Tuesday, April 06, 2021

Talking Socialism | Catching up with AOC

You cannot say nothing will change. We can make the argument that not enough is changing fast enough. These are not nitpicking questions, because this is how the language we use communicates to individuals who is included, who you consider a person.


March 27, 2021
 Don McIntosh 
DEMOCRATIC LEFT

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her way to speak at NYC’s Women’s March, Photo by Corey Torpie


Bronx Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, best known as AOC, is DSA’s foremost socialist superstar. Her June 2018 primary win—a 29-year-old taqueria bartender defeating the third most powerful Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives—inspired up to 10,000 people to join DSA.

The Netflix documentary Knock Down the House details her life story leading up to that victory. Since then, her influence has only grown. Earnest, fun, relatable, and fierce, she became one of Congress’ best known members overnight, and used the attention to pull the national conversation leftward. In October 2019, her endorsement revivified Bernie Sanders’ campaign following his heart attack.

Today—with over 12 million Twitter followers, her picture on the December cover of Vanity Fair, and mass cultural appeal to teens and the not-yet-political—she continues to use her unasked-for celebrity to build support for a democratic socialist agenda. On Jan. 28, more than a quarter of a million people streamed her impromptu teach-in on the gamer platform Twitch.tv. The topic was the GameStop stock market rebellion, but the discussion encompassed a critique of Wall Street and a plug for a wealth tax.

AOC spoke with me by Zoom Jan. 26.

What was your path to joining DSA?

I love this question because I think that my path in DSA very much shaped my organizing strategy. I didn’t grow up in an incredibly ideological household. I have friends that grew up the children of unionists, professors, individuals two or three generations deep into working class movements. That was not my family. I grew up very working class. My mother cleaned houses. My father had a small business. Both my parents grew up in extreme poverty.

What initially drew me to DSA was the fact that they showed up everywhere that I showed up. I started my work as a community organizer before I even knew about the existence of DSA, and I was busy doing work in my community, working with children, working with families, advocating for educational equity. A friend of mine invited me to a DSA meeting in the Bronx/Upper Manhattan Branch. We were in the basement of a church uptown, in Washington Heights I believe. It was my first time being exposed to DSA, and to me it was like, ‘Okay, we’re hearing all this rhetoric and having discussions.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, another group of folks talking.’ Like this is great, this is encouraging.

This was around the time when DSA was picketing one of the major camera companies in New York City, trying to call attention to the warehouse workers. And they brought undocumented warehouse workers to the meeting, and translated their testimony. And on top of that, the chapter had free childcare provided to anyone who wanted to show up. And that to me … at the end of that meeting, I was like, ‘Okay, this is real.’

You know, there’s a lot of people who talk about class issues, there’s a lot of people who are deep in the discourse of struggle. But to me, as someone who grew up in these environments, it was the translation to action that was distinctive to me.

That is what made DSA initially distinctive to me, and made it something that was flagged to me as worthy of continued attention. And then Jabari Brisport ran for City Council. It felt like something fundamentally different to me, even in the context of electoralism.

Ironically enough, before I ran for Congress, and before Jabari had run for City Council in that first race, I myself had huge doubts around electoralism. That’s why I dove into community organizing, because I was one of those folks that felt, “We’re not going to get any substantive change through electoral politics. It’s just not going to happen.”

I felt that way because I grew up around Bronx machine politics, where there was a lot of cynical use and weaponization of identity under the guise of lobbyist-driven policies and corporate policy. I had essentially given up on it, and I felt the only way we’re going to do this is by committing ourselves to our communities.

And so it was that first meeting that I felt, ‘Okay, this is something that’s real.’ Also, in the history of New York City and in communities of color, when you have the Young Lords and you have this organizing heritage, there has historically been tension between DSA and these organizing collectives of color, whether it was Latino and Puerto Rican collectives, Chicano collectives, black collectives…. It was like, “Oh, it’s these white folks. [LAUGHS.] There was this historical fissure. But it really felt like a moment where we were coming together. And so when I would see DSA showing up providing real structural support at BLM rallies, or support for abolishing ICE, where we felt like there wasn’t this class essentialism, but that this really was a multiracial class struggle that didn’t de-prioritize human rights, frankly, I was really impressed. And I felt like it was something worth being part of.

My run for Congress, so much of it was based in coalition building. In the New York City context, I wasn’t a DSA candidate that was homegrown from the start. I went through a process of earning the DSA endorsement. And that was in addition to stitching a collective together of the movement for Black lives and the movement for immigrant rights. Our congressional district is half immigrant, extraordinarily working class and just incredibly diverse in the Bronx and Queens. Along with Senator Sanders’s campaign, which I also proudly worked on, prior to all of this, you know, all of that, I think, really contributed to this moment.

And, for me, there’s a real distinction between us saying that we’re about something and us really being about it in our actions. And it was really that distinction, in the action and in the praxis, that made it distinctive to me and made it something to be a part of.

What a great story. Thank you for sharing that.

DSA’s priorities really are your priorities as well, Green New Deal and Medicare For All in particular. There’s no getting around the fact that each of those are going to require an act of Congress. What is the most strategic thing that DSA members and chapters could be doing right now to bring that about?

I’m a big believer in exercising a dual approach. First of all, I think you’re right, there is no Medicare For All without an act of Congress. The thing is legislation after all.

I think sometimes people fall into this trap of wishful thinking about a poll question, thinking that support is solid, and that it is unsusceptible to the propaganda of corporate lobbyists and the health insurance industry. I think the first thing we need is real honesty about the work to be done ahead of us. There are some issues that poll really well, and the polling is concrete. There are other issues that poll one way or another, and the polling can really fluctuate with just one ad campaign.

Actually, we experienced this in a positive way with the Green New Deal, in that the oil and gas lobbies have gone in so hard to try to give the Green New Deal a bad name. And even after the total hammering that it experienced by the Republican Party, it still doesn’t poll that poorly. However, one thing that we do see is that even in areas where it may not poll as well as we would like, what we find is that it’s highly susceptible to positive messaging. Once we go in and either send organizers, or have other forms of messaging, and actually explain what the Green New Deal is, polling skyrockets for the issue. And so, in terms of tactics and what’s needed, I think we need to actually make the case for single payer health care that is free of cost at the point of service. And we have to say what we mean by Medicare for All, because as we know, there are a lot of cynical actors that try to add all these ellipses, like “Medicare for All who want it that make less than $100,000 per year.” And that’s why we have to engage in the work of organizing.

So I would say in terms of our strategic priorities, yes, it’s continued organizing, yes, it’s also continued support on the state level, for various health care initiatives, such as the single payer proposal in the state of New York.

There’s a lot of that work that we can do outside of electoralism. But there is critical electoral work to be done as well. I think the strategy of supporting candidates, when that strategy is very calculated, focused, precise, when we aren’t casting our net too wide beyond the capacities of any given local organization, is extremely effective. Mounting continued primary challenges or just supporting candidates in general, putting candidates in open seats … I’ve seen the impact of it from the inside—how much even incumbent members of Congress will totally reinvent themselves in a far more progressive direction, because they know that their communities are watching.

In the best case scenario, we get incredible new members of Congress, or we win these open seats, you know, Rashida Tlaib was an open seat. And at worst, we get almost a radical change in the agenda of the incumbent that is presently there. And so in many ways, it’s a win-win in getting that internal traction, that is necessary.

We’ve heard again and again from conservative Democrats, that an AOC style agenda might fly in Queens or the Bronx, but it can’t win in more competitive districts out in Middle America. What’s your answer to that?

I think it’s totally false. I think that their critique may be more aesthetic, to be honest. After all, I was born in the Bronx, and I’m bred in this community. And this is my community. So of course, you know, if I just walk over to another state in Nebraska or whomever, they’re gonna suss out real quick that perhaps I’m not a Nebraskan. But I don’t think that that is really related to policy. I think it’s because I’m a New Yorker, and I act like a New Yorker. And you know what? I need to act like a New Yorker so that I can represent New York’s 14th Congressional District. But I don’t think that critique really holds water in terms of the actual policies that we are supporting. Sure, in terms of my style of advocacy, it’s not going to be the style of advocacy for another local community. But I’m aware of that. And that’s not my job. My job is not to represent any other district than mine right now.

It also applies the other way: They could not come to New York and to our district and be successful here. So it cuts both ways. And I think it’s important that we send the message that our communities are just as necessary, and just as critical as any other. But that said, again, this has nothing to do with the actual policy. A lot of times, it’s the style of that advocacy, and I think that you can just see the importance of a multiracial, and multi-identity, multi-gendered, geographically diverse movement. That’s ultimately the strength and beauty of our collective work with Bernie. There are communities that I’m able to speak to and organize, there are communities that Bernie and I are able to speak to and organize, and there are communities that Bernie is able to speak to and organize. And when we come together, we’re able to build trust, and expand that collective power among all the folks that resonate with each of us individually. The idea, like, “She’s not going to win in this one community or another community” … I’m not trying to, you know? What we’re trying to do is build movement in that community. And that is a very different question than trying to litigate one personality versus another.

Some on the Left have looked at Biden’s record and his differences with the Bernie wing of the party, and they conclude that no progress is going to come out of the Biden administration. What’s your view?

Well, I think it’s a really privileged critique. We’re gonna have to focus on solidarity with one another, developing our senses for good faith critique and bad faith critique. Because bad faith critique can destroy everything that we have built so swiftly. And we know this because it has in the past, and it’s taken us so many decades to get to this point. We do not have the time or the luxury to entertain bad faith actors in our movement. But also we have to value our solidarity with one another. For anyone who brings that up, we really have to ask ourselves, what is the message that you are sending to your Black and brown and undocumented members of your community, to your friends, when you say nothing has changed? Perhaps not enough has changed. And this is not a semantic argument. Just the other night, we in collective struggle were able to stop the deportations of critical members of our community. And that would not have happened in a Trump administration.

Thank you.

They were just on the belt ready to go. And you just cannot say that nothing will change. We can make the argument that not enough is changing fast enough. And these really are not nitpicking questions of semantics, because this is how the language that we use communicates to individuals who is included and who do you consider a person. When you say “nothing has changed,” you are calling the people who are now protected from deportation “no one.” And we cannot allow for that in our movement. That’s not a movement that I want to be a part of. And I know that’s not the movement that we are a part of. We’re so susceptible to cynicism. And that cynicism, that weaponization of cynicism, is what has and what continues to threaten to tear down everything that we have spent so much time building up. We’re allowed to win too, by the way. [LAUGHS.]

