Hamas justified its October 7 attack by the fact that Palestinians have their backs against the wall because of Israeli aggression and Arab states’ capitulation, and that the operation was needed to break the stalemate.

This may be true, but it does not justify Hamas targeting Israeli civilians or purposely enabling Israel’s massive slaughter of Palestinian people.

Some pro-Palestinian activists seem to think that Israeli civilians are legitimate targets because they live in an illegitimate settler state. They are wrong: the crimes of the nation-state do not make all people within its borders equally guilty.

I, like many Jews, agree that Israel has a dubious claim to legitimacy because of its long history of dispossessing Palestinian people from their land and their homes, a history that includes mass murders and the repeated use of force against the Palestinian people.

This charge can be made against many, if not all nations, including the United States.  Nation-state building has always been done in a way that empowered some people at the expense of others.

It is certainly high time to make a reckoning with that past and begin to contemplate reparative steps to right wrongs. We see this happening in the United States, with the removal of Confederate statutes and some tentative reparative policies to redress wrongs against Native Americans and African Americans. For Palestinians, reparations minimally mean the recognition of their right to national self-determination and maximally the creation of a democratic, secular state for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Of course, the United States is now torn apart over this reckoning with its past.

Israel, too, is wracked with conflict over its Palestinian policies. The government is now run by Zionist extremists who have seized on the October 7 Hamas attack to unleash the Israeli army in a campaign to destroy Palestine’s last toeholds on the Gaza and the West Bank.  But Israeli citizens do not uniformly support Netanyahu’s blood thirst. The majority of Israelis opposed Netanyahu’s attacks on democratic rights over the last year. It seems likely that most Israelis still support a two-state solution and that many are looking for ways to stop Israel’s military campaign that indiscriminately targets Palestinians. And some Israelis and many Jews outside Israel advocate a radical restructuring of their country, i.e. ending the apartheid-like idea of a Jewish state.

To be clear: Hamas’ decision to attack Israeli civilians was wrong because it did not distinguish between the state and the civilian population. Similarly, Hamas failed to distinguish the difference between the legitimate demand for Palestinian self-determination and the current needs of the Palestinian people. Hamas clearly placed its demand for Palestinians to regain all the territory taken from them since 1967 above the safety of the Palestinian people who have borne the brunt of Israel’s invasion. Indeed, Hamas celebrates this fact, and its leaders say they look forward to a “permanent state of war” with Israel. Clearly, Hamas has no more regard for the well-being of Palestinian civilians than it does for Israelis.

Even worse, it is unclear who has the legitimate right to speak for the Palestinian people. Because of Hamas’ action, the Palestinian Authority has been sidelined. The Palestinian government led by Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, has been rendered toothless. Even Hamas itself is not a unified organization, and some Hamas factions recently sought a peaceful solution with Israel. Hamas’ decision to trigger this war was made by a small and isolated political group, reportedly without any consultation with important allies, including Iran and Hezbollah.

A poll by Arab Barometer among Palestinians just days before the October 7 attack reveals the civilian population’s deep alienation from all political parties, but especially Hamas, which only 29% of the respondents said they trusted. And the large majority (72%) of Palestinians in this poll said they wished for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Clearly, the decision to go to war was made without the consent of the people who are now paying the cost of it. And Netanyahu’s repeated claim that all Palestinians are legitimate military targets because of their support for Hamas is clearly a barefaced lie.

We are now seeing the dangerous conflation of the state and civil society in another way: Almost all Democrat and Republican leaders are on the same page that any criticism of the Israeli government is antisemitic. This is nonsense. The Israeli state is certainly guilty of horrendous crimes in its current invasion of Gaza. And, as I have already said, the history of Israel’s displacement of Palestinians must be reckoned with. Many Jews, me included, consider calling out the state of Israel for its crimes now and in the past to be of great importance to claim our own Jewishness from a Zionist vision we do not share. (See this letter by Jewish writers and artists). This distinction goes back generations in Jewish history. My family fought against Zionism in Russia when the idea of it was first catching on in the late nineteenth century. At that time, the critique of Zionism was that it undermined the demand for equal rights for Jews in whatever nation they were in. Until the Holocaust, Yiddishkeit stood in open opposition to Zionism, and the Zionists openly disdained Yiddishkeit by seeking to resuscitate Hebrew as a civic language for the first time in millennia.

For many Jews, anti-Zionism is a core part of our Jewish identities. To call us antisemitic is more than absurd. It is……you guessed it, antisemitic. It is no surprise that rightwing Republicans are antisemitic. They have always been so, even when they proclaim their love for Israel.  It is more surprising to hear this antisemitism from the mouths of so many Democrats, including Biden, and to see the large majority of Congressional Democrats vote to condemn Ilhan Omar for her support for Palestine.  These Democrats need to come to their senses and realize that by making an uncritical stand of support for Israel they are conciliating the most dangerous fascist forces in the world.

In conclusion, we live in a time when more and more people feel that the nation-state within which they live is not legitimate because it is not serving their needs. If we are to rebuild societies ways that are consistent with the beloved community, we will have to be clear about this distinction between nation-states and civil populations. Let’s begin with the politics of the moment: let us embrace people—in this case Jews and Palestinians–and ask hard questions about nation-states.

I am so saddened to see the calamity that many pro-Palestinian progressives have created for themselves.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ slaughter of Jewish children, mothers and fathers, a significant number of progressive organizations offered no support for Jews and instead blamed the attack on Israel’s brutal efforts to annihilate Palestine.

This response is being roundly condemned across the political spectrum as unbelievably inhumane, and indeed as smacking of antisemitism.

I agree with the criticism. But we cannot just critique Hamas.

In the days and weeks since the October 7 Hamas attack, my heart breaks for the Palestinian people who are being terrorized and killed by Israeli bombs (and soon by Israeli ground troops).

