Trump’s Path to Dictatorship

 – Real Democracy Movement

23rd November 2024Leave a Commenton Trump’s Path to Dictatorship – Real Democracy Movement

“Let’s make this shocking result into an opportunity. While defending democratic institutions, we should campaign for a new constitution, a political system that can express the direct will of citizens rather than corporate power.”

By the Real Democracy Movement

Dictatorship makes its appearance in all sorts of guises, even through the ballot box, as Americans are likely to find out sooner rather than later. Donald Trump’s decisive victory, courtesy of the Democrats’ lame, arrogant campaign, is the start of a dramatic, historic overturning of the country’s constitution.

Given Republican control of the Senate, and probably the House of Representatives as well, plus the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, the scene is set for Trump to remake the US state in his image.

He intends to accumulate vast new powers for the Oval Office at the expense of other institutions, which were originally designed to produce so-called constitutional “checks and balances”. State officials who stand in the way will be purged. Armed forces will likely be deployed to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.

Black citizens, who largely stayed with the Democrats on polling day, will now fear the loss of hard-won voting and other rights, while women across the United States are certain to lose what’s left of their reproductive rights. Media and other critics will be targets as Trump’s cronies start the search for the “enemy within”, as he called opponents during the election campaign.

Charges against twice-impeached Trump relating to the insurrection in January 2021, when his supporters set out to kill Congressional leaders to stop formal approval of Joe Biden as president, have already been dropped. Trump has promised “retribution” against those who have wronged him and has set up a loyal group of advisers to enforce his demands.

“We’ve already been in a process over the last 10 years of democratic decay,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of .How Democracies Die. “This election will just hasten that decline.” He added:

“The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. People still vote, and elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts” – Daniel Ziblatt

Fascist dictator Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 by way of the ballot box. The Reichstag, the German parliament, then passed enabling legislation that created the notorious Nazi regime. Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said that, while in office between 2016-2020, the president-elect suggested that the Nazi leader “did some good things.”

Just as happened in pre-war Germany, the big corporations have lined up behind the new regime, led by Elon Musk and much of Silicon Valley. They will control the elimination of climate regulations and pave the way for Trump’s trade war plans based on high tariffs against foreign imports. Putin will be encouraged to end the war against Ukraine – on Moscow’s terms, while Trump will stand by if Israel, as seems likely, depopulates northern Gaza and attacks Iran.

Naturally, most Trump supporters are unaware of this agenda. The vast majority of Trump voters were motivated by grievances such as falling living standards, high interest rates and inflation, as exit polls showed. A significant group were also driven by a concocted fear of mass immigration, fuelled by Trump and his even more sinister running mate, J.D. Vance who is but a heartbeat away from the presidency itself.

So how come that Trump — who was impeached twice, convicted of some crimes and charged with others, judged liable for sexual abuse and fined hundreds of millions of dollars in a civil fraud trial — was able to vanquish Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party?

Analysis of the turnout, which was one of the highest of the last 100 years, showed that most of the nation’s 3,000-plus counties swung rightward compared with 2020. The Republican shift appeared across rural border communities in Texas, the wealthy suburbs of Washington, and even normally Democratic counties in New York City.

Despite throwing $1 billion dollars at the campaign, the Democrats had nothing to say to ordinary Americans. Historically a liberal capitalist party, they lost the support of major unions like the Teamsters whose members were drifting towards Trump over issues like the cost-of-living, high interest rates and job insecurity.

“I will say this,” one House Democrat told the Washington Post. “The Democratic Party has a major working-class voter issue. It started a decade ago as a working-class White issue. It’s now gotten even worse and spread across racial lines.” Harris never addressed these issues, just as Hillary Clinton failed to do in 2016 when she was defeated by Trump. So the Democrats came across as an elitist, celebrity-infused party which was entitled to power while Trump tuned into genuine grievances and invented others.

The Biden-Harris support for the far-right Israeli regime’s genocidal war against Gaza and its attacks on Lebanon also turned off a group of younger voters as well as a substantial Muslim minority, who declined to back the Democrats. Trump was allowed to pose as a champion of the oppressed, while Harris came across as the champion of a cultural, prosperous elite. No contest.

In a post-mortem discussion by senior Washington Post columnists, Ruth Marcus said: “I suspect this was more about voters’ anger and unhappiness about their own situations, and about their own perceptions of themselves as victims, including of an elite that disdains them, than it is about Trump himself.

“We are an angry and divided country. A country where too many people are willing to blame immigrants for all sorts of woes. A country that is furious about prices that are not still rising at unacceptable rates but that are too high. A country where too many people somehow find this strongman with his authoritarian impulses attractive as a leader. A country where — and I think we have to consider this as well — too many people are not able to countenance the notion of a Black woman as president.”Ruth Marcus

Scott Jennings, a right-wing CNN political analyst, has called the overwhelming vote for Trump “the revenge of just the regular old working class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to”. In contrast to the Democratic Party, Jennings has his finger on the pulse of the anger felt by working class people who felt ignored by the Harris campaign.

What is happening in the United States is not an isolated process. Italy is ruled by a regime with close ties to fascism, while Hungary is a dictatorship in all but name under Victor Orban. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party-led coalition has collapsed while the neofascist AfD is ready to challenge mainstream parties at next year’s election. In Austria, the far-right, pro-Moscow Freedom Party won 29% of the vote at the recent election.

The widespread rise of populist, authoritarian regimes signals an historic crisis of representative democracy, a concept that first took shape in the US Constitution of 1787. Behind that is a fundamental problem – the inability, let alone the unwillingness, of the present state to deal with pressing issues like poverty, climate chaos and peace.

In the late 20th and early 21st century, neoliberalism found its allies in Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who concluded that corporate-led globalisation was beneficial in every respect. Deregulation on a vast scale set the scene for an unprecedented free rein for financial markets and free-wheeling transnationals. Economic downturns were said to be a thing of the past – until the reality check of the 2008 financial crash put a stop to such nonsense.

So, for example, climate warming has spiralled out of control because the corporations as a whole – not just the oil corporations – resist any serious measures when they lobby at the environment summits to water down agreements. The neoliberal state is a set of institutions that puts markets, low taxation and partnerships with big business above public goods and services.

In the UK, Labour’s embrace of market-shaping investment funds while punishing older people, low paid workers, students, the disabled and those who use public transport, is a case in point. The Reform party under Nigel Farage, a devoted Trumpist, came second in nearly 90 seats, most of them Labour, at the July election. The authoritarians are waiting in the wings here too.

