Nuclear nonproliferation requires national sovereignty; states must believe that they can preserve their security without nuclear weapons. Where international law is respected, and powerful states can be constrained from attacking weaker ones, the incentives for nuclear proliferation decline. Where these conditions disappear, the logic of nuclear deterrence becomes increasingly compelling.

This is the dangerous lesson being taught by our current era.

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The Trump regime’s attacks on Iran, its threats against Cuba, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and numerous other examples have done immeasurable damage to the notion of nuclear nonproliferation. If you know there is a continuous danger of aggression from a great power, why not have a few A-bombs in your arsenal? North Korea’s determination to develop nuclear weapons, for example, makes grim strategic “sense” in a world where agreements mean nothing and there is no way of enforcing even the basics of international law.

As we enter an increasingly dangerous era, our movements must forge a common understanding of the relationship between nuclear nonproliferation and national self-determination. Only by defending both can we begin to rebuild an international order in which countries no longer believe that their survival depends upon possession of the bomb.

The Foundations of Nuclear Nonproliferation

The battle around the issue of nuclear nonproliferation began at nearly the moment that the first atomic bomb was tested in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945, but certainly in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear weapons spread from the US to other countries, and were factored into military planning, though it took decades for much of the global military community to finally accept that the strategic use of nuclear weapons could not win a war.

The world coming to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, alerted humanity to how quickly events could unfold and lead to global disaster.Various forms of nuclear nonproliferation agreements were developed after much of the scientific community united with mass anti-nuclear movements to change the popular narrative regarding the survivability of nuclear war—that is, to make clear that humanity would not survive it.. Splits within ruling circles also contributed towards these agreements.

Military establishments attempted to circumvent many of the restrictions on nuclear war through the sophistry of tactical nuclear weapons, i.e., lower-grade nuclear devices that could, allegedly, be utilized on the field of battle. Much of the world paid less attention to this threat as such discussions were sanitized.

An Unequal Nuclear Order

Nuclear nonproliferation, however, has never been an across-the-board set of equitable agreements. The US and, later, the USSR (followed by Russia), laid claims to the permanent possession of nuclear weapons. Over time, other countries joined the “club,” including Britain, France, China, India, and Pakistan. And then there were those that joined the “dark web” version of the nuclear community, such as Israel and their ally, apartheid South Africa , who would not acknowledge possession of nuclear weapons nor sign the nuclear non-proliferation agreement (at least, in the case of South Africa, until apartheid was defeated).

The early 1990s brought with it two interesting developments. The first was the newly independent Ukrainian government disinvesting from nuclear weapons and, literally, turning their weapons—as residue from the Cold War—over to the Russian Federation. The second development, on a very different note, was the escalating allegations that certain countries, particularly Iraq and North Korea, were either in possession of nuclear weapons or were on their way to possessing them.

Much of the discussion, at the time, revolved around nuclear nonproliferation and the threat from allegedly rogue states that might entertain using such weapons for strategic or tactical reasons. In the US media, fear was inflamed about the alleged danger of nuclear missiles being able to fly from Iraq and/or North Korea, potentially hitting US targets. Ironically, when probably the greatest danger of a nuclear exchange was between India and Pakistan—both of which admitted to possessing stockpiles of nuclear weapons—little global attention went towards the denuclearization of the Indian subcontinent and, instead, to a focus on alleged rogue actors.

Rather than any exploration as to whether and why Iraq, North Korea, and later Iran might have any interest in nuclear weapons, the focus in the global North—and particularly within the US—turned towards the alleged insanity and aggressiveness of the respective leaders of those countries and the supposed ease with which they might decide, willy-nilly, to push “the button” to ignite a nuclear conflagration.

The Incentives to Go Nuclear

The 2003 war against Iraq, the current war against Iran, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with the threat of war against Cuba, should render a more sober discussion on the motivations of smaller nations when it comes to nuclear weapons.

Not only was the US wrong in falsely arguing the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, but they created a dilemma, particularly for smaller nations, which we have been living with ever since. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been a strange ally of the USA. Within a matter of weeks after Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the US and Iraq became enemies. Iraq suddenly became the target of US allegations regarding nuclear ambitions. As we all know, a war then ensued. Was the lesson that the Iraqis should have developed nuclear weaponry? Was the lesson that friendship between nations, even friendship between toxic administrations, was irrelevant?

When Ukraine became independent of the USSR in 1991, Russia recognized Ukraine’s borders. In 1994, in exchange for an agreement that Russia would never invade or threaten Ukraine, the Ukrainians turned over their nuclear arsenal. In 2022, Putin’s Russia carried out a massive invasion of Ukraine. Was the lesson that Ukraine should never have turned over its nuclear weapons?

In 1962, the USSR provided Cuba with nuclear missiles for the purpose of self-defense against US aggression. The world came very close to war. The Soviets withdrew their missiles in exchange for the US withdrawing missiles from Turkey and an understanding of no military attack on Cuba. In 2026, in clear violation of international law, the Trump administration began strangling the Cuban people and threatening an armed invasion. Is the lesson that Cuba should have developed weapons of mass destruction?

The history of the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea offers an alternative example. Regardless of how one views the government of the DPRK, their possession of nuclear weapons has been a real factor in how countries around the world weigh whether it’s wise to attempt regime change. Given the extent to which the DPRK fears an armed and possibly nuclear assault by the US and the Republic of (South) Korea, their development of nuclear weapons is quite understandable, even if one disagrees on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. After all, as the saying goes, just because one is paranoid does not mean someone isn’t out to get them.

Particularly in the post-Cold War period, the guard rails on both nuclear proliferation and national aggression are unraveling. Where no international accountability exists to protect nations under armed threat, taking the direction of weapons of mass destruction becomes completely logical, if at the same time horrific. One need only look at the US/Israeli war against Iran following Trump’s destruction of the Obama administration-led international treaty with Iran regarding nuclear weapons and power, combined with the Israeli intent to keep western Asia in complete turmoil. Topping this, during negotiations between Iran and the US, Trump decided, twice, to initiate armed conflict. Is the lesson that Iran needed nuclear weapons?