At a time of war, a moment of intense emotions, we can ill afford the now all-too common practice of cancelling people because of our solidarity with one side in a conflict. Once again, we have the opportunity to consider how building the beloved community instructs us to view this moment. And we must take this opportunity seriously, because a split among pro-democracy activists will open the door to fascists always looking for an opportunity such as this.

Let’s start with this: Hamas’ decision to murder over a thousand Jews has evoked in virtually every Jew in the world memories of the Holocaust and the pogroms. That includes myself, someone who has spent his entire life rejecting the Hebrew religion and despising Zionism. It’s simple, really: Hamas calculated that a terrorist attack would traumatize Jews. It sought to provoke the reaction one expects from a traumatized people, especially a nation led by right-wing fanatic Zionists: a deeply felt need for revenge. This emotion is too easily aroused in traumatized people because resorting to violence gives them the illusion that they have agency again.

Hamas’s cold-blooded calculation underscores their deep hatred of Jewish people but it also reveals their complete lack of concern for the safety of Palestinian children, women and men who are already suffering the full fury of a traumatized Jewish state, a state whose leaders specialize in using trauma to keep themselves in power. Netanyahu’s “collective punishment” of Palestinians in Gaza is more than a naked violation of human rights: it is reactivating Palestinians’ collective trauma, the Naqba of 1948, when Zionists murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians and expelled over half a million people from the West Bank, forcing them to seek refuge in Gaza.

Netanyahu is happily giving Hamas what I suspect they wanted all along: to draw Israel into an occupation of Gaza, which will lead to a full-on Palestinian mobilization (and likely also draw in Hezbollah and other nations) , a rage over which Hamas believes Israel cannot prevail.

Hamas is perfectly willing to heap more trauma on the Palestinian people if it furthers their extremist goals. And Netanyahu is whipping up and exploiting Jewish trauma to justify Israel’s upcoming occupation of Gaza. Palestinians and Jews are trapped in a downward cycle of trauma leading to violence leading to more trauma. Hamas, just like Netanyahu’s party, is the product of–and merchants of–the politics of trauma.

What we need now is a language that recognizes trauma felt by all parties in this conflict. The problem with blaming only Israel for the attacks is that it does not offer support to traumatized Jews. The problem with not denouncing Israel’s role in creating the conditions for Hamas to rule Gaza is that it does not offer support for traumatized Palestinians.

What traumatized people on both sides of this conflict need right now is safety. And the starting point for that safety is for them to feel that people who did NOT experience that trauma acknowledge their experience, and are at a minimum able to offer their sympathies.

Without this assurance, nothing else matters. Even much-needed Jewish-led demonstrations calling for a cease-fire in the Middle East seem oddly out of touch with the fear and grieving that now grips both Jews and Palestinians. The political demand for a cease-fire is absolutely correct. But at a moment of heightened trauma, that demand must be linked to that experience. This can easily be done, by simply stating that violence only creates trauma, and never can heal it. But without that acknowledgement, the demand for a ceasefire can be (and was) too often construed as another example of people ignoring the plight of Jews.

Similarly, the framework of the two-state solution needs to be linked to healing trauma. The two-state solution is still alive, at least in U.S. foreign policy (Biden reaffirmed it on October 19). The right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination and statehood needs to be understood as the only possible context in which the long trauma of Palestine can be healed.

Unfortunately, both Hamas and Netanyahu’s thugs are hellbent on creating the maximum conditions to make both Palestinians and Jews feel unsafe, and so the cycle of trauma and violence continues to wreak havoc.

Back to my sadness about the progressives who cannot bring themselves to offer sympathy to the Jewish people: their failure is a measure of their own trauma. When students at Harvard, Stanford and my own institution, Berkeley, only think about the suffering of Palestinians at the moment of the mass killing of Jews, they have de-humanized themselves. Of course they are right to care, and care deeply, about the suffering that Palestinians experience daily at hands of Jews. But I suspect the reason that these students have not acknowledged the suffering of Jews is that they see Israel (and perhaps all Jews?) as the epitome of privileged people who are responsible for Palestinians’s suffering. And since at this moment progressives are exploring how to dismantle all forms of privilege, support for privileged people is unthinkable. Indeed, the campuses with the greatest outpouring of support for Palestine and silence on the murder of Jews are those with the most privileged students, who themselves must show their commitment to dismantling privileges, however performative that stance might be.

But, to be real, those progressives who did not acknowledge the suffering of Jews (or of Palestinians) have a deeper problem: they have lost touch with their own humanity. In an era marked by Trumpist fascism, wildfires and heat domes, hyper-inequality and pandemics, everyone has been traumatized, everyone is struggling with their own humanity.

We can ill-afford to condemn anyone for lapses in their humanity at this time. That includes progressive organizations and individuals who have forgotten the plight of Jews at this moment. While we must call them out for their mistake because of the harm they have caused, we need to also acknowledge their humanity, and ask what we can do to make them safe in the face of the traumatic realities they face. To my progressive brothers and sisters reading this: if any of this makes sense to you, please include a plan for self-care and for building loving and trusting relations as you do your social justice work. We cannot afford to turn against one another , especially at a moment when we need the greatest possible unity against the danger of fascism. As this moment has revealed all too tragically, if we do not ground ourselves in love, our social justice work will surely suffer.

This is how we build the beloved community. The process is unbelievably complex and involves many wrong turns along the way. At this moment, in relation to Hamas’ attack on Israel and Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, we must start by acknowledging the trauma on both sides. Before we can get to the politics of the moment, we must center ourselves on the human emotions unleashed by Hamas’ attack. Rather than entering a competition over whose humanity matters more, let us insist that everyone counts–including Jews. Let us turn this dreadful moment into a stepping stone in the long, hard work of building the beloved community.

Polls suggest that a Republican wave is coming in November, one that will spell the end of the Democrats control of the House of Representatives, and perhaps the Senate.

