how it is

trying to write a few true and simple things. plus Tesla direct actions

At the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.

- Ben Lerner, 10:04

Hi.

I’ve been working, alonging the fiction and everything else, on a longer essay that among other things, does some attempted sensemaking of the present in American politics, in the style of building the cathedral or living in interregnum or every day is all there is. The aforementioned pieces have not aged badly, I think; give them a look if you’re newer here. Anyway, in the interim, here are some real basic tho(ugh)ts.

• I grew up under autocracy, which is one form of authoritarianism. This shaped many things about me. The effects of authoritarianism are not evenly distributed. Once it is the settled atmosphere one is surrounded by, it can feel, for a number of people, normal and boring and vaguely pleasant in a haunted way. The first half of my life, as well as studying history and literature, made me understand how authoritarian political system change can arrive and stay in people’s lives, for some like carbon monoxide, for some like nerve gas, and for some like clean pure air.

• The U.S. has plummeted, in three weeks, into illiberalism and significant constitutional challenges. It is presenting some warning signs of beginning to slide into authoritarianism¹ and full constitutional crisis. It isn’t all the way there yet. This distinction matters because we are far from having lost everything, and there are lot of people acting and thinking and posting like we have.

• Illiberalism is a process more than it is an end state. It is something between a soft authoritarianism and an on-ramp to authoritarianism.² Democratic institutions exist, but civil liberties, minority rights, and checks on executive power are undermined. Illiberalism is marked by attacks on judicial independence and the press, the erosion of minority rights, the suppression of academic and institutional freedoms, and nationalist-populist rhetoric. I believe this is where we are.

• Living as a subject of authoritarianism, in the long term, for most people, is like having termites slowly take up residence in your mind. The seductive promise of fascism, many intellectuals have observed, is you do not have to think about other people. Everyone who you’re not concerned with or dislike gets to be NPC. And in choosing this frame, ironically, you become NPC yourself, flabby and frightened and morally compromised, with an ever-narrowing field of vision. You outsource thinking to the state. You outsource action. The ability to take action and the ability to fully see people who are different from you atrophy. Your ability to be a moral actor and stand up for actual people in your life—your patient, your family, your friend, your neighbor—who are suffering or in danger narrows or closes. The ruling party targets those who support the vulnerable, after all.³

• Fascism goes beyond authoritarianism or illiberalism. Fascism is an end state. It is a mobilized ideology that fuses state power with myth, nationalism, and sadistic violence.⁴ Fascism looks like, among much else, total propaganda, captured institutions, nonfunctional free press, captured or nonexistent elections, citizen jailings and use of force against the people. It means that you cannot look at the front page of a newspaper and trust it to bring you news. It means that journalists and political opposition and minorities and the underclass are all at the risk of jailing and political violence. What is very difficult to truly grasp about fascism is that it corrodes and haunts life’s beauty and freedom for every single person under it. As fascism intensifies its hold, its subjects lose the ability to trust and remember other people altogether; this produces a shattering alienation. So I think it’s good to be aware of the shape and stakes of this catastrophic end state, so that we can say: we have been moving toward this and crucially we are not all the way there.⁵ We do have the early and partial seed-forms of fascism present in the current moment, and have had them for longer than the current moment. Fighting this end state, as it begins to root and grow, becomes the most crucial thing, when it comes to defending future dignity, freedom, and meaning in our own lives.

• Something that gives me some slender comfort, that my friend Hanna was the first to articulate to me, is that so far, full fascism has historically never taken hold in a place as diverse as the present-day U.S. There is simply so much difference, so many groups with various and shifting alliances, and in the present day a lack of a clear united majority along an identitarian line, that it produces a comparatively ungovernable mass. This is one reason among many to maintain relationships and coalitions across difference.

