70
All across the United States, people are rising up--refusing to be complicit in the slow-motion annihilation of democracy. They march against a regime that strips away public goods, criminalizes dissent, vanishes students, and hollows out the very institutions meant to protect civic life. But these assaults are not new; they are the culmination of what I once called the scorched-earth politics of America’s four fundamentalisms: market worship, ideological conformity, religious zealotry, and educational repression. These fundamentalisms have steadily laid the groundwork for a society governed by violence, cruelty, and unaccountable power--where the market is sacrosanct, history is erased, justice is inverted, and knowledge is policed.
There’s no real force behind them yet. Protests are there to show how many people you can rally but they’re an empty threat if there’s no option of further escalating things. Strikes, blockades and other, less pacifist measures. Activism is a lot more leg work than just marches.
MLK’s movement was successful because the alternative was Malcom X