The conventional wisdom is that anger over inflation is fueling this Republican surge.  And there is some truth in that, to be sure. But this anger runs much deeper: Republicans, especially in the Trump Era, have mastered the politics of rage, which in a time of great anxiety is all too easy to mobilize. 

As the country emerges from two years of pandemic emergency, we are beginning to see the damage more clearly.  For the first time since the late 1970s, inflation—driven in part by war-spiked oil prices but also by big corporations taking advantage of pandemic-caused supply chain problems—is battering the already weakened middle class and the poor. Some 80 percent of Americans report that making ends meet has become difficult in the past year.

But underneath the inflationary debacle lies a deeper economic problem: forty years of hyper-inequality, deregulation and tax cuts have hollowed out the middle class. In a time of historic inequality and poverty, the American Dream itself lies in tatters. 

The pandemic added gasoline to an already discontent society. And as a result, the U.S. (indeed much of the world) is experiencing a real mental health crisis. The last two years did real harm to everyone: the first year of the pandemic was especially terrifying because we were facing a deadly disease with no idea how we were going to contain it. The deaths of over a million Americans deeply and directly impacted the lives of tens of millions of their survivors. Two years of illness, death, lock-down, social isolation and economic deprivation stressed many families to the maximum: children and the elderly suffered the most, but parents did too, and many marriages were tested to the breaking point.  Let us call this experience what it was: a collective trauma unlike anything since the Great Depression. But even collective trauma has different impacts: those with wealth have weathered this storm far easier than most Americans. Those who suffered the most were people living in poverty, and particularly people of color.

Worst of all, this nation has no language for talking about this collective trauma. Some individuals have the education and the resources to seek the help of mental health experts, who are now completely overwhelmed by the demand. But most Americans have neither the self-awareness nor the health insurance to get such help and are just trying to “get back to normal” on their own.

Republicans could hope for nothing better than unacknowledged trauma and deep anxiety to peddle their politics of rage. And even worse, Democrats have started to play the same game. This is election is indeed the race to the bottom that the Obamas warned us about.

There’s one more element in this vicious election that helps Republicans more than any other: racism. White supremacy is always premised on the view that white people deserve better because they are better. (Republicans have also gotten really good at promoting the idea of exceptional minorities who have somehow redeemed themselves with white people). Through this lens, white voters can easily slip from despair at their troubles into rage at having the good life that is justly ‘theirs’ taken away from them by ‘woke’ Democrats who have turned their backs on hard-working whites in favor of undeserving Black criminals and school dropouts and illegal aliens.   

White rage has been given even more weight than in the past by the successful Republican strategy of using Supreme Court appointments and control of state legislatures to undermine minority voting rights.

What was once seen as unthinkable is now a real possibility: if the Trump Republicans are not stopped, it is possible that a white nationalist government could bring fascism to power in America.

So, what is to be done at such a fraught moment? One possibility is for Democrats to unleash their own version of the politics of rage, and this is indeed what is happening. The Democrats’ politics of rage depict Republicans (and anyone who votes Republican) as participating in a white-supremacist political movement that is opening the door to fascism in America.

But the Democrats’ politics of rage cannot win elections. Republicans have successfully won over many if not most of the white working class and sizable minorities of Black, Asian, Latino and Native American voters who are truly dispossessed from the American Dream. These voters hope that the old American fantasy of free markets and the Lockean dream of a self-regulating civic society (i.e. with minimal government interference in peoples’ lives) will reward the virtues of hard work and family values. To them, the only role government should play is to protect the virtuous (police, military powers) from the ‘unvirtous’, i.e. criminals and foreigners.

The Democrats’ problem is that they are trying to mobilize a base that is much better educated, and wealthier than the Democratic base of the 1930s or the ‘new’ Republican base. While the Democratic voters are certainly very upset by the threat of fascism, the loss of reproductive rights, and racism, polls show they are less likely to vote in this election than Republicans. Indeed, many progressives have responded to the politics of rage by turning away from politics altogether to save their mental health. The politics of rage is less effective with Democrats for another reason: Democrats always yearn for a politics of hope, in which government demonstrates the positive contributions that science-led policies can make to everyone’s well-being. While Democrats can rage against Republicans, they cannot rage against the government itself. And while Republicans can gleefully call for a nihilistic ‘revolution’ (a la Steve Bannon), Democrats wistfully look to smart government leading to a progressively improving society.

If politics becomes a battle between raging echo chambers, Republicans will win every time. Their message is simple. The Democrats’ is not.

The challenge of this moment for Democrats is to figure out a way to mobilize their base and win over independents with a politics of hope, one broad enough and real enough to win over even large chunks of disaffected and traumatized white working-class voters and the growing ranks of Latinos, Asians and Blacks who are voting Republican.  While I am not obsessively looking at this election cycle, not one Democrat I have followed is doing this. No one is campaigning on the success of government in saving us from a deadly pandemic and preventing economic collapse by the Democratic-led historic interventions. Democrats should be running on the foundational importance of the infrastructure bill rather than getting defensive about Critical Race Theory or being allegedly soft on crime.

Fundamentally, however, the politics of rage will not be defeated by policy debates by themselves. Its defeat requires a straight-ahead acknowledgement of our collective trauma and specific reassurances–through action– that we will be ok. What we need today, indeed what we have needed ever since January 6, 2020, is a healing voice, one that can actually be believed. This is not an easy task, to be sure. Joe Biden should have been that voice. While his administration did some important work, he failed at his most important job: to minister to the pain of the American people the way that FDR did in his fireside chats of the 1930s.

