 The New York Times says that 2020 saw the largest protest movement in U.S. history, with polls suggesting that anywhere between 15 million and 26 million people participated in various protests over the summer and into the fall. I think for many people this was viewed as a turning point in the ongoing struggle for racial justice, particularly in the movement for Black lives that had seemed to be in a lull after the election of Donald Trump — 2020 was a kind of wild, roaring affirmation that Black lives matter. There has been very little protest since then, though, certainly nothing on the same scale. So what happened? Why do you think those protests with millions of people on the streets did not produce the kind of change that people thought it would?

My frustration with The New York Times calling this the largest movement is that it conflated the number of people going into the streets in the United States with organization. Organizers at Dream Defenders and elsewhere realized that those people weren’t absorbed into organizations in such a way to build campaigns toward eliminating some of the kinds of violence that put them into the streets in the first place. What is exciting is that the 2020 protests also made abolition and defund the police mainstream conversations, which I think is huge. Those ideas were met with a lot of curiosity. A lot of people learned about abolition through podcasts, through tweets, and through articles. Organizations, especially Black organizations, are grappling with what can be done with all of that energy that was on the streets. I think a lot of people were excited about defund and abolition but weren’t necessarily connected to a political home that was able to transform that mobilization into strategic organizing.

And then I think people were just up against a lot, in terms of reforms being offered as a solution. They were up against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which felt like a real solution that people think at least is something; or they saw that some cities decided to take funds away from the police. They didn’t anticipate that Florida and Texas would try to make it illegal to defund the police and take that power back.

There’s a resource issue, knowing, again, that sometimes we’re up against The New York Times, which let Bill Bratton say that we have “defunded the police,” which isn’t true. Sometimes we’re up against fascists who are banning books; sometimes we’re up against liberal politicians pushing bad policies like community policing. People who tout reform as a more “realistic opportunity” to make social change have resources to push those reforms — more resources than people with more radical ideas about how to change the world. In 2020, I think some people went to the streets because it was anti–police violence but also anti-Trump. Now you have Joe Biden as president. Trump isn’t there anymore as a polarizing figure to resist. And now the new people who were in the streets have to figure out how to fight for causes when Democrats are in office, because there is a lot of “anyone blue will do”— but how do we hold them accountable? How do we push the people we mobilize to think and organize long term, beyond electoral politics?

 Definitely agree that there’s a resource issue. But I think there’s also a more basic tactical issue. You can protest your way to making an issue politically important and attention-grabbing: People talk about policing more and in more charged ways than 10 years ago. We have the mobilizations in the streets to thank for that progress, obviously alongside the organizers who have been keeping consciousness alive between eruptions.

But there’s still the question of who decides what the issue’s importance means and what systemic responses are going to fly — questions that usually get settled well after the protests themselves have been repressed. And that’s the stage when organization really matters. To me, this is why unions are so crucial to making any of this work — not because they are magic or because every member of every union has perfect politics — but because unions are one example of an organization with strategic options that many other kinds of organizations don’t have. They have a group of people who can decide, in democratic processes, what the group’s demands are — politicians don’t get to pick their favorite protest sign and just decide what the protest is really about, as we’ve seen post-2020. If those demands aren’t met, they can respond by withholding something that the people on the other side of the negotiating table want and need, rather than just writing clarifications insisting that the other side has misunderstood why people were picketing or what “defund” or “abolish” really means.

These are the advantages that explain why unions are so potentially politically powerful and have been crucial to movements for justice historically — why they were so pivotal to dismantling Jim Crow, why Dr. King was shot while he was linking up with them. To be clear, other kinds of organizations can play this kind of role too: attacking banks and politicians with debtors’ unions, going after energy companies with ratepayers’ unions, going after landlords and developers with tenants’ unions.

It also shows us what trouble we’re in now that unions are on the defensive. Less than three months after President Biden signed a bill shutting down the rail workers unions’ strike, there was a catastrophic derailment outside of East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled potentially deadly toxins into the air. Train safety had been one of the 

 the unions were pushing for. But corporations like 

, the rail company responsible for the derailment, continue to 

profit. At this point of the climate crisis, who really thinks this is going to be the last environmental disaster enabled by protecting big business’s right to risk all of our lives?

The important part is being able to decide on and build power together, and to do so by using leverage and not just expressing displeasure to people who don’t care. The stronger the organizations are that can do that, the better off we’ll be. Exactly like Derecka said: It’s organization that lets you do this in a stable way alongside and in between spontaneous uprisings.

I want to ask about the resistance. Some of what you all describe are internal debates within the given movement. Should we accept the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act as some means of change, or do we need to do something more radical? So there are those debates. But there’s also tremendous resistance from the right. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, because even as 2020 looked like a high point of resistance to the ineptitude of the response to the pandemic — and to this monumental racism — it also was a moment of mobilization for the right that has gathered momentum in the months since. Most of that looks like the attacks on what they describe as critical race theory, which is part of a discussion about institutional or systemic racism. The attacks on the 1619 Project, which is being literally banned in schools in some states. Derecka, you mentioned the Dream Defenders, who are based in Florida, where Ron DeSantis has created what historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad has described as a laboratory of fascism. A lot of those political attacks have been directed at either trans teenagers or the study of Black people, Black history, anything about contemporary Black America. What do you think the right is doing? Why have this particular response, and what do you think is significant about it?

Protesters outside the U.S. Supreme Court while the justices consider Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 2018. Photograph by Yuri Gripas/Reuters, via Redux.

 When the Muslim ban happened in 2017, do you remember the protests? Another thing also happened that I thought was very fascinating. Donations to the A.C.L.U. exploded. Legal organizations became the vanguard for how to resist white supremacy. If you look at these bans targeting queer and trans kids and families, who are prevented from getting gender-affirming care, the way that people are responding is to outsource the resistance to lawyers and have them go fight: donate, sue in court, threaten to file an injunction. I think that outsourcing resistance lets fascism flourish because then it becomes a problem that we are not confronting with mass mobilization and organization. Instead we’re telling people to let lawyers, legislatures, and the courts work it out.

