Your Leaders Were Lying. Now The People Are Driving

Edited by Sam Thielman

LAST NIGHT ON A CALL held by the Democratic Socialists of America, I heard from a Minneapolis teacher and DSA member, Ari Grant-Sasson. He described the aftermath of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) killing Alex Pretti, a nurse and union member, after Pretti committed the capital crime of trying to help a woman that CBP had knocked to the ground.

First Grant-Sasson described the Minneapolis police arriving on the scene after the ICE-CBP task force had already left. He noted that the cops could have gotten between ICE and the people. I didn’t get the sense that Grant-Sasson is naive about the cops. He was instead noting the vast, unignorable discrepancy between the public-protection justifications for policing and the way the police behave when the people need protection from a federal agency that gleefully spills their blood and then slanders the dead as terrorists. After Friday’s massive strike in Minneapolis to protest ICE, Grant-Sasson hopes that more strikes are coming, and that they will put pressure not only on ICE, but on Mayor Jacob Frey, Gov. Tim Walz and the police.

Then he described something else that has been visible and inspiring in all the reporting coming out of Minnesota: Networks of parents, often using schools as donation hubs, have assembled resource pools. They deliver these resources to their immigrant and nonwhite neighbors who are at risk of being snatched or worse. They ensure their neighbors are fed. They accompany the vulnerable when the vulnerable need to leave their homes. Many people are unable to work but rent will still be due when the month turns over. Minnesotans are helping one another with all of this. 

Amidst the violence of the state, people turn to their communities. They build resilience together out of necessity. To warn each other of the advance of ICE, they array themselves into patrols and conduct reconnaissance. They make mistakes and adjust. They observe their enemy’s patterns and adjust. You can read a point-of-view account of these networks from our friends at CrimethInc. We saw this in Los Angeles, Charlotte, Chicago, Portland and probably in DC. It’s happening in New York, too, though New York has not been flooded with ICE like those cities have.

This, to use a scary term, is called anarchism. Anarchism is not chaos. It's grassroots, stateless socialism. 

I’m not saying these communities are making a conscious choice to embrace anarchism. Their actions emerge from the emergency they face. I’m saying they are organically demonstrating anarchist principles and priorities about people building local power amongst themselves once state functions fail or turn on them. If you want to call it “direct democratic action,” by all means do that. (I am a socialist who supports wielding state power for democratic purposes and through democratic mechanisms, but I respect anarchist traditions and hold the romantic view that socialism and anarchism keep each other honest.) They’re also showing that these principles are not the exclusive domain of dedicated comrades dressed for black-bloc action, but instead are common sense to normies, once normies have to confront the reality of a death squad that is prepared to kill them. [“Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization,” as somebody said.—Sam]

This isn’t a choice such people want to make. It’s thrust on them by the unwillingness of their leaders to protect them. Once ICE killed Renee Good, Walz urged Minnesotans to record ICE, to create a record usable for potential legal action, or just to refute ICE-CBP propaganda. It was the governor of the state off-loading the responsibility for protecting people onto the people themselves. It took two more weeks, and more maiming and death, for Walz to deploy the National Guard. We'll see if they end up providing the protection from ICE that Minnesotans have so far been left to homebrew. 

Frey gave an interview to Charles Homans of the New York Times that crystalized the point: 

At the mall, I asked Frey whether this display of power, and imposition of powerlessness, might undercut the credibility of the city government, the faith its citizens had — needed to have — in its ability to stand up for its citizens in material terms.

"What we’re seeing is exactly the opposite," Frey replied. “We’re seeing people unite. We’re seeing people proud to work with police officers — people who have been extraordinarily critical of law enforcement,” he added. "The loudest critics are now the most vocally supportive." It was only later that I realized he had turned the question to the citizens’ support for the city, not the other way around.

An anarchist punk band from 40 years ago called Amebix once wrote a song called "Nobody's Driving." In the context of a world then seeming to spiral toward superpower confrontation that risked nuclear war, the song sought to shake people out of the delusion that the systems that brought them to the precipice would save them from the abyss. "Your leaders were lying/ Nobody's driving," goes the chorus. (Here's a fantastic Ted Leo cover.) 

Someone in Minnesota is driving. It is not Walz or Frey. It is not Greg Bovino or Kristi Noem or Donald Trump, and it won't be Tom Homan. It is the people themselves: the outraged, galvanized, multiethnic working class, who see the imperial boomerang spinning toward their heads, even if they might not use that term. They are not only building power from necessity. They are laying a foundation that, should they choose to, can take the reins of state power by ousting those who either are failing to protect them or who promise to use state power against them. 

Socialists are at the forefront of an unapologetic, aggressive agenda to abolish ICE and prosecute offenders. Zohran Mamdani got whoops and cheers from the audience of The View when he unequivocally called for the end of ICE. The people are way in front of the Democratic Party, to say nothing of the Republicans. (Trump, despite his advisers, seems to recognize that ICE and CBP have profoundly miscalculated in Minnesota.) But it has been the choice of the dominant faction of the Democratic Party—including Frey, who is pro-cursing at ICE but anti-abolition—to avoid this fight. That should be the lever for ousting this faction from positions of responsibility and taking over the Democratic Party, the only available option for stopping the depredations of ICE through existing political channels. It's a choice between their seats and our lives. 

It won't be easy. It may not happen. I've watched my entire adult life as the Democrats have chosen in moments of emergency—most often, emergencies Democrats either allowed or created outright—to discipline the left, exceptionalize the outrages as "abuses," and offer instead reforms that look and operate more like ratification of the systems that yielded the emergency in the first place. Particularly over the past decade, I've watched the Democrats blame their constituents for their own failures to offer and implement agendas that meet the moment. Such habits contextualize Walz and Frey's off-loading. 

But if a takeover of the existing system doesn't happen, Minnesota is showing the rest of the country that we can build political, social and economic structures that pose actual alternatives to the horrors the current system produces. Such examples are antidotes to what's called "hypernormalization." That's a term emerging from Alexei Yurchak's book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation and popularized by Adam Curtis' instant-classic YouTube documentary. Hypernormalization is what happens when people lose faith in the promises and even purposes of the systems that structure their lives, but because those systems are all that people have lived through, they cannot imagine them collapsing, let alone what comes after the collapse. Doesn't that sound like us today? In the Soviet case, the collapse came as such a shock that it outpaced social resiliency. What came next was oligarchic domination, authoritarian rule, and pitiless war. 

Every empire thinks it is eternal. None of them are. Every empire thinks it has more time than it ends up having. Perhaps it is time to begin taking a lesson from the people of Minnesota—and Los Angeles, and Chicago, and Charlotte, and on and on—and begin to imagine social, political and economic compacts beyond the United States of America and the capitalist hegemony for which it stands. 

THAT'S LIKELY IT for us this week. I'm snowed in like many of you are, and both my kids are in remote school today, like Sam's. I had to write the first half of this on my phone since my older daughter was on my laptop, and then we had a local outage that Optimum just fixed. Even when school reopens, I will be in an afternoon childcare crunch this week while I'm on deadline for a magazine piece that I need to turn around. I'm sorry to our readers, but something has to give, and this week, it's probably going to be our second scheduled edition. I'm running fast to stay in place, it feels like. 

There has been fantastic journalism from Minnesota, including from the excellent local source Sahan Journal and the dedicated journalists of the Star-Tribune. I haven't read Kerry Howley's New York cover story yet, but she has a track record of greatness. Hamilton Nolan's been reporting great stuff from Minnesota as well. And keep an eye out for a forthcoming piece from my good friend Adam Serwer of the Atlantic, who just got back from Minneapolis.