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My appearance on the Nitty Gritty Show, October 1, 2017.

My recent appearance alongside Carol Anderson (Emory University) on the Tavis Smiley Show, September 19, 2017

A teaser for my upcoming podcast…thanks to Brother Ali for permission to use his track Gather Round as the intro and outro music for the show…

Speak Out with Tim Wise Teaser – There is no Moral Equivalence Between Antifa and Nazis

Sometimes America feels like the movie Groundhog Day: a place where we keep waking up again and again to the same shit, hoping against hope that this time — no really, this time — things will be different.

So this time, the videotape of the police officer shooting the unarmed black man (or child, in the case of Tamir Rice) will lead to that officer’s conviction and imprisonment. And then the alarm goes off and we are awakened from our dream state, just like we were the time before and the time before, forced to reckon with a seemingly endless repetition of horribleness.

Or this time, as we watch tens of thousands stranded in New Orleans during Katrina — disproportionately black and poor — the nation as a whole will finally come to understand what those left behind had already known, and for a very long time: namely, that black lives really don’t matter, and won’t until we demand they do. And again, the alarm disturbs our slumber. And again, we hit the snooze button.

Or this time — when yet another white kid shoots up his classroom, or another white serial killer murders a dozen people, buries them under the house or cannibalizes them — we will have our eyes opened to the fact that pathology and deviance are far from the exclusive purview of persons of color. So too when rich white men nearly bring the economy to its knees with financial chicanery so egregious as to make the most industrious of black or brown street criminals seem like rank amateurs by comparison. But then comes the alarm, a clarion that shakes us from our stupor, allowing us to go right back to fearing the usual suspects all over again.

And now, with the white supremacist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, we hope that out of such a tragedy we may finally come to appreciate the sickness of racism, and the indelible stain still besmirching the soil and politics of our nation so many years on. But in order for people to learn they typically require teachers who are qualified to lead them to enlightenment. Events alone rarely do the trick and wisdom infrequently emerges fully-formed from the well of good intentions, let alone fervent aspiration. Some assembly is required. Sadly, we are in a classroom, so to speak, being taught by a man lacking even the most rudimentary pedagogical skills, devoid of content knowledge too, and without the temperament to convey even the most obvious of lessons. It’s a lesson one might think we had learned by now, but no: namely, that white supremacy is a death cult–a truth attested to by the bodies of millions of people of color through the years, not to mention more than a million whites who died either fighting that cult or defending it, from the Civil War to World War Two. This cult cannot be accommodated. It cannot be excused. It must be condemned and it must be defeated as a mentality, as a movement, and as a structurally ingrained social and economic reality. And if its adherents cannot be de-programmed, well then, they must be defeated to, without the least bit of sentimentality.

But the teacher does not understand the lesson, and so here we are. Instead, he has reverted to type, providing succor to the most extreme elements of the far-right fringe. Whether for reasons of true affinity, or the perception that such forces represent a substantial portion of his base without whom his approval ratings would fall even further, or because condemning them forthrightly would appear to him — a man who apologizes for nothing and is loathe to admit he has ever made a mistake — as weakness, matters not. The results are all the same, no matter his intentions.

To say of those in the so-called “alt-right” who descended upon Charlottesville, that “not all” of them “were white supremacists,” and that there were “some very fine people” among them, as Trump did yesterday, is to miss the point by such a wide margin as to call into question whether this is a man even remotely in charge of his faculties. For even if one were to allow that some among them were not Nazis, not supporters of organizer Richard Spencer’s calls for the creation of a “white ethno-state,” and not enamored of the rabid anti-Semitism that characterized the event from beginning to end, it was, after all, a rally to “Unite the Right.” In other words, to put aside whatever picayune differences might separate mere opponents of economic globalism from those who quite openly joke about pushing Jews into ovens, all in the name of reactionary solidarity.

Which is to say, it was an event intended to blur the very distinctions that the erstwhile leader of the free world would now have us make. It was an event to say that among the right there should be no infighting, no rancor, no division. In short, it was an event intended to convey the message that even the ones who aren’t Nazis are willing to make common cause with those who are. As the Proud Boys — a mostly misogynistic group, dedicated to “Western chauvinism” — have put it, there should be no “punching right,” among their side’s members. They are all one thing, not because I’m saying so, but because they are.

Not fine people, let alone very fine people, but rather, rotten fruit from a poisoned tree. All of them.

If I were a fine person and found myself at a march where, to my shock and horror, Nazis and other bigots were featured — and I could see them with their swastikas>, and their “National Socialist Movement” banners, and I could hear them yelling “fuck you faggots” at clergy and other peaceful protesters, and hurling racial slurs about blacks, and chanting “Blood and Soil” (the direct English translation of a Nazi slogan) — I would immediately leave, taking with me my profound embarrassment at having been so misled, so duped into believing this was just going to be a nice rally for conservative principles. That is what a very fine person would do, and even then, only after having ripped the swastikas from the hands of those holding them in disgust.

