Black Politics and Beyond

ne year on, the Trump administration’s descent deeper into the gutter of racism no longer comes as a surprise. Trump’s second presidency has been devoted to demolishing anti-discrimination policies based on the absurd claim that they are unfair to white people, especially white men, who are now the real victims of racism. This is a departure for Republicans. Not that many years ago, most of them would try to co-opt the civil rights narrative as their own by claiming the U.S. had achieved the “colorblind” society that was supposedly Martin Luther King Jr.’s end goal. Thus, civil rights–era reforms were no longer necessary because the movement had succeeded.

Today, Trump and JD Vance have dropped the hollow tributes to King and replaced them with disgusting racist memes that blatantly appeal to white men to see themselves as victims of anti-discrimination policies. The point of this isn’t just to undermine the historic accomplishments of the civil rights movement. It is also to create a scapegoat for the poor and working-class whites who make up a growing section of the MAGA base to blame for declining living standards. Dismantling what remains of civil rights–era laws and policies is necessary to bury the radical legacy of the civil rights movement, which, at its core, was about more than representation in politics and business or even formal political and legal equality. It was about materially improving the lives of all Black people and ultimately of all the have-nots.

rump’s second presidency began in January 2025 with a frenzy of executive orders, including ones attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Within months, this had led to purges of lawyers and federal employees charged with protecting civil rights. By December, Vance was bragging to a nearly all-white audience at a Turning Point USA conference, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” His statement was so uncontroversial for the Trump administration that it barely received news coverage. In an X (formerly Twitter) post shortly before that speech, Andrea Lucas, Trump’s chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asked, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” Trump himself weighed in during a January New York Times interview, in which he declared that “white people were very badly treated” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which supposedly causes whites who “deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job” to lose out. Trump’s white supremacy got cruder still at the start of Black History Month, when he posted a video on Truth Social in which Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces were pasted on the bodies of apes.

If the aim of this undisguised racism is to distract white working-class MAGA supporters from Trump’s abject failure to usher in a new golden age of prosperity for them, it is becoming less and less effective. In November 2024, Trump won half of all voters making $50,000 or less, according to exit polls; his approval rating among this group is now at 38 percent and dropping. Still, the relentless campaign to portray whites as the victims of Black people who got a leg up thanks to government bureaucrats and the Democratic Party has had an effect. An Associated Press–NORC poll in July 2025 found that nearly 40 percent of white adults believe diversity and equity initiatives increase discrimination against white people. A previous poll in 2022 showed that 30 percent of white Americans believe discrimination against them had increased “a lot more” in the past five years.

Many of the beliefs expressed in these polls are detached from reality. By almost any measure, working-class Black Americans continue to lag far behind their white peers. At $55,157, median Black household income in 2024 was over $30,000 less than white household income. The numbers are so skewed because Black workers earn less than white workers in nearly every major industry. Black unemployment is nearly double the rate of white unemployment. Only one in three Black families has a retirement account, compared with more than 60 percent of white families. And the value of those accounts for Blacks is lower because of racism in hiring and differences in wages and salaries over a working lifetime.

As for the favorite boogeyman of the White House, the actual record of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, even in their heyday following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, has never been as robust and impactful as either their boosters or detractors have claimed. Indeed, before the right began its crusade against DEI, many of the biggest critics of these initiatives were people on the left who pointed out that they produced more pledges to make companies diverse than actual jobs for Blacks.

Far from replacing qualified white workers with unqualified Black ones, as Vance and Trump insist is happening, DEI initiatives typically set aspirational goals that mean little beyond a vague commitment to do better. Consider the words of billionaire Larry Fink, CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, in an open letter issued a week into the 2020 protests: “As a firm committed to racial equality, we must also consider where racial disparity exists in our own organizations and not tolerate our shortcomings. We can only heal these wounds — building a more diverse and inclusive firm and contributing to a more just society — if we talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships.” BlackRock increased its fraction of Black employees from 5 percent in 2020 to 8 percent by 2025, a relatively minor change and hardly evidence of Black workers replacing white ones. The company has since dismantled its DEI initiatives in response to Trump’s executive orders and legal threats against corporations that maintained such programs.

The surge of corporate initiatives spurred by the 2020 protests did cause a brief boom in the hiring of diversity specialists. Companies in the S&P 500 hired new heads of diversity at a rate of about 12 per month following George Floyd’s death — almost three times the rate of the previous 16 months. But within three years of the Floyd protests — even before the return of Trump — there was a sharp turn away from these types of hires. According to the employment website ZipRecuiter, job posts related to corporate diversity positions fell by 63 percent in 2023. Besides adding those specialists, diversity initiatives have had almost no impact on who sits in corporate boardrooms. One 2021 report found that only three Fortune 500 companies were led by a Black CEO, down from seven less than a decade previously; there have only ever been two Black women CEOs. As the report noted, “There are more CEOs named ‘John’ than female CEOs.”

Outside of employment, the record of corporate initiatives to address racism is no better. According to the McKinsey consulting firm, between May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, and October 2022, nearly 1,400 American corporations pledged $340 billion to address racism in America. Only a fraction of the money went to addressing the overpolicing of Black people that led to Floyd’s brutal death; just eight companies made donations to Black Lives Matter organizations. Instead, most of the pledges were for investment in housing and other ventures intended to stimulate greater participation from Black consumers. For example, JPMorgan Chase’s racial equity commitment included $8 billion for 40,000 new mortgages and $4 billion to cover 20,000 refinancing agreements over five years. This and similar initiatives were basically profit-making schemes, promoted as aid and assistance. Above all, they were merely promises made by private organizations with no public mechanism for determining if the promises were kept.

In the summer of 2020 and after, it was easier to emphasize antiracism and diversity with bromides about solidarity with Black Lives Matter than to deal with the implications of the other reckoning about race and class caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Shortly before corporate America decided to proclaim its concern about Black lives, plenty of corporations were in the news for reneging on promises to give hazard pay to the disproportionately Black and brown workers who had been designated as “essential.” The sharp turn to DEI initiatives had the added advantage of deflecting attention from the erupting class dynamics exposed in the opening months of the pandemic, when nearly 40 million people lost their jobs by some estimates, and debates raged over emergency supplemental unemployment and moratoriums on evictions. The corporate pivot to DEI emphasized vibes; pay increases, workplace safety, health care, and sick pay faded into the background.

eanwhile, Trump and the Republican Party were honing a different narrative that would help them regain momentum after a humiliating electoral defeat in 2020: Diversity and equity initiatives were proof that the Democrats and their surrogates in corporate America were willing to put their thumbs on the scales to help Black people, even if it meant discriminating against whites.