The linked crises of democracy and the state are clearly a danger to our hard-won rights and freedoms. To see only defeat in the Trump electoral victory is to shed tears for the fundamentally broken political and social system that lies behind the anger and frustration of those who fall for far-right demagogy, wherever it rears its ugly head.

A broken system requires bold solutions. So let’s make this shocking result into an opportunity. While defending democratic institutions, we should campaign for a new constitution, a political system that can express the direct will of citizens rather than corporate power. A system of popular assemblies, outlined in our recent manifesto and taken up by speakers at our powerful 2 October event, offers a way forward.

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• This article was originally published by the US-based Real Democracy Movement on 7 November 2024.
• The Labour Outlook Editorial Team may not always agree with all of the content we reproduce but are committed to giving left voices a platform to develop, debate, discuss and occasionally disagree.

Trump, Trumpism, and the Polycrisis

By Jeremy Brecher

November 22, 2024

Source: Strike!


Image via Strike!/Jeremy Brecher


“Polycrisis” is a word that has recently come into use to characterize the way crises in many different spheres – ranging from geopolitics and economics to climate and pandemic – are aggravating each other and even converging. Trump and Trumpism, like similar leaders and movements around the world, took off in the era of polycrisis and reflect many of its themes. They are also likely to severely aggravate the dynamics of the polycrisis.

Although Trump and Trumpism are deeply rooted in American history, they are also an aspect of the emerging era now widely referred to as the global polycrisis. The polycrisis shaped many of the conditions that promoted the rise of Trumpism. Trumpism, in turn, echoes many of the themes of the polycrisis. Trump’s actions will go out not into a peaceful world order, but into a world order in polycrisis, where the effects of almost any actions are difficult to predict. And his actions are likely to significantly aggravate the polycrisis, in particular making it more violent, unpredictable, and folly-ridden.

Trump and Trumpism must be understood in the context of the polycrisis. In his address to the 2024 Republican National Convention, Donald Trump said,


We have an inflation crisis that is making life unaffordable, ravaging the incomes of working and low-income families, and crushing, just simply crushing our people like never before. They’ve never seen anything like it.

We also have an illegal immigration crisis, and it’s taking place right now, as we sit here in this beautiful arena. It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.

Then there is an international crisis, the likes of which the world has seldom been part of. Nobody can believe what’s happening. War is now raging in Europe and the Middle East, a growing specter of conflict hangs over Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, and all of Asia, and our planet is teetering on the edge of World War III, and this will be a war like no other war because of weaponry. The weapons are no longer army tanks going back and forth, shooting at each other. These weapons are obliteration.[1]

Trump’s description of the world is like a distorting funhouse mirror reflection of reality – the reality of the polycrisis. However fallacious his interpretations and proposals, terrifying threats are a reality in the era of polycrisis.

In reality, inflation has ravaged the incomes of working and low-income families, and the recent inflation is only one manifestation of an out-of-control global economy that has been crushing people since the Great Recession of 2007. In reality, millions of people have been driven from their homes around the world by war, globalization, and climate change. In reality, misery, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities has in fact been occurring, not as a result of immigration, but of the dismantling of public programs that reduce poverty, disease, and destruction. War is indeed raging in Europe and the Middle East, and a growing specter of conflict does hang over Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, and all of Asia. Our planet is indeed teetering on the edge of World War III, and that would indeed mean “obliteration.” That is the reality of the polycrisis.

Trump’s claims that he and he alone can fix the problems he describes would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. But the real reality is as scary as the one he portrays. It is little wonder that millions of ordinary people are suffering from anger, fear, and pain. They are reacting to reality.

The era that preceded the polycrisis, roughly from the fall of the Soviet Union to the Great Recession, was marked by unilateral global hegemony by the United States. It was marked by a neoliberal globalization which imposed unregulated corporate power on every country and institution. It saw political power determined by elections in most countries, however unequal those elections may have been. And it saw governments and corporations at least shadowboxing against the threat of climate change.

This relatively stable if unjust world order has been transformed into the polycrisis. Unipolar US hegemony has been replaced by multiplying wars, the rise of Great Power conflict, and the decline of international cooperation inside and outside the UN. It has also been marked by fragmentation of the global economy and Great Power struggle to dominate what are still global economic networks. International climate protection has become a transparent sham, and major political forces, including the soon-to-be leader of the world’s most powerful country, deny the reality of climate change. The remaining institutions of democratic rule have been shredded by a transition to transparent plutocracy on the one hand and the rise of movements, parties, and national leaders who resemble the classic fascists who rose a century ago – similarly the product of burgeoning global disorder.

The past dozen years have witnessed the rise of movements in dozens of countries that resemble the classic fascism of 1920-1945. They manifest smashing of democratic institutions, contempt for constitutions and laws, utilization of violence for political purposes, scapegoating of racial, ethnic, gender, political, and other minorities, hostility to transnational cooperation, authoritarian dictatorship, and a variety of related characteristics. To include the many manifestations of this phenomenon, rather than exclusively those who proclaim themselves fascists, I refer to it as the new “para-fascism.”

Donald Trump is a paragon of this new para-fascism. His rise to power has coincided with that of para-fascists around the world. In Europe these include Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy; the Law and Justice Party in Poland; Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary; ruling coalitions in Sweden and Finland; Marine Le Pen’s National Rally; Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party; and Alternative Fur Deutschland, among others. In South America similar parties control or share governmental power in Uruguay, Argentina, and until recently in Brazil. In Asia, India’s government under Modi and the Philippines under Duterte and Marcos, Russia under Putin, Turkey under Erdogan, and Israel under Netanyahu have become increasingly para-fascist. China has moved to an expanded nationalism and an authoritarian recentralization of power, though it differs in many ways from other para-fascisms.

Para-fascism – and notably Trumpism — is a child of the polycrisis. The Great Recession, while not the cause of the polycrisis, can serve as a convenient marker for its emergence; as Philippine scholar and activist Waldon Bello noted, the “buildup of fascist movements and parties didn’t start till 2011, i.e. post-Great Recession.” The polycrisis helped make possible the rise of Trump and other para-fascist leaders. They in turn reflected, echoed, and even incorporated many features of the polycrisis:The polycrisis embodies the breakdown of international cooperation and the rise of national conflict. Trumpism is characterized by hatred of globalism and celebration of ethno-nationalism.
The polycrisis is a period of declining US hegemony, Great Power conflict, and war. Trump’s overriding theme, “Make America Great Again,” is a direct response to this reality.
The polycrisis is marked by the emerging conflict between the rising power of China and the relatively declining power of the US – sometimes referred to as an example of the “Thucydides trap.” The demonization of China and the attack against Chinese development has been a central theme of Trump’s approach to international affairs – one echoed by President Joe Biden during the Trump “interregnum.”
The polycrisis represents a transition from globalization’s global economic integration to Great Power battles to control global economic networks. Trump’s pugilistic economic nationalism represents both a reflection and an intensification of this trend.
The polycrisis has seen the decline of democracy and the breakdown of limits on plutocracy. Trump puts this tendency on steroids with his outright attacks on democratic institutions and his transformation of plutocracy into kleptocracy – aka politics by theft.
The polycrisis has seen a near total failure to restrain the climate destruction that is no longer just a threat but an everyday reality. Trump not only denies the reality of climate change but aims to do everything in his power to aggravate it through expanded fossil fuel extraction and burning.

