The Dialectic: Activism Blossoms Under the Trump Presidency

This isn’t an original thought, but it’s a good one.  It was expressed yesterday by the Governor of Vermont, who said something like, “The only good thing about the Trump presidency  is that it has turned tens of millions of Americans (not to mention people all over the world) into political activists.  This intense level of participation in government is actually what democracy is all about.”

Now, some might write this off as Dr. Pangloss/Pollyanna/rose-colored glasses, i.e., putting an artificially positive spin on a bad situation. But on closer examination, we see that the governor’s observation is quite valid.

In reality, it’s simply what 19th Century German philosophers Marx and Hegel told us 175 years ago about a concept they called the “dialectic,” i.e., that any social phenomenon that affects the way a large number of people live (a thesis) naturally spawns its opposite (an antithesis), which battle one another to create a new outcropping sharing aspects of both (the synthesis), which then creates its own antithesis, and so on forever.

Regardless of how it got here, it most certainly did arrive: people are coming out of the woodwork to march for science, climate change mitigation, women’s rights, and so many other things.  Most importantly, a huge percentage of these are people who either never had a political bone in their body until now, or had such interests and beliefs, but never expressed them outside of the privacy of a voting booth.

Amy Goodman, executive producer and host of “Democracy Now!” is a fabulous person whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.  As she puts it, “A free press is the oxygen of a democracy.”   Though it’s debatable the degree to which our corporate-owned mainstream media is “free” in any meaningful sense of the word, the news from outlets like Democracy Now!, Truthout, TruthDig, the Guardian, the Intercept, and the books of dissidents like Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and Noam Chomsky is there for the taking, and it’s receiving record amounts of attention.

It really is a great time to be alive, so as to be able to take part in this amazing watershed period in human history.  This may be not the best of all possible worlds, but it’s the one we have, and it sure is interesting to be here.