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

Since it was announced that Donald Trump would once again become president of the United States, liberal political commentators of all races and creeds have gone out of their way to make sure blame is assigned to Latinxs, 37 percent of whom, according to 

 from 2020, Trump made history as the Republican presidential candidate who has received the largest number of Latinx votes in the nation’s history. Political analysis of the “Latino vote” quickly turned into a referendum on Latinidad writ large. White political commentators like Rachel Bitecofer turned to good old colonial paternalism to explain the growth of Trump’s support among the Latinx electorate by implying Latinx are simply too dumb to understand the consequences of their votes.

Meanwhile, Black political commentators from Joy Reid to 

 and Whoopi Goldberg, among others, rushed to condemn Latinx for 

The feelings of betrayal in Mystal’s posts quickly merged with a long history of nativist mistrust of ethnic minorities who fall outside the U.S. Black-white binary: Asian Americans, Latinx, Arab Americans, Americans of African immigrant descent, and even Native Americans. Many Black and white liberals expressed a wish for mass deportations in retaliation, with Tweets and TikTok videos saying, “

I hope he mass deports you and your entire family

.” For African Americans in particular, a collective feeling of 

We were there for you before, and we won’t forget this betrayal

But who are these Latinx that have inspired such disappointment and rage? The idea of a singular “Latino vote” presupposes that people who identify with the multiple versions of the term — Latino, Latinx, Hispanic — constitute a single voting bloc and share concerns over a single issue, immigration, to the same degree. This reductive view ignores the fact that Latinx are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse people who have different relationships to the U.S. government and, by extension, to U.S. political processes.

Media caricatures erase the diversity of opinion informing Latinx responses to the election. In reality, there is no such thing as a singular “Latino vote.” Instead there is the potential to unite a highly diverse group of people around a set of issues, historical legacies, and desires for their communities. If listened to and engaged, many Latinx voters across the political spectrum are up for grabs.

ativist mistrust is at the heart of the invention of Latinx as a racialized U.S. category of difference and by extension of the so-called Latinx vote as 

. The category, originally called Hispanic, was officially introduced in the 1980 U.S. census following decades of activism by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Afro Caribbean communities. United by their experiences of discrimination and exclusion, a common history of European colonialism and U.S. imperialism, shared ancestral languages and cultural affinities, and, for some, similar migration experiences, Latinx of different racial and ethnic backgrounds have often come together to demand rights and representation for workers, farmers, students, and immigrants.

Since the 1960s, when communities began using the term “Latino” to describe themselves, the population it encompasses in the United States has continued to diversify. Cubans, Brazilians, Haitians, and Central and South Americans of multiple races have moved north, fleeing the economic conditions often caused by U.S.-backed dictatorships and coups and from the capitalist exploitation and environmental disasters wrought by U.S. and European corporations extracting wealth from their home countries. “Latino” functions both as: (1) a U.S. political term coined by activists of shared Latin American ancestry who sought representation and access to civil and human rights for their communities; and (2) a co-optation by the state and the market, something to sell for political or economic gains.

Through a process the brilliant philosopher 

 “elite capture,” Latinx have become both hypervisible and invisible, via a commodification of cultural and linguistic traits (the Spanish language, Mexican cuisine, Caribbean music, etc.) as universal symbols of Latinidad that collapses Spain and the Latin American countries it colonized into a single category while erasing the diversity of the people and their political affiliations and aspirations. Latinx is sold as an exotic commodity in ways that dilute the majority-Black and Indigenous Latin American population. One of the earliest examples of this co-optation by the media is the 1950s TV show “I Love Lucy,” in which Desi Arnaz, who played Lucy’s husband, appeared as a taco-eating (Mexican), bullfighting (Spain), heavily accented Cuban immigrant.

Latinx can be Black, white, Asian, Native, or mixed race. They can speak one (or more) of the roughly 560 languages indigenous to Latin America, the half dozen imposed colonial languages, or a patois, a mix of a colonial and an African language. They can be Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, or they can practice multiple forms of syncretic religions, including the Afro-descended Santería. Some Latinx, like me, both dance and eat salsa. What unites Latinx peoples as a political category is precisely the fact that in the United States we are clustered together, regardless of race, ethnicity, or culture, into a single category for the purpose of being othered as foreign. This amalgamation in turn renders us as a homogenous group that is supposed to share the same racial identity and that is supposed to want the same things and vote for the same candidate. Our othering via homogenization and erasure is what makes it possible for so many official forms to designate “white (not Hispanic)” and “Black (not Hispanic)” as realistic racial definitions.

The U.S. Census Bureau, which has been led by a Latino man, Robert Santos, since 2022, is unclear on what “Latino” means. It acknowledges that Latino is an 

 and even states that Latinx can be of any 

. From 2010 to 2020 about 40 percent of Latinx checked the “Other” box for race, a fact that likely reflects ideologies of mestizaje that erase Blackness and indigeneity from the racial imaginary and have been cemented in Latin America since the early 19th century. In response, the bureau revised the categories in 2024 by collapsing race (white, Black, Asian, et al.) and ethnicity (Latinx) into one ethno-racial category that virtually makes Latinx a 

: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Middle Eastern or North African, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and White. This confusion over whether Latinx is a race or an ethnicity traverses all aspects of our government, institutions, and the public sphere, and it shapes electoral politics in unhelpful and confusing ways.

 a race. Yet grouping all people who trace their ancestry to Latin America into one racialized category has made it easier for them to be made scapegoats by politicians at economically vulnerable moments. The trope of “blaming the immigrant” satisfies the need to assign culpability and reinforces the erroneous belief that all Latinx are immigrants or come from immigrant families. For many of us who identify ethnically or culturally as Latina, Latino, Latinx, or Hispanic and are Black or brown, this new wave of anti-Latinx hate is both chilling and triggering. We know how quickly comments on television or social media can turn into actual threats to our bodies, livelihoods, and property. In the 1930s, this “us versus them” logic led to the deportations of nearly two million people to Mexico, about 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens. During the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s, Mexican Americans, especially youths, were targeted by police and civilians alike. In 2010 states began introducing legislation requiring that everyone who looked “undocumented” — meaning a certain version of Latinx brownness — be stopped and asked for their papers. More recently, during the 2020 George Floyd protests, intense 

 between Afro Latinx business owners and so-called looters in New York and 

As a new wave of anti-Latinx hate grows, Latinx scholars, journalists, and commentators are preparing for worse to come while being bombarded with requests to explain the election results to the non-Latinx public. While some responses have been basic and, frankly, a bit insulting to the Latinx community, such as the argument that the increase in the Republican vote was caused by the use of the term “Latinx” by Harris and others, most responses have been thoughtful, with Geraldo Cadava, Tanya Katerí Hernández, and other scholars taking the lead by explaining the nuances behind the numbers. By far the most illuminating commentary has come from Afro Latinx scholars and journalists, including Hernández, Natasha Alford, and Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, who have 

 us that Black Latinx have been erased from generalized analyses of the “Latinx vote” and by extension from conversations about the “Black vote.” Considering that about six million Latinx identify as Black, their erasure is significant. Journalists Paola Ramos and Maria Hinojosa have examined how colonialism in Latin America and the 

 in their own critiques of Black erasure. For them, Latinx anti-Blackness and a colonial desire for whiteness, paired with what Ramos calls “traditionalism” — the Catholic values that oppose abortion and LGBTQ rights and lead many Latinx people to vote Republican — shaped how Latinx voted in 2024.

