Welcome to The Platypus!
This is the first installment of our newsletter, a reboot of what some of you know as Reading Journal, an occasional email we started sending to friends in February 2020 with links to articles we found useful in making sense of the then-novel coronavirus pandemic and the country’s ongoing political and economic crisis. Our list has since grown to many hundreds of people and outgrown the email format. The Platypus will come out roughly once a week (no commitments!), and any given week will include some mix of opinion, links to books and articles we like, reflections on things we’ve read, a “delights and provocations” section for art and film, and a “savvy corner” featuring cool interventions, campaigns, or events. It’s free, but you can subscribe for $5 per month if you want to contribute to the “crowded out of their apartment by too many books” fund. We’ll be announcing subscriber-only content in the near future. We don’t promise to be topical or relevant, only to follow our many curiosities about politics, ideas, organizing, movements, art, and spirituality. Our basic editorial rule is to include things that make us think in new ways, bring us joy, or both. Please subscribe and spread the word!
Deepak and Harry
You may ask, “Why the platypus?”
Once thought to be a hoax, the platypus is a most improbable critter — an egg-laying mammal, with a snout like a duck’s, a tail like a beaver’s, and a mole’s prodigious ability to burrow. It glows; finds prey with electrolocation, like a shark; and can take down much larger predators with its hind feet, which are equipped with venomous spikes. This swiss army knife of animals perfectly symbolizes what our newsletter aspires to be: eclectic and surprising, wondrous yet formidable.
In this issue . . .
· Deepak’s essay “The Missing Witnesses in Trump’s Trial” offers a more personal than usual take on the Senate’s debate about impeachment.
· a few reading recommendations on the theme of racist authoritarianism
· several inspiring things in Savvy Corner, including a victory by and for trans women of color here in NYC, a smart immigration strategy pivot, and an exciting upcoming event on leadership with two visionary and brilliant leaders, Cristina Jimenez, Co-Founder and former Executive Director of United We Dream and Nse Ufot, CEO of New Georgia Project.
· in the Delights and Provocations section, Harry’s meditative video of geese in Central Park and a review of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe
The Missing Witnesses in Trump’s Trial
As the Senate begins to debate the article of impeachment against Donald Trump, I have been thinking about Srinivas Kuchibhotla. A 32-year-old software engineer from Hyderabad, India, Kuchibhotla was murdered in a Kansas bar a month after Trump’s inauguration. Adam Purinton approached Kuchibhotla, asked if he was in the country legally, called him a terrorist and demanded that he “get out of my country.” Purinton killed Kuchibhotla in February 2017, on the heels of Trump’s Presidential campaign that viciously demonized immigrants, and he invoked the same racist tropes that Trump had used to motivate his base.
Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, grieved after he was killed, asking, “What should I do? What is this life? Is it true that I cannot see Srinu? Is it true that I can’t hear his voice? Is it true I lost the person who loves me the most?” She asked in a Facebook post, “Do we belong here?” Concerned about gun violence, she had previously asked her husband if they should move to a different country: “Are we doing the right thing by staying in the United States of America?”
I read about Kuchibhotla’s murder while conducting research for a chapter in a forthcoming book, Immigration Matters: Visions, Strategies, and Movements for a Progressive Future, a collection of essays about the future of immigration policy after Trump. I felt a connection to Kuchibhotla by virtue of my own family’s decision to emigrate from India, in their case to Madison, Wisconsin, in the late 1960s. My family was part of the great wave of immigration made possible by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), the law that produced the browning of America that Trump ran against. The 1965 immigration law eliminated racist national-origin quotas that had long restricted immigration from the global south. The law was signed and celebrated by Lyndon Johnson at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Although it has received far less attention than the momentous Voting Rights Act or Civil Rights Act, the 1965 immigration law was also a victory of the civil rights movement. The law’s authors did not intend to spark a massive new wave of immigration, but the result has been a transformation of the country’s demography, politics, and culture.