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Notwithstanding his claims to fix the threats people are facing, Trump in power will only aggravate the polycrisis. The rubbishing of safeguards provided by democratic governance will amplify irrational policymaking and exacerbate popular feelings of powerlessness and alienation. Outlandish increases in military spending, designed to implement the fantasy of renewed US global domination, will lead instead to ruinous nuclear and conventional arms races. Trump’s style of provocation, deliberate unpredictability, and unrestrained folly will lead to intensified conflict, strange shifts in alliances, deliberately aggravated chaos, and wars. His energy policies will put climate catastrophe on steroids. This exacerbated polycrisis will produce a self-amplifying feedback loop that will increase the fear and anger that are prime sources – and prime resources — of Trumpism.

[1] “Read the transcript of Donald J. Trump’s Convention Speech,” New York Times, July 19, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/us/politics/trump-rnc-speech-transcript.html

Jeremy Brecher is a historian, author, and co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability. He has been active in peace, labor, environmental, and other social movements for more than half a century. Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! and Global Village or Global Pillage and the winner of five regional Emmy awards for his documentary movie work.

Life With and After Trump

By Michael Albert

November 21, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.





How does one take seriously having a vaccine denier in charge of public health? How about having the world’s richest corporate owner in charge of cutting regulatory agencies? Or having the other foxes in the henhouse, much less Oval office-ing the degenerate ringmaster himself? I would guess all who read this article feel outrage and horror, but also more than a little scared.

Do you go to bed at night or get up in the morning with thoughts, fears, and dread that you want to jettison? Turn off the news. Turn it off. Turn it off. Enough already. Set aside the articles. Stop the flow. Netflix calls. A novel beckons for attention. Go for a walk, get some fresh air. Maybe have a drink or ten. Perhaps throw a fit, or maybe just snarl a lot.

I get all that. And I am not going to tell you that going to meetings or attending them online, reading or writing calls to action, thinking about what to do and how to do it, and urging friends, neighbors, workmates, and family to join you in it will banish the nightmares and bring on only joyous dreams. To fight the power can certainly have inspiring, energizing, and joyous moments, but it will also have plenty of frustrations, strains, drains, and flat out boring moments. It is, however, the only thing that can lead to better days.

In that context, as dreadful as things may now feel, as immobilizing as Trump’s barbarity may feel, the current humane, radical, and/or revolutionary task is to block near-term Trumpian successes while preparing to pursue longer term positive campaigns and agendas. Why? Five reasons. To prevent continued and new Trump-inspired damage at home and abroad.To show that Trump is beatable. He is not someone to start supporting or to double down in support of. Don’t do it. He is someone to usher into ignominy.To prevent structural changes we would have to later roll back.To develop vision we truly desire and means to win it, not just to survive.To contribute to and, yes, to enjoy emergent hope and community.

Trump’s appointments aim to establish a police state. Please read that again. That is our immediate setting. It is not rhetoric. It is not hyperbole. His appointments will seek to trash democracy and participation and increase corporate control. They will try to normalize my-way-or-the-highway rule. Trump’s appointments are not only unqualified and even anti-qualified, they are also shock and awe provocations. They are bludgeons to rob our initiative, but despite their weirdness, each is also smartly attuned to Trump’s perverse, homicIdal aims.

Trump himself is simultaneously a nightmare and a sick joke. As a wannabe dictator, he seeks dominance. As a degenerate clown, he caterwauls toward history’s garbage bin. Which persona will predominate?

As Trump tries to dramatically change society from its horrendously flawed present into a drastically worse future, I believe more than enough people will extricate from his lies, see through his false promises, and overcome their understandable fear and depression to resist both Trump and his appointees. Enough people will resist his border, deportation, spying, coercing, impoverishing, repressing, sickness-inducing, militaristic, misogynistic, racist, and corporatist agendas to scuttle his aims.

Indeed, resistance is already surfacing. But resistance doesn’t automatically succeed. To win, resistance must become a persistent, continuous and unified force. It must attract and retain steadily more public participation. It must manifest increasingly more mutual aid and solidarity. It must raise social costs that elites do not wish to meet. Is that possible? And is it possible before Trump solidifies his support and transforms institutions to his specifications?

Most of Trump’s voters mainly supported what they thought was a positive possibility that he would shake things up so that they might benefit. They wanted change and rightly thought he would cause change. He successfully deflected their realizing it would be change for the worse.

Trump’s voters also secondarily supported prospects of his overcoming problems that don’t exist or fears that are greatly exaggerated but which he will only make worse. And finally, some of Trump’s voters thought he would protect old ways of living against new disorienting trends.

So how do we raise social costs for Trump and more for elites that support or simply put up with his aims?

If we uncompromisingly reach out to many of Trump’s voters while we (and Trump’s own actions) reveal Trump’s true aims and do so while Trump is restrained by fierce resistance, many and we should hope even most of his voters will reject what they come to see as Trump’s negative effects.

On the other hand, if we do not reach out to Trump’s voters and if we do not block Trump in coming months then even his weakly supportive voters will see Trump pull off one programmatic step after another, each of which he will celebrate as serving their interests, as freeing them, and as punishing their enemies, and in that case their tenuous support for him may become deeper and more intense. People who voted for him but voted down ballot for the likes of AOC or for reproductive rights or for a higher minimum wage, or who voted for Trump but would have preferred to vote for the likes of Bernie Sanders, may fall deeper and more intensely in thrall to him. To prevent that is essential.

Activism to block Trump’s agenda needs to welcome and to provide supportive opportunities for participation and leadership to voters for Harris as well as to non voters and indeed to anyone who is already horrified by the specter of a Trump-defined future but who lacks prior experience of active dissent and is thus not already plugged in. Activism should welcome all, but offer suitably different strokes for different folks.

We can’t stop Trump much less move on to win positive change without greater numbers. True enough, you might agree, but you may nonetheless have doubts about succeeding. And I get that things look grim, but does anyone need that point repeated over and over again? To say it will be hard to block Trump and to reverse MAGA and to finally fully rebut fascism’s morbidity is true. But to say that it won’t happen, or at any rate that it won’t happen for years and years, is self-fulfilling unwarranted defeatism. We have to face facts, yes, but not spin them into worse than they are. Defeatism feeds fascism.