I prefer winning, actually.

Millions of people are excited about you being in Congress and rooting for your success. But at the same time, no other figure has been targeted by the Fox News crowd quite like you have. Why do you think that they worked to make you such a bogeyman for the right wing, and what’s it like to be on the receiving end of that?

I think they’ve done it because they know that we are a threat. Particularly because of the fact that I’m a movement candidate. If I was just some kind of one-off singular candidate, I do not believe that we would be attracting the energy and attacks that we attract. So much of this organized power and organized capital has frankly correctly identified that my candidacy is not an individual venture, but that it is representative of an actual working class movement. There is a rush to define me to the country before I have the opportunity to define myself. And if you can get enough people to just tune me out or tune any other person out before they even get the opportunity to hear what one has to say, you’re able to go a long way in preserving the current power structure. However, I don’t think that strategy lasts the test of time. I think it was a very strong short-term strategy. I mean, it continues to be a strategy. But I honestly believe that what was just attempted was: We’re going to throw the book at any candidate like this. We’re going to make an example out of her for everyone else. And then we’re just going to tar and feather her in the press. And then we’re going to mount a $3 million Democratic primary challenge against her that’s bankrolled by Wall Street, that was also a Latina, down to having a hyphenated last name. [Ed.: AOC was challenged in the 2020 Democratic primary by Michelle Caruso-Cabrera.] And it was just the most cynical, disgusting thing. But it was also trying to convince Democrats that this is too dangerous, and that this is a liability. They did that in hopes that it would succeed. And not only was it not successful, but we crushed them, just completely crushed them.

It was very exciting to see that result.

It is exciting, because they weaponized all the cynical powers of trying to get someone of my ethnicity, trying to even confuse people in terms of the name—Caruso Cabrera versus Ocasio Cortez. And [her campaign] had, you know, $3 million, she was a CNBC anchor, so she had TV and camera training and all of it. And the fact that it was so desperately unsuccessful, I think really speaks to the strength of this movement, that there is a glimmer of hope that it will not be distracted by all of the kind of tricks up this corporate establishment’s sleeve. And then beyond that, we went to a general election, which had $10 million behind it, backed by a Republican who then tried to do this whole … I might be getting my my music references mixed up, but trying to do like this whole like “John Mellencamp” vibe, trying to convince people that he’s not actually Republican, that he’s just a working class dude. So it really shows what their strategy was, which is “we’re gonna throw the book at her,” and we’re gonna try to wound her so badly that she doesn’t win re-election and this just becomes a flash-in-the-pan thing. I mean, in the general election it was the second most expensive congressional race in America.

I did not realize that.

Yeah, in the United States, it was the second most expensive race in the country. And so their strategy was to make quick work of us. And they threw everything that they could, and it didn’t work. And now I think they have a problem on their hands. [LAUGHS]

Yeah, because you got re-elected. In fact you absolutely crushed.

And not only that, but we also expanded our presence with the election of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. It’s really showing that this is not going away.

You’re one of 435 representatives in the House, four of whom are open socialists now. Pessimists might look at that and find that daunting, but you put on a recent Twitter video in which you listed all the specific things you personally got done in two years. You tried to do it in two minutes. It took you four, talking as fast as you could. So for our readers, what are some of the most impactful items on that list?

Well, for me, I’m already thinking about this term so far, things that aren’t in the video but have already been early wins. And by the way, this just speaks to talking about how nothing will change … we’ve already had really two very significant wins. One non-electoral, which was the Hunts Point Produce workers, being able to support them in securing wage increases and protecting their health care in their strike efforts. [Ed.: At the nation’s largest wholesale produce market, located in the Bronx, Teamsters struck for first time in 35 years. AOC skipped the presidential inauguration to join them on the picket line. After a week on strike, they won $1.85 an hour raises]

The reason I bring this up is because I do not believe that they would have had the structural and community support they were able to generate, if we hadn’t been building momentum on both electoral wins and non electoral wins. You know, if Joe Biden didn’t win the presidency, that would have been a harder strike. Even though they don’t seem connected, there is something to be said about the morale of seeing your actions manifest into change. I don’t know if as many elected officials would have shown up if they didn’t feel like more people weren’t paying attention. And so to have that institutional support for their demands, really allowed the community to rally around, along with the on-the-ground support that DSA provided.

You know, I thought one of the things that was so inspiring in talking to many of these unionists was that they expressed to me shock, every night that I was there, that so many young people showed up to the picket line. They had no idea what was going on. But they were thrilled. And they knew that it was adding so much power to their strike efforts. And it really kind of goes both ways too. It elevated the consciousness of even the unionists, of the fact that they weren’t alone, and that their struggle was part of a larger collective one, really made the strike stronger. And the other [win] was being able to secure $2 billion for FEMA reimbursements for funeral expenses.

For those who died of COVID.

Yeah, for individuals who have died of COVID. And there’s a couple of reasons why this was so important. First of all, this was a homegrown effort. New York 14 was the most heavily impacted congressional district at the outbreak of the pandemic. And Elmcor and our constituents in East Elmhurst, which is kind of in the shadow of Elmhurst Hospital, the most heavily hit hospital in the country at one point, they reached out immediately. And they said, this is a disease that is disproportionately impacting people along lines of race and class. It is disproportionately impacting the Black, the brown and the low income. And as a consequence, the subsequent deaths, particularly at the beginning, were concentrated among Black patients, brown patients and low income patients.

So you take that a step further, and the expenses for a funeral can go $5,000 to $10,000. That is a life-altering expense for a working class family, when the average American has 400 bucks in savings, especially in the middle of a pandemic, when this is not something that is planned or expected at all. That’s the kind of death that is earth-shattering, that can put a family under for a decade plus, if not more. I experienced this myself when my family lost my dad, and we saw how expensive it was. And it took a decade to get out from that debt.

So when you target this for reimbursement, it’s actually quite a progressive cash transfer. Because when you are reimbursing those who have died of COVID, and COVID is disproportionately impacting the Black and the brown and the working class, you are able to lift those families or at least patch them through to prevent inequity and inequality from further bottoming out the bottom. And that’s the reason we prioritized it so much. The fact that we were able to actually pass it on to the Trump administration is pretty remarkable. We were able to get $2 billion authorized under Trump. Now that FEMA is operating under Biden, we can now work with the administration to administer these funds, and dole them out in a way that is not going to be as stonewalled or corrupt as it would be under the Trump administration.

One of the exciting things about your early days in Congress was your willingness to break from convention, like when you blew the lid on the freshman orientation that was crawling with corporate lobbyists, or appeared at the Sunrise Movement sit-in in Pelosi’s office. Has your strategy shifted at all from those days?

I don’t think so. I do think that the pandemic has complicated those things a little bit, because a lot of stuff really does happen behind closed doors. And it’s funny, but you know, people will say and do things at a cocktail party that they will not do on a Zoom call. So I would say that the opportunities for disruption have varied a little bit in this digital situation that we’re in, but I still think they exist.

One thing I do think has changed is that I do believe we’re getting more sophisticated. I think about all of our tactics as different tools in a toolbox. And when I first started, I had a hammer. And when you have a hammer, everything’s a nail, as they say. But then as you learn about other methods, you can get a wrench, and then you get a screwdriver, and then you’re able to add a lot more to your tools. You add the tools of electoralism — supporting other members to join. You have the tools of sunlight.

There’s this one moment I’ll never forget. We were going through the appropriations process, I believe in 2019 or so. And basically, this is how we fund the entire government, we go along and we fund each agency after the other. And there are these massive multi-thousand-page packages. And I remember finding … sometimes it’s as simple as hitting Control-F and just trying to find every policy-related keyword, to see what’s getting appropriated, and see what you can dig through. That’s literally how some folks go about this, when you’re given 1,000 pages of legislation 48 hours before it drops. But we found this really bizarre appropriation for fossil fuel facilities, and it was like a multi billion dollar giveaway, I believe, at the time. And we were like, “Where did this come from? Did someone slip this in?” And we were gonna propose an amendment to take it out. So we raised the question about this. And because no one wanted to ‘fess up and actually own that they were the one who put that in, it was withdrawn without actually making it a floor fight. Yeah. I don’t think we ever got to the bottom of who was behind that. Clearly, you know, this is lobbyist driven. This was a lobbyist’s language that someone asked to put in. But because the actual line item was so shameful, no one wanted to actually ‘fess up to the fact that they put this in.

There are so many of these wins, that aren’t necessarily public fights every time. They are wins to the tune of millions and billions of dollars that could then be shifted to other priorities. Some of that work is quiet, but it is just as significant as some of the public fighting and organizing. Not to disparage that either, but they complement one another.

You’re famous for skillfully clapping back at haters from time to time, but you don’t come off as mean, and you never punch down. How do you stay so positive?

Oh, thank you. Well, you know, positivity is an organizing tool. And I say that with so much earnestness. There’s a reason why Jabari [Brisport] won, there’s a reason why Zohran [Mamdani] won, there’s a reason why Marcela [Mitaynes] and Phara [Souffrant Forrest] — these wins that we had on the state level, why those candidates won. Look at them. They are relentlessly positive. They are people that you want to be around. And they are not cynical, and they do not engage in “more socialist than thou.” They are just relentlessly positive.

And I think the most important thing that we can do in order to win is to be people and spaces that people want to be around. And that is our organizing priority. We have to make Medicare for All something that everyone wants to be a part of. We have to make Green New Deal something that everyone wants to be a part of. I think people sometimes are dismissive of this, in thinking that it’s less serious than study. But who’s gonna join your book club if it sucks? Who’s gonna join your reading group if they feel judged? So the important thing we need to do is to really create something … excuse my language … but that’s fucking fun.



Photo by Corey Torpie

Don McIntosh is a me
mber of the Democratic Left editorial team.

Democratic Left is the magazine of the Democratic Socialists of America. Signed articles do not necessarily express the position of the organization


https://portside.org
The Self-Determination Act Could Finally End US Colonization of Puerto Rico

For more than 120 years, the US has colonized Puerto Rico. But a new bill cosponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would finally give Puerto Ricans the chance to decide their political relationship with the United States.

April 2, 2021 
Natalia Renta 
JACOBIN

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Last month, New York representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez — joined by New Jersey’s Bob Menendez in the Senate — introduced the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act of 2021. If passed, the legislation would create a process for Puerto Ricans to finally determine the nature of their relationship with the United States, which for more than 120 years has colonized the island.

