When does cooperation become complicity? And what other choice is there?
This morning I want to introduce you to a blogger a bit more radical than I am: A. R. Moxon, who writes a payment-optional Substack blog called The Reframe. I often have reservations about what he’s saying, but I find myself consistently challenged (in a good way). Maybe you will too.
Right now there’s a debate going on in Congress about funding DHS, and before that about funding a fairly large swath of the government. Democrats have tried to hone the issue down as small as possible, and to make only the most obvious common-sense demands in exchange for their support: ICE agents don’t wear masks, have to get judicial warrants, can be held accountable when they use excessive force, and so on. Even this is too much for Republicans, apparently. So Democrats will probably eventually water their position down even further to reach some kind of agreement.
This is usually explained as follows: Democrats want to appeal to a reasonable middle of the country, so that they can build a majority and regain power. Making more extreme demands might alienate the center and leave Republicans in power. That makes sense in its way, but more radical voices reject abandoning principle. When ICE may be building massive concentration camps, compromise makes no sense: Would you feel victorious if you got them to agree to fewer or smaller concentration camps? (“I’ll support Dachau if you agree not to build Auschwitz.”)
That’s the view that animates this week’s Reframe post “Hating the Game“. He starts small, with the MAGA meltdown over Bad Bunny headlining the Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, which makes him a native-born American citizen — unlike previous Super Bowl headliners like Paul McCartney, Sting, Phil Collins, and other English-speaking White males whose selection raised no controversy at all.
But Bad Bunny is brown-skinned and sings in Spanish, making him too “foreign” for MAGA’s nativist base. He is so unacceptable that Turning Point USA (founded by self-proclaimed non-racist Charlie Kirk) sponsored an “All American Halftime Show” featuring the washed-up-and-never-that-good Kid Rock, whose songs have never been described as family-friendly.
So OK, making fun of that is shooting fish in a barrel. (The Onion: “Conservatives Boycott All Forms Of Entertainment“.) But Moxon goes somewhere with it. He starts with this quote from The Washington Post:
Even if Bad Bunny doesn’t use the stage to explicitly condemn Trump’s deportation campaign, the dueling shows will highlight the nation’s deep divide over immigration, and his performance is likely to be viewed through that lens.
This kind of even-handed framing is so common that it may not even raise your hackles. But it raises Moxon’s:
The Post’s framing only makes sense if, as is often the case, the demand of white bigotry is being accommodated. You can be one of the most popular figures on the cultural landscape and it won’t matter; if white racists don’t like you, you’re controversial and polarizing. White racists, meanwhile, are never framed as divisive or polarizing, no, they’re always “concerned” or “anxious,” and the problem to be solved is never their racism, but always how best to assuage it.
From there, he describes three models of political engagement, which he calls the cooperation game, the murder game, and the non-cooperation game. MAGA, he says, is playing the murder game: They are using the machinery of government to dominate opponents and seize loot for themselves. Democrats are trying to play the cooperation game, where you are seeking common ground on which you can assemble a democratically governing majority. Moxon’s observation is that this doesn’t work.
It’s not just a bad idea to play the cooperation game with people playing the murder game—it’s an impossibility. When you act in good faith with those who have proved themselves capable of limitless bad faith, then you are no longer playing the cooperation game: you are merely cooperating with the murder game, and are, therefore, a participant not in the cooperation game, but the murder game.
He suggests playing the non-cooperation game: Stop giving the benefits of cooperation to those who have dedicated themselves to murder.
For the Super Bowl halftime show, non-cooperation looks like this:
Our response should not be “This response to Bad Bunny’s inclusion shows how divided we are, how can we stop this polarization?” Our response should be uncooperative: “The response to Bad Bunny’s inclusion shows just how racist our society is. Racists are angry about the halftime show? Good! Everything about our society should make racists feel alienated. How do we make racists feel even more alienated from even more of society??