In fact, ya know what “very fine people” would do to Nazis? They would yell at them. They would defend themselves from them if need be. And yes, they might even mace them or punch them in the mouth. Very fine people detest Nazis. In fact, detesting Nazis might be a bona fide requirement — the de minimus definition — for being considered a very fine person.

This is not to say that I always find the tactics of antifa to be helpful or strategic, because I don’t. But to suggest, as the president did, that they are in some way the moral equivalent of those they were protesting — or perhaps even worse because at least the Nazis had a permit! — is an act of moral inversion so putrid as to boggle the imagination. Whatever one thinks of antifa tactics, there is simply a difference, and it is not a small one, between those who call for the purging of people of color and Jews from a nation, and those who fight back against people who call for those things. And if we say there is no difference between advocating genocide and oppression and resisting those who advocate these, then we are headed quickly to a place that puts equal moral condemnation upon the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as upon those whom they were fighting. We are suggesting that the enslaved, who often resisted their owners violently, were no better than those who held them in bondage. We are suggesting that the captive who slits the throat of their kidnapper in the middle of the night is no better than the one who took them. And this is a perversion.

Keep in mind, the white supremacists said they would be coming to Charlottesville with weapons. Virginia is an open carry state and they announced beforehand they would be prepared to take advantage of this fact, either for self-defense (their insistence) or to intimidate those who might stand against them. As such, and knowing that the fascists would be armed with guns, with knives, with clubs and other implements of war, for antifa not to have brought something with which to fight back would have been to court an especially one-sided disaster. But however much mace stings and urine filled balloons may stain one’s clothes, to suggest they are equivalent as tools of terror to semi-automatic weapons or vehicles, is to confuse spit wads for atom bombs.

No, there is no left equivalent of Richard Spencer’s call for the ethnic cleansing — purging really — of non-whites from the U.S. There is no left equivalent of the Daily Stormer’s call for white supremacists to protest and disrupt the funeral of Saturday’s martyr, Heather Heyer. We do not march around campuses with torches shouting racist slogans, nor surround our political adversaries — as the white nationalists did on Friday night at UVA (very much without a permit, I might add) — and then wade into their numbers and beat them.

There has been a string of far right murders just since the election of Donald Trump, which has no left or progressive equal, and an even longer history of disproportionate reactionary terrorism with no parallel on the other side: at least 12 times as many fatalities and 36 times as many injuries from right-wing terrorists as from those who could potentially be considered “left.” And not merely because right wingers are more talented at their craft, but because there are simply far more incidents in play.

But of course these pesky facts — things most teachers seek to convey to their students — are mere trifles to the instructor in this case, who by his immunity to them conveys a casual indifference to truth that cannot but deepen the roots of the present crisis. Committed to an alt-reality of his own making, the president sought to elide the differences between Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jefferson, as if calls for the removal of statues to the former would, by necessity, lead to the call for the removal of those in homage to the latter. In effect, he wondered, where will it end, all this political correctness, which seeks to erase historical figures from the national memory?

But statuary to confederates are not intended as history texts, and those who erected them — mostly in the early 1900s, long after the war, and during a time when lynching and the re-assertion of white supremacy in the South was at its zenith — never intended them to be so. These are altars of worship, where the faithful come to drink of the blood and taste of the flesh of their Great-Great-Grandpappy Beauregard, whose perfidy and characterological rot they still refuse to face. To defend these statues on the grounds of historical memory is perverse, for they misremember that history entirely and the cause for which Lee and others were fighting.

Yes, Jefferson was a slave owner, and this fact should be understood and not sanitized or considered a mere time-bound failing on his part (as it often is at the University of Virginia, for instance). But still, there is a difference between someone who said “all men are created equal” even if his actions suggested he didn’t mean it, and those who said (as did Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens) that white supremacy was the “cornerstone” of their new government. One provided us with a flawed yet visible exit from the national nightmare in which he himself was implicated. The others — including leaders in the states who issued declarations of causes for their secession, and in each case named the maintenance of slavery as their purpose — would have extended that nightmare in perpetuity, and without hesitation. Whether Jefferson intended it or not, he gave us a blueprint, however blood-spattered, for building a functioning democracy. Lee and his cohorts had no interest in such things, nor the vision to even imagine them. And that matters.