Okay, you may feel, but why is defeatism unwarranted? Trump won a big battle. True, but we won many progressive referendums for increased minimum wages, reproductive rights, labor gains, and other progressive results, including in red states. Still, Trump will forever claim a mandate, and will certainly try to parlay his actually narrow electoral victory of between 1% and 2% into some immediate Trumpist gains.

He will try to bludgeon or shock passive acceptance. He will point to whatever early reactionary Trumpian gains he manages to enact to try to galvanize support for more reactionary steps. If in response we move quietly aside or we even jeer in righteous anger while we predict our own coming defeat, we will indeed be defeated.

To resist Trump’s every effort, to start to reverse them and to tirelessly tatter his aura of invulnerability, to reduce rather than ratify people’s fear of him, and to interrupt and then hack away at his level of support and build sufficient active unified resistance to finally replace him is all mandatory. And it will happen. But how fast it will happen, which includes with how little human and social loss along the way, will depend mainly on two things.

First, Trump’s overreach and rate of personal unravelling, and second the pace with which resistance spreads, becomes wholistic rather than atomistic, and reaches out to inspire ever wider activist rejection of Trump’s agenda.

That sounds nice, you might think, but is it real? What about the people who voted Democrat? And beyond them, what about the Democratic Party itself? Won’t they be a dead weight of passive resignation? Or won’t they, however well meaning, drag growing opposition to Trump into Democratic Party let’s get back to business as usual-ism? Will we prevent full blown fascism but return to from where fascism emerged?

Just as Trump’s voters are not peas in a pod, so too for Harris’s voters. Some Harris voters will abstain from resisting Trump, perhaps too comfortable, too scared, too convinced it is futile, or sometimes maybe even donning a red hat. Some will resist Trump but with the express intention of returning to fondly remembered business as usual. Some will begin to resist, including people at higher and higher levels of income and influence, but only the more they feel that Trump’s actions are generating resistance that may come for them next. Not praiseworthy, but relevant. And already happening.

Some will want to return to pre-Trump stability but also to enact some serious and meaningful gains for various constituencies and even regarding sustainability for all of humanity. That is also already happening. It’s praiseworthy but not fundamental. And some will want to move past all of that to prepare the way to win fundamentally new economic, political, and social relations. That is praiseworthy and fundamental, but very far from predominant.

How many people will move toward which new posture will not depend exclusively on peoples’ genes or even their personalities. Nor will it depend only on their incomes or their social identities. It will depend somewhat on all of that but also, and crucially, more on what they encounter in coming weeks and months, including on our words and the scope and effectivity of our resistance, and how welcoming our efforts are to new participants.

The Democratic Party will of course reject fundamental change, and for the most part it will even reject meaningful gains whenever it feels they might expand beyond meaningful to fundamental. The avalanche of essays, interviews, and talks that have recently railed at today’s Democratic Party as an agent of oppressive hierarchy and injustice are correct. It is.

Then again, such observations have been correct even in just my own experience, ever since the mid 1960s. And have been correct from still earlier, way earlier, for people even older. I tend to wonder, therefore, when I read such observations, especially in progressive and seriously leftist venues, who are they written for? Once or twice, as a kind of gentle here’s what we all know reminder, I might understand. But over and over in such venues, as if only the author knows? As if it is some kind of newly discovered wisdom? It seems to me that the people who read those essays in progressive outlets already know what they are being told. So what is the editorial point?

The real world truth is that a very large component of resistance to Trump is going to come from organizations and also spontaneous projects with considerable history and even deep roots in Democratic Party activities. If this is not the case, our prospects for preventing full-on fascism will be insufficient. So rather than disparaging such efforts, it seems to me that to try to discern, describe, and debate what to do next along with but not literally melting into such efforts will be more helpful.

When some left writers seem to carelessly dismiss every elected or appointed Democrat much less every voter for Harris as abettors of genocide, misogyny, racism, and corporate domination, they are wrong in the same way as when some left writers seem to carelessly write off all of Trump’s voters as lunatic fascists. These narratives not only ridicule and reject people who are needed for resistance to win, but even people who are already hell bent on resisting.

So, yes, the Democratic Party is part of the repressive, oppressive society that has spawned Trump, produced Trump’s voters’ warranted alienation and anger, and also manipulated and distorted some of the perceptions of Trump’s and indeed of all voters. So of course we don’t want to swear allegiance to the Democratic Party. We even want to keep it in our minds and not forget that it is, as a whole, very much not our ally, but the opposite. But, at the same time, to prevent Trump implementing gain after gain and increasing his support by himself touting his every gain will depend in large part on how many Harris voters resist and, indeed, on how many Democratic Party affiliated actors and organizations resist.

But in that case, a question arises. As we fight to reveal and reject Trump, what do we who aren’t about returning to business as usual seek instead? What do we desire for life after Trump? Is it premature to even ask? After all, we know we have to remove Trump before we can construct better than what we had before Trump.

Indeed, this was one of the costs of a Trump victory. If Harris had won we would now be able to fight for positive and even fundamental change toward a much better future. With Trump having won, we have to first fight against vicious negative fundamental changes that would impose a much worse future. It is also true that on the road to life after Trump Republican majorities in the Senate and House will need to be erased. And then Republican ownership of the White House will need to be erased as well. That is another price of Harris losing. But that isn’t our final goal. Of course not.

It is true, however, that to work to remove Trump can tend toward, can welcome, and can even celebrate and enforce business, government, culture, and households as they were before Trump—or it can begin to inspire desires for and even develop means to win gains toward implementing gains that go fundamentally beyond yesterday’s normal. For that matter, the wherewithal to resist fascism will thrive better if it is fueled and oriented by positive desires for more than restoring the conditions and circumstances that earlier led us toward fascism. We all know that, don’t we? We all know that getting back to everything being broken for us but working fine to serve power and wealth is not our ultimate aim, don’t we?

But if the whole goal isn’t only for the Democrats to win midterm elections in two years so the House and Senate become Democrat dominated, and only for Democrats to win the Presidency in four years so a Democratic Administration replaces Trump (or Vance), then what do we want? If those interim steps are important but not defining, then what do we want for life after Trump?

My answer is, I want Life After Capitalism, After Misogyny, After Racism, After War, After Ecological Denial. What’s your answer? But I am not delusional. We are not going to do all that in four years. What we can do, however, while we stop Trump, is to also think through our aims and methods and begin to implement new approaches able to keep going forward after Trump, even as they are also essential to defeating Trump.

