cliff's notes to save democracy

People have asked where I get my info about how to save democracy, from a systemic, bird’s eye view. This blog below includes a list of resources I recommend.

Not everyone has time to read these sources. But if you [are or] have an avid reader in your neighborhood, someone who loves democracy and loves talking about what they read, give them this reading list. Ask them to be your neighborhood reference guide for democracy-defending strategies and tactics.

But, first and foremost, I recommend you read, play with, implement, and practice “The Daisy Chain: A Neighbor’s Guide to Mass-Cooperation” in your own neighborhood— because without parallel systems of support, we will fall. While I might’ve written The Daisy Chain, it is not proprietary information. The Daisy Chain is simply a synthesis of what decent people have always done when their backs are against the wall and institutions are weaponized against them. It is our common story— mass-cooperation is in our DNA. It’s how we’ve survived this long: adaptation and cooperation.

Remember this: all wars are ground wars. Fascism is a story, a war against humanity, and it is gunning for people’s hearts and minds. It’s using screens to convince people to hate their neighbors and reject vulnerability. A fascist’s goal is to make people lonely, disoriented, and desperate.

The Daisy Chain, if actually implemented [by which I mean practiced, not just shared online] will be the thing that allows us to hold a strike, shield our targeted neighbors, care for each other in the face of structural abandonment, and (should we prevail) write/revise a constitution that rejects this country’s legacy of chattel slavery, genocidal land-theft (colonization), the indentured servitude of working people, and the repression of women and gender expansive people (and all minorities).

In any case, here are some democracy protector readings I suggest people engage with, regardless of where they happen to live— because the rise of fascism is being brought on by an astro-turfed techno-fascist movement. The moment we change our neighborhoods, to practice what we preach and demonstrate the [potential for] essential goodness of humanity in real time, fascism doesn’t have the space to thrive.

That’s not just a hair-brained idea. That’s Mahatma Gandhi’s “Constructive Programme: It’s Meaning and Place,” which is how he used something very like The Daisy Chain to destabilize the colonizers in India and push them out.

Bottom line? You already know what needs doing. It’s important that you actually do it. The Daisy Chain is a map that needs tailored, and refined through practice, to be of any use. Please hear me when I say screen culture is trapping you online, where you are the least useful. Because the emerging contours of these colonizers’ antipathy toward humanity, and life in general, does not change what must be done.

Power is horizontal, not vertical, and The Daisy Chain helps you relocate our ancestral wisdom.

In this moment, we would do well to consider the wisdom in these lines from the film Smoke Signals:

I kept thinkin’. I wish we were this organized when Columbus landed.

Neighbors, the colonizers are back. Their intent is genocidal.

Yes, what white Christian nationalists and techno-fascists are doing is terrifying. It is important to feel that fear, because it tells you what you value, and it’s shouting that our collective survival is on the line. No person survives cascading catastrophes on their own.

But standing there watching weak men engage in horrific violence, and simply talking about it online, only helps them. Y

ou have to get in your communities and build base, and that starts just three neighbors at a time. This is work you can, and must, do.

We are far more powerful; they divide and terrorize to keep us disorganized.

We can change that.