Do we need a legal strategy? Of course. But we need mass resistance by everyday people. We need to go to the libraries where people are banning books to say, “Absolutely not. We’re not going to allow this.” We need strategic, disruptive, direct action. We need protests to push back and to show in numbers that this is wrong. I fear that we now just expect a lot of lawyers to do that work. That makes me particularly nervous because the right wing has taken over the courts and several facets of government. You have lawyers who are afraid to bring lawsuits in federal court because of the Supreme Court. How do we reconcile that with what’s been happening since 2017 — the urge to simply donate to the Legal Defense Fund, donate to the A.C.L.U., donate to other legal organizations to go fight — instead of the kind of mass mobilizing we experienced in 2020 as forms of broader resistance to what’s happening?

And along with the anti-trans bills, alongside banning critical race theory, we have also witnessed since 2014, when Michael Brown was killed, the criminalization of dissent, the introduction of laws to remove access to health care and food stamps for people who decide to go and protest. Some states have passed legislation that have enhanced protections for police, so that police have become essentially a protected class. We are up against states criminalizing dissent, and states banning and criminalizing the ideas that encourage people to think differently and act more courageously about the world, all while Biden calls on Congress and states to give more money to the police and increase the number of cops on the streets by 100,000. Who do you think will be enforcing the criminalization?

It’s also worth pointing out that what we’ve seen on the right are just the latest outcomes of an extremely long-term organizing strategy. Derecka, you mention the takeover of the courts — the Federalist Society started incubating the legal careers of the people who would control the Supreme Court decades ago — for at least one justice, as early as the 1980s. ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, formed in the early 1970s and has been laying the groundwork since then to mobilize police violence against the exact kinds of protest that Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita — a forest defender who was killed by state troopers in January — and comrades were doing in Atlanta against Cop City. The right wing is ahead of us by decades, not just by dollars.

But what do we do? I had not thought about the way the different levels of governing are working here — Trump spent the entirety of his presidency packing the courts with young conservatives, unqualified right-wing judges, who are just there on ideological missions. Then you see Republicans across the country just doing blatantly unconstitutional, illegal things, in hopes of sparking lawsuits that go to these corrupt courts, taking a local issue and making it national. And then the only recourse within this framework is to the reactionary, undemocratic, monarchical Supreme Court. It seems like liberals have played right into this by deciding, We’re just going to sue, we’re going to file a lawsuit here and file a lawsuit there. It is a sophisticated web that has entangled people who think that because these things are so outrageously unconstitutional, of course we must challenge them and get them off the books. But instead it becomes more complicated because of the shape of the judiciary. So what do we do?

 In early February, I had an event with Amna Akbar, Bernard Harcourt, and Cornel West. We discussed Dr. West’s law-review article on the role of lawyers and progressive social movements that he published in the 1990s. What he says in that piece is that lawyers need to continue to fight defensively, to protect and safeguard the rights that we have struggled to secure over time, and remind people about the suffering that we had before those rights. But we, lawyers and the public, have to understand that litigation is not the most radical intervention we all can make; it’s just a very specific role for some lawyers to protect what we already have. To me, it makes a clear case for movement lawyers to be supportive of and in political homes with grassroots organizations who engage in mass resistance to state violence. But we also need to do what Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs call us to do, which is to project — and then build — the alternate vision of the society that we want. I’ve been thinking about that over the past couple of weeks. I think broadly, for people who care about freedom and justice, we can’t be afraid and should be encouraged to be more explicit in our bold ideas about the society that we deserve.

We have to identify and condemn hypocrisy and the criminalization of our ideas. When I hear liberal and corporate Democrats criticize defunding the police and abolition because they say they are losing electoral seats — and go on to sign resolutions that condemn socialism — it’s as if they almost blatantly ignore that whatever sort of language or narratives they use in their campaigns, the right is going to paint it as the most radical thing ever. You cancel a measly $10,000 in student debt, it’s “socialism,” so you may as well just cancel it all — it can’t be that much more “socialist,” right? But Dems pretend that student-debt cancellation and abolition are narrative issues; they hide behind language to obscure why they don’t support the substantive reasons that lead members of the public to organize for these causes. They are not interested in social transformation, and they benefit personally, professionally, and politically from the status quo. So we must be much more energetic, powerful, strategic, experimental, and organized.

We need to continue to explicitly name the radical ideas that we’re struggling for and to take time, as many organizations do, to be in conversation with the public through political and popular education; through art in various mediums; through media that explains what we mean when we say socialism, abolition, feminism, internationalism. We’re struggling and fighting for these concepts, right? So what are they? Why do they exist? Where are people experimenting with them? We need to use these spectacular incidents of violence that have brought people to the street as an opportunity for everyday door knocking, canvassing, and reaching out to people to strengthen our bases. This is why I’m so excited about what Dream Defenders is building, because we need a national membership-based organization that organizes people and invites them to think more critically about politics and what they could be. They can go on to put pressure on the establishment through electoral politics, through protests, through mutual aid, and building alternatives.

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) rallies hundreds of young climate activists in Lafayette Square on the north side of the White House to demand that President Joe Biden work to put the Green New Deal into law on June 28, 2021. Photograph by Chip Somodevilla, via Getty Images.

We have to train people to engage in all kinds of direct action, train people to vote, train people to run for office, and train people to organize. These are not my ideas. These are the conversations I’m having with other organizers, with other human rights lawyers, with scholars, with artists, because not only do we have to think about what we need to do, we have to take the risk and go experiment and try it! And then evaluate, and try again. It is an iterative process. But I think one beauty of that, part of the Black radical tradition that makes me and my work possible, is knowing that we’re not doing that alone. We have to do that not only with people across state borders but in deep solidarity with people who are resisting other kinds of fascism across international borders and learn from their struggles — be in conversation with and think critically about what’s happening in India, in Brazil, in South Africa. We have to be ready to understand and also see ourselves as students of movements who are rejecting the kinds of fascism and neoliberalism that we see in other parts of the world and who are embracing new kinds of relationships and potential futures for us all.