Without progressive leaders who can publicly address our trauma and give people hope, the politics of rage will be successful, and our collective trauma and despair will grow even deeper.

by

Andy Barlow

The Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has profound implications for the future of democracy and the rule of law in this country. The vicious, mean-spirited and triumphant tone of the majority opinion leaves no doubt that the emergent right-wing majority has in mind far more than the end of legal abortions. Indeed, Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion specifically points out that the court’s ruling in this case could directly lead to de-legalizing same sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), to ending non-cisgendered persons’ protection from criminal status (Lawrence v. Texas), and to ending the legality of birth control for married people (Griswold v. Connecticut). Others have already noted that the protection of inter-racial marriage (Loving v Virginia) is also based on the same legal principles eviscerated in this case and is thus endangered. But Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health threatens far more than these legal rights.

The main implication of Dobbs is found not in its legal rationale, but in the right-wing majority’s political reasoning. The Dobbs majority certainly understands that public opinion by 2-1 supports women’s right to choose, and public support for the right of women to choose an abortion if they were a victim of rape or incest is supported by 3-1. They also understand that the Supreme Court is charged with safeguarding the legitimacy of the rule of law in this country and demonstrating that conflicts can be resolved in a non-political way. And they know that polls are showing a steady decline in the Supreme Court’s legitimacy as a non-political (that is, legal) body.  The most salient question is: why would a Supreme Court majority act in a way that will certainly erode the Court’s public support and therefore jeopardize the Court’s own power?

I fear the answer is that these five justices do not care what happens to the rule of law because they see themselves as part of the vanguard of revolutionaries ushering in a new social order in which democracy and the current U.S. Constitution has no place.  In this new America, corporate greed will go unchecked, and popular obedience will be attained by appealing to white male domination backed by unbridled police power. Chief Justice John Roberts could not sign onto Alito’s majority opinion because he is an institutionalist still trying to hold onto the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. But he has clearly lost control: the Court’s leadership is now in the hands of a radical cabal who are gripped by their revolutionary zeal. The new Supreme Court majority was willing to take their radical step because they believe that with half the states ready to enforce their ban, they have the power to make their ruling stick.

The Dobbs’ majority’s radicalism is cloaked in the guise of a legal doctrine called ‘originalism.’ But the Dobbs decision clearly shows that originalism is an intellectually shoddy justification applied in an opportunist and inconsistent way to cover for the new Supreme Court majority’s extremist political aims.

For instance, the Dobbs majority had to demonstrate that Roe v. Wade was not settled law to overturn it. To do this, the majority asserted that abortion had been ‘originally’ illegal for most of American history. This is simply not true. As Kristen Luker demonstrated in her majestic book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Anglo-American common law only prohibited abortion after ‘quickening’ (when fetal movement could be felt). As a result, abortions were widely practiced in the early United States without legal interference until the Victorian Era. It was only in the 1880s that midwives and abortions (as well as homosexuals and pornography) were criminalized. The criminalization of abortion lasted only 80 out of the 233 years of the Constitution’s history, and those years were not the ‘original’ ones.

Of course Roe v. Wade was settled law. Three generations of American women lived in a nation in which they were promised control of their own bodies, their own reproductive destinies.  And in part because of this promise, women grew increasingly confident that even in the face of continual patriarchal resistance they could assert claims to being full and equal individuals. The new Supreme Court majority understands full well that it is not possible to reverse such a fundamental understanding of women’s personhood merely by declaring Roe dead. They understand that the ban on legal abortions—including in some states pregnancies resulting from rape or incest—will take breathtaking use of force by state governments and private vigilantes to make the law effective.  Women will have to be terrorized into submission by the fear of prosecution for murder, charges that can result from the allegations of neighbors and family members.  Women will have to live with the fear that when illegal abortions are performed by untrained people, as they certainly will be, they might die. This is what fascism looks like: the use of coercive force to force women to accept their destinies as childbearing vessels rather than as full individuals.

Women with little money, especially women of color, have already been and will be the primary targets of this reign of terror. Women with money will be able to travel to safe places (inside and outside the U.S.) to get abortions. But women with low incomes, who already are the majority of those getting legal abortions, will not have this option. They are the ones who will have to choose between having an unwanted child that can destabilize her life (and those of her family members) or to risk death in the back-alley abortions which will certainly proliferate.  

The last six years have certainly taught us is that the old rules of governance are no longer in effect. Gone are the days of bipartisanship; gone are the days of respect for the rule of law; gone are the days of respect for science-based expertise. We now live in a nakedly political world, in which the coin of the realm is power, where might makes right. The right wing now has the edge because they came to this realization in 2010, when the Tea Party took over the House majority. The Democratic Party stubbornly held on to the governance rules of the past era, and therefore ceded enormous advantages to the right wing: when McConnell illegally refused to allow the Senate to hold a confirmation hearing for Merritt Garland, Democrats did nothing. When Republicans refused to allow a vote on a new voting rights act, Democrats did nothing. When the President nearly succeeded in overturning the 2020 election, Congress did not even expel House members who had openly committed sedition against the United States.

The radical right has, for good reason viewed the Democrats with disdain. It is possible, however that they have made a significant miscalculation this time. The rightwing had been galvanized since the 1980s by their dream of overturning Roe v Wade, and they have been in a frenetic overdrive to seize the majority of the Supreme Court for over a decade. The Dobbs victory does not galvanize the right; it is for them a cause for celebration for the hard work of the past. But Dobbs most certainly is a wake-up call for most Americans who are not party to this fascist movement. Every woman and every man who respects women, and every parent of a daughter is today personally touched by the arrogance and viciousness of these right-wing justices. The Dobbs decision has the potential to galvanize democratic-minded people to defend the Constitution and democracy itself at this fraught moment in American history. Whether or not they will do so remains to be seen. Will a new kind of political leadership emerge, one that understands the urgency of this moment, one that can arouse people to their higher destinies? This is the test of the moment. We will soon see what this country will do, or not do, to defend democracy from fascism.

I am increasingly convinced that the fate of the Democratic Party depends on the passage of the full Build Back Better Act.