When Southern whites made the choice to go to war with America they did so because however much racism had been embedded in the nation from the start, they didn’t find our commitment sufficient. And that’s saying a lot. They chose a side. It was a side of even more oppression, even more mistreatment than that which the North had been helping dish out upon black bodies and upon indigenous peoples for many a generation. It is the same choice the white nationalists are making now. In a nation where they as whites already have half the unemployment rate of people of color, one-third the poverty rate, and 12 times the median net worth of black and brown folks, they are choosing to go all in for even greater dominance, even greater hegemony. They look out a nation beset by profound institutionalized inequities and rather than ask how we might fix them — or rather than even shrugging and saying “oh well,” as so many are wont to do — are quite literally saying that those disparities are not large enough. And as with the differences between Jefferson and Lee, so too, this suggests some rather profound dislocations between white nationalists and most of the rest of us.

Or does it? Because see, now it is time for us to choose a side if we haven’t already, and to recommit to the fight if we have. And by “we,” I mean those of us called white in this place. When David Duke and Matt Heimbach say that this movement of which they are a part is “speaking for white people,” they are trying to draft us into their army quite without our consent. When Andrew Anglin says that this movement will “take over the country,” as he did this weekend, he is advocating the overthrow of the government. Yours. Mine. Ours. And if you are white, and don’t resist this draft with every fiber of your being — don’t decide in fact to burn your draft card openly and insist that you will choose a different way to live in this skin — then you will have confirmed that they are right. That they do speak for you. And you will have revealed yourself as an enemy of all that is good about this land.

Please know: history will not remember you well for it.

If, as the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, then hoping against hope that this time an officer who shot a black man in cold blood would be held to account, is a type of insanity most profound. Or at the very least evidence of an overactive imagination rivaling that of the most creative screenplay writer. But rest assured, this movie does not have an alternate ending. It has been screen-tested before jury after jury, and it is quite clear by now which conclusion the audience prefers. Expecting anything different is to expect the things that have always happened to stop happening, and for those which never have to become the norm: like believing that any day now, hummingbirds will walk and pre-schoolers take flight.

Philando Castile is dead because Officer Jeronimo Yanez shot him. And Yanez shot him because he claims he feared for his life. And he feared for his life, supposedly, because Castile informed him he had a gun and was ostensibly reaching for it. But this makes no sense, and surely in a society less infected with the pathogen of what Jody David Armour calls “Negrophobia,” all would see why. Aside from the fact that Castile had no criminal history that would suggest he posed a threat to Yanez (something about which Yanez could not have known at the time) there is one thing the officer most assuredly should have been able to discern: namely, that when a man intends to shoot you, he does not announce the presence of his weapon first, so as to give you time to draw yours. This was not, I beg to remind you, a duel.

And so we are left with the ineluctable conclusion that Yanez feared for his life because Philando Castile was a black man with a gun, and for no other reason. Although licensed to carry it — a point he made to Yanez in what would constitute some of his final words — such a thing means little, either to police, the NRA, or those “All Lives Matter” folks who by their silence over Castile’s killing and the acquittal of the one who killed him have made quite clear whom they mean, and don’t mean or include, in their definition of “all.”

This fear of black men — if indeed we should even call it that, rather than the contempt it more closely resembles — is a fascinating pathology, unmediated by even the most elementary logic. And yet we regularly ratify the pathology with the stamp of rationality, pronouncing it understandable even if tragically unfortunate. So the very same logic that says it makes sense for Yanez to think Castile would have told him about his gun before proceeding to shoot him with it, leads large numbers to believe Tamir Rice would have pointed a toy gun — which presumably he must have known held no real bullets — at police who carry actual guns, which most assuredly do. It’s the same logic that allows still more to believe John Crawford would have pointed an air rifle at the officer who killed him at Walmart. And even though we have video in the cases of Rice and Crawford demonstrating that neither pointed their fake guns at anyone, it is apparently easier to believe in the rationality of anti-black fear than to believe in what our own eyes are telling us.

But what is perhaps even more maddening than the facts of the case alone, more grotesque than for a man to be killed in front of a child, more sickening than the nonchalance with which the jury saw fit to return Yanez to the free world, it is the well-intended naiveté of those who would conclude from this, as I gather many do, that such things prove the American system of justice is failing. They are shocked (shocked I tell you!) to be confronted with still more evidence that the notion of liberty and justice for all carries no more weight, and is far less likely to be proved accurate, than a fortune-cookie aphorism or the Lotto numbers your uncle played this week. But the idea that awfulness is evidence of system failure is the kind of conviction one could only afford to fall back upon were they previously fortunate enough to have had faith in the system to begin with.

It is precisely this kind of conceit that columnist David Brooks displayed in the wake of Katrina and the inundation of New Orleans, when he wrote:

“The first rule of the social fabric — that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable — was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.”

