Becoming a Traitor

In the flurry of executive orders during Trump’s first week back, my initial thought about possible ways to counter his signal of grabbing for authoritarian power was to consider that such new rules need people to execute them. If we rely on people to enact these cruel laws and policies, then we can imagine that there might be people who refuse to do so, whether openly or clandestinely. This kind of hope was the same one I had retained for medical workers who might still find ways to aid people to transition or get abortions, working outside or against the parameters of law. It’s the kind of action that we don’t want to talk about, really, and we may only hear of these instances through whisper networks. The model of action this implies goes against the typical leftist ideas of visible mass organized action, upon which so many “revolutionaries” rely. But given the current material and cultural circumstances, modes of actual revolt will more likely take the form of these less visible, or invisible, waves of “smaller” actions, whether in the form of attack or in the form of refusal—not ruling out that some of the planned mass protests might break out int spontaneous riotous gatherings. 

Within the beat that my thoughts went to the possibility of functionary refusal, I saw that the next orders Trump issued were aimed at ferreting out anyone who refused to comply. At first, these orders were specifically in relation to officials with powers of migration control and those in federal positions who might oversee and DEI policies. But now he is largely targeting any “disloyal” federal employees in general. And we see that workers in all kinds of institutions are moving quickly to impose these rules and avoid the ire of the executive who, as the New York Times never fails to remind us, exacts revenge against his enemies. These policies were all things he promised to do during the campaign, and now he claims a mandate to do so given his winning of the popular vote. And people are acting surprised, content simply to raise the question of the possibility of authoritarian takeover, all while saying our hands are tied, we can only rely on a powerless Democratic party, the “left” is in disarray.

This addendum to the policies that targets the particular people charged with imposing them means the administration know the fact that individuals can undermine the vision they are trying to impose. These policies are reliant most of the people in these positions following orders—and with the disappearance of government websites, the erasure of scientific data, the refusal to treat trans teenagers, etc., we are seeing these orders followed. What I am analyzing is not far from Hannah Arendt’s theory in Eichmann in Jerusalem about the banality of evil, though her theory has been contested. In spite of the grand terror of the holocaust of Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and disabled people, the actual implementation of the genocide worked through bureaucracy employed by functionaries, who stamped papers and organized the intermediary steps of shipping people to camps and ordering the components necessary to carry out mass murder. The recent movie Zone of Interest very clearly represents this idea: the Auschwitz commandant lives a sunny bourgeois domestic life up against the walls of the camp. Eichmann’s defense was to shirk responsibility by claiming he was just following orders. Bureaucracy allows precisely for responsibility to be always deferred.

If this perspective of evil’s banality is true, then the only way to stop Trump’s policies internally  would be for a mass yet disparate revolt of state enforcers, from the bureaucrats to the police. But for this to happen, it seems that there would have to be some kind of line crossed in law or action that prompts a large number of people to refuse to do their jobs. Instead, most institutions, despite confusion, are complying (though we don’t know what isn’t reported). And the liberals and the media watch a shift in governing order still retaining hope in the very institutions being undermined to protect against tyranny (as the founding fathers claimed to want in their constitution of the United States). We keep being told that this outpour of disgusting policies won’t stick, is just made to scare us, is an example of Bannon’s idea of flooding the zone, is the fascist attempt to distract us, and so on. But I find that even radicals expect the system to assert itself through laws and regulations, or hoping Trump’s policies (forming new rules and regulations) will be thrown out by courts—all while witnessing over and over again that no one with actual political, financial, police, or corporate power is ever held to account for breaking any laws or social rules.

Trump’s quick movement in this second term follows at least five decades of the more surreptitious reactionary movement of the state, after the momentary (and moderately) progressive blips of the “Civil Rights Era” and the “New Deal.” They set it up, he knocks it down. The reactionaries arranged for gradual takeover of all the branches of government and the liberals have mostly let them have the reins, or even worked to outdo them. The visible and basic functioning of the government over this period allows us to believe that rational governance will continue, and that the absurdity of the Christian white supremacist movements will be tamped down. The lines between an ever more powerful police force and a racist paramilitary force have been blurred. While some of us were still tied to the idea of progress, overt white supremacy has become the norm. And Trump is the seemingly sudden culmination of this.

