s most of you know, it’s tough to run a publication, now more than ever. People want to be well informed but they don’t necessarily want to pay for it, and good writing does cost money, as does editing, design, and all the other tasks that go into assembling a publication. Or, as is often the case, people are willing to pay for good writing and journalism, but there are so many outlets that keep so much of their work behind paywalls that we have to make budget-minded decisions about where we spend money on newspapers and magazines. I get it. You get it.

That said, I want to make a pitch for supporting Hammer & Hope, a magazine rooted in Black politics and culture that is in its early(ish) days and needs our help. As we look at the world burning around us, feeling helpless, publications like Hammer & Hope matter more than ever. It’s not that excellent, rigorously conceived and edited writing will save the world (though it might). The pen is not always mightier than the sword (though sometimes it is). BUT. The kind of writing Hammer & Hope publishes does offer us insight into how we got here, what might lie ahead, and how we can fight the rapidly encroaching fascism, segregation, and white Christian supremacy a great many of our elected leaders are welcoming with open arms.

In their most recent issue, there is 

 about how we need to do much more than vote to create change. Lorgia García Peña 

 of the “Latino vote.” There’s also a great essay about the work 

 in North Carolina to support immigrant communities as they move forward from Hurricane Helene. Braxton Brewington argues that 

, not vaguely defined agendas that won’t really serve Black men’s interests. And, of course, there is much more.
Each issue is full of nuanced, elegant writing and thought leadership that is well edited. The work is unapologetically activist-oriented and committed to liberation for Black people, for Latino people, for other POCs, for women, for the trans community, for immigrant communities, for all of us. Hammer & Hope is a real gem, and it is also a necessity. The coming months and years are precarious, particularly for publications like Hammer & Hope, as philanthropic funders tread the new lines being drawn by the Trump regime. These funders don’t really take risks, and anything that challenges the status quo, which is Hammer & Hope’s bread and butter, is seen as a risk.

So. If you can 

, please do so. Any amount helps. The future of Hammer & Hope is in our (broadly speaking) hands. Let’s do what we can to support their bold risk-taking.

— Roxane Gay


P.S. Any time I mention something to which you may want to contribute, do know that I am contributing, too. I support Hammer & Hope with a monthly contribution.

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay: A Great Magazine Could Use Some Financial Support

 have been deeply moved by the existence of Hammer & Hope. It’s one of the few magazines focused on what’s actually happening in the world right now. We’re in the midst of a lot of horrific things — right-wing escalations here at home and around the world. But whenever I turn to Hammer & Hope, I start feeling like people are doing something about these crises.

Hammer & Hope is a place for an expansive Black conversation that can hold our academic, intellectual, political, and cultural concerns. But it’s also a space that makes you feel like more things are possible. As you finish each issue, you know more about how to move forward with integrity and connection, and that’s a great way to show solidarity.

Social media does so much damage to our brains’ capacity to think. It gives the impression that you can think only one thing, or else someone is going to come yell at you. We can forget that we’re meant to have a lot of different positions. We’re meant to have respectful, brilliant, informed conversations, and to struggle and tussle with one another. Hammer & Hope holds room for our differences at a time when very few spaces are trying to do that. It’s a breath of fresh air to slow down and read these issues — it’s actually good for our brains to take the time to read this way.

It felt so important to me to have a Black magazine dedicate 

 to Palestine. This past year and a half has taught me that solidarity looks a lot of different ways. Where do we put our attention and where do we ask our community to put their attention? With so many crises at home, I could imagine it’s very easy to keep our attention here. But Hammer & Hope has a deep commitment to internationalism. Our crises are in relation to all the other crises unfolding around the world. The same people creating crises for us are creating them in so many other places. I want to say thank you publicly to the magazine for that dedication to international perspectives.

I want every single person who’s reading this to join me in 

becoming a paying member of Hammer & Hope

, even if you can make only a small contribution, because I’m so moved by its reporting and storytelling. It’s so important that people understand: We — the readers and the community — decide whether these outlets actually get to keep going. Our support determines whether or not these places survive. And as much as possible right now, we must invest in building the things we want to exist.

So many of the problems we’re dealing with are massive. It’s overwhelming. We’re talking about the entire globe, entire species; we’re talking about every system. We have to remember that everything massive starts small and is made up of small acts of support, weaving bravery and consistency. The small projects we are able to get off the ground can ripple out to have a really massive impact. We are all fertile soil, and then these seed packets come along. Hammer & Hope is one of these seed packets. Let’s put it into the soil and see what takes root.

adrienne maree brown

adrienne maree brown on Hammer & Hope: It’s Stunning, It’s In-Depth, It’s Black, It’s Cool

Start here. Once you cross the threshold, you’re home. The door

is what brings you from out to in. The door:


the only unit of measurement, not how “poor,”

not four walls, not foundation or drywall or chimney or roof. A door


opens a place into home. Remember, on Gorée

Island, they walked us through that unknown mouth, the Door


made our own bodies a home, made doorways

out of our voices in the air, their undeniable treasure.

each other. How a nod can mean you’re home — home in feet planted, freely, on the floor.

My grandmothers made homes out of things that were not houses — the fervor

of their Blackmother spirits filling the Bessemer projects, the Greensboro trailer —

no fireplace but the warm TV set, no yard but the red clay. The splendor

of what lives beyond what you call welfare, inner city, blight. Don’t you know our

words are a way home? We even bend language into a liberating door.