Brooks, who somehow manages to always be surprised at how terrible his country can be, despite possessing an affect most resembling constipation made flesh — and which might lead one to believe he already understood this kind of thing — is nearly a perfect representation of the naiveté we can ill-afford to indulge. To believe we have ever “protected the vulnerable” — especially the poor and vulnerable of color, who it should be said are in a state of perpetual crisis — is to call into question one’s entitlement to have matriculated past the eighth grade, let alone to find oneself firmly ensconced within the literary confines of the nation’s paper of record. Leaving such folks behind is not a violation of the nation’s social compact. It is this nation’s social compact; the manifestation of that compact in real time. And to lose confidence in our civic institutions as a result of it is only possible for those already possessed of such confidence; which is to say a damn few black people but an awful lot of white ones.

So too with yet another acquittal in yet another case in which yet another black man finds himself on the business end of a cop’s firearm or perhaps chokehold — and as with Rice and Crawford and Eric Garner, among others, on video no less — and yet, nothing is done. No one should be shocked, and I suspect most folks of color are not. They know that the so-called justice system was not established for them, but to protect others from them; that modern policing traces directly to slave patrols, which were the first iteration of real law enforcement in the colonies. They know that this society was quite literally established on the pretext that black peoples were dangerous and needed to be controlled, dominated, subordinated, even killed if need be, and that when they were, there would be little or no consequence for those who had done the deed.

It’s really quite simple: If a system is established to produce certain outcomes, and then proceeds to regularly and routinely produce them, upon what basis can we rationally suggest that the system is malfunctioning? Quite the opposite: if a system is established on the basis of unfairness and inequity, the only actual malfunction would be if that system suddenly and inexplicably began to produce justice. It would only be under such an odd and almost incomprehensible scenario that one might inquire as to why the machinery seemed to be breaking down. Or put a bit differently: If you’re standing at the end of a conveyor belt in a sausage factory and find yourself perplexed as to why it continually sends sausage in your direction rather than, say, chicken nuggets, it is quite apparent that you neglected to read the sign. It’s a sausage factory. Sausage is what it does. Expect sausage.

Put still another way: If America were an App, the devaluing of black life would not be a glitch, but a feature, programmed in from the beginning, with no patch or fix coming in a later edition–at least not courtesy of the folks who designed it.

And please spare me the insistence that because Yanez is Latino his treatment of Castile cannot have been rooted in race. Anti-blackness is no respecter of melanin count. It, like the overarching paradigm of white supremacy for which it serves as the most potent of fuels, is a contagion against which not only brown but even black too often prove defenseless. Nearly half of African Americans demonstrate implicit or subconscious biases against themselves in tests designed to ferret out such things, so the fact that a Latino male — especially one serving in an overwhelmingly white suburban police force — might internalize the same fears or dehumanizing biases of a white cop should hardly be a revelation. It was James Baldwin, after all, who insisted that the worst cops he remembered growing up in Harlem were black, because they were the ones who had the most to prove; specifically, to those above them, ever on the lookout for any evidence that their sympathies might reside with the people.

No, whether or not a phenomenon deserves the label of racism is not always dependent upon the color of the perpetrator. More so, it is dependent on the color of those disproportionately victimized by it. Were this not true then even the American system of chattel slavery could be acquitted on the charge of racism, since, after all, there were some black slaveowners as well as some who were Native American. So too, Nazism could be acquitted on the charge of racism because there were Jewish Kapos in the camps and some Jews in the German Army fighting for the Reich. But to deny the racist provenance of slavery here or the Holocaust of European Jewry there would be to assassinate language. What makes both examples of racism is not that whites were the only ones implicated in the suffering but that the targets in each case were racialized “others.” What made American slavery racist was the fact that although some blacks owned other blacks, they didn’t also get to bid on whites down at the auction block. The system of chattel subordination did not run both ways. What made Hitlerism racist was the fact that although there were Jews who assisted in the oppression of Jews and fought for the government oppressing them, there were no Jews also allowed to march SS men into the gas chambers and slam the doors shut.

And what makes the killing of Philando Castile, and so many others, about racism, is that although sometimes the killers are people of color, the victims are disproportionately black and brown, especially in cases where there is no direct threat posed but “fear” is allowed to serve as an affirmative defense. What makes it about racism is that although there are plenty of white people killed by police, it is almost only white people who are able to brazenly brandish weapons without concern that they might be killed by police for doing so.

To wit, earlier this year in Dearborn, Michigan, where two white gun fetishists walked into a police station, masked, armed, and wearing body armor, to file a complaint over a traffic stop to which they had previously been subjected. It was a traffic stop, one should note, from which they had managed to emerge unscathed, despite being armed (like Castile), and despite cursing at the officers (quite unlike Castile). Semi-automatic rifle in tow, and with face covered, in a way no black man or identifiably Muslim male could be without being seen as a gang member or terrorist, the men proceeded to ignore police commands for several minutes when told to lay down their weaponry. And they are still breathing in a manner Philando Castile is most certainly not.

