From a Deweyan perspective, the calls for "healing" and "reconciliation" with the right/republicans who brought us to this point are hypocritical at the very least, and bullshit at the very most, and not because of Dewey's views on democracy, but his views on community. (1/n)

One of the essential requirements for a functioning community is the sharing of experience such that it can be taken up and integrated into the collective experience of the community to make available new possibilities as possibilities for that community. (2/n)

This is why Dewey is so big on communications technologies, why he laments the state of newspapers in his writings on democracy, and why he is concerned about members of the public who profess equality in public, but engage in discrimination and marginalization in private. (3/n)

It is also why "healing" or "reconciliation" will fail. Put simply, folks on the right/republicans continue to reject the truth of those experiences that do not align with their preferred worldview and, consequently, do not integrate those experiences into their own work. (4/n)

This is, mind you, also a problem of the left (broadly construed to include DSA types and democrats) w/r/t experiences that run counter to their understanding of the political and social needs of a community, or the ways that some problems are experienced as such. (5/n)

The distinction is that the ideologies of the left (broadly construed) lend themselves to enough flexibility to integrate novel experiences to resolve problematic situations. The right tends not to do this, instead preferring to reject even considering these experience. (6/n)

And by "reject," I mean everything from "fake news," to the ways that their worldviews prevent them from seeing some economic and social policies as beneficial. Moreover, the kind of consolidation of power that the right has attempted REQUIRES this rejection of experience. (7/n)

I say it requires this rejection because you cannot acknowledge, as a possibility of nature through culture, the truth of experiences that run counter to your worldview and still seek to organize experience in ways that do not integrate other experiences. (8/n)

Rejection might be in the form of minimization of experience ("police aren't a problem"), redefining experience (the antifa/BLM = Terrorists move), traditional modes of rejecting experience ("Fake News"), or avoiding the experiences altogether ("what about all lives?"). (9/n)

Given this, it is impossible for there to be genuine reconciliation with the right/republicans because their engagement with the world is such that they do not view the experiences of the marginalized as true experiences worthy of integration into their ongoing practices. (10/n)

This engagement has resulted in habits of thought and conduct, intensified by the reign of the Tangerine Tyrant, that enabled them to be more vocal about their rejection of experience and, to be perfectly clear, the need to eliminate any/all subjects of that experience. (11/n)

As MLK Jr. said that the terminus of racism is genocide, I would say that the terminus of the ideology of the right/republicans is the elimination of all those who have an experience that runs counter to their own, either through the violence of policy or the streets (12/n)

To be clear: the right/republicans have as their end in view the elimination of all those experiences and experiencers that could be viewed as hostile to their own way of being in the world, and they seek power to make actual this elimination through organizing society. (13/n)

To bring it back around, there can be no "healing" or "reconciliation" with such individuals because that would require acknowledging the truth of the experience, the truth of the experiencer, and their role in making the experience possible, which they refuse to do. (14/n)

And because they refuse to do this, one cannot heal because healing in this context would require the integration of the experiences they reject to change the behaviors that they engaged in to make possible those experiences. You cannot be in community with such people. (15/n)

So where does that leave us? Dewey (and MLK, tbh) would suggest the use of all available social force to bring to heel these individuals and to check their power to do damage to the society such that they are rendered impotent and new habits of thought can be put in place. (16/n)

This, in the words of Frerie, might be experienced AS violence BY the right/republicans, but it is a necessary kind of violence needed to displace the habits of thought and conduct that brought us to this place. However, the left is generally loath to use such violence. (17/n)

Which gets me to a problem with the left (broadly construed) wherein it consistently fails to integrate the results of its activism, politics, failures, and successes into ongoing inquiry to be applied in novel situation. This is most clear in the Democratic party. (18/n)

But is also symptomatic of other leftist groups, DSA etc. Again, for Dewey, there is little difference on the social ends of the left but there is great difference between the means to reach these ends, which is "the tragedy of democracy in the world today." (19/n)

As means are to be tested in experience and improved through the integration of the results of that test back into the means. the tragedy of democracy in our time is that groups on the left fail to integrate the results of their experiences to improve their means. (20/n)

Instead, they double down on their means without considering the possibility of doing something differently in light of the new possibilities made immanent by the changed situation, which itself is an impediment to any "healing" they might engage in. (21/n)

Put simply, because the left can't get its shit together to decide on how to reach the social end of "healing," we're not likely to see any movement on that front, and this failure will allow the right to further coalesce around its rejection of experience. (22/n)

That said, we're fucked. Basically. Unless of course the left gets it shit together. And by "gets its shit together," I mean integrating one another's experiences into the broader processes of inquiry into how to reach the end of healing the nation. (23/n)

As for what I think? To paraphrase Sherman:

The problem of the culture war consists in the awful fact that the present class who rule our institutions must be removed outright rather than through the practice of representative democracy. (fin)