Toward a Stronger Movement for Peace and Justice

To a great extent, at least in the US, there has been a strange space or wall between movements and efforts against nuclear proliferation, movements against war, and movements to defend the national sovereignty of peoples and states under threat by imperialists or national bullies. These movements occasionally overlap but they do not seem to include the same people. The reality of the current world situation is that there is an actual and practical overlap in the issues and, therefore, there must be an overlap in response.

Thus, at a critical movement such as this, opposition to nuclear weapons and the need for nuclear free zones—as is desperately needed in western Asia and on the Indian subcontinent—must be linked to larger matters of national sovereignty and the right of nations to settle internal matters in the absence of foreign interference. We certainly should have learned this lesson in 2003 in the context of the Iraq War, but many of us looked at it too narrowly and focused on the arrogance and aggression of the US alone, not recognizing the longer-term implications of the invasion. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the US/Israeli attack on Iran, the stakes have heightened and the desire for a nuclear counter-threat to aggression appears to become more reasonable for those facing assault.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade unionist, international solidarity activist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. @BillFletcherJr; billfletcherjr.com

The fight against Trump’s mass deportation of migrants has raged for some 17 months.

Immediately when he took office, Trump announced his massive deportation efforts, and just as quickly it became clear that he had no interest in deporting violent criminals (who in any case have the right to due process, documented or not). Rather, the regime was rounding up and deporting your neighbors, co-workers, fellow worshipers, and school children—all through racial profiling. In my own community of Lynn, Massachusetts, they are deporting what we can only call “the best of the best,” shredding the fabric of our community and taking away our beloved friends and community leaders.

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Victories have been won, and battles lost. In the face of vicious attacks by ICE and other federal agents, there has been massive resistance, both spontaneous and highly organized. The experience is now there to sketch the outlines of the strategic and tactical resistance to ICE as it has been built on the ground by our blood, sweat, and tears.

This article describes the three legs of a “resistance triangle” for defeating ICE: mass resistance and mutual aid, demands on public institutions, and ending corporate support for ICE. It also shows how success in these fronts and a growing public outcry has forced the Trump regime to shift tactics in its ethnic cleansing campaign. In this new terrain as well, the three fronts presented here provide a framework for the powerful and creative resistance needed to end the deportation machine.

Fighting—and Winning

1. MASS RESISTANCE AND MUTUAL AID

This front includes ICE watch, whistle mobilizations and cameras, direct nonviolent confrontation, and mutual aid. The goal is to make every neighborhood a fortress. Every school a fortress. Every union a fortress. Every church/temple/mosque a fortress.

This is foundational, the base of the triangle. Without any of the three sides of the resistance, the triangle weakens and collapses. But mass direct resistance drives everything else. The Minnesota resistance is the high point so far. It has been costly, and has already been paid for in arrests, beatings, and blood. The rest of us owe them a debt that cannot be repaid. Without the mass resistance, ICE would still be surging in the Twin Cities, fascist great-coated Bovino would still be in charge, ICE Barbie would still be Secretary of Homeland Security, and the number of detentions would not be dropping.

In an essential DIG podcast, Minnesota leaders described how the resistance there was built. A dozen years of efforts to align core elements of labor, immigrant communities, and faith organizations built support for each other’s campaigns. Joint staff training, political education, and experimentation was involved. Different social movements were understood to have different strengths and weaknesses, different cultures and structures. No one organization or group of organizations tried to “brand” the movement as their own. Alignment meant agreed-upon goals and values; it did not mean agreement on everything. Rather it meant working together despite disagreements, with respect to all. And in moments of upsurge, it was understood that the resistance had to include a broader front than anything that had come before, often out of the hands of the people who had built the infrastructure of the movement.

The particularities of Minnesota history and culture backgrounded the effort. Minnesota has a long tradition of civil society activism, including the highest voting rates in the US. The labor movement in Minnesota has a proud history, from the Iron Range mines to the Teamster-led general strike of 1934 to the Local P-9 meatpacking rebellion in Austin in 1985-1986. The Minnesota resistance built, politically and organizationally, on the previous upsurge in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. The state has a strong tradition of faith organizations welcoming immigrants.

While this particular history is important, most every city and state in the US has its own working class social movement history, whose footprints need to be recovered and popularized. This is certainly true here in Lynn, Massachusetts, with its labor, abolitionist, women’s, and queer history and struggle that date back 200 years.

The larger battles on this front are well known: Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte. But the stunning breadth of the support for immigrant families and efforts to protect them has not been told and may never be recorded. It took place in smaller towns as well. For instance, while attending a G-League basketball game in Portland, Maine, I met a high school teacher who had delivered class materials and food in her small Maine town of Saco to her students’ Latino and Congolese families who were afraid to attend school or shop.

Key to success is both building a broad united front and including the voice of the most directly affected people. In Lynn that has meant both strengthening long-term relationships and developing a group of affected migrants and their families to play a leading role.

There is much discussion in our movement about what role mutual aid or other services play in all of this. I believe it is essential and powerful, even though as a Minnesota immigrant leader put it, “We can’t food bank and fundraise our way to freedom.”

Our experience in Lynn is that support for families—those threatened or those who have already lost loved ones and breadwinners to ICE—is deep and broad. The performative cruelty of Trump’s campaign has sparked disgust and anger. We have organized several events in Lynn such as baby showers for immigrant moms and received contributions even from Trump supporters. In a patriarchal society where women are at the core of caregiving and family resilience, resisting attacks on children and families resonates powerfully among women and in the largely gendered helping professions like nursing and K-12 education.

The work of power-building organizations is to take that response, build organization, educate, and create something sustainable with an upward spiral of political consciousness. This isn’t easy—we have struggled here in Lynn to build an organization out of our Food Aid program which provides support to 750 families monthly—not least because ICE kidnapped our staff driver, Manny Kenga. As a friend in North Star Socialist Organization warned me, with good reason, “In the conflict between service and power-building, service wins every time.” In a DIG podcast, SEIU’s Greg Namacher in Minnesota recommends getting any staff out of mutual aid projects as soon as possible after the program is established. It is certainly true that the pressure of sustaining aid programs can be burdensome and divert organizing resources.

But unions both service and organize. Most partner groups of our New Lynn Coalition (a permanent force of labor, community, and faith organizations), such as the Worker’s Center and the Lynn United housing organization, do both with considerable success.