And please, spare me the racist apologetics masquerading as social science about how police shootings of black folks are justifiable because of the higher crime rates in black communities. First and most importantly, research indicates that there is simply no correlation between local crime rates in given communities and the rates at which persons (white, black or otherwise) are shot and/or killed by members of law enforcement. If disproportionate killings of blacks by police were the simple result of blacks committing more crime, then we would expect those shootings to be more prevalent in places with higher rates of crime, and especially black crime. But this is not the case. According to a study spanning the years 2011-2014, which looked at county-level data across the country, controlling for crime rate differences has almost no independent effect on the rates at which police disproportionately shoot African Americans.

Second, by definition the only issue for any given shooting is whether or not the person shot by police could be reasonably perceived as posing a genuine threat to an officer or others. Crime rates have no role to play in assessing individual incidents. After all, if a white man pulls a gun on a cop and points it at them, the fact that in the aggregate black guys are seven times more likely than white guys to commit homicide (thanks to the correlation between homicide and various economic conditions disproportionately experienced by blacks), would hardly make it rational for the officer to calmly holster their weapon in deference to FBI statistical tables and abstract mathematical probabilities. Likewise, if a cop confronts a black person like Philando Castile who is courteous and actually informs the officer about his weapon and his license for it — which again, is not what a cop-killer does, ever — the fact that other black people who are not Philando Castile commit homicide seven times more often than white people would be irrelevant to what the officer should do in that moment. To suggest otherwise would be to allow cops to approach blacks on the street and blow their brains out on the daily, and so long as they only did it six times as often as they did it to whites, there would be no evidence of racial unfairness under the logic of the racism denialists and cop apologists who populate the far-right.

And please, no more questions about “Why don’t black people just respect authority, or do as they’re told by law enforcement?” Because even when they do, this is what happens. This is why they run, cross the street, turn around and walk the other way, or engage in some other “furtive movement” as the police like to call it. Because even when they’ve done nothing wrong, they cannot stake their lives on the dubious possibility that the officer they encounter will presume that. Indeed, the insistence for black folks to respect authority — when that authority has such a long history of disrespecting them — is more than a tone-deaf stretch. It amounts to a demand that the African American community ignore its history entirely, and by history I mean even those things that happened last week, let alone last century. It amounts to a demand that some 40 million people adopt amnesia as a cultural virtue, and that their failure to do so will then be used against them when they fail to show sufficient deference to the very forces that have operated as their enemies for so long. Or even when they do.

And finally, no more insistence the next time this happens that the deceased was “no angel.” Because in the eyes of the schoolchildren who knew and loved Philando Castile as a valued, trusted and caring staff member who made their days brighter, he was very close to that. And yet he is still dead. Because anti-blackness doesn’t care how you sag your pants or if you wear a tie to work. It doesn’t care if you hustle CDs from the back of your car to help support your family or punch a clock everyday. It doesn’t care how you play your music or if you say “Yes Sir,” and “No Sir.” It doesn’t care that you’re a doting father. It doesn’t care that you’re twelve years old. It doesn’t care if you’re an honor student or a dropout. It only cares that you’re black.

And if you are, it only seeks to remind you of two things: first, that according to the founding logic of the culture in which you reside, you have no rights that white men are bound to respect; and lastly, that you are the sausage, and the machinery is operating exactly as designed.

Tim Wise on CNN to discuss Bill Maher’s use of the N-word and racism in America

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they see the world and others in it.

Those who view the world and its inhabitants as basically good, and who remain relatively hopeful about the better angels of our nature, though occasionally caught off guard by the less salutary aspects of the human condition, tend to believe in the capacity of everyday folks to solve problems and make the world a better place, given the right incentives and resources. Not to mention, their ability to smile, to laugh, and to find light-heartedness even amidst great pain makes them considerably more pleasant to be around. Although given to bouts of deep melancholy — after all, the optimist is perhaps more dismayed than others by evidence of their miscalculations, when they are occasionally and quite rudely disabused of their buoyancy — these are the kinds of individuals who nonetheless typically inspire us to be better than we are and who have little doubt that we can be.

Alternately, those whose disposition is gloomy, and who see the world as a mean and nasty place filled with equally mean and nasty people, though occasionally proved right — there are, after all, such people and life can be tragic — tend to inculcate a defeatist cynicism and a harshness of affect counterproductive to the building of compassion, empathy or community. Their utter inability to smile, laugh, or reassure others marks them as not merely hard-headed rationalists reluctant to dwell in the occasionally unrealistic optimism of the perpetually cheerful; rather, it suggests a dystopian mindset fundamentally at odds with a functioning belief in democracy, however messy, and freedom, however chaotic. It is not merely a Debby Downer-ism into which we all fall from time to time, but a seriously maladjusted persona, almost constitutionally incapable of joy.

