Don't Let Fatalism Break The Spirit Of Resistance
Building things doesn't have to be that much harder than breaking them.
“It’s easier to break things than to build them.”
You might call this the deflating mantra of the second resistance. It’s on everyone’s lips.
I have examples at hand, but don’t really want to single any one progressive or politician out for amplifying the sentiment. Paste it or a similar permutation into any search field, and you’ll see what I mean.
Why has this become such a widespread lament? Three reasons come to mind.
Because it’s true to some extent, in most cases.
Many people who say, “it’s easier to break than to build,” are processing their own grief along the way to acceptance.
Others may be speaking in stark terms to best convey the gravity of the situation. This isn’t the normal ebb and flow of politics, it’s an act of mass vandalism.
The expression has thus taken on a meme-like quality. People who repeat it aren’t typically offering a considered assessment of what has happened, and what the future might hold—they’re making a show of their own sober realism. We see things clearly. The damage is severe. Fixing it will be hard.
I want to discourage overuse of this and similar phrases. The main reason is that, while true in a literal sense, it isn’t always true in the most foreboding sense. Not every act of destruction is like the leveling of a city, and not every act of rebuilding requires clearing out rubble and laying new foundation.
I reflect a lot these days on what would have happened if Mitt Romney had defeated Barack Obama in 2012, and quickly repealed the Affordable Care Act. That would have exemplified the thesis that breaking is easier than building. It’s a big part of what made that election feel so weighty. Establishing a universal health care mechanism took Democrats decades. The bill that passed took over a year to write. It was going to take four more to phase it in. But with Congress on his side, before the implementation had begun in earnest, Romney could have zeroed it out, and quickly. Gone.
In that case, though, the entity Republicans had targeted for destruction hadn’t been completely built, and their plan wasn’t just to make it function poorly but eliminate it under the law.
That’s not the situation Donald Trump and Elon Musk have created. And it concedes too much to would be despots like them to spend our time bemoaning how difficult it will be to clean up in their wake. Surely one reason they’ve engaged in so much vandalism so quickly is to leave their political opponents demoralized and inert. Like Ozymandias, they would like us to despair.
But those of us who stand against them can acknowledge the damage they’ve done and maintain a posture of dignified defiance and resolve. We can commit to rebuilding faster than they imagine possible. Their comeuppance won’t be purely legal and political, but psychological, too. As their empires crumble, they’ll see they sacrificed them all for nothing.
ABUNDANCING TO A DIFFERENT TUNE
This alternative, more optimistic ethos is out there, too.