I used to think my proper tongue meant I leaned toward

the thing that stole our culture. But we can’t outgrow our home. Or,

we have never left in the ways that matter — home in our flavors,

our dances, the languages we live. Home is in us, behind a locked door.

We bent the blue cries of this place into full-bodied song, bent frail walls into shelter.

We bent the cast-off portions into a meal, we bent two cents into a dollar.

We bent redlines and tenements into a sanctuary you can’t enter.

If you want to know how Black folks find our way back to heaven, start here. Open the door.

Carrie Mae Weems

Ashley M. Jones

Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, N.Y.

Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems and Jack Shainman Gallery

Come In 

ow do we put back together a society that has broken apart? How do we build solidarity within a culture of individualism, punishment, and accumulation when we are constantly repairing ourselves in the face of various forms of daily heartbreak?

If we lend ourselves to the emergent struggles of our times — against Cop City; for Black history, abortion rights, trans liberation, widespread debt cancellation, climate justice, access to land, and alternative food systems; in solidarity with actors and writers on strike and so many others — drawing connections and showing up is where we should start and return to again and again. Now is a time for experimentation and discipline alike. We need to accept what an activist involved in the fight to Stop Cop City in Atlanta calls 

 rather than demand political, strategic, or tactical purism. We have to allow for different people to show up in various ways in terms of ideology and struggle; in our protests and movements, we need the widest participation possible to win.

The uprisings of 2020 showed serious cracks in the system’s legitimacy. By some estimates as much as 

 participated in the protests in some form, a figure without precedent in U.S. history. Around the world, people held protests in at least 

, embodying the globalized nature of our emerging struggles. Mass social upheavals unsettle the status quo; disruption proves to everyone that “normal” is a product of circumstance and not inevitability, that things might not have to stay the same after all. That revolt sent a flare into the sky: 

Don’t mistake the status quo for daily acquiescence. 

. We’re neither happy nor content with things as they are.

But we need more than protests and temporary uprisings. We must further develop our organizations into social institutions capable of creating new relations in every domain of our lives here and now. Previous generations of struggle led to the 

 to one of the worst epidemics in modern history. This fact is not lost on today’s ruling class, which is hard at work making sure today’s young students don’t know how or even whether these past victories happened — 

At work, let’s fight for strong workers’ movements — not only unions — that recognize and build upon the shared interests of a multiracial working class. At schools, let’s struggle against censorship like the opposition to 

 and Black history in the state of Florida while also fighting for 

 like Planting Justice’s in California, and for expanding access to and resources for public schools 

the way the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil

 does. Let’s push for state accountability by planning and constructing the missing infrastructure of our neighborhoods like the socialist shack dwellers movement 

 in South Africa. Their struggle shows how the democratic input of everyday people shapes the built environment of their community, while also recalling the mutual-aid efforts of organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.

In Atlanta, several formations came together to build independent grassroots power to fight Cop City. They have targeted formal legal and political processes but also organized protests, occupied the forest where the city intends to build the police training facility, held a week of actions, and put on music festivals. In response, they have been targeted with sustained and virulent police violence and repression, tarred as terrorists by the state government.

These examples reveal the strategic importance of stable organizations pursuing long-term projects and programs. Uprisings are not enough — constructing an equal and democratic society requires the sustained participation of the people. They are the legitimate creators of the institutions and defenders of rights central to communal life. Beyond the 

 of direct democracy in protests, assemblies, and occupations, we need people power in practice and not just in slogans.

Hammer & Hope

Illustration by Dakarai Akil. Photographs by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times, David Paul Morris/Bloomberg, Andri Tambunan/AFP, George Rose, and Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images.

Illustration by Dakarai Akil. Photographs via Getty Images.

Uprisings Are Just the Beginning

he state of the country is dismal. The decline of the United States into a more open form of authoritarianism continues. Donald Trump has escalated a potentially 

 the chief civil servant at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on baseless charges that its economic data was “rigged.” The developments of the Jeffrey Epstein story provoke 

 from the president and his administration officials equal parts farcical and chilling. The Voting Rights Act and other major victories of the civil rights movement are “hanging by a thread,” according to 

. And the administration’s assaults on climate protections threaten 

 of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the privatization of public services in the aftermath. Trump’s big, ugly bill, passed into law on July 4, gives Immigration and Customs Enforcement an additional $75 billion, enabling mass deportation and violent control over migrant workers and 

The damage here is connected to damage elsewhere. The Trump administration’s massive cuts to 

 have contributed to food insecurity and famine in several places, including 

; in the last, aid distribution sites run by a 

 where Israeli soldiers have shot to death dozens of Palestinians seeking food as part of a Trump-backed plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Trump’s illegal use of El Salvador’s inhumane carceral system has strengthened its far-right president, Nayib Bukele, whose party just approved constitutional changes allowing unlimited presidential terms. The Trump administration is threatening a trade war with Brazil and sanctioning one of its judges in order to prevent the country from protecting its democracy from the 

 former president and Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.

But cracks in the right-wing offensive are also starting to emerge. Although chiefly symbolic, promises of recognition of a Palestinian state by 

’s conditional threats to do the same, indicate growing momentum in favor of the global movement for justice in Palestine. Students have endured arrests, expulsions, and systematic persecution in order to denounce Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, which is gaining recognition from new sectors of society, including 

, who cynically denied it for more than a year. Norway’s 

 to begin divesting from some Israeli companies may signal that more material costs for the state of Israel are on the way.