Colonial legacies are central to how many Latinx people, particularly those who are descendants of immigrants, think about politics. U.S. military and political interventions in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America impacted how nations defined themselves racially, how they border their countries, who governed them, who they traded with, and even if they were allowed to be sovereign. The impact of the relationships between U.S. and Latin American governments continues to shape immigration patterns, but rarely gets acknowledged in mainstream debates.

There is a direct correlation between what the U.S. did to our parents’ countries of origin and why we are here. That colonial wound is experienced in a variety of ways and continues to shape our votes. There are people who identify as Latinx whose ancestors never migrated to this country; they lived in places that became known as California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming prior to U.S. expansion into and annexation of parts of Mexico in 1848. Some Latinx trace their roots to U.S. colonial possessions, as is the case with Puerto Ricans. Others are descendants of Latin American immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Arturo Schomburg, the Black Puerto Rican collector responsible for the gift to Black histories that is the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. And there are Latinx like my family, a mix of immigrants, new Americans, and second-generation Americans whose presence in the mainland is relatively new (arriving within the past 50 years) and whose ties to our countries of origin remain strong. To this diversity add race, religion, class, gender, education, political environment in countries of origin, and the issues they care about as Americans, and the unified group known as Latinx becomes quite fractured.

 reminds us, thinking that more than 65 million people of such diverse backgrounds have only one concern — immigration — is reductive. It is also based on xenophobic racism, harmful nativist narratives, imperialist and colonialist legacies, and anti-Blackness. The mistake Democrats continue to make is to assume Latinx are a mass of brown immigrants whose only concern is how to stay in this country and not get deported rather than a constituency of voters who are citizens of this nation and who experience and think about electoral politics through a lens that is shaped by their particular relations to race, class, gender, and religion as well as by the issues most affecting their families, communities, and countries of origin: the economy, health care, reproductive justice, climate crisis, trade relations, and policies toward countries of origin (particularly relevant to Cubans, Haitians, and Venezuelans).

While immigration is among those issues for many Latinx voters, particularly those who are part of recent waves of migration, it is not the main concern of all Latinx voters, who, like most voters, tended to cite economic issues as a top priority. In fact, as recent polls have shown, some Latinx are as concerned about 

 as other groups. When I interviewed a small group of Latinx Trump supporters in the Bronx for a book project, Afro Latinx Americans of different ages, to my surprise, said a recent case in which an undocumented immigrant was accused of sexually assaulting a young girl in a 

 park had swung their vote to the right. In Brooklyn, during a similar interview, a group of New American Latinx, mainly of Colombian descent, cited concerns about a housing shortage if new waves of immigrants and refugees were allowed entry in driving them toward Trump.

xit polls, as well as continued analysis by Latinx organizations, are a good starting point for understanding where to begin organizing if the left wants to harness Latinx voting power in elections to come. We learned, for example, that while Trump did better with Latinx voters in general, he made more headway with 

 than women. Some have argued that this gender gap reflects not only a certain form of 

and machismo that is prevalent in Latinx communities but also the same traditional cultural values Ramos described. For more traditional Latinx families, the economic burden falls on the man, who is often expected to support his household (or multiple households). If men are railing from a lagging economy, still underemployed due to the aftermath of Covid, it’s not a huge surprise that many found Trump’s promises of prosperity, wrapped in a masculine narrative of strength and rapid success, to be appealing. The economy was a huge driver for Latinx Republican votes across the country.

Another key element for those seeking Latinx votes is familiarity with the constituency’s specific communities, which vary by region; relationship to immigration, race, and class; and familiarity with the U.S. electoral process. The success of Latinx politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Adriano Espaillat, Ruben Gallego, and Raúl Grijalva in their congressional bids, including in red or purple districts, was in great part due to their familiarity with the communities they serve.

Take New Jersey, for example, a state with 

 that has traditionally voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Gains among the Latinx population in particular have now turned New Jersey, for the first time ever, into a potential purple state with a 

 with the New Jersey Monitor’s Sophie Nieto-Muñoz, Patricia Campos-Medina, president of Latina Civic Action, explained that Latinx in New Jersey voted Republican because “there’s a disconnect — they’re not getting any messaging from Democrats that appeal to them. They don’t get opportunities to run. They don’t get their candidates. They don’t get attention. Therefore, once they hear a message of economic opportunity and investments and business growth, they appeal to that.”

Nearly one in four people in New Jersey identifies as an immigrant, which makes it likely that a large number of Latinx in the state are immigrants or come from immigrant families. Many come from countries where socialist governments have left many people in poverty and unable to access basic opportunities, as is the case with the growing population of Venezuelans and the more established Cuban population in Union City. They might be averse to voting for candidates associated with the left, defaulting automatically to the Republican Party, simply because it seems like the safest option. Others, like my family, come from countries with legacies of dictatorship and find Trump’s rhetoric eerily familiar. Both factions of Latinx immigrants — those running away from socialism and those running from the right — mistrust politics, which Nieto-Muñoz reports manifests as either minimal participation in electoral processes or voting for the candidate who seems to acknowledge the bare fact of their existence (by appearing on Univision, for example). The lack of understanding of what Latinx are politically leads to a lack of representation. And when so few Latinx run for positions in New Jersey’s state government, it is difficult for Latinx who are new Americans to understand who would have their backs.

If the Democratic Party wants to convince Latinx people to join it and if the left wants to organize with and among Latinx, the first thing that they must do is to understand what Latinidad is, who identifies with the various terms used to name Latinidad, what issues affect particular Latinx communities across the United States beyond immigration, and what broken promises need to be addressed. For many Latinx immigrants in mixed-status families, there is still a feeling of betrayal that lingers from the failure of the DREAM Act, which Obama promised and could not deliver. An undocumented community organizer in Trenton, N.J., where I am from, reminded me recently that “our community carries this mistrust because Obama … looked so many of us in the eye with the promise of a DREAM Act, then once elected turned into the border czar himself.” That Democrats since Obama have continued to detain and deport immigrants en masse, intruding even into sanctuary cities like Trenton, does not help. To move forward, Democrats need to make amends by pairing with community leaders, people who can educate them to better understand our differences, needs, and desires. More importantly, politicians and organizers should work with Latinx communities now, every day, and through the years to come, not only during the few months that precede presidential elections.

Donald Trump attends a roundtable discussion with Latino leaders in Doral, Fla., Oct. 22, 2024. Photograph by Kenny Holston/The New York Times.

There Is No Such Thing as the “Latino Vote”

On Nov. 7, 2024, Daniel Denvir spoke to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about Kamala Harris’s catastrophic loss to Donald Trump, the prospect of a multiracial working-class dealignment, and where the left might go from here for an 

 I’m thinking back a lot to 2016, when the big story was white working-class voters shifting hard to Trump, and we can all really clearly remember the elite liberal refrain that these uneducated white people were just racist, plain and simple, and that that was the explanation for Trumpism. And racism of course played a role. It always plays a role here in the United States of America — that’s not novel. But after 2020 and then Harris’s loss this week, it’s really abundantly clear that this class dealignment from the Democratic Party is a multiracial phenomenon. What’s your diagnosis? What’s driving this class dealignment, and why does the Democratic Party seem totally incapable of confronting it?

