We need to start at the definition of “politics”
On re-imagining the municipality as a self-defense network
As federal policy changes come home to roost—in the form of just spitballing here increased homeless encampment sweeps, deportation raids, an even more unchecked housing crisis, cuts to social safety net programs, cuts to school funding, Culture War-style conditions placed on school funding, expanded paramilitary training and privatized surveillance technology for police officers, emboldened local revanchist psychos, a renewed interest by said psychos in the Planned Parenthood clinic etc etc etc etc etc—it’s going to fall on local alternative outlets like this one to really fearlessly expose the rot without concern of sounding biased for doing so or giving the hooting fascists “equal time.” And make no mistake we are surrounded by hooting fascists.
So right at the top here I have to ask that you consider joining the ~715 folks who support this outlet. Being reader-funded gives us the freedom to cover the city in a way that just so happens to be all-the-more urgent after Tuesday.
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The more subscribers, the more I’m able to pay writers like Aislinn and Shaun and Liz and Greg Opperman and Chris Robarge. I did the math and with ~1,200 paid subscribers I’m able to bring on a second full-timer. All money invested in this outlet is re-invested in the construction of a genuine grassroots media infrastructure that centers the health of the community over the spectacle of what we consider “politics” in this country.
It just so happens that’s the theme of today’s piece. So let’s get to it.
The municipality as a self-defense network—local groups to support—odds and ends
To re-imagine the municipality as a self-defense network
The party that exists to come in second place came in second place. I’m not going to spend much time on any standard electoral take—you’ve gotten enough of that elsewhere I’m sure. I think Ryan Broderick in the most recent Garbage Day summed it up nicely:
Turns out marketing yourself as a watered down version of the competitor isn’t the slam dunk the wonks thought it would be. Even if it doesn’t totally encapsulate the totality of her failure yesterday, it’s a fitting indictment of how badly Harris missed the mark that no one on her team noticed how pointless it was to earn a Taylor Swift endorsement while also cozying up to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
Also: The consultants who led her campaign were, by the way, the same consultants that managed the Biden campaign. None of them will face any professional consequences for this. And will likely run Josh Shapiro 2028 and lose to JD Vance.
Point is: the Democratic Party fulfilled its role in things by losing, and everyone involved got paid.
(Bernie’s statement goes hard though. And the fact that all the Palestine supporters in Congress got re-elected is while Harris lost is... telling. )
But this is not a national politics newsletter. This is a local newsletter. So here’s the rub: The problems facing Worcester—affordable housing, over-policing, homelessness, demonization of immigrants, and pervasive institutional racism—no one is coming to save us from them. Certainly not the feds, nor, for the most part, the state. Every city is now on its own.
We need to re-envision the municipality as a self-defense network. We need to take care of our community while understanding that no one else will. We need to understand that the way we weather this storm is by reaching out to the world around us, forming new connections, making neighbors out of strangers and friends out of neighbors. All we have is us.
Certain of you I’m sure are saying yeah duh, known that for a long time. And to that I say yes, same. I’ve been making that case in one way or another for four years now. But to be serious about our politics is to understand how we are not normal and it’s our responsibility to win over normal people.
The current moment gives us an opportunity to open up a fall net of sorts. This election result is destabilizing for the standard liberal worldview in a way that 2016 can’t even touch. There are going to be a lot of Good Democrats on the edge of the proverbial cliff, and we need to make sure we’re there to catch them.
So, if you find yourself looking at these election results with a more totalized hate in your heart for this country than you’ve ever had: Welcome! Come on down to the pit. Some of us have been here a long time, and it’s not so bad. With enough of us we’ll be able to build the ladder out. Lord knows no one is ever going to drop one down.
So repeat after me: Both Parties Are On The Same Side. Both Parties Are Bad.
Here’s the way to look at this election, I think: The party in power was punished for a set of conditions that both parties work in tandem to impose on the majority of Americans. The conditions are imposed at the behest of a ruling elite who enjoy a totalizing control of the political machinery. The grip is so tight they’re able to obscure the hand. We’re offered a narrative that the Republicans represent fascism and the Democrats a bulwark against it. Really, they’re both in their own way enablers—the Republicans the raw, ferocious id and the Democrats the image-obsessed ego. The Dems exist to come in second place—to say “this isn’t who we are,” while allowing the Republicans to drag the whole thing in their direction. They are the squeamish and polite brand ambassadors of fascism where the flag decals and hooting don’t cut it. This serves the unmentioned goals and invisible masters of both parties.
