How to survive the forthcoming rule of Trump

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Editor’s note: Guy Lancaster’s provocative message is not for everyone. In fact, some of our editorial staff disagree strongly with some of his points. But as we all grapple with the meaning of this election, we think it’s important to present a range of views and responses. We’re publishing Lancaster’s shock and awe reaction — a literal call to arms, even for the libs — as one perspective among many.

As the Arkansas Times’ own Matt Campbell wrote earlier this year, “America is cooked.”

The U.S. Supreme Court not only paved the way for another Donald Trump presidency, but it also ensured that he will possess unchecked dictatorial powers once he’s back in the White House.

At the local level, our own governor raised a wad of cash to combat incipient democracy in Arkansas (See: abortion rights, medical marijuana). And if we can’t even get some of these issues to the ballot, chances are that Arkansas’s extended experiment in direct democracy is dead. You know the Republicans will simply raise the bar for the next election.

What will happen now is anyone’s guess, but make no mistake — there are dark days ahead. How do we respond? Well, I’ve come up with a list of suggestions, but I have to tell you that my list is riven with contradictions. After all, it is incumbent upon us to remember that our fellow Americans who voted for Donald Trump still remain our fellow Americans and that we should always retain an expansive notion of just who “we” are. At the same time, though, the Trump movement has mobilized the forces of violence akin to the Ku Klux Klan and, before that, the anti-abolitionist crackdown in the slaveholding South. Any openness to the other side must be tempered with a concern for one’s personal safety.

In short, what you’ll find below is less a guidebook and more a cry from the heart from one still struggling to reconcile a range of reactions to the devastation this election will no doubt wreak upon the country we love. Take it for what it is.

First, remember who Republicans are.

During the 2020 Republican National Convention, the party opted not to put forward a platform that would highlight the values it held and the policies it would pursue but, instead, committed itself solely to Trump’s reelection. That was the Republicans’ only policy. And loyal service to Trump remains the mission of the Republican Party today. There is no vision of a greater future for this nation indivisible and its citizens than what best profits Trump.

Therefore, it’s more accurate to think of someone like French Hill not as the 2nd Congressional District of Arkansas’s representative in Congress, but as Trump’s representative in the 2nd Congressional District of Arkansas. Every Republican office holder represents Trump, not us.

The next time you are tempted to write to your congressman with concerns about something like wait time for treatment at the VA hospital, ask yourself: Would you request help from Vladimir Putin’s best friend? The next time you are tempted to invite your local elected official to your MLK Day celebration, ask yourself: Would you invite David Duke’s favorite president to this affair?

Even if some Republican officials remain personally disgusted by Trump’s behavior, they will not do a damn thing to cross him. Long gone are the days when elected representatives occasionally crowed about standing up to the leadership of their own party. Not one Republican will ever say a single word against Trump, and most of them have so internalized their public pronouncements upon his virtues that they no longer have to feign a belief in his unique greatness.

I believe there is no need to communicate with any Republican official. They do not serve you and never will. Remember who they are.

Second, delete all your social media accounts.

Since his purchase of what used to be Twitter, Elon Musk has operated that site with the apparent sole aim of advancing right-wing ideology and promoting “Great Replacement” and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. No surprise, then, that Musk came out in support of Trump, propping up his candidacy with millions of dollars and numerous high-profile appearances. You who remain on the platform now dubbed X may think yourself part of the online resistance, but you are not, for you are doing more damage to your cause by remaining there.

Social media depends upon a certain number of “normies” to balance things out and make the platforms relatively attractive to advertisers. Without average people, platforms stagnate and become uninteresting even to their own users. Take a look at Parler, Gab and Truth Social, the right-wing social media platforms launched as alternatives to the likes of Facebook. None are remotely successful, and Truth Social, in particular, was bleeding so much money earlier this year ($328 million in its first quarter) that it would have closed up shop were it not for Trump’s cult buying stock out of religious devotion,thus propping up the company. (However, Truth Social is likely to get huge infusions of capital now that Trump is set to be president, for this will be an easy means for investors to curry favor with him and shape our policies, foreign and domestic.)

As Charlie Warzel recently noted in The Atlantic, it’s time to consider X a white supremacist site on par with Parler and Gab. Elon Musk can’t rake in much money from an audience of reactionaries and sex traffickers alone. But when you are on social media, you help to subsidize those reactionaries and sex traffickers. With every tweet, you are helping to fund the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is solely owned and operated by Trump.

Alongside this, you need to get off social media because you need to start taking your own safety seriously (more on that below). They are tracking everything you do. These platforms can tell how much time you spend just looking at particular content, so even if you don’t post anything critical of the Trump regime, you can be labeled an enemy just for spending too much time gazing at anti-Trump memes. So when Trump demands that Elon or Zuck turn over a list of all the people who don’t love Trump, you will be on that list, even if you use Facebook solely to keep track of the grandkids.

Get off right now. For your sake, and for the sake of your grandkids.