 It’s a tough predicament. Unlike the people whose interests they’re protecting, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the short term to focus only on the long game — the movement is fighting against murder and caging and evictions and deportations, not the very livable disappointment of getting stuck in a job at a lower federal court. But I think we can probably all agree that the legal organizations, whether the Legal Defense Fund or A.C.L.U., are not the organizations that are going to get us over the finish line. So it’s worth figuring out which fights can do double duty — which organizations we can support that will help build long-term power while and through fighting the needed short-term campaigns. I’m glad that we get to hear from KC Tenants in this issue, because that definitely seems like the kind of organizing that could do both.

I’m teaching a course on the civil rights movement right now, so I’ve been reading a lot about tactical questions, questions of strategy and social movements. The legal strategy versus the mass movement was so profound in the civil rights movement. The N.A.A.C.P., of course, championed a legal strategy that targeted Jim Crow laws; just the whole legal edifice in the South was an affront to the 14th Amendment. So the N.A.A.C.P. believed that the movement should let the lawsuits work their way through the courts to have a more secure victory. But King, and the activists in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], argued that the legal strategy makes no sense without a mass movement. In other words the 14th Amendment had been the 14th Amendment for nearly 100 years by 1965. And that didn’t matter, even after the Voting Rights Act. Often histories of the civil rights movement or this period of the 1960s almost immediately pivot outside the South after the Voting Rights Act — we go elsewhere, we go to Watts, we go to the urban rebellions in the North. But if we stay in the South, you see that even though the law changed, there was not the kind of transformation where the law was this on Tuesday, and on Wednesday all the new regulations went into effect. And we thought we overcame; we were singing “We Shall Overcome.” The law doesn’t matter if people aren’t on the ground, making its enforcement reality. King makes a particular point: that the legal strategy relies on the passivity of those who are most impacted by these decisions. Because you’re telling people to wait for the courts to solve this question, wait for the law to change. And meanwhile, you know, life is hard on the ground. I think those are powerful points. 

I also think that part of the power of the protests against the Muslim ban in the winter and spring of 2017 was not just that people weren’t just sitting around waiting for lawyers, even though that may have eventually been the result, but that it did three things. One, it showed the authorities that no, you can’t just get away with this. Two, it forces the mainstream media to have not just this kind of surface, drive-by coverage but a deeper engagement with the issues bringing all of these contradictions to the surface, the main one being that we are supposed to be a country founded on religious freedom. Protests create the conditions so that people are able to see the contradictions that usually exist beneath the surface. And then third, and perhaps most importantly, is that it imbues a sense of confidence among those of us who are horrified about what the state is doing. Because it can absolutely seem overwhelming if you’re just sitting with your newspaper or watching the news. And seeing people do blatantly illegal things. This is supposed to be a country based on religious freedom, right? That is one of the core tenets in the Bill of Rights: freedom of religious association. There is no state-sanctioned religion; you’re free to practice whatever your religion is. You know this, but if there’s no one doing anything to protect it, it feels like maybe I’m not sure about what I know. Maybe no one cares, or maybe this is just the fate of our society. But when you see hundreds and then thousands of people protesting, it affirms that you know what you know. And it is a way to encourage resistance; it is a way for people to build confidence. It is a way of demonstrating that we are many. And so I feel like that combination of things is part of what we need now. I completely hadn’t thought about it until you said it, but this whole idea that we’re just going to fight this out in the courts isn’t enough.

It’s not something we can just litigate or legislate our way out of, as you both have acknowledged. I’ve been frustrated with the silence of a lot of the popular leadership in the Democratic Party — not surprised, because they are the leadership of the Democratic Party, but frustrated because they are further proof why we need mass public resistance and can’t simply vote our way out of this problem either. For example, as a gesture toward countering the fascist and racist critical race theory bans, why aren’t liberal Democrats rushing to affirm the thing that’s been banned by Republicans? Grants from the Biden administration to affirm racial justice in our schools — where’s that? Where’s that program? What resolutions are being passed to highlight the importance of Black study? Why is this the time to pass a resolution to condemn socialism? Where’s the resolution at least acknowledging “diversity” in educational thought? Because the banning of books and ideas, in addition to the silence coming from the Democratic Party, leaves even liberals feeling isolated and overwhelmed that this is happening. But when the masses are being told that the right way to approach this is to “go vote” or “go sue,” they are implicitly being told not to “go resist,” “go fight.” But that’s what we all need to do — go fight.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 7, known as the “Stop Woke Act,” to ban critical race theory on April 22, 2022. Photograph by Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images.

This is where the liberal political establishment and the conservative establishment often intersect. The Democrats are more than willing to criticize DeSantis for his authoritarianism, but they don’t actually want to talk about the content of what is being banned. They don’t want to talk about critical race theory. They don’t want to talk about African American studies. They don’t want to talk about Black feminism. They don’t want to talk about the Movement for Black Lives, because it brings to the surface the same issues that the Republicans also want to avoid. Because if we deal seriously with Black history, with African American history, and nearly 300 years of slavery, 100 years of legal subjugation, maybe these Black people have a point about redress. Maybe they have a point about reparations, and maybe they have a point about the need for programmatic institutional interventions to repair the inevitable harm and financial devastation that would come from nearly 300 years of slavery and 100 years of legal subjugation. Neither party is interested in having that conversation, because that’s a trillion-dollar conversation. More than a trillion dollars goes to the military now. It doesn’t go to reparations; it doesn’t go to housing, health care, education, and all of the forms of redress that are owed as a result of nearly 400 years of legalized oppression and exploitation. So neither one wants to talk about it.

And what we get instead is, “Look at this Black woman I put on the Supreme Court. Look at my vice president, look at what I do for Black people” — which is through these individual appointments of Black people —“look at my press secretary.”

Yeah! “Look, here’s a holiday. I’ve surrounded myself with all of these Black women, surely I hear you. And I’m committed to this.” I think it’s important that we continue to polarize people who support the Democratic Party around these issues. We should help reveal how racial representation and political power are actually dichotomies presented by the Democratic Party. Do you want a Black Supreme Court justice? Or do you want student-debt cancellation for HBCU students? Because Biden promised both and reneged on the latter. Do you want him to choose a Black woman running mate so that he can keep your votes, or do you want him to champion universal health care so that you can keep your life? Do you want an additional 100,000 diverse cops on the streets? Or do you want investment and the proper infrastructure in your neighborhood to keep you and your community safe?

