The Death of Agency

or: maybe this whole "president" thing was a bad idea

There’s a worker-owned, queer-owned bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina called Firestorm Books, and it’s run by my friends and I care about it deeply. I wrote at least one book curled up on their couch with my laptop, and when I went down to Asheville to cover the hurricane relief happening there after Helene, Firestorm was a hub of mutual aid and organizing. Maintaining community infrastructure has value, and sometimes a bookstore is more than a bookstore.

They’ve been running into some financial problems of late and worry they’ll have to cut their own wages. But they fulfill online orders. So I’ve been working to try to send traffic their way, and I’ve got a referral deal with them now. The books that I pick out and recommend, you get 10% off (and I get a cut too, to be transparent). So I’m positing books that I use as sources for Cool People, books that I read from on Book Club, and of course my own books.

Some recent titles:

Here Where We Live is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple: I just interviewed Molly on Cool People about the Labor Bund and how it presents a clear alternative to Zionism for Jewish folks who care about their heritage. The book just came out yesterday, and it already went into a second printing before it was even released.

A Towering Flame, by Philip Ruff: The source for my episodes about Peter the Painter. Maybe the most adventurous tale of revolution I’ve ever read, written by an author who spent decades uncovering the story.

Black Arms to Hold You Up, by Ben Passmore: You can hear me talking to Ben about his graphic novel of Black history on Cool People. Maybe the best take on a complex history that I’ve ever read.

Or you can see the whole list.

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The Death of Agency

This week the president of the United States promised genocide, and everyone (including me) is waiting around for other people to deal with it. “Where are the revolutionaries?” people are posting. “Why aren’t the streets flooded with anti-war protestors?” people are posting. “Why hasn’t the 25th amendment been invoked to remove Trump from power?” people are posting.

Here I am, posting.

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A couple decades ago, I took the ferry from Finland to Sweden thanks to the kindness of some strangers who’d decided to give me money at a gay bar in Helsinki. Well, really, I’d been passed out in the gutter outside, but we don’t have to tell that story. The important part was that I was on an overnight ferry and those of us without money for private rooms all slept in seats or on the carpeted floor on the main level.

Shortly before we reached Stockholm, a man started yelling at his wife in Swedish, and all thirty or so of us stared in horror, and for long moments, none of us did anything. I thought to myself “everyone else around me knows what’s being said, so it’s up to them to act.” I don’t know what excuse everyone else around me came up with, but excuse themselves they did. Maybe they figured it was a job for the police.

Finally, the man raised his fist. Myself and a young man stood up and stepped towards the aggressor. I think I yelled “what the fuck!” but I’m not certain. The man put down his fist, intimidated into silence.

I doubt I did much to solve the problem, longterm, but I’m equal parts proud of myself for standing up and embarrassed it took so long.

I’ve thought about the bystander effect ever since. How when there’s a crowd, it’s easy to believe that solving a problem is someone else’s responsibility.

Here we are, in 2026. The US is ruled by a mad king, and none of us knows what to do.

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We’re in a strange bind right now, in which no one feels like they have much agency.

The democratic politicians in congress (those who are actually attempting to make the world better) feel powerless because they don’t have the numbers and are waiting for the elections. It might be true that they are powerless, but it comes across as careerism when they post toothless statements about voting to impeach.

Meanwhile, blue states come across powerless because they don’t want to be the ones who pick a fight with the federal government and trigger a civil war. This is a legitimate concern: there is no specific reason to believe that the antifascist side would win an open war of blue vs red. Yet every mayor and governor who does not task their police with arresting ICE is admitting that the law (and morality) are less important to them than the structuring of power. They are admitting that laws only exist to control the actions of the powerless.

Fear of civil war doesn’t explain why blue states are spending their political capital on disarming their own populations through anti second amendment legislation. If there has ever been a moment where we want liberals and progressives to have access to firearms, it’s right now on the brink of large-scale conflict. It also doesn’t explain why blue states are rushing to pass privacy-invading laws like the age verification systems that promise to destroy anonymity on the internet, or anti-3d printing laws that remove people’s right to explore and create.