The Republican Party’s base among poor and working-class whites has changed significantly in the past decade or so. The economic downturn in rural areas, combined with hospital closures and the growth of low-wage jobs without health insurance, has led to a much wider use of Medicaid in these areas. In 2014, the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to millions of people, including low-income white Republicans. This has complicated the right’s age-old strategy of demonizing those who rely on welfare-state programs. Previously, the right wing had mostly heaped blame on “welfare queens” living high off government handouts at the expense of hard-working, tax-paying white families. But now, needing to appeal to lower-income whites who were more likely than before to rely on government programs, the right made Black professionals in both the public and private sector the new enemies. The attacks on diversity initiatives in higher education and corporate America are aimed at middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Americans. The Trump administration is inviting whites, especially white men, to blame their stagnating or declining living standards on the supposedly rising fortunes of Black people.

This narrative was used to justify the Trump administration’s assault on the federal workforce. Last May, in a memo titled “Merit Hiring Plan,” a Trump official echoed right-wing conspiracy theories about the federal government using racial quotas to guide its hiring practices. The memo explained how “the overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats.” Not surprisingly, the Trump layoffs within federal agencies have hit Black civil servants, particularly women, the hardest. Black women lost 318,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and April of last year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during that period. According to The New York Times, agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the workforce, such as the Department of Education and U.S. Agency for International Development, suffered some of the largest workforce reductions, if not complete elimination. After the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of employment attorneys alleged that the Trump layoffs “disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not male or white,” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Trump administration took down the website allowing the public to track the race and gender of government employees.

The claim that civil rights protections and diversity initiatives have led to the displacement of white men from the workforce is another manifestation of the right wing’s great replacement conspiracy theory. This “theory” is mostly associated with Latinos and immigration, but it was also a motivating factor in the massacres of Black people in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Buffalo, in 2022. Of course, the idea that Blacks are taking over and supplanting the rightful place of whites is no less absurd than the immigrant variant. Yet it serves a purpose for the MAGA right in giving white working-class and poor people a scapegoat on which to blame their deteriorating living conditions, especially now that Trump and the Republicans have been in power for a year and have achieved nothing for the “ordinary” people they claim to stand for.

If racist scapegoating can get a hearing, it is because 

 has happened to white working-class people, along with the rest of American workers. The causes have been widely discussed: The decline in U.S. manufacturing and erosion of union strength over decades has led to sharp declines in earning power and material deprivations across the board. To manage this decline, Americans have taken on a record $18 trillion in household debt. Meanwhile, the affordability crisis grows worse and worse.

This is the context needed to understand the economic insecurity that pervades the lives of all working-class and poor people — Black, brown, and white. During the past decade, the media began to focus on one facet of this crisis of working-class life: “deaths of despair.” In the popular view, this referred specifically to working-class whites without college degrees aged 45 to 54 who died from opioid abuse, alcoholism, or suicide. But from 2015 to 2022, the rate of “deaths of despair” among Black Americans tripled, ultimately surpassing the rate among whites. Even beyond the statistics, though, the accusation that this tragic product of social malaise and economic marginalization was somehow caused by civil rights law or diversity initiatives makes a mockery of the profound levels of hardship afflicting all working people, which have led to a decline in overall life expectancy in the U.S., sharper than any other country in the developed world.

The right wing has had help in perpetuating the idea that civil rights laws have gone too far. In the case of the Democrats, it is their silence that speaks volumes. Worried about losing potential white swing voters, the party leadership said little after the U.S. Supreme Court, now packed with right-wingers, abolished affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. They have had even less to say about Republican attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as a justification for removing civil rights protections for Black workers and students. The Democrats’ appeal to Black voters is mostly focused on the threat to voting rights. But with their silence about other issues, they give credence to the Republican talking points that antiracist protections have come at a cost for white men.

y imagining that civil rights protections take something from white men, not only are the causes of white deprivation obscured, but the role of discrimination in Black economic subordination is also lost. The 20th century civil rights struggle for Black Americans was as much about opening the robust post–World War II economy to Black workers as it was about addressing the indignity of racial insults and stigma of inferiority. Or as Martin Luther King Jr. explained in 1963, “The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. … The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities.”

The eventual passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act removed formal legal barriers to the full participation of Black workers in the then-booming U.S. economy. But King and others recognized that more was needed to ensure equal Black participation in all aspects of the economy. They called on the federal government to be proactive in helping Black families out of the poverty imposed on them through decades of racial discrimination. As King observed:

No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.

King understood that proposing such a program for Black workers would be untenable in a world where millions of white people were also living in poverty. So in the aftermath of the 1963 March on Washington, he called instead for a “special, compensatory measure” for all the financially marginalized. He compared the scale of such a program to the GI Bill promised to veterans when they returned to the U.S. after World War II. King recognized that “millions of white poor” would also benefit from this kind of social legislation. He described poor whites as “the derivative victims” of slavery: “They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education.” Discrimination, King continued, “has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.”

Some aspects of King’s insights are dated. Today, financial precarity and insecurity exist among a much wider layer of white workers, not just among those mired at the bottom. Also, King’s vision flowed from the existence of an expanding U.S. economy that created the modern white middle class. That economy no longer exists. Instead, millions of workers suffer declining living standards while historic levels of wealth are concentrated at the top of society. Racial attitudes have undoubtedly changed since 1963, though the pandering of Vance and Trump shows that racist scapegoating can still be effective. Perhaps an even bigger change is how Black American life has transformed in the past 60 years. The end of legal discrimination and federal enforcement of civil rights laws in the 1960s opened paths to upward mobility for some Black Americans. No one in King’s day would have imagined the number of Black millionaires and those making over $100,000 today. From the record number of Black Americans serving in Congress to the emergence of a small but significant Black elite, some aspects of Black life are unrecognizable compared with 60 years earlier.

But the shared reality of economic uncertainty and insecurity for millions of Black and white Americans alike — along with millions of others — provides the basis for the kind of political movement that King envisioned. Various individuals and social groups have long used race for their own objectives, whether in pursuit of reactionary or progressive goals. Today’s wealthy, Ivy League–educated white men blaming anti-discrimination policies for the declining living standards of ordinary white people is no different. Challenging this scapegoating and the destructive right-wing program it seeks to advance will require a mutual understanding of the grievances we share and a commitment to come together and fight to turn the tide against Trump.

Donald Trump greets lawmakers after giving the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol, March 4, 2025. Photograph by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.