A week after Trump was inaugurated, the Victoria Islamic Center in Texas was burned to the ground. A few weeks after Kuchibhotla was murdered, a white supremacist traveled to New York City with the goal of finding and murdering a Black man – and did exactly that, stabbing Timothy Caughman to death and confessing to police that he harbored a deep hatred of Black men. Then, in August 2017, a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, Virginia, rammed his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring over thirty others. Studies reveal a dramatic rise in hate crimes in the Trump years – what has been dubbed the “Trump Effect.” Shortly after the November 2020 election, the Trump administration’s own FBI reported that hate crimes had risen nearly twenty percent in the past four years and that hate-inspired murders reached their highest levels in 28 years.
Seen through this wider lens, the January 6th insurrection is not an aberration, but the culmination of a campaign of terror and violence directed against Black, brown, immigrant, and Muslim communities. Most Americans think of hate crimes and violence by right-wing groups as something marginal to the “real business” of politics and policy. However, much of the modern Republican Party has been deliberately fomenting a continuous rebellion against the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, from Nixon’s southern strategy to Reagan’s dog whistles on welfare and crime, and under Trump, they very nearly succeeded. Violence by lone wolves and organized hate groups has been essential rather than incidental to their plan.
Considered as a matter of strategy, hate violence has direct and indirect effects. Fear of violence discourages migration – as it did for thousands of Indian families, shocked by what they learned about Trump’s America from wide coverage of Kuchibhotla’s murder in Indian media. Violence by private individuals and organizations, incited by politicians, can be just as effective as laws or regulations that restrict immigration. Violence against marginalized groups, when allowed to fester by majorities who don’t themselves feel endangered, gives white nationalist groups confidence. When Trump called Mexicans “rapists,” characterized the African nations from which some immigrants come as “shithole countries,” and made his infamous comments about “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville, he was encouraging and legitimizing white violence in a perverse call and response.
Violence also creates fear among people who plausibly believe themselves to be potential targets. Fear is a powerful emotion, and it usually demobilizes people who feel it. It is no coincidence that the groups that mobilized first as the “resistance” in the early years of Trump were largely white and middle class, people who felt some measure of safety and security. Throughout the Trump years, we did not see mass marches of millions of immigrants of the kind we did in 2006 and 2007, for the very good reason that immigrants were afraid. In a viral video after the riot at the Capitol, Arnold Schwarzenegger invoked Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” in 1938, during which Nazi mobs murdered at least 91 Jews, destroyed some 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses and at least 267 synagogues. But American history is itself replete with examples of the use of violence by private, armed groups, with the support of politicians, to restore or sustain the racial order – from the Colfax massacre of 1873 to the burning of Black Tulsa in 1921 to the 4,400 lynchings that spurred six million Black Americans to move north in the Great Migration. These attacks have been principally directed against Black and indigenous people but have also targeted immigrants, religious minorities, and other marginalized groups. White terrorism is not something aberrant in America – it has been a cornerstone of right-wing political strategies. Unchallenged, hate crimes lay the groundwork for attacks on democratic institutions and more powerful people, including even members of Congress.
There is a particular detail of the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla that haunts me. When Purinton first menaced him at that bar in Olathe, Kansas, Kuchibhotla and his friend prepared to leave the bar, rightly sensing that they were in danger. They were persuaded to stay by other patrons, who apologized for Purinton’s behavior. The manager told Purinton to leave. One of the other customers paid the tab for the Indian immigrants, and the manager bought them another round of beer and fried pickles – which Kuchibhotla particularly liked. “Everybody kept coming up to us saying this is not what we represent, you guys belong here,” Kuchibhotla’s friend said later.
Purinton then returned to the bar and shot the two men, killing Kuchibhotla. Too many white Americans and politicians have been those patrons at the bar, publicly deploring the hatred directed at vulnerable groups but comforted by the idea that “this is not who we really are,” or by the fiction that it could be contained at the margins of political life. (The execrable Nikki Haley’s plea to “give the man a break!” after Trump’s incitement to insurrection shows that brown people can be complicit, too). The Trump regime began with racialized hatred – and culminated with an insurrection threatening democracy. Trump’s conviction in the Senate is surely justified – but saving democracy will require a much deeper effort to excise the racist and nativist rot that threatens it.
Srinivas Kuchibhotla and all those we’ve lost over the last four years to racist violence won’t offer testimony in the Senate this week – but we can remember them as we take stock of the crimes of Donald J. Trump.