In short, if you believe, as Dr. King did, that “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice,” you will have a different disposition and manner of engaging that universe and its problems than one who believes the same moral arc to be, as with most of those who live beneath it, brutish and unforgiving. The former encourages one to meet people with a certain equanimity and good faith, while the latter inspires a view of others as adversaries who are, all of them, out to get you: as writer and eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen says, the “fuckers and the fucked.” And if one views the world that way, one aspires to be the one doing the fucking—to get others before they get you.

When such personality types are found in one’s family or among one’s group of associates, they can be, by turns, annoying on the one hand (in the case of the “don’t worry be happy” bunch), or depressing on the other. But one learns to navigate and deal with both in time, to take them in whatever small doses one needs to retain a sense of balance. In fact, one could say that the ideal for oneself might be a healthy blend of the two types: the careful optimist and hopeful pessimist, believing in the good but prepared for the bad and thus, rarely knocked off stride by it on those occasions when it emerges, full-blown. But when one or another of these personality types reside in the President of the United States — someone with immense power and the ability to do great good or incalculable harm — the stakes are different then when the same manifest in your second cousin, or close friend, or the person who sits in the cubicle next to you at work.

Whatever one can say about Barack Obama in terms of his accomplishments, his political philosophy or his policy decisions, only the most viciously partisan could deny that his disposition, even in the face of significant political and personal attacks, was almost unceasingly positive. Indeed for some of us on the left it was often aggravating to bear witness to the ecumenism that was his hallmark. It sometimes drove us to distraction, this ability he had to smile, remaining cool and calm even as people questioned his place of birth, and thus his legitimacy to serve as president: a racist and ignorant calumny furthered more by his replacement than anyone else in America. So often we wished for him to take the gloves off, to call bullshit, and to do more than the subtle, though effective, mocking he often delivered to others (including Trump) at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. Knowing the contempt in which he was held by the right — folks who came together immediately after his election to plot how they would destroy him and block his agenda — many of us longed for Obama to match fire with fire, to put down the knife he had brought to a gunfight and to, as Boots Riley might put it (if not on behalf of Obama per se), pick a bigger weapon. But it was not to be. Partly, perhaps, this was because as a black man in America, Barack Obama knew his anger would be read differently than that of his 43 predecessors. And if there is one thing he has learned in the course of his remarkable and unique life, it is how not to scare white folks too much. But even more to the point, we were longing for something impossible, not because of Barack Obama’s racial identity but because of Barack Obama. It simply isn’t who he is, and it could never have been the way he would govern.

As for Donald Trump, and again whatever one thinks of his political philosophy, only the most willfully inattentive could deny that his disposition is almost the exact opposite of the man he has replaced in the Oval Office. There is nothing sunny or optimistic about him. Even when he bellows that he will “make America great again,” he does so with a perpetual scowl on his face. It is the same scowl one sees on the cover of his book, released during the campaign, or on his official presidential Twitter avatar; the same frozen frown one could behold every week on Celebrity Apprentice, whether he was firing someone or pledging to give their “great, fantastic” charity $50,000. The scowl never changed. It is a look that says everything is awful, that he peers out at his nation and is disgusted by what he sees. It is the kind of look one makes upon smelling something unpleasant — a skunk in the road or a dirty diaper — but in Trump’s case, the affect never fades. He can smell the shit, always and forever. And even as he disses the nation in ways no leftist or even liberal could without being called a traitor and told to “pick another country” if we don’t like it, his fans eat it up like manna from some heavenly host. To borrow a phrase from the manosphere and “pick-up artist” community that so flocked to his cause (because sexual predators stick together), Trump is literally “negging” America — saying dismissive, snarky and pejorative things about the country — just like misogynistic PUAs do with women, so as to signal the kind of disinterest guaranteed (in their minds at least) to make those women swoon. Whether the practice actually works on women, or at least those with even a basic modicum of self-esteem, is surely arguable. But that it has worked with tens of millions of Americans and much of Congress is not.

Far from a mere critique of Donald Trump’s personalty, I would suggest that the difference between his eternal negativity and Obama’s sometimes maddening optimism is more than an interesting biographical footnote. Because while President Obama’s penchant for deliberative action fed by a faith in the nation and its people may have led him to be too forgiving of his enemies, too willing to compromise with people unfamiliar with the term and unlikely to return the favor, President Trump’s penchant for pettiness and revenge, fed by the fundamental lack of faith in America — a place to which he referred as a “disaster” while seeking to govern it — presents an altogether different challenge and danger for us all.