In a discussion I held with Cindy Milstein, they pointed out that the genocide in Gaza has shown us that we can’t hope for action from on high (states, militaries, international organizations) to stop terror. And Milstein diagnosed this belief even in anarchists, feeling powerless against the mass murder perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and its endless streaming into our phones, waiting for some state power to intervene and say, that’s enough. Clearly we also couldn’t hope for a mass refusal of these same soldiers to carry out these atrocities. Though some defected, for the most part, these terror agents followed their orders given the lifelong indoctrination and subsequent training in coldblooded cruelty. Likewise, we can’t hope for a mass defection of the US police force—they have solidified their political power, holding cities, states, and politicians hostage.

As I said above, people who want to instill hope are saying that Trump’s overwhelming first weeks of action are meant simply to demoralize us and make us feel powerless, and so we should counter that with the actions we are already taking, the groups we are already involved in, to sustain our sense of power on a smaller scale. But I also find that many of us counter the sense of hopelessness and powerless with a subterranean belief in the institutions of the state checking the oncoming terror.

This invisible belief in the power of institutions may not stop us from our own form of action, but it persists nonetheless, and we should try to critically examine it. It relies on an understanding of institutions (or ideological state apparatuses) that empties them out of the people tasked with enacting them: they are ahistorical functions regardless of who populates the bureaucratic offices. It is not a far step from this understanding to the view that overlooks that the police are simply enforcers largely untethered to the letter of the law; that the Supreme Court has delivered the control of the state to the most extreme reactionary forces; that representatives don’t actually care about reflecting their constituents’ desires, only manufacturing consent by claiming representation; that the media consistently enables all of these things in their show of outrage, balanced by pointless commentary; that our own capture by social media and technology at large has replaced action with consumption, a highly stylized and concrete society of the spectacle. (On this last point, that the social media platforms have shown themselves willing to suck up to Trump clearly should belie any possibility that they can serve as robust tools for counterpower: but we only have to look at the extent to which politics have become discourse.) The image of the institution obscures the gradual and now sudden decay. 

In any of these spots of power, there is someone doing what they are expected to do, regardless of their own moral compass. So my question is how can we support a dispersed yet powerful refusal by anyone who retains any shred of power within these systems to play their roles? How can we cultivate traitors? In a recent course I taught that was offering a critical eye on the cultures of business and finance, my students kept analyzing the movies we watched (many circling around the 2008 crash) by discussing how bankers were cut off from moral action by their very positions. They called it “losing their humanity, individuality.” They were satisfied, often, with the idea that, once sucked into these networks, one gives up their allegiances to anything other than profit. I kept asking them if they could imagine someone refusing: could the person promoted to management refuse to bust the union, even if it meant losing her job? Would losing that job mean that she lost the power to help, the lie she told herself when she accepted her new position? (I think here also of the people who say they become cops to help their community from a position of actual power). I don’t think anyone in class really could imagine someone enacting this betrayal, that someone would take the bold move to speak out, given the risk of losing their jobs. Even the bankers who rack up millions and billions of dollars. And the students have a point: we have been able to see that the continual immiseration of most people works very well to move them away from collective rebellion to focus individually on making ends meet. (I will defer analyzing why the capitalist class will stand by while Trump makes his moves.)

But why can’t more people imagine this refusal? I typically speak of it, within the realm of employment, as a rejection of identification with the position or the power you are given. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has written about the implementation of compliance as many of us being given a police function in our jobs, unthinkingly willing to snitch out anyone who steals from work, or who is lazy at work, what she calls “guard duty”: “both uniformed security positions and jobs like assistant manager at fast-food franchises—jobs whose main duties are to ensure workers don’t cheat the time clock, keep their hand out of the till, and don’t give out free stuff to their customer-friends.” (“What is to Be Done?,” Abolition Geographies). This function is why the whistleblower is so rare. The individual punishment outweighs the collective benefit of speaking out.