• There is a vast and growing discrepancy between people who are paying attention to politics and people who aren’t. A lot of people I’ve encountered of late who have been paying some attention to the news have expressed dissociation, numbness, overwhelm, or deep distress over the current state of U.S. politics while saying that they don’t know what to do, what to hope for, and what to think. It goes without saying that people have lives entirely outside of politics, busy and stressful ones. People have families, illnesses, crushes, job searches, busy jobs, the definition of a lot going on. Still, this discrepancy, after a certain point, is harmful.

• We need a public, by which I mean, we need a mass of people with some kind of consensus understanding. This is a fragile, capacious time, where things could go in a vast number of directions. 200,000 people are getting fired today for no reason from the federal government thanks to Elon Musk; more will follow. Without intervention our institutions will hollow out so that when we turn to them to catch us—in times of economic need, natural disaster, health vulnerability—more and more of us will fall through the cracks and into the depths of the American underclass. The present is a state where anything can happen, and a public can in theory be coauthor of what happens. But collective understanding and sensemaking is a crucial first step for collective action. There need to be ways to form it without letting the zone flooding and mind-termites all the way in.

some thoughts on what to do, take or leave

• You need a reserve of psychic strength to weather this time, and crucially, to act in it. So build it up. Protect and nourish your body and your mind. Find ways to connect to other people, to good art, to some form of political practice, and to the earth. Talk about how you feel, but not endlessly. Turn outwards, from your phone and from yourself, towards other people. Have something or someone to care for. Help someone, and preferably not just one person, to care for you. Leave the house reasonably often, see and watch and read real art, have a fitness or health practice, do things that make you happy and feel present in your body.

• Over the next few weeks, find ways to collectively make meaning of what is happening, in person, with people you know. I have been doing this and it has contributed greatly to my feeling well and okay despite the various horrors.

• Don’t take them seriously with every single thing they say, or on every single news story spin cycle. I mean, take them seriously, in the sense that they have the ambition to reshape and destroy the U.S. government in some pretty serious ways, implement sweeping austerity and enrich themselves in the process. The reshaping will affect you and yours, now or eventually, if they’re successful; we don’t want this. But they’re also not all-powerful. They’re immoral, unruly, breaking what they can, and trying to maximize attention. Their coalition is unwieldy and fragile and with many an absolutely radioactive loser in the mix. They want you to be distracted, disorganized, and distraught. So I think it’s good to use discernment, think critically, and take a breath.⁶

• The primary mechanism of your future obedience, indoctrination, numbing, or neutralization will be your smartphone and the multinational corporations that carve out real estate on it and in your mind. Each of us gets to decide what to do with that. Dislodging illiberal power will happen largely in meatspace (with signficant laptop coordination, to be clear 😉). Figuring out how to show up in real life, in the physical world, when it counts, will matter for everyone. And if you are involved with some kind of political outfit that is open to new membership, I beg of your group to have a robust communications program outside of Instagram.

• Clench your fucking fist and remember who the fuck you are. Live well and defiantly and by your values. Personally I’m interested in being—and being around people who are—brave, honorable, unfragile, capable, thoughtful, and in possession of style, humor, and moral nerve. Maybe you are too. Defiance, once you’ve tapped into it, is useful. It can give you an animating energy, it can remind you of your own aliveness and stamina. Anger is better, always, than despair. Take in what they’re doing, what it means. Tell yourself you want to live past this. Live to see their downfall; live to see them die.

• The small things matter. Nearly anyone can do them. To act politically is a muscle and a muscle that atrophies. It makes sense, maybe, to try to stay fit.

• The best way to convince our shared enemies, and yourself, that you’re not NPC, is to play. 😘

art by Nu Xuan Hua

I started this newsletter to write to my friends, and that’s what it still feels like, how I want to try to keep it feeling as long as I can. I am thinking of so many of you with tenderness. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.

