Giving Resistance a Good Name

Giving Resistance a Good Name

By David Swanson

It’s popular to refer to the political line of a major corporate party in the United States as something like “the resistance” when the other of the two parties is on the throne of what both parties have, over many decades, actively converted into an unconstitutional position of something wildly beyond old-fashioned royal powers. Around 2004 the Democratic Party line was to pretend to oppose wars. Around 2018 it wasn’t. So the “resistance” of that party’s followers included war opposition in 2004 but not in 2018. Its essence was and is not resistance at all, but obedience.

When it comes to the general habit of resisting unproven, unworthy, illegitimate, and unpopular authority, the stance promoted by U.S. culture is quite mixed, and virtually everyone in the U.S. government is opposed to resistance as a matter of principle or as a matter of cowardice. For every whistleblower, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people who could have exposed the very same abuses and chose not to.

Bruce Levine believes that the anti-authoritarian personality type is beaten down and drugged out of people by U.S. culture, and that we suffer in the United States from excessive apathy and obedience because the activists we need have been diagnosed as ill, drugged into submission, conditioned by schooling, tamed by rewards, hounded out of academe and respectability, imprisoned, and chased out of the country or exiled. Add those factors to long working hours, lack of economic security and healthcare, student debt loads, tons of television viewing, obsessive consumerism, social isolation, bootstraps bullshit, and the mythology that holds that submissive loyalty to the U.S. flag equals a brave stance for liberty, and you’ve got a population primed to put up with more shit than probably any other on earth — and, perhaps not coincidentally, the country producing the most violent destruction around the world and, by some measures — and per capita by virtually every measure — the most destruction of the earth’s environment.

The rest of the article is here.