Our calculations can only conceive of our unique position (much as we are trained to react to individual tragedy and ignore mass murder on the state level). When you live paycheck to paycheck, it is hard to make risky decisions; it’s hard enough to imagine a future beyond next week, let alone a revolutionary one. This discipline goes a long way to make us follow orders. But for those who are in more eminent jobs, add to this the myths of the self that we grow up with, that we will discover who we are in form of our gender, our sexuality, and our work. When you feel you are given a worthy position, you will most likely uphold its norms over your beliefs. And when the crumbling suddenly quickens, as with Trump’s first weeks, the desire for the previous normal is stirred in us.

My hope is that we can find a way to synthesize individual betrayal with collective refusal. Perhaps this is a scattered disorganized plan of action, but we may be able to organize the recognition from one traitor to another, so that the actions can grow exponentially. How do we instill this culture of becoming traitors? How can we signal to those people occupying positions where it is possible to refuse the implementation of cruel policy that they won’t be out on their ass with no support should they speak out? For example, we already have fairly robust networks of supporting prisoners; we can extend similar support to these traitors. And this culture would hopefully then extend further to betraying our identity positions too: acting against whiteness, settler colonialism, and class.

I don’t have much hope right now that government officials will collectively refuse, or that legislators will use their powers to check the grab at power, or that newspapers will trade in feigned outrage for taking a stance. (They call the politicians powerless because they “follow the rules,” the same rules they are watching being broken. Are they truly powerless?) And perhaps it is true that a growing number of people simply think Trump’s policies are popular. Clearly his actions have emboldened anyone who wants to employ street violence (the one thing the newspapers keep saying is that his pardoning of the January 6^th participants is the most worrying thing he has done).  

But I pose my question here in order to open up another avenue of action for us, in addition to all the things we are already doing to sustain our lives and even find pleasure in them. We often critique ourselves by wondering whether our mutual aid networks merely relieve the state from the duty to take care of us. That any gap we fill in just further erodes the safety net at worst, or gets coopted by the state into versions of our work that now also function to enforce discipline. But if we truly desire the end of the state and destruction of empire, then we also desire filling these gaps ourselves, not relying on the state. And that will ultimately demand we all become traitors individually and find collective support in doing so.

To return to the Nazi example, the ones who did take clandestine action against the fascists were known as the partisans. The name itself reflects a willingness to take a stance against the system: we have allegiances but not to the state. They operated in guerilla form, not in massive action. Along with our active betrayals, we can form a culture of secrecy where information and action spreads under cover. We can feign powerlessness, shock, and outrage, while really doing something.

Of course there is a good number of us who rely on certain government programs, on institutions that run on federal funding, and thus on a certain continuity of people remaining in their positions, doing their jobs. For my part, as a chronically ill person, I use medicaid to see my doctors and receive my (expensive) treatment. Though I can imagine a kind of “seizing” of the hospitals by staffing them with people willing to treat anyone, I currently rely on the infrastructure that manufactures the drugs and delivers them to hospitals. In a culture of traitors, another form of betrayal than flat out refusal, would be people reporting for duty in their various positions but using them against their purposes. This is akin to what Moten and Harney describe as the undercommons: operating in and against the systems, as much as possible under the notice of enforcers. 

To prepare a roll out robust traitorous action, we can all look to the ways we already betray this world and its dictates. To choose one example close to me, we can see that trans people enact a betrayal to the idea that one must remain in a gender assigned forcibly at birth. And though this kind of betrayal has gotten much violent attention due to a certain visibility purchased over the last decade, trans people also know how to operate in the shadows through invisible networks of support. Though I don’t expect to see mass transition, I wouldn’t be unhappy if it did happen. Regardless trans people can serve as a model to all the non-trans people of a way of living betrayal, inside and outside, and against the world. The fear of taking the step is the unknown consequence, but we can never be sure that one moment will follow the next.  So why should we act as if it does?