From the FB page Catmin's Anticapitalist Treehouse of Solidarity
Talking to Democrats made me realize something important. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who ask permission… and those who impose their will. The first group believes in rules and civility. Not just as constraints, but as fundamental aspects of reality. They believe that if you make a good case, if you follow the process, if you appeal to the better nature of those in power, then the right thing should happen. And if it doesn’t? Well, shucks, then you’ve simply done all you can. The second group understands that the world is not an episode of The West Wing where simple fairness and virtue is rewarded. The world is a terrain, shifting and unstable, where victory belongs to those who shape and adapt to conditions rather than accept them. The world does not give out medals for good civility and adherence to the rulebook. It does not care if you followed the process. You survive by maneuvering.
This is the fundamental divide in American political strategy right now. The people who put all their faith and hope in the Democratic Party… the loyal ones, the ones who still complacently believe… are in the first group. They want to ask permission of power rather than wield it. They would rather follow the rules and lose than break them and win. And that’s why they keep losing.
Let’s talk about abortion rights. For decades, Roe v. Wade was treated as an unshakable pillar of American life, a constitutional right set in stone. And for decades, people like me pointed out that it was not ACTUALLY set in stone. That it was a judicial precedent that could be reversed. That the Republican Party had been explicitly campaigning on overturning it for decades. That if Democrats actually cared about protecting abortion, they would have codified it into law. But they didn’t. When I said this—when I pointed out that Democrats were not acting like people who wanted to win this fight—I was told I was being cynical, unfair, unserious. I was accused of not understanding how politics works. “Trust the process,” I was told. “The party knows what it’s doing.” Then the Supreme Court overturned Roe. And suddenly, the people who had spent years attacking my position that we SHOULD HAVE BEEN fighting to protect those rights started screaming about how I was the problem.
Now, the presidential election wasn’t about policies, or parties, or even democracy itself. It was a referendum on the Supreme Court. Suddenly, I was expected to fall in line and vote based purely on the vague promise that maybe, someday, a different justice would be appointed, and maybe, someday, Roe would be restored. No plan. No actual use of power. Just faith. Just trusting the process and falling into line. But I don’t trust processes that repeatedly fail. The Supreme Court is now an unelected legislature, making sweeping changes to American life while the actual elected legislature remains in gridlock. If Democrats were serious about protecting abortion, they wouldn’t have just defended Roe as an abstract principle. They would have wielded power to ensure that abortion rights couldn’t be revoked by a handful of appointed justices. But they didn’t. Because at the end of the day, they are process-seekers. They believe in asking permission, not imposing their will.
I don’t just see this in politics. I’ve lived it in my own life. A while back, my department was marked for closure. I was told, in a somber meeting, that my job was gone. That it was nothing personal… just budget cuts, just business, just the way things go. I was expected to accept this, clean out my desk, and quietly disappear. And many people did. They heard the boss. They saw the writing on the wall. They accepted that the process had spoken. They found new jobs and moved on. But I didn’t.
I had a union behind me, a union I personally helped to build, and I knew that the best thing I could do was to stall the process. To play for time. So… we fought for severance, for concessions—anything to slow the process down. We kept the negotiations going as long as possible. The meetings happened at a snail’s pace. One this month, one next month…
I kept collecting my paycheck.
And then something happened:
Management changed.
The people who had ordered the closure were no longer in charge. And the new people? They didn’t really understand what was going on. They were new to the role, disoriented. And they weren’t as committed to finishing the job. By the time the dust settled, guess what? I still had my job.
The people who had taken the termination at face value? Who accepted the process and moved on? They were gone. But I was still there, on a new union contract. Because one of the key points of the delaying strategy was to GET THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT RATIFIED in the meantime and therefore suddenly make me much harder to terminate. I didn’t succeed because I was special. Not because I was lucky. But because I refused to accept the process as final. I maneuvered. I adapted. I imposed my will. And I had a hell of a lot of help from my union brothers and sisters, who understood the tactic and stood shoulder to shoulder with me.
This is why I find it so bizarre when people mock The Art of War. There’s a trend online of people treating it like a total joke, as if it’s just a collection of obvious observations. “Did you know armies need food? Wow, so insightful!!!” But that’s because they don’t understand what it actually is. The Sunzi is not about war. It is a poem about power. It is a meditation about understanding the nature of conflict and shaping reality to your advantage. It is about knowing when to advance and when to retreat, when to hold the line and when to let the enemy exhaust themselves. It is about refusing to fight battles on someone else’s terms. Most people don’t think like this. Most people—especially American liberals—want to believe the world is fair, that justice is inevitable, that if they just follow the process, things will work out. But that’s not how power works. If you want to survive, if you want to win, you have to stop asking for permission. You have to shape the battlefield. You have to impose your will on the world before the world imposes its will on you.
I want to offer some thoughts on Mahmoud Khalil. And let me just say it's complicated.