The Self-Determination Act comes as Puerto Ricans are rising up — against a federally imposed fiscal control board, government neglect in the wake of Hurricane Maria, gender and racial violence on the island, and business as usual in local government — making the status quo colonial relationship untenable. The bill correctly recognizes that Puerto Ricans themselves — not their colonial overseers — have the right to determine their own future.

Here is how the law would work. First, the Puerto Rican legislature would pass a law to initiate a status convention. Residents of Puerto Rico would elect delegates to the status convention, who in turn would outline a slate of political status options and accompanying transition plans in consultation with a commission composed of members of Congress and the presidential administration. The political status options could include statehood, independence, free association, or any option other than the current colonial arrangement. The status options, and the accompanying transition plans, would then be put to a vote in a special referendum on the island. Finally, Congress would ratify the selected status option — deferring entirely to the choice of Puerto Rican voters — and the US and Puerto Rican governments would begin to implement the new arrangement.

Puerto Ricans have voted on several political status referenda over the years. Indeed, some statehood proponents point to the most recent referendum — an up-or-down statehood question in November 2020 — to argue that Congress should immediately pass a bill that would put Puerto Rico on a path to statehood.

But Puerto Ricans have never had a chance to vote on their preferred political status with the benefit of knowing the implications of each option and what a transition process would look like. For example, if Puerto Rico were a state, could the Puerto Rican courts and legislature continue to operate in Spanish? Under a “free association,” would residents of Puerto Rico be able to retain US citizenship? If the island became independent, would the United States provide any reparations to Puerto Rico for over a century of exploitation and neglect? Many more questions related to culture, language, taxes, debt, and citizenship, among others, loom large.

With the requirement that each political status option presented in the referendum be fully defined and include a transition plan, the process outlined by the Self-Determination Act would finally give the people of Puerto Rico a meaningful voice in their political future. Additionally, the bill allows for ranked-choice voting, meaning that residents can voice their true preferences without worrying that their vote won’t matter if their top choices are not supported by a majority.

It is also worth noting that past referenda have been plagued by controversies, including concerns over how the questions were structured, a boycott, and in the case of the most recent referenda, election irregularities that have triggered litigation. The Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act would provide a clear, transparent process that would put all options on the table and guarantee residents a fair vote.

The timing of the bill is not accidental. In the last several years, a cascade of events — the ongoing debt crisis and the fallout from Hurricane Maria, most notably — have made painfully clear that whatever language the United States chooses to use, Puerto Rico is a twenty-first-century colony.

By the time the then governor declared the island’s debt unpayable in 2015, Puerto Rico had already been experiencing years of economic contraction caused in large part by federal policies foisted on Puerto Ricans. In the summer of 2016, the Supreme Court issued two decisions that dealt a blow to any semblance of the island’s autonomy — invalidating a Puerto Rico bankruptcy law even though it could not avail itself of federal bankruptcy protections, and declaring that Congress retains ultimate control over Puerto Rico under the Territorial Clause of the US Constitution.

Later that summer, Congress invoked its authority under the Territorial Clause to pass the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). This law imposed an unelected, unaccountable Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) (which those on the island labeled “la Junta”) and created a path of austerity to pay Wall Street at the expense of Puerto Ricans. Still reeling from the debt crisis, the island was hit by Hurricane Maria — and promptly abandoned by the federal government. Some experts estimate the hurricane caused over a thousand deaths, many of them avoidable.

Puerto Ricans have not taken these events sitting down. Organizations like Casa Pueblo and Comedores Sociales, active before Maria, played a critical role in its aftermath. Pension-holders have organized through Construyamos Otro Acuerdo (“Building Another Agreement”) to demand their pensions remain intact through the PROMESA bankruptcy process instead of being slashed in favor of Wall Street creditors. Colectiva Feminista en Construcción (“Feminist Collective Under Construction”) has brought issues of gender and racial violence to the fore. Perhaps most significantly, in the summer of 2019, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the streets and successfully demanded the resignation of Governor Ricardo Roselló, chanting, “Ricky renuncia y llévate a la Junta” (“Ricky, resign and take the Junta with you”). In the wake of #RickyRenuncia, a progressive party not defined by political status preferences — Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (“Citizens’ Victory Movement”) — emerged as a significant political force on the island.

It is in this context of colonial injustice and left organizing that the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act emerged, with broad support from progressive organizations and parties from both the island and the diaspora.

There is no easy resolution to 123 years of US colonialism in Puerto Rico. The relationship has caused, and continues to cause, great harm to the island. While no bill will single-handedly resolve more than a century of injustice, any just path forward will require a credible, inclusive, and democratic process. With an organized and engaged Puerto Rican public — a requirement for the passage of the bill and the success of the process it outlines — the time is ripe to end US colonialism in Puerto Rico once and for all.

Natalia Renta is a senior policy strategist at the Center for Popular Democracy.


Can Social Movements Realign America’s Political Parties to Win Big Change?
Groups such as Sunrise and Justice Democrats are reviving the old idea of realignment, with hopes of provoking new political transformations.

March 30, 2021 Mark Engler and Paul Engler

Activists rally in support of proposed 'Green New Deal' legislation outside of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) New York City office, April 30, 2019 in New York City. , Drew Angerer/Getty Images

In the second week of November 2018, the Sunrise Movement made a sharp transition. Throughout the prior year, the youth-based climate organization had clocked long hours working in support of Democratic candidates in an array of selected districts — walking miles to knock on doors, identifying sympathetic voters and getting people to polls. Now, dozens of Sunrise members sat on the floor in the Washington, D.C. office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Scores of others spilled out into the hallway, lining the walls of the office corridor and carrying signs in the group’s signature yellow and black that read “Green Jobs for All” and asked “What Is Your Plan?” The demand of the sit-in was that the Speaker of the House endorse the Green New Deal, an ambitious legislative program to decarbonize the economy — something Pelosi was hesitant to embrace. In short, Sunrise had abruptly gone from campaigning hard for the Democratic Party’s members to fiercely protesting its leaders.

Casual observers could be forgiven for being confused or thinking there had been a sudden change of strategy. There hadn’t.

The action reached a climax when one of the newly elected congresspeople that Sunrise had supported, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, decided to join them. It created a striking image: a member of Congress who had not even been sworn in, standing in the center of a circle of nonviolent dissenters, confronting her own party’s leadership. The civil disobedience became a media sensation, propelling the Green New Deal into the spotlight of national politics and markedly changing the terms of debate over climate policy.

One might ask what the thinking behind Sunrise’s unusual two-step might be: What big idea would lead the group to doggedly support Democratic candidates one week, then stage a protest in the office of the party’s most senior official the next? And could such a maneuver lead down a coherent path toward political progress?

In a word, the idea in question is “realignment.”

The concept of realignment is not new. It has a history that runs through the works of some of the country’s most renowned mid-century political scientists, as well as through the careers of figures such as legendary organizer Bayard Rustin, eminent socialist Michael Harrington and conservative culture warrior Newt Gingrich. It runs today through Ocasio-Cortez and other social movement-oriented Congressional Democrats who announce the intention, in AOC’s words, of “bringing the party home” — and who in fact may take it places it has never gone before.

“Realignments happen when a long-term social transformation, a crisis, and the right leader converge to change the landscape,” writes political journalist George Packer in The Atlantic. The word often resurfaces with the inauguration of new presidents. Particularly with his 2008 election, which brought a super-majority for his party in the Senate, Barack Obama was seen by some commentators as ushering in a permanent Democratic majority. That is, until Donald Trump broke through the Democrat’s “Blue Wall” in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and flipped at least some voters in the white working class, giving rise to speculation that his win was the realignment of lasting consequence. Biden’s election has been seen as less historically weighty than those of his predecessors. Nevertheless, his success in passing the landmark $1.9 trillion recovery bill led New York Times columnist David Brooks to dub him a “transformational president” and prompted New York magazine’s Eric Levitz to contend that “the law could plausibly mark a leftward realignment in American policymaking.”

Such claims are not unique. Left scholar Mike Davis notes that, while it is mostly old-timers who remember when the idea of realignment was at the peak of its popularity, the notion that certain moments represent fundamental ruptures, reshaping what ideas parties stand for and what constituencies they represent, has a stubbornly persistent appeal. Even as academics debate the theory’s validity, he writes, “the thesis of the ‘critical election’ that durably realigns interest blocs and partisan loyalties remains the holy grail of every actual presidential campaign.”

Outside of presidential elections, realignment has another meaning for social movements promoting far-reaching change. For groups like Sunrise and Justice Democrats — known for its critical role in recruiting Ocasio-Cortez and propelling her insurgent primary campaign in 2018, as well as for helping to support other members of “the Squad” — it is a way of thinking big. Rather than being content to remain in the role of always pushing from the outside or supporting a few handpicked politicians, the concept encourages them to aspire to a more fundamental shift in power relations. It is part of a strategy to form and advance a bloc that can become a dominant force in the U.S. political system. It means, effectively, building a bold new party within the shell of the old.

Could such a feat be possible? What lessons can we learn from realigners of the past? And what is the practical consequence of movements naming this as a key strategic goal today?

A once and future dream

The academic theory of electoral realignment has been called “one of the most creative, engaging and influential intellectual enterprises undertaken by American political scientists during the last half century.” It was first advanced by Harvard professor V. O. Key, Jr. in his 1955 article “A Theory of Critical Elections.” Later, it was developed by scholars including Walter Dean Burnham, a student of Key’s, and James Sundquist, a former speechwriter for Harry Truman. The theory proposed that America’s political party system has evolved in punctuated bursts — often 30 to 40 years apart — and that certain vital elections end up defining their eras by mobilizing fresh groups of voters and putting new issues at the fore of the public agenda. For the likes of Burnham and Key, “critical realignment” involves intense, disruptive moments in which partisan allegiances are reshuffled, majority coalitions fall, and previously uncompetitive minority parties gain new acceptance of their politics.

Think of contests such as the election of 1860, which marked the ascendance of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party and presaged a civil war over slavery; or 1896, when business-funded Republican William McKinley defeated populist-aligned William Jennings Bryan; or 1932, which gave rise to the New Deal order. These elections had generational consequences. They set the mold for the type of governance that followed in subsequent decades: After New Deal liberalism became dominant, even its critics were forced to govern within its core assumptions about the role of government. Likewise, after the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, even Democrats acquiesced to the idea that “the era of big government is over.”

Each of the major claims of academic realignment theorists has been disputed, with a variety of other scholars arguing that American party development is in fact more gradual and that punctuated 30-year cycles cannot be reliably predicted. But even as this academic debate unfolded over the decades — and indeed even before many of its key entries were written — the concept of realignment took on a life of its own both in popular commentary and in the world of political organizing.