White Supremacy in Donald Trump’s White House

Hammer & Hope co-founder Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written a new introduction for an 

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

, which includes the groundbreaking statement, along with interviews and essays reflecting on its impact, among them a new interview with Angela Y. Davis. In this excerpt from the introduction, Taylor describes the emergence in the early 1970s of a distinct current of Black feminism, contending with multiple concerns, that would give rise to the Combahee collective.

lack feminism never developed into a mass movement in the way that the mostly white women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s did. Most Black women remained in the Black liberation movement, even as they tried to make the movement address their concerns about women’s oppression. By the early 1970s, for example, it’s likely that a majority of members of the Black Panther Party were women, as the organization began to focus less on armed confrontation with police and more on mutual aid organizing and community-based activism, like the free breakfast program, which reflected the kinds of concerns that animated Black feminist consciousness and politics. Black women already had prominent roles in community organizing without forming new organizations, which would have been regarded with the hostility typical among men in the Black liberation movement at that time. Historian Premilla Nadasen has argued that Black women’s struggles for greater access to welfare rights should be understood as a critical part of Black feminist organizing, which would deepen our understanding of Black feminism as an organizing project. She argues that “the welfare rights movement was one of the most important organizational expressions of the needs and demands of poor Black women. Predating the outpouring of Black feminist literature in the 1970s, women in the welfare rights movement challenged some of the basic assumptions offered by other feminists — white and Black — and articulated their own version of Black feminism.”

But outside of the structures of a social movement or organization, the changing political economy of the 1960s meant that millions of ordinary Black women were radicalized by their economic marginalization and poverty amid American affluence. Meanwhile another cohort of Black women was rising into the middle class through the emergence of better jobs in government and the public sector, along with greater access to colleges and universities. In a note for a 1966 special issue on “The Negro Woman,” Ebony publisher John H. Johnson described the dual fortunes of Black women: “She still cleans the houses and cooks the food of Miss Anne but she also computes the figures for planned space shots and does cancer research in hospital laboratories. She is still the ‘mammy’ to many a wealthy white woman’s child but she has also seen her own son graduated magna cum laude from Ivy League colleges. While she is still arrested for prostitution on Chicago’s North Clark Street, she also sits as ambassador representing her country abroad.”

Thus, a “golden cohort” of Black women writers and artists — daughters of the Black poor and working class — helped to define the terms of Black women’s radicalization in broader terms, even as it was overlooked in the white feminist movement. The legal scholar, civil rights activist, and NOW co-founder Pauli Murray argued, “In the face of their multiple disadvantages, it seems clear that black women can neither postpone nor subordinate the fight against sex discrimination to the black evolution.” When the writer and educator Toni Cade Bambara edited a collection of Black women’s writing, 

, in 1970, she began the volume by declaring, “We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate society. … If we women are to get basic, then surely the first job is to find out what liberation for ourselves means, what work it entails, what benefits it will yield.” She asked what the “feminist literature,” including 

, had to do with Black women: “How relevant are the truths, the experiences, the findings of white women to Black women? Are women after all simply women? I don’t know that our priorities are the same, that our concerns and methods are the same, or even similar enough so that we can afford to depend on this new field of experts (white, female).”

For other women, such as the rising political figures Shirley Chisholm of New York and Barbara Jordan of Texas, the world of Democratic Party politics opened new opportunities for political change. But the entry into mainstream politics further revealed the hostility experienced by Black women, especially from Black men. One Black man opposing Chisholm’s feminist agenda commented, “You can’t equate the problems of women and the problems of blacks, whatever Shirley says,” adding, “Women simply aren’t exploited or denied opportunity on the same basis.” Even though Chisholm was running a left-wing, antiwar campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind., in March 1972 did not endorse her candidacy.

In 1974, the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbians based in Boston, organized themselves as a break to the left from a more conventional national organization called the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which itself had been formed as a Black-oriented version of the National Organization for Women. Murray, a co-founder of NOW, had left the group, feeling that it was overly focused on middle-class white women. The NBFO’s founding statement in 1973 explained that the group’s emergence was necessary to “strengthen the current efforts of the Black Liberation struggle in this country by encouraging 

 of the talents and creativities of black women to emerge, strong and beautiful, not to feel guilty or divisive, and assume positions of leadership and honor in the black community. … We will continue to remind the Black Liberation Movement that there can’t be liberation for half the race.”

Barbara Smith and her twin sister, Beverly, who helped to found the Combahee River Collective, were initially active in the NBFO chapter in Boston. But they broke away to form a new group “since we had serious disagreements with NBFO’s bourgeois-feminist stance and their lack of a clear political focus,” as the Combahee statement later explained.

The Combahee River Collective engaged in local campaigns across Boston, but it was never very large and mostly focused on internal consciousness-raising and political education. The collective is best known for its powerful statement, drafted in 1977 at the request of Zillah R. Eisenstein, who wanted to include it in her anthology 

Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism

As Barbara Smith, a co-author of the statement, said of its significance: “The concept of the simultaneity of oppression is still the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological contributions of Black feminist thought. We examined our own lives and found that everything out there was kicking our behinds — race, class, sex, and homophobia. We saw no reason to rank oppressions or, as many forces in the Black community would have us do, to pretend that sexism, among all ‘isms,’ was not happening to us.”

The Combahee River Collective is also widely recognized for introducing the phrase 

 to explain its orientation toward politics in the 1970s. Smith identified three main reasons why Black women began to organize separately and with their own agenda:

1. “The racism of white women in the women’s movement”;

2. Third world men who sought “to maintain power over ‘their women’ at all costs”; and

3. “White men and Third World men, ranging from conservatives to radicals,” who “pointed to the seeming lack of participation of women of color in the movement in order to discredit” feminism “and to undermine the efforts of the movement as a whole.”

For Smith and her contemporaries, these obstacles to the inclusion of Black women within movement spaces inevitably meant that Black women’s issues were not taken seriously and would be addressed only through their own organizing efforts — thus the centrality of identity. Yet Smith has repeatedly emphasized that the collective did not see this as necessarily hostile to coalition politics, something they, in fact, routinely practiced. While the historical context necessitated Combahee’s theorization of “identity politics,” the material pressures bearing down on Black women made alliances with others indispensable to their survival.

Pauli Murray recognized this need for coalition when she argued, “By asserting a leadership role in the growing feminist movement, the black woman can help to keep it allied to the objectives of black liberation while simultaneously advancing the interests of all women.” One year earlier, the Black feminist Mary Ann Weathers had described how to develop unity based on the mutual interests of women: “

 women suffer oppression, even white women, particularly poor white women, and especially Indian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, [Asian], and black American women whose oppression is tripled by any of the above mentioned. But we do have female’s [sic] oppression in common. This means that we can begin to talk to other women with this common factor and start building links with them and thereby build and transform the revolutionary force we are now beginning to amass.”

But Fran Beal mapped out the obstacles to this kind of coalition: “If the white groups do not realize that they are in fact fighting capitalism and racism, we do not have common bonds. If they do not realize that the reasons for their condition lie in the system and not simply that men get a vicarious pleasure out of ‘consuming their bodies for exploitative reasons’ … then we cannot unite with them around common grievances or even discuss these groups in a serious manner because they’re completely irrelevant to the black struggle.” However, Beal did not spell out the means by which Black women 

 overcome their oppression — if a mass movement that included groups beyond Black or other third world women was necessary.