Deepak Bhargava, February 6, 2021
Recommended Readings
Today’s theme: racist authoritarianism.
Political scientist Joe Lowndes offers a super-smart take on “The GOP, the Far Right, and the Transformation of the Party System.”
The far-right takeover of the GOP might hurt it electorally, but our assessment should not just be the prospects of traditional party competition within bourgeois democracy.
The GOP has now morphed into an entity not currently controlled by elite managers. Openly authoritarian, political entrepreneurs at the county, state, and national level vie to represent a massive base of tens of millions who believe Biden was installed illegally. Their ties to armed paramilitaries are open in some places, only slightly veiled in others.
This then is a historic shift in the US party system itself, the institutional effects of which are as yet unclear. The GOP will increasingly compete through institutional vote suppression and extra-institutional intimidation, street violence, and direct action - enacting repressive rule where they can win, and sabotaging governance where they can't.
In The New Republic, Osita Nwanevu makes a crucial point in “The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon.”
Of all the “big lies” distorting our politics, one of the largest and most popular—back in 2010 and now—has been the notion that our political divisions are the product of under- or miseducation. The Republican Party’s flight into lunacy, it’s often suggested, has a fairly simple cause. The unwashed aren’t getting The Facts in school or from their media sources, and it’s up to the enlightened to shower The Facts upon them—perhaps, as some “disinformation” experts recently suggested to The New York Times, with a “reality czar” at the White House manning the hose. This was the explanation many turned to as the Trump era began, and it was the explanation many turned to for how it ended. …
According to court records and media coverage reviewed by the University of Chicago’s Robert Pape and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats’ Keven Ruby, a full 40 percent of the 193 people charged with breaking into the Capitol grounds were business owners or white-collar workers. “Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose,” they wrote. “They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants.” . . .
And as much as the right’s critics might prefer an understanding of what’s happened to our politics that flatters their intelligence, the challenge we’re facing isn’t that millions of hapless and benighted yokels have been bamboozled by disinformation. It’s that millions of otherwise ordinary people from many walks of life—including many who went to and even excelled in college—have a material or ideological interest in keeping the Democratic Party and its voters from power by any means possible.
Last week, the New York Times published an in-depth report: “77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election.” It should be required reading for every member of the Senate, indeed for every American, because it meticulously reconstructs the sequence of ever more desperate and anti-democratic moves Trump took to hold on to power.
In the aftermath of that broken afternoon at the Capitol, a picture has emerged of entropic forces coming together on Trump’s behalf in an ad hoc, yet calamitous, crash of rage and denial.
But interviews with central players, and documents including previously unreported emails, videos and social media posts scattered across the web, tell a more encompassing story of a more coordinated campaign.
The investigation is full of damning revelations, but the worst may be that the plan to march from the Ellipse to the Capitol originated only days before January 6th, coming not from the event’s original sponsors but from the White House.
In The Guardian, Heinrich Geiselberger argues “The attack on the US Capitol was a case of ‘liquid authoritarianism’ in action.” He offers a compelling framework to understand the distinctive combination of menacing planned insurrection with lampoonable buffoonery that played out on January 6th.
The trouble with concepts such as “coup”, “fascism”, and “authoritarianism” is that they all date back to the period that the late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called “solid modernity”. By “solid” he meant societies with large groups of people bundled up in intermediary associations (churches, unions, parties) with ideologies that were at least striving for some kind of consistency, and the predictability that comes with it.
Tamás spoke of “post-fascism” back in 2000. But all the “post” concepts have the disadvantage of only saying what something is not or no longer. Bauman himself bristled at the term “postmodernity”, but used a positive, content-filled counter-concept: as a lot of solid things had melted into air, he argued, western societies entered a phase of “liquid modernity” in the final quarter of the 20th century at the very latest. Atomised, volatile, swarm-like, with porous borders between gravity and earnestness, sincerity and irony.