Sanders, AOC, Michael Reich, maybe even Gavin Newsom, and plenty of others whose work I don’t know are saying something halfway similar. They are saying that they in the Democratic Party need to jettison the practices and commitments that their Party has been emphasizing for decades. Those folks are not revolutionaries the way I, for example, prefer. But the odd thing is that they do appear to be self critical of their team. They are saying they have failed. But they are not saying they give up, Trump wins. They are not saying to Trump, go ahead and trample everything. They are not saying they will just try to survive until Trumpism runs out of energy.

No, they are saying that they are not only going to fight, they are going to change their ways, or at least try to. They are going to try to reach out more widely and more aggressively to people who work and not to people who own workplaces, or in some cases, those who boss those who obey. Okay, I won’t belabor that some of them, yes, some of them in the Democratic Party, even if saddled by not yet fully rejecting such basics as private ownership and patriarchy, are sincerely taking stock and seeking to change their ways. But I will merely say that we need that and should welcome that, and not ridicule it and them, and call it mere manipulation.

And I will add, can’t we do as much regarding our team? Our movements? Our organizations? To blame Harris, Democrats, mainstream media, social media, widespread ignorance, rampant apathy, malignant cynicism, all past American history, and even in some degree the whole population is all true enough. It may even be an important part of usefully understanding our emerging context. But what about our own faults? What about the problems we have, within our team.

There is going to be resistance. A whole lot of resistance. What are some things we might want to consider about how our resistance unfolds? Maybe that growing in size and scope and not in verbosity or outrage is the primary measure of success. Maybe that each perspective welcomed as part of the whole needs to respect and welcome and even support and nurture and certainly not rail at and reject every other perspective welcomed as part of the whole. Maybe that to tell ourselves things we already know is not near as important as to find ways to constructively communicate with those who we don’t know and don’t yet agree with. Maybe that to raise social costs for elites is our only road to success and for that it needs to be all willing hands on deck, in turn reaching for unwilling hands too.


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Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.

Mourn and Organize

By Peter Bohmer

November 22, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Trump’s victory is a serious loss for most people in the United States and globally. I disagreed before the election and now, that it didn’t matter who won the Presidential election. Let us mourn and grieve but not give up. Elections matter and this one certainly does but being political means building and gaining power, being active to further what you believe in, much more than voting or supporting a candidate.

I don’t know if any campaign would have caused a Kamala Harris victory. However, her pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian positions, her pro fracking and promoting more oil and gas production by the U.S., and especially her promotion of neoliberal economic policies and not promoting raising the minimum wage, or making unionizing easier or advocating for universal, quality and affordable health care for all was wrong morally and tactically (to win).

Racism, and certainly sexism, were a big factor in Trump’s victory, more below. It is hard to measure its influence on the election, but a proportion of the U.S. population is not willing to vote for a Black and Indian woman with immigrant parents for President. The Republicans also stoked and played into transphobia. Support for Trump’s toxic masculinity contributed to his growing support from 2016 to 2024 among young men; this was most pronounced among the non-college educated.

Perhaps most significant is the defection of working class and non-college educated households and individuals to Trump and the Republicans, first primarily among whites and increasingly among Latin@, Asian American and African-Americans. Among African Americans, the decline was primarily among men. Some of this was manifested in non-voting. Nonvoting increased significantly from the 2020 Presidential election. Nonvoting should not be exaggerated but my guess is that three million less will have voted in 2024 than in 2020 in spite of a voting age population that grew by four million. Much of the decline in voting was in areas that have been the most strongly Democratic, e.g. Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles.

The recent election was not a landslide for Trump and the Republicans. They will continue their small majority in the United States House of Representatives and flip the Senate from 51 who vote Democratic to 49 Republicans to, 47 Democrats to 53 Republicans. Trump gained about three percentage points in the Presidential race, compared to 2020, from 47 to slightly below 50% of the vote, and Harris lost about three percentage points compared to Biden in 2020, from 51 to 48 per cent of those who voted. Including votes for third party presidential candidates, almost three million, Trump will have received slightly less than ½ of the votes of those who voted.

Even if Harris had won by a small margin much of the following is still relevant. In this period, where the threat of fascism must be taken seriously and combatted, the concept of non-reformist reforms or reform and revolution is still applicable. The idea is to organize, develop campaigns to have victories that at least partially meet people’s felt needs, that can’t be fully met in a capitalist society, leading to further demands, that build political consciousness and power from below. An example would be winning a campaign for free public transportation with worker and community control of the transit company. A challenge and priority today is the need to prevent further declines in all forms of justice and programs, e.g., Medicaid, and stop attacks on the most vulnerable while organizing to go beyond the status quo.

Key is building and furthering social movements, organizations, developing ongoing campaigns with a focus on the following struggles. Victories, even partial victories and substantial reforms will be more difficult with the Republicans rather than the Democrats controlling the Presidency, U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court but still possible. Hopefully this control will be temporary but let us not put most of our energy and limited resources towards getting Democrats elected in 2026 and 2028.

Key Issues!Anti-Authoritarianism, anti-Fascism. By this I mean there is a substantially greater likelihood of a more repressive state with more serious repression and oppression focused on the most vulnerable and those who actively oppose this authoritarian agenda. This danger is real, the most serious in my lifetime. We are not living in a fascist society and should never exaggerate the current reality, but that is the current project of Trump, Vance, key advisors like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and Project 2025, and most of Trump’s appointees.

It is imperative that we build a broad coalition with all who support democracy and oppose increased repression even if they don’t share our perspectives on some issues. Our challenge is to build a broad front against fascism while simultaneously having some of us put forward a theory and practice that opposes all forms of oppression and advocates for justice and liberation for all. Let us continue to organize to free all political prisoners, present and future.

We should support a diversity of tactics including teach-ins, rallies and large demonstrations, direct action including civil disobedience and disrupting business as usual while being deliberate to not isolate ourselves from the broader population; that our actions build the movement against repression rather than isolate it. Although there will be opposition by many Democratic Party officials and many courts and judges to growing authoritarianism and that is necessary, let us not rely on them or follow them to stop the current danger. Palestine Solidarity and an Arms Embargo of Israel—One of the most significant social movements in the US (and globally) in the last 13 and a half months has been the Palestine solidarity movement, on and off campus. Netanyahu is celebrating Trump’s victory and is expanding the war in Lebanon, the West Bank, and threatening to go to war with Iran. Although difficult to be so, the Trump Administration will probably be even more supportive and complicit in Israeli genocide than the Biden Administration has been. Gaining an arms embargo and the US demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the end of the Israeli war on the West Bank and Lebanon will be even more difficult than under Biden but not impossible and should continue to be a priority.

