People Are Good
MLKs dream of solidarity lives on in Minnesota
The great battle of our time is between solidarity and nihilism, between belief in the fundamental decency of people and belief in zero-sum self-interest. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X came to believe that solidarity was the future of the civil rights movement, that we must work together to overcome economic and political oppression. In standing up for each other, the people of Minnesota uphold the legacy of MLK Jr. Perhaps, in their support for Ukraine and protection of Greenland, the rest of the civilized world will find their capacity for solidarity reinvigorated as well.
Solidarity and Universalism
“Realpolitik” is Bullshit
By the end of their far-too-short lives, both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had come to believe in the need for solidarity across races and with others around the world in their fight for freedom, equality, and economic justice. Solidarity and universalism, the idea that every person has intrinsic value, are the polar opposite of Trump’s divide-and-conquer nihilism, as articulated by Stephen Miller:
“We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power…These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Trump and his associates invoke “realism” as an excuse for American aggression. I have always HATED the use of the term “realism” to describe the theory that people are supposedly inherently self-interested and competitive. This is a perfect example of manipulative framing. When they call their view “realism” they imply that only they see the world as it really is and that those of us who believe that humans are basically decent are naive and unrealistic. This is bullsh*t. Those who see most clearly understand that people are fundamentally empathetic and that the world runs on interdependence, not competition.
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Cooperation is Humanity’s Superpower
People are inherently social animals. We have mirror neurons; we are built to feel what others feel. We need social interaction. Most people really do care about other people, even people they don’t know personally. Imagine the first families and tribes created by humans. How long do you think it took for them to realize that they would all be better off if they worked together, if some of them hunted for food or gathered water while others made stuff and protected the young?
Ezra Klein says:
Cooperation is humanity’s superpower, and the way we have enlarged our circle — from kin, to tribes, to religions, to countries, to the world — is miraculous.
We didn’t get to 8.3 billion people by having everyone look out for themselves. While there is a place for competition, human civilization runs on cooperation. Government is just a tool that we use to cooperate on a larger scale. Even laws depend on voluntary cooperation, on people’s willingness to engage in “pro-social behavior” (that which contributes to social cohesion) for the mutual benefit of all.
“Anti-social behavior” and self-interest with no regard for others is the exception, not the rule. Sociopaths can’t comprehend altruism, so when they see other being kind, they are convinced that they must be faking it. People like Trump and Putin seek power and manipulate public opinion to convince us that everyone else is as broken as they are. The greatest danger we face right now is that too many people believe them.
Don’t Feed the Nihilism.
Trump and company are trying to send the message that “everybody’s bad, but they’re the baddest.” If you don’t also make the overt case that most people are good, just talking about how bad they are does not negate their message, it reinforces it. Their violation of norms and ability to break the law with impunity only demonstrate how “smart” and “strong” they are. The cruelty is the point. In a dog-eat-dog world, the meanest dog is king.
The truth is that might-makes-right never works. The “top dog” lives in constant fear of the man one step down, looking to slit his throat in the night. (That doesn’t sound like freedom to me!) Increasingly isolated, he looks out the window of his fortress, envying the peasants their camaraderie. Imagine Trump or Miller or Musk showing up at a pot-luck dinner and somebody actually being happy to see them at the door. Even dogs don’t like them.
Freedom is a Cooperative Endeavor.
We don’t sacrifice our freedom for security. The protection that we give each other through solidarity is what gives us freedom from constant fear and danger. Perhaps people stand in the street and protect their neighbors at their own risk for the same reason that countries like Canada, Mexico, and the nations of Europe are banding together to stand up to Trump: the realization that we must work together to be free.
The entire strategy of demonizing immigrants relies on the idea that the world runs on competition over scarce resources, and that someone else’s gain always means your loss. Xenophobia is a weapon they use to divide us. The best way to disarm our opponents of that weapon is to practice solidarity: to champion the intrinsic and equal value of every person, to recognize that we need each other and be willing to work with and for each other.
Minnesota Good
In Governor Tim Walz speeches and in many columns and news articles, people have pointed out Minnesota’s history of grassroots progressivism, strong safety net, and willingness to embrace immigrants. They suggest that Trump has it out for Minnesota because it is a living example that disproves his claims about how the world works.