The Build Back Better Act provides a blueprint for the United States’ future that develops a green economy that is based on manufacturing (rather than one based on financial speculation). This economy would be supported by a new social contract that guarantees all Americans access to pre-school and community college education, and radically lowers the cost of health care by expanding the role of Medicare to set prices.

In short, the Act would empower the federal government to finally counter long-neglected problems that have had the cumulative effect of producing widespread disenchantment with government’s potential to do good, a fact that has been skillfully used to fan the flames of white nationalism and fascism in the U.S.

Rebuilding the economy by producing 3 million (unionized) green jobs a year would significantly counter act the hyper-inequality which has made the rich richer, the poor poorer and tears apart the middle class. And best of all, the $3.5 trillion bill would be easily paid for by raising taxes on the rich and corporations for the first time since the 1970s, as well as by stimulating economic growth, which has always been the way government reduces the size of its deficit (as opposed to cutting spending, which always increases deficit spending).

Polling shows that all of the major features of the Act are popular with the American public. But it seems likely at this point that Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema are hell-bent on radically reducing the scope of the Act. Manchin has explicitly said he opposes the law for its attempt to re-engineer the U.S. economy and wants it to devolve into a welfare bill that is solely focused on providing relief to the ‘truly disadvantaged.’ This is no surprise, given Manchin and Sinema’s ties to the gas and oil industry.

Here’s the problem: the Build Back Better Act cannot pass the Senate without Manchin and Sinema’s support because the Democrats only have 51 potential votes (including VP Harris as President pro tempore of the Senate). But if the Act is radically pared down to appease them, it will garner little enthusiasm from progressives or the American public at large.

In other words, I fear the Democrats are in a go big or go home situation. Either progressives—who have already won a major victory by getting Biden to support their demands—succeed in forcing Manchin and Sinema to vote for the full bill, or they fail and the American people will sink further into despair both because of government’s inability to address the corrosive effect of the multiple social crises of this moment. In short, either the progressives win in 2021 or the radicalized Republican Party will have the advantage in 2022 and 2024.

This is even more so because unless Manchin and Sinema are forced to support this progressive agenda, passage of the badly needed John Lewis Voting Rights Act will be very unlikely.

In my previous post (link) I argued that this moment requires mass mobilization. It is now clearer than ever that the only thing that will force Manchin and Sinema to stop gutting the Build Back Better Act will be millions of people taking to the streets. We only need to look back at the New Deal legislation which became law only when the Congress of Industrial Organizations organized and mobilized 12 million workers during the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, I do not see that happening in 2021. While some activists are calling for marches (e.g., the Poor Peoples Campaign), the general feeling even among progressives seems to be one of exhaustion from years of fighting Trump and Covid.

It may well be that the amazing opportunity of this moment—a progressive Congress and a President willing to take a big chance—will be for naught. And if it is, Democrats may be wandering in the wilderness as a fascist movement takes over both the House and the Senate next year. If that happens, let us remember this moment, and understand that the Democrats had the opportunity to go big and failed to understand what it would take to do so.

Progressives have finally arrived as a significant force in American politics. President Biden’s decision to put his physical infrastructure bill on hold until the social infrastructure bill has been enacted is the latest sign that progressives have a lot more muscle in American politics than at any time since the early 1970s.

Progressives–elected officials, labor unions and community-based organizations–have for months demanded that all Democrats must commit to a historic effort to reconstruct American society, the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act, and not just to fixing bridges and roads. Biden’s decision on October 2 to delay a vote on the infrastructure funding bill signaled his willingness to support the progressives’ demand.

The power the Progressive Congressional Caucus demonstrated this week comes from the fact that all 100 of its Congressional Representatives were elected by appealing to social justice and a Green New Deal and in many cases won office by building electoral coalitions that included large numbers of Black and brown people. And their power also comes from the undeniable fact that the Democrats won the Presidency and the Senate primarily because of grassroots organizing by progressive organizations in many swing states, including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

This moment—when conservative Democrats were trying to limit social spending and prevent new taxes on the rich—demanded that progressives stick to their guns, and that they did. Before October 2, conservatives like West Virginia Senator Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema had enjoyed their power because any bill they did not support cannot pass the deadlocked Senate. But by demonstrating their power to block the passage of the infrastructure bill in the House of Representatives on October 1, progressives are now themselves a force to be reckoned with, and as such have redefined the “center” of the Democratic Party. The conservatives are no longer the only ones framing the debate over spending and taxation.

Let us remember that the whole point of the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act is to seize this moment to transform America. It would fund a major expansion of Medicare and finally bring down pharmaceutical and health care costs. It would provide badly needed funding for education, especially for community colleges. It would refocus the U.S. economy on manufacturing things rather than on banking and would curtail the power of banks. And perhaps most importantly, it would significantly move the U.S. towards a carbon-neutral future. And all of these initiatives would be framed by an equity lens. In short, the Build Back Better Act is a serious effort to transform the United States away from its neo-liberal economic malaise and inability to grapple with social crises. This is indeed a transformational agenda.

But there is one major problem that progressives have yet to address: the need to mobilize constituents to demonstrate support for the Build Back Better Act. Unfortunately, there seems to be little desire for grassroots mobilization at this time, even by the very organizations whose mobilizing work was so critical just 10 months ago, including labor unions. This is understandable given the national weariness and wariness about Covid. The problem is, the fight for the future of the Democratic Party is going to be waged very quickly, perhaps in the next month. Massive demonstrations of public support for the Build Back Better Act are vital to tip the scales even further. 

Let’s remember that the stakes at this moment could not be higher. If the Democrats cannot unite to support Biden’s progressive agenda, Biden will be in big trouble, the American people will lose even more confidence in government, and the social crisis now in its second decade will continue to corrode the fabric of society. 

And let us never forget that Trump and his minions are just waiting for such a catastrophe to renew their efforts to bring fascism to America.