If the president perceives of the nation he has been called to lead as a place of “carnage” as he put it in his inaugural speech, or a place perpetually losing, governed until now by manipulative leaders who have deliberately turned their backs on the people, then that president establishes not only a deep and abiding hostility towards elected officials other than himself — which is calculated to produce uncritical loyalty to him and him alone — but paints a picture of a hellscape beset with constant dangers from which only he can deliver us. It’s why he said as much during the campaign, bellowing that he “alone” could fix the economy or defend the nation from ISIS. This, even more than racism or xenophobia is the heart of Trump’s neo-fascist politics. If the nation is failing and the current leaders elected through democratic processes cannot be trusted, then not only they but democracy itself has failed. As such, what good is it anyhow? This is a mentality further nurtured when the new leader loses the popular vote, as Trump did, by nearly 3 million votes, yet still insists that he has captured a mandate anyway, irrespective of the majority will. That most of his fellow Americans rejected him matters not. The will of his people is the will of the people, and his will is theirs.

This was the oft-overlooked problem with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Aside from the relatively obvious shortcoming of the mantra — America has never really been great for some, whether people of color, LGBTQ folks or the poor, not to mention millions of women as women — the phrase suggested a lost glory, a fetishistic nostalgia which is always found in the seedbed of fascist political movements: the idea that things in the nation were once idyllic, until those people, whomever they may be — blacks, immigrants, Jews, globalists, the gays — usurped the people’s will for their own pernicious purposes, and squandered the former glories of said nation.

Nothing good has ever come from a political leader beholden to such a fatalistic mindset as this. A man such as Trump who comes to power on the back of that kind of narrative is almost intrinsically a danger to every democratic impulse, inherently hostile to the deliberative and dispassionate balancing of national moods, desires and interests so critical to a republic. A man such as that is almost a perfect cardboard cut-out of a dictator, however much he rules over a Constitutional system of government ostensibly marked by appropriate checks and balances.

And a man such as that cannot help but unleash the destructive forces of both state and individual violence. In his inauguration speech he clearly signaled his intentions to do just that, all (of course) in the name of protecting the people laid low by the failures and betrayals of all the others who ever led them. With his dark and foreboding portrayal of America, not as a “shining city on a hill” as Reagan would have it (however naively) or as a place in need of serious efforts to create a “more perfect union,” as Obama put it many a time, Trump painted a picture of a nation on veritable life support. Forget the record string of job growth over the last 6-plus years of the Obama Administration, or the massive cut in the numbers of people lacking health care, or the substantial closing of the gap between whites and blacks in terms of health care access thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Not that these accomplishments are sufficient to rescue the Obama legacy from much deserved progressive criticism — the ACA has inadequately protected the public from rate hikes by a still empowered insurance industry and the new jobs pay less on average than the ones lost in the Bush recession — but still. To Trump, it is as if these things and others I could list are entirely inconsequential. To Trump, America is merely a place of hopelessness, violence and decay, where all the jobs are gone, where Muslim terrorists lurk around every corner and where gangs and drugs ravage the cities. It is Mad Max in real time, or perhaps Escape From New York, with Trump reprising the role of Snake Plissken called to save the rest of us from savagery.

Imbued with such a mentality, and committed — as his website and inaugural address make clear — to the restoration of “law and order,” we must expect this president to cease the Obama administration’s investigations of abusive police departments, turn a blind eye while law enforcement attacks those protesting for greater police accountability, and seek to make good on his campaign pledge to encourage stop-and-frisk policies in the nation’s cities like those made famous in his own New York, which he praised during the campaign as having worked “wonderfully.” This, despite the fact that such policies are blatantly unconstitutional, not to mention almost laughably ineffective at ferreting out criminal conduct. Of persons stopped in New York City under the practice, only 6 percent received even a minor citation and half of these were thrown out of court for lack of evidence, meaning at least 97 percent of persons stopped were ultimately innocent of any real wrongdoing. Fewer than 2 percent were found with drugs on their person, and out of 4.5 million stops over a nine year stretch, only 4500 guns were confiscated: a miserable one-tenth of one percent of all stops. Even after controlling for crime rates in particular neighborhoods, black New Yorkers were far more likely than their white counterparts to be stopped, even though whites, when stopped, were actually more likely to be found with contraband. Indeed, one of the architects of the policy has admitted that its purpose was less to fight crime than to instill fear in the hearts and minds of young black men in the city by convincing them that they could be stopped any time they walked out their front door.