(I’m not impressed by the ostensible alternative to fascism that the democratic party is offering.)

As for the activists, the anti-war movement today looks nothing like it did twenty years ago because twenty years ago the government pretended to care about popular opinion. Bush Jr. and his friends spent a whole year building support for us to invade Iraq, but Trump just does whatever he feels like on any given day. We don’t feel like we have any agency.

Today’s activists can also look back and see that in 2003 the world’s largest demonstrations in history took place, with millions of people marching around the world, and it accomplished nothing. I’d say “it made us feel better about ourselves,” but at least for me, that part isn’t true.

There are the No Kings rallies, and I never want to talk trash on people who are doing what they think they can, but an awful lot of people wonder what the point is, what the theory of change is, behind mass protests that do not engage in civil disobedience or disruption.

As for revolution, well, that’s never been an easy task. Once again, we are cursed with the knowledge of history, and an awful lot of revolutions have been lateral moves at best. What’s more, a revolution is a mass action or it isn’t a revolution, and in the surveillance society we live in (that the democrats are eager to expand), it’s hard to organize and build trust.

This isn’t to say none of this is worth doing. It’s just my best effort to answer the question “why isn’t anyone doing anything?”

For better or worse, most people are waiting for conditions to change. Few of us feel like we have agency, and most of us feel like other people have more agency. We’re all waiting for someone else to do something. For there to be an organization you can join, a march you can go to, a politician you can vote for.

It turns out, we have to build the organizations. We have to call for the marches (and set the terms, and stop hiding behind non-confrontational politics as if they are more ethical). Those who are interested in working within the electoral system need to be supporting actual grassroots campaigns and politicians.

We also, and maybe this is the most important part of my whole point… we have to support people who are doing rowdy shit. When we sit around and bemoan that no one is doing anything, the fact is that people are doing things. (shoutout to Bumlung on Bluesky for reminding us of this). There are people facing trial for bodyslamming ICE agents. There are prisoners in jail for setting fires at ICE facilities. There are the Prairieland defendants, recently convicted of material support for terrorism for attending a noise demonstration outside an ICE detention center in Texas.

But most people doing spicy things aren’t getting caught. They’re not even bragging about it on the internet, so we might not ever know it happens.

If we want to rebuild our sense of agency, the way to do it is to accomplish things. Accomplish mutual aid. Accomplish building organizations that grow local power and decisionmaking (worker’s councils, rapid response networks, underground railroads, neighborhood assemblies). Accomplish preparedness—look realistically and soberly at what might be coming, and get ready for that with people. And accomplish, well, rowdy shit. We need a movement with teeth and we need to practice building our agency.

And while we’re doing that (and we are, in fact, doing that. All over the country, people are doing these things), the president is threatening to wipe out entire civilizations, targeting the very civilians that a few weeks ago he pretended to be liberating.

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If a political office wields so much power than an unpopular man can threaten genocide without consulting the public nor their elected representatives, that political office should not exist. This seems like the mildest way I could possibly phrase that. Presumably, no political office should wield the power to commit genocide even if it is popular, but we’ve got to start somewhere I suppose.

I think our descendants will view positions like “president” with the same disdain we hold for kings.

Whoever is elected, going forward (presuming our current system lasts until 2028), we will all have to remember that they are capable of authoritarianism, of tyranny. The exploits in the code that is the constitution have been laid bare, and that code needs to be patched, rewritten, or scrapped.

If you were to ask me, I’d give you the same answer I’ve believed in for decades: we need a system that is not a “state,” governed from the top down with rigid borders, but instead a series of local councils that federate together to collectively administer the larger territory. Our democracy needs to be bottom-up, or it is not democracy. I think the truth of that has been laid bare the past few years.

But I don’t think I need to convince you of that in order to convince you that the current system is fundamentally broken if it is capable of producing this result.