AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU
All,
Since
the national presidential election on November 5, 2024 and Kamala
Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump there has inevitably been an endless
deluge of random finger pointing, fiery recriminations, performative
ego outbursts, and blatantly accusatory blame gaming leveled by various
functionaries, professional surrogates, alienated voters, and high
ranking officials of the Democratic Party hierarchy aimed at both Harris
and a very wide range of people associated with Harris’s campaign
documenting how and why she and it ultimately failed.
So
while it’s clear that a number of structurally and thus electorally
vulnerable mitigating factors played various roles in what went wrong
and why it is equally or even more important to highlight what far too
many self serving pundits and Monday morning quarterback activists have
simply failed or refused to see, understand, and explain with regard to
what actually happened and why on a broader scale.
So
while I generally agree with the still rather limited overall critical assessment
that Harris’s campaign took a defensive, shallow, and absurdly
passive/aggressive tactical stance/position on the crucial issue of the political
economy in favor of spending far too much time, resources, as well as
strategic and tactical focus and energy on the tacit support of
rightwing anti-Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney (who it was incorrectly
assumed would positively influence and/or reliably deliver votes from
suburban Republican women and other ‘moderates’ within the rank and
file of Republicans generally who are appalled by Trump’s misogyny,
racism, and clearly fascist agenda), I am as always nevertheless deeply
dismayed and disgusted by the Democratic Party’s perennially major
problem in their typically and far too often braindead “critical
assessments” of what is obviously “wrong with their Party.” These deeply
structural, ideological, ethical, and institutional problems have been
integral to both national political parties for well over a century now
and show absolutely no evidence of changing in any significant
progressive manner on behalf of genuine social, economic, and political
change for the society in general and the poor and working class in
particular.
However
what is emphatically missing from these general analyses of what and
who is responsible for our current ongoing crises is the proper framing
of establishing precisely why both national political parties as well as
their leaders and elite donors, and most importantly their respective
national citizen bases of grassroots support and advocacy are as usual
currently facing the major encroaching dilemma and hegemonic
contradiction in American politics today.
That fundamental dilemma and foundational contradiction is the ominous rise, rapid expansion, and finally widespread institutional, systemic, and bureaucratic reality of economic inequality, cultural repression, social manipulation, and political oppression that openly and covertly embodies, represents, and expresses fascist ideas, values, and practices. So it’s never merely a case of determining who to vote for in an election “no matter what.” If one is serious about engaging in the long term struggle for genuinely radical and transformative social change from the left one is compelled whether one likes it or not to go beyond what we are being told by the various individual “mainstream” candidates and their endless number of donors, advisors, handlers, and press agents what we as voters “can and should strive for” instead of setting an independent agenda of our own as engaged citizens that truly reflects what our collective perspectives, values, ideas, and desires are and then actively fighting on behalf of grassroots activism that essentially will steadfastly challenge and critique any and all already agreed upon “consensual” candidates and platforms chosen and approved of in advance by the hierarchy of the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Thus
In my view what has been strangely overlooked, taken for granted,
and/or bizarrely dismissed in the 2024 presidential election is any
larger practical sense or baseline understanding of what the deeply
fascist national MAGA movement and its brazenly criminal titular leader
Donald Trump actually is and represents ideologically, politically,
economically and culturally, and even more importantly what its massive
zombie cult tentacles within the GOP and gigantic white electoral base
is absolutely dead set on doing no matter what we may think or do
otherwise.
Unless
and until we collectively and realistically face and soundly defeat
this overarching existential and empirical threat and its deadly menace
all talk of what is insanely and rather childishly still called
“politics” in the United States is utterly meaningless. Thus in
response to this ongoing crisis I have amassed a very wide array of
articles, essays, polemics, statements, critical analyses, reflections,
and conceptual ruminations on what we all need to do far above and
beyond what we have presently done and not done, thought deeply about
and recklessly ignored, intimately embraced, and stupidly pushed away.
To say that our very survival not merely as a society or nation state
emphatically hangs in the balance but our very existence as a species on
this raging embattled planet is truly endangered is a terrifying
understatement. Stay tuned, stay diligent, and stay woke because the
worst--and our fierce battle against it in all its forms--is yet to come…
Kofi
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/election-black-voters-white/
Politics
Enough With the Bad Election Takes!
To properly diagnose what went wrong, we need to look at the actual number of votes cast.
by Steve Phillips
December 11, 2024
The Nation
To properly diagnose what went wrong, we need to look at the actual number of votes cast.
by Steve Phillips
December 11, 2024
The Nation
Why did Democratic turnout contract?
(Will Newton / Getty)
As bruised and battered party leaders search for solutions and explanations, they have had to contend with politically shallow, culturally ignorant, and mathematically incorrect interpretations of electoral data. These bad takes have come from myriad sources, most recently and alarmingly from The New York Times and its chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, who occupies one of the most prestigious and prominent spots in the political media universe because of his paper’s outsize influence on public opinion.
In his December 3 newsletter, Cohn argued that it would be a mistake “to conclude…that Harris might have won if [Democrats] had voted in the numbers they did four years ago.” Cohn based his contention on the belief that “millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly backed Harris or even made the leap to Trump.” Then he sought to buttress that position by pointing to the election results in Clark County, Nevada, where the Democratic margin shrank from 9.3 percent in 2020 to 2.6 percent this year. Citing statistics that Democratic voter turnout fell, Cohn posited that “two-thirds of the shift toward Trump was because voters flipped his way.”
Cohn’s conclusions are not only mathematically incorrect; they are, in fact, absurd. For some inexplicable reason, far too few people in politics pay attention to the single most important data set there is: actual votes cast. Looking, as Cohn does, at shifting statistical margins and percentage turnout rates by party misses the more obvious point of who actually voted. Cohn completely misses the fact that Kamala Harris got almost the exact same number of votes in Clarke County as Joe Biden did in 2020.
If the Democrats lost a lot of voters to Donald Trump in Clarke County, then how did Harris get nearly the exact same number of votes there as Biden did four years earlier? (Vote tallies are not yet final, but Harris is just 1,665 votes shy of the 2020 number, in a county with more than 1 million voters.) At a minimum, she would have had to backfill those allegedly lost voters with new Democratic voters, but this inconvenient fact is completely overlooked.
The underlying reality that many in the media and politics are missing is that in four of the battleground states—Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin—Harris exceeded Joe Biden’s performance four years earlier. The biggest story of the election is not that Trump succeeded in flipping the allegiances of previously Democratic voters; it is that Republicans did a better job of mobilizing their previously infrequent voters, while Democrats squandered far too much money on television and digital ads trying to appeal to Republicans.
To properly understand why Republican turnout expanded while Democratic turnout ultimately contracted, it helps to look at the now centuries-long role that white racial resentment and fear have played in US politics. New York Timesreporter Astead Herndon’s podcast The RunUp touched on this reality when he conducted a focus group after the election. One of the participants broke it down clearly when she said, “People just came out of the rural areas and came out of everywhere to make sure that that Black woman would not win.”
A similar wave of racial resentment surfaced in Georgia in 2018 when Stacey Abrams came within 55,000 votes of winning the gubernatorial election. Abrams boosted Democratic turnout by 68 percent over the 2014 numbers, but fell just short because of a combination of massive voter suppression (e.g., purging hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls) and a historic increase in white voter turnout that occurred at the same time that Georgia was as close as it had ever been to having a Black female governor.
