Episode 385 of RevolutionZ features our 28th excerpt from The Wind Cries Freedom, an oral history imagining and reporting from the next American Revolution. This excerpt follows organizers inside RPS as they build a second national convention with chapter-based delegates, intentional representation, and real mechanisms for deliberation. It continues our look at movement infrastructure. How did they scale participation, keep decisions accountable, and build cross-country solidarity without turning politics into a personality contest? How did they retain and radiate autonomy within solidarity? What lessons can we glean from their reports about their feelings, motives, and choices?
The centerpiece of that discussion is the Revolutionary Participatory Society's shadow government project, a parallel set of roles and public policy positions meant to challenge the real government while proving an alternative can be serious, detailed, and rooted. How did they set it up? What did it entail? Our "guests" from the future also address a hard strategic question by way of a report describing a thorny convention conflict. What happened when “revolution” got momentarily confused with macho violence? Their report argues for nonviolent discipline, de-escalation, and the long game of building numbers, legitimacy, system changes, and real-world institutions that meet needs now. It says they fought state violence by creating circumstances in which state violence would benefit movements more than the state.
But, before all that, we of course live in the now, not the future, and where we are, where I am, Trump recently threatened to obliterate an entire population, an entire civilization, and then, incredibly, the news cycle kept rolling, and most of us still woke up, got out of bed, went to school or work, returned home, made dinner, and acted like nothing much had changed. We might have wept, we might have cursed or even screamed. But we accepted a bargain. We didn't reorient ourselves to openly, forcefully resist. I wrote a response that started as a moral howl about Trumpian threats, U.S. imperial violence, and the quiet danger of becoming “good Americans” like yesteryear's "Good Germans," people who perhaps disapprove in private but who don’t challenge, refuse, and disrupt in public. My howl addressed government officials, soldiers, media people, teachers, and students, as groups who could avoid the label "Good American" if they would just do their jobs as they claim to. Serve the public, protect the public, report what matters, teach the public, and become the public.
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