It’s Monday evening, former-now-returned Tennessee state Representative Justin Jones has been reinstated, and crowds nearby are — and I’m not kidding — singing “This Little Light of Mine.”
It’s very civil-rights-era.
Only it’s NOW.
We don’t have the video of the singing yet here, but here’s news on the reinstatement by the locals.
As I write this, now-again-Representative Jones just got sworn in on the capitol steps and walked back into the state legislature to huge applause.
We don’t know what will happen tonight, and we don’t know if this new development will hold. We do know that the Tennessee state legislature is threatening to both take over control and/or to remove funding from Nashville metro area authorities and governmments. It appears that this is partly just because they want to, and partly in “retribution” for the Nashville metro area demanding that the Justins (the two state representatives expelled last week) be reinstated (one of whom now has been).
Devolution is a scary word. We don’t use it much in reference to government, because we haven’t had to in the US.
I learned it as part of emergency management. Devolution can happen when a government at any level starts to fail; like when they can’t perform the services that are part of their social contract. One of the scariest texts I’ve gotten in my life was on the first Friday after Hurricane Katrina landed in 2005, when the US Government was warning its components (one of which I worked for) that some devolution of local governments was happening in the New Orleans metro area. Fortunately, while some local devolution did occur then in New Orleans, it didn’t last. Order and government was restored. The devolution crisis was averted, although the greater hurricane catastrophe persisted. But — with an intact government, it was less bad than it would have been had local government in the region completely devolved. In the midst of a disaster, a mostly-functional local government is absolutely essential to basic survival, and to aiding with that until some services and infrastructure begin to get restored. Local government is also the vehicle to bring in emergency disaster aid, and to make sure it gets where it needs to go.
Devolution is dangerous, as you might imagine. It can happen in a lot of ways — not just when services start to fail.
Devolution can happen when lawlessness becomes more powerful than the law in a certain area. It can happen when the existing governent and/or its institutions dissolve.
The Tennessee state legislature is essentially threatening lawlessness… especially by threatening to seize power from Nashville metro area governments and quasi-governmental authorities. Also by threatening to expel legislators as they are reinstated.
Will the Tennessee legislature follow their own threats this week — especially now that at least one of the legislators they’ve expelled has been sent for reinstatement by his local government constitutuency? We don’t know. The state legislature so far seems pretty brazen. It is certainly unbothered by blatant racism in choosing to expel only young black legislators.
Why wouldn’t they continue their streak? Lawlessness begets lawlessness. People who push the limits and get away with it go after pushing for more. Oh by the way — MSNBC reports that some armed person shot up the home of a journalist associated with The Tennnessean this weekend while he was home with his family. Devolution, escalation, violence, and so on. Violence against journalists is certainly not an aspect of a peaceful, stable society. Hint: we’re not currently in a peaceful, stable society.
There’s another high-profile, insidious, dangerous example of lawlessness unfolding in the US right now… and it’s with the federal Trump-appointed judge in Texas who has declared that he alone knows more than the US Food & Drug Administration — the FDA. This judge has stated that he can make illegal the use of the most common abortion pill in the US for the whole country… thus overriding decades of institutional processes, data, and science that is a part of the FDA process.
It’s devastating for women, for family planning, and for women’s health… but it would also completely throw the institutional order and processes that we’ve come to expect from the FDA and from entire industries completely on their head. That likely includes all FDA-approved medications in the US, the entire US (and corresponding worldwide) pharmaceutical industry, and countless food companies and other food sector components as well.
It’s potentially highly destabilizing. It may well be devolutionary.
This is bad.
All of it.
We need governments to work according to the rules they have been accorded.
That’s a key piece of the social contract; the social construct for a government for our modern society.
We need local, state, and federal governments to stay in their lanes and follow agreed-upon processes.
We need institutions to work.
We need executive branch agences at every level to remain functional in ways that uphold a very, very complicated society that we have built around them.
We need all of the interrelated and interdependent systems contingent upon all of these government agencies, private sector elements, and judicial system components to continue to function in order for our society to operate.
