this is the final Alt-Right Playbook. it's called The South Bank of the Rubicon.
thank you for watching this series the last eight years. I'm not going anywhere, but I'll be turning my attention to topics other than conservative rhetorical strategies; going forward, I don't see our battles being fought with rhetoric.
support my work on Patreon and/or subscribe to me on Nebula. transcript below the cut.
The Rubicon is a river in Italy. The story goes that, at the end of the governorship of Julius Caesar, he was ordered to disband his army and stay north of the Rubicon. When, instead, Caesar marched his army across the river and towards Rome, it was considered an act of treason, and the beginning of the Roman Civil War, at the end of which Caesar would reign victorious. It is said, as he forded the Rubicon, Caesar declared, “The die is cast.”
In today’s vernacular, we refer to a metaphoric Rubicon as the point of no return. Children “cross the Rubicon” into adulthood, isolationist governments “cross the Rubicon” into international politics. Each of us will cast the die several times in our own lives. But we say also that movements, that people, cross the Rubicon when they become irredeemable.
When times are bad, we wonder anxiously how far from the Rubicon we are. When does an insurgency become a war, a demonstration a riot? When is the moment an economy in danger becomes one in collapse? We scan the horizon for the riverbank, hoping we didn’t cross it some ways back.
The thing about points of no return, the reason we worry over them so much, is it’s rare to know where they are until they are some ways behind you. The Rubicon is not the Mississippi; it is a muddy little creek history lost track of for centuries.
In the United States, we are increasingly comfortable saying that our democracy is “under threat.” That we are “at risk” of descending into authoritarianism. Few are ready to say that the threat has arrived. And I’m referring to myself as I say that: I’m not ready to say it’s arrived. No one wants to call it prematurely. The Right screams that “the Left” - Black Lives Matter or Antifa or some thinly-veiled caricature of The Jews - are ready to kick down your door and bash your teeth in. And I talk about why they say this, their need to exaggerate the threat from the Left, so that, when they aggress against us, it seems like self-defense. So that we are to blame for any violence we suffer. I talk about the danger of this thinking being accepted. I say the way mainstream conservative politicians and media legitimize these arguments is “worrying.” But I don’t say “they are saying this in preparation to kick down your door and bash in your teeth.” I want people to listen to me. I don’t want to sound irrational, and I don’t want to sound like them. And… I don’t want it to be true yet.
Say, for the sake of argument, you are, at this moment, ankle-deep in the water, desperately wondering how many paces you are from The South Bank of the Rubicon.
There was a time when any number of things would have been the moment. If you could go back to 2015 and ask, “Is a candidate promising to jail his political opponents, or a president building concentration camps at the border, or a lame duck provoking an insurrection to overturn a vote, the moment where you would unequivocally call him a fascist?” And we would have said, “No question.” But those moments came, and they went, and we called them troubling, we called them dangerous, but it still seemed alarmist to call them fascist. Journalists and policy wonks still reacted with surprise if you came anywhere near the word. You could still run a campaign on “reasoning with the Right.” Republicans have made great strides by being so blatantly horrible that accurately describing their behavior sounds like hyperbole.
It seems we are always approaching the other side of the Rubicon, never arriving. We can turn back. The north is still the nearer bank.
There is a knack to this. Everyone expects it to happen all at once. That one day we will wake up to swastikas and kids in cages and unmarked vans disappearing people off the street. But those all happened on different days. And the swastikas were a natural extension of the barely-coded language of the Administration’s supporters, the cages were the next step after their family separation policy, and the vans were not a surprise after years of police militarization. You don’t have to cross the river quickly, just steadily. So that every step makes the last one seem inevitable and the next one obvious. The people who say “this will never happen on our watch,” they will divert the river south to make it true.
It’s losing a little ground on a dozen fronts every day. It’s seeing so many lines crossed you can’t even remember where you used to draw them. It’s the readiness to give up on things being better and just wanting them to be quiet.
I can’t tell you if that moment has come. I don’t know how to call it any better than you. So, instead, I’m going to ask you to do something: I want you to decide, at this moment, what the Rubicon is for you. What is that undeniable instant where, if something drastic does not happen immediately, your rights and freedoms are forfeit. And don’t show up in my comments saying it happened years or centuries ago - you’re not wrong, but cynicism is acceptance. I’m asking when would be the time to act. Write it down. Put it on your phone or your dry erase board or a post-it on your bathroom mirror. So when that moment comes you will remember that this was your Rubicon, because it won’t feel like it anymore. It will feel like the next logical step.
And ask yourself, when that moment comes, what is the right thing to do? You don’t have to have an answer yet. But think on it. Cuz we haven’t been doing it.
As a leftist, the futures I envision are full of possibility. I am fond of saying “there are a hundred ways forward and only one way back.” So many things we could try if we allow ourselves to let go of white supremacy, of capitalism, of patriarchy. Imagining the future is a kind of world-building. To be on the Left, at least the way I try to do it, is to desire a spreading out, a pluralizing, an abandonment of hierarchy and a sharing of power between us all. I don’t know if that future is likely, but I know it’s possible.
That’s not how things look on the Right. For the Right, left to its own devices?
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