Biden is not the only target. We experience this directly with Black politicians, too, who are willing and excited to play into a certain kind of racial-representation politics in exchange for more transformative demands. Keeanga, you write about this so well. I think that’s such an excellent point. We have to continue to remind each other what we are owed, what we deserve, and what we can build together.

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh damn, the government can just give me things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 It’s insulting to people’s intelligence.

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

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

 We see all these liberal pundits who are saying, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, do you want a cookie for fighting racism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 That’s what the working class looks like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I support fracking — in fact, my administration expanded fracking

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

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

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

 You can be cynical and Black and be like, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ast July, when it became public that a founder of the African American Intellectual History Society had accepted the $300,000 Dan David Prize, which is headquartered at Tel Aviv University, a group of leading scholars in the field of Black studies wrote and circulated an open letter in protest to the boards of AAIHS and the new affiliated journal, Black Global Thought. We understand that in a field as diverse as ours, scholars have a wide variety of opinions about any number of topics. But it is simply duplicitous for the public-facing AAIHS and its journal to align itself with the radical politics and history of the Black studies tradition while privately the most influential person associated with both accepts this prize during the Israeli government’s ongoing genocidal siege of Gaza and its belligerent and bellicose attacks on the West Bank. We invite you to read and circulate our letter. 


An Open Letter to the Leadership of AAIHS

As scholars of Black studies working in a long tradition of internationalist and global solidarity, we reach out to you, the officers and leaders of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), to take a stand. The Israeli government has essentially obliterated Gaza, killing and maiming tens of thousands of civilians, scattering over a million refugees, and critically damaging or destroying every university, hospital, library, and any other repository of Palestinian life and history. The West Bank is also increasingly under siege.

Unbelievably, and in the midst of such horror, members of the AAIHS have accepted the Dan David Prize, housed at Tel Aviv University. We view its $300,000 award as thoroughly tainted by wars of aggression and underwritten by American and Israeli state imperialism. While we acknowledge that many foundations and institutions that fund our paychecks and fellowships are implicated in odious activity and funding streams, we simply cannot allow base false equivalences to justify complicity, acceptance, and boosterism of organizations directly engaged in illegal occupation, according to the International Court of Justice. ​​Tel Aviv University, located a mere 40 miles from Gaza, was built on the remains of a Palestinian village razed by Israeli commando forces in 1948. It houses the Institute for National Security Studies and receives generous funding from Israel’s Ministry of Defense to train combat officers. Faculty and student researchers have collaborated with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer and supplier of drones that target Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. By accepting the Dan David Prize, hosted by Tel Aviv University, the AAIHS leadership has essentially crossed a global picket line of Palestinian solidarity and violated calls to refuse the prize by Palestinian activists.

Your organization is framed around the ideas of the Black radical tradition and purports to extol the insights, frameworks, and logics of Black internationalism while also seeking out and situationally aligning itself with Black leftists. Your blog, Black Perspectives,

offers the political vision of Black radicals, including the principle of international solidarity. As board members and past presidents of the AAIHS, you know the dangers of cultural projects that are designed to shroud brutal racial violence and deadly racial capitalism through the elevation of selected representatives of liberal multiculturalism and official antiracism. As writers, teachers, scholars, and activists in this tradition, we must guard against the capture of Black intellectuals by those who would rationalize or implement colonial agendas executed through regimes of racial terror.

Recently, your leadership announced the founding of a new journal, Global Black Thought,

declaring that it was developed from the urgency of the current political moment. In a recent interview, the journal’s managing editor said, “Whether it is the battle against resurgent right-wing movements, climate change, or the shifting balance of power worldwide between traditional and emerging world powers, Black people across the globe are going to have a critical role to play in those debates. Understanding how those contemporary debates are informed by the long and rich history of Black intellectual discourse is important for everyone.” Indeed, a special issue on “Black Feminist Truth Telling” is slated as part of the inaugurating events of the new journal. This is an alarming example of invoking a tradition rooted in anti-imperialism, international solidarity, and protest to project an image of radical politics and thought while simultaneously remaining silent or even accommodating the brutal siege of Gaza and all of occupied Palestine. Students, faculty, and staff at the universities in which AAIHS leaders and members work and whose only offenses are peaceful antiwar protest or criticism of Israel have been disciplined, and many still face the threat of this harassment. How can you launch a new journal ostensibly dedicated to global Black thought while remaining silent on the issue of Palestine? At best it is ill informed, at worst mendacious. Is AAIHS only interested in building a brand that invokes Black radicalism and Black feminism to appeal to Black scholars while maintaining no particular commitment to the underlying ideas of freedom, justice, and self-determination that animate those traditions?

The leaders and membership of AAIHS should be at the forefront of condemning the Israeli government’s actions. We have seen the callous repression of that movement by conservative lawmakers and liberal university administrators. To be sure, the forces that seek to ban or circumscribe Black studies and Black history on college campuses are the same forces that mobilized to suppress Palestine solidarity encampments and protests this past spring. Indeed, the most conservative critics link the rise of Palestinian solidarity to critical race theory, ethnic studies, and diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. They believe that the study of Black oppression has made young people particularly sensitive to the treatment and experience of Palestinians, so they have taken to demonizing Black studies as “grievance studies.” Recent polling has shown that more than two-thirds of Black Americans support an immediate and permanent cease-fire to end Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. This is an issue that you cannot hide from. Your silence will not protect you. It emboldens those who are working to remake the university by removing dissenting voices, thought, and politics. Your silence exposes glaring contradictions that deserve explanation. Is your Black internationalism and ethical commitment only historical? What of the rich history of Black intellectual and political affinity with Palestine? Some contradictions deserve explanation even if members have decided that they have no particular interest in the cause of Palestinian freedom and self-determination. The AAIHS’s reputation and positionality — in representations of Black liberation, internationalism, and feminism — are at stake because of your silence.