In the early 1960s, a number of leaders on the democratic socialist left, including Michael Harrington — whose 1962 book, “The Other America,” helped to animate the Kennedy administration’s War on Poverty — set out to intentionally fracture the Democratic Party in order to build it into something better. Southern Dixiecrats had been an important part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, but their inclusion had proven to be a devil’s bargain. Today, it is well known that powerful racist senators maintained Jim Crow by obstructing civil rights legislation for decades; less well-remembered is the critical role the “Southern Vote” played in pushing anti-union legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act. As historian Paul Heideman explains, “Figures from Walter Reuther to Martin Luther King, Jr. noticed that the Democratic Party contained within it both the most liberal forces in official American politics, like Hubert Humphrey, and the most reactionary, like Strom Thurmond … [T]he Dixiecrats had prevented the Democrats from assuming a coherent political identity as the party of American liberalism.”

Harrington and others believed that, if “Southern racists and certain other corruptive elements” could be pushed out, the Democratic Party could resemble something like a mainstream European social democratic party. Harrington argued in 1962 that a union of welfare state liberals, organized labor, Black voters empowered by the civil rights movement, peace movement constituencies, and other progressive “conscience” voters could “forge a dynamic new coalition which will force a basic realignment in American politics.” From that time until his death in 1989, Harrington and the organizations he would help form — first the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and later the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA — would be associated with this realignment strategy.

In the mid-1960s, things seemed to be on track. With Lyndon Baines Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, decisive Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, and organized labor at the peak of its postwar power, it seemed realistic to think that a strong social-democratic majority could be assembled without the reactionary Dixiecrats.

Bayard Rustin, another important backer of the strategy made this point in his famous 1965 essay, “From Protest to Politics.” A prodigiously talented organizer who was kept out of the spotlight due to homophobia but nevertheless served as an advisor to King and a lead planner for the March on Washington, Rustin wrote: “It may be premature to predict a Southern Democratic party of Negroes and white moderates and a Republican Party of refugee racists and economic conservatives, but there certainly is a strong tendency toward such a realignment” — a tendency, he believed, that would only grow stronger as millions more African Americans in Southern states were registered to vote.

Elsewhere, Heideman notes, Rustin further explained his thought: “If we only protest for concessions from without,” the strategist reasoned, “then [the] party treats us in the same way as any of the other conflicting pressure groups. This means it offers us the most minimum concessions for votes.” However, he concluded, “if the same amount of pressure is exerted from inside the party using highly sophisticated political tactics, we can change the structure of that party.”

The right realigns


The logic was sound. But in hindsight it is clear that things didn’t quite go as planned. While the Dixiecrats did flee the party after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, social democrats struggled in the wake of the Southerners’ departure. The Vietnam War was one big reason for this. Many establishment liberals proved themselves all too willing to follow LBJ into the morass of the conflict, permanently alienating themselves from the rising New Left.

Secondly, on the labor front, realigners had envisioned backing from unionists in the mold of Walther Reuther of the United Auto Workers — a stalwart progressive who lent active support to civil rights struggles. They instead ran up against an AFL-CIO under the direction of George Meany, a bureaucratically-minded labor leader who prided himself on never leading a strike and never walking a picket line. The labor federation backed hawkish foreign policy, and in 1972 the AFL-CIO declined to officially endorse the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee George McGovern. For his part, Meany was seen golfing with Nixon and members of his cabinet. Tragically, by the end of his life, Bayard Rustin had become ensconced in defending such labor officialdom; once a prominent pacifist, he took on the role of scolding radical critics of the Vietnam War.

Through the following two decades, Harrington and other leftists continued their push to empower progressives within the Democratic Party. But, in the end, it was conservatives who were able to capitalize on changing social conditions.

“Like us, the New Right believes in realignment,” wrote historian and future Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee national director Jim Chapin in 1975. Although slowed somewhat by the crisis of Watergate and then by the Democrats’ move to nominate a Southern evangelical, Jimmy Carter, in 1976, the Republicans were able by the 1980s to realize a version of the “southern strategy” famously articulated by Nixon aide Kevin Phillips. A newly aggressive assault on organized labor helped. With profit margins declining in the 1970s, segments of capital that had previously tolerated New Deal policy revolted. They joined with other corporate interests to break the unions — an attack fully backed by the White House once Ronald Reagan took office. Meanwhile, operatives such as Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, deftly brought apolitical religious conservatives into the Republican fold under the banner of the “moral majority.”

At times, realignment rhetoric figured explicitly in this work. As one example, Weyrich acolyte Newt Gingrich convened a two-day conference of conservative leaders in 1989 devoted to discussing how to lock in a right-wing majority with a strategy of confrontation rather than bipartisanship. Responding to the event’s doubters, Gingrich argued in a letter to the Washington Post that the meeting had been an important step in bolstering a Republican Party that could “drive realignment from the presidency down to the precincts,” spreading conservative dominance “to Congress, governorships, state legislatures and local government.”

In 1976, Harrington wrote, “[T]he nation is at one of those turning points which then fix the outlines of an entire era to come.” And while hopes for realignment within the Democratic Party dimmed in the decade that followed, they did not vanish entirely. Early in the Reagan era, Frances Fox Piven, the great theorist of disruptive power, argued that mass voter registration of people on social welfare rolls could “force a party realignment along class lines” — particularly if accompanied by defiant protests over voting rights. Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson’s insurgent campaigns in 1984 and 1988 presented the possibility, albeit fleetingly, that the Democrats could be remade in the image of a multiracial, class-conscious “Rainbow Coalition.”

Looking back, it is undeniable that the era’s organizers did not prevail in realizing such a prospect. And yet the failure of progressive realignment in the United States at that time was hardly unique. Social democratic efforts throughout much of the world suffered dramatic setbacks, and alternate strategies — such as creating a “Citizens Party” or building up radical factions within industrial unions — also did not yield particularly hopeful outcomes. Ultimately, the left was entering into a period of decline. In 1992, when Democratic candidate Bill Clinton captured the presidency, he would consolidate the Reagan revolution by declaring the kind of “big government” programs of the New Deal and Great Society obsolete. A generation of neoliberal, “New Democrat” leaders followed his lead and compromised their way to the center.

An age-old debate, settled?

Much has transpired since to reset the table of political calculation, but possibly nothing as immediately consequential as a 2016 campaign that defied all predictions. Prior to that time, virtually no one in America’s class of professional political commentators could have imagined that a 74-year-old, Jewish, self-described socialist who had built his political career as a Vermont independent would come shockingly close to defeating Democratic Party insider and presumptive Obama successor, Hillary Clinton.

Bernie Sanders, addressing crowds with a pronounced Brooklyn accent and calling for a political revolution against the billionaire class, rose to win 23 states in the presidential primaries — including Oklahoma, West Virginia, Michigan, North Dakota and Idaho, all states later claimed by Donald Trump. Well after the election year ended, Sanders polled for a time as the most popular active politician in America. Then, in 2020, he made another impressive run, emerging as a frontrunner in a crowded Democratic field. Sanders won the vote in key early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada before falling to Joe Biden’s “Super Tuesday” surge.

The Sanders campaign of 2016, in particular, reinvigorated left debate about electoral strategy. At the same time, it represented something of a paradox: By running within the mechanisms of the Democratic Party, Bernie had remarkable success in mainstreaming progressive ideas, providing an attractive alternative to the marginalization typically associated with third-party bids. And yet, his failure to secure the nomination — and a perception that he was unfairly robbed by the party establishment — left many supporters nursing bitter resentment toward the Democrats, whom detractors claimed were morally bankrupt. “They have always been, they always are, and they always will be,” wrote one disaffected Berniecrat.

By the 1990s, DSA had already moved away from the traditional realignment position pursued by Harrington, and it had declined to officially endorse presidential candidates including Bill Clinton and later Al Gore in 2000. And yet, the dilemmas that the strategy sought to address have not disappeared. Chris Maisano, an editor at Jacobin, writes: “The debate over whether … electoral action should be waged on Democratic Party ballot lines is perhaps the most persistent controversy on the U.S. left.” The strong grip of corporate Democrats dampened hopes that the party could ever be remade and kindled dreams of an independent political formation — a Green, Worker’s, Progressive or Labor Party. And yet, entrenched barriers to third parties, most notably the lack of proportional representation and notoriously stringent ballot access requirements in many states, has made the American two-party system largely impervious to outside assaults for a half-century or more.

The Sanders campaign swelled the ranks of DSA and gave rise to new initiatives including Justice Democrats and Our Revolution. Moreover, the combination of anger at the Democratic establishment and recognition of the party’s primaries as fertile ground for outsider candidates to contest — and sometimes win — has prompted a new wave of progressives to enter these elections at all levels of government, with some candidates openly identifying as democratic socialists. In the U.S. House of Representatives, this has resulted in the formation of the Squad, a group initially made up exclusively of women of color — Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — who unabashedly promoted a policy agenda far to the left of party leadership. In some instances, such as Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, its members ousted powerful incumbents while articulating a new vision for the party.

While many activists may not think of themselves as realigners, a broad practical consensus has emerged around doing electoral work largely through the Democratic Party ballot line. Georgetown historian Michael Kazin argues that “as a consequence of his two national campaigns, Sanders and his legion of admirers embedded a growing social-democratic movement inside the heart of the Democratic Party.” Meanwhile, Maisano writes, “the political developments of the last few years have effectively settled the Democratic Party question, at least for now.” He adds: “Whether we like it or not, working-class organizers will continue to use major party primaries so long as they exist and bear fruit.”

To be sure, there remain strategic differences and debates. Among DSA members, some see a rupture with Democrats as inevitable. They advocate for building an identity and infrastructure that is as independent as possible from the Democrats, in preparation for an eventual “dirty break.” Others within DSA are comfortable with the prospect of laboring within the Democratic Party structure for the foreseeable future and even attempting to gain power over internal party machinery — moves consistent with realignment strategies of the past. As one example of this tendency, a leftist slate in the southwest recently succeeded in sweeping the top five elected positions of the Nevada Democratic Party, prompting the whole of the state party’s centrist staff to resign in dismay. Activists working in this vein often ally themselves with a wide range of other groups seeking to promote left-of-center candidates. These include newer, Sanders-inspired groups, but also others such as the Progressive Democrats of America, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, MoveOn, People’s Action, and the Working Families Party — not to mention more progressive unions, community and civil rights groups.