“Politics” as currently defined is a spectacle, an invented reality. The whole professional class comprising it has a vested interest in maintaining the belief that voting for president every four years is the height and extent of a citizen’s political life. That the ballot box is where problems are solved. That one choice is salvation and the other doom. It is a game, carefully presented. The only way out is to stop playing. And the way to stop playing is a mass collective reimagining of politics. One that doesn’t conflate voting with participation, or watching TV with staying informed.
I like the way Joshua Hill put it yesterday in his New Means newsletter:
It’s up to us to bring the systemic nature of the problem into focus, first in our own understanding, then in conversations, and ultimately in our organizing. We have to avoid getting caught up in blaming one group or another and see that the global rightward shift in recent years is connected to the vast inequality that has been facilitated by capitalism and neoliberalism.
We need a politics that demands real participation in real life, all the time. That consciously rejects the spectacle. That doesn’t begin with voting but ends with it. That places a greater importance on weekly meetings than quadrennial get-out-the-vote drives. That sees power as a collective shared experience, in need of constant nurturing and maintenance, serving those involved intimately and directly.
Perhaps the only arena to build that new vision is the municipality—the real-life, tangible community as opposed to the invented one on the TV. The shared identity around a city as opposed to the more artificial attachments to a state or country or, especially, political party. A municipality could be the unifying power lever of all the smaller communities within: built around labor union chapters, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods. In some alternate universe there is probably a city hall that responds to and leverages the political will of a well-organized and connected community. That’s not the one we have right now.
Ours, like most, is essentially a captive regulatory body for real estate developers with armed guards working at the behest of a loose cartel of vested profiteers. That’s all a city government can be in “politics” as we understand it today—the same definition that lets a gameshow host run roughshod over the entire national political establishment, remaking half of it in his image and rendering the other impotent, trailing in his wake, saying Dick Cheney is brat.
We can’t do anything about that “politics”—it’s not something you can vote on!—but we can reject the definition. In the tiny microcosms of our cities, towns, neighborhoods, workplaces, we can put a new, redefined politics on offer—one where the good guys aren’t on TV, they’re down the street. One that recognizes the bad guys own the TV, the internet, the major news outlets, and the good guys need to find a way around that.
That circumnavigation is a generational project, likely multi-generational. We’re currently at square zero.
To accept that American “politics” is an invented reality is step one. Those of us who’ve already taken it have a responsibility to help others get there. It simply can’t go on being a fringe opinion. How to do that is the pressing question—perhaps the only question—of the moment.
You’re not going to win over a critical mass of the American public by suggesting they read Foucault and Baudrillard. They’re just not going to. Adam Curtis documentaries are for nerds and Kanye West. Any effective popularized translation will be reliably censored by the corporate media. So you need an entirely independent media apparatus and—you guessed it—that’s also a hell of a lot easier to build and sustain in the context of a community than it is a nation. (This is what I have been doing for four years, by the way.)
Tuesday was a dark cloud that will likely hang for the rest of our lives. But we have our silver lining: the spectacle produced an unprecedented mass disillusionment, one for which it has no remedy other than submission to the fascist id. But a remedy does exist, just not in the spectacle’s imagining of “politics.” Now more than any time in recent memory, a lot of people are suddenly willing to entertain the idea that the system itself just isn’t designed to work for us. That the whole thing has to be contested. That the good guys and bad guys currently on offer are both bad, actually. That in a way they’re working together.
Last night, I watched a video of David Graeber (RIP) explaining just that coordination, better than I ever could:
There’s a symbiotic relationship between these centrists, who are just sort of sneering elitists, and these guys who are the scam artists who pretend to be yokels, pretend to be idiots, pretend to be fascists. They’re not even real fascists, they’re kind of phony fascists. They are trying to set up a situation where those are the only two viable political choices. Because they both feed off and complement one another.
What Graeber describes here is not a reality but the carefully-presented illusion of such. The ultimate goal of the spectacle is achieved when we take that illusion to be real life. On Tuesday, the magician’s hand became dangerously apparent to a larger swath of the public than is comfortable for the spectacle maintainers. Already, we see them try to close ranks with racist pontification about Latino men, for instance. Like I said: no remedy besides the fascist id.
The remedy is in the real, physical world—in the social fabric of community, an entity many times older and more powerful than the spectacle. Dormant for decades, but intact. Breathing, however shallow. The task at hand is to awaken it.
A municipality re-imagined around community, one that consciously rejects the spectacle, disaffiliates with either of the two parties, and adopts a posture of self-defense against the state, just may be the thing that sparks that awakening. Such a city, in the coming political climate, could be a lightning rod of inspiration.
Community associations that used to proliferate have often disappeared. Block associations and tenant unions and community defense organizations must return and multiply. Communal spaces where you can spend time and connect with neighbors without spending money must be constructed. Networks of care and mutual aid groups must flourish. All of these forums are ways for us to connect with one another and do the radical politics we need, and not simply wait until the next election comes around. As Grace Lee Boggs said, “Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.”