But to the man who sees little more than carnage and chaos in urban America — this, even as violent crime rates in general (and among black Americans in particular) remain about half the level they were in the late 1980s and early ’90s, despite upturns in some (though not most) cities over the past two years — none of this matters. Just like it didn’t matter than his widely-condemned attack of John Lewis for daring to criticize him was premised on the easily falsifiable idea that crime in Atlanta (Lewis’s Congressional district) is out of control and the city is falling apart. As Trump put it in one of his daily eruptions of petulant twitter-vomit, Lewis should spend less time criticizing the great leader and more time fixing his district, where presumably people have no jobs or education and are dodging bullets every time they venture away from their homes. Facts need not intrude upon the lenses worn by this president. He sees what he sees and truth is entirely fungible. So it matters not to him that far from a place that is falling apart, 5 of 6 residents in Lewis’s district are not poor, 90 percent have at least a high school diploma, and 40 percent have a college degree (which is well beyond the national average). And it doesn’t matter that crime is down 30 percent in Atlanta just since 2009, and since Lewis first entered office in 1987, violent crime has dropped in that city by nearly two-thirds.

His unfamiliarity with truth and his complete disinterest in it, goes hand in hand with his despairing cosmology. If you see the world, or in this case the nation as a reeking city on a dung heap, it becomes impossible to believe anyone who suggests otherwise. It is the mentality of the conspiracist, which no doubt explains Trump’s fondness for people like Alex Jones and the paragons of paranoia at Infowars. Anyone who presents evidence that the sky is not falling, that crime is generally dropping, as with unemployment, and that wages are beginning to rise, as with health care access, can be written off as merely part of the plot to fool the masses. To present evidence rather than to merely accept the rhetoric of the leader is to be in league with the evil overlords who are seeking to deceive the nation for some pernicious end.

Meanwhile, the man who insists that those people are the ones doing the manipulating, or seeking to exercise authoritarian control over the “sheeple” motors ahead, manifesting the very behavior about which he is warning. That none of this bodes well for the nation is an understatement of somewhat Biblical proportions. When an autocrat decides on a path he will lie and manipulate and distort for his purposes, or tell his press secretary to lie, even about crowd numbers at an inauguration. Or have an adviser invent a phrase like “alternative facts” to describe what in the past we would simply call lies. It’s enough to make Goebells blush, or the Kremlin, or Kim Jong-un. And once we re-name words and concepts, and tens of millions of people accede to the duplicity in the name of the great man and his promises of safety and security and giving their lives meaning again, the distance between that place and whatever Orwell was writing about grows shorter by the minute. War becomes peace not because it is but because the leader says it is.

If we are to effectively resist this autocrat, to marginalize him, to destroy his movement and relegate him to the ashbin of history as just another bad idea — like asbestos, truck nuts or Trump steaks — it will be necessary for all those invested in liberty (even when we disagree over the particulars of policy and on many issues) to join forces in the effort.

And even more, it will be necessary for those of us on the left to point out the delicious irony of Trumpism in relation to our own politic. For generations it was we, from liberals to radicals, who were called America-hating, unpatriotic, and hostile to the nation and its institutions. Even as we demanded that America live up to its self-professed principles — which by definition suggested a fundamental belief that we were capable of the task — it was we who were instructed to love it (as it was) or leave it. Those who preferred the status quo, of segregation, blatant and legally inscribed inequality, of women and LGBTQ folk as secondary or tertiary citizens, were the ones deemed lovers of all things American. It was the people who stood for the pledge and crossed their hearts and mumbled words they had learned in pre-school but about whose meaning they had never been encouraged to spend much time thinking, who were hailed as full-throated, red-blooded members of the community. But now we see things for what they are. It is the right that is invested in cynicism, and what they themselves used to call “America hating.” What is more hateful after all: believing that we can do better and insisting that we not rest on our laurels (let alone go backwards to a fictive past), or declaring that the nation is a train wreck, where we’ll simply have to accept millions of people without affordable health care, 15 to 1 wealth ratios between whites and blacks, and an economy in which the top one-tenth of one percent of the population control as much as the bottom 90 percent combined?

It seems self-evident that to whatever extent patriotism has any positive meaning at all — or at least to whatever extent loving the nation does — it is we on the left who manifest it far more concretely than the right and infinitely more so than Donald Trump. It is one thing to see the nation in its complexity, the pain amid promise, and to demand that something be done to bring the reality in line with the rhetoric. It is quite another to see the nation as a one-dimensional shit-show from which only a solitary personality and his bombast can rescue us. The first runs the risk of being naive, while the latter runs the risk of complete civic death and the dissolution of any and everything that ever made one’s society worth having or saving in the first place.

So if you love your country and the people in it, this is your time to prove it. And it may well be the last one you get.

Choose wisely.