Fascist America or Sacred America

ON THE 5th ANNIVERSARY OF JANUARY 6TH

I pray to the ancestors before beginning any book project, asking for guidance and doing my best to trust what comes through. Before writing Original Politics, all sixteen chapters came, in sequence, in one download. I was told that one of the chapters in Part Three would be called Fascist America or Sacred America. At the time, I found this quite surprising, as Donald Trump had not yet been elected president. I should have realized then that he was going to be elected, and reelected, but I did not fully trust the original inspiration. I believed Clinton was going to win, then Biden, then Harris. I was wrong two out of three times. The download came through for a reason. The ancestors saw what I could not, because they operate outside linear time. They see the future as if it had already happened, and perhaps it has, for them.

When I fully trust the guidance of the ancestors, magic happens. During the summer of 2016, I knew I was going to write the book, but I was still marinating how to do it. It was then that my dear friend Susan Stanton invited me to a conference in Illinois called Honoring the Ancestors of Ancient America and encouraged me to come via Amtrak, partly because the train station was near the conference site, and partly because, in her experience, interesting things always happened when she took the train. I accepted the invitation, and during the two day sojourn through the mountains, prairies, and marshlands of America, I can tell you now—she was right.

Since I was traveling alone, Amtrak randomly assigned other passengers to dine with me, and on one particular evening, I was assigned three other passengers who were also traveling alone and had widely divergent political views. One was a white male from Lawrence, KS, who was a Trump supporter; another was a gay, African-American man from New Mexico who was a Bernie Sanders supporter (although he considered him too far to the right!); and the third was a Native American man who didn’t like any of the candidates. I realized then that I had been gifted with my own little focus group and said a silent prayer of gratitude. Then I asked them: “What is the sacred purpose of America? And why would your candidate fulfill that? “ I cannot go into as much detail on the conversation as I did in the book, but suffice it to say that everyone got along quite well, although I found it oddly disconcerting how much the Sanders and Trump supporter ended up agreeing with each other. It seems that those on the far right and far left can meet in the middle sometimes, perhaps because they are both dissatisfied. The Native American man was in some ways more dissatisfied, but he was also quite wise. He said that the political nation of America had appropriated much of its original values from Native values: liberty, equality, and natural rights. This became the foundational premise of the book.

Immediately after the train ride, I began my own search for what is the sacred purpose of America. And about a third of the way through writing the book, I had my answer: the sacred purpose of America is unity in diversity. Unity in diversity is a meta-concept that includes liberty, equality, and natural rights. Such a principle was touted by the founding fathers, who used the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum (Out of the Many, One) on the Great Seal of the United States. Unity in diversity is also a sacred principle among Native nations (who tend to include diversity from the entire natural world), and in many ancient religions, including Hinduism. Importantly, here in America we have an opportunity to practice unity in diversity not as an abstract concept, but as a living reality. All the world’s peoples have come to settle on this soil. There is a wealth of different peoples and different ways of knowing in this nation, which I personally find attractive. Of course, some think there is too much diversity. That is why I titled Part Three of Original Politics Maximum Diversity. The very concept of diversity has become a bone of contention.

As long as diversity is welcomed and encouraged, differences can become harmonized into a greater whole. But when difference is discouraged, as is the case now, aggressive efforts may be taken to eliminate it. The current administration is literally seeking to defund or simply eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in academia. Note that they never call it “diversity, equity, and inclusion;” they call it “DEI” (as if the acronym itself is something evil).

To be clear, both sides are seeking unity. One side seeks unity through diversity; the other side seeks unity through exclusion. Elimination of diversity is a prerequisite for fascism. Every fascist government has sought to demonize those they deem different. Mussolini succinctly defined fascism as “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Those that are against this administration have been labelled traitors, communists, or “Antifa.” In case you didn’t know, Antifa simply means “anti-fascist.” Antifa is an ideology; it is not an organization or a movement, not yet anyway. It is only a threat if your intention is to create a fascist state.

With that said, not everything that is going on now is detrimental to the nation in the long term. Whether he realizes it or not, Trump is serving a sacred role; he is a trickster figure uprooting the status quo. I tell a story in Original Politics that illustrates what I am talking about. It is an adaptation of a White Mountain Apache story, and it goes like this:

An old woman has been long at work weaving a beautiful tapestry. As she nears its completion, she pauses to stir a soup. When she stirs the soup, however, her black dog, asleep in the corner, awakens, pulls on a loose thread, and causes the weaving to unravel. Where there was beauty and harmony, there is now confusion and chaos. But the old woman, returning from stirring the soup, is unfazed. She stares into the disorder, picks up a loose thread, and reimagines a new way to restore beauty and harmony. ^[i]

This story aptly describes where America is today. Things are unravelling before our eyes. As unsettling as this is, from time to time we need the black dog. We need a trickster figure to unravel our efforts at perfection, because when everything is pulled apart, we gain an opportunity to see what is the underlying reality. A certain element of the population has long been racist and sexist. This is not something Trump created. He is simply a leader who has enabled people’s bigotry and prejudices to come out of the shadows.

In short, Donald Trump is a revealer of the American psychological shadow. That can often be dangerous, leading to violence, as it did on January 6th, 2021, but it can also be an opportunity to see the nation as it really is, which is a prerequisite for making genuinely substantive change. Please remember this today, on the 5th anniversary of the January 6th insurrection.

Sometime after that train ride, but still before the 2016 presidential election, I dreamed that Trump was a window washer. He was standing on scaffolding outside the top floor of one of New York’s tallest skyscrapers, looking into the building from the outside. He turns to look down on the city, becomes frightened and passes out, his head facing down from the scaffolding. There is a window washing crew with him and they are afraid to wake him up in that position, thinking that the Donald would have a heart attack and die. And so they huddle to decide what to do and finally determine that the only course of action is to slowly lower the scaffolding back to the ground before waking him. That was when the dream ended. I shared this dream while conducting a dialogue in Taos, NM the following year and asked the participants to imagine themselves as the window washer, and to think how they might see our country more clearly. The responses were very encouraging; the group actively envisioned a better America and world.

I say this not to diminish the dangers of the time we are in. Fascist governments of the past have often claimed to want to make their nation great again, only to turn their attention to perpetrating war on surrounding nations. The events of the last week in Venezuela are deeply concerning, as is the level of lawlessness and corruption in our own government today. I am not saying this in defense of Maduro, who my Venezuelan friends assure me is horrifically corrupt. But the fact is we have arrested the leader of a foreign nation and charged him with breaking our laws, while our own president, a convicted felon, is sitting in office, protected by a Supreme Court that has declared him immune from prosecution for “official acts.” This is a bitter irony, hard to swallow.

Of course, in the end, authoritarian trickster figures only last for so long. Eventually, the people rise up and remove them, and I fully expect that to happen here. When that time comes, I pray that We, the People will be like the woman who stares into the tapestry, reimagining a way to reweave the fabric of the nation at a higher level of integration. It may be difficult to imagine a better world during these challenging times, but it is the right thing to do. It is also the most loving thing to do. A better world does not mean simply vanquishing our enemies. It is possible to build a diverse and more inclusive nation and world without losing compassion for those that disagree with us, even our fallen leaders. Love includes all, even the trickster figures among us.

^[i]. Gabrielli, Julie. Weaving and Unravelling in Black Dog Times. https://juliegabrielli.com/2016/11/09/weaving-and-unraveling-in-black-dog-times/