Years after the publication of the Combahee statement and greatly influenced by the observations of the writer Audre Lorde (who took part in Combahee Collective retreats), Barbara Smith noted the importance of respecting “difference” in politics: “I will never forget the period of Black nationalism, power, and pride that, despite its benefits, had a stranglehold on our identities. A blueprint was made for being Black and Lord help you if you deviated in the slightest way. … How relieved we were to find, as our awareness increased and our own Black women’s movement grew, that we were not crazy, that the brothers had in fact created a sex-biased definition of ‘Blackness’ that served only them.”

She went on to caution against a strain of thought then seeping into the Black women’s movement: “In finding each other, some of us have fallen into the same pattern. … I am not saying that any particular group of Black women does this more than others, because at times we can all fall prey to the ‘jugular vein’ mentality, as [Audre] Lorde terms it, and want to kill or erase from our universe anyone unlike us.” The movement would need to overcome differences, because our liberation “will not come about, as Bernice Johnson Reagon puts it, inside our ‘little barred rooms.’”

Smith emphasized the distinction between organizing autonomously to ensure that a political agenda is developed around a particular set of issues and making separatism a matter of principle. She quoted Cheryl Clarke’s observation that we “have to accept or reject allies on the basis of politics not on the specious basis of skin color. 

Have not black people suffered betrayal from our own people?

” Even more consequently, Smith noted, “The worst effect of separatism is not upon whomever we define as ‘enemy,’ but upon ourselves as it isolates us from each other.”

Beyond recognizing that the differences existed, neither Lorde nor Smith clarified how to overcome these differences in political terms. The notion of identity politics and even coalition politics as a response are simply ways of negotiating and coexisting with those differences. Overcoming difference is not the same as washing it away. Instead, political solidarity is a recognition that we have a mutual interest in organizing together to create a political force that can change the conditions that we all suffer from, even if that suffering looks different based on social position.

Excerpted from the introduction to the second edition of 

, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and published by Haymarket Books. Reprinted with permission.

The Black Feminist Collective That Gave Us Identity Politics

The Democratic Party establishment is living in a state of fear — not about the fascist administration running the country but about the Democrats’ base embracing left-wing politics. Party leaders are so terrified by the victory of democratic socialist and other left-wing candidates in this summer’s primary elections that their smears about “woke” leftists have at times veered into MAGA territory. But the Democrats’ “woke” panic has also intensified a debate on the left about the legacy of the 2020 uprising for racial justice and how to organize today. We asked Hammer & Hope co-founder Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor to untangle the questions.

The victory of socialists and other left-wing candidates during the Democratic primaries this year is terrifying the party establishment — to the extent that self-identified centrist Democrats are attacking some of the party’s nominees in ways that they would have denounced the left for. Why are left candidates winning, and why are party leaders so shocked by that?

 All this hand-wringing about left candidates by Democratic Party leaders is bizarre on one level. The expectation seems to be that left politics won’t appeal to anyone in the general elections in November. But if you look at the success of socialist and progressive candidates in combination with polling around support for universal health care, access to housing, increased public spending, and more, it’s clear that there’s a high level of left-wing sentiment in this country.

That was borne out in the Democratic primary elections. I think that’s what the Democratic Party establishment is freaking out about. They say they’re concerned that the politics of these candidates won’t play in the November general election, and the Republicans will be able to hang on to power in Congress. But I think what they’re really concerned about is that left politics 

 resonate — and you’ll have progressives and democratic socialists in office demanding that the Democratic Party leadership actually do something.

That gets at the structural problem for the Democrats. A lot of liberal pundits attribute the problems that the party faces to poor messaging — that Democrats just lack clarity on what they’re trying to say. But the answer isn’t just hiring the right consultants to get the message right. There’s a more fundamental problem: The party is pulling in different directions.

Mainstream Democratic leaders may believe in some level of government programs, but they reject proposals for universal health care and a bigger vision of the role that government should play in funding social programs.

And on the other hand, you have the left wing of the Democratic Party — either progressives or democratic socialists running on Democratic Party ballot lines — who have a totally different idea of what government should be doing. They want to revamp how government operates to return to something more like the New Deal era.

Whatever you think about these currents in the Democratic Party, the idea that they can peacefully coexist within a single party has been proved false by the past 10 years.

As a party, the Democrats govern with an eye toward protecting and promoting corporate America in the same basic way that Republicans do, but with a marginally greater level of state intervention and without the xenophobia, racism, and nastiness that defines Republican politics today. On the question of economics, they’re in lockstep. The leadership of the Democratic Party is completely beholden to the same interests as the Republicans. The Democratic Party has its own billionaires and its own corporations that it wants to serve. It has its own commitments to the state of Israel and to AIPAC. That creates a structural problem for the Democratic Party because so many people who have traditionally made up the party base are moving to the left.

The Republican Party’s agenda in the second term of Trump is a naked giveaway of wealth and power to the richest and most elite people in the country. The consequences of the rapid abandonment of any kind of regulatory state is right in front of our faces. This summer saw a fucking mass diarrhea outbreak, repeated recalls for salmonella, and other evidence that our food system is breaking down after the Trump administration took a sledgehammer to the federal workforce, including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control.

Then there’s what Trump calls the Big Beautiful Bill, which is a massive redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, paid for by the evisceration of Medicaid and cuts in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that have kicked more than 4 million people off food stamps. The actions of the Department of Education have left 9 million people in default on their student loans.

The disaster for working people is obvious, and it’s also clear to see who’s benefiting from the economy and Trump being in power. The primary elections and opinion polling about what people want are a reflection of that. So is this fight within the Democratic Party resulting from the emergence of progressives and democratic socialists offering an actual political alternative.

The concern for the Democratic Party establishment is what to do in a moment like this. The party leadership is committed to a style and substance of politics that is outdated and irrelevant. This is a political crossroads for the Democratic Party.

 It was predictable that MAGA would try to smear all Democrats by denouncing so-called woke politics as out of touch with ordinary people, and mainstream Democratic leaders are using almost the same attack lines in criticizing progressive candidates.

But there’s a debate raging on the left after some left leaders, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, tried to walk back their previous support for slogans like “defund the police” in the context of electoral campaigns. Others on the left seem to see that as a betrayal of principle. What do you think? And how do you think the left should respond when faced with these accusations that it’s supporting unpopular positions like defunding the police?

 It’s complicated because we don’t have a common understanding of the issues that we’re trying to assess. This is the problem when you accept the framing of the right, which is what’s happened. Since the mass protests of 2020, the right has engaged in a campaign to redefine the notion of “woke” in order to vilify any government policies and social practices meant to challenge discrimination.