We need to deepen and broaden the Palestine and Lebanon solidarity movement. Although popular support for a U.S arms embargo has majority support in the U.S., one of our tasks is to increase knowledge and active opposition to the U.S. and Israeli war in the Middle East. The U.S. support for Israel was not the major issue for most voters in the recent election although it probably caused many eligible voters to not vote for President and in fewer cases to vote third party. I think the mainstream media and Democratic Party leaders underestimate the importance of Palestine, and not only to Muslims and Arabs. Winning a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the end of bombing of Gaza and Lebanon is a central issue of our time and Israel could not continue without continued U.S. military support.

We also need to also address the underlying issues by supporting the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the end of the blockade and siege of Gaza and the right of return of Palestinians to within the 1948 Israeli borders, often called, Israel 48. Also we should campaign for a solution that leads to the equality of all people, Palestinian and Jewish, in what is historic Palestine, the end of Jewish domination. Even if Israel stops in the future the bombing of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the need for a continuing and strong Palestine solidarity movement continues.

3) Economic Justice, Policy

At the very least it is important to maintain the inadequate social safety net we have: Social Security, the Affordable Care Act (healthcare), Medicaid and Medicare, food stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, protecting unions, child care subsidies, etc. Although an uphill battle with all three branches of government controlled by Republicans and the neoliberal leadership of the Democratic Party, there is popular support for the following which we should organize for.Making it easier to unionize, supporting the PRO Act (Protecting the Right to Organize Act). This act would make it easier to organize, including gig workers who are usually defined unjustly as independent contractors and thus not eligible to form or join unions.
Raise the national minimum wage to at least $15 an hour with yearly increases to cover the increase in prices.
Extend the Affordable Care Act towards universal, quality and free health care for all including undocumented immigrants and inmates financed by taxes on the wealthy.
Resist all tax cuts for the 1% and organize a campaign for a more progressive tax system, increased taxes on capital gains, corporations and high-income households.
Forgiveness for student debt
A non-reformist reform for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that guarantees every household an income above the poverty line while maintaining or increasing most existing social programs. Complementary or a possible alternative is winning Universal Basic Services (UBS) that would provide free or affordable and quality public services such as healthcare, childcare, education, transportation, and internet access for all residents.

4) Immigrant Justice


At the very least, maintain DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and resist and stop by any means necessary the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Organize to continue and expand Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that allows people from countries in war, people facing a severe crisis to remain and work in the United States during dangerous conditions in their home countries, e.g. people from Haiti, Venezuela, Ukraine!

We should do active immigrant defense at the community level and organize at the city, State and National level to prevent mass imprisonment and deportation of immigrants and against the use of the courts, private corporations like GEO, local law enforcement and the National Guard and U.S. Military to carry this out. We need to build an underground movement and a mass movement in solidarity with all immigrants.

Anti-immigrant politics and related policies are a key part in the United States, Canada and Europe right-wing social movements and growing political parties for fascism. Challenging all aspects of this right-wing anti-immigrant politics must be a central part of our campaigns. It is a part of the struggle against continuing U.S. racism. Unlike the Harris campaign which didn’t challenge the demonization of immigrants, a popular education campaign about the positive aspects of immigration—revitalizing depressed communities, their humanity, providing key labor in many sectors of the economy, e.g. agriculture and housing construction, the tech industry; and furthering diversity, is essential.

The U.S. by its past and present, foreign intervention in other countries, e.g., Central America, and the U.S. being a major cause of climate change, should be explained in accessible terms as a cause of refugees, including climate refugees coming to the United States. We should increase the support and solidarity with and granting paths to citizenship for these asylum-seeking refugees. Those fleeing poverty are also refugees, economic refugees.

5) Climate Justice

We need to further organize to maintain the reforms although inadequate of the Biden administration, e.g., The Inflation Reduction Act which incentivizes growing usage of wind and solar energy and electric cars, and towards the elimination of coal production; the appointment of some people in the EPA and other agencies who take the climate crisis seriously. It means the United States staying in the inadequate Paris Climate Agreement, which is a forum for advocating for increasing financial aid to the Global South countries so they can develop economically, while decreasing the use of fossil fuels.

Trump’s campaign promise of “Burn, Baby Burn, and his appointees should be taken at face value. He plans to withdraw from the inadequate Paris Climate Agreement; it

means increased drilling for oil and natural gas on public lands, it means reducing restrictions or regulations on the production of fossil fuels, and the increased production and export of liquefied natural gas. This extractive policy poses an existential threat to people across the world if Trump and the oil industry get their way.

The majority of people in the US want to reduce the use of fossil fuels and there is a significant climate justice movement on and off campus. Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) of fossil fuel companies and of financial institutions supporting this sector is alive and growing. Our task is to grow popular movements to win the phasing out of fossil fuels by ending all subsidies on oil and gas production, that cuts off financing of this industry, that gets institutions such as cities, churches, pension funds, and universities to divest from corporations complicit with this industry. It will be easier to have victories at the State and local level so demands should be directed there at least as much now as at the Federal level. A growing campaign for a Green New Deal that combines good jobs at a living wage, racial and economic justice and keeping fossil fuels in the ground has the potential to build a broad coalition. It should include financial support for the Global South. A diversity of tactics including militant action is called for. The broad support for dealing with the climate crisis means that militant actions can have broad support and delegitimize further the petroleum industry.

6) Reproductive Justice and the Right to Abortion


We should continue and expand our organizing to institutionalize the right to abortion at the State and local level, including the public financing of the costs of abortion. This does not mean giving up on struggles for the national right to abortion, but victories are easier at the current time at the State level. Also, abortion clinic defense remains essential!

Like the broad concerns about the climate, most of the population supports the right to abortion, even in States that voted for Trump.

7) Solidarity with LGBT struggles, people.

Anti trans advertising and speech were a major part of the Republican campaign at the national level and at the State level, e.g., in the campaign against the reelection of Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Popular education in support of trans rights is important both in the general population and in all our movements. So is defense, physically, being welcoming in our communities and organizations, and organizing for LGBT rights in our programs and campaigns.

8) Globally, we need an internationalist global solidarity framework and practice which includes but is not limited to Palestine and Lebanon. What follows are a few specifics.

The ultra-nationalism of the Trump administration is a serious threat to the population of the world, especially in the Global South. There is no respect for the sovereignty of other societies or their right to self-determination nor concern for their people. This needs to be challenged at the ideological level and against the related actions and policies.