More generally:
[Non-cooperation] can be strategic; refusing to grant even one vote toward the funding of a murderous government, until the death squads have been utterly abolished, and the vile white supremacist serial child rapist of a president who controls them has resigned, along with all of his cabinet, and submitted to prosecution. It can be legislative; refusing to allow voice votes, in order to grind down the apparatus of government. It can be social; refusing to fraternize with Republican colleagues, or refusing to serve members of Republican governments or their death squad in restaurants and businesses. It can be tactical: following the death squads and impeding their work; playing loud music to keep them awake; making them and their abuses known and shaming and shunning and excluding them for daring to murder their neighbors. It can be losing paperwork. It can be deliberately misunderstanding instructions. It can be purposefully dawdling. It can be tripping somebody up, getting them lost and turned around, obstructing the gears of brutality, sabotaging the engines of murder.
It’s not murder, and it’s not retributive; it’s removing all the benefits of human cooperation from all humans who play the murder game—not because we hate the humans (though it’s difficult not to hate people who would murder their neighbors, and I don’t shame those who can’t manage it), but because we hate their vile murderous game.
If you’re like me, you read The Reframe and think: “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” (Example: Do we have to call it “the murder game”? Isn’t that needlessly off-putting?) But why not, exactly?
I’m calling attention to non-cooperation this week for a very specific reason: If the guardrails completely fail and Trump manages to cancel, steal, or ignore the midterm elections, then the only response short of violent revolution is the ultimate form of non-cooperation: the general strike. We need to start talking about it as a real possibility right now. We need to get the general public thinking about it and deciding how they will respond to it. Otherwise, if and when the need arises, most people will brush it off as impossible. But it’s not impossible. It’s an effective tactic whose roots go back to ancient Rome.
There are many possible layers of resistance to a fascist takeover. Currently, I’m counting on the courts and the elections. But if those fail, we’ll need to fall back to more radical tactics. The people who are too radical for us now may someday be our best friends.
While we’re talking about Bad Bunny, Trump hated his show: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Because, you know, Spanish. Nobody speaks it.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
I don’t understand why people claim they don’t understand Spanish. I studied and learned German, but I’ve picked up quite a few Spanish words, just from the general culture.
Taco. El Presidente. Loco.
This is a personal argument, rather than a tactical, strategic, moral, or rhetorical one: I feel like I owe my personal growth and moral transformation out of what Moxon refers to as the murder game to people who played what Moxon refers to as the cooperation game. They were under no moral obligation to be patient with me, explain (slowly and calmly enough for me to understand) my shortsightedness, and demonstrate an alternative. I wish (I really, really wish with every fiber) I had possessed the moral, ethical, and civic clarity to figure things out apart from kindness so much greater than my own. But I don’t think that’s likely ever to have happened.
I think Moxon makes an excellent argument (and, as a rhetorical scholar, I find his analysis of the Post lead’s framing top-notch). But I cannot be sorry that there are people willing to play what Moxon calls the cooperation game. I owe them a lot.
(Addendum from original commentator:) I’m probably overly conflating what Moxon refers to as the cooperation game on a national governmental scale with a particular persuasive posture. Still, that was my read on the post here, so I’ll let it stand.
“But I cannot be sorry that there are people willing to play what Moxon calls the cooperation game. I owe them a lot.”
On a personal level this is very true, but I believe the real point is that this is on a much larger scale. The extreme and un-yielding positions of our current “grift-vernment” under T are making the cooperation game untenable because it is only ever *one way*. There is zero co-operation from the T/GOP in response to reasonable offers of cooperation.
Capitulate or Shutdown/Resist seem to be the only choices.
Importantly, we can only get OUT of the “murder game” two ways: Either the courts and elections hold, or we do a lot of violence and a lot of innocent people get killed (a lot, lot more than is happening now). If we decide we want to “win” by relying on the courts and elections, than we have to win enough consecutive elections by big enough margins that we can build back structures that have been torn down, and put in place better guard rails, and do enough to make people’s lives better, that we “win” long term. It is NOT AT ALL CLEAR that we can do that without playing the cooperation game.
Trackbacks
[…] week’s featured posts are “Non-Cooperation” and “Dying in Broad Daylight: The Washington […]