One of the reasons that it is essential that those attempting to analyze election results have deep cultural competence is that the electoral power of white racial grievance has long been a staple of American politics. In 1948, Southerner leaders outraged by President Harry Truman’s support for civil rights banded together to form the Dixiecrat Party whose platform unapologetically stated, “We stand for the segregation of the races.” Twenty years later, staunch segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama, used his defiant call for “segregation now…segregation forever” as a springboard to his 1968 presidential campaign. In 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign by traveling to the county in Mississippi that was nationally famous as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. The same Southern states that anchored the Confederacy made up the cornerstone of Wallace’s, Reagan’s, and now Trump’s electoral support.
Understanding this historical context—the kind of “family history” that a doctor takes—illuminates the proper path forward. Given the abundant evidence of the electoral power and endurance of white racial fear, Democrats must do even more to maximize voter turnout of their supporters than they have in the past. Nearly half of Democratic voters are people of color, and the country’s profound racial wealth gap means it takes even more resources to help those families surmount the myriad financial and logistical hurdles that make it harder to vote. And Democrats must aggressively pursue a policy agenda that will galvanize the proponents of equality in commensurate numbers as the enemies of racial and gender justice.
If this election proved anything, it is that no amount of money or television ads are going to change the minds of voters susceptible to the fear-based and divisive politics of the Republicans. The good news is that there are still tens of millions of supporters of justice and equality among the ranks of those who did not vote this year. And despite what you may have read in The New York Times, prioritizing policies and politics that engage, inspire, and mobilize those potential voters is the correct course of treatment and path back to power for the Democratic Party.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve Phillips
Steve Phillips is a best-selling author, columnist, podcast host, and national political expert. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brown Is the New White and How We Win the Civil War. He is also the founder of Democracy in Color, a political media organization dedicated to race, politics, and the multicultural progressive New American Majority.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-white-voters-trump/
Politics
Democrats Must Change Their Whole Approach Toward White People
Most of them are with Trump, and that’s not going to change. Instead, Democrats should target a far more winnable group of voters.
by Steve Phillips
June 17, 2024
The Nation
PHOTO: Former president Donald Trump attends a rally on June 9, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Eric Thayer / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Democrats need to realize that if Donald Trump’s felony conviction won’t weaken his support among most white voters, then nothing will.
In the days after Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsification of business records, white leaders from coast to coast rushed to microphones and social media to pledge their allegiance. Polls show no meaningful erosion of backing for Trump among voters (a New York Times/Siena survey found just 3 percent of his supporters saying they plan to switch their vote after the conviction).
None of this should be surprising. In a country that is growing increasingly racially diverse, the Republican Party remains disproportionately white (83 percent of GOP voters are white, according to Pew Research analysis of exit polls). White rage has always been the rocket fuel powering Trump’s ascendance and continued political relevance. Most have forgotten that when he entered the 2016 presidential contest in the spring of 2015, he languished in the polls with the support of just 5 percent of Republican voters. Then, in his presidential announcement in June of 2015, he demonized Mexicans as rapists and murderers and clearly sent a signal that he would be the defender of white people and the culture he claimed immigrants of color threatened to destroy.
The political fruits of the speech were instantaneous. Trump rocketed to the top of the pack in a matter of weeks and has never looked back. He infamously marveled at the fervor of his (overwhelmingly white) supporters when he commented in January 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Now, Trump stands alone as the first former president impeached twice by Congress and criminally convicted of a felony (well, 34 felonies to be exact, but who’s counting?). One would think that if anything would dampen the enthusiasm among members of a political party that once embraced law and order and the criminal justice system as core to its identity, it would be that criminal justice system rendering 34 guilty verdicts. But that has not been the case.
Even former Trump critics and ostensibly moderate voices such as former Maine senator Susan Collins have quickly come to Trump’s defense, saying, “The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.”
Why are Collins and other Republicans being so craven? Simple: The evidence has been clear for decades for anyone who cared to look. From a quantitative standpoint, championing white nationalism in this country has always been good politics.
In 1968, unapologetic white segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama ran for president and won five states. Twenty years prior, South Carolina leader Strom Thurmond—who infamously conducted the longest filibuster in US history when he tried to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957—ran for president on the overtly segregationist platform of the Dixiecrats, and won four states. And 88 years before that, the entire presidential contest turned on the question of whether white people could legally buy, sell, and own Black people—48 percent of the voters backed pro-slavery candidates (the slave states couldn’t agree on a single candidate and divided their votes, making it possible for Abraham Lincoln to prevail with just 39 percent of the vote).
The implications of this history for Democrats are profound. The dominant strategic focus of the Democratic Party has been and remains to woo white voters, but in my 30 years in national politics, I have seen precious few examples of empirical data and research guiding this quest to win white support.
To address this gap, I have spent the past year working with the groups Showing Up for Racial Justice and the Working Families Party to conduct a study on what the data really shows about white voter behavior over the years. We just released the resulting report titled “Expanding the White Stripe of Our Multiracial Coalition” this week (“white stripe” as in how to broaden the white stripe of the multiracial rainbow that is the Democratic electorate). In conducting the report, we analyzed decades of electoral data, Census reports, and field experiments by a wide range of social change and political organizations.
With the clarity that Trump’s conviction won’t dislodge his white supporters, the findings in the White Stripe Report are more timely and urgent than ever. The report offers three top-line calls to action. They are:
• Target the right white people
Much of the media and too much of the Democratic focus has primarily centered on trying to change the minds of voters inclined towards Trump. But there are millions of progressive-leaning whites who are infrequent voters but would likely support Democrats if they did come out and vote. This pool of people is a far more promising demographic to target. Political strategist and former political director of the AFL-CIO Mike Podhorzer has described the necessary shift in approach as pulling back the lens to look at the working-class female food servers pouring the coffee for the white guys in those stereotypical Midwestern diners that so many reporters flocked to in the wake of Trump’s win in 2016. That woman is far more likely to vote Democratic, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s all-out assault on reproductive rights over the past year.
Our analysis of the nonvoting population among registered voters in 2020 identifies 26.9 million whites who didn’t cast votes but would probably have backed Biden. A far better use of funds this year will be making sure that those white people vote, instead of spending millions of dollars on endless television ads trying to get Trump supporters to switch allegiances.
• Spend proportionately
There comes a point where Democratic spending on white people results in diminishing margins of returns. The results of every presidential election over the past 32 years show that white support for Democrats remains in a narrow band from 39 percent to 44 percent.
Most of them are with Trump, and that’s not going to change. Instead, Democrats should target a far more winnable group of voters.
by Steve Phillips
June 17, 2024
The Nation
PHOTO: Former president Donald Trump attends a rally on June 9, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Eric Thayer / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Democrats need to realize that if Donald Trump’s felony conviction won’t weaken his support among most white voters, then nothing will.
In the days after Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsification of business records, white leaders from coast to coast rushed to microphones and social media to pledge their allegiance. Polls show no meaningful erosion of backing for Trump among voters (a New York Times/Siena survey found just 3 percent of his supporters saying they plan to switch their vote after the conviction).