The danger of a U.S. initiated war against China is real. In criticizing the exploitation of workers in the Chinese economic system and its domestic repression, let us make sure to demonstrate solidarity with the Chinese people and challenge anti-Chinese racism and demonization. We should oppose the threatened high tariffs against Chinese made goods. They are a regressive tax, meaning a lower proportion of their income will be paid for these increased tariffs by high income people and a higher proportion by the United States working class. Besides hurting Chinese workers, it will raise prices of most goods here. (Let us also stop Trump’s threat of raising tariffs against Mexican goods.) In addition, Chinese and U.S. cooperation in dealing with the climate crisis is necessary, e.g., sharing technology.

Other necessary parts of our global solidarity framework and social movements are continued opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

Peace and peace treaty with Iran! This does not mean supporting Iran’s oppressive and repressive regime, internally, but it does mean opposing all US aggression against Iran and opposing in all ways Israeli aggression against Iran including war.

We should oppose and end U.S. sanctions and/or U.S supported regime change against Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Iran.

We need to reduce the military budget and the number of U.S. military bases abroad.

What Else?


Education, Popular Education and the Media!

We shouldn’t ignore or demonize all the 78 million people who voted for Trump on November 5, 2024. He won half of the people who voted. Of those who supported Trump, there was justified anger against the ruling class of this country and against the elitism of the professional-managerial class (PMC) who are increasingly becoming the base of the Democratic Party. Much of the recent Democratic Party campaign was wrongly aimed at the PMC even though it failed to gain sufficient voters from the PMC to win; its support continued to decline among working class voters, many of whom did not vote.

The power of Fox News and right-wing social media in promoting Trump and the Trump agenda is very central to their success and a lesson for us; the importance of expanding our media and social media presence.

Some of the opposition to Harris and especially the support for Trump and the Republicans is racist and misogynist. The appeal of MAGA, Make America Great Again, is an idealized view of the U.S. past, i.e., the 1950’s where white men had more social status than Black people and other people of color and more than white women, and their leadership in all institutions was not challenged and the U.S. was the dominant power globally—economically, politically, militarily and culturally. The growing tendency of substantial numbers of white working-class members to support the Republican Party because of their resistance to racial equality has been apparent in presidential elections since 1968. It has been a conscious strategy of the Republican Party beginning with Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968, to gain a base with the white working class, not only in the South, but nationally by appealing to white fears. Trump and the movement he lead have been even more explicit and successful than past Republican campaigns in this racist appeal.

However, to write off half of the U.S. population as deplorable and hopelessly white supremacist and misogynist is wrong and defeatist. Conservative ideology and the right-wing movement have grown in the U.S. and in many other countries, especially in the Global North. Many are decent people who follow fake news. Let us be principled about racial, gender, immigrant and LGBT justice and rights while treating those who voted for Trump, respectfully.

We need to find points of agreement, e.g., their anti-establishment perspective, justified anger at the inequality of income and wealth in the United States and understand the causes of their support for MAGA. Then let us respectfully develop together a framework built on solidarity and caring for all while targeting those with economic power and global capitalism.

We should make a priority of popular education with those who are not wealthy but who share much of the Trump agenda. Schools are important arenas for popular education but so are neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, and community organizations. An aspect of reaching out means building inclusive communities and activities that overcome the isolation and alienation that is prevalent in the United States and a breeding ground for supporting strong and authoritarian leaders. It means reaching out and going in a respectful and principled way to communities where the majority support Trump.

A New Political Party?

The Democratic Party is a corporate controlled and pro imperialist Political Party. Interrelated is the increased alienation of young people, and the working class from it. Its transformation into being the political party that leads radical social transformation or even substantial positive reform of this country is unlikely to happen, and not worth the effort.

The Green Party received 0.5% of the vote for President in 2024, in spite of the opening they should have had because of the support for Israel, increased oil production and neoliberal economics by both major parties. They are primarily a party that runs weak campaigns for President every four years. The campaign of Green Party Presidential Candidate, Jill Stein, was concentrated in battleground states rather than in safe states which would have made sense, by getting more votes than they got and not helping Trump win. The Green Party claimed there was no difference between the Democrats and Republicans parties. In practice, the Green Party worked, even though ineffectively, to ensure a defeat by Harris. This was wrong although they did not cause Harris to lose because even if everyone who voted for Jill Stein had voted for Kamala Harris, the result would not have changed in even one State. Trump would still have won all the battleground States, even Michigan. There are many good people in the Green Party and many people who voted for them because they couldn’t vote for the Democratic Party because of its total support for Israel. We should reach out to them. The Green party and Jill Stein have repeated the same failed strategy and focus on Presidential campaigns for the last 20 years and not learned from these failures. It is time to put the Green Party to rest.

We need to build a party of a new type, not necessarily in the immediate future as it will require mass movements and major social upheaval. These are necessary preconditions for a significant new political party where millions are willing to go beyond the Democratic Party.

Why and What Kind of Party?To help connect and build unity across the major issues and social movements I have been examining and others social movements.
Develop and share historical memory of our past strategies and visions, and our victories and lessons from our gains and defeats, e.g. from Reconstruction.
Involvement in campaigns within social movements at a local, State and national level and in solidarity with others at a global level.
Developing an anti-capitalist vision(s) of an alternative to capitalism, One developed economic proposal is the participatory socialist vision developed by Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel and others, see www.realutopia.org
Not primarily electoral but has an electoral component! Running candidates that are accountable to our program, and involvement in initiatives consistent with our program should be a part of this proposed political party but only a part and not the priority. Probably more initially at the local level! Social movements are the key to challenging corporate and government power, towards reform and revolution, and this should be the focus of this political party of a new type.

By not being primarily electoral, we avoid the difficulty of getting off the ground in an electoral system structured to marginalize third parties. However, for this party to flourish, it needs to have a significant base to begin with and not be the creation of a few left intellectuals or small groups nor be a self-appointed vanguard party. Discussion should begin but the conditions are not right for its formation now.

In closing, get involved in organizing against authoritarianism and for justice and liberation! Our future and all of humanity and nature depends on it. On campus! Student movements have always played a central role in positive social change. The Palestine solidarity movement and encampments are a current example; the campaign for divestment from fossil fuel corporations is another.
In your community, workplace! Building strong social movement unionism is a priority and there is increased support for unions.

Now is not a time for escapism, resignation, cynicism, despair, or nihilism. Those in power, whether Trump or centrist Democrats win if we don’t challenge them on all levels.

REFLECT CRITICALLY on mistakes we, the left, have made that have isolated and limited us while not rejecting the left. Learn from our mistakes. Discuss with others what we can do better to be more effective. It is insufficient to blame the Democrats, the mass media, social media and those who supported Trump. Focus on what we can do!

