So, I’ve been thinking about movements ultimately successful in the face of home-grown fascism, terrorism, and violent subordination, as well as the rise of Republican Fascism at the grassroots level. I am thinking of U.S. abolitionism from Revolutionary times to the Civil War, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the anti-Jim-Crow/civil rights movement associated with MLK Jr. and Bayard Ruskin. And of the white Christian patriarchal movement that led to today’s Republican Fascism. 1/

All of these movements tapped into previously existing networks, such as churches, older political movements, magazine editors and writers. Those networks gave rise to coalitions and collaborations which did things that were new and daring. What got the new coalitions and collaborations off the ground was some level of preexisting trust and camaraderie rooted in the original networks. 2/

Trust and camaraderie can be developed without personal, face to face contact, but that sort of interaction makes it much easier. We are evolutionarily adapted for developing trust or distrust on the basis of in person encounters; now, when we in the U.S. face serious danger, we are going to need networks of trusted others. 3/

But, many of us who stand for secular constitutional democracy, rule of law, anti-corruption in government, women’s liberation, equal justice for black and brown people, and so forth are not church or synagogue goers. The sort of close knit intellectual circles of the late 1800s (e.g. American Transcendentalism or American Pragmatism) don’t exist in the same way today. 4/

Still, we are going to need what I will call background networks of trust that can ground protection from and opposition to Republican Fascism. This is why I have been urging people to show up to settings where we might develop them such as local libraries and muncipal government meetings. But then today, I realized that we who are active on Mastodon have another channel. Some of us live near each other. 5/