None of this should be surprising. In a country that is growing increasingly racially diverse, the Republican Party remains disproportionately white (83 percent of GOP voters are white, according to Pew Research analysis of exit polls). White rage has always been the rocket fuel powering Trump’s ascendance and continued political relevance. Most have forgotten that when he entered the 2016 presidential contest in the spring of 2015, he languished in the polls with the support of just 5 percent of Republican voters. Then, in his presidential announcement in June of 2015, he demonized Mexicans as rapists and murderers and clearly sent a signal that he would be the defender of white people and the culture he claimed immigrants of color threatened to destroy.
The political fruits of the speech were instantaneous. Trump rocketed to the top of the pack in a matter of weeks and has never looked back. He infamously marveled at the fervor of his (overwhelmingly white) supporters when he commented in January 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Now, Trump stands alone as the first former president impeached twice by Congress and criminally convicted of a felony (well, 34 felonies to be exact, but who’s counting?). One would think that if anything would dampen the enthusiasm among members of a political party that once embraced law and order and the criminal justice system as core to its identity, it would be that criminal justice system rendering 34 guilty verdicts. But that has not been the case.
Even former Trump critics and ostensibly moderate voices such as former Maine senator Susan Collins have quickly come to Trump’s defense, saying, “The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.”
Why are Collins and other Republicans being so craven? Simple: The evidence has been clear for decades for anyone who cared to look. From a quantitative standpoint, championing white nationalism in this country has always been good politics.
In 1968, unapologetic white segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama ran for president and won five states. Twenty years prior, South Carolina leader Strom Thurmond—who infamously conducted the longest filibuster in US history when he tried to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957—ran for president on the overtly segregationist platform of the Dixiecrats, and won four states. And 88 years before that, the entire presidential contest turned on the question of whether white people could legally buy, sell, and own Black people—48 percent of the voters backed pro-slavery candidates (the slave states couldn’t agree on a single candidate and divided their votes, making it possible for Abraham Lincoln to prevail with just 39 percent of the vote).
The implications of this history for Democrats are profound. The dominant strategic focus of the Democratic Party has been and remains to woo white voters, but in my 30 years in national politics, I have seen precious few examples of empirical data and research guiding this quest to win white support.
To address this gap, I have spent the past year working with the groups Showing Up for Racial Justice and the Working Families Party to conduct a study on what the data really shows about white voter behavior over the years. We just released the resulting report titled “Expanding the White Stripe of Our Multiracial Coalition” this week (“white stripe” as in how to broaden the white stripe of the multiracial rainbow that is the Democratic electorate). In conducting the report, we analyzed decades of electoral data, Census reports, and field experiments by a wide range of social change and political organizations.
With the clarity that Trump’s conviction won’t dislodge his white supporters, the findings in the White Stripe Report are more timely and urgent than ever. The report offers three top-line calls to action. They are:
• Target the right white people
Much of the media and too much of the Democratic focus has primarily centered on trying to change the minds of voters inclined towards Trump. But there are millions of progressive-leaning whites who are infrequent voters but would likely support Democrats if they did come out and vote. This pool of people is a far more promising demographic to target. Political strategist and former political director of the AFL-CIO Mike Podhorzer has described the necessary shift in approach as pulling back the lens to look at the working-class female food servers pouring the coffee for the white guys in those stereotypical Midwestern diners that so many reporters flocked to in the wake of Trump’s win in 2016. That woman is far more likely to vote Democratic, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s all-out assault on reproductive rights over the past year.
Our analysis of the nonvoting population among registered voters in 2020 identifies 26.9 million whites who didn’t cast votes but would probably have backed Biden. A far better use of funds this year will be making sure that those white people vote, instead of spending millions of dollars on endless television ads trying to get Trump supporters to switch allegiances.
• Spend proportionately
There comes a point where Democratic spending on white people results in diminishing margins of returns. The results of every presidential election over the past 32 years show that white support for Democrats remains in a narrow band from 39 percent to 44 percent.
Having
a realistic expectation of what percentage of white voter support the
party is actually seeking will be key heading into November, as will be
setting a limit on the amount of money, time, and effort that will be
spent trying to exceed that limit. Saving money in this fashion will
free up funds to invest in mobilizing voters of color who support
Democrats at much higher rates.
• Run toward—not away—from racial issues.
Though this may seem counterintuitive, it turns out that being explicit about race doesn’t diminish support among white voters. In fact, it could increase support by activating those millions of progressive nonvoting whites.
The default impulse of most white people when it comes to issues of diversity, racial justice, and equality is to change the topic. In the research we examined, the data shows that pushing back on these attacks and summoning people to be their highest and best selves actually works. Democrats received their highest share of the white vote in the past 24 years when they challenged America to elect a Black man as president, and Obama secured 43 percent of the white vote in 2008.
In the Kentucky gubernatorial election last year, the Republicans backed Daniel Cameron, an African American Trump follower who had defended the notorious police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020. In his 2023 campaign, Cameron deployed the divisive tool du jour of attacking transgender youth, but the incumbent governor Democrat Andy Beshear, a white man, fought back, vetoing a bill targeting transgender children, saying, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God.” Beshear handily won.
What this moment is showing all of us is that there is virtually nothing that will change the minds of the tens of millions of whites who support Trump. If Democrats want to win, they need to embrace this reality and turn their attention and resources to doing what works to get the maximum number of realistically attainable white votes possible.
• Run toward—not away—from racial issues.
Though this may seem counterintuitive, it turns out that being explicit about race doesn’t diminish support among white voters. In fact, it could increase support by activating those millions of progressive nonvoting whites.
The default impulse of most white people when it comes to issues of diversity, racial justice, and equality is to change the topic. In the research we examined, the data shows that pushing back on these attacks and summoning people to be their highest and best selves actually works. Democrats received their highest share of the white vote in the past 24 years when they challenged America to elect a Black man as president, and Obama secured 43 percent of the white vote in 2008.
In the Kentucky gubernatorial election last year, the Republicans backed Daniel Cameron, an African American Trump follower who had defended the notorious police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020. In his 2023 campaign, Cameron deployed the divisive tool du jour of attacking transgender youth, but the incumbent governor Democrat Andy Beshear, a white man, fought back, vetoing a bill targeting transgender children, saying, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God.” Beshear handily won.
What this moment is showing all of us is that there is virtually nothing that will change the minds of the tens of millions of whites who support Trump. If Democrats want to win, they need to embrace this reality and turn their attention and resources to doing what works to get the maximum number of realistically attainable white votes possible.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-right-has-a-150-page-battle-plan-to-shut-down-progressive-civil-society/
Op-Ed
Politics & Elections
The Right Has a 150-Page Battle Plan to Shut Down Progressive Civil Society
Attacks on Palestine solidarity are the opening salvo in the right’s stated plan to suppress social justice groups.
by Negin Owliaei & Maya Schenwar
Truthout
November 27, 2024
Westend 61 / Getty Images; Edited: Truthout
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, after a campaign in which Trump threatened the press, the left and “the enemy within,” 204 Republicans and 15 Democrats in the House of Representatives decided to hand a gift to his incoming administration — one that could be used to squash any kind of dissent.
The dangerous gift, HR 9495, is known as the “nonprofit killer bill” because it would unilaterally give the Treasury secretary the power to strip the tax-exempt status from any nonprofit they decide is a “terrorist-supporting organization,” all without due process for the organization in question.