Bauman, who was born in the Polish town of Poznań in 1925 and experienced the dark sides of solid modernity, applied his concept widely: “liquid love”, “liquid time”, “liquid surveillance”. Single events are by their nature liquid or transient, so while Bauman would probably not have spoken of a “liquid putsch”, it is quite possible that he might have spoken of “liquid authoritarianism”: irony instead of grim determination; social media instead of radio broadcasts; swarms instead of orchestrated formations; merchandise instead of uniforms; followers instead of members; flashmobs instead of regular meetings; erratic policies instead of long-term projects. Trump lards his speeches with references from pop culture. “Sanctions are coming,” he tweets, like a character in Game of Thrones.
Attempts to distinguish the phenomenon of Trumpism from its predecessors do not have to trivialise it. What looks liquid or carnivalesque can have terrible consequences. Pipe bombs may still lie in wait for already vulnerable groups or government employees or certain elites.
Arnold Schwarzenegger compared the storming of the Capitol to the November pogroms in Nazi Germany in 1938. The Twitterati pounced and proposed the Beer Hall Putsch as the better comparison. The Nazi movement itself was still in a liquid stage in 1923 before it solidified organisationally and institutionally in the 1920s and 1930s. States of matter can change into different compounds: from solid to liquid to gas and the other way round. In this sense one could interpret “Trumpism” or “rightwing populism”, at least when it comes to its diverse base, as an attempt to use liquid-authoritarian means to react to a situation of cultural and economic liquidity. All with the goal of realising the nostalgic utopia of a more solid modernity.
Historian Manisha Sinha has a very compelling piece in the New York Review of Books, “The Case for A Third Reconstruction,”which argues for very aggressive use of state power to break the back of authoritarianism.
The history of Reconstruction reveals that moments of crisis can also provide opportunities to strengthen our experiment in democracy. With a Democratic-controlled Congress, the new administration has just such a chance to inaugurate a much needed “third reconstruction” of American democracy. …
Reconstruction also provides us with a roadmap for how to deal with racist domestic terrorism, which now looms as the greatest danger to American democracy. …
Above all, the history of Reconstruction demonstrates the imperative to bring the full weight of the law to bear upon those attempting to overthrow democratic government by terrorist means. Initially, President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress acted forcefully, establishing the Department of Justice and passing the three Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 that contained the first Ku Klux Klan. The law was initially designed to protect Southern black voters from violent intimidation. Hundreds of African Americans testified before a congressional committee to the white supremacist violence to which they were subjected in the South. The second Enforcement Act of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act) eventually activated federal legal intervention targeting the Klan in areas like upcountry South Carolina, which Grant declared to be in a state of insurrection and subject to martial law. Under a plan devised by Attorney General Amos Akerman, hundreds of Klan members confessed and were arrested, putting an end to Klan violence in that state.
Savvy Corner
In a New York Times op-ed featuring Lorella Praeli of Community Change Action, “A Plan B for Immigration,” Jorge Ramos describes the brilliant pivot by immigrant rights movement leaders to press for using rescue and recovery legislation to legalize essential workers, Dreamers, and people with Temporary Protected Status.
On Tuesday, February 16, from 12:30-2 p.m. ET, join an event Deepak will be moderating: “Leading for Social Change at a Critical Time: What Do Leaders Need?” with the amazing Nse Ufot, CEO of New Georgia Project, and Cristina Jimenez, co-founder and former Executive Director of United We Dream.
Finally, let’s celebrate the leadership of trans women of color and the amazing Make the Road New York (MRNY) for getting the “Walking While Trans” ban passed in the NY state legislature. (Special shout out to a student of Deepak’s and organizer at MRNY, Mateo Guerrero, who played a big part in this campaign!) From the New York Times:
“This is going to save some lives,” said TS Candii, a community organizer and a Black transgender woman, who said she had been assaulted by a police officer under the guise of the law. “Knowing that no one will ever be profiled or experience trauma like mine again because of this law will for sure help me and many of us move forward with our healing.”
Delights and Provocations
Treat yourself to two minutes of mesmerizing tranquility with Harry’s video of geese on ice in Central Park.
After seeing Education, the last film in Steve McQueen’s provocative and deeply humane series Small Axe, we want to (again) urge everyone to watch it on Amazon Prime. The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday offers an appreciation that doesn’t give too much away but is even more satisfying to read after taking in all five films: “The unbreakable gaze of Steve McQueen: ‘I’m asking you, please, look.’”