A socialist approach needs to distinguish itself from the work of our allies in the nonprofit and faith worlds whose work is limited to advocacy or purely service, and from anarchist-influenced approaches that divorce mutual aid from a power-building strategy.

I would put it this way:

Mutual Aid + Organization + Political Education = Resistance

The New Lynn Coalition has held three actions against mass deportations. Working with the statewide resistance campaign organized by LUCE, we followed their lead and developed our own six elements of resistance:

1. Verification/Patrolling: The program of LUCE and Neighbor to Neighbor (N2N) in which people patrol neighborhoods to find ICE and “verify” by asking for their ID and filming them, in some cases causing them to leave.

2. Information: A WhatsApp site where people identify ICE presence to a hotline and centralize it for the community.

3. Organizing/Outreach: Neighborhood walks, store visits, contacting new organizations and individuals.

4. Material Aid/Survival: Financial and moral support for those who have lost loved ones, especially breadwinners, to ICE. New Lynn adds families to our Food Aid program where possible.

5. Electoral/Political: Asking questions during endorsement processes about what the candidate is doing to stop ICE, pushing them to uncomfortable positions beyond what is “practical.”

6. Unifying our Communities (Buen Vivir): Events like one New Lynn held for the Haitian community earlier this year, or music festivals, barbecues, potlucks. Safe spaces and joy—the joy of community, the joy of resistance. The joy of a vision of a better world.

This can be streamlined to verifying, mutual aid, organizing, and electoral work. The combined effect is to protect as many people as possible, as our forebears protected freedom seekers from the Fugitive Slave Act. Direct action can disrupt the conveyor belt of courts, police, and lack of legal support that leads our neighbors to detention and deportation.

2. DEMANDS ON PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS

This front involves laws, executive orders, and resolutions.

When pressed to take a stand, state and city officials, even in blue areas, will cite federal pre-emption on immigration enforcement as a reason not to fight. Of course there are legal obstacles to states and cities blocking or disrupting ICE. But so what?

There is plenty these officials can do, and playing it safe is a betrayal. As a union officer for many years, I came to appreciate the legal advice of our attorneys, but also understood that their advice would always be conservative. They saw their job as protecting the union from any legal consequences.This was advice I should have ignored!

For our part, we make decisions in a way that will win a particular fight and build organization and class consciousness: “Win as much as possible and weaken the enemy through collective action, spread class consciousness and build the unity of the working class through education and organization, and recruit people to socialism by promoting international solidarity, agitating against capitalism, studying and providing a program to build an alternative world.” Needless to say, this approach may mean reaching for new legal ground or rejecting legal advice entirely.

After multiple meetings with undocumented migrants and their families, the mayor of my city of Lynn signed an Executive Order restricting ICE activities (jointly with several others including Boston’s Mayor Wu, which gave him political cover). It forbade ICE from using any city property (they had been assembling at the city graveyard), required local police to record and file ICE misconduct for possible legal action, and specified other positive steps. The Massachusetts state legislature, Governor Healey, and our local district attorney are working on a bill that would prevent ICE agents’ presence in district courthouses, their favorite and most effective hunting ground. It is at the courthouses where the LUCE ICE watch is focused now—volunteers identify ICE officers, expose them, scramble for legal advice, track people they seize, etc.

Other local officials have gone farther. Denver Mayor Mike Johnson has declared that local police have a duty to intervene directly when force is used by federal agents that “could cause death or serious bodily injury.” Reformer District Attorney Larry Krasner in Philadelphia has promised ICE agents: “This is how it works. You commit crimes within the jurisdiction that is the city and county of Philadelphia, I prosecute you...No, the president cannot pardon you.” In blue states we often have the power to refuse to follow federal policy in diverse ways.

Our experience at courthouses shows how the fields of engagement are constantly changing, and how each step is important but insufficient by itself. On the day the Executive Order was issued in Lynn, we received four reports of ICE sightings. Through the federal database, ICE can still identify people without papers who are arrested for any petty issue like running a red light, and wait for them outside police stations. If we are successful in keeping them out of the courthouse, they will lurk outside—and we will follow them there.

The strategic goal of political and legislative resistance is to split the municipal and state governments from the federal government and the New Confederacy—using the US system of federalism to our advantage. This is a critical step to stop the consolidation of the New Confederacy’s power grab at all levels of government, throwing sand in the gears of the kidnapping machine in every way possible. Cities and states (and counties) can restrict ICE activities, set up defense funds, investigate and prosecute ICE crimes, challenge warrantless home break-ins, and use their soapbox. Massachusetts has supported a bail fund for immigrants taken by ICE. Lynn set up a fund which can be used in part to defend immigrants—and through a campaign led by Neighbor to Neighbor, the City Council just rejected the Mayor’s budget, demanding more funding for immigration defense.

A sympathetic but hesitant district attorney told me, “We need the perfect case to proceed. When you go against the king…” But even symbolism matters. The breakthrough will come when local officials, police, and district attorneys arrest and prosecute ICE agents. That is the crisis we want, and a first breach happened in April, again in Minneapolis.

As with mass resistance and mutual aid, the political and legislative resistance has been varied and widespread beyond what anyone can track. In NH, the three county commissioners representing Rockingham County applied to hold ICE detainees in the Rockingham County jail. Two Republicans outvoted the one Democrat. Several citizens who became known as the “Deerfield Five” (one of whom I’m proud to say was my sister) organized turnout to speak out at county commission meetings and had several direct, thoughtful discussions with one of their Republican commissioner. After hearing all the testimony and watching the videos of the ICE murders in Minnesota, the commissioner flipped his vote. He told the town that as someone with many years of background in law enforcement he just “could not make sense” of what ICE was doing. Another small, important, and unheralded victory.

The townspeople overturning a county jail ICE hold in Deerfield, New Hampshire, and the teacher helping immigrants in Saco, Maine, registered no national attention, but they built the resistance. We are everywhere, even when we don’t know it.

3. ENDING CORPORATE SUPPORT FOR ICE

This means shutting down the corporate profiteering that makes the terrorizing of our communities possible.