Few people thought in 1855 that slavery would end in 10 years. Although racism has continued this was a partial but important victory.

We can win!

Si Se Puede!

Thank You!


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Peter BohmerWebsite

Peter Bohmer has been an activist in movements for radical social change since 1967, which have included anti-racist organizing and solidarity movements with the people of Vietnam, Southern Africa, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Palestine and Central America. For his activism and teaching, he was targeted by the FBI. He was a member of the faculty at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA from 1987 to 2021 where he taught political economy. He believes alternatives to capitalism are desirable and possible. Peter is the proud parent of a daughter and three sons.

 

The Right Wants to Divide Rural People and the Working Class. Here’s How We Unite.

The director of the Appalachia People’s Union on why the South is ready to stand up to Trump

By Beth Howard

November 22, 2024

Source: Barn Raiser

Members of the Kentucky People’s Union, an organizing group co-founded by Beth Howard, pose for a photo after a community meeting in Ashland, Kentucky, in 2023. Participants wore red bandannas to honor redneck miners who fought at the Battle for Blair Mountain in 1921. (Courtesy of Beth Howard)

I have been a grassroots community organizer in the South for nearly 20 years, a region with a long legacy of working-class movements. As the director of the Appalachia People’s Union, a project of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national group organizing white people for racial and economic justice, I have committed to doing what I can to organize my own people into multiracial movements. The things my community needs—affordable housing, health care for all, strong public education and nourishing food—depend on working-class white Southerners choosing solidarity with people of color. I’m moving my people away from white supremacy because I am a rural, white, working-class woman from Appalachia, not in spite of it.

One of the most important lessons in organizing is that no matter what happens, we stick together. When those in power try to divide us, we have each other’s backs and know who the real enemy is. Divide-and-conquer tactics are what has led to MAGA’s success and power. The far right’s ability to successfully tap into the pain and suffering of working-class white people and divert their anger toward immigrants, trans kids and people of color instead of billionaires and crooked politicians who do the bidding of corporate interests and the ultra-wealthy has once again put Trump in the White House. It has handed MAGA both the U.S. House and the Senate, as well as many state and local governments and judges.

Like those who voted for Trump out of a place of fear and pain, those of us who voted, organized and campaigned to block him from the presidency are hurting too. Now that he has won, we are still hurting and also terrified. We are worried about the future of our communities: our trans loved ones, our immigrant neighbors, students in public schools and those already struggling to survive every day.

White people delivered this victory to Trump. Out of 76 million votes cast for Trump (2 million more than in 2020), 84% of those were white voters. To be clear, urban areas handed some of the largest margin shifts toward Trump, yet he gained even greater margins in rural white working-class counties than the last election.  

It’s tempting to blame white rural working-class Trump voters, to see them as ignorant, hateful or “less than.” It’s tempting to push them away, to signal to everyone else, “It wasn’t me. I’m one of the good ones.” That’s human, and it can feel good to lash out and to surround ourselves with those who think and act like we do. But we should not fall into this trap.

Those of us who are fighting against MAGA must be crystal clear: the people to blame are the ruling-class billionaires, the people at the top. Not other working-class people.

If you are Southern, you know that Southern mothers and grandmothers love to give you a list of rules for how to behave, whether it’s how you act in the grocery store, at church or at school. Sometimes it’s a clear list of things to do, but other times, when the task at hand is less clear, you can count on a conversation many of us might label “here’s what we’re not going to do.”

So, in honor of the age-old wisdom of working-class Southern matriarchs, here’s what we’re not going to do.

We are not going to blame voters, people of color, Palestinians and Arab Americans or white working-class people. We will not blame rural people or Southerners. We will not under any circumstances blame each other.

Instead, we should blame those at the top who are getting rich by ensuring we all suffer. Let’s blame the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, who gave over $130 million to Trump, and whose wealth jumped by more than $70 billion since Trump’s election, according to estimates from Forbes magazine. Or let’s blame the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and the biggest landlord in Los Angeles, who both gave millions to Trump’s campaign. Or how about we blame the billionaires who made their fortunes by taking advantage of the economic crisis in 2008. These are people who have a vested interest in ensuring working people do not stand together to win progressive change.

Fascism is often talked about as something that happened in Nazi Germany, something over in Europe that people are bringing here, but that’s not accurate. The Nazis studied the Jim Crow South and used it as inspiration. Fascism is American made. And because it is homegrown, SURJ has committed to the South because we know that if we want to defeat the MAGA movement, we have to defeat it where it’s strongest.

Through the Southern Strategy, the far right has spent generations capturing state legislatures and local governments, cutting funding from public schools, rural hospitals and other programs for working people, suppressing voters, and terrorizing queer people. As a region, the South is the poorest in the country, and the rural poverty rates here are significantly higher than urban poverty rates. But, unfortunately, the South is also the region the liberal Democrats have all but abandoned.

Instead of blaming us, let’s look to the rural South for answers, because of all the people in this country we are some of the most well equipped to deal with fascism and its origins. From slavery to Jim Crow, we have lived under and fought against fascist rule for generations. We can and have always been leaders in this struggle. Let’s look at our region as a key region to invest in, and know that when we win the South, we can win the whole nation.

Group of striking Union miners in the Lick Creek district of West Va., in 1922. (Library of Congress)

In this electoral cycle, 3,500 people took action with SURJ. We talked to over 2.5 million voters, mainly in the South, specifically North Carolina and Georgia. In the places we organized, white voters came with us. But this work goes on year round and not just around elections. We are out here in the rural South and Appalachia knocking on doors, creating common cause, and organizing white people away from Klan and other far-right forces into multiracial fights for housing, health care and education. We are going to continue throwing down for those who are under attack like immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and the working class. 

I know that where we go and where we organize, we win and that gives me enormous hope. In honor of the 10,000 strong multiracial “redneck” coal miners in the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, whose September 1921 labor uprising was the largest in this nation’s history, you will see me and my folks in rural eastern Kentucky wearing our red bandannas and contending for our people just like our ancestors did, one conversation at a time. 

My friends, we cannot be divided. We must turn toward each other. It’s the only way through.

Beth Howard is Appalachia Organizing Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and the author of Rednecks for Black Lives, a forthcoming memoir from Haymarket Books. She lives in Lexington, KY, but grew up in a rural white working class community in Eastern Kentucky. Beth has been a lead organizer on winning campaigns to raise the minimum wage and restore voting rights. She’s also worked on winning electoral campaigns engaging white working-class Southerners. Beth is the creator of the viral narrative campaign Rednecks for Black Lives. You can find her on Substack at Working Class Love Notes and online at bethhowardky.com.