Luckily, we have right here in our city a bunch of great organizations that perfectly fit this description. (List further down.) Time, energy, and money invested in these would go a lot farther than anything handed over to the Democratic Party. Not another dollar to the Dems as far as I’m concerned.
And, you’ll remember, we came damn close in the last municipal election to overthrowing the entrenched townie old guard—during 2023, a year when the average Massachusetts Dem was content to pretend everything was normal, especially if they owned a home and/or stocks (the majority of Worcester’s municipal electorate). Needless to say, 2025 will not be the same. But the community-building work should take precedence over electoral organizing—both will be more successful that way. (In a future piece, maybe Sunday’s, I’ll explore the upcoming election in more depth.)
The only encouraging aspect of the last few days (besides the party that enables and funds a genocide eating shit for it) is that I’m far from alone in thinking like this. My favorite writers are all talking about the need to turn toward local community organizing.
For instance, I like how Kim Kelly put it in a video she made titled “homework.”
Aright so here’s what you’re gunna do: you’re gunna make some new friends. You’re gunna start talking to more people at work, and at the post office, and at the library. You’re going to talk to your neighbors. You’re going to figure out who seems cool and you’re going to figure out who seems like they need help. And you’re going to build up your community. You’re going to bust out of that bubble.
I am in a bubble. You’re in a bubble. We all have our own bubbles, right? You’re gunna expand your network, because the next few years are going to be really fucking bad. And the years after that are probably not going to be much better. When we say, you have to organize. When you say, we protect us, that means talking to people, that means making new friends, that means finding the mutual aid groups in your neighborhood and getting involved. That means putting yourself out there, because the only way we survive this is together, and we have to figure out who “we” is, before we start thinking about moving to Canada or whatever.
Canada has problems too. Talk to your neighbors. Because we’ve gotta make it through this.
In other words....
Below is a list of the kind of groups Kelly was talking about.
Local groups to get involved with…
…in no particular order!
Update (Friday, 11 am): Here are some orgs I initially missed that readers shared
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Worcester (FYI: They’re holding a virtual meeting on Monday 11/11 6:30 p.m. to process election results and build community)
Worcester Food Not Bombs (new!) (FYI: This Saturday, 1 p.m., distribution event at city common)
Also: Worcester DSA is holding a rally in Worcester at noon Saturday, RSVP here.
I’ve done my best to make it a complete one, but I’m sure I’ve missed some, drop a comment or send me an email (billshaner at substack dot com) and I’ll update.
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Odds and end
I’m now a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World Freelance Journalist Union!1 Woohoo!
The card is now the second coolest thing I own, behind my Disgusting Brothers mouse pad of course.
Luke O’Neil over at Welcome To Hell World described how I’m currently feeling better than I can, per usual.
It has become painfully apparent to me that my efforts to pull Democrats at least some small degree further left have been a colossal failure. I already knew that years ago but one still has to go through the motions.
I feel an empty loss for words right now similar to when there's a shooting big enough we all have to talk about it. Everyone doing their material. No one learning anything. No point trying. Just a blanket of sadness.
But you know nevertheless we persist.
Given the WPD’s penchant for including Shotspotter in every relevant press release, we can conclude by reading this release...
On November 6, 2024, at approximately 10:30 AM, Worcester Police officers responded to the area of City Hall on Main Street for reports of gun shots. There was a fight involving three males in the rear of City Hall near the Common. One of them pulled out a firearm and fired a few rounds before he fled the scene. There are no known injuries. WPD detectives are investigating.
...that Shotspotter did not pick up the gunshots behind city hall yesterday, despite it being well within the coverage area. What are we paying for, again?
It’s not all bad though: the mayor has signed off on an official resolution proclaiming Nov. 9 WU-TANG DAY
I do not know anything about this besides that the picture exists and it was sent to me. I intend on keeping it that way. I can only hope he decided to do this the day after the election.
This is such an unserious city you just gotta love it.
On that note, I’m out! Talk to you on Sunday. Be good to each other.
First version of this had “International Workers of the World” which is a stupid brain fart. Sorry about that.
Hi there, I would add Jeremiah’s Inn to this list. Great local food pantry and recovery program that also works with students experiencing food insecurity at Clark through the Food Insecurity Resistance Movement (FIRM) student group.
Great work Bill.
I just wanted to note your use of the past tense in the Democratic Party’s current genocide. The genocide in Palestine is not only still ongoing but ramping up.
“The only encouraging aspect of the last few days (besides the party that enabled and funded a genocide eating shit for it)“