ICE relies heavily on the private sector to help carry out its Gestapo-like crusade against immigrants and their allies. Without the logistical, financial, and political support of large private corporations, its capacity to terrorize our communities would crumble.

As I stated above, it can be fruitless to search for and defeat the logic of a particular Trump policy, since he rules more by spectacle than policy. We face not goose-stepping Nazis in full regimented bloom but a contradictory clown show of Silicon Valley Psychos and Pseudo Proletarians. Yet the essential driver is always power serving profit.

Trump has made it clear that he isn’t even opposed to migrant workers in US fields—as long as they are paid even less than they are now. There is money to be made and political benefit to white supremacy. “There is now a white fear industrial complex, where many people get very rich and very powerful by telling white America that they are under constant assault,” as a recent PBS documentary (“White with Fear”) put it.

The private prison industrial complex is also part of Trump’s “we.” Our dear Lynn friend Manny from the Congo was seized by ICE when he showed up for his regular check-in at the ICE office in Burlington, MA. He has a work permit, worked two jobs in community service, and has no police record of any kind. He drove the New Lynn Coalition’s Food Aid van, delivering support to 750 families. We found him in the hell hole called the East Montana detention center in El Paso, now held in a tent with 75 other people for 23 hours out of every day—for 8 months. It was built for $1.2 billion in a secret contract handed to an unknown private for-profit company with no experience in the task at hand. The tent city has seen chilling cold temperatures and brutal desert heat, measles and tuberculosis outbreaks, multiple suicides, and at least one confirmed homicide. One billion two hundred million dollars to create a torture chamber where they put the best of the best our society has to offer. Your tax dollars at work.

We need to choke off the profiteers from their profit. And it can be done—has already been done, as shown by the Avelo “Abduction Airlines” victory. A broad coalition decided on a campaign that targeted Avelo Airlines which transported ICE detainees. The coalition aimed to shut the Avelo flights down, and set broad political goals as well for a campaign that:

1. Helps us build a BIGGER working-class base

2. Strengthens strategic alignment

3. Connects attacks on immigrants to billionaire attacks on the multiracial working class

4. Weakens the New Confederacy

The coalition also looked for a winnable campaign, which meant targeting a corporation with a public-facing brand that was vulnerable to political and economic pressure, had some financial vulnerability, and relied to some degree on government support and subsidies. Avelo Airlines fit the bill. And they are now out of the deportation business.

Organizers assembled a broad national coalition of unions, faith organizations, and others, from Indivisible and Democratic Socialists of America to the Association of Flight Attendants (a CWA affiliate) to newly emerging local immigrant groups. The flight attendants pointed out that they are required to evacuate a plane in 90 seconds or less in the event of an emergency, which is hard to do when “an entire flight of people handcuffed and shackled would hinder any evacuation and risk injury or death.” Churches denounced the moral atrocity of the abduction industry, and city leaders denounced the use of taxpayer dollars for subsidies. And all pointed to the corporate profits skimmed from the suffering. There were street protests across the country wherever Avelo landed or took off, 97,000 letters to corporate leadership, and the withdrawal of subsidies and municipal and union investments.

This:

Led to this:

There are similar campaigns against Citizen’s Bank, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Hilton, Palantir, and other corporations who have contracts with ICE. Direct resistance is not enough; we can actually stop ICE by eliminating corporate support, dealing material blows to the capitalists behind the attacks, not just targeting bad politicians or evil fascists (although there are plenty of them!).

The Regime Adapts to the Strength of the Resistance

We are in a new phase of the resistance. As arrogant as the Trump administration is, even they aren’t entirely ignorant of the reaction to their ethnic cleansing campaign: they now avoid the “surge” of thousands of federal agents into high-profile performative attacks on big cities. The tide has turned, and support for mass deportation has collapsed, at least with a widespread belief that Trump has “gone too far.” The issue that Steve Bannon bragged had “80-20” public support has stimulated the strongest—and fabulously multiracial—mass movement against the dictatorship so far. Court cases are collapsing and judges are openly raging at the blanket refusal of ICE to follow court orders.

When even Florida sheriffs are rejecting the draconian mass deportations of Governor DeSantis, who prides himself with being the most anti-immigrant governor in the United States—the tide has indeed turned.

But the underlying goals and methods have not changed. Mass deportations of migrants continue in service of the only consistency beneath the spectacle: power to serve profit, with white supremacy as the essential throughline.

Fewer spectacular “surges” of zombie police in some ways makes our task more difficult: mass deportations grind on in more insidious ways. Our friends and neighbors are still being kidnapped and disappeared. Warehouses are snapped up to “house” human beings. Racial profiling has been blessed by the Supreme Court. ICE officials are fired who do not kidnap enough people to meet assigned quotas, like managers at GE (where I worked for 33 years) were fired for failing to make Friday shipping quotas for aircraft engine parts. Immigration judges, in the separate court system controlled by the executive branch, are fired (100 of them) if they allow someone their freedom to live here. And while most of us were looking away, thousands of National Guardsmen from the Old Confederate states have occupied Washington, DC—something they could not even accomplish during the Civil War.

Fear of kidnapping and disappearance is just normal life here now. We’ve gone from shock and awe to WWI-style trench warfare. The machine grinds on.

The focus on the “surges” has actually misrepresented the actual impact of the mass deportations. There were more ICE detentions in the southern cities of Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio, where state government fully supports ICE depravities, than there were in Minneapolis/St. Paul during the Minnesota “surge.” Trump and wannabe cowboys like Bovino rule by spectacle more than policy. But the attacks on migrants by a thousand cuts —ripping away food, housing, education, and health care—continue. The regime tried to go so far as to declare 2.7 million migrants to be officially dead at Social Security, which would cut off their ability to access bank accounts, credit cards and social services, creating,—all the more pressure to self-deport.

Migrants are widgets on a cruelty efficiency chart. But unless you live in the directly affected communities, it may be below your radar.

The Resistance Triangle Will Win

The immigrant defense campaigns are growing and multifaceted. The three fronts are of course interrelated, and a particular campaign or tactic may not fit neatly into a single category. There is no single magical response that will turn the tide until the MAGA fascists are expelled from office and eradicated as a political force—which will take midterm victories and more: years of both social mobilization and electoral organizing.