 I think it’s really important to unpack what happened and who voted and what this is about. The problem is that the bottom of the Democratic Party literally fell out. And so I 

 in my magazine, Hammer & Hope, that the biggest problem for the Democratic Party was not necessarily the defection of Black men to Trump — although I’ll come back to that — but the indifference to the election itself. Trump wasn’t the biggest competition — it was the couch. Were people motivated enough to get up and go and deal with all of the nonsense of what it has become to vote in this country?

I don’t know exactly who voted in 2020 and didn’t vote in 2024. There’s still a lot of parsing through the exit data to get the full picture. Still, it is important to talk about the defections where they happened among Latino men and Black men in particular. One of the things that has been missing from the discussion about the Democratic Party’s campaign over the last few months is the way that the party was systematically missing the extent to which people are in crisis.

The heart of Joe Biden’s insistence that he remain in the race was that he had turned the economy around. By all conventional measures, the American economy was doing well: unemployment historically low, poverty low for African Americans, the rate at which people are living in poverty is at historic lows. Biden was correct that the rate of inflation had precipitously declined; I think it’s at around 2.1 now. Problem: falling rates of inflation are not falling prices, it just means the rate at which prices are rising has slowed down. And so we are still stuck. Whether it’s price gouging or not, the resting place of these prices is really out of whack with what people’s incomes are. Especially when you take into consideration the nest eggs that people had amassed through the Covid payments — whether it was enhanced unemployment, the stimulus checks, being at home and not having to pay for gas, rent moratorium — people were able to store away money, and that money’s gone. Savings over the summer began to dip as low as they had been in the recession of 2008. The Democratic Party seemed to have no consciousness of this. How does this economic picture play out in real life?

A historic rise in homelessness is on schedule to rise even higher at the end of 2024. Food insecurity is high. All of these kinds of barometers by which people measure the quality of their life pointed downward for working-class people. Median rent today is 20 percent higher than it was in early 2020. There was a study that showed in the first quarter of 2024, household debt had exceeded $17 trillion. To the extent that people are holding their lives together, it’s through credit cards, which of course we know is completely unsustainable.

You can go through the statistics, you can go through all of these kinds of measurements to piece together what a working-class person’s life is like, and you contrast this to the platform and the promises and policies that the Democratic Party has had on offer since the convention, and it’s like they’re living in a different universe. Take yourself back to the Democratic National Convention, where the theme was joy. Not only was joy perverse in the midst of a genocide in Gaza, but the theme of joy is just not appropriate when people are facing homelessness, when people are facing housing insecurity, food insecurity, so on and so forth. I won’t give them the benefit of saying that there’s a kind of strategic fumble, because I think these are the politics of the Democratic Party: a hostility to an expansion of the welfare state, a hostility to the Covid welfare state that was quickly assembled and then just as quickly disassembled. But what it did was show ordinary people that actually it is possible to use the government to improve people’s lives overnight. You can literally do this overnight.

The Democratic Party, which paints itself as the party of working-class people, the party of ordinary people, has not had a message to communicate that, because I just think it is not a part of their bag. When you look at what is actually on offer compared to what individuals are dealing with, there is a mismatch. And I think that the chickens have come home to roost with that. We’ve seen the dramatic fallout: to lose the presidency, the Senate, most likely the House, is a dramatic condemnation of the Democratic Party strategy.

 Yeah, I think we can’t overstate the centrality of the housing crisis amid the larger cost-of-living crisis, amid a half-century-long process of neoliberal economic restructuring that has had a dramatic political impact, which I think even the Biden administration started to realize in some ways in terms of thinking through things like the Inflation Reduction Act and rebuilding the labor movement. This will rebuild the base that the Democratic Party needs to win. And that had been eviscerated under the Obama and Clinton administrations.

And yet even though Biden in these certain ways departed from neoliberal orthodoxy, he was still so constrained by neoliberal orthodoxy in that amidst a cost-of-living crisis, he could not consider price controls. In the United States, they were off the table. We saw zero concerted effort from the White House and mainstream Democrats to deal with the housing crisis by pursuing rent control. And as you just pointed out, all of this on the heels of Americans during the pandemic getting this glimpse of what a modest social democracy might look like — 

Oh damn, the government can just give me things.

Protesters holding a George Floyd banner in Foley Square, New York City, May 29, 2020. Photograph by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images.

And they took it away. I think it’s important to point out that in 2020, because there were 26 million people marching in the streets, exerting unprecedented pressure on the Democratic Party, Joe Biden was forced to go from telling donors in the fall of 2019 at the beginning of the primary season that not much would change if he were to become president to him having to change everything during the course of that election to try to transform activism in the streets into votes for him. And in doing so, the Democratic Party made big promises. We can go through the Democratic Party platform that was turned over to activists to basically rewrite in the summer of 2020: the promises to cancel student debt, to pay for family leave, to invest money in child care, on and on and on. And what happened?

 Opposing regime change in Iran — that went out the window!

 What happened in the midst of all these promises? They won more votes than in any other presidential election in American history. So to go from that, to conclude with Kamala Harris that we need to run away from that, that we need to dump all of that, is absurd and really politically insane. The Biden administration, in an effort to rescue the economy that had been sidelined because of Covid and the demands that people stay at home, also had to enact dramatic reforms with the American Rescue Plan that were really effective and again demonstrated to people that this kind of government investment to make people’s lives better is good. It’s popular. Pew did a bunch of polls about investment and government: Is it for the good? Is it for the worse because we might go into debt? Consistently large majorities support government involvement in health care, government use of resources to mitigate poverty, government resources to ensure that people have housing, government resources to ensure that people have child care. People want investments in their schools. So it’s not like this narrative developing now that Americans are just right-wing and Trump gives them what they want, and what do they want? They just want to be angry and lash out. It’s actually not that. The people want reform. And the Democratic Party runs away from reform and has spent the better part of two generations trying to disconnect itself from the legacy of an earlier era of reform. And so Democrats don’t actually champion these policies. They champion horrible public-private partnership programs that mimic what real reform would look like, but they don’t want to be seen as a party pushing for the resumption of any kind of welfare state. They’re a party with a muddled message, whether it’s Joe Biden and searching for the soul of America or whatever the hell he described it as in 2020 or Kamala Harris and we’re the party of joy and freedom, whatever that means in a time of extreme political and economic crisis.

 We saw support for government action to raise wages as well; minimum-wage referenda passed in red states this week. I think something that we always point to and that you’re rightfully pointing to here is that we on the left have majority support on so many of our core issues. But what we have failed to do so far is to create a bigger story, a bigger narrative, a new form of common sense, something that makes all this compelling as a cohesive form of politics that people will identify with. If we could run all of our left platform as referenda simultaneously throughout the nation, we’d have social democracy if not socialism overnight. But that’s not how it works. We need to construct some sort of cohesive political package that appeals to a majority, and that’s what we haven’t figured out.