This is a time for every progressive in the U.S. to show up and show out. Ideally, we need to be in the streets in the millions at this moment.  If such efforts are not forthcoming, and the Build Back Better Act is not enacted, progressives had better do some serious soul-searching to figure out how we let this important opportunity to reconstruct America slip through our fingers.

Jamelle Bouie wrote a terrific opinion piece in the July 30 New York Times [LINK]. He completely dismantles the argument advanced by Senators Joe Manchin (WVA) and Kristen Synema (AZ) that the best way to achieve voting rights is through bipartisan cooperation.  Bouie reminds us that the 14^th and 15^th Amendments were enacted by one party, and that all of the significant civil rights enforcement laws of the Reconstruction Era were too.

Bouie concedes, however, that the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights act were passed by bipartisan majorities. His explanation: the two parties were not ideologically unified. Each had a liberal and a conservative wing, which in the case of the Southern Democrats was the result of the marriage of New Deal social democrats and Southern racists whose power rested on the historic exclusion of Black people from voting.

But Bouie does not adequately explain why this ideological diversity has evaporated. First, let’s clear up one thing:  the Democratic Party remains ideologically diverse to this day, with a newly emboldened socialist wing and a contingent of so-called ‘centrists’ who cater to white suburban swing voters. It is the Republican Party alone that has ousted its centrist wing and consolidated on a racist, nationalist an authoritarian ideology now called Trumpism. This Republican Party has no illusions about or interest in bipartisanship.

As I have argued in other posts, this trend towards greater political polarization reflects the social crisis created by neo-liberal capitalism. Bipartisanship was practiced in an era of a widespread consensus on the American Dream and the middle class as the lynchpin of the American social order. Hyper-inequality and forty years of attacks on government policies to redistribute benefits from the rich to the middle class and the poor have shredded the belief in the American Dream, ripped apart the middle class and plunged the poor into a deep crisis.

This social crisis has now become undeniable to virtually everyone except for opportunists seeking to hold onto ‘centrist’ politics. Republicans have rebranded themselves as a radical political party of the right, and most Democrats (including newly ‘woke’ Biden) have rejected neo-liberal premises in favor of social democratic ones.   

The only politicians left holding onto the dreams of the good old days of bipartisanship are those Democrats who are actively defending neo-liberal policies. Those who have come to their senses and realize the true gravity of this moment are beginning to understand that we need a new Reconstruction Era, and that this one, just like the first one, will have to be championed by one political party on its own.

The real test of the Democratic Party is now upon them: will they shrug off the demagogic appeals to bipartisanship being used to defend the Senate’s filibuster rules and find the courage to pass the For the People Act by themselves? Or will they allow Republicans to enact state laws to suppress voting rights as part of their strategy to give birth (yet again) to a white nationalist America? There can be no illusion about one thing: the defense of the filibuster is now, as it was in the 1950s, the defense of white supremacy, not bipartisanship.

This moment is not only a test for the Democratic Party. It is also a test for progressives. It is everyone’s responsibility to compel the Democrats do whatever they can to enact the new voting rights protections, including suspending the filibuster rule. But right now, there seems to be little energy on the part of progressives to do so. While some groups like the New Georgia Project and the Poor Peoples Campaign are trying hard, their efforts have not produced a mass movement capable of moving national politics. Unfortunately, most civil rights organizations are showing their utter inability to engage in grassroots organizing and most labor unions are sitting on the sidelines.

Now is the time for progressives to mobilize their constituencies in every way they can. We may look back at the summer of 2021 as the moment when American democracy was saved or when American fascism began. To paraphrase MLK: Where do we go from here?

I’ve been watching Philly DA (the PBS documentary series) and loving it for highlighting the intense contradictions of working as a progressive inside the legal system.

The series documents the work of Larry Kramer, who has been Philadelphia’s DA since 2018. Kramer says that he spent his 30-year career as a defense attorney complaining about the criminal legal system and since being elected as Philadelphia’s District Attorney, he now had the power to make changes.

But does he? It is certainly true, as Jonathan Simon has so well explained in Governing Through Crime, the system of mass incarceration made DAs powerful.To lock up the largest proportion of civilians of any country, Congress and state legislators had to strip judges of their traditional prerogatives of discretionary sentencing and had to make it almost impossible for most poor people—disproportionately Black and brown—to have access to a defense lawyer capable of pushing against the plea-bargaining machinery created by DAs to “efficiently process” cases. DAs increasingly had the most discretion—and therefore the most power—to decide who was going to go to jail and for how long. And for decades, DAs ran for re-election by boasting about their 99% conviction rates and throwing red meat at voters by filing outrageous charges and recommending harsh sentencing in ‘hot’ cases that received public attention. Indeed, being a prosecutor became all but a pre-condition for running for all elective offices by the early 2000s.

Larry Krasner is attempting to use the power of the DA office against the system that made it powerful. Unfortunately, Philly DA provides a lot of evidence that the other institutions of the legal machinery of mass incarceration—police, judges, legislators, social workers (Child Protective Services, for example)—have the power to resist his reform efforts. In episode after episode, we see Krasner and his team trying to institute major changes, only to find that by the end of the episode they were only able to win small reforms, and at a high price. In one episode, we see the enormous effort it took to charge a police officer with murder after he shot an unarmed Black man in the back. And then, at the end, we learn that Krasner declined to charge 19 other police officers who had also killed suspects. In another episode we see Krasner working to reduce sentencing recommendations for minors convicted of serious crimes. And he does succeed in convincing a small number of judges to shave off a few years while many other judges reacted with outrage at his efforts. All in all we are left with the sense that Krasner is only able to make marginal changes, and that the machinery of mass incarceration remains largely intact.

Here’s the problem: Krasner’s capacity to make change is not nor can it be based on the power of his office. That power arose because the DA was part of the machinery of mass incarceration. By challenging that system, we see the very limited power Krasner has to effect change. Time and again, Krasner tries to do something big and ends up accomplishing something smaller, and at an enormous cost.

