I learned that Donald Trump would be president of the United States of America in 2016 while attending a memorial service for my friend, Clark Fitzgerald, who had died in a car accident on his way to protest the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota. 

The night of his memorial, his best friend read some of Fitzgerald’s writing; the Trump presidency had seemed unlikely to many of us then, but Fitzgerald, among others on the anti-fascist left, had an acute awareness that we could not rely on establishment politicians as a bulwark against oppression.

“Account for real needs and desires whilst making a million and one sacrifices,” wrote Fitzgerald, a radical New York-based organizer who I first met during Occupy Wall Street. “Fight so hard that we don’t feel as if we’re going to explode all the time, make that the great American pastime again.”

Eight years later, it appears that Trump has won again.

Democrats bet on appeals to neoconservatives — including war criminals like Dick Cheney — and touted harsh border policies, bolstering rather than challenging Republican anti-immigrant frameworks. 

Kamala Harris may have relied on women to vote for abortion rights, but she promised little more than a potential return to the flawed and insufficient norm of Roe v. Wade, at best. Like President Joe Biden, she supported a genocide and failed to distinguish herself from extremist Zionists like Trump.

Whatever wins were made by organized labor throughout Biden’s tenure — and these were notable — they were not a focus of the Democrats’ 2024 White House bid. Harris’s economic plan was Wall Street and Silicon Valley-friendly, wrapped in the language of “opportunity” for the mythic “middle class,” rather than a needed reckoning with the demands of a diverse working class living in this desperately unequal superpower.

Fitzgerald did not live long enough to see one, let alone two Trump presidencies. But when I think about what he has missed, I do not think about the White House. I think about what he would have loved to have seen. Things like the extraordinary mutual aid efforts that kept vulnerable neighbors fed at the heights of the Covid pandemic, or the tenants movement growing nationwide, holding more and more landlords accountable and keeping many dozens of people in their homes. He did not see the powerful 2020 Black liberation uprisings, nor did he see the resistance in Atlanta to the construction of Cop City, a massive police training facility. 

He did not witness the Gaza solidarity protests, millions strong, taking to the streets, or droves of students nationwide joining encampments and risking suspensions and expulsions to demand an end to their institutions’ complicity in genocide. Fitzgerald, I dare say, would have been delighted by the networks circulating abortion pills and hormones to those who need them, in states where gender-affirming care and abortion are already banned or heavily restricted. 

Staring down four more years of a Trump presidency, which threatens even greater totalitarian violence than his first administration, these grassroots interventions of recent years may seem cold comfort — siloed and repressed as they have consistently been. But we have also just witnessed, yet again, the resounding failure of an establishment Democratic Party, seemingly more committed to rightward triangulation than providing a positive program for the country, its citizens and denizens. 

I invoke the late Fitzgerald here, and Standing Rock, and Occupy, and mutual aid networks, and the George Floyd uprisings, and Gaza solidarity activism — anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-genocide struggle of recent years more broadly — because the Democratic establishment has made clear that it is committed to a failed policy of appealing to the right, only to lose to the right. The same pattern informs rightward, anti-immigrant political shifts in Germany, Britain, Italy, and beyond. 

Right-wing politics have been reconfigured as the normalized center.

Far-right policies and parties tend to win the day when so-called centrists take up conservative platforms to purportedly capture disaffected white voters and thus keep the far-right at bay; the upshot is treating conservative nationalism as the fulcrum of all politics. This is what the Harris campaign did, particularly when it came to immigration. At best, as with Britain’s currently ruling Labour Party, the Tories might have lost, but right-wing politics have been reconfigured as the normalized center.

For Democrats, appealing to the right has been a disaster of realpolitik, especially in an electoral system that structurally favors Republicans anyway. But what’s worse, Democratic strategies have failed and harmed the most vulnerable communities both in the U.S. and those who suffer under the yoke of U.S.-backed wars. 

It’s too early to tell whether the Democrats will learn from these losses, or simply — as they have before — groundlessly blame the left for failures that have little to do with left-wing voters. Those who have opposed Israel’s genocide are an easy punching bag but do not account for Trump’s victory. Establishment Democrats have themselves to blame, but the left has no time to wait for self-reflection on the part of this predictable party.

The most powerful social movements of the last decades did not primarily build on support from Democratic leadership.

There is an urgent need for social justice movement organizing, growing unions and union power, antagonism rather than acquiescence to existing power structures, and expansive networks of care and support. The most powerful social movements of the last decades did not primarily build on support from Democratic leadership under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Nor did they collapse during Trump’s first tenure.

There’s no one way to plug in to today’s interconnected struggles. The Palestine solidarity movement, which also challenges U.S. hegemony and colonial power structures, is a rich terrain for culture workers, researchers, and workers of all trades — not only students and professors. Those on the front lines ensuring continued access to abortions and trans health care are always in need of greater support. If you’re a tenant, you could join or organize a tenants union; if you’re a worker, even precariously employed, there’s always room to join or build upon unionization and organizing efforts. Mutual aid groups abound in every city. Local governments nationwide are building cop cities in need of fierce opposition.

I left my great friend’s apartment late on Tuesday night, heavy-hearted but unsurprised that Trump would likely return to power. I first met this friend during Occupy too. “We’re not starting from scratch,” she reminded me, as we hugged goodbye. Movement politics — long and painfully aware that there can be no robust reliance on the Democratic mainstream — is where we must turn and further build.

We are not starting from scratch.




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