That’s the big vacuum. It can be described as the distance between what people want and the vehicle by which we can achieve that. The Democratic Party has always posited itself as that since at least the last three quarters of the 20th century. But I think in some ways, the end of Obama’s presidency marked a finality in a certain kind of belief in liberalism. This failed campaign of Kamala Harris’s really closes the coffin on that. It doesn’t mean that the Democratic Party is dead. I remember the summer of 2015, when the Republican Party was a laughingstock of the world because they seemed to be serious about putting Donald Trump forward as a presidential candidate. By the time he is inaugurated in January, it will be 10 years from laughingstock to the most powerful political party in the world.

In the two-party system, your fortunes can change very quickly, but there’s a structural problem that the Democrats have in that the working-class base, the core constituencies, are leaching from the party. And that to me is the most dramatic storyline of this presidential contest. Again, when you look at the exit polls, the solid working-class range of voters making $30,000 to $50,000, the majority go to Trump. It was Kamala Harris who won the big money in the U.S. context, $100,000 to $200,000 earners, the $200,000-plus earners. The vast majority of white workers without a college degree go to Trump. It is true that most Black workers without a college degree went to Harris, however. But the base of the Democratic Party is being frittered away. Significant portions are going to the Republican Party, and then other parts have just been left to float away into the ether because no one represents what it is that they want. So this is a structural problem for the Democratic Party. How will they reconstitute an electoral coalition that can give them an ability to compete in these races? And based on the kind of political framework that they are putting forward, which is vapid, vacuous commentary that is nothing-speak?

A homeless encampment on Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia, Pa., April 2023. Photograph by Teun Voeten/Panos Pictures/Redux.

 I think the vacuousness is really a big part of it. Poll testing everything that you say comes across to people as insincere, plastic bullshit.

Because it is. In Philadelphia, what has been described as the poorest of the big cities for more than a decade, they’ve been having rock concerts downtown. There’s a housing crisis in Philadelphia. There is a crisis of poverty in Philadelphia. There are dramatically underfunded public schools in Philadelphia. And the Democrats come rolling in with the celebrities, and they have nothing to say about any of that except get out the vote. It is an embarrassment. And people pick up on that.

 It’s insulting to people’s intelligence.

It’s absolutely insulting people’s intelligence. There is the condescension and arrogance of Barack Obama, who likes to tell voters that change is incremental. These people tell us these are the most consequential elections of our lifetimes, and yet we shouldn’t expect much. There’s a mismatch between the low expectations and the idea that change is only incremental — the rent’s not incremental, right? The cost of living that changes from one year to the next is not incremental. And then there’s the lecturing from Obama, him telling Muslims not to bite your nose off to spite your face, lecturing to Black men that any economic concerns they have don’t exist, that actually it’s just sexism. There’s the condescension of the Democratic Party, there’s the elitism of the Democratic Party, and you combine all of this with their absolute inability to change anything on a national level and then on a local level. What people have is continuity from one administration to the next. The same sorts of conditions that exist under an Obama administration exist under a Trump administration and a Biden administration. So it does feel like, what’s the point? What 

 the point of going out to vote for this or that politician when not much changes for the good in my everyday life? There are many different factors that they’re going to have to overcome to reconstitute a voting coalition if they have any hope of being relevant in the near future electorally.

 We see all these liberal pundits who are saying, 

It’s not Kamala’s fault. It’s the American people’s fault

, which brings to mind that great Brecht line about dissolving the people and electing another. Unfortunately, in an electoral democracy you actually have to win people’s votes and they don’t take well to being condescended to, and that’s not just among the super party elite. In white middle-class neighborhoods, right adjacent to where I live in Rhode Island, I see signs everywhere that say “Harris Walz Obviously,” and it feels sort of exemplary of a problem. There’s a clip circulating in recent days from the late David Graeber, where he argues that there’s some kind of sick dialectic connection between this sort of elite liberal smugness that really prioritizes feeling good about oneself and virtue signaling and then these clown cartoon scam artists playing dumb on the right.

Yes, I think there’s the playing dumb from the Yalies that is always hilarious and frightening and disgusting to watch. I have a class of freshmen, and I was wondering what their reaction would be. I remember in 2017 or 2016, the reaction was pretty much like someone had been killed: shock, terror, complete overwhelm and bewilderment. But I think for these young people, they’ve grown up with Trump as a political figure whereas we grew up with Trump as an entertainer, a kind of buffoon, as part of a seedy popular culture in the United States, which enhanced the shock value of him becoming president. For these students of mine, he seems like just a weird kind of unhinged, right-wing politician.

But I do think Trump’s anger and disgust resonates with people in this artificial world of mainstream politics. Trump isn’t offering any plausible solution to those economic issues either. It’s not like he actually has a coherent economic plan. His plan for housing is 

I’m going to deport 11 million people, and you can live in the places they used to live in

. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s dangerous and disgusting, but it is also completely nonsensical and absurd. So it’s not like people are comparing policy platforms. Instead it is a kind of thumb in the eye to the status quo; even if you’re not getting anything in return, there’s some kind of strange satisfaction in having stuck it to these suits, the scolds, the people who have figured it all out and are here to tell you that you owe them your vote.

There’s an aspect of this that is beyond the kind of bread-and-butter policy discussion. There’s something so stifling and gross about American politics. Trump’s rambling rally speeches where people are streaming out don’t make any sense, and yet they’re not the canned political speech that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz offer, that by the 17th time we knew all of the applause lines, we knew all of the inflections, we knew exactly what they were going to say. Part of the Democratic Party’s political crisis is that they are the establishment, they are the status quo, and people are tired of that. They’re sick of that because they equate that with continuity in the conditions of their everyday lives.

 Democrats protecting a status quo that so many people want to destroy and replaying 2016’s status quo protection campaign — I think it’s related to which voters the Democratic Party is pursuing. Democrats would like to believe that their strategy of courting anti-Trump Republicans, affluent professionals, and suburbanites is somehow unrelated to them losing working-class voters. But I think they’re obviously related; courting one for so many reasons entails losing the latter, and it’s a process that really took off under the Clinton administration. This is a political choice that entails certain policy choices. Could a multiracial working class be won over to a populous social democratic candidacy that was oriented toward class conflict? Is the basic problem that the Democratic Party as it’s currently constituted can’t do that because they can’t wage class conflict against the very elites they’re pursuing as their base?

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaking at a campaign rally in Rindge, N.H., Feb. 6, 2016. Photograph by Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post, via Getty Images.

I think the first glimpse of that potential was in 2016 with Bernie Sanders’s surprise run even though people criticized Bernie for not having a particularly refined message about the problems of racism in American society. The campaign was truncated before we could see the full integration of young Black people who were certainly attracted to his political message and the economic reforms that he was championing. But by 2020, clearly Sanders’s campaign represented a totally different future for the Democratic Party: the kind of political coalition that we salivate over now, the multiracial political movement that I think has all the potential in the world. We can see the potential more clearly now than in the past 50 years, with the mutual evisceration of Black, white, and Latino life in this country.

