Fear, hate, revenge, ignorance, pettiness, apathy and many other common human foibles drive much of the noise-making in modern American public affairs. Ever-quickening authoritarian goose-steps in recent decades, the most recent decade in particular, have morphed into decisive leaps towards outright fascism in recent months, especially following the murder of a prominent Christian nationalist and right-wing provocateur.^{1 2} Although the widow of the slain organizer and youth evangelist forgave the “young man” and “lost soul” who allegedly shot and killed her husband — adding that she believed her husband’s murder was “part of God’s plan”³ — the American president took the opposite approach. “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them,” he sneered before claiming that the assassin’s bullet “was aimed at all of us.”⁴ The president delivered his bullet-aimed-at-all-of-us assertion as sequel to an earlier declaration that cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left as the true perpetrators guiding the assassin’s murderous impulses, refusing any suggestion he should call on the people to come together to find unity and common ground.⁵

It is perhaps at this moment when we Americans who locate our political and/or social orientation somewhere on “the left” (whether liberal, progressive, antifascist, socialist, etc.) might take long-overdue stock in where we stand, and the looming peril we find ourselves in.^{6 7} We might — with at least some justification — consider ourselves smarter, more morally upright and talented than the dotards, dimwits, doofuses, dipshits, sycophants, malign opportunists, bad-faith operators and sociopaths who haphazardly jerk at the levers of political, social, military and economic power.⁸ It is these dullards, however, who have made impressive strides towards marching the entire society through the gates of hell and into the all-consuming fire of fully engaged fascism while the rest of us seem to muster little more than worthless virtue-signaling, frowny disapproval and impotent hand-wringing. This pathetic push-back has not only failed to slow America’s march into authoritarianism, it has likely accelerated it. It also tells a sorry story of our inadequate capacity to fight back effectively, and our anemic willingness to win.

If you’ve made it to this point in this blog post, you may have already “had it ‘up to here’” with the scolding tone in the paragraphs immediately preceding this sentence. And who can blame you? I don’t know what to do about the perilous moment we, as a society, find ourselves in any more than anyone else. What I can do, however, is observe and attempt to learn what is going on all around me.

For example, I work for a regional governmental organization situated in a county and a city in the Pacific Northwest. Most folks in the city and county where I live and work consider themselves relatively “progressive.” This is particularly true in the organization I work for. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, all but the most “essential workers” (those with jobs that required them to do those tasks on location, and without significant interruption) were told to go work from home. We did exactly that, and most of us immediately recognized particular benefits of not having to go into the office every day. So even after effective COVID vaccines rolled out and people got their shots and the pandemic subsided, many of us lobbied fiercely to have the privilege of continuing to work from home. Thus, many of my coworkers continue to work almost exclusively from home to this day.

Well, so what? For starters, the folks with jobs that require them to leave their homes every time they have to report to work are often acutely aware of the privilege differential between themselves and those who have the option to work from home. This awareness was especially acute during the darkest days of the COVID pandemic. One of my friends, a hair stylist I’ll call “T,” described how she was forced to improvise and innovate. She recounted the dread and anxiety she felt about losing her livelihood — and potentially her home if she found herself no longer able to pay the mortgage — if she did not find a way to get clients to show up and get their hair styled. Fortunately for her, and for her clients, she found a way to make that happen, although it wasn’t easy or cheap.

My friend’s story has countless variations, many of which failed to result in happy endings. Legions of coffee shops, restaurants, retail stores, hair salons, bars, dry cleaners and a myriad other establishments were forced to close shop as office workers vacated their office buildings in favor of working from the comfort and convenience of their own homes. The establishments that did manage to survive often did so in a noticeably diminished capacity. In my town, as in many others, indigent folk — often drug addled and/or mentally, physically and/or emotionally incapacitated — took over sidewalks and other public spaces once filled with work-a-day folks going about their daily tasks.

Those who remained, and/or those who felt like they were left holding the bag — small business owners, retail chains, large property managers, and many others — understandably got upset. But so did many in the work-a-day rank and file, like my buddy Joseph, a security guard who patrols the perimeter of the skyscraper situated across the street from the modest office building where I work. An immigrant who grew up in a refugee camp in Tanzania, Joseph claims his parents beat him every day because he “wouldn’t listen.” Still in his early 20s, Joseph continues to live with his parents, who also immigrated to the U.S. I asked him if his parents continue to beat him every day for not listening; he laughed and said “no, that’s illegal here.”

Joseph was born and raised in the Tanzanian refugee camp because a brutal civil war in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo drove his parents from their homeland and into the refugee camp. Later, after the family had relocated to the United States, and Joseph accepted a job as a security guard, he began to translate the dysfunction he encountered every day — the drug addicted folks, the insane people, the petty criminals, the street thugs, the shiftless layabouts, the down and outers, the lost souls, and so on — as a clear sign that society was falling apart. Like so many others in our society who came to similar conclusions via any number of varying routes, Joseph began rooting for voters to return the real estate mogul and presumed pussy grabber to the Oval Office, apparently concluding that qualities that drove narcissistic sociopaths to make big real estate deals while grabbing pussy as pussy-grabbing opportunities arose⁹ would somehow clear the streets of the kinds of dangers and nuisances Joseph encountered every working day.

Joseph’s logic, of course, was not sound. But the logic produced by a society addicted to spectacle, numb to shame, and distracted by shallow entertainments is also not sound, no matter where one resides on the political, social, or economic spectrum. The first moment I recognized that Joseph may have begun to have doubts about his former enthusiasm for America’s Dotard-in-Chief was when he told me about his neighbor, an immigrant from Mexico who ICE agents dragged from his home, leaving his wife and six American-born children to fend for themselves. As so often happens, it is only after the deeds are done and the results of those deeds become obvious, that it becomes apparent that maybe another path, perhaps a better path, might have resulted in better outcomes.

So where is our October surprise? That likely depends on where we go from here.^{10 11}