Lydia Polgreen in today’s New York Times:
Trump is convinced that Minnesota belongs in his column, insisting that he won it all three times he ran for president but that his victory was snatched away by devious local election officials. His administration seems to think that riling up resentment against the state’s roughly 100,000 residents of Somali origin is a ticket to luring the state’s white supermajority into his xenophobic camp. But Minnesotans are unlikely to take the bait. The state has a long tradition of welcoming refugees, and Somalis — along with Hmong, Cambodians, Ethiopians and Ukrainians — have become part of the fabric of the state.
Minnesota hasn’t given its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate in 50 years. It eluded even Ronald Reagan, who swept 49 states in 1984. For decades, Minnesota has been a bastion of defiantly progressive politics, home to heroic figures of the left like former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, an ardent civil rights supporter, and the progressive Senator Paul Wellstone, who tragically died in a plane crash in 2002.
The concept of “Minnesota Nice” – a sort of “in joke”/informal advertising slogan – has become something of a rallying cry. Less about trying to be polite and more about being willing to put yourself on the line for your neighbor, perhaps the people of Minnesota should be upgraded from “nice” to “good.”
How Do We Win?
The displays of violence and power by Trump (and the tragic rejects he manages to recruit for his cause) are meant to get us to give up hope in humanity, but we’re not going to do that. We will stand up for each other. Their cruelty only drives our solidarity, causing us to set aside our petty differences to realize how much we mean to each other.
Focusing on how bad they are, just calling them racist, evil, oppressive, fascist, and so on, only feeds into their claim that “everybody fighting for themselves is the way the world works.” To them, their evil is just more evidence of their tactical superiority in a world where there is no morality above might-makes-right.
The only way to beat their message is to point out incessantly how so many people are good, in so many ways, in so many places. We need to talk about how human society is based, not on competition, but on the recognition of our interdependence and concern for our neighbors, whether those neighbors are from the other side of the world, like the Somalis and Hmong in Minnesota, or on the other side of the ocean, as the people of Greenland are to the people of Europe.
As MLK Jr. said:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
Thank you so much for reading this. I hope it is of use to you in your work and activism!
In solidarity, always,
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Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647
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“As citizens, we knew we had ceded some of our individual rights to society in order to live together as a community. But we did not believe this social contract included support for an immoral system. Since the people invested government with its authority, we understood that we had to obey the law. But when law became suppressive and tyrannical, when human law violated divine principles, we felt it was not only our right, but our duty to disobey. As Henry Thoreau strongly believed, to comply with an unjust system is to accept abuse. It is not the role of the citizen to follow the government down a path that violates his or her own conscience.” - John Lewis
Antonia, a call for coast to coast unity and grace from the mountains high to the wave crashed coasts, in memory of Martin Luther King Jr.
"We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools."
"The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country Not Theirs
This nation belongs to the people who live here and work here and raise families here and will be buried here. It does not belong to billionaires who hold citizenship in three countries and will flee to their bunkers the moment things get bad. It does not belong to tech oligarchs who view democracy as an obstacle to efficiency. It does not belong to foreign interests who have purchased so much influence that they might as well be writing our laws themselves.
We have to stop letting them divide us. We have to start seeing each other as fellow Americans again instead of enemy combatants in a culture war that was manufactured to keep us weak. We have to remember that the person screaming at us online is also a victim of the same manipulation, and maybe if we stopped screaming back and started talking, we might realize we have been fighting the wrong enemy this entire time.
Turn off the television. It is not informing you. It is programming you. Question everything, including the sources you trust, especially the sources you trust. Talk to people who disagree with you and do it without trying to win. Listen to why they believe what they believe. You might discover that the monster you have been told to hate is actually just another person trying to make sense of a confusing world with imperfect information, exactly like you.
Remember who you are.
You are an American. Your ancestors came to this land or were brought to this land or were already on this land, and regardless of how they got here, they built something together that was supposed to be different from the old world’s tyrannies and aristocracies. That project is not finished. Every generation has to fight to keep it alive against the forces that want to drag us back to a world where a handful of rulers own everything and everyone else serves at their pleasure.
Stop letting them divide you. Your enemies are not your neighbors. Your enemies are the people who profit from your division and are building machines to replace you the moment you are no longer useful.
Start acting like it before it is too late". —The Wise Wolf