We could talk about the economic categories or statistics, the study about the deaths of working-class white people that came out right before the pandemic, the so-called deaths of despair in which ordinary white working-class people without college degrees were dying of drug addiction, opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide. What has happened through the pandemic to now, the rate at which white people were dying quicker, Black working-class people have caught up. And so the mutual immiseration of the lives of the multiracial working class absolutely lays the political foundation for a movement. The problem is not that that potential doesn’t exist, it’s that it has not been a part of any real political initiative in the U.S.

Black Lives Matter was so important in terms of raising the profile of the impact of racism in the lives of Black people in this country in ways that are hard to appreciate now because it’s become such an accepted and understood aspect of life for Black people in the United States. Ten years or 15 years earlier, there’s really an absence of discussion about the impacts of racism in the lives of Black people. One of the other things that the best parts of the Black Lives Matter movement did was demonstrate how the working-class character of Black life is part of what made Black people vulnerable to policing and to the overrepresentation of Black people in the criminal legal system. The problem, though, is that a movement focused purely or exclusively on the lives of Black people actually doesn’t have the social capacity to transform those conditions that make Black people vulnerable to policing in the first place. So if we say that social inequality and economic inequality are at the center of that vulnerability, then it actually takes a mass movement to transform that. A movement that defines itself as Black Lives Matter is not the vehicle that can actually build the mass multiracial movement that is necessary, because something has to capture the radicalization of white people and transform that into politics as well.

We saw in 2020 one of the reasons why the backlash was triggered was because of the radicalization of young white people. Because millions of white people were marching against racism sometimes in places where there were no Black people. And we have a left that often responds so cynically to that — like, 

Oh, do you want a cookie for fighting racism?

 No, people don’t want cookies for fighting racism. This is an important development in our political movement to try to build the type of mass movement that’s necessary to change the social and political conditions that are disproportionately affecting Black people but that are affecting the entire working class and poor people in this country.

That’s the kind of vehicle we need to organize and to build. And without that, what we are seeing is that the Republicans have successfully tried to step into that political vacuum. We can say that Trump’s political platform, his policy platform, and his economic plans are ridiculous and make no sense. But what the Republicans are doing is offering a narrative to explain why your life, your life chances, your quality of life have gone into the toilet. 

We’re going to offer you an explanation. We’re going to blame immigrants, and we’re going to blame crime. 

The Democrats don’t have an explanation for why this has happened.

 No. They don’t have an explanation because they don’t have an enemy. Because the enemy is the base that they’re hoping to have.

Absolutely. This is a political problem. Some parts of the left try to relate to the anger and despair of working-class people, but often it’s turned into the discourse of white privilege, which just sounds ridiculous when you look at the absolute destruction of working-class white life in this country. Another part of the left will crucify you if you say the wrong thing, including that you’re going to vote for Kamala Harris because you’re afraid of Donald Trump — that makes you a genocide apologist. I understand the sentiment, but it’s difficult to grow beyond what you are if you see everyone as the problem or everyone as a potential enemy. It means that the explanations that the left has — this is capitalism, this is racism, this economy is set up to fail for working-class people, we need to redistribute the wealth, we need to not give the U.S. Department of Defense nearly a trillion dollars every year, we don’t need to give Israel tens of billions of dollars while our schools, hospitals, public infrastructure is completely falling apart — all of the arguments that the left could be offering to fill this political void go unheard because often the left cuts itself off from that audience. There’s a critique of everything and everyone. There’s a sense of acrimony. The left is inhospitable to people who are not already like us. What we are reduced to then is groups of friends and groups of like-minded people who like to stay that way. We can’t grow like that. We can’t get big like that.

 Little study groups and sects, which some people I think actually kind of perversely yearn to return to the comfort of, because being in mass politics and organizing, say, tenants in a building, some of them are Trump voters, and you need every single person on board. That is what a tenant union looks like. That is what a labor union looks like.

 That’s what the working class looks like.

 A mass movement. There is a certain type of identity politics that really does play into the right’s hands. And this is something that mainstream analysts ahead of the election have really glommed onto, but they’ve done so in a really confused and confusing way because in fact the upshot isn’t selling out racial justice or trans people. It’s building a big movement that tells a cohesive, compelling story about what’s going on in this country and how to fix it. And that invites everybody in.

People gathered at the Black Lives Matter Plaza on 16th Street, near the White House, Washington, D.C., June 19, 2020. Photograph by Probal Rashid/LightRocket, via Getty Images.

That has solidarity at its core. The old Knights of Labor slogan that an injury to one is an injury to all and really explicating what that looks like and what that means — we were onto something with that in 2020, and that is part of the reason why the backlash was so fierce. I wrote about how Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin, said in 2022 when the Republicans were washed out in the midterm elections, that this is because of multicultural curriculums in schools, that if Republicans don’t change or address this, that they will never win another election. And part of that was not just critical race theory but a reaction to young white people marching militantly in the streets against racism. That was a critical opportunity to not just come out of 2020 having dumped Trump but really building a vehicle that could grow. Instead all of that energy got diverted into getting Joe Biden elected, then got diverted again into the Georgia Senate races in January 2021, and then was demobilized. Joe Biden, even as he was backing away from his promises and doing the bidding of Republicans in deconstructing the emergency Covid state, faced no resistance or opposition. The only hint of opposition and resistance to Joe Biden came last spring with the eruption of the Palestinian solidarity protest, because it was the one issue that could not be co-opted into the Democratic Party in ways that Black Lives Matter could, in ways that the immigrant rights movement could, in ways that the LGBT movement could. This is part of the problem, the demobilization. So here we are, faced with renewed political attacks, still lacking those vehicles to respond in a mass way.

It doesn’t mean that people won’t respond and that we can’t respond because people inevitably will when Trump tries to initiate deportations and all of the horrible things that he has promised to do. But on the left, we have big problems: the fracturing of the left, the lack of political vehicles, the entanglement with the Democratic Party. It’s not like Joe Biden just pushed a button and the left is demobilized. It’s also about how groups who believe that access within the Democratic Party gives them the ear of officials in the party, and perhaps that is the most effective way to get change. These are political debates that need to happen, strategic debates, tactical debates about what it is that we should be doing and how it is that we build ourselves out of the current crisis we’re in right now.

 And I think we need to have those debates in, if possible, a comradely fashion that really assesses the conjuncture and possible paths forward strategically rather than moralistically.

 But I think that is actually a big thing. How do we build our way out of this? Are we going to do it on these online platforms? Can we get in rooms together? Can we talk to each other? It sounds so touchy feely. But there is a culture problem on the left — the hostility, the intolerance, which I think has conclusively been proven to be a feature of online engagement. Something has to change because there’s not just going to be cycles of Trump comes in, there’s going to be a resistance, we resist and resist and resist and have a confrontation, and then we funnel all of our resources to get Josh Shapiro elected as president. It’s not happening because the Democratic Party’s core constituencies are breaking off.

There’s a real question about what we can do that has to be seriously addressed. There’s this idea from liberals that this has happened before. We’ve confronted this before. Let’s have a women’s march in January. Things are materially worse for people. The Trump administration is not going to be surprised. They were just as surprised as everyone else when they won in 2016. Stephen Miller has been planning since 2020 how to get back to the White House and intensify the deportation machine. Project 2025 is unfortunately a real thing. They have a plan of governance. It doesn’t mean that they just hit a button and execute the entire thing, but this is not a surprise: 

Yes, we’re returning to power. We have plans.

