From summer to fall, I had spent the time until this election outside of jails. I am still outside the jail, waiting for whoever gets released, though the weather grows colder. And I will remain here. This is the place to be when the illusions of social progress burn themselves away, just as it is where one should be when the rhetoric of change outstrips its reality. From here, one can find the distance necessary to think without becoming caught up in any party’s vision. Both parties built this hell. The Republicans, through their white supremacist embrace of the need to build the new plantation. The Democrats because they are afraid the Republicans will call them weak on crime. Neither particularly care about the woman sitting her with her family, waiting all day for someone to be released, uncertain if he even will be this week having been told nothing because she speaks Spanish. The Republicans demonize her, the Democrats are too afraid other than to go along with the Republicans—and then they wonder why they cannot count on immigrants to vote blue.
Outside the jail, in all its casual violence, Harris is just another prosecutor. If you have not been inside the jail, that may sound righteous. If you have been there, you know better. The prosecutor is a cop, like the cops who call you a “body” when they pull you from your cell and take you in chains to the judge, who sits on a raised platform, warns you against going to trial, and then offers something that sounds, in context, lenient if you only go along and plead guilty. At the lowest levels, it looks like systematic bribery with community courts raking in small fines in exchange for not risking short stays in prison. With every small fine they simply demand that you affirm their view of you, that yes, you are guilty, whatever the circumstances were, because the danger of defending yourself is too great. This is the court system. You are guilty until proven innocent, no matter the civics class propaganda that claims otherwise. Ninety-plus percent of cases end in guilty pleas. That is the expectation from the judge and the prosecutor, who both increasingly sound the same. The defense attorney is an afterthought. Though Trump is a Mussolini, it is important to remember Harris was an official in this system of violence. Perhaps she has played that role in good liberal conscience making small reforms here and there. But then, what does that mean when this is the set dressing to mass suffering? Here in Georgia, we should know that our jails were once plantations. To this day, the incarcerated labor on them pays nothing – not that pay would change the condition of unfreedom in the fields, the machine shops, or in the towns collecting your garbage while you sleep unknowing of your sanitation worker’s condition. In California, they are used like conscripts in the wars against wildfires.
But now we do not have to deal with banal, liberal evil, which drapes itself in robes of quiet competence and reform in managing irredeemably systematic forms of violence—because Mussolini has won. So, we are in for a season of explicit fascism. Maybe now the Democrats will see their mistake in not offering an alternative other than “anyone but Mussolini” in lecturing their voters who demanded some positive vision instead of considering that actual change — the kind necessary for bold, moral stands — might be appealing. But I doubt that the problem with the Democrats is one that they can fix, both because I suspect they will not be given another chance and because they are a product of a two-party system in which bribery legal and a lack of options strip voters of a meaningful choice. This last fact they came to count on as ensuring that, no matter what they became, how many terrible policies they might support — like closing the border, enabling Israel, selling new oil drilling leases — they could always say that they are not the worst and demand support on that status alone. This permitted an endless rightward track as the party pursued the failing strategy of courting Trump’s base and neglecting their own. The Democrats assumed they would win, ultimately, through demographic inevitability, and failed to see how they had to actually appeal to those constituents, and all the while the likelihood of just such a demographic shift among voters eroded the veneer on the Republicans until they revealed themselves as what they are now. The Republicans are learning more competent authoritarianism. For the two-party system to sustain itself, it would have been necessary years ago to put safeguards in place against today. You cannot count on winning a game by the rules enough times to permanently defeat a cheater. In the end, they will throw the board at you. The board is now in Trump’s hands.
Nostalgia for the Democratic Party is not a meaningful basis on which to build a politics of resistance. I say nostalgia even as the Democrats still exist because their ongoing existence in name belies the fact that the fascists are in power now and they cannot be counted on to give it up electorally. The Democrats, as an electoral party, are necessarily dying. Hopefully, this will give us a moment to view politics through a more nuanced, qualitative lens than the feelings of attachment to a party permitted. Meaningful resistance to fascism, which must go beyond opposition to its totalitarian strong-man aesthetic, needs to be built upon prison abolitionism, including abolishing the enforcers of totalitarianism: the police; the freedom of everyone to move across borders; and necessities such as healthcare, housing, and a meaningful quality of life. It was the belief in the need for prisons, in the need for violent enforcers of so-called “law and order” to kill and abuse whatever strangers we unjustly fear, in impermeable borders, and the disposability of some lives that has gotten us here. It will take action against these tendencies to get us out – action the Democratic Party, beholden to its donors, was unwilling to take.
I do not know what you can do. I do not know what you are willing to do. This is a moment many have invested in believing could be delayed indefinitely. Now it is here, again, inevitably. Come join me outside the jail. We were criminals. Do not tell me we have been domesticated yet. They are defining trans women as criminals again. We must show up for those facing repression now. It matters with whom you place your sympathies. It will change your reality. I have watched so many be coerced into plea deals. So many never even tried, were never even given a show trial. They will need us when they get out. We will have food and water, shoelaces and belts, directions to the bus, the train, and car rides home. Let the fascists come. There will be crowds outside the jails. In the night, we will make noise, and in the morning, we will celebrate as each one is freed. These measures are wholly inadequate, but we must show up for the so-called criminals, we must show up for ourselves. You vote now with your actions, your affiliations. They have always been what matter. The fascists will not leave power voluntarily. You must build them a golden bridge for their retreat.