Each organization possesses its own orientation with regard to the future of the Democrats. But their leaders may well overestimate their ability to determine the long-term impact of their work. As trade unionist and DSA activist Dustin Guastella observes, on a certain level ideas such as “realignment” and “break” are not actually strategies. “Rather, they are outcomes of political struggle,” he writes. “They depend on how the major parties react to shifts in the electorate and organized political action: either the party is unable to heal an internal divide, resulting in a ‘break’ (like the Whig moment in the 1850s) or the party adopts the policies of insurgents in order to consolidate a new constituency (like the New Deal moment in the 1930s).”

Despite some differences among them, a robust collection of groups opposed to the Democratic Party’s centrist old guard and corporate donor base are now seeking to build independent infrastructure that can allow them to recruit and run dissident candidates. They are looking to build the social base for left ideas. And they are working to craft appeals that will allow them to draw together powerful majorities. The more successful they are, the more they will make a mark on the landscape of American party politics — even if the exact shape of that mark might be difficult to predict.

Who are today’s realigners?

Many within this social movement ecosystem do not use the language of realignment. But a few groups, such as Sunrise and Justice Democrats, evoke the idea as an important part of their vision of change. Strategists in these organizations are today’s realigners.

For Justice Democrats Executive Director Alexandra Rojas and Communications Director Waleed Shahid, the Sanders campaign offered only a taste of “what was possible in transforming the Democratic Party into a vehicle for lasting social change.” Meanwhile, Sunrise co-founder Will Lawrence expresses confidence in the usefulness of reclaiming realignment as a strategy. “It’s the secret sauce,” he said. “We couldn’t have done what we have without our understanding of alignments and factions guiding how we navigate political choices.”

So what significance does the idea of realignment have for how these organizations behave?

The lessons that can be derived from the concept’s history are filled with caveats. The academic literature on realignment is largely descriptive — seeking to understand past developments in American political history — rather than prescriptive. It does not offer a clear path forward for those seeking to organize social movements. Guido Girgenti, the media director for Justice Democrats and a co-founder of Sunrise, reflects on this challenge in the 2020 Sunrise book “Winning the Green New Deal.” “Realignments are messy, rare and big,” he contends in an essay written with Shahid. “No single person or group has their hand entirely on the rudder, and there’s no step-by-step method to succeeding.”

These concerns notwithstanding, the concept of realignment has some important practical effects for the groups that use it, giving them language to highlight a set of strategic considerations that arise as they craft an “inside-outside” approach to politics. Three of these effects are especially worth highlighting.

First, as Rustin suggested long ago, thinking about realignment encourages movement organizations to express large ambitions that go beyond forever functioning as outside pressure groups or single-issue lobbies. Instead of aiming merely to extract concessions by being the thorn in the side of elected officials and other powerholders, realigners are vying for power. Echoing Mike Davis, Girgenti and Shahid write, “The project of an era-defining realignment is perhaps the biggest goal a movement can aspire to in American politics.” In their pursuit of policies such as the Green New Deal, Sunrise and Justice Democrats seek not only to alter the accepted common sense about the solutions our society needs, but also to back up such cultural change with a reorientation of the political forces that can pull the levers of state power.

Second, the concept orients the realigners toward working within the Democratic Party, but also toward being in conflict with others inside the party’s big tent. Maintaining a majority that can defeat reactionary Republicans is important. But just as critical for these groups is the objective of advancing a specific faction within the Democratic coalition, with the aim of making that arm of the party into the dominant one. This orientation creates a marked distinction between Sunrise and a group like, say, the League of Conservation Voters. The latter generally works to get more Democrats elected (and occasionally endorses Republicans with nominally pro-environmental voting records), without pushing for a wider ideological shift in the party. Meanwhile Sunrise adopts a more confrontational strategy, focusing on electing champions and — in line with Piven — retaining direct action as a core part of its repertoire. It is willing to use both door-knocking and sit-ins as ways of influencing the party’s composition and ideology.

In his classic 1942 study on democratic politics, E. E. Schattsneider described a political party as “an organized attempt to get control of the government.” Contemporary political scientist Daniel Schlozman adds, “Because political parties organize social conflict … they also structure the possibilities for movements to achieve ongoing influence.” But in America, the peculiarity of the party system means that these opportunities are structured in unusual ways. In countries with parliamentary systems, the dynamics of realignment largely play out in debates between different political parties with distinct ideologies. These parties might then have to decide whether or not to enter into coalition governments with one another. However, in the United States, the ingrained two-party system means that tension between different factions commonly takes place within the major parties. “In any other country Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” Ocasio-Cortez has stated. “But in America, we are.”

Given this reality, an often-cited maxim holds that organizers should not think about the Democrats as a coherent collection of like-minded individuals. Rather, they should see the party as a terrain of struggle. As Rojas and Shahid write, “It’s not a team, it’s the arena.”

In an interview with Dissent magazine, Shahid further elaborated on this reasoning: “A good way of thinking about the situation in American politics today is that the left wing of the party — whatever label you want to use for it — is a junior partner to a senior partner in a coalition government,” he said. “The senior partner is the party of Pelosi and Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Dianne Feinstein. They have more power. But we are in a coalition together to get over 50 percent and keep the Republicans out of power.”

Long term, the idea is to shift the balance of power so that the left becomes the dominant faction, reversing the current roles. At that point, risk-averse political pragmatists seeking to stake out “mainstream” and uncontroversial positions will model themselves after progressives, rather than the Clintonian “New Democrats” of the past. “If you look at U.S. history,” Shahid argues, “it isn’t just ideologically driven figures like [anti-slavery champion] Thaddeus Stevens or [New Deal-era labor advocate] Robert Wagner that drive politics, but also … people who come from the old guard of the party but see history changing beneath them. That is a really good sign for the broader trend of realignment. At least in my reading of history, that’s how change has happened: not only does the party co-opt you, but you also co-opt the party.”

Reading the clock of the world

A third consequence of thinking in terms of realignment is that it encourages activists to carefully take stock of the amalgam of social forces at play on the American political scene. Realigners often cite the late, storied Detroit organizer Grace Lee Boggs, who urged advocates of transformational change to ask, “What time is it on the clock of the world?”

One can fault past strategists like Rustin and Harrington for miscalculating how segments of capital, labor or the right would respond to dynamic social conditions. But their political plans, unlike too many liberal projects, were not rooted merely in idealism or wishful thinking. Rather, they were based on a hard look at the fault lines in the dominant parties and on a plausible vision of how a majoritarian grouping could have formed amid the social movement upheavals of the 1960s. A similarly deliberate probing of the currents flowing through America’s electorate is surely needed now.

Could there be a structural basis for realignment today? Current realigners tend to endorse the left-populist analysis that the 2008 economic crash and the lingering insecurity faced by working people has created a crisis of legitimacy for neoliberalism. In many parts of the world, traditional parties offer no adequate solutions, and so they have lost ground to insurgent groups that rally public resentment against established elites.

Of course, it is not only progressives attempting to fill the void. As in the past, the right believes in realignment, too. Conservative ethno-nationalists, playing especially on racial grievances, have shown that they can also ride the wave of disaffection; Donald Trump is by no means the least among them. Currently, fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and the mounting crises of climate change have only furthered the destabilization of the previous order.

Neoliberal “New Democrats” may have once gained momentum within their party. But even arch-centrist Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and advisor to several Democratic presidents, acknowledges the terrain has since shifted. “Admittedly,” he stated in early 2020, “today’s landscape is much friendlier for progressive ideas than it was when either Mr. Clinton or Mr. Obama was running for office.” In part, this reflects the hard work that movements have already done in shaping public opinion. But it is also aided by demography. As Shahid contends, “One of the signs of realignment happening today is the generational shift. Millennials self-describe as very ideologically left compared to other generations.”

The country is also growing more diverse, with the power of older, white voting blocs eroding in the face of demographic movement toward a “majority-minority” country. These trends give hope for revival of the kind of alignment envisioned by the Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s. Along these lines, Rojas and Shahid quote historian Barbara Ransby, who writes of the Squad: “They are wisely acting as if they represent the demographic and political majority that their generation will become.”

“They are not only the future of the Democratic Party,” Ransby added. “They are the future.”

Nevertheless, Shahid warns, “I’m not someone who thinks demographics are destiny. You still have to do politics.” That means making tough decisions. While realignment might give groups like Sunrise and Justice Democrats a defined orientation in crafting their response to present political conditions, it leaves many important questions unanswered. For instance, strategists must weigh the relative importance of “mobilization” and “conversion” — whether a faction aspiring to power should focus on more aggressively activating its own base or on peeling off people previously devoted to other groups. “If the mobilization analysts are right, new voters are the key to realignment,” Piven explains in her book “Challenging Authority.” On the other hand, “if the conversion analysts are right, changing party loyalties among existing voters are the key.”

Other questions include: How to formulate a “race-class narrative” with widespread appeal? How much should left groups target moderate incumbents in strongly “blue” Democratic districts and try to replace them with progressive champions, versus pursuing a 50-state strategy and trying to win in unexpected places? Should insurgents embrace the goal of representing the true “soul of the party,” or should they reject partisan language and attack moribund Democratic Party structures as part of the establishment? How “coalitional” should they be with other groups at a given moment — including those they might not agree with fully — and how confrontational?

Even as they consider these dilemmas, the organizers can take solace in having a clear view of the task they face. “The common sense in the country is fracturing,” Sunrise teaches in its activist trainings. “We have a generational opportunity to shape it. If we don’t, the right will. Inclusive populism is about uniting the largest ‘we’ possible and winning [over] common sense beyond our own movements and issues.” Could the urgency in such a perspective drive a reordering of American politics? While some view history as a cautionary tale, today’s realigners take inspiration from past organizers who have wrestled with this grand ambition and sometimes, improbably, succeeded.

Research assistance for this article provided by Akin Olla.

The Temptation of Secession

By Geoffrey Himes | March 12, 2021 | 
 Illustration from the Kean Collection/Getty Archive


At first it was just iconography. The Confederate flag, that symbol of violent rebellion against the United States in defense of slavery, flew from porches, front yards and pick-up trucks.

Then it was spoken aloud. In early December, the late right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh said, “We’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?... There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government.” Allen West, the chair of the Texas Republican Party, suggested that “law-abiding states” form a new and separate nation.

Then it was acted upon. On January 6, a violent crowd the smashed windows and doors of the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to seize control of the building and stop Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden. With Confederate flags flying, they succeeded for several hours.

What should be the response of the left? Should we resist secession as fiercely as Abraham Lincoln once did? Or should we say, “Goodbye and good riddance”?