More hopeful is the global movement of workers in solidarity with Palestine, which includes trade unions mounting direct actions against 

 and other shipping companies accused of assisting Israel’s genocide. The Trump regime’s attempt to use the military to intimidate Los Angeles was met by an equally militant response by Angelenos, led in part by 

, and other organizations. In Nevada, the Culinary Workers Union made history by 

 of the entire Las Vegas Strip for the first time in the city’s history. In Ohio, community and church leaders are 

 to protect their Haitian neighbors from the growing mass deportation machine. Meanwhile, the growing electoral momentum of the mayoral candidates 

 within the Democratic Party that could lead to a 

Thank you for reading our work. Please donate generously to these grassroots mutual-aid projects that provide crucial work on the front lines:

 is a binational project created in 2023 to provide food, supplies, and medical care to Sudanese refugees in Adré in eastern Chad fleeing genocidal violence in Darfur, as well as displaced people within Sudan.

 is a donations-based aid initiative led by Palestinians who work to provide emergency shelter and aid to displaced families in Gaza.

 is a rural association based in Haiti aimed at promoting cultural and equitable economic development through cooperatives and popular education.

The Workers’ Center of Central New York

 is a grassroots organization focused on political training and labor rights for low-wage workers, including undocumented people.

It Feels Like Hell on Earth, but Another World Is Possible

t’s morning again in America. Federal agents snatch students off the streets. The White House boasts of banishing hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison, ignoring the judges who demand due process. Head Start, federal science research, and domestic violence shelters await the chopping block. Hospitals turn away trans teens. Retirement accounts go up in smoke. The regulatory state unravels while corporate polluters are empowered to spew toxins far and wide. Powerful corporations and institutions abandon their meager commitments to diversity. Milquetoast Democrats barely object, fantasizing that they can win by 

. The Trump administration is repurposing antiracism into a grenade and lobbing it at the remnants of the welfare state. Across the world, the right wing is blowing up everything and incinerating the planet. White supremacy is apocalyptic for everyone.

Regular people are stepping into the fray, providing the varied, creative, noncooperative opposition to the neo-fascist administrative takeover that we need. A thousand people gathered outside the upstate New York home of President Donald Trump's border czar to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abduction of a local family, leading to their release. Street protests and demonstrations at Tesla showrooms, part of a worldwide economic boycott of Elon Musk’s company, have resulted in a whopping 71 percent drop in its profits in the first quarter of the year. 

 took place from late January to late March 2025, compared with the same period during the first Trump administration. The demonstrations are smaller than earlier iterations, having to rebuild after the demobilizations of the Biden presidency. While this era of resistance may lack the iconic novelty of the 2017 Women’s March, a more capacious and potentially unruly coalition is being forged — one more attuned to the problem of oligarchy, less inclined to exceptionalize Trump, and potentially more capable of nimble responses to cascading crises.

It’s no surprise that people are fighting back. An April poll of 2,300 registered voters found that 

 of the Democrats surveyed support politicians “who are calling on Democrats to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Trump and his administration and ‘fight harder.’” Instead, Democratic lawmakers are “

” about such pressure from the people they represent. Constituents in deep red areas have so opposed proposed cuts to social services like Medicaid and SNAP that the National Republican Congressional Committee chair 

 to stop hosting town halls to avoid incensed audiences.

For 18 months, the mainstream media and leading Democrats refused to distinguish anti-genocide protests from antisemitism. Now international students who dared to criticize Israel’s death-dealing in Gaza face detention and deportation. We interview the Cornell graduate student Momodou Taal about his decision to leave the country under the threat of political abduction. These shocking acts of state repression are alerting more people to the ways Palestine has been used as a wedge issue by people for whom Jewish safety has been a useful pretext for a power grab.

Power grabs have come fast and furious in recent months and in multiple forms, from Musk’s chainsaw to the public sector known as DOGE to the rolling back of already inadequate renewable energy commitments and the cross-sector witch hunt against antiracism efforts. This issue details some of the ways people are resisting. We profile newly organized federal workers and learn from filmmakers, artists, and Afro-Brazilian Beyoncé fans who understand that culture, to quote contributor Maddy Clifford, is “essential to building the power to defeat fascism.” And let’s not forget that Los Angeles, a global center of cultural power, was literally ablaze earlier this year. Robin D. G. Kelley writes about recovery efforts in Altadena and the community’s vision for regeneration and new beginnings.

To effectively combat fascism, we need to understand it as an international phenomenon. The British writer Gary Younge considers how Trump and his brethren in England and across Europe fuel movements where “a belligerent sense of whiteness and national identity, beset by economic insecurity, is winning elections.” In South Africa, one such movement has gained steam after Trump condemned a new land reform law as racist against Afrikaners. We talk to Zandile Nsibande, a leader of a shack-dweller movement there, who explains why working-class Black people also oppose the law.

Here in the United States, we can understand the latest government and corporate attempts to roll back civil rights, antiracism, renewed labor militancy, and climate progress as part of a counterrevolution without a revolution, a reactionary response to the promise of the 2020 uprisings. Five years after the George Floyd rebellion, our abolitionist dreams threatened the status quo. Now the right — assisted, as ever, by some liberals — is on a deadly rampage to quash those dreams at any cost. Conservative extremists intend to burn down Washington, abolishing the Department of Education, dissolving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and waging a scorched-earth war on antiracism efforts. Poor Black and brown people are already suffering the most, but the consequences will be devastating for almost everyone except the supremely wealthy.

