My main pursuit–intellectual or otherwise–from May 2014 to (almost exactly) November 8th, 2017 was to find a way to shoehorn Socialism into the fabric of the America that I grew up in.
After those 3 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that that pursuit and the questions that inspired it may have been 100% folly. That the pursuit was folly, however, may end up providing answers to many of the questions that I encountered in the pursuit of answers leading toward the ontologically-supreme goal: advancing Socialism in the USA.
The America I grew up in is a dusty, snowy, windy high mountain desert, nestled between the ski areas and Denver–suburban sprawl punctuated by mesas, hogbacks, and foothills. You’d think the suburbs endless, were it not for the interventions of geology. It was, until I returned from college, a largely foreign land that I felt I didn’t need to make any effort to understand; after all, I grew up there.
Thusly, if the overriding goal was/is instantiating Socialism, I was already putting myself behind the 8-ball–perhaps even further away, behind the 8-ball, two tables over. While it was almost certainly due to the arrogant overconfidence of the 18 year old in part, it is understandable that I wouldn’t see the things about Colorado that I’d need to until I removed myself from the situation, hovered above and one abstraction away like an objective scientist.
After four godforsaken years in the literal swamp of Washington D.C., I returned to the place where I grew up, ready for the rest of my life. Instead, I found out just how hard it is for a Philosophy major to get a decent job in a city that was pivoting–and fast–to high tech pursuits. Consequently, I ended up in my parent’s place, hating life and wasting time.
This period lasted almost 6 months before I found employment with a healthcare nonprofit. That said, I still couldn’t make enough to move out, so I had the unique position where I was making what one could theoretically deem as an “adult income” while still living at home and not paying rent.
So I bought books. I bought a lot of fuckin’ books. Books about Marx, about the history of America, about geography and the environment and psychology–I consumed nearly everything I could in order to better understand the world around me. In that pursuit, I began to notice a pattern, a pattern which could help to bridge the divide between the Socialist Colorado in my head and the Hickenlooper/Hancock Colorado of bitter, grey reality.
I had never given much credence to the idea that different peoples had distinct political cultures. It seemed to stray too far from the “material base defines superstructure” orthodox understanding of Marx that I agreed with. That said, a very small portion of Colin Woodard’s American Nations and a couple of odds and ends that led to further specialization and further narrowing has given me my new synthesis (if you’ll allow such insanely lofty language).
According to Woodard’s conception, the “unique national culture” of the Interior West is that of a resource colony. And this makes sense. In the early 1900’s when monopoly capital ran rampant, the political reaction was one of SPUSA and IWW; as the Bundy ranch debacle demonstrated, in modern times the railing is against faraway government bureaucrats. In both cases, however, there is a similarity: a concentration of power (or capital), thousands of miles abstracted from the facts on the ground, exerting control over OUR lands and resources.
There IS a unique political culture in the Rocky Mountain West. We are a reaction against the perceived locus of power on the coasts. And, again, in that purely materialist conception, the Interior West is still a resource colony. Have been, hopefully won’t always be. At least, that’s what the actually-existing-socialists who kept getting elected in Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico hoped around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Many of the names that got involved in this period in time are famous to only a very specialized group of people–names like Mary Harris Jones, Bill Haywood, Davis Waite–and many of the conflicts sound like made up Civil Wars from Newt Gingrich’s alternative history novels. The Victory Mine Massacre, the Colorado Mining Wars, the Bombing of the Vindicator–if these names make it sound like a legitimate war was going on, that’s with good reason: there was.
For your right to the 8 hour work day, many miners died. Many of their family members were massacred. Many of their leaders were assassinated. But they didn’t give up. Even when they were atomized immigrants of several different european countries brought in to break strikes, unable to communicate (and thus, organize) with the east of the English speakers, they managed to coalesce and find solidarity in one another. Even when the armed forces were called in on you, you never considered surrendering and instead began military training. Labor has never been more radical and vital than in the mining industries around the turn of the century, and it’s time to remind folks.
The reading, researching, traveling, and thinking led to one conclusion. The Rocky Mountain West is ready for Socialism, ready for a return to a time when Red State meant RED and the GOP felt it necessary to literally hire private armies to hold us back. I went to D.C. looking for some rational, liberal nonsense that would provide a silver bullet in “solving” Colorado’s politics. I stand here, 8ish years later, knowing that there’s no silver bullet, none save organizing. 8ish years ago, I left Colorado thinking something pathological about the character of the state and I know now that there’s no pathology here save what the coasts gave us. We always had it right, and goddammit we just need to remember why and how we got it right.
Bury me at the rodeo.