Of course, Krasner’s accomplishments are significant: the Philadelphia Police Department has long been notorious for its racism (remember Frank Rizzo? If not look him up!) and cops now worry that they might be held accountable. Krasner’s push to end of cash bail for many crimes has freed thousands of incarcerated people who had not been convicted of any crime.  A few judges are sentencing people to shorter terms (although all sentencing guidelines in the United States are absurd).  These are real achievements that have helped to blunt the impact of police violence and mass incarceration on Philly’s Black and Latinx communities.

And, in recognition of his progress, Krasner has retained his electoral coalition based in the Black community and progressive whites. In May Krasner easily won the Democratic nomination for a second term, trouncing his ‘law and order’ opponent 65% to 35% and virtually guaranteeing a second term.

But I come away from watching this remarkable documentary wondering if Krasner could do far more had he spent more time working with community organizations to build a permanently mobilized movement against mass incarceration and racist police violence

The series implies that Krasner is uncomfortable with community organizing. In one episode, we see Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez lecturing Krasner about the need to go to a community-police block party in Kessington, a multi-racial working-class neighborhood. When he does go (somewhat reluctantly), he has difficulty connecting with the people in attendance. “Larry’s inability to do retail politics is going to either make him successful or not,” Quinones-Sanchez says in frustration.

Perhaps Krasner is well-connected with Black and brown communities and the problem is that the documentarians didn’t highlight it.

This is the real test for any progressive officeholder: to what extent do they utilize their time and resources working with community-based activists to permanently mobilize large numbers of people in support of radical policies like defunding the police or ending mass incarceration? Obviously, Krasner must devote considerable time and energy to doing the D.A. job. But he must also understand that the power to effect fundamental change does not come from the office he holds, but from the direct power of people demanding these changes.

We know, thanks to the 2020 election results, that there are powerful minority community organizations in Philadelphia capable of real mobilization. The test of Krasner’s strategy will be the extent to which he works with these organizations not just during his re-election campaign, but throughout his term as Philly D.A., and not just to win an election but to build the grassroots movement against police violence and mass incarceration.

The Democratic Party is still in the grip of an old nostalgic fantasy, in which they find a way to entice Republicans to join them in enacting legislation ‘for the good of the country.’

Much of the Democratic Party leadership—including Bernie Sanders— believes that the passage of economic stimulus measures, such as the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill, will entice Republicans back into ‘normal’ politics when they realize that these spending measures are popular with swing voters.

In short, most Democrats argue that they must find a way to work with Republicans in order to “get things done.”

But meanwhile, as Democrats dream of bipartisanship, the Republican Party veers further and further away from democracy and towards white nationalist fascism. With military-like discipline, Republicans are methodically suppressing voting rights in every state they control. With lower voter turnout by people of color, Republicans plan to not only retake the House of Representatives but also to keep control of state legislatures in the year that states will undertake the once a decade task of drawing new voting districts using the 2020 Census data. The Republican strategy will be aided by a Supreme Court majority which just finished gutting the Voting Rights Act, and by a flawed Census whose count of the U.S. population was continuously undermined by the Trump Administration. And any Republican who stands in the way (Liz Cheney) is summarily purged from the GOP.

In order to win support for its authoritarian project, the Republican Party is whipping up a racist frenzy with absurd attacks on “critical race theory,” passing (clearly unconstitutional) laws in six states that prevent public schools and universities from teaching about structural racism today or the history of racism in the formation of the United States. Republicans are also passing anti-abortion laws that are clearly meant to invite the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade next term.

The complete breakdown of legislative bipartisanship and the willingness of the Supreme Court majority to undo the most basic legal protections for people of color and women of all races reflects the reality of our time: we live in the midst of an ever-deepening social crisis, and there is no unifying vision capable of pulling Americans together. While Covid made matters worse, this crisis has been unfolding since the 1990s. The crisis is fundamentally caused by neo-liberal policies that unleashed banks to financialize the global capitalist economy. The result has been that wealthy nations are being torn apart by hyper-inequality and the reduction in investments in all institutions serving to unify society, including those providing social safety nets to the poor.

And to be clear about it: Republicans are the ones calling attention to the crisis, and the ones offering a radical vision for a new future. Their racist screed is fueled by attacks on the haughty coastal elites who are driving America into the ground. Indeed, young Republicans proudly refer to themselves as revolutionaries seeking to overthrow a corrupt and outdated system. Democrats are the new conservatives, still enmired in the belief that 20^th Century legislative procedures and ideas about the rule of law can save the day.

Republicans are telling white people that the real social crisis they are experiencing is the result of growing numbers of people of color laying claim on society’s resources. They offer a fantasy of America’s past, in which they claim white people lived in peace and prosperity with one another, and anyone who wanted to work hard could get ahead.  This America, they argue, was destroyed by people of color gaining power, and using their influence to undermine America’s ‘traditional values.’ It is worth noting that this argument was first made not by Republicans but by 19^th Century Democrats, who in the Reconstruction era made the same appeal to white Southerners nostalgic for the ‘gracious Bourbon life-style’ of the slavers.

It is time for the Democrats to realize that this moment requires them to make a radical break with the past and to embrace a radically different vision for the future. Democrats need to make explicit that they are the party defending the U.S. from fascism. Democrats need to make a clean break with neo-liberal capitalism and embrace social democracy. They need to stand firm on the need for a Green New Deal to address the existential threat of climate change. They need to stand firm against financial institutions and unregulated and untaxed corporate greed. They need to take real steps to end anti-black and anti-immigrant police violence and end mass incarceration.

The defense of voting rights, for example, will require a radical act by Democrats–the destruction of the filibuster rules in the Senate–since not a single Republican Senator will support even this bedrock principle of democracy.  The urgent large-scale effort to shift the U.S. economy away from finance-based investments to investments in production (and green production specifically) will have to be undertaken by Democrats with no Republican support. The efforts to re-orient national security towards the real threats posed by right-wing organizations will never have bipartisan support.