The latter option is tempting. After all, if you subtract the votes of the old Confederacy and the upper Great Plains states, you are left with an electoral college that will not only consistently put Democrats in the White House but also Democrats far more liberal than we’re used to. Given a Congress of representatives only from the Northeast, the West Coast and the Great Lakes, you will be able to pass Medicare for All, a carbon tax, free community college, free day care, immigration reform, progressive tax reform, police reform and much more on the liberal wish list. What’s not to like?

A lot, actually. But the fantasy of secession is so appealing to many imaginations that it’s worth examining in detail.

First, let’s imagine what would have happened if Lincoln had allowed the South to walk away from the Union. That might have prevented full-scale war—at least for a while—but it wouldn’t have brought peace. You would still have millions of enslaved Black Americans with more motivation than ever to escape to a North that had repealed the Fugitive Slave Act. The result would be raids from the South to retrieve escaped slaves and attempts by the Northern militias to capture or repel the raiders. Soon you would have a constant guerilla war all along a long land border.


Meanwhile, the economic disparities between an industrial, capitalist North and an agrarian, feudal South would widen as the former’s tax revenue and investment capital would no longer be available to the latter. Before long, free Whites in the South would be as eager to cross the Potomac and Ohio Rivers as enslaved Blacks.

Desperate to retain its unpaid and underpaid labor, the South’s landed aristocracy would have to resort to more and more brutal suppression. As Northern newspapers filled with stories of plantation owners whipping and shackling workers of both races, the Northern government would face mounting pressure to intervene. And sooner or later you would have the Civil War you were trying to avoid in the first place.

Imagine it’s four years after secession. You are a Union sentry on border duty in Brunswick, Maryland. It’s March, but ice floes still bob in the rushing Potomac. As the sun rises above the wall of trees on the Virginia side, you see a raft filled to brimming with African-Americans splashing through the brown waves. Farther to the east are three rowboats full a raggedly dressed Irish-Americans. Pursuing both groups are skiffs full of Confederate soldiers, some of them rowing furiously, some of them standing with muskets aimed at the escapees.


As a sentry, what do you do? Do you hold your fire in hopes of keeping the fragile peace between the two nations? Or do you fire on the skiffs in hopes of giving the raft and rowboats enough cover to make it to the Maryland banks? Do you regret supporting appeasement of the South? Do you regret gaining your own political and economic progress at the price of redoubled suffering by these African-Americans and Irish-Americans? The musket in your hands is loaded with shot. What do you do?

Lincoln refused to let it ever get to that point because he realized two things. First, you can never have a true democracy if the losers of an election believe they can just quit and walk away rather than accepting the results. Democracy can’t work unless the losers respect the results and the winners respects the losers’ rights.

The Southern states lost the 1860 election, even though non-White men and all women were barred from voting. If there had been universal suffrage, their defeat would have been even greater. Lincoln and the Republicans (yes, the Republicans, a very different kind of party in those days) won a commanding victory on a platform to merely limit slavery, not abolish it. But that was enough to push the South into rebellion.


Rather than cope with their diminished power in the aftermath, the South chose to secede. Rather than peacefully adjust to the inevitable tide of history against slavery and feudalism, the South chose violent resistance. All that resistance got them was 300,000 of their own soldiers dead and their economy and landscape shattered. It’s not a coincidence that today’s secession movement is motivated by a similar refusal to accept the verdict of the voters.

Lincoln’s second realization that there’s no moral justification for securing the liberty of some at the price of depriving it for many more. Would it be worth it to build a richer, fairer North if millions of Blacks were consigned to perpetual slavery in the South, if millions of poor Whites were doomed to virtual serfdom? Would it be worth it to raise the quality of life in the blue states today if it meant the oppression of Blacks and Latinos by Jim Crow laws, if it meant the impoverishment of the White working class by the plutocratic one per cent? Lincoln didn’t think so in 1860, and I’ll bet Joe Biden doesn’t think so now.


Okay, let’s imagine how secession would work today. Let’s say that all the former Confederate states but Virginia seceded plus Alaska and the border states of Kentucky and Missouri as well as all the non-Pacific states west of the Mississippi except Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona. There are many other arrangements you could come up with, but let’s go with this for now. That leaves us with 24 Confederate states and 26 Union states.

The Union would begin with an enormous economic advantage, and that gap would only widen as the Confederacy lost its huge tax advantages from the former federal system (currently, most red states pay less than their fair share in taxes and receive more than their fair share in government benefits). As average wages rise in the Union and as the Union government improves health coverage, education accessibility, civil rights and the environment, even as the Confederate government is cutting back on all those things, intellectual workers in places like Austin and Atlanta will flee to the coasts.


You might begin the separation with open borders, but as more and more Confederate citizens cross into the Union to use services they haven’t paid for, as more and more goods made in underpaying, polluting factories are shipped across the border, some controls will inevitably be put in place. Beleaguered right-wing politicians in the Confederate capital of Birmingham will try to mollify their discontented voters by blaming everything on the Union and may even use dog whistles to encourage armed resistance. And there you are again, back at the Civil War you were trying to escape.

Suppose you are a border guard in Cincinnati in 2029, four years after the Second Secession. Thousands of trucks and cars cross the bridge from Kentucky every day, and you can’t check them all. But you have a tip about this tractor trailer carrying auto parts from Birmingham. After you force the truck to pull over into a side inspection lane, you throw open trailer doors and start unloading.

You pull out dozens of boxes of air filters and carburetors before you start finding boxes full of semi-automatic rifles and hand grenades. When you try to arrest the drivers, they pull out guns and start shooting. The gun battle lasts only 15 minutes before both of the drivers are dead, but two bystanders and one of your own are also dead, and five others are wounded.


Union President Kamala Harris closes the border and soon the traffic is backed up nine miles into Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina and at every interstate-highway checkpoint between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Confederate President Josh Hawley demands that the border be opened and threatens retaliation if it’s not.

Suddenly you find yourself, just a lowly civil servant just doing your job at the border, on The Rachel Maddow Show. When the silver-haired hostess asks how the whole incident happened, you go through the timeline step by step. When she asks, “Do you think this whole Secession should have been stopped back in 2025 before it got to this point?” what do you say?


For QAnon Origins, Look to the Pink Floyd Internet Hoax
By Eric R. Danton 
 September 16, 2020 | 
Photo by Sean Rayford/



Think of it as an origin story, or a cautionary tale: imagine an anonymous persona in an online message board, posting tantalizing hints about a secret intrigue requiring communication and collaboration to unravel. Now add believers around the world devoting hours to dissecting and debating clues as they concocted intricate, unverifiable theories in the hope of solving the mystery.

Sounds like QAnon, but this secret intrigue predates the delusive right-wing conspiracy theory by 25 years. It was the Publius Enigma, an internet riddle stemming from Pink Floyd’s 1994 album The Division Bell. Beginning in June 1994, someone using the name Publius began sending cryptic posts through an anonymous online remailer to alt.music.pink-floyd, a usenet group (a sort of pre-graphical online discussion forum), alluding to a message hidden within the album.

In the first missive, Publius wrote, “You have heard the message Pink Floyd has delivered, but have you listened?” The author encouraged readers to work together, and promised to serve as a guide but wrote, “I will not solve the enigma for you.” In a subsequent message that more explicitly spelled out the challenge, Publius claimed “a unique prize has been secreted,” and offered a prompt: “Lyrics, artwork and music will take you there.”


The game was afoot. Over the next two years, until the remailer shut down, Publius occasionally dropped arcane clues and offered encouragement as Floyd fans who had some modicum of proficiency with the early public internet posted their theories and conjecture on the discussion board. Naturally, there were skeptics. Publius promised to provide proof that the riddle was real, instructing fans to pay attention when Pink Floyd performed at Giants Stadium in New Jersey on July 18, 1994. Sure enough, during “Keep Talking,” the light bank at the front of the stage flashed the word “Enigma,” followed by “Publius.” As it happened, the band also performed Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety that night, which some Enigma believers were certain couldn’t have been a coincidence.

For a certain segment of deep-diving Pink Floyd fans (including me, as a college student), the idea that Pink Floyd would have included hidden meanings in an album wasn’t super far-fetched. The band had been tucking snippets of conversation and dialogue into songs since 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, and there was even a tongue-in-cheek backward message on “Empty Spaces” from The Wall in 1979. “Congratulations,” then-singer and bassist Roger Waters says. “You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont.”


Floyd was also known for elaborate album art: the man shaking hands with a doppelganger in flames on the cover of Wish You Were Here, for example or the pig floating over London’s Battersea Power Station on the front of Animals or the ribbon of old-fashioned hospital beds stretching into the distance on a beach on the cover of A Momentary Lapse of Reason. All of those images were real: the band and their art director, Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis, actually did float a giant inflatable pig over the power plant, and line a beach with 700 metal-frame beds.

Album art for The Division Bell featured a pair of stylized metal sculptures of heads facing each other in a field near Cambridge, England, with Ely Cathedral visible between them in the distance. The last song on the album, “High Hopes,” opens with the peeling of church bells. It’s silly in retrospect, but given the band’s commitment to a certain grandiosity of scale, maybe the latter-day Floyd lineup of David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright would have dreamed up some kind of brainteaser. Maybe it even involved the cathedral!


Spoiler: nope. The whole thing turned out to be a stunt by Pink Floyd’s record label to promote the album, an early effort at viral marketing before that term even existed. The riddle was “some silly record company thing that they thought up to puzzle people with,” Gilmour said in 2002. If there was an actual puzzle, it remains unsolved, though the enigma became an obsession for some believers who never gave up trying. Even now there are websites and YouTube videos purporting to explain the mystery, though trying to follow the reasoning is like watching Russell Crowe eagerly connecting dots that didn’t exist in the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind.

Fake or not, the Publius Enigma was more plausible than QAnon, which holds that Q, allegedly an anonymous high-level government official, is revealing details about a global cabal of prominent politicians, celebrities and billionaires who are Satan-worshipping pedophiles intent on bringing down Donald Trump, who is working to stop them. Like the Publius Engima, QAnon was born online—on 4chan, in this case, an anonymous message board known for white supremacy and anti-Semitism. That’s where Q posted in October 2017 that Hillary Clinton would be arrested within two days—the first in an ongoing string of false claims.


Q’s posts, known as “drops,” are often nonsensical, like some kind of right-wing cosplay fever dream. But they’re vague enough to allow his (or her, or maybe their?) acolytes to “decode” them and overlay their own interpretations, which often seem to involve the political right’s longstanding fixation with the Clintons, and a newer obsession with the sex-trafficking of children. The conspiracy theory has grown increasingly tangled to include the baseless suspicion that antifa activists are setting the fires currently ravaging the West Coast, or that Coronavirus is somehow connected to 5G cellular networks, among other bonkers ideas.