How can we make sense of this onslaught? We asked Black organizers, writers, and academics to consider the state of Black politics and what has changed since the breakthrough in 2020, when millions of people hoped for reparations and racial justice. What happened to the largest and most significant Black movement in two generations? What went wrong in the Black Lives Matter era? Only by answering those questions can we move forward. And we must.

Illustration by Stephanie Santana. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler, via Library of Congress.

White Supremacy Is Apocalyptic for Everyone

ow do we begin to encapsulate the political chaos of the past few months? Joe Biden’s soporific and incoherent June debate performance was followed by an attempt on Donald Trump’s life by a 20-year-old registered Republican and then the most unhinged Republican National Convention yet. Now that Biden has announced that he will no longer seek re-election, some of the fog is beginning to clear. Like a growing number of party elites, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, a former top cop in California who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Who knows what will happen next.

In recent weeks, Biden’s flailing ineptitude brought together an unlikely group of bedfellows (“bedwetters,” according to the president’s diehard supporters) who successfully demanded that he step down — a motley crew that included many left and progressive organizations, some big money donors, former Obama insiders-turned-podcasters, veteran consultants such as James Carville, Never Trump Republicans, a smattering of Democratic representatives, George Clooney, and a majority of Democratic voters. This strange alliance united people who insist that Biden has been one of the greatest American presidents — the problem was his age and rambling delivery — and those who object to his principles and policies, particularly his unwavering support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

The left has long called attention to Biden’s weaknesses. But over the past 10 months, his administration has profoundly alienated core constituencies the Democrats need to win, young people foremost among them. Videos of unbearable suffering in Gaza — the leveled buildings, bloodied and traumatized children, and anguished parents — have sparked a moral revolt, prompting people to take the fight for Palestinian liberation to the streets, college campuses, the United Nations, and the ballot box. Organized student protesters and Democrats opposed to the unfolding genocide who voted uncommitted in the primaries were the first to show en masse that Biden was unelectable, well before the now infamous debate.

Much to the annoyance of liberal pundits — including the newly Biden-skeptical Carville, who fumed, “Don’t talk about fucking Gaza and student loans!” — the rising generation understands that the occupation of and assault on Palestine is inseparable from other crises, including systemic racism and police violence, unchecked corporate power and public austerity, fascism and climate disaster. In response, new bonds of solidarity are being forged across racial, ethnic, religious, and generational divides to fight for Palestinian liberation — developments we tracked in our previous issue.

But far more than the 2020 protests for racial justice, this movement has sparked ferocious resistance. Nearly everywhere, transformative solidarity is not only spreading — it is also being undermined and criminalized. For exercising their First Amendment rights, students have been slandered, beaten, arrested, suspended, expelled, doxxed, and blacklisted, including some of those interviewed and photographed for this issue. Educators have been reprimanded or fired or had their hiring frozen. New York Democrats responded to the protests against genocide in Gaza by proposing legislation that would turn blocking public streets or bridges into acts of domestic terrorism. At the federal level, Republican lawmakers from other states have 

This is a continuation of a longstanding trend that intensified after the Standing Rock protests and then again after the 2020 uprisings, when multiple states passed laws imposing harsh penalties on protesters who obstruct traffic on roads or even sidewalks. The state is setting dangerous new precedents, something Priscilla Grim chillingly illustrates in an essay in this issue; she was indicted on racketeering and domestic terrorism charges simply for joining a protest against Atlanta’s Cop City. (Let’s not forget that the Atlanta metro police routinely train and swap tactics with the Israel Defense Forces, providing further proof our issues really are connected.) In every case, the goal is the same: to splinter fragile coalitions, isolate the left, scare off potential allies, and foster reactionary solidarity to quell dissent.

Whenever ordinary people begin to come together across their myriad differences to challenge oppression, wherever fragile shoots of trust begin to grow, the powerful seek to mow them down and plant a more mean-spirited and lethal crop in their place. Last fall, influential Democratic Party adviser Ruy Teixeira published a piece connecting the progressive response to Gaza to the George Floyd uprisings. In it, he encouraged his fellow Democrats to “throw the intersectional left under the bus.” Over the past 10 months, many elected officials have done just that, further emboldening a fascist right that has beaten nonviolent protesters while funneling mountains of cash into MAGA candidates’ coffers and pretending to denounce a make-believe scourge of antisemitism on the left. A disturbing number of Democrats have provided cover for their opportunistic Republican colleagues, including New York Representative Mondaire Jones, who sided with AIPAC to oust his cease-fire-supporting colleague Jamaal Bowman. For members of both parties, Palestine is not a real place full of real people but a wedge issue to exploit in order to marginalize the left — to sabotage inclusive, transformative solidarity while fostering its reactionary counterpart.

Across the world, far-right governments, which have been gaining ground by forging reactionary solidarity among their base, have faced encouraging electoral setbacks in the face of solidifying opposition in France, India, and the United Kingdom, while the threat of renewed austerity in Kenya has brought together coordinated mass protests of such intensity that President William Ruto dismissed almost his entire cabinet. It remains to be seen how a new Democratic ticket will respond to this fraught moment and whether organizers can continue to build on the momentum that forced Biden to step down to help ensure his successors stop funding the slaughter of Palestinians.

