CHECKMATE
“What is at stake today in America, is the nature of our government,” writes Heather Cox Richardson in her January 5, 2022 Letters from an American post on Substack.com. “Will we accept an authoritarian government like that currently under attack in Kazakhstan, in which an autocratic leader funnels money to his cronies while ordinary people struggle, unable to fix the system that is rigged against them until finally they lay down their lives to change it? Or will we restore the principles on which the Founders based this nation: ‘That all men are created equal’ and that governments derive ‘their just powers from the consent of the governed…’?
That’s the question that drives the next crucial moves in the American political chess game now in play. The game-board for what’s been called “the ultimate war game,” is now rigged against the governed, i.e., the pawns, the great mass of ordinary folks divided and made powerless by the propaganda mills of the wealthy elites, and it’s obvious that the Republican component of the Ruling Class does not have the consent of the majority of the governed to do what they are doing—restricting the vote in Red states, inciting insurrection in the nation’s capitol, and spreading lies and dissension throughout the land via their incendiary media outlets.
“Life is like a game of chess,” said Allan Rufus. “To win you have to make a move.” In America today, the Republican Party of Trump has defined the game as a war on Democracy and made a series of moves intended to silence the voice of the people by restricting the vote in order to maintain control of the levers of economic power. Meanwhile, the Democrats, once known as the party of the people, have abdicated their responsibility to protect democracy with their tepid responses to the Republicans bold moves, provoking a disaffected faction of pawns to vote for a demagogue who abruptly changed the rules of the game, and staged a violent, deadly assault on democracy. “A single unambiguous aim is the keystone of a successful military campaign, or action on the chessboard,” according to Google’s take on conflict. “Selection and maintenance of the aim is regarded as the master principle of warfare. The ultimate aim is to give checkmate to the opponents King.” We the people who comprise the ranks of the pawns must now make and maintain moves that ensure that the Kingly system of predatory capitalism and its corporate enablers advocating endless consumption and ruinous exploitation of the earth cannot escape through the nefarious neoliberal loopholes now woven into the fabric of our imperiled democracy.
Marcel Duchamp once said “Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.” As a metaphor for politics, Duchamp’s quip seems especially apropos, as does the frequent comparison of chess to war. The ruling elites seem to have forgotten that when the game is over, as Lisa Rence Jones pointed out, “The king and the pawn go back in the same box. In life and death we are all equal.”
Unfortunately, although the class war waged by the Republicans and some complicit Democrats to undermine democracy violates the spirit of freedom and traditions of justice that our republic was established upon, no specific rule of law on the books has been breached. So, it looks like we’re going to have to base the people’s resistance to the onslaught on the noble principles set forth in the Constitution, which worked well enough for the rebel-rousers who ignited the revolutionary war that established our republic in the first place. At the moment, the advocates for democracy are just pawns in the game, but it is a lethal game that both sides will lose if they fail to acknowledge the gravity of a much bigger and more consequential event now in progress that will ultimately decide the outcome of all the little games human beings play, namely the climate crisis, an overarching reality that threatens to extinct us all unless we can overcome our political differences and join together to stand for life itself, the sacred gift that all governments ignore at their peril.
Here in America it’s not a class war we should be fighting, targeting our fellow citizens as enemies, but rather a war of survival against the formidable common enemy of global warming. As Michael T. Klare points out in his October 17, 2017 Scheerpost article How to Save The World from a Climate Armageddon, “We face a future all-too-literally embroiled,” in what he explains, “could be the hottest ‘war’ around.” Klare emphasizes that although pledges to limit emissions from all nations is essential, the commitments of two global players are crucial—China and the United States. “In the end it’s not complicated,” writes Klare. “If the planet’s two ‘great’ powers refuse to cooperate in a meaningful way in tackling the climate threat, we’re done for.” 1
The point is the threat of global warming is huge and the response to it must encompass the whole of humanity as we learn the crucial lesson in community that Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME), learned so well in her long life of service to the people of the Pine Tree State. “We’re all in this together,” she writes in What I Take With Me, her heartwarming article in The Island Journal. “A sustainable community provides everyone with a chance to succeed, whether by getting a basic education or being able to start their own business or feeling confident that they can stay healthy. That community cannot remain without cooperation.” 2
Unfortunately, the American people are not all embracers of Pingree’s sapience. Among the dominant political players, especially in the Trump Republican’s camp, global warming, against all evidence, is considered a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats to gain political advantage. Meanwhile, Mother Nature, indifferent to the vain agendas of human beings, is making her own arrangements for the Apocalypse based on the principles of ecology, not ideology. Robert Hunziker’s recent heart-stopping piece on Scheerpost, Warnings from the Far North, describes the dire circumstances facing mankind. “It’s never been more urgent and timely,” he writes, “for the world to change its ways and abandon the current economic maelstrom that haunts all life on the planet. The pros and cons of capitalism’s experiment with neoliberal tendencies that enrich the few and burn the many should be debated in the context of strained resources throughout the biosphere, including all life forms. The GDP-to-infinity paradigm is barreling towards a wall of impending extinction. It’s already on a fast track.” 3
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said Abraham Lincoln in his famous speech about slavery, a sentiment that also applies to the climate crisis. “I do not expect the house to fall,” the president also said, “but I do expect it will cease to be divided.” In order to fulfill Lincoln’s great expectation of consensus and ensure that the house of democracy will not fall, the American people must transcend the divisive agendas of partisan politics and strive to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 in concert with all the other nations of the world by keeping fossil fuels in the ground, by investing in appropriate renewable energy solutions, by adopting farming techniques that enhance greater biodiversity, by protecting wetlands, forest resources and the world’s oceans and river systems, and by methodically dismantling the predatory capitalistic global economy. These are the moves that make the most ecological sense. They are the next, right moves toward building a strong democracy guided by the rule of law instead of corporate rule and establishing a just and sustainable world for all beings.
JUSTICE VS CAPITALISM
Michael T. Klare, How to Save the World from a Climate Armageddon, Scheerpost, October 17, 2017.
Chellie Pingree, What I Take With Me, Island Journal, publictions@islandinstitute.org.
Robert Hunziker, Warnings from the Far North, Scheerpost, December 27, 2021.