"Rebels in our own time"
My 3/28 speech at No Kings 3, Cincinnati
I spoke at the No Kings rally in Cincinnati two weeks ago. Thanks to the incredible local organizers from 50501, and the good people doing the national work at Indivisible, I was able to address about fifteen thousand people at the largest Cincy rally so far.
The speech should stand on its own, and the camera helps us to understand that it arose from a time and a place, and that it was in large measure a conversation. There is a lot of joking and back-and-forth that I can’t summarize in prose! After I was done I made a big circle in the crowd for greetings, handshakes, and hugs -- and that took so long that I was late for the march, which was also great. All of that was part of the experience for me, though it isn’t captured here. Seeing what organizers can do and meeting people who want to stand out is a joy on its own.
When you take in the video the themes should be pretty clear! You don’t have to read any of the below -- just watch if you like. The video is right here, at this link, or click on the photo.
One thing I was after was the relationship between opposition and liberation. The slogan « No Kings » creates a big space for agreement to oppose the abuse of power. But opposition makes no sense without a vision of what is better. So with the crowd I wanted to link the idea of No Kings with the idea of freedom: not only freedom from the overweening tyrant, but freedom to become the best people we could be.
What does it mean -- I was asking next -- to be commemorating 250 years of the American republic. To an uncanny degree, what the Trump people in this 250th year are doing is repeating the abuses that the American founders complained about: arbitrary taxation; taxation without representation; imperial attitudes; wars without consent. The point -- I went on -- is not that the founders were right about everything, but that they were rebels in their time (I was borrowing this from Frederick Douglass and his famous speech “What to a slave is the Fourth of July?”).
To honor the origins of of our republic doesn’t mean going back to the eighteenth century. It means being rebels in our own time. It means demanding freedom, aiming for something radically better in the future.
So the way that the Trump people are trying to rule us is about ending the republic. For the republic to survive, it has to be better -- we have to have liberation that includes schools, and health care, and justice, and opportunity, excludes mass incarceration, and concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing, and senseless, criminal wars. We have to be able to speak together rather than have our conversations determined by oligarchs and algorithms. We have to work together rather than allowing ourselves to be isolated.
So we are acting -- I wanted to say -- for a new beginning. There is no going back to the distant past or even to the recent past. The future opens when we act. And I was trying by the end to say what forms of action are available: solidarity, defense of the less fortunate, protection of elections and aiming towards big electoral victories, local organizing, and mass action -- by which I meant in particular May Day, which is now just three weeks away -- make a plan!
The fact that a historian is showing up in person—-at rallies, in crowds, making circles through fifteen thousand people for handshakes; matters more than the speech itself. Snyder is putting his body where his analysis is. That’s rarer than it should be.
Most public intellectuals are content to diagnose from a safe distance. Snyder is choosing the harder thing: to be accountable to the people he’s writing about, in real time, in the rain.
Thank you!!
Johan 🐌
YES! We have to envision a better future and work to create it. We need to have conversations about what the structure should look like to ensure our safety and freedom. I applaud the people around the world who are standing up and speaking out against this current chaos--AND we should also be talking in great detail about what we want next. In my small town, I'm creating some interactive theatre sketches to do that-- get people talking. It's a tiny start, but we need these conversations -- and we need to keep envisioning a future we can all live with. Thanks for your encouragement and good work!