Truthout has been covering this legislation in its many iterations since last spring, when its predecessor, HR 6408, passed the House with overwhelming support but stalled in the Senate. We’ve also covered the landscape from which this bill emerged. While the threat of its use under a Donald Trump presidency is particularly alarming for a broad range of groups, this bill has to be understood as part of a bipartisan (and transnational) push to stifle the Palestine solidarity movement.
The newer version that the House passed on November 21 includes an add-on that might help move it more quickly through the Senate, postponing tax deadlines for American citizens detained abroad. While a separate bill to do just that has already cleared the Senate, a spokesperson for the body’s majority leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer, told The New York Times that he’s opposed to the nonprofit portion of the bill. While it likely won’t come up in this legislative session, Republicans may raise the bill again next year when they hold both bodies of Congress. A wide coalition of nonprofits was able to persuade some House Democrats who previously supported the legislation to vote against it this time around. That coalition will continue to advocate against the bill as it goes forward.
Regardless of what happens with this particular piece of legislation, nonprofits, including independent media, can’t rest easy. The Trump administration, and the right more broadly, still have plenty of tools at their disposal to attack organizers. And while Palestine solidarity activists may have a wider target on their backs, organizers for any causes even remotely associated with the left should be paying attention.
We already know what will come next: we can expect to see more racketeering charges, otherwise known as RICO charges, thrown at organizers — charges historically used to attack fraudulent money-making schemes from groups like the Mafia. Immigrants who engage in any kind of activism may be more likely to see their legal immigration status threatened. Corporations could work with right-wing interest groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to target protesters at “critical infrastructure” sites like weapons manufacturers. Groups doing any kind of meaningful work, ranging from investigative journalism to campus protests, may get tied up with frivolous lawsuits from right-wing actors.
The right is openly telegraphing its next moves for all of us to see.
We can anticipate these alarming steps because we have been watching the slow drip of repression for years now. These tactics are already being used on members of the left, whether on the dozens of Stop Cop City organizers indicted under RICO laws, or on the pro-Palestine protester who had to fight to keep his student visa, or on the members of the environmental movement who are charged under ALEC-orchestrated laws for their anti-pipeline protests.
We also know this because the right is openly telegraphing its next moves for all of us to see.
The Heritage Foundation’s Detailed Plan to Criminalize Palestine Solidarity
Members of the Heritage Foundation, notably the authors of Project 2025, have another playbook in their back pockets meant to crack down on the movement for Palestinian liberation. Known as Project Esther, their plan is to create “a national strategy to combat antisemitism.” Project Esther alleges that the pro-Palestine movement is part of a global “Hamas Support Network” with branches that operate as “Hamas Support Organizations,” which puts everyone from groups like Students for Justice in Palestine to the Open Society Foundations in their crosshairs. “Whether in the halls of academia or in the halls of power, HSN supporters and influence targets must be made to feel extreme discomfort,” the Project Esther authors write. “We will generate that discomfort.”
They go on to suggest public relations campaigns against such groups, as well as legal attacks that draw on RICO and counterterrorism laws to take out the movement. The goal is to “organize and focus a broad coalition of willing and able partners to leverage existing — and, if required, work to establish additional — authorities, resources, capabilities, and activities.”
As Dima Khalidi writes in Jewish Voice for Peace’s anthology, On Antisemitism, “The most prevalent tactic to intimidate advocates for Palestinian rights into silence is still to falsely accuse individuals, groups, and the movement for Palestinian rights as a whole of being motivated by antisemitism and support for terrorism. It’s no coincidence that the tactics overlap, and go hand in hand. It is, after all, much easier to sow the idea that those who promote Palestinian rights are antisemitic if they are also depicted as pro-terrorist.”
Members of the Heritage Foundation, notably the authors of Project 2025, have another playbook in their back pockets meant to crack down on the movement for Palestinian liberation. Known as Project Esther, their plan is to create “a national strategy to combat antisemitism.” Project Esther alleges that the pro-Palestine movement is part of a global “Hamas Support Network” with branches that operate as “Hamas Support Organizations,” which puts everyone from groups like Students for Justice in Palestine to the Open Society Foundations in their crosshairs. “Whether in the halls of academia or in the halls of power, HSN supporters and influence targets must be made to feel extreme discomfort,” the Project Esther authors write. “We will generate that discomfort.”
They go on to suggest public relations campaigns against such groups, as well as legal attacks that draw on RICO and counterterrorism laws to take out the movement. The goal is to “organize and focus a broad coalition of willing and able partners to leverage existing — and, if required, work to establish additional — authorities, resources, capabilities, and activities.”
As Dima Khalidi writes in Jewish Voice for Peace’s anthology, On Antisemitism, “The most prevalent tactic to intimidate advocates for Palestinian rights into silence is still to falsely accuse individuals, groups, and the movement for Palestinian rights as a whole of being motivated by antisemitism and support for terrorism. It’s no coincidence that the tactics overlap, and go hand in hand. It is, after all, much easier to sow the idea that those who promote Palestinian rights are antisemitic if they are also depicted as pro-terrorist.”
The Capital Research Center’s Plan to Criminalize the Left More Broadly
In yet another blueprint for repression, another right-wing think tank, the Capital Research Center — whose founder also had ties to The Heritage Foundation — goes even further in depicting a wide variety of progressive activists, organizers and the groups that support them as “pro-terrorist.”
The think tank’s 150-page document, titled “Marching Toward Violence: The Domestic Anti-Israeli Protest Movement” lays out a multistep plan for targeting a wide variety of progressive and left groups — including everything from Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America, legal defense organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild, and many others including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
It is clear that the authors of these types of playbooks are trying to take down the entire ecosystem of the left.
While the plan purports to focus narrowly on pro-Palestine organizing, it effectively lays out a method by which the right could attempt to use statements made on Palestine by a broad swath of groups to forcibly halt progressive organizing and resistance in the U.S. The fact that the Capital Research Center sprinkles a few white supremacist right-wing actors within its suggested list of targets should not distract us from the reality of its overwhelming focus on shutting down organs of the left.
The plan proposes to target the groups in its crosshairs with a wide array of attacks, ranging from stripping organizations of their nonprofit status, to filing RICO charges, to deporting immigrants who protest, to filing class-action lawsuits against groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. The document creates a list of 159 organizations to target by explicitly naming them as “pro-terrorism” based on bunk “documentable evidence.”
This kind of language is likely not too surprising for anyone familiar with the tactics used, both by the right and by the state, under the so-called “War on Terror.” Indeed, its author, Ryan Mauro, is a known figure in the anti-Muslim movement and formerly worked at the Clarion Project, a right-wing initiative fueling wildly Islamophobic conspiracy theories, including an infamous debunked one on Muslim “no-go zones” so extreme that the Southern Poverty Law Center took note. The organization itself features members on its staff and board that came from the George W. Bush administration as well as the Reagan one, and a former Heritage Foundation fellow as well.
While these playbooks certainly are scarier in the hands of a Trump administration, it’s important to contextualize them in the larger movement from the right that spans back decades — one that has had its sights on Muslim and Arab communities in particular.
Even for those familiar with these types of threats, there are still some points in the document from the Capital Research Center that might be helpful to think on as we prepare for the years ahead. One thing to consider is the breadth of “research”: the document has more than 700 footnotes documenting everything from action alerts to articles to a truly disturbing number of social media posts.
