The People Are Taking Control Now. Get Used To It.

The CIA-funded Washington Post put out an article this week titled “The Bernie Bros and sisters are coming to Republicans’ rescue.”

First, let’s thank the Post for acknowledging Bernie Sanders’ polling higher among women than men by including “sisters.” It shows that whether or not a group is actually male-dominated or has anything else wrong with it, the types behind such headlines are going to attack that group if it challenges the neoliberal power structure. Their goals are not to advance social equality, or to win elections for the designated good guys as that article professes, or to defend any kind of pragmatism. It’s to maintain the imperialist, corporate capitalist hierarchy that they profit from, whatever the alterations of reality that need to happen in the process.

The problem is, for most people these alterations can’t be accepted. The majority of the country does not believe that Russia is what’s caused the Trump presidency (which, good news, was officially disproven last week), or that unparalleled destruction and imperialism are how to keep us safe, or that it’s right to keep half of Americans in poverty while giving the top 0.1% as much wealth as the bottom 90%. The people not believing what they’re told is not what the ruling powers can’t handle, though-that fact doesn’t mean much when the elites holdoverwhelming control. What those elites can’t handle is that the people are now actually taking away their power.

What the oligarchs really don’t like, as the headline mentioned above proves, is when the people apply their dissenting attitudes into meaningful action. When they successfully run a candidate of their own whose sabotaged campaign is used as inspiration for thousands of future campaigns like it. When they build a little-noticed but growing series of local communities whose energy and business systems aren’t dependent on large corporations. When they take the latest lies from the U.S. war machine and use the alternative media, which has surpassed popularity of the corporate media, to mostly undermine faith in them.

Of course, my telling the rulers to get used to it is rhetorical. That’s not what rulers do, and their counters to the uprising has been staggering: mass arrests and police harassment against the Occupy and Democracy Spring Protestors; psy ops like “fake news” that spread suspicion about dissenting voices; the demonization of Muslims, immigrants, and African Americans to deflect from the corporate state’s failures; blatant election rigging; and the increases in surveillance, censorship, and police militarization. 

Yet those are all standard tactics of authoritarian regimes. The special thing about this oligarchy’s attempts to keep itself going is how easily it can use war and catastrophe to its advantage; after decades of manufacturing relatively minor conflicts, the U.S. empire is now trying to take power through starting a Third World War. This is clear from the nuclear missiles that have been encircled around China and Russia; from the aggressive neo-Nazi regime the U.S. installed in Ukraine in 2014 so that it could destabilize the Russian Federation; from the neocons’ doing everything they can to escalate tensions in Syria while Russia has already threatened military retribution; from NATO’s making many former allies of Russia turn against Russia; from the many hoaxes that are clearly involved in the corporate state’s instigation of hostility toward North Korea; from the uniform statements from corporate media pundits, political leaders, and NATO allies that Russia’s fictional hacking of the DNC was an “act of war;” from a U.S. military head’s recent promise that he would nuke China if given the order. 

A geopolitical shock like has never happened before is being prepared, and when it comes we’ll have to make just as big an effort to stop it from working as intended. We’ll need to organize for revolt underground as civil liberties are eliminated. We’ll need to counter the corporate state’s propaganda by spreading alternative news in secret. We’ll need to keep the population from being intimidated into submission by a government that won’t tolerate any dissent.

And you know what? We’re going to do all of this, and then build the peaceful, ecologically balanced social democracy that humanity needs to survive. We’re going to do this because the will to fight for a better world has already been put in us irreversibly, and because our civilization and planet have become too damaged by the old systems for us to go back to trusting them. That’s what the power centers can’t understand or accept. But whether or not they can, they’re coming down.