Election Day in America is two days away as I write this first post, or rant, or whatever it may evolve into. In the New York Times this week, Ezra Klein frets about the political re-alignment, while David Brooks opines about the intellectual re-alignment. I could nitpick, but much of what they both say is true: somehow MAGA is a movement that appears aligned with the economically precarious (which, let’s be honest, is a majority of American families, living paycheck to paycheck), while in actuality Trump and his cronies are fiscal vampires, drinking the stuff of life straight from our veins. All the while gaslighting like wild—it’s not corruption if you don’t hide it/if it was just a norm not a law/if it’s an emergency…

One election or two is not going to change the situation we are in. How this suckiness happened was decades in the making—early Steve Bannon, the Reagan revolution, Project REDMAP—and it won’t be reversed. It shouldn’t be reversed because reversal assumes that what was before is what is wanted. I am going to hazard that we don’t know what is wanted next because we have never been in this exact political-social-scientific-historical moment before, and we have some collective dreaming to do.

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If radicals and progressives could stop wringing our hands for a few, we might take this opportunity to dig under slogans and election cycles and ask ourselves some questions about meaning, belonging, story and power. Questions that require some long-term thinking. I mean, I think we are capable of thinking as proactively and long-terms as the fascists, right? Totalitarian populism is in part the result of decades of center-Left neoliberalism and centuries of Enlightenment Euromodernity on which our entire economic, political, educational, and social systems are built. This isn’t some big announcement by me; I merely refer to the backstory of Klein and Brooks’s thinking, critique thoroughly developed by too many scholars to name here, emerging from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Black Pessimism, Decolonialism, feminist and queer theory (I overview this theory in my forthcoming book, Wynter’s Queer Revolution)… All those -isms scholars mocked by the Right, which I studied as an undergrad— in the 80’s!

All that critique—needed, important. But we are still here in Make America Fascist Again 2025.

Things are really shitty for a lot of people, but wringing our hands about the moment does not change it. We need immediate organizing, struggle, and mutual aid for sure, but we also need a long-term imaginary, an abundant vision that digs underneath the scabrous political and flim-flam meaning-making strategies of the far Right. Here it is, in a nutshell: let’s do what Sylvia Wynter says and reinvent the human.

Sylvia Wynter is an outrageously underappreciated decolonial scholar and artist whose life-long oeuvre tells us that we, human beings as a species, have been outrageously constrained. We “mistook the map for territory,” as she says in her 2006 essay. We have been convinced by Enlightenment discourses which segue directly into liberal discourses that human beings are A Thing, that we can be Known, and more knowing will lead, neoliberal Panglossian-like, to the betterment of all.

We see how that has worked out.

Wynter—though not, as far as I know, queer in her, at this writing nearly-century-young, person—is so queer-coded in her ideas. Working with Frantz Fanon’s idea of sociogeny, she argues that we need to take seriously the idea that humans are fully bios-mythos, story-telling animals that have told ourselves a tiny, limited, violent Euromodern story of who we are. That origin story is a brutal gilt myth about Progress, Freedom, Individualism, Exceptionalism, Civilization. Education, and, well, nearly everything, acts to initiate us into this myth.

Instead, Wynter says, we need to rewrite all of education, from pre-school to Ph.D., as an initiation into new origin stories: education as the science of origin stories. It is no surprise that the radical Right has been working to suppress any efforts to break the hold of even the results of the myth, from the teachings of the Black Panther Party to drag queen story hour. If we doggedly follow Wynter, though, the underlying myth might be the hinge point, the point where we can toss “identity politics” out the window while still centering those most harmed by Euromodernity.

So while we in the U.S. are connecting with our neighbors’ kitchen tables through community fridges, investing in our communities as we dance in front of ICE facilities, we also need to experiment with Wynter’s insistent demand. The biggest problem we have is that we think, “Humans ARE…”

Humans, instead, take place.