It also boxes its targets into two categories — one is the “Islamists, communists/Marxists, and anarchists” — which we might take to mean the left. But interestingly enough, it also mentions white supremacists as potential targets — putting Nick Fuentes and the hate group Patriot Front side by side with organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, which draws quite a bit of the author’s ire, along with Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine. This kind of calculation on the part of the author is useful for us to note when some liberal groups suggest switching the focus of terrorism laws and rhetoric to include the amorphous right-wing “domestic terrorism” in their scope, a tactic that can only boomerang back to hurt the left.
What might be most concerning is how this document tries to ensnare a broad range of actors. The document makes connections with groups centered around abolition, racial justice and the environment, in addition to the Palestine liberation movement. In what could be considered laughable if it weren’t so scary, the author has come up with four overlapping circles of the “pro-terrorism, anti-Israel movement,” which range from “political warfare” at the widest to “domestic terrorists” at the narrowest, with “supporters” and “inciters” in between.
Will foundations and major donors, which have relied on tax-deductible 501(c)(3) status as a condition for funding, rise to the moment by breaking with their long-held set of rules?
To give a more concrete sense of how these are applied, the think tank outrageously lists the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center (also known as Indybay) under the header of “domestic terrorists,” accuses Black Lives Matter Grassroots of being “inciters,” lists the Center for Constitutional Rights under “supporters” and charges the Democratic Socialists of America with “political warfare.”
The blueprint for repression takes aim at everyone from fiscal sponsors to, crucially, the legal support organizations that usually come in to provide support once activists are targeted. It is clear that the authors of these types of playbooks are trying to take down the entire ecosystem of the left.
We must acknowledge the stakes of these attacks: Most progressive and leftist nonprofit organizations are overwhelmingly supported by foundations and large donors who require tax-deductibility as a precursor to granting funds. For most, losing nonprofit status could easily mean a quick death.
As problematic and imperfect as the nonprofit apparatus is — we deeply appreciate critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex — the difficult truth is that most medium-to-large left and progressive organizations rely on it.
When Left Groups’ Material Survival Is Threatened, What Can We Do in Response?
So, how can we resist, in the face of this existential threat amid widening repression?
First of all, self-education is key. Right-wingers are drawing upon history to formulate their playbook, which carries echoes of prior fascist movements, as well as, in the case of organizational targeting, the Patriot Act era and the Red Scare. We must read up, too!
Let’s form study groups and involve our nonprofit organizations in conversations about past instances of institutional targeting and histories of resistance. For example, during the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s, the McCarran Internal Security Act allowed the attorney general to petition a “control board” to designate organizations as Communist and then require them to register with the Justice Department. The organizations resisted straightforwardly: None of the 25 groups labeled as Communist actually submitted to register with the Justice Department.
During the post-9/11 Patriot Act period, the federal government targeted several Muslim nonprofits, including the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. It accused these nonprofits of providing “material support” for terrorism and froze their assets, leading to shutdowns. Several of the organizations’ leaders were targeted and imprisoned. In response, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the asset freezes in court, and a wide range of human rights groups protested, issued statements, and launched campaigns and petitions. The Committee to Stop FBI Repression was formed to push back on the targeting of activists accused of links to “terrorist” organizations.
These asset freezes and shutdowns, as well as resistance efforts, are reminders of the importance of building connections with aligned advocacy groups and legal aid organizations in the current moment (although, frighteningly, the right currently seems intent on targeting legal defense groups alongside grassroots activist efforts).
Our next steps must include a recognition that liberation movements are often impacted by periods of significant repression, extreme surveillance, dismantlement of core institutions, and criminalization of individual activists.
The looming threats to left and progressive nonprofits may also pose a stark challenge to philanthropy in the coming months and years. That sector may need to shift its standard modes of operation to forestall mass chaos among left and progressive organizations.
Will foundations and major donors, which have relied on tax-deductible 501(c)(3) status as a condition for funding, rise to the moment by breaking with their long-held set of rules? Will they forego the 501(c)(3) requirement in cases where that requirement is weaponized by fascist powers? Or will organizations stripped of their status be simply left to die?
In the weeks prior to inauguration, will foundations help grassroots organizations build financial reserves to allow for flexibility in the face of legal and economic threats? Moreover, how will funders respond if nonprofit organizations’ assets are frozen and they’re suddenly left without the cash flow to pay out staff severance, let alone operate?
These are all questions that philanthropic organizations and individual philanthropists might consider contending with now, before the worst consequences descend.
The material survival of the grassroots and nonprofit groups being targeted will also hinge on the degree to which masses of individuals can rally grassroots support to buoy organizations that are targeted by baseless right-wing smear campaigns under the guise of “antiterrorism.” If a host of nonprofit organizations – including both smaller local groups and major mainstays of the national progressive activism infrastructure — suddenly lose their nonprofit status or face legal attack, will masses of supporters be able to mobilize sufficient grassroots support to sustain them?
We Need Strong Coalitions to Resist This Attack on the Left
Going forward, our next steps must include a recognition that liberation movements are often impacted by periods of significant repression, which often includes extreme surveillance, dismantlement of core institutions, and criminalization of individual activists.
We’ve witnessed this over the past half-century with the movements for labor and economic justice, Black, Puerto Rican, Chicanx and Indigenous liberation; peace and anti-imperialism; environmental justice and animal liberation; civil liberties; racial justice and police abolition; and of course, Palestinian liberation.
Such repression requires us to build strong links with other targeted groups — recognizing repression as a common denominator that can unite us in the struggle against authoritarianism.
Such repression requires us to build strong links with other targeted groups — recognizing repression as a common denominator that can unite us in the struggle against authoritarianism. As historian Dan Berger writes in The Struggle Within, “The ubiquity of state repression affords an opportunity to forge solidarity among multiple revolutionary movements. Seizing this opportunity does not mean ignoring contradictions. … Instead, it offers a chance for people committed to radical social change to work with one another, addressing differences in ways that build alliances and strengthen the potential for revolutionary possibilities.”
How can nonprofits from across multiple issue areas and multiple ends of the left/progressive tent find common ground in our real fears that our organizations will be shut down, our assets frozen, our bank access curtailed, and our work cut short at a time when it’s needed most? Working toward broader and deeper coalitions with similarly threatened organizations will be vital.
In the movement journalism world, we’ve been laying that groundwork over the past year with our recently launched Movement Media Alliance, a coalition of 18 social justice-driven media organizations committed to supporting each other’s sustainability and defending each other in the face of existential threats. Many progressive and left organizations, more broadly, have been working to find common purpose since the election of Trump; for example, two days after the election, the Working Families Party hosted a mass call sponsored by 200 organizations — a rare coming-together moment that could form a seed for emerging solidarities as groups’ organizational infrastructure is endangered.
Real efforts at coalition-building — resisting competition in favor of mutual uplift efforts — could serve to mitigate the secondary impacts of organizations being baselessly and instrumentally designated as “terrorist-supporting.” For example, if an organization is federally designated as “terrorist-supporting,” peer organizations could sound the alarm about the false allegations and affirm the accused group’s positive impact and importance to the social justice ecosystem so that donors and allies are less likely to back away.
Meanwhile, all of us in — and proximate to — the nonprofit world would do well to wrestle with the potential implications of a mounting direct attack on our organizations and our people. How can we be nimble? How can we lean on each other? How can we fight back? Let’s get together and talk about it.
