With much respect for Benjamin and her work, let us recall that Bush’s lies are far more likely to be more extensively contested under Trump than under Obama. In neither case does the challenge much come from the government carrying out the policies supported by Bush’s lies, but surely this does not have to be re-re-re-established.
In the days after the Trump election, there is an apparently very difficult truth for the left, center, Democratic, progressive, liberal, fellow-traveler, moderate, and kinda-sorta contingents to bite down on. That difference is still that what was the elected and appointed parts of the Obama contingent and the Clinton contingent or the elected Democratic contingent are still pro-war, pro-violence, globalist, anti-worker, and anti-democracy.
This is far less uniformly true of the majority of the voting base that elects these candidates, but it is no less true for that. As long as the rhetorical and polemic move to present Trump and his particular band of thieves as thoroughly apart from the machinations of the recent central Democratic party, the call for unity will remain ironically divisive even when presented by people with wonderful personal credibility, like Medea Benjamin.
In general, the problem with what people routinely call “apathy” has almost nothing to do with any genuine failure to care about the world that the so-called apathetic find around them. It rather that for whatever various reasons the promise of political action bears almost no credibility for the people so often called apathetic. it is a little hard to imagine that the sort of freak show that we have just passed through has to convince far more people that political action is inherently ineffective.
I would love to see some sort of argument presented that might successfully convey that there is a point of engagement here that can be successfully entered upon. I should think that doing so for most of us would absolutely have to involve actually responding to the debacle of the electoral system and the abandonment by the Democratic party of its one time working ideals and some level of useful response to that instead of simply moving on to Bush’s Iraq Lies as though these had been contested by the Democratic Party or the Federal Government or some related entity over the last eight years. I don’t mean in the least to presume to be the one to tell Medea Benjamin or Code Pink about all this, but at the same time, I am not and I do not think everyone else is apt to be willing to put the last eight years aside as though they did not happen.