 And there are no kind of old school establishment Republicans or deep state figures who are going to be in the room to mess it up for him. They’ve got a team that’s ready to go.

They have the government. They have all the chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court. This is not 2016.

 I think you’re rightfully pointing out the pitfalls of so much of the liberal and left liberal nonprofit industrial complex just banking everything on defeating Trump and then relying on access to the Biden White House. But conversely, on the left, debates about the electoral project we’ve had over the past decade or so have become so fraught because there are clear limitations to it. We’re obviously not anywhere close to fully winning yet.

But I want to reiterate what you said about Bernie 2020 and then expand on it. It traced the outlines of a possible working-class multiracial majority, especially given what’s happening with Latino voters right now. Look at California and Nevada and the vanguard role that working-class Latinos played in the social democratic struggle in 2020. But then, just as a counterfactual that we experienced, look at a presidential cycle where there’s no Democratic primary and there’s absolutely no left pole in the debate. Everything lurched way to the right.

Everything lurched to the right to such an extent that the influence of 2020 was airbrushed from history. This to me was one of the most shocking developments with the Harris campaign, the just complete removal of Black Lives Matter and the antiracist movement. The most dramatic example of that happens with the Democratic Party platform. The Democratic Party had had an opposition to the death penalty as part of its platform since 2016. And they took it out.

 That was so gratuitous! Who was even looking to check that?

You don’t want to be weak on the death penalty. So you remove that, you remove any reference to police brutality, you remove any reference really to police reform, to discrimination.

 And you attack Trump for not finishing his border wall rather than condemning the idea of the border wall.

Donald Trump speaking in front of the border wall near Pharr, Tex., June 30, 2021. Photograph by Sergio Flores/AFP, via Getty Images.

Yes, we’re going to sign the bill that spends a billion dollars to finish a wall that originally Kamala Harris called a medieval vanity project.

I support fracking — in fact, my administration expanded fracking

. But with Black Lives Matter, it was surprising to me the extent to which that part of the discussion was left out of the assessment about why Black people in general are so lukewarm on Kamala Harris. Eventually Black women’s votes for Harris matched what they had been for Biden, but Black women had also been trailing in support. I think that people have underestimated what it means to have Kamala Harris, a Black woman running for president, refuse to speak about racism, refuse to talk about racism as part of the campaign when the past 10 years have really been a period of struggles around Black Lives Matter. I believe that it was the abandonment of antiracism, as well as the continuity of economic marginalization and inequality experienced by working-class and poor Black people, that meant the freefall of Black support for Joe Biden that then was transferred to Kamala Harris. Other aspects of this don’t even warrant discussion in the mainstream media, like the abolition of affirmative action.

Even though the Supreme Court decision affected a small number of Black people, it set a tone of permissiveness around racial discrimination that you could then see play out with the attacks on DEI, which also affect probably a relatively small number of Black people but change the environment and discussion around racism, so much so that you then have Republicans denying that racism is an issue, denying that racial inequality is an issue. Very quickly, programs that might affect small numbers of Black people change the political atmosphere that affects the vast majority of Black people. And then all of a sudden you feel as if the issues that are most important to you are being ignored and excluded. Polling shows that vast majorities of Black people think that racism is responsible for putting limits on their ability to ascend socially in American society. Vast majorities of Black people think that the system is rigged against them, think prisons were set up to particularly constrain and hold them back. Pew originally classified this under “racial conspiracy theories,” but this is actually about Black life in the United States. The Democratic Party self-imposed an end to discussions about racism: 

We don’t want to be woke, so we’re not going to talk about affirmative action. We don’t want to be woke, so we’re going to take DEI out of the party platform.

 You can be cynical and Black and be like, 

. At the same time, it feels like once again the issues that are affecting us are completely marginalized and disappeared. Even if it doesn’t come out as a sharp critique, it does come out as a kind of 

 about this election. And that is part of the disaffection with the Democratic Party that they have no solutions for, because they don’t want to talk about racism, because they don’t want to be the woke party, and they don’t want to talk about all of these issues that somehow can be ascribed to wokism, which then leaves them not a lot to talk about when trying to reconstitute the electoral coalition that they once had.

 I think the Democratic Party adopting essentially a fascist position on Palestine, supporting a settler-colonial genocide of a mostly refugee population and in doing so waging an all-out political war against major constituencies that are typically Democratic voters, smearing huge swaths of American college students as antisemitic extremists, has been a key thing that has facilitated the larger rightward move of the Democratic Party. Exit polls show us, and just common sense shows us, that Gaza was not the number one issue for your median voter who showed up on Tuesday. But I think it was arguably decisive in Michigan, and I think it had huge knock-on effects across the board in terms of alienating young people, alienating progressives, obviously alienating Arabs and Muslims. Putting the Biden administration into the most brutal form of conflict with these portions of its base alienated those portions in a really profound way unlike anything I’ve seen in my entire life in politics. I’ve never been so disgusted by a Democratic ticket as somebody who’s been disgusted by pretty much all of them in my entire adult political life. But it’s also part and parcel of what made the Harris-Cheney alliance almost inevitable, because where else was she going to go after a year of their administration demonizing the antiwar alternative?

I was trying to talk to my students, because they wanted to talk about the election, and it’s a class on politics, so it made sense to do so. One of the things that they were struggling to understand is why Liz Cheney campaigning for Harris was causing such a visceral reaction for some people. These are 18-year-olds, and they have absolutely no recollection of the Iraq War. I was trying to explain the hypocrisy and the betrayal — Barack Obama became president running against the legacy of Dick Cheney, the architect of the Iraq War, and to just erase that history was demonstrative of the way that the Democratic Party engages in its own self-induced amnesia. We always talk about the right and the kind of hamfisted attacks on history that the right engages in; they ban books and ban classes and change curricula. But the Democratic Party is engaged in the same kind of exercise in parading Liz Cheney around as some kind of hero because she doesn’t like Donald Trump and in Kamala Harris thanking Dick Cheney for his service to the nation. What on earth does that even mean?

A protest on the eve of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, Ill., Aug. 18, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Hatcher/AFP, via Getty Images.

It lends itself to the utter cynicism that regular people hold this party in. When you look at the age categories of people and how they’re voting, that has to be a part of the mix. Many of us remember the U.S. war in Iraq, and to see Liz Cheney paraded around as some kind of hero for purely partisan reasons is really disgusting. I think that kind of cynicism and the U.S. sponsorship of the Israeli siege on Palestine really activated the anger and disgust of young people. The number of 18- to 29-year-olds voting for Harris compared to Biden also fell off dramatically. The war in Gaza is not the number one issue but is certainly part of what we sometimes refer to as the enthusiasm gap. A big part of it has to do with Kamala Harris’s pathetic response, which is 

Yes, I know thousands of people appear to be getting killed, and I’m not going to do a single thing to change any aspect of the policy

. I think some consultant told her that it’s good to empathize with the pain people feel, so you should say something about how tragic it is, the number of people who are being killed, but then make sure that Israel cannot become a political issue for you.