Therefore, we urge the AAIHS to (1) issue a statement against the Israeli state project of Palestinian annihilation and in favor of peace and freedom for Palestinians in the Middle East, and (2) issue a statement of transparency, assuring readers and potential contributors that the AAIHS’s annual conference, new journal, and general activities are not being funded by the Dan David Prize. If the AAIHS cannot take these basic steps to preserve the integrity of the Black radical tradition in which they profess to operate, we urge a withdrawal from the AAIHS and its upcoming conference at Brown University.

Sincerely,
Andrea Y. Adomako
Leslie Alexander
Moya Bailey
Davarian L. Baldwin
Lucien Baskin
Frances M. Beal
Martha Biondi
Lisa Brock
Simone Browne
Charisse Burden-Stelly
Chris Cameron
Charlene A. Carruthers
Cathy J. Cohen
Ashon Crawley
Angela Y. Davis
Gina Dent
Erica R. Edwards
Navid Farnia
Roderick A. Ferguson
Johanna Fernández
Aisha Finch
Tiffany N. Florvil
Nyle Fort
Marisa J. Fuentes
Lorgia García Peńa
Adom Getachew
Dayo F. Gore
Frank Guridy
Sarah Haley
Leslie M. Harris
Christina Heatherton
Marc Lamont Hill
Gaye Theresa Johnson
Nikki Jones
Joseph Jordan
Robin D. G. Kelley
Micah Khater
Tiffany King
La TaSha Levy
Toussaint Losier
Minkah Makalani
Wendell Marsh
Kyle T. Mays
Erik S. McDuffie
Uri McMillan
Robin Mitchell
Donna Murch
Premilla Nadasen
Leigh Raiford
Barbara Ransby
Conor Tomás Reed
Shana L. Redmond
Russell Rickford
Akira Drake Rodriguez
Dylan Rodríguez
J. T. Roane
David Romine
SA Smythe
C. Riley Snorton
Damien Sojoyner
Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine
Brandi T. Summers
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Ula Y. Taylor
Jeanne Theoharis
Erik Wallenberg
Stephen Ward
Daniel Widener
Alden Young

Author affiliations are for identification purposes only. The authors and signatories offer this analysis as private citizens. The views expressed are their own and do not reflect any employer or university.

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

n the days and weeks before Americans vote for their next president, Donald Trump has reached deep inside the gutter for his latest stump speech material. He spent much of September insisting that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating the pets of locals. “Illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life,” Trump said at a California press conference in September. In his lone presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump claimed, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Even as local officials insisted that nearly all of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally, Trump promised to organize a large-scale deportation of them anyway. More recently, at a rally in early October, Trump traveled to Aurora, Colo., to rail against immigrants he described as “animals,” “barbaric thugs,” and “sadistic monsters.” As if to make Trump’s point, the campaign adorned the stage with life-size photos of the faces of Latino men.

Trump’s campaign has been fueled by racism, misogyny, and homophobia, a consistent and extraordinary display of bigotry in person and via commercials bombarding swing states across the country. And yet this race is razor close, leaving us to guess who may eventually win. Even as Trump’s campaign has offered little more than racist rants, lies, and a few incoherent economic policies (higher tariffs and eliminating taxes on tips for service workers), he stands as good a chance as Harris of winning the presidency.

How can this be? There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also 

 that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters 

 with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, 

 found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

But even with these stark distinctions between the candidates, and also between Trump and voter preferences, Harris has struggled to rise in favorability or distinguish herself from Trump in this race, which remains a toss-up. Beyond identity, Harris was slow to fill out her presidential platform with programming to indicate how she would be different from Trump and the president she currently sits behind. When asked on a recent talk show how she diverges from Biden, Harris distinguished herself by highlighting her intention to appoint a Republican to her future cabinet. These kinds of antics threaten to undermine her support with Democratic voters who see themselves as progressives. While Democrats describe Trump as a fascist and Joe Biden went so far as to 

 that Trumpism and elements of the Republican Party seemed akin to “semi-fascism,” it is odd, as some kind of gesture toward bipartisanship, to insist on putting a Republican in the cabinet. Yet she is reaching for political gimmicks because even with what one could point to as the successes of the Biden administration, like its aggressive efforts to recover from the catastrophic economic effects of the pandemic, these issues have not earned Harris voters any more than they did for Biden.

Since Biden delivered his last State of the Union address in January, the U.S. has enjoyed the highest rate of economic growth, its lowest inflation in the past year, and the strongest wage growth among its peer nations in the G7. Rates of poverty and unemployment have fallen and remain at historic lows. This includes Black workers, who are also experiencing historically low rates of poverty and low rates of unemployment — though they are still higher than for white people. Biden’s presidential campaign was impervious to this supposed economic good news. Indeed, Harris’s run was made possible by the national shrug about Biden’s economic recovery — the so-called vibecession. But the problem was never just vibes. Much of those real material gains were undone by historically high inflation in 2022 that ate into the rising wages that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the worst of the pandemic as businesses tried to lure workers back. Almost half of Americans say they are not as “well-off now” as they were when Biden took office. Nearly 60 percent say the economy is getting worse. Given the ever-rising costs of essential goods — especially housing, health care, and education — they are not wrong.

Economic uncertainty and insecurity are underwriting some measures of the skepticism confronting Harris’s historic run. She has attempted to distance herself from Biden’s record, but it is difficult to do so when you are the vice president. But the reluctance of some segments of the Democratic Party’s core constituency to embrace Harris points to deeper problems for the Democratic Party. Harris’s weak support among Black voters has been a canary in the coal mine for months but has been ignored on the assumption that Trump’s bigotry would cohere these voters into alignment with Harris. Instead, Black support has continued to be a drag on Harris’s momentum.

Harris continues to poll lower among Black voters compared with Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. She has been stuck at around 80 percent with Black voters who say they will cast ballots for the Democratic candidate in the coming election. Black women are Harris’s biggest supporters, but the 83 percent who say they will vote for her is a notable drop from the historic high of 96 percent who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and even the 91 percent who voted for Biden in 2020. All the efforts of the Democratic Party to cast Harris’s campaign in the same light as Obama’s run in 2008 miss the ways that Obama’s legacy had changed by the end of his second term. By the time Obama left office, he and Michelle Obama might have been personally revered, but many Black voters were disappointed with his underwhelming presidency.