A majority of Americans believe a cease-fire is urgently needed. But we need more than positive survey results — we need to do the hard work of cultivating solidarity and building collective power. The question is what kind of solidarity we, the people, will choose to grow: A flourishing, inclusive, and transformative solidarity that fights to universalize access to affordable housing, transportation, dignified working conditions, and peace? Or a poisonous, exclusionary, and reactionary variant that aims to incarcerate, deport, and deprive people of rights, protections, and even life itself?

he distinction between transformative and reactionary solidarity reminds us that solidarity is not always a good thing, as Hammer & Hope editorial board member Astra Taylor and the activist Leah Hunt-Hendrix argue in 

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea

. Picture the odious insularity of white supremacists, ethno-nationalists, and religious fundamentalists or of otherwise hypercompetitive billionaires who lock arms to defend their class interests, the provincialism of police unions, or the resentful bonds men’s-rights influencers forge with their followers. These people are united, but toward what end?

This form of reactionary politics exceeds U.S. borders. Narendra Modi’s Hindutva dogma promotes Hindu Brahminical domination through violence against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Adivasis, and Dalits throughout India; Viktor Orbán’s fascist traditionalism encourages religious and racial intolerance in Hungary; Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionism colonizes and kills Palestinians while also smearing anti-Zionist Jews in Israel; Javier Milei’s anti-migrants and anti-Indigenous austerity plan led to the closing of the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (Inadi) in Argentina; Jair Bolsonaro’s racist legacy includes the subordination of minority groups to the Christian majority and the rise of a militarized Christian state in Brazil. These leaders have one another’s backs, as documented ties between Netanyahu and Orbán reveal, as well as the growing popularity of the Israeli government among European far-right parties. Reactionary solidarity locks its adherents in a toxic embrace that essentializes its enemies — “human animals,” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians last fall.

This chauvinism serves a purpose. To paraphrase legal scholar Ian Haney López and author Heather McGhee, reactionary solidarity functions as a “plutocrat’s scythe”: a way economic and political elites weaponize a wide range of resentments and fears to harvest obscene wealth and power. And harvest they have. Fascist formations and parties around the world continue to make inroads, gaining converts and seats in legislative bodies. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires has climbed to a record high. Some of the most notorious members of this class are now proud promoters of a racist, conspiratorial right wing. Trump endorsers Elon Musk and Bill Ackman are bound by reactionary solidarity, having conscripted themselves and their vast fortunes into the “war on woke” — a battle absurdly out of proportion to any racial justice reforms or concessions. It’s a reminder of just how threatening some found 2020 and the specter of multiracial solidarity.

But the problem isn’t just the right. Embedded in every conservative backlash is the failure of the liberal establishment to improve people’s lives. Liberals’ unwillingness to blame the capitalist system for hurling us toward mass immiseration and planetary destruction leaves people grasping for explanations, and the far right is happy to fill the gap. Millions can barely make ends meet, yet corporate Democrats claimed for months that the issue was bad vibes and the public’s ignorance about how inflation works, opening space for fascist faux populists to position themselves as champions of the working class.

This reminds us that the term “backlash” has always been a misnomer. It misleadingly implies that conservative counter-reactions to social movements are natural and inevitable as opposed to ongoing and engineered. But division is not our default state; authoritarians spend money, time, energy, coordination, power, and opportunism to foment it. The right’s forging of reactionary solidarity is a long-running and expertly executed project — one that takes advantage of not only liberal failures but also the shortcomings of the left.

olidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing,” writes the renowned and much missed labor strategist Jane McAlevey in 

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

. Whether reactionary or transformative, building solidarity requires resources, vision, and a willingness to dig in for the long haul. The kind of solidarity we need has to be consciously cultivated, meeting by meeting, day after day. Many of the pieces in this issue document efforts to do precisely that, whether in Sudan or Haiti or during past iterations of struggles that we continue to fight.

As leftists, we know we’d all be more secure if we funded social services instead of jails; more stable if our neighbors could stay safely housed and well fed; better paid if immigrants weren’t exploited for poverty wages; healthier if we protected the air and water in poor communities and distant countries. If being right were enough, the left would have won long ago. The same goes for having public opinion on our side. Survey after survey shows Americans want many progressive things, from environmental protections and universal health care to free college and union representation to a cease-fire in Gaza. But polling results aren’t power.

Power is created by building transformative solidarity and engaging as many people as possible — like the unlikely coalition that came together to push President Biden to pass the torch, based on little more than a shared desire to have marginally better odds of staving off Trumpism. To pose the kind of challenge that can restructure society on a more profound level, we will need to build movements that are both disciplined and diverse. In the United States, few if any social groups have the numbers to single-handedly overcome the forces invested in our oppression, which means we need one another to win. The multiracial working class toils day after day, but to exercise collective power over the economy, it has to be brought into consciousness, each individual transformed when they come to the realization that they are valued and needed and can be part of something bigger than themselves. That’s what organizing is all about.

We organize by meeting people where they are, even when they are somewhere that initially disappoints or even offends us. In a 2020 interview, 

, recounts a trip to Palestine he took as part of a delegation for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He recalls his dismay upon returning home when some people he met expressed reservations about being in solidarity with Palestinians on the grounds that some harbored anti-Black sentiments. He responded that the Black community was hardly free of Islamophobia — should Palestinians withhold solidarity from them? In Kelley’s words, “solidarity is not a market exchange.” It’s not transactional, a kind of down payment on future reciprocity or a campaign donation that can buy Mondaire Jones’s vote. It’s transformational.

Of course, making space for difference and disagreement is easier said than done, especially at high-tension moments like the present, when we’re encouraged to denounce people who fall short and to see all conflicts as zero-sum. This patient ethos can be tough on those of us who prioritize conceptual clarity and consistency. “We think that the world will collapse as the result of a logical contradiction: this is the illusion of the intellectual — that ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation,” observed the late great sociologist Stuart Hall. “When, in fact, the whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic  (i.e. historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference.”