From Deerfield, New Hampshire, to Saco, Maine, and Lynn, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minnesota, the people have spoken and ICE is in political retreat. But the abductions are changing tactics. The splashy “surges” have provided red meat to the MAGA base, but have also boosted mass resistance. The deportation machine continues in less obvious but perhaps more effective and efficient ways.

To win, to decisively defeat ICE, we need to build deeper organizations of mass resistance, sharpen and deepen the divisions between municipal and state governments on one hand and the national power of MAGA at the federal level, and go on offense against the corporate ICE profiteers. Their ethnic cleansing campaign against migrants is the cutting edge of their white supremacist imagination, and white supremacy is the brutal sinew of the MAGA program: power serving profit.

We have to win this. Flood the Resistance!

Jeff Crosby is a labor and community activist and a socialist. He worked as a grinder and elected union official at GE in Lynn, Massachusetts, for 33 years, and as Executive Director of a community/faith/labor coalition, the New Lynn Coalition, for 10 years.

Major anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence have a way of coming at inconvenient times. When the bicentennial took place, the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, Congressional investigations had revealed massive FBI spying on US citizens, and Richard Nixon had just resigned in disgrace. Public confidence in the government was at a low ebb.

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The centennial in 1876 was even worse. The federal government was about to abandon its commitment to Reconstruction, pulling troops out of the South to bribe Florida electors into voting for a Republican presidential candidate who had, in fact, lost at the polls. Nearly a century of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, lynchings, and Klan terror would follow. In the South, a brief experiment in biracial democracy abruptly ended; in the North, robber baron capitalism was in full swing. Within a year, a largely spontaneous railroad strike prompted pitched battles across the country between federal troops and street protesters enraged by the depredations of the railroad barons.

The 250^th anniversary of the Declaration is a few days away. For many, the current occupant of the White House bears a striking resemblance to the sniveling monarch in the hip-hop musical Hamilton. The real King George was supposed to be ruling by Divine Right; Donald Trump seems to think he is as well, turning his ICE brownshirts loose on city streets, using his office to enrich himself and his family, flouting laws, and starting wars on a whim only to become bored with them weeks later. Despised by much of the population, he clings to his diminishing mass base with naked appeals to white racism and male supremacy. He plasters his name on every public venue he can think of and honors the nation’s founding with a cage match on the White House lawn.

So what are we supposed to celebrate? The men who signed the Declaration were hardly heroes. Most were wealthy merchants and/or slaveholders. They had an agenda that reflected their class interests. The revolution they led left slavery intact, accelerated the dispossession and outright murder of Native peoples, and reserved political power for a narrow slice of the population. After 250 years, we are still dealing with these contradictions.

But revolutions, even conservative ones, have a way of taking on a life of their own. The American Revolution could not have succeeded without the support of ordinary people whose interests did not neatly align with those of the Founding Fathers. And once the revolution was over, the Declaration’s afterlife exceeded the intentions of its authors. Its promise that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” and its assertion that “all men are created equal” would be taken up, again and again, by people the founders would never have imagined as political equals: enslaved Africans, workers, women, and anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world.

Founding Fathers, or Deadbeat Dads?

The contradictions that confronted colonial society on the cusp of the revolution were real enough, but nowhere near as momentous as Thomas Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence would suggest. “No taxation without representation,” the battle cry of the revolution, hardly seems like the sort of demand that would arouse the masses. Measured against the popular grievances in British colonies like India and Ireland, where the economic stakes were greater and the human cost far higher, the “long train of abuses and usurpations” cited by Jefferson look like small potatoes.

But the leaders of the revolution, Jefferson among them, had class interests to protect that distinguished them from most colonists. They saw British trade and taxation policies as detrimental to their businesses, and many of them feared that Crown-appointed colonial administrators lacked the resources and the wherewithal to protect them should the masses of people show any signs of restiveness.

Jefferson identified with the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, who challenged hereditary rule by royal families and a landed aristocracy. For them, and for much of this country’s revolutionary generation, political power properly flowed not from bloodlines but from property. The Declaration’s famous line about governments “deriv[ing] their just powers from the consent of the governed” is widely seen as a call for democracy, but it was also a defense of private property—including property in slaves. Significantly, there was already a growing debate in England about the morality of the slave trade, and American slaveholders regarded it with deep unease.

Jefferson himself was deeply ambivalent. Born into the Virginia aristocracy, Jefferson disliked the idleness and self-indulgence of the planter class; he believed that slavery not only robbed enslaved people of their natural rights but also corrupted the slaveowners. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he would write in 1782. But he was too burdened with debt to consider freeing his own 600 slaves—even after he fathered several children with one of them. And politically, abolishing slavery outright was a bridge too far. A denunciation of slavery in the original draft of the Declaration was left on the cutting room floor, replaced by a specious claim that King George had “forced” it upon the colonists.

The “chosen people”?

If Jefferson thought the Southern planters were morally compromised, he pinned his hopes on the white yeoman farmers whom he considered “the chosen people of God.” He envisioned a democracy of small producers and hoped that the settlement of the frontier would allow their emergence as the dominant social class in the new nation. They already made up a majority of the population of colonial America.

But wealth in the colonies was concentrated in the hands of a few whose fortunes were tied to transatlantic trade, mainly shipowners and large planters growing crops for export. For anyone else, the largely unsettled west held out the best hope of an independent livelihood.

Lacking access to markets in the coastal cities, farmers in the interior produced mainly for their own use. What business they engaged in was apt to involve barter with their neighbors. If taxes imposed by the Crown affected them, it was because without access to currency they had no way to pay them. Tax collectors on the frontier sometimes came in for rough treatment.

What really rankled, though, were British restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians. After a long, grinding war, Britain had wrested formal control of the area from the French, but it was still wilderness, and for all practical purposes it remained Indian land. Occupied with expanding and defending its empire in other parts of the world, Britain had no stomach for colonizing the Mississippi Valley, much less policing it. But people still defied the British ban on settlement, and they resented that the government would not protect them from Indian resistance, or even provide them with authorization and resources to protect themselves.