In 2016, with Trump challenging Hillary Clinton, 51 percent of Black people agreed that Obama’s presidency was “one of the most important advances” for Black Americans, but that was down from 71 percent in 2009. Only 37 percent of African Americans thought his administration had improved “race relations.” Last, 52 percent of Black people polled said that Obama’s policies had “had not gone far enough” to help Black people. But the most important barometer of disappointment with Obama’s presidency was the eruption of the Black Lives Matter social movement during the twilight of his administration. The idea that Harris is a revival of the spirit of Obama in 2008 fails to comprehend how the persistence of economic inequality and police abuse and violence created disillusionment at the end of his term. Of course, no one believed that it was Obama’s responsibility to single-handedly undo generations of racial discrimination during a two-term presidency, but when he was running for president in 2007, he obliquely presented his candidacy as the fruition of generations of civil rights struggles. When he traveled to Selma, Ala., in 2007 to give a speech to former leaders of the movement, he said, “We’re in the presence today of giants whose shoulders we stand on, people who battled not just on behalf of African Americans but on behalf of all of America; that battled for America’s soul, that shed blood, that endured taunts.” He added, “I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Of the previous generation, which he called “the Moses generation,” he said, “They took us 90 percent of the way there. We still got that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side.” But by 2012, when a chastened Obama was asked whether his administration had done enough for Black businesses in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, he said, “I want all businesses to succeed. I want all Americans to have opportunity. I’m not the president of Black America. I’m the president of the United States of America.”

Supporters waiting for the arrival of Kamala Harris during a campaign rally at the McHale Athletic Center in Wilkes Barre, Pa., Sept. 13, 2024. Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

 of 589 Black voters, 84 percent of Democrat-affiliated respondents affirmed that their party “understands the problems of people like me” and 75 percent agreed with the statement that the Democratic Party “can fix the problems facing people like me.” But when confronted with the statement that the Democratic Party “keeps its promises,” only 60 percent agreed. The unresolved crises of both the Obama and then the Biden administrations — namely, persisting economic inequality and the continuing problem of police brutality in Black communities — have shaped many Black voters’ concerns and substantiated the claims that Democrats don’t keep their promises. Consider that nearly three-quarters of Black people in the U.S. believe that the “prison system” was designed “to hold Black people back” and almost 70 percent believe the same thing about the police, 

 that “the economic system was designed to hold Black people back.” The numbers are even higher among Black adults with a college degree. The lack of resolution of or even serious engagement with these issues in the race for president has turned into a political crisis that now threatens to undermine Kamala Harris’s campaign. History is not cyclical but is in fact cumulative.

This is a better context with which to understand the small but clearly significant appeal of Trump to some Black men and a modestly increasing number of Black women. Instead of addressing the specific concerns Black voters have with the Democratic Party, Obama took it upon himself to intervene with one of his infamous scolds of a Black audience. In early October, during an election appearance in the swing state of Pennsylvania, he dismissed the erosion of support for Harris among Black men as sexist: “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” That may be a part of the mix, but the underlying assumption that Democrats are simply entitled to Black votes without having to account for their record is part of a larger political problem that is coming home to roost. The bigger issue for the Democrats is not the defection of Black voters to Trump but the potential indifference of Black voters to the election more broadly.

In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

It is a strategy that risks Harris’s standing among the core constituents of the Democratic Party, and it may threaten her influence among other voters as well. In focusing on the future, Harris avoids talking about the past. She has defined her campaign as a “new way forward,” but this framing — intended both to distinguish her campaign from Trump’s while also distancing herself from Biden — has left her campaign unable to politically contextualize and explain the inflation experienced during Biden’s term, which Republicans have blamed on his excessive spending. Instead of embracing the popular pandemic-era programs and the bolder aspects of Biden’s legacy — expanded unemployment insurance, student loan relief, antitrust measures, climate investments, and pro-union stances — and pledging to reintroduce or expand them, Harris acts as if it were all a mistake to move beyond in favor of some nebulous future.

Not just a poor strategy, it reflects the natural resting place of the Democratic Party. Biden’s gamble on a big welfare state in 2020 was the product of the combination of an unprecedented protest and a devastating pandemic, not a real commitment to using public money to break with decades of neoliberal austerity. The previous two presidential races unfolded against a backdrop of an insurgent Black Lives Matter movement and the leftward pull of Bernie Sanders placing uncomfortable demands on the party. In this race, though, activist currents in the dormant BLM movement quickly fell in line to back Harris with no demands and a narrow focus on simply getting out the vote. Sanders, along with many members of the Squad, are also marching in lockstep with the Harris campaign, despite her retreat from the more progressive positions she took in 2020. Harris’s consultants and campaign operatives have restored the Democrats’ messaging around policing, market economics, and reactionary immigration policies while dropping any pretense of social democratic programs that made Sanders’s run for president so popular. Moreover, Harris’s refusal to consider any deviation from Biden’s commitment to Israel has also undermined her support from constituencies she needs to win this year’s race.

The irony is that when Sanders ran in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party primaries, his candidacy set the terms for a broad field. In a race to catch up with the front-running Sanders, Harris even adopted his policy proposals around free public health care and college. But in this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters.

It remains to be seen how many of these voters — Black, brown, young, working-class, without college degrees — can be mobilized to vote for Harris. But the Democratic Party’s dependence on the charisma of its older cohort, particularly Obama, relies on a stagnant image of history, one where we never learn the lessons of the past. In reality, voters carry their political resentments and disappointments into the future — not for the sake of cultivating political villains, but because their circumstances have not improved enough that they can afford to forget.

