I recently posted here a video in which I invited people — who find it too painful to spend much time on our immediate battle against this destructive Trumpian force, but want to stay in the battle, to go to a kind of “War College” to gain an understanding of the battle that could help us triumph in the longer run against the Fascistic force now in power in America.
A claim like that — about future consequences of the integrated understanding I’m beginning to lay out here on Daily Kos — is impossible to prove. Indeed, I can’t claim to know with any clarity how much this way of seeing our situation would empower our effort to defeat this ugly and destructive force, and drive it into oblivion.
The future being conjectural, I turned instead to the past for supportive evidence that if Liberal America saw things through the perspective that my lifelong study of the forces at work in the human world offers, this rising fascist force could have been killed in its cradle.
- (Starting in the early 90s, when I tried to raise the alarm about Rush Limbaugh represented a way a fascistic force could pour toxins into the consciousness of tens of millions of Americans. (I was told by liberal gatekeepers that “Rush Limbaugh’s audience is not our concern.”)
- And then from 2004 onward, I was told I was alarmist when I warned that American democracy was in peril, that the Republican Party had become a very different and dangerous kind of force in the world.
- In 2014, I campaigned for the Liberal World to PRESS THE BATTLE and that the Liberal World should press the battle by exposing and denouncing that rising fascism, to wage a battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, lest that battle be forfeited and something Americans had always regarded as “Evil” be enabled to take control of the country.
I regard that as evidence that the “way of understanding” I’m offering in this “War College” would have more helped strengthen the pro-Democracy side that now has catastrophically lost power to the Fascist Force (in the 2024 election).
Which would mean that the “War College” claim is justified, as the coherent vision of the human situation seems to provide a clearer view of the battlefield, and what’s at stake, and perhaps of how it should be fought.
By happenstance there exists a video that illustrates how I combined the larger perspective with the immediate political battle when I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in a 2:1 Republican congressional district in 2012.
It was the high-point of my campaign. (This video went viral.) And it exemplifies the politics I have been espousing, which addresses the immediate battle in a way shaped by the “way of understanding” offered in this “War College.”
So here in this speech I expressed the vision of my BETTER HUMAN STORY in a form appropriate for a political banquet on the eve of an important election. I sought to reveal the nature of WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST as part of a call to battle.
(This is 2012. Well before Trump.)
That was a call to battle, in the form of a picture of what we’re up against. Two years later, I tried to issue a Call to Battle again— with a series of articles titled PRESS THE BATTLE. Then in early 2015, I published another Call to Battle in the form of a book — titled WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST: The Destructive Force at Work in Our World— and How We Can Defeat It — that I self-published because I had forebodings that the 2016 election would be a calamity for the nation, and self-publishing was the only way could I get the book out before the election.
The War College is about putting together an integrated way of understanding both what’s going on at the immediate level, and the larger picture that shows more of what this battle’s about, and where it’s coming from.
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On Tuesday here, I will reintroduce that foundational idea that leads into that “Big Picture” view of humankind’s situation that I call A BETTER HUMAN STORY.
Thereafter, the entries in the coming series will have titles that begin with “War College.” My hope is that consistency in name will make it easy for those who wish to follow the unfolding of that integrated understanding of our situation to do so.