As philosopher and poet Audre Lorde recognized, we need to find ways to find common cause in our complexity and heterogeneity:

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identi­ties. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our dif­ferences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

Black Lives Matter protesters outside Trump International Hotel and Tower in Midtown Manhattan during another day of demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd, New York, June 5, 2020. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson/VII.

Gaza, the Democrats, and How to Fix Our Wretched Politics

t’s perpetually election season in the United States, but this one has been especially bizarre and intense. Donald Trump was shot in the ear. Joe Biden mumbled his way through a debate that was his downfall. Kamala Harris fell from a coconut tree and became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. But Harris’s campaign quickly squandered the initial burst of enthusiasm and momentum as it pivoted to courting centrists and trying to outflank the opposition on the military and border security. The first Black and South Asian woman to have a chance at the Oval Office, Harris has tried to position herself as a transformative candidate in the mold of Barack Obama while actually running more like Hillary Clinton, pandering to Wall Street and vowing to include Republicans in her cabinet. This rearranging of the deck chairs on the sinking Democratic ship has unfolded against the backdrop of racist anti-immigrant fearmongering, conspiracy theories and threats of post-election violence, catastrophic heat waves and hurricanes, and the unceasing, enraging, heart-rending genocide in Gaza and devastating strikes across the region.

We don’t know what will happen on Nov. 5, but we do know we can’t afford to ignore elections. Political power matters, and it’s important to understand how it operates — and how we might influence it. That’s why the writers in this issue have taken the time to examine the electoral dilemma from multiple angles. They 

 why this presidential race is so close, 

 Harris’s reactionary appeals to Black men, and 

 the strategy that drove the Uncommitted movement. We 

 to two former Biden officials who resigned in protest over the administration’s policy toward Israel and Palestine and also 

 at more participatory alternatives to elections that allow people to vote for policies instead of voting for personalities.

In the end, we know our collective liberation won’t come from the ballot box. There are many other forms of power we need to build and wield if we want to transform society: power in unions, power in the streets, power in deeply rooted community organizing and coalition building. This is the power displayed by the 

 aiding their western North Carolina neighbors in Hurricane Helene’s aftermath and by the patient organizers who have built a 

 that has helped make Minnesota a progressive stronghold. It’s the power 

 and faculty are forging on campuses as they begin to repair movement infrastructure destroyed by the far right and band together to fight administrators hellbent on squeezing workers.

There is also power in alternatives, in beginning to build the world we want out of the rubble, planting seeds for future harvests by constructing cooperative enterprises, reconnecting with the land, and trying to create a future free of incarceration. We see this kind of visionary power in the 

, where people are creating new systems of agriculture and exchange in order to resist colonization and exploitation. This is the power sought by 

 who are working to dismantle the prison industrial complex, one of the pillars of the fascist threat now threatening to engulf us.

As essays in this issue reveal, building small-d democratic power — power rooted in solidarity — is never easy. Our organizing efforts have to contend with racism, sexism, mistrust, external attacks, internal conflict, and the common but misguided view that outcomes are always zero-sum. But as an account of the deep connections between Palestinian and Black liberation argues, this kind of solidarity isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s a strategic one. We can save ourselves only if we do the work to save one another.

As academic and activist Donna Murch writes, “Winning is hard, but it is absolutely necessary.” Even if the worst outcome of an all-out takeover by the far right is avoided in the weeks and months ahead, the left can hardly begin to claim victory. To have any hope of actually creating change on a scale that meets the crises that define our time, we need to organize everywhere, building power person by person, day after day in our workplaces, schools, faith centers, neighborhoods, rural communities, local governments, and more. We need a plan that extends far beyond one election cycle, and we need to be realistic and relentless about the monumental effort, insight, compassion, and courage this task requires. Let’s get to work.

Illustration by Golnar Adili. Photographs by Abbas Momani/AFP and Erin Lefevre/NurPhoto, via Getty Images.

Elections Matter, but We Need More Than the Ballot Box to Achieve Collective Liberation

he state of Israel has unleashed the most brutal military bombardment since World War II on the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. This siege came in response to Hamas’s breach of the wall that delineates the Israeli occupation and the group’s subsequent attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.

 the nearly 15,000 air strikes the U.S. carried out on Iraq in its campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017. In December, U.S. intelligence sources divulged to CNN that 40 to 45 percent of the 

 against Gaza were “dumb bombs,” or unguided missiles, which can be more dangerous to civilians in densely populated areas.

“When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target,” an Israeli military source told reporters as part of a bombshell 

 attributing the virulence of Israel’s assault in part to an increased reliance on artificial intelligence to generate targets. “Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

Intense anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, and what the Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said described as “Orientalism” have underwritten the West’s perpetual wars, sieges, and onslaughts against the Middle East, wars that America’s client state, Israel, has helped manage for multiple generations. This racism has normalized America’s and Israel’s war crimes in the Middle East.

But this is far more than a simple ideological project. As the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the region, to the tune of more than $3 billion each year, Israel has long been of use to the West as the Zionist project of building a state on the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population. The U.S. disguises its geopolitical designs to control access to the region’s oil supply under the guise of rooting out terrorism. Though America’s “war on terror” failed, its afterlife of security theater, surveillance, and abject racist demonization of a perpetual Arab or Muslim “other” lives on.

