Susan Faludi: It’s Time to Cast off Magical Thinking and Prepare for Struggle!

by Sunsara Taylor

July 9, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On July 5, Susan Faludi, a longtime feminist author who has made important contributions to understanding and fighting the oppression of women, wrote a New York Times column called “Senators Collins and Murkowski, It’s Time to Leave the G.O.P.” In it, Faludi imagines a world where nominally pro-choice Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski could “halt the whole charade, and alter the course of history, with a press release.” The idea being that they would announce to the world they were dropping out of the Republican Party and refuse to approve Trump’s next Supreme Court pick in order to protect women’s right to abortion.

To this I can only respond: WAKE UP! With Roe v. Wade—and so much more—on the line with the impending appointment of a new Supreme Court justice and the cementing in place of a fully fascist Supreme Court... Now is NOT the time for magical thinking.

The Christian FASCIST movement that has been built up over decades and is now dominant in every branch of the government at every level is NOT going to be stopped by a press release or by two senators switching parties. This Christian fascist movement has bombed clinics, killed doctors, shamed women, and passed hundreds of punitive and medically harmful restrictions on abortion. They have mainstreamed LIES about abortion and women’s health. They have gutted healthcare programs all over the world that are right now costing the lives of thousands if not millions of women in order to gag healthcare providers from even letting women know where they can access safe abortions. And they’ve done all this not because they give a single fuck about babies—but because they have always been motivated by their desire to CONTROL WOMEN.

This violent reassertion of PATRIARCHY—backed up by religious lunacy of one kind or another—is an international phenomenon bound up with, and forward driven by, profound and intractable yet massively intensifying contradictions facing the entire global system of CAPITALISM-IMPERIALISM. These contradictions include economic shocks, global rivalries, and massive migrations driven by capitalist globalization, environmental devastation, and imperialist and other reactionary wars—as well as profound demographic and economic changes right within the borders of the United States which powerful ruling class forces fear will unravel this country if they are not violently reversed. This is what underlies the fascism that has been rising in this country for decades and which, with the establishment of the Trump/Pence regime, now holds power across many major institutions and every branch of the United States government. Their program includes not only violently slamming women and LGBTQ people into a real life Handmaid’s Tale, but also Making America WHITE Again—ethnically cleansing and building concentration camps for immigrants, police executions of Black people coupled with virtually lynch-mob incitements by Trump, banning Muslims—as well as ramping up environmental plunder, America First terror against the people of the world, and so much more.

To act as if all this were some passing or shallow phenomenon that could be diverted with a parliamentary trick—even if Murkowski and Collins were inclined to make the switch you so wish for—is to believe and to spread deadly delusions which humanity can ill afford.

The fascist Trump/Pence regime and its deadly program for billions of people is NOT going without an ENORMOUS FIGHT. Two Republican senators who approved the cabinet appointments of KKK Wizard Jeff Sessions and fascist biblical literalist Betsy DeVos are CERTAINLY NOT going to be the ones to stop this... again, even if they wanted to.

ONLY A MASSIVE, SOCIETY-WIDE STRUGGLE WAGED BY MILLIONS CAN STOP THIS FASCIST AMERICA.

There IS a force that can do this. It is NOT coming “from the top.” It can ONLY come from BELOW—from the people. We have seen the potential for this in the massive protests that have swept the country again in recent weeks. But this needs to go much further, with sights set much higher—on driving out the whole regime. This means going into the streets not just for one day, but in sustained and massive outpourings that demand: THIS NIGHTMARE MUST END! THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America! These outpourings must not stop until that demand is met. This is what RefuseFascism.org is organizing and fighting for. This is what many, many more people need to join with.

It is harmful to spread false hopes that keep people passive in the face of catastrophe. Stop believing in schemes, gambling the future of humanity. It is time to cast off magical thinking and prepare for struggle.