“Woke” has a longer tradition in the Black vernacular of meaning being politically aware. The phrase was reawakened, if you will, during the first phase of the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2010s. The right began to focus on “woke” when its political fortunes were turning sour in the late 2010s, because of the reaction to the first Trump administration.

 administration in presidential history; there were some 60,000 documented protest actions against Trump from 2017 to 2021. This led to a growing popularity of critiques of racism and of status quo politics. Maybe the clearest example of this was the 1619 Project, which was the creation of the New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project put forward the idea that racism, not freedom and democracy, is at the heart of the founding of the United States, so we should see 1619, when enslaved people first arrived to the English colonies, as the true beginning of the nation, not 1776.

This was the high point of a moment when progressive ideas weren’t sequestered to a certain part of the population but had a wide hearing. The response of the right was to reinvent “woke” as a smear, a mocking critique of what the right described as race ideology, by which they meant any sympathy with antiracism. The smear then migrated to gender ideology. “Woke” was used against the acceptance of transgender people, evidenced by the move toward gender-neutral bathrooms and gender-neutral books and the growing social acceptance that people could choose their own gender identities.

The right cobbled this together into a critique of political excess: The left is running amok, trying to force people to believe what they believe and think what they think. It all hinges on the idea that a “woke” critique of racism is about making ordinary white people feel like they’re personally responsible. That shifts the focus of antiracism from a systemic critique back to the idea that individuals are at fault, and the left is just attacking white people. So the current vilification of “woke” was an invention of the right to undermine the growing popularity of progressive ideas and politics and the openness to challenging the status quo, in however halting and uneven a way.

 on the left about the practice of politics — about whether the style of politics that the left has been engaging in has become more of a hindrance than a help to the movement in taking advantage of the new openness to progressive and left ideas.

In 2022, Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, who played a leadership role in the Movement for Black Lives for many years, wrote a very long 

 called “Building Resilient Organizations.” Two years after the 2020 George Floyd uprising, the article was trying to come to grips with the question of why the uprising wasn’t able to fulfill any of the movement’s goals. A lot of what Mitchell raised had to do with the practice of politics. He wrote about neoliberal identity politics, which

 has also written about: this idea of elite capture, where elites take hold of political frameworks that may come out of popular movements and use them for their own ends.

The slogan that came to define the 2020 protests was “defund the police.” But without any kind of clear political strategy of how to achieve something as ambitious as that, people — out of frustration or just not knowing what to do next — could fall into the moral condemnation of others for not seeing things the way that they saw them. So if someone questioned defunding the police because they weren’t sure what the alternative to policing would do with violence and crime, activists didn’t always address these everyday fears. Instead, there was a tendency to condemn people out of hand for not caring if Black people die.

It’s been six years since the uprising in 2020, and things are in many ways demonstrably worse than they were. Last year was the first year since the uprising that police killings went down. Beyond the issue of policing,

we’ve lost the federal right to abortion; affirmative action has been abolished by the Supreme Court; and there’s a concerted effort to legally wipe out the existence of trans people.

I think the question that people are grappling with now, without necessarily recognizing it, is: How did that happen? How did we go from up to 26 million people in the streets — and not for a one-off No Kings march, but for weeks on end over the summer of 2020 — to this?

I think that’s really the question that isn’t being asked in what we might call the woke wars, which AOC uncorked with her comment about “Woke 1” being crazy. In one part of the left, there’s a defensive reaction; people are asking if AOC and others are dismissing wholesale movements against racism and attempts to deal with the issue of policing. And another part of the left seems to be saying that there were elements of those movement struggles that were useful, but there was also a way in which the practice of politics was alienating.

It’s important to untangle what we’re talking about: Are we talking about the political demands from that period? Or are we talking about a style of politics that did become alienating? Many of the things that Mitchell was pointing out in his 2022 article were genuine. The role of neoliberal identity politics in that period meant that it was common sense in movements to believe that people of color should have the last word in any debate, regardless of what they were saying.

Plus there was a tendency toward maximalist demands. Anyone who wasn’t for the abolition of police without qualification was for the forces of capitalism. Where’s the space for political debate and discussion? For allowing people to engage one another with the intention of persuading people? For making an argument and whatever the outcome of that argument still finding ways to work together? These are some of the questions that still need to be discussed. But the way that this discussion has emerged over the summer, it feels as if people on the left have retreated into camps instead of actually taking up the issues.

 The defund slogan — which the right and liberals want to ask about at every opportunity because it has become a smear — seems to have become the litmus test in this debate on the left.

 Right. I think defund the police is a good example of how what could be an important discussion for the left has descended into camps.

Was the demand to defund the police overreach by the left that exemplifies the political excesses of what people call “woke”? I think that’s a misreading of defund the police and how it emerged as a political demand. It came out of a recent history of the failures of measures to reform police. From 2010 through 2018, there were repeated efforts at reform that failed over and over again to have any significant impact on police violence. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd was just the most recent example of the failure to rein in policing.

The idea of defunding the police was always seen by activists as just one part of a two-part process.

The idea was originally expressed as “divest-invest” — that is, divest from police and invest in the community as a way to deal with the root causes of crime. That’s not particularly crazy or excessive.

But 2020 was a moment — and I think AOC made this observation in her comments — when anything seemed possible. You had upwards of 26 million people in the streets, and there’s a power that comes with that.

Corporate America was bending over backward to 

 as if it were in sync with the movement, and members of Congress were draping themselves in kente cloth and kneeling in the Capitol.

You can see why people would think anything was possible in that political moment, including defunding and even abolishing the police in the near term.

 of the Black Lives Matter movement’s organizing strategy became clear. Because of the dispersed and decentralized nature of Black Lives Matter, there could be demonstrations everywhere, and there was no one in charge who could just turn things off and tell people to go home.

That was important to the wildfire spread of the movement. But it also could be a detriment when it was time to organize an effort to convince people who were open to the idea of defunding the police but weren’t ready to embrace it as a slogan.

I also think the slippage back and forth between the ideas of defunding the police and abolishing the police confused matters. Defunding the police can be taken to mean that you minimize the presence of policing by redirecting funding from law enforcement. That’s different — or at least that sounds different — from abolishing the police. Opinion polling in the moment bore this out.

Support for defunding the police ranged up to the high 40s in the polls, whereas there was no similar level of support for abolition of police. I think conflating those two things could confuse the issue in the minds of activists and in the minds of the public.

Are these ideas that the left should abandon like some elected officials who seem to be running away from them? I think it’s important to have independent organizations that don’t just think of their political strategy based on what is electorally possible at a given moment. At the same time, there’s a real question of whether the slogan “defund the police” has become so distorted after five or six years of haranguing by both Democrats and Republicans that the phrase itself is no longer useful, even if the ideas underlying it are.