Even if it’s not your central issue, it just is another example of the political doublespeak that these people engage in, which underscores their utter insincerity. The last thing I’ll say about this particular issue and how it factors into the collapsing support for the Democratic Party is the way that this election has been framed as our last-ditch effort at saving democracy. These people tell us that Trump is a fascist, that democracy is on the ballot, that this may be the very last election we can ever participate in. But yes, we’re going to have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to hand the keys to the White House over to Trump on Jan. 20, and we’re going to come together as Americans. I’m sorry, what?

It makes no sense. It underlines the utter lack of seriousness of this party, because either that was a gimmick and you didn’t really mean it, so now you look like idiots, or what are you talking about? This person is going to be responsible for ending democracy. He’s going to be a dictator on day one. And you’re just going to give them the keys to the White House? I’m sorry, what? So Israel, Palestine, the fact that Biden gave the okay for the political crackdown by the police last spring by publicly characterizing the Palestinian solidarity protest as violent, as antisemitic, gave the signal to administrators and the police that it was fine to go on the attack. I think students recognize and remember that. On the one hand, they were told that the Republicans are the big threat to democracy. Republicans are the threat to free speech and to the freedom to think. And yet it’s Democratic mayors who are calling out the police to beat the hell out of protesters, to shut protesters up, to move protesters off the streets. And it’s probably liberally aligned college administrators who also colluded with law enforcement and police to repress student protests. Not to mention the double standard around free speech, where speech in support of and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is absolutely policed and repressed. Anything said about Israel is looked at with a microscope with the intention of finding an excuse to punish, to marginalize, and to silence.

These contradictions are clear to anyone paying attention, and we know that tens of thousands of students around the country were paying attention. So it didn’t need to be the number one issue. It needed to be one of a thousand cuts that leached any kind of enthusiasm and hope that this campaign would represent something different and could cause people to equivocate or to just feel like it really doesn’t matter. Because if Gaza was your issue, you had no candidate in this campaign. And even if it wasn’t your central issue, the position of Kamala Harris was such a representation of the status quo that it had to cast a pall over everything that she claimed to be running on.

 I think and worry that if we see a new wave of serious repression of the left unlike anything we’ve seen in my lifetime under Trump, we will look back at these liberal elected officials and administrators as having set important precedents and having legitimated it.

And it’s not just on Palestine. The attacks on Palestinian solidarity are the Trojan horse, because at many of these college campuses where there’s a tremendous amount of union activity, they’ve changed the rules around protest. They’ve changed the rules not just around political content. Take Princeton, for example: it wants to restrict protests in front of the main administrative building to the walkways in front. Now of course the main administrative building is a central target for students because that’s where the president’s office is, that’s where the provost is. But if you’re in a union on campus, that’s where your employer is, that’s where the boss is. They don’t say just for pro-Palestine marches or protests, you can’t be on the grass. It’s for any protest. It is using the repression of Palestinian solidarity on campus to address other issues in the awakening of the campus as a workplace and as a site of political and economic conflict. They’re using these protests to change many rules that will manage the way these conflicts play out.

 The repression that Stop Cop City protesters have faced feels like perhaps the most foreboding example of what we could be facing.

I would be interested in seeing the exit polls from Atlanta and the way that the overwhelming and tremendous repression of the activist movement there plays out politically. Because if I’m thinking about this as death by a thousand cuts for the Democratic Party, how does local rule and the local repression by the Democratic Party affect the overall enthusiasm, interest, engagement of ordinary Democratic voters? In Atlanta the repression of Stop Cop City was so craven, reckless, abusive, and then the same political apparatus turns out and says, 

That’s why we got to get the vote out for Kamala

. I mean, there’s a disconnect. You see that in Philly, though not to the same extent. The new mayor is not liked very much and is ramming through a billion-dollar new stadium for the local basketball team, the 76ers.

Stop Cop City activists in the Atlanta Forest in Georgia, March 4, 2023. Photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis, via Getty Images.

 Next to one of this country’s most precious Chinatowns.

Yes, the activists and organizers from Chinatown have been ignored and completely marginalized. It has no support apart from developers and a very small portion of people. No one likes this. Again, you have these local officials doing terrible things who then turn around and say, 

. I don’t think it’s the most consequential thing, but I do think there is something to say about the political mismanagement of the Democratic Party, the face of repression from the Democratic Party on the local level that is also a part of this mix. Because you can see Trump’s numbers in New York, in Philadelphia —

In L.A. Everywhere. It’s not just suburban and rural white people. Inroads everywhere in the heart of America. In Chicago. You cannot disconnect that from the utter dysfunction of the Democratic Party and local politics.

 Yeah, 100 percent. I am redoubling my own commitment to building organized left power in an organized working class, in my case in Rhode Island, through tenant organizing and housing justice. Not only is it a good in and of itself, but we need to make deep blue states and cities into social democratic models. There’s no strategy for national power that doesn’t run through functional and appealing models at the local and state level.

Absolutely. In that sense, all politics is local, but those local politics are connected to the dysfunctions of the national party as well. It also influences the dynamics around race and the dynamics around class, because increasingly in these cities, we have Black mayors, increasingly Black women who are at the helm of these cities. And it brings the issue of class to the surface in Black politics in these local arenas. I do think this has an impact that plays out in national politics. For the left, it means that we have to take up the local issues, too, and not just the national debates, the national campaigns. How are you organized on a local basis? How do we connect local struggles to national struggles to make sure that we have coalitions that exist on different levels as the foundation for building the mass movement that we’ve been talking about?

“Neither Party Represents the Working Class” poster, Queens, New York. Photograph by Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images.

Donald Trump’s Victory, the Elitism of Democrats, and the Need to Build a Hospitable Left

In 2016, Trump’s first electoral victory came alongside a peculiar, controversial narrative: that “economic anxiety” explained the support of white “

” voters for Trump. It returned after the 2020 election, when supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol in order to prevent turnover of power and 

 as the Republican Party geared up for primary season.

A number of problems with this explanation for Trump’s appeal emerged immediately. The “white” part of the working-class economic anxiety narrative, whether 

, provoked ire: white working-class voters made up 

 winning coalition in the 2016 primary, and a sizable chunk of that demographic did not buy what Trump was selling. Meanwhile, working-class Black voters reliably voted Democratic in the 2016 election, just as they had for decades. Studies conducted after that election 

 between financial hardship and voting for Trump — in fact, Trump’s supporters in general skewed 

But perhaps something has changed. Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory featured a more 

 voting coalition than the Republicans have put together since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Is there something to the economic anxiety narrative after all? And if so, what does it mean for the political path forward?

There’s certainly something to economic anxiety. To put it in a global perspective, journalist John Burn-Murdoch noted that 

 in the “developed world” hemorrhaged votes in 2024 — downstream, he argues, of economic and geopolitical conditions like inflation and the great power war in Ukraine that present “arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians.” From this vantage point, what is surprising is that Democrats lost so 

votes, rather than so many, as they outperformed their developed-world counterparts.

 a graphic based on the AP VoteCast survey alleging that the changes in vote share over the most recent U.S. presidential elections evidenced a “security gap,” with less secure groups like Black and nonwhite, non-college-educated men shifting toward the Republican Party. As Nathan Tankus 

, a host of Covid-era social protections — eviction bans, Medicaid expansion, and student loan payment pauses — were either eliminated or allowed to expire in the years following 2021, which had a disproportionate effect on the lowest-income Americans.