Going forward, our next steps must include a recognition that liberation movements are often impacted by periods of significant repression, which often includes extreme surveillance, dismantlement of core institutions, and criminalization of individual activists.
We’ve witnessed this over the past half-century with the movements for labor and economic justice, Black, Puerto Rican, Chicanx and Indigenous liberation; peace and anti-imperialism; environmental justice and animal liberation; civil liberties; racial justice and police abolition; and of course, Palestinian liberation.
Such repression requires us to build strong links with other targeted groups — recognizing repression as a common denominator that can unite us in the struggle against authoritarianism.
Such repression requires us to build strong links with other targeted groups — recognizing repression as a common denominator that can unite us in the struggle against authoritarianism. As historian Dan Berger writes in The Struggle Within, “The ubiquity of state repression affords an opportunity to forge solidarity among multiple revolutionary movements. Seizing this opportunity does not mean ignoring contradictions. … Instead, it offers a chance for people committed to radical social change to work with one another, addressing differences in ways that build alliances and strengthen the potential for revolutionary possibilities.”
How can nonprofits from across multiple issue areas and multiple ends of the left/progressive tent find common ground in our real fears that our organizations will be shut down, our assets frozen, our bank access curtailed, and our work cut short at a time when it’s needed most? Working toward broader and deeper coalitions with similarly threatened organizations will be vital.
In the movement journalism world, we’ve been laying that groundwork over the past year with our recently launched Movement Media Alliance, a coalition of 18 social justice-driven media organizations committed to supporting each other’s sustainability and defending each other in the face of existential threats. Many progressive and left organizations, more broadly, have been working to find common purpose since the election of Trump; for example, two days after the election, the Working Families Party hosted a mass call sponsored by 200 organizations — a rare coming-together moment that could form a seed for emerging solidarities as groups’ organizational infrastructure is endangered.
Real efforts at coalition-building — resisting competition in favor of mutual uplift efforts — could serve to mitigate the secondary impacts of organizations being baselessly and instrumentally designated as “terrorist-supporting.” For example, if an organization is federally designated as “terrorist-supporting,” peer organizations could sound the alarm about the false allegations and affirm the accused group’s positive impact and importance to the social justice ecosystem so that donors and allies are less likely to back away.
Meanwhile, all of us in — and proximate to — the nonprofit world would do well to wrestle with the potential implications of a mounting direct attack on our organizations and our people. How can we be nimble? How can we lean on each other? How can we fight back? Let’s get together and talk about it.
Help us Prepare for Trump’s Day One
Trump is busy getting ready for Day One of his presidency – but so is Truthout.
Trump has made it no secret that he is planning a demolition-style attack on both specific communities and democracy as a whole, beginning on his first day in office. With over 25 executive orders and directives queued up for January 20, he’s promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, and implement a “drill, drill, drill” approach to ramp up oil and gas extraction.
Organizations like Truthout are also being threatened by legislation like HR 9495, the “nonprofit killer bill” that would allow the Treasury Secretary to declare any nonprofit a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip its tax-exempt status without due process. Progressive media like Truthout that has courageously focused on reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza are in the bill’s crosshairs.
As journalists, we have a responsibility to look at hard realities and communicate them to you. We hope that you, like us, can use this information to prepare for what’s to come.
And if you feel uncertain about what to do in the face of a second Trump administration, we invite you to be an indispensable part of Truthout’s preparations.
In addition to covering the widespread onslaught of draconian policy, we’re shoring up our resources for what might come next for progressive media: bad-faith lawsuits from far-right ghouls, legislation that seeks to strip us of our ability to receive tax-deductible donations, and further throttling of our reach on social media platforms owned by Trump’s sycophants.
We’re preparing right now for Trump’s Day One: building a brave coalition of movement media; reaching out to the activists, academics, and thinkers we trust to shine a light on the inner workings of authoritarianism; and planning to use journalism as a tool to equip movements to protect the people, lands, and principles most vulnerable to Trump’s destruction.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Negin Owliaei is Truthout‘s editor-in-chief. An award-winning journalist, she previously worked at Al Jazeera‘s flagship daily news podcast, The Take. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Maya Schenwar is director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. She is also Truthout‘s editor-at-large and board president. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition; co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms; author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better; and co-editor of the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. In addition to Truthout, Maya’s work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The Nation, and she has appeared on Democracy Now!, MSNBC, C-SPAN, NPR, and other television and radio programs. Maya is a cofounder of the Movement Media Alliance (MMA) and Media Against Apartheid and Displacement (MAAD). She lives in Chicago.
“Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples,” he wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism.” In contrast to other “isms,” “the truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”
—Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
—Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
In 2021, Paxton wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in which he stated that he now believed Donald Trump was a fascist, after insisting for several years that he was instead a right-wing populist. Trump's incitement of the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol was the deciding factor in him changing his view.
“If Trump wins, it’s going to be awful. If he loses, it’s going to be awful too.” Paxton scoured his brain for an apt historical analogy but struggled to find one. Hitler was not elected, he noted, but legally appointed by the conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg...In Italy, Mussolini was also legitimately appointed. “The king chose him,” Paxton said, “Mussolini didn’t really have to march on Rome.” Trump’s power, Paxton suggested, appears to be different. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said. “Which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”
—Robert Paxton, from interview with Elisabeth Zerofsky "Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind”, New York Times magazine, October 23, 2024
PHOTO: Robert Paxton (b. June 15, 1932) Credit: Erik Madigan Heck for The New York Times
The Anatomy of Fascism. by Robert Paxton.
Vintage Books. 2004
Vintage Books. 2004
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/05/the-dismantling-of-democracy-a-grim-projection-of-american-fascism-under-trump/
The Dismantling of Democracy: A Grim Projection of American Fascism Under Trump
by Henry Giroux
July 5, 2024
Counterpunch
HENRY A. GIROUX
(b. September 19, 1943)
"In the end, there is no democracy without informed citizens, no justice without a language critical of injustice, and no change without a broad-based movement of collective resistance.”
--Henry A. Giroux, "A. Democracy in Exile Fights Against Fascism", Truthout, June 7, 2018
--Henry A. Giroux, "A. Democracy in Exile Fights Against Fascism", Truthout, June 7, 2018
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/.../httpbostonrevie…
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on December 7, 2020):
Monday, December 7, 2020
Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley On The Real Meaning of the 2020 National Presidential Election and the Profound Intellectual and Political Legacy of Dr. Cedric Robinson (1940-2016)
DR. CEDRIC J. ROBINSON (1940-2016)
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/black-working-class-blair-kelley
Books & the Arts
A Sweeping History of the Black Working Class
By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Blair LM Kelley’s book, Black Folk, helps tell the larger story of American democracy over the past two and a half centuries.
by Robert Greene II
June 12, 2024
The Nation
The famous “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably the best-known public statement by Martin Luther King Jr., was given at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In it, King urged the nation on in tackling segregation and political inequality, but he also talked about economic injustice: How, he asked, could Black Americans continue to live “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”?
King was not alone in highlighting the economic disparities ravaging Black America on that day. The March on Washington, after all, was about jobs as well as freedom, and one of the themes that connected the plethora of speeches given by the leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement was a concern about economic inequality and the desire to realize freedom in all the domains of life—not just politics and civil society. “Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act,” thundered A. Philip Randolph, “but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers black and white?”