It was an issue that united hardscrabble yeoman farmers of the West and wealthy land speculators from the East. In deference to their interests, Jefferson would include the Second Amendment when he drafted the Bill of Rights 10 years later. The “right to bear arms” enshrined by our current Supreme Court was originally about Indian removal, a process that would continue a century longer as the nation expanded westward.

Black lives mattered

Yet if the Declaration meant property rights and political independence to the founders, and land and local autonomy to frontier settlers, its promise of equality took on a very different meaning in Black hands.

The much-quoted passage in the Declaration that “all men are created equal” seems truly revolutionary even today. With a few exceptions, the Founding Fathers never suggested that the Declaration’s embrace of equality applied to Black people. But that did not stop Black people from acting as though it did. The Declaration actually served as an inspiration for Gabriel’s revolt, an aborted slave rebellion that occurred in Virginia 25 years later. The abolitionist movement repeatedly invoked it. In a famous Fourth of July speech in 1858, Frederick Douglass excoriated white America for betraying its promise. In the Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln—his own racism notwithstanding—said the Civil War was being fought to defend it. Every struggle against racism in this country, every effort to extend democracy in the face of capitalist power, has found the idea indispensable.

By the same token, antebellum slaveowners found it increasingly hard to swallow. At the time of the Revolution, they typically defended slavery as a necessary evil and viewed their slaves mainly as a source of cheap labor. But as the abolitionist movement gained steam, drawing strength and moral authority from Frederick Douglass and others who had escaped bondage and fled North, they stopped apologizing and started justifying their ownership of human property as a good thing, indispensable to civilization’s survival. In the South Carolina low country, where Blacks outnumbered whites by as much as eight to one, the perceived threat of rebellious slaves loomed as large in the minds of slaveowners as the fabulous wealth being wrested from their labor.

In 1822 a well-organized conspiracy led by a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey probably would have seized control of Charleston had it not been betrayed at the last minute. Nine years later, in tidewater Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody slave uprising and remained at large for weeks until he was finally caught and executed.

The Southern slaveocracy concluded that any talk of abolition was a menace and had to be stopped, lest it encourage further rebellions. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, their leading voice in Congress, took the Senate floor to declare that the Declaration’s assertion of equal rights was “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Other spokesmen for the planter class insisted that slavery was not simply a labor system, it was “the step-ladder by which civilized countries have passed from barbarism to civilization.”

After slavery was finally abolished, Jim Crow laws were justified with the same language of social control, though the term “separate but equal” paid cynical lip service to the Declaration. In 1896 the Supreme Court offered its blessing to the charade in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Nearly six decades—marked by often bitter struggle—would have to pass before the high court finally acknowledged that segregation and inequality were functionally related.

Consent of the governed?

The Declaration of Independence has another abiding message today: its affirmation of the right of revolution. The mere fact that the American revolution occurred encouraged a succession of anti-monarchical and anti-colonial uprisings in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean that were more socially transformative and often far bloodier. In 1946, when the people of Vietnam had defeated Japanese occupation and were preparing to resist recolonization by the French, the Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh would draft a national constitution taking entire passages word for word from Jefferson’s text.

At a time when too many politicians reflexively talk about the “right to exist,” it’s worth noting a central premise of the Declaration: states derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” No government possesses an inherent right to exist, independent of popular will. Governments do not have rights; people do.

Jefferson believed in the rights of the individual and insisted that there are some areas of our lives where the government has no business going. This tradition has yielded important gains. Jim Crow laws that dictated where Black people could live, work, and go to school have fallen. More recently, movements have challenged the state’s ability to dictate whom people can marry, whether women should have children, or how people live their private lives.

But the right of revolution goes beyond rejecting government intrusion in our personal lives. It’s not only about how we are treated as individuals, but about our collective destiny.

The Black liberation struggle—indeed, the struggle of any oppressed people—is all about making that distinction. Martin Luther King Jr. famously observed that the right to sit at a desegregated lunch counter doesn’t mean much if you can’t afford the price of a hamburger; he spent his last years challenging the class contradictions that kept people from affording it. Malcolm X didn’t pontificate about a “color-blind” society; he called for an end to white people’s power over Black people. The Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party didn’t demand equal treatment and an end to discrimination; it demanded “the power to determine the destiny of our Black community.” A Latino leader of the Third World strike at San Francisco State College in 1968 summed it all up nicely: “We don’t want equality, we want self-determination.”

Implicit in the call for self-determination is Jefferson’s argument that governments that rule without “the consent of the governed” should be overthrown. He spoke of “the tree of liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” and at one point mused about the need for a revolution every 20 years.

Mao Tse-tung, who pinned his hopes on the rising national liberation struggles in the Third World, believed that their fate was inextricably linked to that of the Black liberation movement in the United States. He pointed out that colonialism and imperialism had their roots in the African slave trade, and the capitalist system grew and flourished on the backs of enslaved African American labor. Viewed in that light, Black people’s confrontation with the ambiguous language in the Declaration of Independence is truly a global one.

For 250 years, Americans and people around the world have been fighting over the meaning of 1776. They still are. The Declaration of Independence has always contained profound contradictions. Simultaneously a defense of slavery and an inspiration for slave revolts, a justification for settler expansion and a touchstone for anti-colonial liberation, the Declaration remains contested terrain.

Revolutions may be defined by the class outlook of those who lead them, but they invariably hold out the promise of something bigger, a vision of human liberation. When they fall short, they inspire us to keep struggling—in ways that no cage match can contain.

Peter Shapiro is a longtime labor activist living in Oakland. Many years ago he studied US history at UC Berkeley. More recently, he wrote Song of the Stubborn One Thousand: The Watsonville Canning Strike 1985-87 (Haymarket Books).

The announcement of the US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding allegedly ending the war between Iran and the USA/Israeli axis has brought forth more confusion than I can remember in the aftermath of any crisis. And, how can we even use the word “aftermath” when, shortly after the “signing” of the Memorandum, Israel continued its relentless war against Lebanon, and Iran—as a result—announced another blockade of the Straits of Hormuz! And then, on June 21st, Trump, once again, threatened Iran and specifically threatened to kill the Iranian negotiating team! We will get back to this in a moment. First some background.