Third, cultivate actual community.

As an atheist, I don’t have much truck with gods and goddesses, but I am a big believer in church.

You might be familiar with “Soggy” Sweat Jr.’s masterful 1952 “If by whiskey” speech, in which the renowned Mississippi state representative managed to come down on both sides of the debate on alcohol prohibition. He condemned the whiskey that “defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home” and more, while praising the liquid that “enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only a little while, life’s great tragedies.”

In like manner, I would condemn the church that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children in order to pay for Pastor John’s McMansion on the ritzy side of town, and fosters every form of bigotry and prejudice by reference to the imagined law of some imagined god. But I would also praise the church that brings good men and women together despite their differences, provides to members the care and concern often absent in the faceless bureaucracy of our government, fosters friendship, and teaches its members that the universe is much bigger and much wilder than they might ever imagine.

Certain conservative voices are not wrong when they claim that secularization has left people lonely, but that is simply because what was socially valuable about church has not been replicated in another setting free of religious ideology. Sweden has largely escaped the secularization blues, having actively promoted membership in athletic clubs, book circles and the like. Loneliness, especially combined with social media, radicalizes people.

We don’t necessarily need churches, but for a stable society, we do need institutions that provide a true sense of community. As the labor historian Erik Loomis recently lamented: “From the union hall to the church to the bowling alley, we have simply disbanded every institution that brought disparate people together in ways that could either be teaching moments or simply to have civil conversation. I have no idea how to bring that back, but without bringing back institutions, I don’t see how we chip away at the complete disconnect so many voters have with the reality of how power works in Washington.”

Moreover, given that any government dominated by Republicans will follow not the rule of law, but the rule of Trump, you will need to create alternatives to the government that now regards you as an enemy. You will need mutual aid organizations to provide those services the government will not. Look to our history for examples of this, such as Little Rock’s own Mosaic Templars of America.

Lastly, you will only survive the coming years psychologically if you are able to cultivate in your life spheres untouched by politics. Oppressed peoples everywhere have had to nourish their souls with beauty now and then to keep carrying on. Be it an actual church, a gardening club, a book club, a sports club, or whatever, foster some part of your life that isn’t centered upon simply surviving long enough to see our country restored.

But whatever group you join or start, don’t create a page for it on social media.

Fourth, take your privacy seriously.

Do you use Google? If so, why? As Adam Conover discussed in a recent podcast, Google is not a search engine company – it’s an advertising company with a search engine attached to it. And success in advertising on the internet means harvesting as much information about you as possible.

Try DuckDuckGo instead, which offers greater privacy (you can even make it your default search engine for whatever browser you use). As with its search engine, the web browser Google Chrome also logs everything you do; the same goes with any Google product, including Gmail.

Other browsers provide a little more privacy. DuckDuckGo has its own browser. Mozilla Firefox and Opera aren’t too bad on this front. But probably the most secure is Tor. (DuckDuckGo will even let you watch YouTube videos without all the annoying commercials, just so you know.)

After the election, I began the process of moving my personal email from a Gmail account to Proton Mail, which offers end-to-end encryption and is based in happily neutral Switzerland. Other such services are available, such as Tuta. For each, the best features come from establishing a paid account, but they do have free alternatives. I also recommend getting the Signal app, which offers not just encrypted texting but also a feature that lets you set an expiration date for any messages, automatically deleting them.

If you have a cell phone, you should have a Faraday bag. Every cell phone, but especially every smartphone, is a tracking device sending your current location to whatever company sold you said phone. And there is reason aplenty to suspect that every phone is actively listening to you. I was once having a conversation with a colleague about switching the language on my keyboard to Swedish, and she started seeing advertisements when next she logged into Facebook for Swedish keyboard overlays.

That is why, when I finally broke down, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and bought a smartphone, I also bought a Go Dark Faraday bag. Under Trump, the rule will be this: Do not text anything, do not say anything, and do not travel anywhere with your phone you don’t want the government to know about.

And you know what else helps to bolster your privacy? Paying cash for any goods and services you receive. Try it out.

Fifth, take your safety seriously.

I’ve got a friend who currently lives in a liberal enclave on one of the coasts who was, some time back, invited to join a well-funded anti-gun organization. “They’re doing the Lord’s work,” my friend said, “but I’ll be honest, the idea of joining rubbed me the wrong way. For years, the only thing keeping me alive as a gay person in the rural South was owning a gun and letting other people know I had it on me all the time.”

The prevalent leftist positions on firearms, which range from their absolute abolition to their exclusion from the public square (that is, opposition to concealed or open carry), might be worth rethinking.

I don’t mean to imply that we must regard all Trump voters as violent extremists against whom we must be perpetually armed. Jennifer Senior recently asked in The Atlantic: “How do we move forward without venom, without looking at strangers — and people within our own party — as potential enemies? As people who, if given their druthers, would undo the American project and destroy its values and make this country profoundly unsafe?” I don’t know, but we do have to find a way. In my own circles, I know people who voted for Trump but who don’t seem to want me personally strung up as one of the “enemy within.” (Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.)