A socialist, Randolph always thought deeply about the relationship between race, labor, and class in American society. This—as well as how they relate to gender—sits at the heart of Blair LM Kelley’s book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class. In this masterful analysis of US history, Kelley offers a new and refreshing perspective: While focused on the history of the Black working class in particular, she at the same time captures truths about the American past writ large: How the racialization of minority groups is intertwined with class; how capitalism extracts profits from labor; how the politics of race and class can clash within Black America; and even how the latest outbreak of the culture wars in the United States—over how to teach American history—is a dire threat to understanding this rich and variegated legacy. By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Kelly helps tell the larger story of American democracy over the past two and a half centuries.
Kelley, who is currently the director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, has focused on Black and Southern history throughout her career. Her first book, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship, discussed how the tactic of boycotting public transportation by Black Americans did not begin in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead, Kelley showed, the first campaigns started with streetcars in the 1890s and early 1900s and led to the Supreme Court taking up the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896.
Like Right to Ride, Black Folk offers a unique take on a familiar history, in part because it includes the personal narratives of members of Kelley’s own family tree. Beginning with a chapter on an enslaved ancestor named Henry, a blacksmith, she then tells us about her great-grandfather, Solicitor Duncan, and her grandfather, John Dee. Through their stories, Kelley personalizes the history of three generations of Black working-class men as they went from slavery and sharecropping in the Deep South to trying to make a living in World War II–era Philadelphia. From Reconstruction to Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the Depression and New Deal era, Kelley details what remained continuous within Black working-class history and what did not.
Black history, Kelley notes, has not always been told as a story of the working class, but by doing so she reminds us of the centrality of labor to all of Black history. Charting the transition from slavery to freedom at the end of the Civil War and the formation of new labor regimes during the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and New Deal periods, she also examines the ways in which the freedom to choose how and where one works was a central concern for Black Americans. While we tend to emphasize, in histories of the Reconstruction era, the political and social travails involved in extending voting rights to Black men, as well as the rise of Black politicians and the violent counterrevolution of the 1870s, Kelley also stresses that, on the ground across the South, the freedom most dear to Black Americans was the freedom to choose how to live their new lives—and that included how to make a living, too.
To understand Black religion, politics, and cultural creativity in the Reconstruction era, Kelley notes, one has to understand this struggle to find dignity and create the foundations of emancipation as one that was often centered on the labor Black Americans performed. No longer forced to work as slave labor for someone else, they now had to decide who they would work for—and how. That so many Black Americans saw their struggle for this more expansive understanding of freedom weakened—though not destroyed—by the rise of sharecropping helps explains why it remained such a defining issue for members of the Black working class.
As Kelley shows, Black working-class organizers and agitators, from railroad workers to those organizing within the US Postal Service, were on the front lines, pursuing not just higher wages or better working conditions but also civil rights reform. The rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters as an engine of social change is one of Kelley’s key examples. Formed by A. Philip Randolph in 1925, the union soon became a critical part of the Black struggle for civil and political rights in the 20th century, serving not only as the labor organization for railroad-car porters—one of the few decent-paying jobs available to Black men in the early to mid-20th century—but also a conduit connecting Black Americans north and south, east and west, via America’s rail lines to advance a general program of emancipation and racial equality.
Not all of Black America agreed with the union’s radical bent. Kelley describes attempts by The Chicago Defender, the famed Black-run newspaper that spurred many Black Americans to join the Great Migration north, to weaken the brotherhood due to the paper’s skepticism toward labor organizing. Randolph and the working-class members of the brotherhood, however, could give as well as they got: Randolph would sometimes refer acidly to the Defender as “the Surrender.”
Alongside Kelley’s discussions of work, she also offers a careful reading of the important role that gender plays in the history of the Black working class. Telling the story of washerwomen like Sarah during the Great Depression, she puts Black women at the center of her history and, in this way, joins the illustrious company of historians like Tera Hunter, the author of To ’Joy My Freedom, who wrote about Black women’s lives in the Deep South in the post-Reconstruction era and offered a study of how race, gender, and labor intersected in ways that many Americans have never learned about.
Hunter was interested in how Black working-class women—often erased from the broader narratives of gender and labor in American history—found ways to organize in order to create an economic and social space in which they could survive and even thrive. Expanding on Hunter’s work, Kelley examines how Black working-class women, from Rosa Parks to Fannie Lou Hamer, not only sought to transform their workplaces but also became an integral part—if not sometimes the integral part—of the larger struggles of Black Americans during the civil rights era.
Connecting the struggle of working-class women to the history of those struggling for Black freedom, Kelley also makes it clear that it was often not the “talented tenth” of Black middle-class intellectuals and activists who helped break the grip of segregation over the South, but rather working-class Black Americans. The reader of Black Folk can only be humbled by the hard work of washerwomen in the South in the late 19th century—and domestic servants throughout the country in the 20th century—in their efforts to secure their own economic rights in spite of tremendous pressure not to do so. And that reader will also begin to see how these working-class actions established a pattern for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s. The working-class women that Kelley chronicles in this book did more than just make “space for their families,” she explains; they also pursued a political struggle “for their rights, for their dignity, and for one another.”
Such working-class solidarity repeatedly showed itself throughout the second half of the 20th century. When Randolph and King led the call for a Freedom Budget in 1966 to address the plight of the poor, they sought a solution that would benefit not just Black Americans but all members of the working class, regardless of race. “The tragedy,” Randolph wrote in his introduction to the budget, “is that groups only one generation removed from poverty themselves, haunted by the memory of scarcity and fearful of slipping back, step on the fingers of those struggling up the ladder.” Randolph acknowledged that many in the working class—especially, but not only, the Black working class—knew that they were one financial disaster away from being poor themselves.
As Kelley points out in her conclusion, what these activists had long recognized was that the plight of the Black working class was often shared by the working class as a whole. This simple truth was made plain during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and Donald Trump’s administration. Yet, as Kelley also notes in the final pages of her book: “The Trump-caused obsession with the white working class…has obscured the reality that the most active, most engaged, most informed, and most impassioned working class in America is the Black working class.” It is this element of the American body politic that has, in the past, tended to offer the most hope in trying times. As the son of Black working-class people, I can say that this is true today too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Robert Greene II is an assistant professor of history at Claflin University and has written for Jacobin, In These Times, and Dissent.
"What's Past is Prologue..."
KING: Using 'working-class voters' as shorthand for white people is insulting and rooted in racism
by Shaun King
March 7, 2017
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
by Shaun King
March 7, 2017
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
PHOTO: A sea of working-class white people at an October 2016 Trump rally in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
In case you missed it, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the presidential election and Republicans now control the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the majority of state houses, legislatures, and governorships across the country. At no time in my lifetime have fewer Democrats been in power than are in power right now. In the age of Donald Trump, it can be hard to focus on anything other than the dangers he poses, but I've heard one thing repeatedly blamed for why the Democrats have lost so much power and I have to address it — the idea that the party will continue to lose until they win over "working-class voters."
What follows will often be a montage of clips showing white people working in factories or attending Donald Trump rallies, narrated by a discussion on how Trump succeeded in certain voting districts that Obama and Bill Clinton previously won. Again, these districts are primarily white districts, outside of America's major cities, but the discussion, instead of using racial terms, has grown quite comfortable calling these voters "working class."