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Though the mainstream media and liberal commentators have consistently referred to the USA/Israeli assault as Trump’s supposed “war of choice,” such a designation entirely misses the mark. Would one call Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 a war of choice? Perhaps in a very technical sense since it was not a defensive war, but the reality was that it was a war of naked aggression. History has identified it as such and there has been no ambiguity, except among a certain ring of fascists.

Additionally, consider that Trump twice engaged in what were supposed to be good-faith negotiations with the Iranian government, only to launch military actions against them during the negotiations. The Japanese did exactly the same thing in the leadup to Pearl Harbor and, in fact, Japanese negotiators were in Washington, DC at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. History has been very unkind to the Japanese for such duplicity. Why should it be anything different with Trump?

Let us be clear that this has been a war of aggression on the part of the USA and Israel, countries which had similar and different reasons to attack Iran. They carried out the attack with a high level of hubris, poor intelligence, an irrational view of air power replacing soldiers on the ground, and an overall lack of preparation. In fact, they could not even define the objectives of the war.

During the course of the war there have been liberal commentators who have criticized Trump for failing to enter the war with a set of clear objectives, including but not limited to the failure to overthrow the Iranian theocracy or definitively crippling their military. This point of view is astounding since it suggests that had Trump been clearer about destroying the Iranian military and overthrowing the Iranian regime the war might have been justified! As any student of international law can attest, an unprovoked military assault against a country that offers no evidence of an imminent attack is in violation of international law and such actions have, since World War II, been condemned, with the exception of the “pass” regularly provided to Israel.

The contempt for international law demonstrated by Trump, et al., went hand in hand with a dismissal of human rights. On the first day of the war of aggression, US aircraft killed 175 Iranian civilians, mainly children, in a missile attack on a school. The attack at first appeared inexplicable except when it was later revealed that the US intelligence assessment of that area was completely out of date. Trump’s response? According to the New York Times, Trump replied most recently, “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”

Trump’s contempt for the victims of US atrocities matches his contempt for people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean unless, of course, they are Afrikaners from South Africa. It is in Trump’s contemptuous view of the global majority that we see the parallels between the Trump administration on foreign and domestic policy. The ethnic cleansing and atrocious treatment of immigrants in the USA—documented and undocumented—who have been warehoused and denied humane treatment displays the same attitude the Administration has taken towards the Iranians, including attacking civilian targets and attacking non-military Iranian targets on the high seas. The basic principle that applies is that no principle applies! This is what so many people failed to understand when they classified Trump as a supposed isolationist. He and his administration are not isolationists! Instead they are a regime that believes that no law, foreign or domestic, should constrain a US administration from undertaking policies driven by perceived self-interest, however avaricious.

The Memorandum signed by Trump is as odd as a four legged duck. Despite the denunciations of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action— the Iran nuclear deal of 2015—by Trump and MAGA and their insistence that it be obliterated, Trump has won nothing of substance for the US ruling elite. As has been acknowledged in both Left and Right circles, the Strait of Hormuz was open before the war; the price of oil was down; the global economy was not teetering on the brink of recession; billions of dollars per day were not being thrown into war; and Iranian civilians, neighboring Arabian/Persian Gulf nation-states, along with US personnel in western Asia, were not facing war and terror. Trump has won nothing for the US elite or his MAGgot millions. And, as should be obvious, the people of the United States have won nothing through the pirate assault on Iran.

How should we understand this situation? First, these are the steps of a 15 year old encased in the body of an 80 year old who displays serious cognitive issues. Second, these are the actions of a segment of the US political elite that wishes to reshape the world in the interest of transnational capital, particularly the fossil fuel and tech sectors. Third, these are the actions of an Administration that exists in both unity and tension with Israel wherein it, for ideological and strategic reasons, wishes to reinforce Israel, while at the same time Trump does not particularly value chaos in western Asia (the latter appearing to be a major objective of the Israeli government).

This war and settlement are an abomination. The entire process of engaging in this war of aggression must be denounced, if not ridiculed. The stand of people of good will must be that there was never any justification for this war and, indeed, the USA and Israel need to supply Iran with reconstruction assistance. They cannot afford to walk away and shrug.

There is one more critical lesson. Our fight against rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism at home is not now and has never been separate from our duty to oppose wars of aggression and acts of tyranny on the global stage (the latter including standing with the Iranian people not only against the USA/Israeli aggression but, separately, against the repressive Iranian theocracy). Trump and MAGA have a global vision which includes domination of the Western Hemisphere; transactional relationships with other countries insofar as it benefits transnational capital and US political elites; and strong relationships with other tyrannical powers under a 21st century version of spheres of influence. The global majority has no interest in such a vision. And such a vision will not succeed to the extent to which we succeed in taking down rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism in our respective countries.

We moved far too slowly in responding to the Iran war. We sit awaiting a possible US strike against Cuba, not to mention other possible Trump targets. Those of us standing against rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism simply cannot sit out the global struggle.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is coordinator and cofounder of standing4democracy.org. He is a longtime trade unionist, international solidarity activist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction.

Long ago I peered into a pool of water and fell in love with my own reflection. I was, after all, the most beautiful man in the world. Little did I know that I’d been cursed by Nemesis, goddess of revenge, for ignoring the men and women infatuated with me. She made it so whomever I loved could never love me back. Naturally, the reflection in the pool couldn’t love me, and I was distraught.

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At that point I turned into a daffodil. But now, millennia later, I find myself back in human form—this time in Washington, DC, with its Mount Olympus vibe and phallus-shaped temples poking the heavens. Is Nemesis giving me a second chance?

I come to a giant pool and, forgetting my earlier trauma, peer into the water. Luckily, it’s clouded with globs of green and flecks of blue, so no reflection. Crisis averted.

I wonder what’s brought me to this time, and this place. I seek answers from other mortals around the pool. They are laughing about a “no-bid swimming pool contractor,” scooping up blue flakes, and pointing tiny, seemingly harmless weapons at each other. Several of them compliment my attire—a figure-hugging yet tasteful tunic—and wish me “Happy Pride Month.”