The problem with the “economic anxiety” narrative was never the explicit, even self-evident, part of its case: of course voting trends and political behavior strongly correlate to people’s actual, felt, and expected ability to meet their basic needs and provide for those they care for. It would be stunning and surprising if political behavior 

 respond to this reality — the concrete needs that the abstraction of “the economy” meets, however imperfectly and unequally.

The problem, in contrast, was the implicit aspect of the narrative: the idea that explaining voters’ behavior via economic anxiety rendered other explanations unnecessary, particularly those that highlight the role of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia and the machinations of political actors who stoke and exploit these attitudes. This has never made much sense. Voters’ expectations of their economic prospects are measurably affected by political outcomes: after Trump’s election in 2016, white economic anxiety “

,” while African Americans’ anxiety climbed to its highest level since 2000. One potential explanation for this kind of shift: zero-sum beliefs about which social groups will be protected economically based on who is in power, with white voters more optimistic about their fates under Republican leadership and Black voters more optimistic about Democratic leadership.

The portrayal of economic anxiety as a standalone rather than complementary explanation to the machinations of plutocratic bigots also flies in the face of what we know about the actual campaigns whose job it was to appeal to voters. The Trump campaign abetted and benefited from not only the 

 of its own strategists and campaigns but also the broader 

 is President-elect Trump. As Taylor Jo Isenberg, executive director of the Economic Security Project, 

 it: “Trump exploited the very real economic anxieties many Americans feel, and he directed that fear towards refugees, immigrants, transgender individuals, and other marginalized communities. It is an intentional choice to pull on the threads that hold our democracy together and unravel them to serve his own interests.”

As soon as we are prepared to accept that it might be easier to win on political messages like “Immigrants took your job” when 

 or underemployed, we are already in a position to see the 

 we’re being offered between economic and cultural explanations. The one helps to explain the other.

The false narrative of economic anxiety as the sole cause of the country’s rightward turn fits into a larger one, with Democratic Party insiders blaming “

. But debunking or fact checking — giving people nothing more than a better story about why they are economically insecure — won’t be enough to counter this narrative. It remains effective in part because the economic insecurity is real and inadequately addressed by the political status quo.

The critical work, then, lies in building power for people to secure their affordable housing, food, and dignity via a path that does not flow through an authoritarian strongman or the 

 of women, minorities, or immigrants. And that trail will be blazed as it always has been: by workers’ unions, tenants’ unions, debtors’ unions, and similar groups. These efforts don’t deny identity for some abstract, theoretical universalism but rather are rooted in the real universalism of connecting people across cultural and racial differences through concrete political projects with defined goals. The answer to economic anxiety is not even more moaning about coastal elites or “wokeness”: it is durable political power built on 

. The only route to true security for all — for a world that doesn’t toss aside common public interests in order to protect the narrow private interests of politicians or shareholders — is the solidaristic protection of all by all.

A Trump supporter at a campaign rally in Madison Square Garden, New York City, Oct. 27, 2024. Photograph by Mark Peterson/Redux.

The False Narrative of Economic Anxiety

This is the second installment of a two-part series of interviews with people organizing in Sudan conducted in May 2024. Read the introduction and the first interview 

If you would like to help grassroots civil society and mutual aid groups at the frontlines of relief efforts in the parts of Sudan most impacted by state violence, donate to the 

— Rabab Elnaiem, Nisrin Elamin, and Sara Abbas

Tahani Ajak, a writer, engineer, teacher, and volunteer who grew up in Sudan and South Sudan, lives in a refugee camp for South Sudanese in White Nile State, close to Sudan’s border with South Sudan. She runs women and youth discussion groups in the camp, helps mothers secure food and other necessities, and writes about life in the camps, shedding light on the grave abuses suffered by refugees at the hands of the Sudanese state and their neglect by humanitarian organizations.

Until 2011, when South Sudan declared independence from Sudan after decades of struggle, the South Sudanese were citizens of Sudan, albeit ones who faced deep-seated structural racism and a plethora of other intersecting oppressions, including being excluded from positions of power, deprived of educational opportunities, and subject to the forcible extraction of resources from their ancestral lands. Millions, many of whom were born and raised in the north, moved to South Sudan in search of justice, equality, and a better life in a country of their own.

But in 2013, war started again in the newly independent nation, forcing millions to flee and cross the border into neighboring countries, including Sudan. Now holding the status of “refugee” instead of “citizen” and with little material means, many had nowhere to go but the camps. Others moved to Khartoum and other cities and towns across the country in search of work or education or to be near relatives. When the current war started in Sudan in April 2023, it devastated those in the city already living on its margins, as Ajak has 

. Here she talks about the revolution, the war, and life in the camps.

ue to the unstable conditions of war that prevailed for many years in Sudan, my father moved often to find work. My family and I lived in different villages and cities in greater Sudan — its north, south, east, and west. I grew up in the midst of a diverse Sudanese life that saturated me with its beautiful richness, in cultures that shaped my conscience and expanded my knowledge about the nature of life in the country. I grew up embraced by the warmth of the Nile, which divides Sudan from Halfa, in the far north, to Nimule, in the far south, surrounded by stories my grandmother told about the ancestors, which she recounted to us under the magic of the moon hanging over the city of Malakal. That magical moon and the shores of Buri Abu Hashish, the dignity of Jebel Kujur, the sweetness of a cup of coffee under the Taka Mountains, and dancing to the rhythm of the 

 are among the things that motivated me to write, to stay close to people, and to reflect on how they live.

For me, the December Revolution of 2018 is part of an ongoing national project, a struggle that has existed since the founding of the Sudanese state in 1956. The state’s founding was accompanied by the emergence of many popular national liberation movements against the unjust governments that assumed power in the years that followed. State violence peaked with the National Islamic Front’s coup in 1989, which pushed Sudan into a spiral of darkness and greatly increased the suffering of the people. During the 30 years of that regime, the circle of war expanded to encompass all parts of the country.

When the revolution came in 2018, it embodied hope for me and for all Sudanese. It was preceded by student struggles when I was at university, struggles of resistance to military rule. The fight has always been about standing together in the face of injustice, so that we can build a new Sudan that accommodates everyone and establish a civil state in which the values ​​of freedom, peace, justice, and equality are achieved across the society. The December Revolution took place in order to rebuild the Sudanese state along different lines.

The war that began on April 15, 2023, is a real threat to that project and represents a departure from the path of the revolution and its achievements. It threatens people’s lives, their stability and security. All over the country, it proves destructive to everything that was built by the people’s struggles and by the martyrs who gave their lives and blood as a dowry to achieve a free and democratic Sudan.

Hammer&Hope

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No. 5

Fall 2024

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No. 5

Fall 2024

Thank You

Hammer & Hope

Previous Article

Next Article

More From This Issue

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

There Is No Such Thing as the “Latino Vote”

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