Do we jump on the anti-Trump bandwagon?

 By Steve Otto

 As I watch the impeachment trial, over former president Donald Trump’s spectacle in Congress, back on January 6, a few things go through my mind. A lot of liberal Democrats are chomping at the bit to find Trump guilty. It is easy to jump on the anti-Trump bandwagon. But the problem is that I’m not really a liberal. I’m a democratic socialist and maybe even closer to a Marxist.

I was a high school kid in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those were remarkable years. A cultural renaissance took place. Then there was a new left Marxist movement rising from one campus to the next. There were peaceful protests. There were also two Marxist leaning movements that took up guerrilla war fare, the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Between outright insurrection and peaceful protests were those in the middle, such as the Yippies. The Yippies[1] and similar groups tried to cross both the hippy cultural movement and the new left. In the long run, they were not treated much different from the insurrectionists. There have been examples of the US government trying to send a message to those who would use any kind of violence, even vandalism, that such activity will be met with the most extreme punishment. Rebellion from the left would NOT be tolerated AT ALL!

But now, in Congress, we are seeing our government dishing out the same message to people on the right—some of them on the far-right, so the rightwing insurrection will not be tolerated AT ALL. These rebellious factions are on the right and far-right—so far to the right, we are just about dealing with fascism that is not all that different from the movements we saw in Spain and Italy before World War II. As with Europe, our US fascists have a charismatic leader, Donald Trump.

So while it is tempting to jump on the anti-Trump bandwagon, I can’t help fearing that doing so will some day come back to haunt some of us who have not always followed the pro-government rules. There were about 5 people killed. But considering the size of the insurrection, with a few thousand Trump supporters, most of the damage was just petty vandalism. They did hit some people and they broke some windows, but does the government really need to arrest EVERYONE who went into the Congress that day? We need to really think about what we are doing when the calls come out to round up the small time people—especially the misguided. 

[1] Steve Otto, War on Drugs/ War on People, (Ide House, Los Colinas, 1995), p. 105-109.