Deciphering Q’s inscrutable clues gives the conspiracy theory an immersive game-like quality that can be addictive, writes Joe Pierre in Psychology Today. The puzzle-solving aspect has trickled out from vile corners of the internet into the mainstream, where QAnon ideas increasingly pop up in a more sanitized form in Facebook groups, among influencers on Instagram and even in mommy-blogs, burrowing into the consciousness of people prone to believing in conspiracy theories. (See the Steak-Umm Twitter feed for a wealth of sources and studies. Bet you never thought you’d read that sentence.)


“That they’re willing to fuss with such puzzles is a testament to the compulsive power of Q’s methods,” the novelist Walter Kirn wrote in Harpers in 2018. “By leaving more blanks in his stories than he fills in, he activates the portion of the mind that sees faces in clouds and hears melodies in white noise.”

The Publius Enigma hit many of those same game-play pleasure centers, but never metastasized into something more toxic. For one thing, its spread was more limited: the public internet was nowhere near as prominent in the mid-’90s, and early social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace were still almost a decade away. Also, the Enigma was born in the marketing department of a record label, and not a message board known for buoying racism and bigotry. Given that the Publius riddle was a ploy to hype a late-career album by a band past its peak, the stakes were pretty low to start with, and, the obsessive searchers aside, the whole thing essentially faded from view after a couple of years.


Yet like the Publius Enigma, QAnon is, in a sense, a marketing campaign. Part of what it’s selling, of course, is a virulent far-right worldview set in an alternate reality, coupled with a very real threat of violence. The FBI in 2019 warned that conspiracy theories including QAnon are likely to drive “both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.” There’s more to QAnon than ideology, though: Wouldn’t you know it, a New Jersey man who runs a QAnon-affiliated website is also developing a right-wing social media app called Armor of God, according to an investigation by the fact-checking organization Logically. He’s already raking in $3,200 a month through Patreon for Q-adjacent website maintenance.

There’s something almost poetic about the possibility that QAnon is a disinformation campaign doubling as a long-lead grift seeking to exploit the deepest fears of Trump’s base for profit. It would be fully ridiculous if it weren’t also dangerous. Say what you want about The Division Bell—it wasn’t Pink Floyd’s best album—but at least their riddle had a soundtrack.


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Dispatches From Q-Land #1: QAnon's Latest Struggles to Rationalize a World They Don’t Understand

By Jim Vorel
 Photo via Unsplash, Wesley Tingey
March 16, 2021 | 



Ever since the election in November, we at Paste have been covertly plugged into the seedy online breeding grounds of the QAnon conspiracy theory— “free speech” right-wing internet bastions such as Gab and Parler, where violent fantasies are free to run wild as Anons (which is how they refer to themselves) prop each other up with hopes of violent revolution and the ever-delayed purge of their political enemies known as “The Storm.” I can assure you that spending countless hours in these internet hellholes is something I have no particular desire to be doing, but after becoming fascinated/obsessed by QAnon’s destructive influence and hate-mongering effect on American culture in the last three years, I saw it as something of a responsibility to keep an eye on the places where these terrifying discussions were happening. Lurking among them, I watched in real time as events such as the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol made idle QAnon fantasizing into deadly reality.

In the months since the election, I’ve written a few sprawling deep dives into QAnon internet culture, in an attempt to explain how their beliefs operate and how they’re able to retain faith in obvious falsehoods, even after countless defeats. My first piece covered the entire period between Election Day and Inauguration Day, chronicling the unshakeable confidence of Anons who swore that Joe Biden would never be inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States on Jan. 20. The second piece likewise covered the Q influencer sphere during Biden’s first month as President, recording how Anons were attempting to rationalize their mounting defeats and the lies they’d been fed, such as the idea that Donald Trump would magically become the President once again on March 4, 2021.


After those two massive pieces, each filled with hundreds of (disturbing) images and screenshots, I feel like I’ve covered the basic ground of “what is QAnon?” pretty thoroughly at this point, and I’d like to permanently retire myself from the “collecting and synthesizing hundreds of screenshots” game. But try as I might, I can’t drag myself away from continuing to monitor QAnon chatter on Gab in particular, and I still believe that people may need to know what the cult of QAnon is obsessing about at any given time, especially if another event like Jan. 6 is a possibility.

Therefore, I’m launching this new monthly(ish) series, which I’m titling Dispatches From Q-Land. Each month or so, I’ll check in with the latest topics of frantic QAnon obsession, potential threats bubbling on echo chambers like Gab, and illustrate how Anons are perpetually attempting to rationalize their world and avoid having to confront reality.

Let’s get to it, then.


The Painful Cognitive Dissonance of Q Believers


If there’s one defining experience that almost all Anons are linked by, it’s that they almost all seem to be struggling with cognitive dissonance more than ever in this moment, whether they recognize it or not. In particular, there are a few specific topics that Anon communities find it very difficult to discuss these days, because their beliefs have a tendency to clash directly against their other beliefs, or the beliefs of other Anons. There are numerous subjects where Anons end up split right down the middle, with half believing one version of events and the other half believing the polar opposite. All of this is amplified by the fact that Q himself seems to have permanently disappeared, leaving the cult in flux, and without any voice of authority to establish doctrine. There still hasn’t been a single post from Q in 2021, and you can feel the directionlessness and lack of organization in Q communities as a result, because every influencer commands their own flock. Infighting abounds. In their current state, it’s hard to believe that Anons could agree to organize in pursuit of any specific task.


As far as specific topics of cognitive dissonance go, though, none is more pervasive than COVID-19 and the increasingly available coronavirus vaccine. From the beginning, QAnon has had a tough time deciding how to feel about COVID, with half believing that the virus doesn’t exist at all, and the other half claiming that COVID is a biological weapon developed by the Chinese to target Americans. This results in some Anons highlighting that “COVID is a hoax,” or “COVID is no worse than the cold,” while others dramatize it as a plague unleashed by the evil Deep State to target GOP seniors. The group’s struggles to arrive at consistent messaging on the virus itself, though, is nothing compared to their cognitive dissonance when it comes to the vaccine. This is one of the issues where you can truly feel the anxiety in the air, as the group’s contradictory beliefs tear it in two directions at once.

A typical Anon statement on “China Virus.”


As you might expect, Anons are united against the vaccine in a broad, general way. They paint it is as “rushed” to completion and dangerous, despite the fact that the “rush” happened during Donald Trump’s presidency, and despite the fact that Trump has always demanded credit for Operation Warp Speed’s role in speeding development of the vaccine. Some claim that the vaccine is literal poison, and that those who receive it will be dead in minutes, hours or days from its “DNA-altering” effects. Others believe it’s part of some kind of dystopian, New World Order-style microchipping program, complete with “the mark of the beast,” etc, which plays in nicely to the apocalyptic Christian mysticism that runs hand in hand with QAnon. Whether it’s from a rationale of personal freedom (“you can’t tell me what to put in my body,” etc), religious fundamentalism or conspiracy theories about being poisoned to death by the Deep State, it was pretty easy from the start for the average Anon to be anti-vaccine. And given that Trump had been largely silent about actively promoting the vaccine, Anons took that as tacit endorsement of their beliefs.


That has all changed in recent weeks, and it’s sent Anons into a tizzy. First, Trump unequivocally endorsed the vaccine during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), in his first major public appearance since Biden’s inauguration. For the first time, the former President told his own supporters that they should get vaccinated, saying this: “Everybody, go get your shot.” That line comes from the middle of a rambling passage in which Trump is demanding that he and his administration receive credit for the successful vaccine rollout, in which he also said the the following: “Never forget that we did it. Never let them take the credit because they don’t deserve the credit. They just followed, they’re following our plan … Joe Biden is only implementing the plan that we put in place. Never let them forget. This was us. We did this. And the distribution is moving along, according to our plan.”

EDIT: Tuesday night, Trump was asked again in a Fox News interview if he would recommend his supporters should receive the vaccine, and he said the following: “I would recommend it and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly. But again, we have our freedoms and we have to live by them and I agree with that also. But it is a great vaccine. It is a safe vaccine and it is something that works.”


Only a day later, the following news broke: Both Donald and Melania Trump received the vaccine themselves in January at the White House. And last week, Trump put out yet another public statement, phrased like he was composing a Tweet on the toilet, demanding credit for the vaccine once again. As hard as it may be to believe, the following is an actual press statement from an actual, former President of the United States. Frightening, I know.




Unsurprisingly, this has made life damn near excruciating for Anons who believe that the vaccine is a Deep State plot to inject literal poison into our veins. Why would Donald Trump, the figurehead deity of all QAnon belief, receive a deadly vaccine? Why would he tell millions of his supporters that they should receive a deadly vaccine? Why would he take time to release multiple statements wanting credit for a deadly vaccine or say that Joe Biden’s administration was “only implementing the plan that we put in place” when he’s talking about distributing a deadly vaccine? Who would want credit for a vaccine that kills people?

This leaves only two, equally undesirable conclusions for Anons to draw:

1. Donald Trump is telling millions of his supporters to receive a deadly vaccine, and has been a Deep State pawn all along. Millions of MAGA people will die from poisoned vaccines.

2. The vaccine isn’t actually dangerous, and Trump merely wants credit for a popular thing. Which means that Q influencers have been lying about the vaccine for months.


Suffice to say, Anons really don’t care for either of those options, so they’re forced to confabulate other scenarios in which their delusion can be allowed to persist. Some might say, for instance, that “Trump didn’t receive the real vaccine,” ignoring the fact that millions of MAGA people still would be receiving the real, apparently deadly, vaccine. Some Anons straight-up deny that Trump ever said “everybody, go get your shot” at all, despite there being countless transcripts and video of him saying exactly that, along with the fact that he continues to take credit for the vaccine in general. Others come up with scenarios where the deadly vaccines would exclusively target Anons and MAGA people, to explain why everyone else isn’t dying after getting their shots.

AKA, “the vaccine is only dangerous to those who choose not to receive it!” Brilliant.


