but a fringe of Europe and parts of North America and Australasia, as fascism and its satellite authoritarian movements and regimes advanced."
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914–1991), London: Abacus, 1994. "The Century: A Bird's Eye View" [an introduction], pp. 6–7.

"Even more obvious than the uncertainties of world economics and world politics was the social and moral crisis, reflecting the post-1950 upheavals in human life, which also found widespread if confused expression in these Crisis Decades. It was a crisis of the beliefs and assumptions on which modern society had been founded since the Modems won their famous battle against the Ancients in the early eighteenth century - of the rationalist and humanist assumptions, shared by liberal capitalism arid communism, and which made possible their brief but decisive alliance against fascism, which rejected them."
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914–1991), London: Abacus, 1994. "The Century: A Bird's Eye View" [an introduction], p. 11.

Gil Durán writes in The Nerd Reich (2026):

"Toni Morrison called fascism 'marketing for power.' Fascism is nakedly aggressive and authoritarian by design, a terrifying spectacle of power for the sake of power, 'recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas.' In addition, it 'is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones — so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears.'"

Law is based on 'judges, well, judging'

In a September 28, 2021 article for Raw Story, Terry H. Schwadron reports:

[Jessica] Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School...explains that [Jonathan] Mitchell, who now runs his own one-man law firm, is dead set against both Roe and the cases governing same-sex rights because "they're based on judges, well, judging."

The same Jonathan Mitchell who is seeking termination of abortion as legally valid argues in his Mississippi abortion case challenge due for hearing in December that women can have no protected right to abortion because it was never written in the Constitution.

The metaethical question implicit here — as always, when discussing Constitutional fundamentalism — is this: Is it relevant that the Constitution itself is based on Madison, well, maddening, and the Founding Fathers, well, foundering? Or, are those human sources infallible or otherwise not to be questioned, and the only human infallibility that matters is judges, well, judging?

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

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Gavel by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Here, Kristi Noem uses the term "activist" as an insult against a judge to explain why she doesn't have to follow the judge's orders.

(While we're here, think about what it means when they call anyone else an activist. It's just a word they use to delegitimize that person and whatever power they may have.

KARL: Did you know about the judge's order when you issued your order for the planes to continue? KRISTI NOEM: This is an activist judge. We comply with all federal orders that are lawful and binding.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 30, 2025 at 11:28 AM

They’re simultaneously arguing that soldiers have to follow all orders from the president, legal or not, but they get to ignore orders from a federal judge if they feel they’re not legal.

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) November 30, 2025 at 12:43 PM

'Surviving Autocracy': A search for new language

Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar said that "autocratic transformation" happens in three stages: attempt, breakthrough, consolidation.

In a new book Surviving Autocracy, Masha Gessen (they/them) says these terms apply to the current American situation. (Gessen was citing a 2019 prepublication manuscript of Magyar's The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes: A Conceptual Framework.) These terms, Gessen says, are better than "using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe." What we are experiencing under Trumpism is not an ordinary political debate within the existing system. A new system is crushing the existing system, and we need new language to describe it.

These ideas, and very much more, in this book:

Masha Gessen. Surviving Autocracy Riverhead, June 2, 2020.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.