Sarah

appendix: some things I would like to draw your attention to

• I’d love a lot more eyeballs on the #TeslaTakedown, a burgeoning series of connected direct actions. There’s a more detailed explanation here, but in short: the primary anchor of Musk’s eye-bulging wealth is the overvalued Tesla stock bubble. If it pops, he becomes more economically vulnerable. This, and Donald Trump kicking him to the curb (unlikely), are the only two things that could potentially dislodge him from continuing to chew through the wires of the car we are all being driven in.

  • This is one action of many on 2/19, focused on supporting federal worker unionists.

  • If you are feeling like absolute shit about the state of things and your partner or good friend also feels like absolute shit, you can get some people together to lather certain neighborhoods and local Tesla dealerships with these flyers, or make your version of these.

• I think some of you think it is cringe or lib or useless to call your representatives right now. I assure you that it is not. More broadly, I recommend that all of us think less and less of politics through the lens of aesthetics or personal identity category, but I digress.

  • Also, if you live in New York state, Eric Adams has effectively made Donald Trump the mayor of NYC, to keep himself out of jail. This is an important inflection point, with multiple officials including card-carrying conservatives resigning over this wild corruption. Call Kathy Hochul and your state and city reps, tell them you want Adams removed from office.

• This Solmaz Sharif poem has often brought me comfort simply for what it names, and for its icy, tessellating truths.

• I’ve been listening to the really lovely debut EP from Green Fuse, a newly launched project from multihyphenate Sarah Esocoff. I’m calling it…angelic grunge. Congratulations, Sarah. 🌱🔌

me writing this 800 tabs open forgettin 2 eat lunch

1. I think it’s useful to briefly talk terms and meaning here, without getting too Civics 101. Authoritarianism is a governance system characterized by strong centralized power and limited political freedoms, where individual rights, independent media, and political opposition are all suppressed in favor of the state’s authority. Rule of law that applies to all is weak to absent. It’s an umbrella category.

2. Some examples of the illiberalism to authoritarianism pipeline are: Hungary (under Orbán), which began by controlling courts and media under a nationalist platform and is now considered an electoral autocracy; Turkey (under Erdoğan), which shifted from a pluralistic democracy to a powerful centralized presidency, with jailed journalists and opposition leaders; Russia (under Putin) which moved from a compromised democracy to full authoritarian rule through media control, election manipulation, nostalgic nationalist appeal, and brutal suppression of dissent.

3. Here’s one chilling present-day example of that kind of targeting. Here’s another.

4. Some signs of fascism are: the militarization of society, where armies, paramilitary forces, or police force act as political enforcers. The full normalization of political violence and persecution, where there are attacks on or jailing of opponents, targeted assassinations, hunting down of minority groups that people are made to hate; rampant racism, xenophobia, and scapegoating of minorities by the state and by its people is common. Total propaganda where the state controls public discourse, untrue nationalistic myths run rampant, truth is unconfirmable, and alternative narratives than the dominant party’s or the Leader’s are destroyed or suppressed. Charismatic cultlike leadership, where the Leader is widely seen as the embodiment of the nation, the father figure, the only possible savior.

5. There’s a widespread tendency to collapse Bad Things into The Bad Thing. To me, degrees matter, scale matters. The path of the last three weeks is a path that plausibly leads to the end of U.S. democracy, which was already straining and compromised and had been ever since the end of Reconstruction. Some people like to say that we are already in full fascism, we do not live in a democracy, this is as bad as it gets. This is short sighted, entitled, and ethnocentric. This is not as bad as it gets. It matters to prevent it from getting a lot worse.

6. Think about your relationship to news consumption if you don’t have to do it professionally: time blocking, media sourcing, deciding if you want push notification alerts for breaking news. For those of you who want information in a form other than breaking news alerts crashing over your heads like icy waves, this is a tracker of the implementation of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy behemoth that Donald Trump disavowed constantly on the campaign trail, and is now putting into motion. I read nearly all of Project 2025 in the fall, before writing living in interregnum. I can’t say I find looking at the tracker…easy, but I have found it better than the alternatives.