In fact, most Anons seem determined to create a universe in which the vaccine is dangerous, while simultaneously avoiding holding Donald Trump responsible for promoting and demanding credit for that same dangerous vaccine. In their reality, Donald Trump is literally telling millions of Americans to kill themselves with poison, and they’re fine with that. Why are they fine with that? Well, in the words of many Anons, it’s okay because “Trump knows that his supporters think for themselves, and a lot of them will never take the vaccine even if he says we should.” Never mind the fact that some percentage of MAGA voters will no doubt listen to Trump and get vaccinated, receiving shots of what Anons believe is poison. The average Anon can’t be bothered to care about those people, even when the people in question are their own allies, friends and family. Which is to say: Even if Anons were RIGHT, and the vaccine was poison, many wouldn’t care if Trump told their friends to receive it and those people subsequently died. Even then, many Anons wouldn’t have a problem with Trump. That’s how rooted they are in their beliefs—even with the cognitive dissonance killing them inside, they can’t break free from it.


Granted, in incredibly rare scenarios, you do come across the occasional Anon who is disgusted with Trump for encouraging the vaccine.

“I put my life on the line for you and got nothing for return” is the QAnon version of “I ___ ___ ___ and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”


This same sort of cognitive dissonance applies to many other topics in the QAnon orbit as well. One notable example? The remaining National Guard troops stationed in Washington D.C. According to some QAnon influencers, the presence of the military in D.C. is a clear indication of Joe Biden’s tyrannical, anti-constitutional crusade to oppress Americans and rob us of our various freedoms. They show images of the fencing, and the soldiers, and draw easy comparisons to various tin pot dictators.

Of course, other Q influencers are still arguing that the “military is in control,” or that “Patriots are in control,” and that the military in D.C. is there under Donald Trump’s orders to confine Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats in what is apparently an entire prison city. In this scenario, the military is just waiting for the always just-around-the-corner orders to perform a bloody coup and topple the Biden administration, so that Trump can return to the White House. Once again, we’ve reached a scenario where Anons want to believe two mutually opposed things at the same time—that Joe Biden is abusing his military power as a dictator, and that Joe Biden doesn’t have any military power because the soldiers all still answer to Donald Trump. Again, Anons struggle mightily to reconcile these two beliefs.


For the sake of experimentation, I’ve occasionally tried to challenge Anons on Gab about some of these sources of cognitive dissonance, such as Trump endorsing the vaccine, or calling the Jan. 6 insurrection the work of Antifa, despite the fact that the participants in that siege proudly declare their loyalty to Trump. Rarely is it effective, but you do have to shake your head at some of the backflips that Anons are able to turn in order to justify not having to adjust their opinions. Pointing out that one person has espoused two, mutually opposed viewpoints does not tend to faze them—I’ve legitimately been told by Anons that “it doesn’t matter” if their views are factually correct or incorrect, but merely that they’re participating in the crusade. Suffice to say, this is thematically extremely appropriate for QAnon, in a belief system that has long been opposed to the very concept of objective truth. Talking with Anons feels a bit like going before a judge in a court case, only to be told “It doesn’t matter if we correctly find you guilty or not guilty; what matters is that I feel good about the result.”

QAnon Potpourri: Quick Bites of Lunacy



Here are some more topics that have been catching the eyes and overactive imagination of Anons lately.

1. QAnon on Dr. Seuss, et al

Getting riled up about “censorship” (while also calling for public executions of their enemies and expecting no consequences for it) has always been a QAnon tenant, so you better believe they were ready to get on board with a wider GOP push toward calling any kind of criticism “Cancel Culture.” In particular, they zoned in on absurd, non-news stories like Dr. Seuss being “canceled,” cherry picking bits of non-information while employing a steadfast ignorance to include context or the full story. Suffice to say, Dr. Seuss Enterprises this month announced that it would no longer be publishing six titles by Theodor Geisel that have been criticized over the years for their depictions of Black and Asian people. Those books include such illustrious titles as McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambles Eggs Super! and other minor Dr. Seuss titles you’ve never heard of.


So naturally, QAnon claimed that The Cat in the Hat had been banned, because they’re incapable of operating without hyperbole and deceit. It led to a proliferation of memes like this, which Anons use to incense and radicalize internet users who can’t be bothered to read any kind of context.




There’s nothing more QAnon than managing to misspell “Suess” in the midst of your meme implying that the Deep State is coming to take away your Bible.


2. Gab’s Embarrassing Hacks



The post-election period and subsequent ban of Donald Trump from every major social media platform was a boon to hucksters running two-bit, alt-right social media alternatives cloaked in the garb of being “free speech” bastions, and both Parler and Gab, along with others such as Telegram, have had their own moments in the MAGA sun since then. Parler was of course shut down for a lengthy period after Amazon web hosting revoked its services, establishing another theme: These businesses tend to have horrendous technical savvy, both when it comes to running their sites and delivering on the anonymity and security they promise their conservative users. In other words, what a site like Gab promises is usually completely different from what a site like Gab delivers.

This was all illustrated rather beautifully when novice hackers managed to shut down Gab entirely last month, stealing the data of pretty much every user in the process. Gab CEO Andrew Torba, a lovely man fond of saying that other social media services are “serving Satan” and posting memes that say women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, responded by refusing to pay ransom demands for user data, and posted that the site had been secured. And then, a week later, the site was hacked for a second time, with the attackers mocking Torba by taking over his account and posting the following.




That’s a mosaic, literally made from Gab user data and photos. The incidents only served to highlight the total lack of preparation by the Gab team to protect their users, who claim to value privacy and data protection more than any other subset of American society. To date, Gab still hasn’t even taken the most basic steps imaginable, such as making users reset their passwords, to keep users safe. It’s a good illustration of a basic adage: Don’t forget that these sites and their users tend to be just as incompetent as they are ignorant.

3. QAnon Transitions Away from Dates




In my last QAnon deep dive, a month into the Biden presidency, I wrote about how Q influencers in particular seemed to increasingly be realizing the obvious: Giving believers specific dates to focus on is bad business when you’re trying to keep them on the hook (and bleeding money into your account) for as long as possible. As such, and despite a massive amount of reporting from the traditional news media (far too much, to be honest), this is part of why QAnon’s much-publicized March 4 date passed without incident. Some Anons did indeed expect Trump to suddenly become President again on that date, but many others had been sufficiently warned off in advance from expecting anything. You can expect this to become the new norm.

QAnon influencers are in the business of peddling hope, or “hopium” as they say. If someone suggests a date is important in advance, and that date is far enough away on the horizon, Q influencers will run with it, offering their support to stoke the spirits of Anons and keep them in a perpetual state of anticipation. As the date gets closer, however, the influencers will slowly start to raise questions about its veracity. This culminates in renouncing the importance of the date on the eve of the non-event (to avoid being called wrong), along with shaming and then gaslighting Anons who say they’re expecting events on specific dates. They’ve even coined a term to more efficiently insult each other here, calling this “datefagging.”


You can now follow this process on pretty much any proposed Q-date of significance. For example, after the failure of March 4, many Anons immediately pivoted to March 20, on the 167th anniversary of the Republican Party’s founding. This interview with your typical Anon is rife with March 20 promises. March 20 has also been promised as important by some notable Q influencers, including perhaps my favorite account on all of Gab right now, a fellow named WhipLash347. Take a look at this very typical post of WhipLash’s, and see if you can read to the end without your brain melting out of your ears.




I wouldn’t blame you if you could no longer read the rest of this piece because you just chucked your computer monitor out the window, but in the off chance you’re still here, it gets even better. Not only is this schizophrenic, stream-of-consciousness style of prophecy exactly what WhipLash does on Gab every day to more than 24,000 followers, it came less than two weeks after his last failed prediction.

That’s right—WhipLash was a March 4 believer. In the days leading up to March 4, he stated that he was “100% certain” The Storm would finally occur on that date, and that him being incorrect about the issue was “statistically impossible.” When March 4 finally arrived, WhipLash responded by saying … nothing about his promise from a week earlier. Literally nothing. He just went on with business as usual, refusing to acknowledge he’d ever made the prediction at all.

Guess what his 24,000 followers said? If you stuck with “nothing,” you’d be about right, because even those Q influencers who do make constant failed predictions don’t tend to be held accountable for any of them. The vast majority of followers simply ignore failed predictions entirely, and focus on the next prediction. The few that do finally snap at repeated failures, meanwhile, are shouted down and viciously insulted by their own comrades, as in this exchange.




This is your reward for being an Anon for years, accepting everything you’re told, and then eventually having the gall to question someone who gave you a fake promise: Being called a “soy boy libtard” by the fellow Anon who’s supposed to be your loyal ally in the holy war against the Deep State. Instead of joining you in righteous indignation when you’re repeatedly lied to, your allies instead side with the person who continues to lie to them.


The smarter influencers, however, seem to realize that dates in general are more of a trap than they are a benefit, even if most believers will never hold them accountable for failed predictions. And as some of these disappointing dates have come and gone, I’ve begun to notice something: A lot of the influencers seem to be slowing down. Accounts that used to post a half dozen times a day or more now frequently go a few days between shorter posts. Increasingly, they look toward the future in a more vague and general way. It’s as if the Q movement is beginning to ossify into more of a long term, “power saving” mode, with the influencers pushing the attention of Anons away from obsessing over specific, unimportant events in the next week—which is their usual state of being—into a more long-term mindset that involves less active participation and more blind faith. In this version of QAnon, one simply sits at home and keeps the fires burning, stoking the personal conviction that everything will happen “on God’s time,” and that they don’t need to be personally involved. The influencers, meanwhile, can keep up the slow drip of hopium, selling books and merchandise, and asking for crowdfunding donations.


QAnon has so often been compared to a cult in the past, and the comparison is usually apt. But if anything, the group’s overtones are increasingly like an organized religion … except without the organization. I mean this in a sense of movement away from reactionary, revolutionary talk, of the “we need to go grab torches and pitchforks” sort, and more tired resignation in the direction of “we need to be patient and have faith.” As time goes by, Anon expectations deteriorate. They begin to reexamine their Q drop holy texts, and find ways to rationalize a long hiatus and justify the fact that they’ve run out of steam.

Perhaps some drift away from the group, or become “black pilled,” in the QAnon parlance. But many simply become less active, and organizing becomes harder and harder when any date that is put forth is shot down not by your enemies on the outside, but by your own allies. Eventually, you end up with a group militantly not doing anything, because when someone suggests a new prediction, another Anon replies with the following, blaming arrogant prognosticators for “THE DELAY.”




If that image doesn’t evoke the image of Anons as religious fundamentalists, patiently waiting for the apocalypse or end of days when they’ll receive salvation, I don’t know what would. Perhaps if we’re lucky, that’s exactly how the entirety of QAnon will end up, leaving the rest of the world well enough alone.


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