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

oe Biden stated what his party takes to be the truth about Democrats and Black America, when, days before police officers murdered George Floyd in 2020, he told a host of a popular Black radio show while promoting his candidacy, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”

Biden’s claim was galling. As a race-baiting legislator in the 1980s and ’90s, he helped to dismantle welfare and expand the criminal legal system. The comment was also presumptuous; for weeks, Biden was engaged in competitive Democratic primaries. But the Democratic Party 

 basically owned the Black vote for nearly a half century. Did Blackness confer such a political uniformity that even someone like Biden could say that a vote for him was a vote for the interests of Black Americans?

If that’s true, why has it been hard to sustain a movement against racism in the United States? What undermines the unity of Black people amid racist attacks, including the recent mass shooting of Black people in a Dollar General store by a white supremacist in Jacksonville, Fla.? Days after Biden’s impolitic quip, the largest protests in American history unfolded across the country. The “Black lives matter” slogan assumed new meaning in a pandemic that had ravaged Black communities in particular. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd shocked the public out of its exhaustion with our upended society.

Local activists unveiled radical demands to uproot the causes of violence, disease, and death — demands born of the chaos of the pandemic and the radicalization created by the state’s failure to enact meaningful reform. Protesters called for the redistribution of public money away from the police and back into libraries, health care, housing, schools, and social programs. Ordinary people responded to the pall Donald Trump cast over national politics, and they also protested local conditions worsened by police brutality and austerity budgets.

When Biden claimed that no Black person could vote for Trump, he sensed the political impact of Trump’s racist insults hurled at cities with Black mayors or large Black populations. Trump had once 

 Baltimore as a disgusting and rat-infested city where no human being would want to live. Chicago became a catchall for his racist caricature of American cities — what he called “American carnage” in his inauguration speech in 2017. He 

 of San Francisco, “It’s worse than a slum; there’s no slum like that.” As a response to Fox News host Sean Hannity singling out Black-led cities, Trump 

, “Everyone gets upset when I say it. It’s not racist. Frankly, Black people come up to me and say ‘Thank you, sir, for saying it.’ They want help. These cities, it’s like living in hell.”

Trump’s misconduct made it easy for Black public officials to decry him across national news outlets and voice solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Many protesters hoped that those politicians, some of whom 

 to empathize with the anger on the streets, would lead the way in transforming protest demands into public policy. Sylvester Turner, the mayor of Houston and the former president of the African American Mayors Association, said as much in 2021: “Black mayors, we have to get it,” adding, “We come from these communities and many of us live in these communities. So who better situated to address all of these needs and challenges than we are?” The sentiment was the same the year before: Black elected officials would stand in solidarity with Black protesters to pursue reform. All of this heightened protesters’ expectations; if federal politicians rejected their demands, maybe local ones would fulfill them, especially when it comes to police reform, which is a local issue given there are around 18,000 police departments.

Yet Black leaders in local and federal office largely failed to enact substantial reforms, which they claimed to be uniquely qualified to deliver. Instead, police killings nationally 

 in 2021 and 2022 than they had been in 2020. Often in politics, politicians say one thing and do another, and Black elected officials are no different. Political change requires cooperation among multiple parties, which can be hard. But these officials used their identity to cultivate an impression that they harbor unique insights that allow them to be effective legislators. It is a perspective crystallized by the title of an article by the social scientist and writer Andre Perry: “To Protect Black Women and Save America from Itself, Elect Black Women.”

Despite the greatest concentration of Black political power in American history, the problems that plague poor and working-class Black communities persist. We not only had a two-term Black president, and Black attorneys general, but now there are two Black Supreme Court justices. Black people preside as mayors of some of the largest and wealthiest cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston; soon, Cherelle Parker, a Black woman, will become mayor of Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city. There are more Black elected officials in Congress than ever, but there has been no substantive reform. As a result, nearly 40 percent of Black people said in a recent poll that “B.L.M. has done the most to help Black people in the U.S. in recent years,” compared with the paltry 6 percent that said the Congressional Black Caucus had done the most. And for all the B.L.M. movement’s problems, more than 80 percent of Black people polled say they support it.

Black politicians’ suggestion that a shared racial identity means their election alone will fix Black communities makes it appear that the hard work to forge solidarity and engage in political struggle is unnecessary. Some describe this gap between promises and outcomes as selling out or even betrayal, yet Black elected officials complain of being held to a higher standard by the media or Black voters, who, they claim, hold unrealistic expectations for change. But these officials made false promises as Black insiders working on behalf of the community, which prompted new questions about how to achieve change.

he historian Robin D. G. Kelley has challenged the “presumption of a tight-knit, harmonious Black community that has existed across time and space.” During the Jim Crow era, residential segregation and racial terror seemed to unite the fates of Black people. Then, just as now, the Black community was contingent, fragile, and riven by class tensions between the Black middle class and the Black poor and working class. Whatever cohesion born of necessity then cannot be invoked today as an actual strategy to fight oppression. The successes of the civil rights movement further frayed any sense of a unified Black community, as more Blacks rose to the middle class and elected office. The generation that came of age after the 1960s benefited from the rights and affirmative action initiatives that cracked open the possibilities of a better life. Greater access to college and better-paying work, and with it better housing, transformed their lives and raised expectations that they could ascend in society. But that came at a cost.

“When members of a racial or ethnic group become affluent,” the political scientist Michael Dawson wrote in his groundbreaking book 

, “they seek to preserve their ‘well-earned’ measure of security and privilege by forming coalitions with other racial or ethnic groups whose economic interests are similar,” leading to increased “class conflict among African Americans.” This was true in 1994, when Dawson published his book, and it is even more true today. For all the focus on the racial wealth gap between Black and white families, the greatest transformation in Black life in the past 50 years has been class polarization 

 Black families. In 1975, fewer than 1.4 percent made over $100,000. Today, that figure is 20 percent.

When it comes to the Black elite, the top 5 percent of Black households 

 had higher incomes than 85 percent of white households. The highest-earning 20 percent of Black middle-class households had higher incomes than 62 percent of all white households. “Du Bois’s ‘talented 10th’ has become the ‘prosperous 13 percent,’ ” quipped Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard African American studies professor, in a 2016 article. Today, that number is most likely higher. In the article, “

,” Gates observed, “There are really two nations within Black America.” “The problem of income inequality,” he added, citing the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, “is not between Black America and White America but between Black haves and have-nots, something we don’t often discuss in public in an era dominated by a narrative of fear and failure and the claim that racism impacts 42 million people in all the same ways.”