Yet the Republican Party is increasingly defined by its embrace of violence, as demonstrated by members’ attitudes toward the insurrectionists of January 6. Extremist groups such as the Proud Boys now operate as unofficial paramilitaries supporting Trump and his party. But there are also plenty of low-level lone wolves out there. Earlier this year, people here in Arkansas were threatened and harassed for simply seeking, through the power of the petition, to place on the ballot an amendment that would permit abortion. Folks gathering signatures even faced death threats for their efforts.

You have to protect yourself. If it helps, know that there is a long tradition of people on the margins arming themselves for individual or collective defense, as two important books within the last decade point out. Nicholas Johnson’s “Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms” lays out a history of Black gun ownership starting even before the Civil War, when many African Americans kept a revolver at hand in the event those slave catchers caught up to them. Charles E. Cobb’s “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible” illustrates just how the private threat of violence made public nonviolence a feasible strategy for securing liberty.

Maybe you accept what I’m saying but simply don’t feel safe even learning about firearm safety in a gun culture steeped in reactionary politics. Believe it or not, there are leftist groups out there aiming to provide camaraderie to folks like you, such as the Socialist Rifle Association, which even has members in Arkansas.

Sixth, understand that the “us versus them” feeling you may have isn’t quite indicative of reality.

The real “them” is smaller than you think, far smaller than the actual number of people who voted for Trump. In fact, I’d argue that it’s actually limited to the people at the very top of our society, people who are far removed from the need to survive in this world, people with so much spare money they are building Bond villain compounds in Hawaii, that they are throwing money Trump’s way solely to make real their own nihilistic fantasy of ruling a post-apocalyptic earth.

Survival is collective, and we have to survive with each other. And most of us have been practical about that, even when it clashes with our preferred ideology. My grandmother once told me about her small-town Arkansas doctor whom everyone knew was gay, back in the mid-20th century, but about whom nobody said a word, because they needed their doctor and their doctor needed them.

Think of those anti-immigrant Republicans in Ohio who stood up to defend Haitian newcomers to that state because they had revitalized local economies. Think of Republicans in places like Iowa who might cheer “Drill, baby, drill,” but who push for subsidies for wind farms because those are making energy cheaper for their own communities. Most of us are really great at accommodating what technically violates the precepts we claim to hold dear.

And most people want tomorrow to be relatively predictable. Very few of the folks who daydream about a civil war don’t actually want one to happen. They just want to indulge in a bit of fantasy, like they do about that old high school girlfriend, and maybe it helps to add a little bit of spice to everyday life.

So your enemy isn’t some hillbilly waving his Trump flag. Your enemy is the guy who gave Trump millions in campaign money. That asshole is relying upon us adopting an “us versus them” perspective that helps his apocalyptic fantasies achieve reality. The only way to defy him is through the deliberate rejection of that framework, through the adoption of a worldview that acknowledges only “us.”

Seventh, take the historical perspective.

You are not in this necessarily to create a better present. You are in this to secure a better future.

We all know the stories of immigrants who came to this country and worked terrible jobs in the coal mines (like many Germans) or in laundries (like many Chinese) or in hauling waste (like many Jews and Italians) so that they might earn the pittance it takes to ensure that their children’s lives were not nearly as terrible. And then those children worked hard-enough jobs themselves to ensure that their own children might have a life more free from burden.

There are people out there who want to destroy the American experiment, precisely because it has been so radically successful. They want to roll the record of “Amazing Grace” in reverse so that the song goes “I could see but now I’m blind,” because they hope to profit off that blindness, just as they have profited off slavery and hatred and oppression since the very founding of this nation.

These people have always been here. They have never been as powerful, but by taking the steps outlined above, we can deprive them of at least some of their power.

I’ll be honest — it’s going to take generations to build back the institutions we need to protect democracy. But a good start is simply participating in democracy beyond voting, especially in those realms of civil life that remain (at least technically) nonpartisan. Become a member of your neighborhood association. Go to meetings of the city council and the planning commission and school board. Remember, Republicans started out working at the local level; we must do the same.

You have to be willing to plant seeds and never see the trees. Democracy in America has never been a given; indeed, for much of American history, our nation has been a democracy in name only. That’s why Leonard Cohen used the future tense when he sang, “Democracy is coming, to the U.S.A.”

Now, some of you reading this have already realized what I am asking you to do. I have asked you to distrust the government, get off social media, start forming communities of affinity focused upon a higher purpose, and arm yourself for your individual and collective protection.

I have, in short, asked you to behave just like conservatives. But the truth is that we are the new conservatives, just trying to conserve the liberties handed down to us by our Founding Fathers and Mothers. We desperately need to conserve what is best about America before these billionaires have a chance to harvest it for the scrap of their fantasies.

And atheist that I am, I pray we are up to the task.

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