That’s important to remember: The underlying argument about defund is that we should be focused on the root causes of crime and violence, and that means we should devote funding and resources to social programs, public agencies, public institutions, and public services. That argument makes sense to me. Polling shows that people want redistributive politics today as much as in 2020, and greater funding for public and social programs was always a part of the divest-invest model.

If any society were serious about ending violence and crime, you could probably deal with 90 percent of the problem by making sure that people lead good lives. And you could devote resources to dealing with the social dysfunction that leads to other instances of violence. The first answer is to provide good housing, good jobs, access to health care, and access to the things that people need. Any society serious about ending poverty, violence, and crime would immediately do that.

But it’s important for the left to remember that defunding the police was never 

 about the invest part either. As a left, we still have to take up the issue of the role of policing in our society. Crime might be a pretext for the police to be present somewhere. But crime is certainly not the reason that the police exist. You can see that in the way that Trump has weaponized the issue of crime to justify deploying law enforcement to different cities. He did this in Washington, D.C., flooding the streets with federal agents and the National Guard. This had nothing to do with crime and everything to do with asserting control. Last September, a week after Memphis announced that its crime rate had hit a 25-year low, Trump ordered the formation of a Memphis task force — a surge of federal law enforcement officers and the National Guard to work alongside the 2,000-member police force in a city of 600,000 people.

This has been an unmitigated disaster. The Trump administration has used crime to justify a military-type occupation of a Black majority city. For those who think we can just move on from the issues of race by emphasizing the class dimensions of inequality in the service of building a mass movement, the United States will always remind you that it’s almost impossible to talk about class in this country without talking about race.

In Memphis, Trump wants people to buy into having their cities occupied under the auspices of safety from the “Black criminal,” but this occupying force is then available to interfere with social movements developing in response to the construction of data centers and in opposition to the abuses being committed against immigrants. Racist policing, justified as the means to protect people from crime, opens the door for a much wider pattern of discrimination and injustice.

The socialist and communist left in the United States has long understood that if you don’t take on the issue of racism, you can’t organize an effective mass movement on the basis of class — not in the United States. This is a multiracial, multiethnic society in which the ruling class has perfected the art of divide and conquer by preying on ethnic and racial divisions — divisions that aren’t natural but that exploit the differences that exist in this country.

In order to get to the heart of this discussion about “woke,” you have to look at how we got to this point six years after having 26 million people in the streets.

What do we learn from that? What do we need to preserve from that moment? What do we need to change? How do we answer the pressing question of how to build a multiracial movement that doesn’t just stop the madness of the Trump administration but also begins to change this violent, vicious status quo, where things are getting so much more difficult for ordinary people? That’s the real challenge that we’re facing right now.

 One critique of the left candidates, particularly those who are directly connected with the Democratic Socialists of America, is that their base is white and middle-class, and Black communities oppose them. How should we look at this critique?

 Let’s start with the question of why DSA is disproportionately white. I think this is a fair question, and there are multiple answers. For one thing, this is a majority-white country, so it’s easy for a lot of organizations and institutions that are not exclusively about race to be mostly white.

But I think the more important question is about the politics of the DSA and whether they make it an organization that should appeal to Black and brown people. DSA is involved in campaigns and projects around affordable housing, immigrant rights and resisting ICE, support for reparations, and more universal issues, such as a living wage and universal health care, all of which are crucially important to Black and brown constituencies. Also, the group does have Black and brown members who have an expressed desire to bring more Black and brown people into the organization.

This is a moment in which the left should be trying to grow. Relative to other left groups, the DSA is quite big, but relative to the political opening that exists in a country the size of the United States, it is actually small. So DSA and the left have to grow, no matter who is joining: white people, Black people, Asian people, Latinos and Latinas.

The idea that came up during the primaries that Black people aren’t actually interested in socialist politics is an old, stupid one that gets brought back every once in a while, usually when socialist organization becomes visible in a more public way.

The first answer is that most people in the world who have identified with the politics of socialism — which are really about redistribution and collective ownership — have been nonwhite.

Some form of socialist politics was evident in the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s and the ’60s and the national liberation struggles that swept across the “colored” world in the ’60s and ’70s. Nonwhite people saw collective ownership, opposition to private property, cooperation, and aspirations for freedom, justice, and democracy as their politics.

What about Black people in the United States? This is similar to the fake issue raised by Democratic leaders that all these socialists will ruin the party’s chances in the November general election. The actual worry of mainstream party leaders is that the socialists will get in positions of power, govern effectively where they can, and put more heat on the Democrats for their inability or unwillingness to be effective.

Similarly, I don’t believe the worry is that Black people aren’t interested in socialism. I think the worry is that the more Black people hear about socialist politics, the more Black people will become interested in socialist politics. That’s borne out in many polls. The people in the United States most sympathetic to socialism are Black people. Why wouldn’t Black people be interested in a politics of collective ownership, based on putting the public’s well-being first — a politics that removes the obstacle of profiteering and profit-making from our ability to lead a decent life?

I think we’re seeing a glimpse of what the future might look like with Angie Nixon’s campaign for U.S. senator from Florida.

Nixon joined the DSA a few months before the primary election she won, and she’s subsequently explained that she’s not a socialist by repeating a lay understanding of capitalism: 

I make money; I own a small business; therefore I’m a capitalist

. But her campaign is indistinguishable from what a DSA candidate would run on: universal health care, demilitarizing the police, decriminalizing drugs, housing for all.

And to the shock and horror of the punditry, her strongest vote totals in the primary came from low-income, working-class Black communities.

The mainstream media’s main observation about supporters of democratic socialists and progressives is that they are white, college-educated, and middle- and upper-income relative to the rest of the population. But I think that Nixon’s campaign shows concretely what Zohran Mamdani’s general election victory in New York City also showed: If you focus on campaigning in Black working-class communities, socialist politics appeal to Black people more than any other demographic in the United States.

Why would we judge something as it is emerging, rather than where it may end up? We can look at the trajectory of Mamdani’s campaign. He lost the Black vote in the Democratic primary. But that didn’t mean that his platform didn’t appeal to Black people. It meant that his campaign had to do politics! What is politics? It’s about engagement and persuasion. That was the 

 Mamdani made between the primary and the general election, to continue to go to Black neighborhoods and communities and make the case for socialist politics.

This is what the bankrupt Black political establishment is afraid of. Given their much-talked-about proximity to Black people, they know that if you come into working-class Black communities talking about the need for rich people to pay anything at all, let alone their fair share, those communities support it. They support using those resources to provide good housing for people, to provide child care and health care, to fully fund public schools, to create city-run grocery stores.