Soon after Israel began its siege, Joe Biden made a mockery of Palestinian grief and death. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” he said, echoing the Israeli government. His 

 recognizing 100 days of the war on Gaza made no mention of the thousands of Palestinians whom Israel had killed. More recently, Biden enjoyed an ice cream cone with a late-night talk show host while blithely suggesting the possibility of a cease-fire. A week later, The Washington Post revealed that the United States has quietly delivered 100 weapons packages to Israel over the course of its assault, including thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, and bunker busters.

Of course, the U.S. has long licensed Arab death. Consider the Clinton era. In 1996, when Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” asked UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children caused by U.S.-backed sanctions on Iraq, Albright infamously said, “The price is worth it.” Activists confronted her the next year, and she responded, “I am as concerned about the children in Iraq as any person in this room.” But, she added, “Saddam Hussein is the one who has the fate of his country in his hands. … He is the one responsible for starving children, not the United States of America.”

George W. Bush claimed after the attacks on Sept. 11 that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” and “Islam is peace.” But the indiscriminate targeting of Arabs and Muslims abroad through various war efforts and domestically by federal and local police during the Bush presidency contradicted such overtures. The federal government’s gearing up for war reverberated across the country and fomented an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and extraordinary racism. 

 taken soon after Sept. 11 found 58 percent of Americans supported “intensive security checks” for Arabs, 49 percent favored special identification cards for them, and 32 percent approved of “special surveillance” of Arabs.

The media played a significant role in providing bigoted justifications for racial profiling. Richard Cohen, then a columnist for The Washington Post, 

: “We have become driveling idiots on matters of race and ethnicity. One hundred percent of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 mass murder were Arabs. Their accomplices, if any, were probably Arabs, too — at least Muslims. Ethnicity and religion are the very basis of their movement. It hardly makes sense, therefore, to ignore that fact and, say, give Swedish au pair girls heading to the United States the same scrutiny as Arab men coming from the Middle East.”

Indeed, less than a month after the attacks, Bush sang a different tune from his earlier overture:

They hate us because we love the idea that people can worship an Almighty God any way he or she sees fit. They hate us because we love political discourse and a free society. They hate us because of our free press. They hate everything about us, because of our freedom. And there’s another — there are a lot of distinguishing features, but one of the most clear ones to me is this: We value life in America. We say everybody is precious, everybody counts, every life has worth, every life has dignity. They don’t value life.

An emboldened American security state was activated. In the weeks after Sept. 11, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies rounded up and detained more than 1,200 people, mostly Arabs and Muslims. The Department of Justice initiated a program of “voluntary interviews” with 5,000 “non-immigrant” men who claimed citizenship from countries the U.S. insisted harbored Al Qaeda. Two years later, in preparation for war with Iraq, a new Iraqi Task Force, created by the FBI, interviewed 11,000 people of Iraqi origin living in the United States, many of them citizens.

The swell of anti-Arab suspicion and racism shaped the lead-up to America’s baseless war of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. Politicians’ xenophobia obscured the brutality of a war that killed between 150,000 and perhaps as many as 600,000 Iraqis. The widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, already weakened by a decade of brutal U.S.-backed sanctions, resulted in even more deaths of Iraqis. It also helped to foment the conditions that allowed for the creation of the U.S. gulag in Guantánamo Bay — a military space controlled by the U.S. absent any rights or freedom. The climate of war allowed for torture and abuse of detainees at 

, too. Tens of thousands more were killed in Afghanistan — the longest war in U.S. history, ending only in 2021.

According to a 2023 report from Brown University, researchers estimated that more than four million people were either killed or eventually died in the War on Terror. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, millions have died from what The Washington Post 

 as “waves of violence, hunger, the devastation of public services, and the spread of disease.” In fact, it was anti-Palestinian bigotry that drove the creation of and shaped the development of anti-terrorism laws, according to a new 

 by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In 1969, the first-ever mention of terrorism in a federal law “dealt specifically with restricting humanitarian aid to Palestinians and inaugurated a pattern of rendering Palestinians synonymous with terrorism.”

The characterization of Arabs and Muslims as forever enemies was built into politics and disseminated through popular culture, which endlessly portrayed brown-skinned men as terrorists.

Republicans have long worn their derision of Arabs and Muslims openly. The far right concocted a mass hysteria over the conspiracy theory that Muslims sought to implement Shariah law in the U.S. Since 2010, state legislatures have introduced at least 201 anti-Shariah bills. Breaking with longstanding international consensus, Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested land of Jerusalem. And he implemented a ban on entry into the United States from a handful of majority Muslim countries after he was inaugurated as president, a ban the Supreme Court upheld. More recently, in the weeks after Hamas’s attacks, Montana Representative Ryan Zinke introduced legislation (with 10 cosponsors) that would 

 from entering the United States. “I don’t even want to call it the Palestinian flag because they’re not a state,” Republican Representative Max Miller of Ohio 

 after Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib pinned a Palestinian flag to her office door. “They’re a territory that’s about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we’re going to turn that into a parking lot.”

We have come to expect such racist dreck from the Republican Party. But this is the Democratic Party’s war. Democrats have mastered the art of performing grief even while Biden’s intersectional and multiracial cohort of UN ambassadors and functionaries oppose cease-fire resolutions that could immediately end the war. When Tlaib spoke out early in favor of a cease-fire and for an end to Israeli atrocities in Gaza, Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, a queer Haitian American, described as “repugnant” and “disgraceful” statements from Tlaib and others in the Squad calling for a cease-fire or criticizing Israel.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi told Palestine solidarity protesters to “go back to China” and 

 that calls for a cease-fire are “Mr. Putin’s message.” As if time-traveling back to the Cold War, she pressed on without evidence. “This is directly connected to what he would like to see,” she said. “Some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere,” but others “are connected to Russia.” Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, 

 that if Canada attacked Buffalo, N.Y., in the way that Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, “there would be no Canada” — an apparent endorsement of collective punishment and the right of Israel to annihilate Gaza.

