Everyday progressive people can feel that danger is in the air. But what precisely is this danger, and how can we stop it?
In the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, a mass anti-racist rebellion of everyday progressive people emerged. This movement was made up of millions of workers of every race and nationality, people from all walks of life who believe in equality and justice, led by a promising new generation of young Black activists.
The potentially revolutionary character of this rebellion manifested most sharply in the streets of Seattle, Washington. On June 8, 2020, the Seattle police unexpectedly abandoned the East Precinct in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, allowing protesters to set up barricades and take control of six city blocks to form a no-cop protest zone (CHAZ/CHOP). The protesters issued radical demands that the Democratic mayor, Jenny Durkan, was compelled to negotiate with to appease the mass public support for the movement.
The Democratic Party then mobilized its loyal liberal reformist non-profit organizations to co-opt the leadership of this movement and water down its radical demands, to direct it into channels that would not challenge capitalist wealth and power. On July 1, Mayor Durkan sent SWAT teams in armored humvees to clear the zone in what looked just like a military occupation (or counterrevolution). It was in this context that Joe Biden was elected the following November, promising that under his presidency “nothing will fundamentally change.” Biden told his wealthy donors “I’m the only thing standing between you and the radical left.”
Biden and Harris
With a long career of lip service to organized labor and eight years as the vice president to the first Black president, Biden had some credibility with progressive anti-racist workers, allowing him to win the election. This credibility was entirely undeserved. Beyond simply being a servant of Wall Street, Biden began his political career as an extreme anti-Black segregationist. He authored the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994 that unfairly targeted Black people for incarceration, and shocked the arguably fascist Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in 1982 by defending the killing of Palestinian women and children.
Upon taking the presidency, Biden put the street movement for racial justice to bed and oversaw a massive buildup of militarized police forces in our streets. This included the construction of “cop cities” where police forces now practice drowning a future urban uprising in blood. Biden pushed a major global shift toward militarization and war which eventually led to the Gaza genocide. In response to this genocide, for the first time since Biden took office, a new movement emerged in the streets to stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and demand an end to the genocide.
This was when the truly anti-democratic nature of the Democratic Party revealed itself most clearly. Like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden before her, Kamala Harris was selected by the party elite without direct input by voters, and ran a neoconservative campaign. She campaigned with the Cheney family, architects of the disastrous US invasion of Iraq, zealously assuring her donors that she would never budge to pressure from the left or compromise her commitment to police militarization and genocide. But when this failed to stop the pro-Palestine movement and Harris lost the 2024 election to Trump, the Wall Street elite found themselves looking at Trump as their only hope for crushing the grassroots progressive movement and saving themselves from the danger of another rebellion for racial and economic justice.
Who, or what, is Trump?
The emergence of Trump cannot be understood without going back at least as far back as the 2008 financial crisis. It is nothing unusual for racist grifters to attempt to exploit the economic suffering and discontent of the population by fanning the flames of ignorance and paranoia. But when this suffering becomes sharper than usual, in a perfect storm of political crises, these tactics have a way of spreading like wildfire.
This suffering caused a series of convulsions from below within the working class as had not been seen in the United States for decades, from the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 to the Ferguson anti-racist protests of 2014, leading to the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders. Between the prospects of the fascistic Trump and the moderate “socialism” of Sanders, the Democratic Party elite chose to undemocratically sabotage the popular Sanders. This led directly to Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016.
While Trump carefully presents himself as an undisciplined, sloppy, ignorant fool, his danger must not be underestimated. Trump and his team are meticulously following long-established neo-Nazi tactics for manipulating the woes of everyday middle class people to seize dictatorial power and crush all opposition. The long goal of Trump and MAGA is to eliminate any form of democracy for workers, using non-denominational Evangelical Christian churches as a propaganda network and organizing base, to usher in a neo-Nazi police state dictatorship.
The consolidation of such a regime would mean all progressive grassroots organizations physically smashed to atoms or driven into the shadows, and the criminalization and repression of all opposition, with the help of MAGA’s mobs of crazed fanatics and klansmen and no formal legal means of pushback. We are not quite there yet, but getting dangerously close.
The struggle against Trump must be a struggle against the capitalist system that produced him!
Workers must abandon the Democrats as any sort of leadership in this life or death struggle against neo-Nazi police state dictatorship. It was the Democrats who led us here and threw us to these fascist wolves!
The only way out of this blind alley is to bring back the spirit of the antiracist rebellion of 2020! While taking great care not to provoke Trump’s repression, workers of all races and nationalities who oppose fascism, sexism, transphobia, and bigotry of all kinds must once again become galvanized as activists and community organizers, to prepare to lead another mass upswell of millions that could stop MAGA in its tracks. They must merge with the movement for Palestine to learn its strategies and tactics, independently of Democratic Party–aligned “leaders” who would direct us back into the hands that brought us here.
Only the workers can stop fascism and genocide! Shut it down!