Black people, who are disproportionately working-class

 not only will vote for that agenda but may also take it up as a social movement. The class warfare politics of the Trump administration and the utter ineptitude of the Democratic Party establishment have opened up a huge political vacuum with working-class people, who are the vast majority of the U.S. population.

About half of the households in this country have an income of less than $80,000 a year, and they’re barely keeping their heads above water. Things are gruesome right now, and they’re getting worse every single day. There’s a huge opening, and the real fear of the political establishment is that the socialists will figure it out and walk into it. What it means on the right is a doubling down on absurd levels of racism and bigotry — and when that doesn’t suffice, pure physical repression, as in Memphis and D.C. What it means for the Democrats is seeing the political opening but being utterly clueless about how to step into the vacuum.

That leaves a huge space for the left. But to take advantage of it, we have to figure out what we can absorb from the Black Lives Matter period that is useful and what about the practice of politics has to be left behind in order to build a mass movement that is multiracial and reflective of the entirety of the working class.

The Democrats’ “Woke” Panic and the Left’s Response

mericans roundly oppose Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime and the miserable state of the country. While the president claims that he has a mandate on “mass deportations,” 62 percent of the public opposes his draconian immigration policies. Outraged people in liberal and conservative towns and cities nationwide have come together to defend their neighbors from the terror of abductions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of adults blame Trump for the rising costs of groceries — a signature campaign issue of his — and half say his policies are making them worse off financially.

But given the scale of the onslaught, there is a sense that people aren’t resisting enough. The New York Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg described the apparent conundrum: “There’s less hope and more resignation” now compared to Trump’s first term. “In the last election Trump won the popular vote, and most demographics shifted rightward. The resistance has seemed exhausted and demoralized, and leaders in business, law and academia have adjusted accordingly,” she wrote.

Mass protests have demonstrated disagreement with the Trump agenda. But protests have generally been fragmented and localized, proving to be little more than speed bumps for Trump’s reckless agenda. What we need to build a more sustained resistance, one that can pose a real threat to the Trump regime, are more rooted, sustained local and regional networks.

rotest is the continuity from the first Trump presidency to the second. From the iconic Women’s March after Inauguration Day in 2017 to the historic uprisings in the summer of 2020, no other president in modern U.S. history has endured thousands of protests and demonstrations against almost every facet of his administration. During Trump’s first term, the Crowd Counting Consortium tracked upwards of 60,000 protests involving at least 21 million people, describing the outpouring as probably “the biggest sustained protest movement in U.S. history.” The mass movement of 2020 was instrumental in pushing Trump out of office and ushering in the Joe Biden presidency. But even as Biden began to betray his campaign promises, his administration met little resistance. That’s until the 

In the early days of Trump’s second term, 

 organized to protest his plan for mass layoffs. Local activists targeted Tesla dealerships across the country with pickets and protests to oppose Elon Musk’s role in dismantling federal agencies and firing federal workers. The protests were likely instrumental in helping to tank Tesla’s stock and push Musk out of the Trump administration in late May. Yet his nefarious influence in disrupting the operations of the federal government has persisted.

By the spring, the demonstrations had grown to sizes similar to those that had dogged the first Trump administration. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered at Hands Off demonstrations in April to stop what the organizers called “the most brazen power grab in modern history.” At Trump’s behest, the typically anodyne Flag Day, June 14, was transformed into a bellicose parade celebrating Trump’s birthday, and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. The No Kings protests held the same day were the largest anti-Trump demonstrations yet. Organizers claimed that more than five million people participated in some 2,000 locations nationwide — the largest single-day protest since the first Trump term, and proof that Trump doesn’t have a mandate.

But the protests are not large or politically cohesive enough to pose an actual threat to the regime. His opposition has yet to cohere into a formation with a clear political agenda. Part of the reason is that the politics of these demonstrations and the liberal opposition more broadly are muted, if not murky. The No Kings demonstrations were organized to reject “authoritarianism, billionaire-first politics and the militarization of our democracy,” according to the organizers, without offering a vision for how to move forward. What should we do other than protest? What are the constructive demands that could attract a broad base of people? The vague demands of liberals may lead ordinary people to assume their goal is to get society back to how things were before Trump returned to power. Organizers aren’t offering enough political clarity.

Even worse, if protest organizers and liberals make calls to return Democrats to power in the upcoming national elections without insisting on major political changes, people may become even more checked out. Americans are disappointed with Democrats’ weak resistance to the GOP. Any opposition that offers simplistic defenses of our democracy or that aspires to return Democrats to office and get back to normal may deepen the right wing’s hold on power.

eople’s disillusionment with the representative institutions of our democracy — the Supreme Court, Congress, our two major political parties, our corrupt political system and even the media — should inspire calls for radical changes to our so-called democracy.

The American public views their governing and civic institutions as caught between corrupt and ineffective. In the spring of 2024, less than a quarter of Americans polled expressed trust in “the federal government to do the right thing.” That was during the Biden administration. Eighty-five percent of people said they “don’t think elected officials care what people like them think.” Such skepticism also extends to political parties. A record 28 percent expressed sour views of both major parties — an increase from 7 percent 20 years earlier. Americans’ confidence in the Supreme Court slid a whopping 27 percentage points from 2019 to 2025. Three-quarters of Americans believe that democracy is under threat, but much of that sentiment seems driven by how people experience an impoverished democracy in their day-to-day lives.

This contempt extends to the media, too. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mainstream media. Take The New York Times, widely perceived as the standard bearer of liberalism and among the loudest institutions to proclaim the need for a robust defense of democracy. But the paper undermined its ostensibly lofty position with its recent intervention in the New York Democratic mayoral primary race. The Times editorial board, almost a year after announcing it would no longer endorse candidates in local elections, urged voters not to rank Zohran Mamdani, a state legislator who is an avowed democratic socialist, in the ranked-choice voting system. The editorial landed days before the primary, when polls indicated that Mamdani was second only to former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

The editorial board conceded that Mamdani “offers the kind of fresh political style for which many people are hungry during the angry era of President Trump.” Yet it justified its position by deriding Mamdani as an “elite progressive” with an “agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” Even more baffling, it concluded that Cuomo “would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani,” even though in 2021 The Times had cited “74,000 pieces of evidence” of long-standing patterns of “unwelcome and nonconsensual touching,” “offensive comments,” and other misconduct in calling for his resignation as governor.

Of course, editorials by The New York Times editorial board are not widely read. But this refusal even to consider Mamdani a plausible candidate fuels the idea that large, powerful civic and political institutions don’t care what people think. Institutions like The New York Times want people to stop Trump but only on their own terms, and in ways that preserve the failing status quo. American passivity is fueled by the idea that it doesn’t matter what the public thinks because those with power do what they want anyway.

