The Truth is On Our Side … And This is Why We Lose

As has happened in Texas and Wisconsin, legislators from the minority party fled Oregon in order to obstruct the passage of legislation by preventing quorum. However, unlike in those states, the legislators didn't merely flee, but they also called upon local far-right terror groups for "protection." That is, the Oregon GOP called on groups like the Oregon 3-Percenters, asking them to arm themselves so that they could resist - violently, if necessary - any attempt to return the legislators to the legislature (even though such a move would be lawful). More simply, the GOP is asking terrorists to intervene in the democratic process – they are using violence as a tool in the legislative process. This is fascism.

However, one of the differences between the current rise of fascism and that which happened in the 1920s and 1930s is the diffuse nature of the current strand. Whereas the Brownshirts were card carrying members of the Nazi party, there is often no direct institutional tie between the GOP and militia groups like the 3-Percenters. And this has allowed a measure of plausible deniability, as the GOP can claim that it doesn't support these terrorists, while nonetheless acting in ways that do. And then, when the GOP needs these armed groups, they happen to be there ready for orders.

Part of this institutional diffuseness can be attributed to "The Turner Diaries," the book that influenced people like Timothy McVeigh, and that preached this type of de-centered organizational structure. But I also think it has something to do with the fact that the United States has a two-party system. Unlike in interwar Germany, where the Nazi party was a new party, the GOP is a pre-existing and established party. And this means that it has to conduct itself, at least publicly, with a certain measure of "decorum." For instance, if the GOP started training and arming "official" GOP militia groups, people would freak out, because the majority of us expect our political parties to obey the rule of law. But if they keep their distance from these groups, and allow them to grow in an environment created by the GOP and meant to be conducive to their growth, people worry less.

Case in point, the story in Oregon. This story is one in which the GOP is arming itself against its Democratic opponents who are acting lawfully. And it's hardly getting any attention. But if the 3-Percenters were a militia armed and trained by the GOP, it would. So, the organizational diffuseness not only allows plausible deniability (which wouldn't work in this situation, as the groups are explicitly working together), but it also allows the GOP to claim that they were only calling upon random "patriots" for help. That is, the GOP doesn’t have to take responsibility for the 3-Percenters, but they can still call upon them when it proves useful.

It doesn’t take much to see past this charade, but I get the impression that many of us still resist doing so. At the very least, the endless parade of GOP denials wouldn’t work if, rather than naively believing lie upon lie, we instead looked at what their actions revealed. And their actions are clear – the GOP, as in the case of Oregon, has armed terrorist militia groups throughout the United States. Granted, they didn’t arm them directly, because this would have been politically foolish. But they did create the conditions by which it could occur, they fanned the flames to ensure that it did, and they then called upon these groups when they were needed. However, this is an uncomfortable truth to accept, and many of us don’t.

In fact, what’s happening in Oregon isn’t anomalous given the history of the GOP and right-wing terror, but instead, it’s merely the next step in a trajectory that’s been unfolding for decades (if not longer). In fact, if we stretched our imagination back far enough, we could pretty easily paint a direct line from the non-state terror that occurred under slavery to that which occurred under Jim Crow and on to our current batch of far-right terrorists. As it goes, recent historical scholarship has done a good job in arguing that the origins of the Second Amendment lie in the need to call up citizens for slave patrols. That is, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that states could call upon ordinary citizens for the purpose of violently subjugating escaped slaves. And in this light, there’s an obvious connection between this and the way that the Second Amendment currently operates, insofar as it now allows the arming of far-right militia groups that can then be called on by right-wing establishment politicians. But try to arm left-wing liberation groups (not that I advocate this), and you quickly find the limits of the Second Amendment. Just ask Huey Newton.

One of Kierkegaard’s great insights was that in the pursuit of truth we are often our own worst enemies. In fact, philosophers dating back to Plato have argued that the greatest impediment to the truth is our desire for lies, if I also happen to think that Kierkegaard offers us the most significant account of this problem. But this problem isn’t purely a personal problem inhibiting our pursuit of self-knowledge, in the way that Kierkegaard thought it was, it is also a political problem too. That is, we’re not only avoiding the truth about ourselves but also the truth about the world, because if we acknowledged this latter truth, we might feel compelled to change the world. And this is a responsibility that few of us want to embrace.

Politics on the left have always depended on the ability to help others overcome their resistance to the truth, while politics on the right have depended on the ability to craft a lie that people are willing to believe. But we often underestimate this willingness. It is not the passive naivety of someone who lazily fails to do their due diligence in exposing a lie, but the deeply willful act of someone who wants nothing more than to avoid the truth. These lies don’t have to be good ones, they just have to satisfy our desire for lies. And unless we contend with this desire, even in its most mundane of manifestations, our gains will always be tenuous.

So, the truth might set us free, but there is another truth here too. And that truth is that until we are free, freedom is the enemy of our desire.