The immediate test is whether Senate Democrats will unite to end the filibuster rules that will be used by Republicans to prevent the passage of the For the People Act, the law that would restore the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

At this point, the pragmatic argument in favor of bipartisanship (embodied in Joe Manchin) is preventing Democrats from going all in on this essential act to defend democracy. Worst of all, it seems very likely that the Democrats only have this year and next to accomplish their agenda before Republicans re-take the House.

The problem, of course, is that progressives simply do not have enough power to force the Democratic Party out of its nostalgic dreams of a return to the past. Most Congressional Democrats still consider winning white suburban swing voters (and to defend the American Dream) to be the holy grail of their politics. Unfortunately, if Democrats fail to enact the For the People Act, we will almost certainly have to endure yet another two years or longer of Republicans returning to power and using that power for the sole purpose of advancing their white nationalist and anti-democratic agenda.

Of course, history is not on the side of white supremacy. And the Republicans know it, which is why they have turned into an authoritarian party.

But the immediate future is likely to produce more of the same dynamic we have experienced since 2008: Democrats win power enough to advance social democratic policies (Obama’s ACA and Dodd-Frank Act, Biden’s efforts to revive U.S. industrial production) and Republicans then sow a racist reaction to halt their efforts, using increasingly repressive means as Democrats gain more voters. This truly is what Gramsci meant when he said, “the old social order is dying but the new has not yet been born.”

We will have to endure more of this dynamic until a coalition anchored by communities of color and organized labor has gained enough power to define the Democratic Party’s agenda and to elect 51 progressive Senators, a progressive majority in the House of Representatives, and a progressive President.

In 2021, it is likely that progressives will continue to be frustrated in their efforts to derail Republican Party extremism. But the main task continues: organize, organize, organize.  There are now many progressive organizations (such as the New Georgia Project and Make the Road New York and Philly) who understand this and are doing excellent work. And with their efforts we are learning that democracy is not defined only by political participation (i.e., the right to vote), but by people learning their power to participate in the making of society itself.

Progressives today must have the discipline to keep building minority communities’ leadership and organization with an eye on the prize of slowly but surely bringing the new American majority into focus. The road will be bumpy, but we know where we are heading. Let us keep our eyes on the prize.

The defeat of the Bessemer Alabama Amazon organizing drive caught many progressives off guard. After all, there had been a ton of national hype by politicians including President Biden and by faith leaders such as William Barber. Polls show that 2/3 of Americans support unions. Bessemer has a storied history of Black-led labor organizing in the steel plants. Given the recent progressive upsurge by Black communities in the South, success against one of the most notoriously anti-labor companies in the country seemed assured.

But the Amazon drive failed. And failed spectacularly. Only 55% of eligible workers voted in the certification election, and of those who did, 70% opposed unionization.

Progressives need to come to terms with what happened at Bessemer for a simple reason: there can be no progressive future—for a society that values and supports everyone’s well-being–that does not eventually rest on the power of workers organized in labor unions.  As Marx explained over 170 years ago, the most widespread experience of oppression in capitalist societies is the exploitation of workers. The all-too common experience of struggling to make ends meet while working two or three dangerous jobs in a country where the top 1 percent gets 90 percent of the wealth cuts across race, gender, national and sexual differences, and provides a potentially powerful path for people to come together for social justice in the broadest way. The power of workers over capital is the surest way for people to compel the redistribution of wealth that is prerequisite for building a just society.

So, what happened at Bessemer? My colleague Jane McAlevey wrote an unflinching post-mortem in the April Nation. (LINK). She acknowledges that anti-union labor laws have tilted the field in favor of companies, and that Amazon abused even these favorable legal prerogatives during the union drive. But McAlevey argues that unions cannot wait for better legal conditions, or for companies to behave differently. Instead, she underscores the importance of long-term, intensive and face-to-face discussions to convince workers to get organized in hostile conditions, work that can only be done by workers known and respected in their workplace. And in Bessemer, she argues, the union did not do these things.

McAlevey’s perspective is not just a critique of what went wrong. She provides a positive vision of labor organizing, one that is based on empowering the workers themselves to organize their own workplaces with a clear-eyed understanding of the difficult challenges they face. Most importantly, McAlevey’s vision for organizing is rooted in the understanding that such a transformation of workers’ self-understanding and relationships to one another is a slow and arduous process, one that requires lots of personal conversations and repeated tests of workers’ capacity to fight.

McAlevey has provided a road map for community-building that goes beyond the labor movement. In her books and articles in the Nation magazine, she has shown us the same approach to organizing that was used by SNCC organizers in the 1960s and is used today by community-based organizations like Make the Road New York and Pennsylvania. These methods are rooted in a deep confidence in the people who are suffering oppression—be it in the workplace, or at the hands of police or la migra or white supremacist thugs or landlords or schools– a recognition that they and only they can be the agents of their own liberation. The job of the union organizer or political activist is mainly to identify community leaders and to support them to undertake the hard and long work of organizing.

McAlevey’s work provides a concrete and practical guide to this approach to community building. Aside from her on-gong organizing work and reporting on labor for the Nation, she has also written three books. You can view them here.

This understanding of organizing is essential for everyone who seeks to build the beloved community. Many progressives today are college-educated people who are either from privileged backgrounds or have left their communities to go to college and get a decent job. McAlevey’s work is a reminder that the actual agents of social justice are the people who live in oppressed communities.  As much as her work points to their roles as leaders of any meaningful labor or community organizing efforts, she also reminds privileged progressives to be humble, and to recognize the limits on what they can offer (as well as their real contributions) in the historic moment we now are living. Most importantly, McAlevey’s work is brutally honest about the difficult conditions we face but is also powerfully optimistic about oppessed peoples’ potential to create change.