This weekend’s gathering at Little Louie’s was shaped by a heavy theme: war, and the political atmosphere that keeps war profitable and permanent. We talked about how U.S. foreign policy so often treats violence as a tool of “stability,” even when the result is instability for everyone except the interests being protected. That sense of inevitability, the idea that conflict is the default setting, hangs over our politics like a low ceiling.
We also talked about how authoritarian politics grows in the soil of fear and exhaustion. When people feel cornered, they look for simple answers and strong enemies. In the U.S., that pattern is reinforced by a two-party system that narrows debate until “choice” becomes a contest between two versions of the same story: protect the same donors, fund the same weapons, manage the same crises, repeat. Many of us feel trapped in elections where dissent is treated as disloyalty and where moral clarity is punished as “unrealistic.”
At one point I brought up a line from Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” When corporate power and government power braid together, ordinary people are left negotiating with institutions that don’t fear them and don’t serve them.
From there we asked a harder question: If we oppose authoritarianism, what do we do with the emotions that authoritarianism feeds on? Anger can be righteous, but it can also be harvested. It can be turned into a product, a habit, even a lifestyle. It can become fuel for the permanent war story, because a frightened, furious public is easier to steer toward enemies than toward solutions.
That’s why I shifted the conversation to temperance.
Christopher said temperance is difficult for him, especially when he’s angry. That honesty mattered. Temperance isn’t about pretending we don’t feel rage or grief. It’s about refusing to let those feelings drive the car. It’s the discipline of choosing what we consume, what we repeat, what we amplify, and what we become.
Temperance matters in an economy designed to press every pleasure button it can reach. Corporations profit from overstimulation: endless outrage, endless sugar, endless doomscrolling, endless “one more episode,” endless “just one more.” We’re heading into an obesity crisis and a mental health crisis at the same time, and neither is it an accident. We live in a system that extracts value from our cravings, then blames us for having them.
And we’re not “weak” for struggling. Our brains are built for scarcity, for survival, for quick reward. But we’re living in an environment of engineered abundance: not abundance of nourishment, but abundance of temptation. In that environment, temperance becomes a form of self-defense.
If our party is serious about opposing fascism, then our biggest win can’t just be winning arguments. It must be not becoming what we oppose. We can reject politics that survive on humiliation, scapegoats, and permanent enemies. We can build something regenerative instead: politics that includes stakeholders, repairs harm and grows community power rather than managing despair.
