Introducing ‘Tracking the Crisis’
Avoiding overwhelm and reactivity to the constant outrage-manufacturing machine in this time of debilitating political turbulence and change
By Joe Guinan
We are at an extraordinary moment in American politics and history.
We have long argued that the crisis we are facing is systemic in nature, and that a decaying system incapable of being reformed but unlikely to collapse outright would force the issue of political-economic system change onto the American agenda.
The outcome of the last presidential election means that the first major attempt at a rupture with business-as-usual in Washington is now coming from the political right. This is the meaning of Trump and Musk’s current Shock-and-Awe assault on the U.S. administrative state.
A great deal of the old is now being unceremoniously swept away by a radical right Administration seeking to break the bounds of decades of national political stalemate and stagnation.
Progressives tend to view recent U.S. history as a period of unending neoliberal hegemony, with corporate Democrats and Republicans alike alternating in pursuing many of the same failed and failing policies. But the right have their own extended narrative of many years of shortcomings and frustrations, too.
These include the essential failure of the Reagan Revolution to shrink the size of the state (at least in terms of government as a share of GDP), as well as their perception of a losing battle in the culture war in the face of seeming progressive advances on social norms around race, gender, and sexuality.
Add to that their obvious discomfort explaining the long-run effects of their own favored policies of trade liberalization and globalization and tax cuts, and the embarrassingly obvious failure of ‘trickle-down economics’ to actually trickle down, and we can perhaps at least appreciate their bind, even if we don’t sympathize with it.
This is especially true of the realization that among the political consequences of a half-century-long period of wage stagnation for the American worker is a growing angry political backlash, in which the gap between the headline performance of the U.S. economy and the deteriorating outcomes for so many ordinary people has generated deep resentment against elite governance and a widespread belief in the rottenness of the system.
All of this has brought the political, economic, and social aspects of the systemic crisis to a head. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and the failure of the Democrats to embrace and offer any kind of serious economic alternatives has left the latter on the wrong side of ‘status quo/change’ and ‘system/anti-system’ electoral dynamics.
As a consequence, the first attempt to break out now falls to an Administration sitting at the head of some of the most regressive and plutocratic forces in American political life.
A world of pain will now flow from this, and is already flowing. We are witnessing the wholesale attempt to turn the American people against the administrative state by stripping it of all capacity to govern in their favor, whether through the management of forests and parks and wetlands or the effective stewarding of public data and payments systems, and everything in between. (The few notable exceptions include immigration and border enforcement and the ongoing projection of U.S. military power abroad.)
And yet, there will likely be openings and opportunities in all this for something radically different and better.
While we lament the loss of park rangers and oceanographers and financial regulators, the net effect of the U.S. state on many people’s lives has not been positive for a long time now. The assault on America’s painfully antique constitution and dismantling and wrecking of the capitalist administrative state may yet open up possibilities for a more democratic polity and economy – a true commonwealth.
“The assault on America’s painfully antique constitution and dismantling and wrecking of the capitalist administrative state may yet open up possibilities for a more democratic polity and economy.”
At The Democracy Collaborative we will have a lot to say in the coming weeks and months, regarding not only the paths that brought us here – about which we’ve been clear for a long time, and which we tried to flag in the run-up to the last election – but also about some of the real solutions.
These include the immediate and practical steps that people and state and local leaders can take to protect their communities and livelihoods against the top-down onslaught, as well as forging a medium-term path out of crisis, by using Community Wealth Building methods and approaches. Expect plenty from us on that in due course.
For now, however, we want to recognize the immense pain and difficulty of the present moment for so many – and to offer one new tool we have been developing as a means of coping with the Shock and Awe, and of moving from paralysis to action.
Just before Trump’s second inauguration, we met in the snowy hills of Vermont with our allies at the People’s Network for Land and Liberation to survey the political landscape and prepare ourselves for what we knew was coming.
As part of those conversations, it became clear that, as emotional beings, some new practices would be necessary to manage the feelings of overwhelm that would inevitably arise from the anticipated constant broad political assault across so many fronts.
These dangers, it was argued, should be thought of as a deliberate political strategy in and of themselves – and indeed have been spoken of as such by none other than Steve Bannon, in an interview back in 2019:
“All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover. But we've got to start with muzzle velocity.”
As an antidote to this, and born of recognition that we are witnessing a deliberate strategy to disorient and overwhelm people with the scale of the current political onslaught, we are pleased to launch TRACKING THE CRISIS. This is The Democracy Collaborative’s news aggregator and round-up, which tracks the Trump Administration’s administrative, legislative, and other actions, as well as a broad array of movement responses, and delivers just one email per week into your inbox cataloguing the intervening developments.
With TRACKING THE CRISIS, we aim to release ourselves and our allies from the debilitating cycle of reactivity to the constant outrage-manufacturing machine, ensuring we keep abreast of developments but aren’t paralyzed or overwhelmed by them.
It is therefore being conceived of as a psychological as well as an analytical tool.
If it simply serves us and our allies in our need for manageable information about the new Trumpian moment, it will have met its purpose – although we are curious to see whether it might reach a wider audience.
Our tagline for this tracker is: “We read the news so you don’t have to!”
We hope you will subscribe, and if you find it useful please pass this tool along to others whom it might also benefit.
Meanwhile, anything you wish to bring to our attention for the tracker can be emailed to us at tracker@democracycollaborative.org
Solidarity in these difficult and challenging times from all of us at The Democracy Collaborative!