Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

When American democracy was Trumped and the new president was inaugurated, I was deep in Mexico, steeped in cognitive dissonance and disorientation as I apprehensively looked toward that imaginary wall. No, Mexico has never disoriented me, rather, the essential features of this small town of 20,000 ordinary people helps me put world events in a human context. Yet, each time I thought of the fact that a narcissistic reality-show host with delusions of self-obsessed grandeur was “running the country,” I sank into momentary despair. I always remember, though, action is a far better anti-depressant than any pharmaceutical.

Electoral Shock Therapy

I never thought that Hillary Clinton, the widely hated pillar of the Washington establishment, was quite presidential the shoe-in that the pollsters, pundits and Party boosters proclaimed. Their intimate entanglement with the Washington elite diminishes any claim to objectivity – they hated Trump as much as they hated Bernie. However, Bernie had demonstrated the depth of resentment toward the system that has so miserably failed us, by mounting a major campaign from nothing but small donations and telling truth to power. If the DNC had not stolen the nomination from him, the race would have been between two ostensible outsiders – the demagogue and the ‘democratic socialist.’

I knew that the word “socialist” no longer carried the stigma that it had for the 1950s generation, who feared both communism and Joe McCarthy. And Bernie’s authentic lifelong progressive grandpa persona clearly inspired the underrated

millennials. Sure, I have some policy differences with Bernie, but they are trivial by comparison with the stakes that were at play in 2016. The ambivalence among democrats and independents toward Hillary’s Wall-Street backed neo-conservative interventionist pseudo-liberalism was palpable. Yet, the idea of electing the first woman to be president, as a ‘follow-up’ to electing the first Black president in history, had strong appeal among regular democrats.

Things would have been pretty bad if had we elected Hillary – oh, I guess we actually did elect her, by over 3 million popular votes, but the electoral college, just like the heavy Republican gerrymandering, is out of range. Of course, things could not have been this bad. We face now the iron fist of accelerated blatant tyranny rather than the velvet glove of the pseudo-democracy of the “deep state.”

I need not go through the litany of cruel executive orders and destructive presidential appointments that has everyone in federal agencies running for cover. It is not an oversimplification to say that each Trump nominee is dedicated to demolish the agency over which she or he will preside. And the Senate confirms the sociopathy. Science be damned – full speed ahead on a militarized fossil-fueled oligarchic economy! Plunder is the renewed preference. It cannot end well, but it will not hold for long either.

Okay, we know all that. The only question now is what are we to do for the next four years? We cannot wait for the final train wreck. Forget all the talk of impeachment; the Republicans are irrational cowards. Besides, do you really want Pence as president? Sure, it is possible that a reaction vote in the mid-term elections could change the majorities in the House and Senate. Look at what Trump has already done to unravel the modest work of the past 8 years. Really, do you still think we can find the answers to our urgent national and global dilemmas in the irrational optimism and piecemeal compromised performance of U.S. national electoral politics?

Something’s Happening

But something else is happening and they don’t know what it is, do they Mister Jones? The grand scale of the global surge of the Women’s March on Washington a few weeks ago surprised me. The sudden ground swell of protests at airports against the religious persecution of Muslims, banning them by presidential decree, startled my sense of futility. I had heard of the local incarnation of the Women’s March, which had already gone international, just in time to join in at the village of San Pancho on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Relatively out of touch in rural Mexico, I only heard of the airport protests via Internet news sources. It was clear, however, that something new was emerging from the grief of a profound political betrayal of the American Dream.

The book I’m writing, The Social Illusion: Preparing for the New Great Transformation, suggests the need and new possibility of forming globally extensive networks of local social movements to stop the insanity and form viable ecological communities. There is already some evidence of this emergent trend and the “transcommunality” it implies (John Brown Childs’ important concept I will explain in an upcoming post), in diverse movements to stop the destruction of indigenous lands and water, along with general oppression, from Standing Rock to rural India.

I had heard of “Indivisible,” an ad hoc loose network of groups forming strategies to oppose the barbaric policies of the new administration. At the San Miguel Writers Conference a couple of weeks ago, I ran into Terrance NcNally, long-time progressive radio personality. I told him of my book and my effort to characterize accurately what seemed to me a nascent new form of global social mobilization for change. Terrence shared with me a long list of groups and sources related to that very kind of global uprising, happening right now. “Indivisible,” for example, involves diverse groups that are working on different particular issues, but who have become loosely affiliated in order to respond quickly to situations such as the Muslim ban. Terrence confirmed my belief that such networked groups around the world can quickly mobilize to respond to a particular threat of the new tyranny, with the support of Internet connections, of course.

Resistance, Replacement, Restoration, and Resilience

Now, here’s the big issue for me. While it remains vitally important to resist both the destructive actions of predatory capital and especially the new predatory political administration more urgently than ever, that is not enough. We have reached a point of such severe global ecological breakdown, as the global warming effects of former and current carbon emissions accelerate, that we must take action now to replace the neoliberal global economy with local ecological communities. Such action could both restrain the global economy and its destruction and build parallel social structures within local ecosystems, as viable replacements for entanglement in the carbon economy of the corporate state.

We are already deeply into the destabilization of climate and we will soon feel more devastating effects of the carbon already in the atmosphere. Virtually nothing is being done (except talk) at the national or international levels to slow or stop the carbon

economy. It appears that only local groups and communities can, and must, initiate grassroots action now. If we wait for the “authorities,” we will have passed the tipping point of catastrophic climate collapse. That will make the collapse of societies around the world inevitable. Locally initiated replacement of the corporate economy must begin immediately. That means forming new social relations and connections to local ecosystems. No easy task, but that does not make it any less necessary.

Extractive capital and consumer waste have seriously compromised many local ecosystems. Their restoration is necessary for the survival of local communities. The bonus is that they also constitute forms of mitigation of climate disruption, often by sequestering carbon, building water tables, rebuilding soils, and enriching local agriculture for local food production. We must restore living Earth systems to achieve a level of human resilience that can stave off the species extinction that the business-a-usual path threatens.

Transcommunality within the chaos of the New Great Transformation will be necessary, both among local groups and across globally networked social mobilizations, to resist, replace, and restore, to achieve a livable world.