In contrast, the Mamdani campaign demonstrates what a combative response to Trumpism could look like. With more than 50,000 volunteers, the campaign acted like a social movement, one that had to overcome bipartisan attacks and the vitriolic racism of the right. More important, the politics of the campaign took a forward-looking, constructive approach. For months, Mamdani focused on a redistributive agenda that called for taxing the wealthy to generate resources that would make the city more tolerable for working-class New Yorkers: universal child care, fast and free public buses, a $30 minimum wage, rent freezes. He put affordability at the heart of a campaign to defend democracy. And beyond that, he stood 

 the rights of Palestinians. That’s attractive to people. He offered a proactive agenda both in local and national politics.

And voters responded. He garnered more votes than any candidate in New York mayoral primary history. In his victory speech, he said, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations not because the people dislike democracy but because they have grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and weakness.” He added, “In desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat. New York, if we have made one thing clear over these past months, it is that we need not choose between the two.”

In response, a rogues’ gallery of Democratic Party operatives and donors are furiously cobbling together an opposition to Mamdani, the will of the voters be damned — further evidence of the party’s situational defense of democracy. More and more people believe that the political and governing institutions of our democracy, including elected officials, are unresponsive to them. Why would we expect the public to defend those institutions?

his view of democracy among liberals and Democrats — we’ll defend it when we like the candidate, policy, or court decision — is not much different from Trump’s democracy. His administration will go along with policies and court decisions it likes and ignore those it doesn’t. Recently, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois told Democrats, “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” imploring, “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now.” He added, “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.” Many other Democrats share his desire to fight Trump on their terms, but not in ways that challenge the parts of the status quo they continue to defend. That includes the disgraceful role of the U.S. in financing Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

When student activists flooded the streets to show support for Palestine in the spring of 2024, Democrats denounced them as antisemitic, and then-President Biden maligned their largely peaceful protests as violent and disorderly. The Democratic Party wants protests of the Republican Party’s political agenda (unless those protests are led by a progressive Democrat). But if you call Israel’s war on Palestinians genocide or criticize arms shipments to Israel, the Democratic National Committee will label you antisemitic and may mobilize the police to destroy your protest. Even internally, the Democratic Party is hostile to democratic expression it does not control. The gun control activist David Hogg was hectored out of an elected leadership position in the Democratic National Convention. His transgression? Suggesting that Democrats who were out of step with the politics of the base should face primary challenges. Political protests are not like water faucets that Democrats can turn on and off depending on whether they approve.

Trump’s attacks prove once again that political movements are not guaranteed. They need more to grow than worsening conditions. We’re still in the early days of this miserable presidency, and no one knows what might lead to the kind of political outpouring that could curtail or even stop Trump’s reactionary agenda. An incalculable mix of confidence and consciousness combine in unpredictable ways to give millions of people the belief that they can stop a government on a rampage. In an April poll, 59 percent of Americans described the beginning of Trump’s second presidency as “scary.”

Eventually, people’s anger and disgust will overwhelm their feelings of fear and intimidation, especially as the terrifying c onsequences of Trump’s big, ugly bill set in. Add to that the ongoing horror of the ICE raids and the heartless policies that leave victims of climate catastrophes in Texas, New Mexico, and elsewhere on their own. Systematic efforts to roll back the civil rights infrastructure that took 100 years to build will also motivate those appalled by racism to act.

or many, that moment arrived when a proliferation of local networks formed to challenge the draconian immigration raids in Los Angeles, where ICE’s attacks have been particularly concentrated. Thousands of Angelenos fanned out across the city to defend immigrants, protest, hold and attend know-your-rights trainings, and provide grassroots aid to families once again pushed into the shadows. On July 10, 1,400 people showed up for a training in nonviolent civil disobedience in Los Angeles.

Beyond L.A., ICE raids have forced other communities to develop their own networks, as in Milford, Mass., where ICE captured and detained Marcelo Gomes da Silva, an 18-year-old student. Gomes da Silva, who arrived in the U.S. from Brazil when he was 7, was taken by ICE while on his way to volleyball practice. Hundreds of his classmates and teachers, along with other community members, swung into action, putting ICE on the defensive. Right after the high school’s graduation ceremony, the students, still in their gowns, marched into town, demanding his release. They were joined by around 200 teachers. He was released six days later.

According to one report, Milford was the first New England town to join an ICE program to crack down on hiring undocumented immigrant workers. In last fall’s election, 42 percent of Milford voters chose Trump. Since securing Gomes da Silva’s release, the community has continued to organize as it builds a lasting network to resist ICE’s fascist tactics.

At the heart of such efforts is a politics of togetherness and solidarity, an us-against-them orientation. This reflects the growing class polarization in the country, evinced by a government led by billionaires and elites who loot public coffers to engorge their bank accounts even further. These kinds of local ties and networking are important, especially when the befuddled Democratic Party remains politically paralyzed. They have offered no hint of leadership on any relevant issue, especially immigration, leaving every city to chart its own course. The development of a coherent opposition is coming together through local responses to a wide range of political and economic attacks instead. It’s not just the size of the protest and demonstrations in defense of an abstract idea of democracy that matter. The day-to-day reality of how people defend against the cruel attacks on workers will define the opposition required to survive this era.

Building an Opposition to Survive the Trump Era

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?

Hammer&Hope

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

@KeeangaYamahtta

Contributions

Forum

Black Politics and Beyond

Issue

10

White Supremacy in Donald Trump’s White House

Issue

10

The Black Feminist Collective That Gave Us Identity Politics

Issue

12

The Democrats’ “Woke” Panic and the Left’s Response

Issue

7

Building an Opposition to Survive the Trump Era

Issue

5

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

Issue

5

The Leaders of the African American Intellectual History Society Cannot Remain Silent About Palestine

Issue

5

Why Is the Election Between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris So Close?

Issue

1

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

Issue

2

Black Class Matters

Issue

1

Hammer & Hope: Toward a Radical New Future

NO PAYWALLS,
EVER

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TODAY

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

@KeeangaYamahtta

Contributions

Forum

Black Politics and Beyond

Issue

10

White Supremacy in Donald Trump’s White House

Issue

10

The Black Feminist Collective That Gave Us Identity Politics

Issue

12

The Democrats’ “Woke” Panic and the Left’s Response

Issue

7

Building an Opposition to Survive the Trump Era

Issue

5

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

Issue

5

The Leaders of the African American Intellectual History Society Cannot Remain Silent About Palestine

Issue

5

Why Is the Election Between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris So Close?

Issue

1

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

Issue

2

Black Class Matters

Issue

1

Hammer & Hope: Toward a Radical New Future

NO PAYWALLS, EVER

SIGN UP TODAY

NO PAYWALLS,
EVER

SIGN UP
TODAY