Beyond such crass rhetoric, in early February, 

 voted for a $17.6 billion aid package put forth by Republicans to finance Israel’s siege of Gaza; it failed to pass. Instead of pressuring Israel to allow more aid trucks into Gaza, which is on the brink of famine, the Biden administration has dropped parachutes of food aid, some of which failed to open midair, killing people upon landing, and rushed to create a temporary port off Gaza’s coast for humanitarian aid shipments, a theatrical, cumbersome workaround.

But we are in a new moment. For the short life of this war, millions across the globe have roared in opposition, demanding a cease-fire, along with medical aid and food for Palestinians. The protests spurred a campaign spearheaded by South Africa at the International Court of Justice to make a surprising intervention, holding that Israel’s actions may constitute genocide. Opposition to Israel’s siege has activated a Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. led largely by Palestinian Americans and young Jews. U.S. financing and arming of this war has made Biden politically vulnerable even as he continues to stand by it.

Biden’s polling among Arab Americans voters has plummeted from 59 percent to 17 percent, while progressives have threatened to withhold their votes in the fall’s presidential contest. His political future is further imperiled by 

 to Israel’s actions in Gaza among Democratic voters, especially the young. Most recently, tens of thousands of Democratic Party primary voters in Michigan, Minnesota, and elsewhere voted “uncommitted” as a protest vote against Biden’s Gaza policy. The Democratic establishment downplayed the Michigan vote in public, but when Vice President Kamala Harris was dispatched to commemorate the 59th anniversary of the Selma civil rights march, she called for an “immediate cease-fire,” then paused for applause, “for at least the next six weeks.” Of course, the movement demands an immediate and permanent cease-fire and an end to the occupation. Harris’s use of “cease-fire” instead of Biden’s “pause” is the administration’s effort to co-opt an antiwar movement that has spiraled beyond their control or their imaginations. But that rhetorical shift is also evidence that the “uncommitted” movement is unsettling the party’s consensus, as was Senator Chuck Schumer’s surprising excoriation of Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech.

Palestinians have challenged the U.S.-Israeli war machine. The U.S. war in Vietnam was the first to be broadcast widely in the homes of Americans, and the Israeli onslaught in Gaza is the first genocide to be watched live on people’s smartphones across the globe. The sheer determination of the Palestinian people to document their own suffering has transformed our understanding of this lopsided war, slicing through state-generated propaganda that has, since Vietnam, sought to shield the public from the death and destruction that is the reality of all war.

As the West has moved toward remote war conducted by drones, the human costs have become more abstract. Mainstream media outlets reinforce that remove, refusing to show the extent of the carnage, obliquely sanctioning the dubious claims of “smart bombs” and other euphemisms meant to assuage the public’s concern about the deaths of innocents. Because Israel has locked Gaza’s doors, courageous Palestinian journalists have risked their lives to broadcast Israel’s atrocities, and dozens have died doing so. It is because of Palestinians that we know of the hunger they are experiencing, visible in the gaunt bodies of their children. We know of the sniper attacks outside hospitals, the bombings of residential housing, mosques, and universities. Palestinians have learned how to circumvent the mainstream media’s equivocation about the value of their lives. They have seized the technology to show the world the consequences of Israel’s actions. Activists around the world emulated those techniques to document global movements like Occupy, the Arab Spring, Fees Must Fall, and the Black Lives Matter movement during the Ferguson uprising in 2014.

But today it is not only Palestinians who document their genocide in real time. For months, Israeli soldiers have 

 their atrocities. There are the group selfies of soldiers huddling, smiling in the foreground of the smoldering remains of apartment buildings and neighborhoods. Male Israeli soldiers fondling the underwear and nightwear of Palestinian women. A soldier in a tank 

 about running over a Palestinian man. Israeli soldiers beating, degrading, belittling Palestinians on camera, as if to showcase their hatred as well as their imperviousness to human rights, international law, or the rules of warfare. Israel has made a mockery of all of it, as settlers build illegal housing units 

 at record pace, murdering Palestinians in the process and arresting thousands to be held in indefinite detention. In doing so, it has betrayed the fake piety of U.S. officials who defend Israel’s every action while deflecting queries about a cease-fire or humanitarian aid for Palestinians. That these bureaucrats feel obliged to explain this particular foreign policy is because of the mass movement and Palestinians who, from a tiny strip, occupy the center of its moral universe.

The longevity of the Palestinian movement in Gaza and beyond allowed a core of activists to immediately jolt into action after Israel began to strike Gaza. Student activism organized around the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign has been a staple of the Palestinian solidarity movement for years. Now there are almost 100 new 

 chapters. The political atmosphere is still charged by a decade of Black Lives Matter activism and just three years removed from the paroxysmal marches in the summer of 2020. Solidarity activism replaced the political ennui brought about by an adrift Biden administration.

Even as young Jews and many of their parents have rejected Israel’s war, Israel’s propaganda machine has denounced the movement as antisemitic. Those accusations have created an academic year like no other, with student activists taking courageous action week to week, while being 

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