This was an exaggeration, of course. Compared with white Americans, we can measure the fragility of the Black middle class and even the Black elite by their relative debt burdens, or income or wealth disparities. And while the wealth gap between the Black poor and the Black middle class may strain political allegiances, it also connects them. Middle-class Blacks are more likely than their white peers to provide financial support to poorer relatives. But this does not guarantee political solidarity; middle-class Blacks may resent people who “hold them back.” Largely because of racism in the real estate market, middle-class Black people are also more likely to live closer to poor Black neighborhoods than middle-class white people relative to poor white areas. This is no recipe for unity. Instead, Black homeowners who want property values to rise to protect their devalued assets may feel antagonized by this proximity.

The new opportunities for social mobility increased class tensions, which manifested in negative attitudes. In 1986, only 44 percent of Black people felt the values of middle-class and poor Blacks had “become more different.” That figure rose to 61 percent in a 

 where 70 percent of Black respondents with a college degree agreed that there was a value gap between middle-class and poor Blacks. Nearly one in four said that growing diversity within Black communities meant that they could no longer be considered a single race.

, only half of Black people believed that “what happens to other Black people in the United States affects their own lives.” About a third said that they have “everything or most things in common” with poor Black people, compared with 12 percent who felt a deep affinity with wealthy Blacks. Any sense of a shared reality decreased as a person got wealthier: only 22 percent of Black people who identified as “upper income” expressed the greatest solidarity with the Black poor compared with almost 40 percent of low-income Black people who did.

The Black radical scholar Angela Davis lamented this shift in attitudes in a 2007 interview with British journalist Gary Younge: “We used to think there was a Black community. It was always heterogeneous but we were always able to imagine ourselves as part of that community. I would go so far as to say that many middle-class Black people have internalized the same racist attitudes to working-class Black people as white people have of the Black criminal. The young Black man with the sagging pants walking down the street is understood as a threat by the Black middle class as well. So I don’t think it’s possible to mobilize Black communities in the way it was in the past.” She went on to say, “I don’t even know that I would even look for Black leadership now. We looked to work with that category because it gave us a sense of hope. But that category assumes a link between race and progressive politics and, as 

 says, ‘There aren’t any guarantees.’ What’s more important than the racial identification of the person is how that person thinks about race.”

Not only attitudes but even the meaning of Blackness has changed over time. There are 11 million more Black people in the United States than there were in 2000. This includes Black immigrants, who make up 12 percent of the Black population, and Black Hispanics are 6 percent of Black people, per the U.S. Census. Attachment to their racial identity varies widely across these groups. More than half of U.S.-born Blacks say they have “everything or most things in common” with other U.S.-born Blacks. But that figure drops to about a quarter for Black people born outside the U.S. These differences in identity, lifestyle, and income are expressed in finances and economics, as well as politics.

While Black people vote almost in unison for the Democratic Party, they may want different things based on social class: Greater access to homeownership may be urgent for middle-class Black people, but rent control and eviction mitigation strategies matter more for the Black working class, whose needs are harder to meet politically. The needs of the Black middle class are both in sync with the aspirations of the Black political class and more legible within the existing political and economic system. This is why corporate entities have been eager to champion ending the racial wealth gap, increasing homeownership rates, and expanding Black business, while ignoring calls for rent control, expanded access to Medicaid, and reinstatement of the monthly child tax credit that lapsed in 2021. These different political goals help explain the gulf between Black elected officials who receive corporate donations and the millions of ordinary Black people they claim to represent. And when Black elected officials engage in the age-old politics of blaming poor people for their own condition, which former senator Carol Moseley Braun tried to put into legislation, the prospect of a single, unified “Black agenda” gets muddied.

s one of two Black women ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun showed that she was ready for the political prime time in the Democratic Party when she offered an amendment to the much despised 1994 Crime Bill that would try juveniles as young as 13 as adults if they committed a crime with a gun. She initially crafted what was her first major piece of legislation to target 12-year-olds, The Chicago Tribune reported, and she called for their parents to be fined up to $5,000.

Moseley Braun made sure there was no confusion over her intentions in an 

 with reporters. “Do we treat juvenile criminals like criminals or like juveniles?” she asked. “I believe the philosophical basis and practical basis for separating juveniles out of the criminal justice system that existed 100 years ago, when all this reform happened, no longer exists.” She added, “The older juvenile criminals use the younger ones as mules for their guns, for their weapons; they are the ones who are doing more shooting now than any other group, in large part because they know there will be no sanction in the juvenile court system.” Moseley Braun aimed her comments at a white audience to try to validate her presence as the lone Black woman senator.

More so than any other Black political figure, it was Barack Obama who spoke to the American public in two registers, often at the same time: one for a white audience and one for Black America. He pioneered the archetype of the compassionate scold, willing to tell Black communities hard truths. When Obama stumped for the presidency in 2008, at a stop in Beaumont, Tex., he said: “Turn off the TV set, put the video game away. Buy a little desk or put that child by the kitchen table. Watch them do their homework. If they don't know how to do it, give them help. If you don’t know how to do it, call the teacher. Make them go to bed at a reasonable time. Keep them off the streets. Give ’em some breakfast. Come on.” He added, “You know I am right. I’ve got to talk about us a little bit.” The people in the crowd loved it, because it sounded familiar. Now Obama was authentically Black, not just jockeying for the Black vote. And white people could also enjoy it without feeling racist, because a Black man said it to a Black audience roaring in approval.

Hammer&Hope

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

@KeeangaYamahtta

Contributions

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After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

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

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

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

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Black Class Matters

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Hammer & Hope: Toward a Radical New Future

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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

@KeeangaYamahtta

Contributions

Issue

1

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

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

2

Black Class Matters

Issue

1

Hammer & Hope: Toward a Radical New Future

FREE TO READ

SIGN UP TODAY

FREE
TO READ

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TODAY