But here's the thing — working-class African-Americans voted for Hillary Clinton en masse. So did working-class Latinos and working-class Asians and working-class Native Americans and pretty much every non-white, working-class demographic in America. Here's the rub. In an apparent attempt to not deal with the fact that it's working-class white people who are abandoning the Democratic Party, the phrase "working class" is being used in place of the race-specific description.
In case you missed it, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the presidential election and Republicans now control the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the majority of state houses, legislatures, and governorships across the country. At no time in my lifetime have fewer Democrats been in power than are in power right now. In the age of Donald Trump, it can be hard to focus on anything other than the dangers he poses, but I've heard one thing repeatedly blamed for why the Democrats have lost so much power and I have to address it — the idea that the party will continue to lose until they win over "working-class voters."
What follows will often be a montage of clips showing white people working in factories or attending Donald Trump rallies, narrated by a discussion on how Trump succeeded in certain voting districts that Obama and Bill Clinton previously won. Again, these districts are primarily white districts, outside of America's major cities, but the discussion, instead of using racial terms, has grown quite comfortable calling these voters "working class."
But here's the thing — working-class African-Americans voted for Hillary Clinton en masse. So did working-class Latinos and working-class Asians and working-class Native Americans and pretty much every non-white, working-class demographic in America. Here's the rub. In an apparent attempt to not deal with the fact that it's working-class white people who are abandoning the Democratic Party, the phrase "working class" is being used in place of the race-specific description.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton face off during US presidential debates
This is a problem. Because here is what I know — when I get up at 6 or 7 a.m. and take the train to work in the morning in Brooklyn, the trains are packed with working-class voters, and they generally aren't white. When I lived in Atlanta, and Kentucky, and Southern California, the early-morning streets and bus stops were clogged with workers, and they were rarely white.
KING: If U.S. had Calif. laws, we'd likely recall Trump today
Something ugly happens when "working class" becomes shorthand for white. It projects the very distinct impression that working people are white. And sure, white people work, but all over this country, including deep in red states, people of color are filling millions and millions of working-class jobs — in the service industry, factories, public service jobs, the health care industry and everything in between. And the overwhelming majority of those men and women voted for Hillary Clinton and down-ticket Democrats.
Trump arrives to speak to a campaign rally in Naples, Fla., on Oct. 23. (Evan Vucci/AP)
Please stop saying that the Democratic Party has lost "working-class voters." It hasn't. It's an insult to the tens of millions of working-class voters of color who have voted faithfully for decades for each and every Democratic candidate thrown their way.
The Democratic Party, no doubt, has real issues it needs to address about how poorly the party has addressed the needs of everyday people on the issues of minimum wages, gender and racial pay equality, the skyrocketing costs of college tuition and health care, and so much more, but let's be clear: whether the Democratic Party deserved it or not, working-class voters of color have remained faithful to the party in spite of just how corporate and elitist it has become. While the Democratic Party is indeed in a fight for its soul, its identity, its core essence, and is still struggling to be clear on what it stands for, it is not losing because "working-class voters" have bailed.
White people have bailed. The majority of all people of color voted for Hillary Clinton. The majority of all white people voted for Donald Trump. And while I agree with the basic philosophy of Bernie Sanders that if the Democratic Party would do better by all working-class people, it could possibly begin to win back working-class white people in the process, we must not erase the fact that tens of millions of working-class voters simply are not white. Period.
Gunman yells ‘go back to your own country,’ shoots Sikh man
If you want to say that working-class white people are abandoning the Democratic Party, say that. Otherwise, if you fail to include the racial designation you aren't just wrong, you are insulting. Saying "working class" when you truly mean "white working class" only advances the ugly stereotypes that hardworking Americans look like white lumberjacks and listen to country music. They damn sure might look like that here or there, but working-class Americans look like all of America. They are of every hue, every gender, every shape and size, every ability, every ethnicity and nationality. To reduce "working-class voters" to rural white people is a gross oversimplification of the beautiful complexity of this nation.
This is a problem. Because here is what I know — when I get up at 6 or 7 a.m. and take the train to work in the morning in Brooklyn, the trains are packed with working-class voters, and they generally aren't white. When I lived in Atlanta, and Kentucky, and Southern California, the early-morning streets and bus stops were clogged with workers, and they were rarely white.
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Something ugly happens when "working class" becomes shorthand for white. It projects the very distinct impression that working people are white. And sure, white people work, but all over this country, including deep in red states, people of color are filling millions and millions of working-class jobs — in the service industry, factories, public service jobs, the health care industry and everything in between. And the overwhelming majority of those men and women voted for Hillary Clinton and down-ticket Democrats.
Trump arrives to speak to a campaign rally in Naples, Fla., on Oct. 23. (Evan Vucci/AP)
Please stop saying that the Democratic Party has lost "working-class voters." It hasn't. It's an insult to the tens of millions of working-class voters of color who have voted faithfully for decades for each and every Democratic candidate thrown their way.
The Democratic Party, no doubt, has real issues it needs to address about how poorly the party has addressed the needs of everyday people on the issues of minimum wages, gender and racial pay equality, the skyrocketing costs of college tuition and health care, and so much more, but let's be clear: whether the Democratic Party deserved it or not, working-class voters of color have remained faithful to the party in spite of just how corporate and elitist it has become. While the Democratic Party is indeed in a fight for its soul, its identity, its core essence, and is still struggling to be clear on what it stands for, it is not losing because "working-class voters" have bailed.
White people have bailed. The majority of all people of color voted for Hillary Clinton. The majority of all white people voted for Donald Trump. And while I agree with the basic philosophy of Bernie Sanders that if the Democratic Party would do better by all working-class people, it could possibly begin to win back working-class white people in the process, we must not erase the fact that tens of millions of working-class voters simply are not white. Period.
Gunman yells ‘go back to your own country,’ shoots Sikh man
If you want to say that working-class white people are abandoning the Democratic Party, say that. Otherwise, if you fail to include the racial designation you aren't just wrong, you are insulting. Saying "working class" when you truly mean "white working class" only advances the ugly stereotypes that hardworking Americans look like white lumberjacks and listen to country music. They damn sure might look like that here or there, but working-class Americans look like all of America. They are of every hue, every gender, every shape and size, every ability, every ethnicity and nationality. To reduce "working-class voters" to rural white people is a gross oversimplification of the beautiful complexity of this nation.
Pretty much every non-white, working-class demographic in America lined up behing Hillary Clinton. (WIN MCNAMEE/AFP/Getty Images)
It's like reducing all Latinos in this country to Mexicans when the reality is that to be Latino in this nation could mean that your family is from a dozen different countries — none of them being Mexico.
Have you ever noticed how often our nation painfully reduces non-white groups and classifications in the ugliest possible ways? It's why we have white men attacking Sikhs, apparently thinking they were Muslims — who they associate with terrorism — because to be brown and ethnic in America must mean you are dangerous.
PHOTO: President Trump’s base of white, working-class voters showed up at his rally in Cincinnati, Ohio. (WILLIAM PHILPOTT/REUTERS)
Our conversations must be fully parsed and nuanced. It might take more time and make some people uncomfortable, but moving forward, please, pretty please, stop saying "working-class voters" if you are really just talking about white people.
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