two books that really depressed me (draft-in-progress)

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During the pandemic I read two books that really depressed me:

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart

and

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean.

Both books made it abundantly clear how well-organized, well-funded, strategic and insanely determined the people I think of as evil actually are. They know what they are against and continue - again and again, with ever-shifting tactics - to work toward the overwhelmingly destructive changes they envision. They are hypocrites but that doesn't stop them, they just keep fighting for what they want. The means justify the end, all strategies are considered. They work to short circuit all the ways mass movements are able to activate change. And they know the way for them to change things is by changing laws. If they weren't so sickeningly well-funded it wouldn't work. When you have the money to keep trying and trying, hiring as many people as necessary to brainstorm and implement, eventually you can find the things that work.

This isn't to suggest it's time for despair. It's probably never really time for despair. But an understanding of what we're up again is really difficult to stomach. Reading these books made me wonder: what would it mean for the left (however you wish to define it) to devote the same amount of time and energy to changing laws. But without the same amount of billionaire money backing such endeavours I find it hard to feel confident it would work. Yet I know there must be way. I keep coming back to the question of strategy and tactics.

This is the passage from The Power Worshippers I posted when I first read it.

And then, thinking about this post some more, I also find myself thinking that things continually change, the situation is never quite the same as it was in the past. The christian nationalists, libertarians and so many other parts of the far right have been fighting in this way for such a long time now. Perhaps their victories are in the present and their failures are in the future. The fact that they've been so successful in destroying society must also create some sort of opening. We can now so clearly see the world they are making and how few people it serves, how many lives it destroys, how it destroys the natural world we depend on for our very survival. Can their victories also mark the beginning of their end? I keep coming back to the question of strategy and tactics.



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