We are seeing one comment after another from right wing men who say that Good would be alive if she only “obeyed.”
This is the totally wrong response.
In America, we don’t and shouldn’t blindly obey. We vindicate our rights only by exercising them Which means we speak out. We ask questions. We reject orders from people with no authority to issue them and especially when they are contrary and confused.
And even when we are wrong, government has to respect our rights and humanity by only acting with violence when absolutely necessary to protect someone life. And that was not the case here.
And, in contemporary America, women don’t and shouldn’t blindly obey men. Women can only vindicate their equality by rejecting the demand to obey. And decent men respect women who do that.
And even if women are wrong, decent men don’t respond to disobedience violence.
The demand for obedience by officials of citizens is characteristic of authoritarian, autocratic and fascists regimes. The demand by men for obedience women is characteristic of extreme patriarchal regimes.
And as many people have pointed out, these demands for obedience are very much tied together—-along with the demand by white people of Black people for obedience.
For what powers Trump’s fascism is the reaction of patriarchal, white supremacist men to their displacement from the center of our society by movements that seek to vindicate the so-far unrealized promise of equality that is central to our founding ideals, however much they were neglected in practice.
Free people do not make obedience the most important virtue. That is the virtue that characterize subjects not citizens.
That MAGA men embrace obedience today is a very sad state of affairs, one that shows how weak and threatened they are by genuine equality. But it also is extremely dangerous because their weakness and fear generates their love of authority and violence that, they believe, is being exercised on their behalf.
The truth, however, is that authoritarian violence is always carried out for the benefit of the autocrats.
Trump and Vance understand this too well. And their immediate turn to lies and deception after the modern of Good is the classic move of fascists.
The best way to fight back against Trump, Vance and their weak, frightened followers is show them that we supporters of freedom, independence, and democracy exemplify the strength and fortitude to which they pretend.
Pennsylvanian are doing that all over the state, in urban, rural, and suburban areas.
We need more protests. We need more confrontation. We need more angry voices. We need civil disobedieance. We need to make life difficult for the feckless politicians who claim to be on our side but do little. They need to stand with us and use their authority to block ICE and the national guard federal troops.
We need to show our strength and embolden each other to stand tall and strong.
If we do that, the cowards on the other side who hide behind their guns and Trump and Vance’s lie, will ultimately collapse before the moral force of our actions.