When pieces fail or falter or get interrupted… we get cascading effects. Nobody knows what those are going to be, or what cascading effects the first-order cascading effects will cause.
People talk casually about “collapse,” but there’s nothing casual about collapse. It’s calamitous. We’d be wise to avoid it. We can, if we can hold our institutions and rule of law together.
Devolution is dangerous. Our society is way more fragile than people want to think.
As things intensify in the US (and they will), it’s going to be really important that we have the courage to hold certain pieces of society together.
We’re in an era of transition and maybe of transformation. What we hold onto and what we let fail during this time will have a huge impact on what the future looks like. It will all have a huge impact on humans. Successful, thriving democracies protect humans including the most vulnerable.
When a society devolves, the most powerful with the most guns and/or money are the ones who seize power. In devolution, society can quickly become a tyranny. Historically oppressed people and communities are likely to pay the biggest price. Holding onto a functional but threatened democracy is a critical way to fight for social justice in a moment like this.
As dysfunctional as our current democracy/republic is, keeping it is way, way, way better for the huge masses of people than failure would be. Transforming and evolving it would be even better.
Nothing like an era of transition to do that.
So are we going to leverage our assets during this time… or sit back and see who else decides to fight for power and win?
We have the option to fight. To get in the game. To get engaged.
If you want to get in the game, Shift the Country has been getting ready for this moment. This emerging organization set up for systemic action, for holding the line, for transition, and for facilitating transformation as all of this unfolds.
We can make shift happen through connection (Thing 1); by doing more with coalitions and community (Thing 2); by partnering with or pressuring business (Thing 3); by championing vision, values, and moral courage (Thing 4); and by raising a ruckus, driving the narrative, and spreading all of that widely (Thing 5). Those 5 Things are here.
We. Have. Options.
Plus, this right here is a highly unique organization specifically set up for this moment in time. We’re not aware of other groups set up to work on countering authoritarianism in structural ways like this.
It’s a scary time.
It’s also an empowering time; should we have the collective capacity to go that route.
We’re going to need courage, solidarity, and inspiration, too. And we can do all of that. In fact, Shift the Country has built connection, solidarity, support, community, and coalitions into our structure.
Get involved. Sign up for an event. Check out this list of events here for April/May, or join this one event Thursday night about how we can ramp up to raise a ruckus all over the US by this summer.
Share this stuff everywhere — with your friends, with your online groups, and with your groups in the real world. Donate if you’re in a position to. And keep the faith — in this democracy, and in humans. We’ve got good people.
Let’s make some shift happen.
Thinking about Tennessee...thinking about the broader implications. I've mentioned before that I feel lucky to live in a blue bubble. But I understand that I am no more protected from the devastating effects that a general devolution would result in than those of my fellow citizens who live in places like--Tennessee. It just might take a little longer to get me--but if it is unleashed, it will be a national disaster. There are other folks in this group who also live in blue states. I hope they are aware that is no guarantee of immunity. That's why it's so important for ALL of us to figure out what we can do to stop this madness--before it's too late.
For a little more clarification from someone in Tennessee, the threats from the state level to punish cities is not new, this is just yet another of them. At the meeting of the Nashville Metro Council where Justin Jones was reinstated, as an example, there was an announcement made about an injunction against the state being successful and the council being able to remain at full size for now and through the next election. It was easy to miss -- the whole meeting was something like 11 minutes.
What was that about? Last year, the council voted not to host the 2024 Republican National Convention. Different members had different reasons, from security costs that likely wouldn't be reimbursed and having to shut down large swaths of town, negatively affecting many businesses, to not being comfortable hosting a group that consistently negates Nashville's ability to run itself as it desires. Anyway, in the wake of that, the state passed a law that would limit the size of metro councils to 20. This was obviously aimed at the metro council, which has 40 members. Nashville Metro Council just won an injunction against that punishment in court 3-0.
Living in Tennessee, I'm just thankful that what's going on here has been exposed to the world more fully.