It’s all so confusing. But in the ensuing days I learn much from my fellow mortals—in particular, how the gods of Washington display the very traits that got me in so much trouble. To wit:

• They declare their talents and achievements superior to all. “This was highly sophisticated material... that could last for 100 years, applied by very talented people, many of whom came from the Great State of Oklahoma, where I won 77 out of 77 Counties, THREE TIMES, the only President to ever do so.”

• They make up stories to burnish their image. “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool—just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”

• They find others to blame for their purported mistakes. “We’ve had some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool…Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail!”

I hear the mortals bemoan a “personality disorder” and warn of consequences for excessive self-love. But what consequences could there be? The days of condemning sinners to eternal torment or turning them into flowers are long gone.

Still, these gods’ magic is wearing thin; discontent blooms like algae across the land. Out of character for me, but I have to admire these people defying their rulers. In the battles sure to come, I’ll be rooting for my fellow mortals.

Jennifer Thomas is a speculative fiction writer and occasional New Liberator contributor. You can read some of her stories at jenniferthomas.net.

This year and every year, we are reminded that the great liberation of Black people on Juneteenth 1865 is a call towards more life, wider commitment, and deeper freedom. In the shadow of Callais and on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States, we must honor the best of what our ancestors have struggled, died, and lived for by struggling and fighting for the hearts and minds of millions.

In this moment we look to an address by W.E.B. DuBois at the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Columbia, South Carolina, October 1946, urging young people to regard the South as the battleground in the struggle for emancipation of working people, Black and white. He called on them to fight for “a new nation, a new economy, a new culture in a South really new.”

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Behold the Land, by W.E.B. DuBois

The future of American Negroes is in the South. Here three hundred and twenty-seven years ago, they began to enter what is now the United States of America; here they have made their greatest contribution to American culture; and here they have suffered the damnation of slavery, the frustration of reconstruction and the lynching of emancipation. I trust then that an organization like yours is going to regard the South as the battle-ground of a great crusade. Here is the magnificent climate; here is the fruitful earth under the beauty of the southern sun; and here, if anywhere on earth, is the need of the thinker, the worker and the dreamer. This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalist monopoly.

Remember here, too, that you do not stand alone. It may seem like a failing fight when the newspapers ignore you; when every effort is made by white people in the South to count you out of citizenship and to act as though you did not exist as human beings while all the time they are profiting by your labor, gleaning wealth from your sacrifices and trying to build a nation and a civilization upon your degradation. You must remember that despite all this, you have allies—and allies even in the white South.

First and greatest of these possible allies are the white working classes about you, the poor whites whom you have been taught to despise and who in turn have learned to fear and hate you. This must not deter you from efforts to make them understand, because in the past in their ignorance and suffering they have been led foolishly to look upon you as the cause of most of their distress. You must remember that this attitude is hereditary from slavery and that it has been deliberately cultivated ever since emancipation.

Slowly but surely the working people of the South, white and Black, must come to remember that their emancipation depends upon their mutual cooperation; upon their acquaintanceship with each other; upon their friendship; upon their social intermingling. Unless this happens each is going to be made the football to break the heads and hearts of the other.

White Youth is Frustrated

White youth in the South is peculiarly frustrated. There is not a single great ideal which they can express or aspire to, that does not bring them into flat contradiction with the Negro problem. The more they try to escape it, the more they land into hypocrisy, lying and double dealing; the more they become, what they least wish to become, the oppressors and despisers of human beings. Some of them, in larger and larger numbers, are bound to turn toward the truth and to recognize you as brothers and sisters, as fellow travelers toward the dawn.

There has always been in the South that intellectual elite who saw the Negro problem clearly. They have always lacked and some still lack the courage to stand up for what they know is right. Nevertheless they can be depended on in the long run to follow their own clear thinking and their own decent choice. Finally even the politicians must eventually recognize the trend in the world, in this country, and in the South. James Byrnes, that favorite son of this commonwealth, and Secretary of State of the United States, is today occupying an indefensible and impossible position; and if he survives in the memory of men, he must begin to help establish in his own South Carolina something of that democracy which he has been recently so loudly preaching to Russia. He is the end of a long series of men whose eternal damnation is the fact that they looked truth in the face and did not see it; John C. Calhoun, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman are men whose names must ever be besmirched by the fact that they fought against freedom and democracy in a land which was founded upon democracy and freedom.

Eventually this class of men must yield to the writing in the stars. That great hypocrite, Jan Smuts, who today is talking of humanity and standing beside Byrnes for a United Nations, is at the same time oppressing the Black people of Africa to an extent which makes their two countries, South Africa and the American South, the most reactionary peoples on earth, peoples whose exploitation of the poor and helpless reaches the last degree of shame. They must in the long run yield to the forward march of civilization or die.

What Does the Fight Mean?

If now you young people, instead of running away from the battle here in Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, instead of seeking freedom and opportunity in Chicago and New York — which do spell opportunity — nevertheless grit your teeth and make up your minds to fight it out right here if it takes every day of your lives and the lives of your children’s children; if you do this, you must in meetings like this ask yourselves what does the fight mean? How can it be carried on? What are the best tools, arms, and methods? And where does it lead?

I should be the last to insist that the uplift of mankind never calls for force and death. There are times, as both you and I know, when

Tho’ love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,
‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe
When for truth he ought to die.

At the same time and even more clearly in a day like this, after the millions of mass murders that have been done in the world since 1914, we ought to be the last to believe that force is ever the final word. We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world is reason if this ever becomes a reasonable world. The careful reasoning of the human mind backed by the facts of science is the one salvation of man. The world, if it resumes its march toward civilization, cannot ignore reason. This has been the tragedy of the South in the past; it is still its awful and unforgivable sin that it has set its face against reason and against the fact. It tried to build slavery upon freedom; it tried to build tyranny upon democracy; it tried to build mob violence on law and law on lynching, and in all that despicable endeavor, the state of South Carolina has led the South for a century. It began not the Civil War — not the War between the States — but the War to Preserve Slavery; it began mob violence and lynching and today it stands in the front rank of those defying the Supreme Court on disfranchisement.

Nevertheless reason can and will prevail; but of course it can only prevail with publicity — pitiless, blatant publicity. You have got to make the people of the United States and of the world know what is going on in the South. You have got to use every field of publicity to force the truth into their ears, and before their eyes. You have got to make it impossible for any human being to live in the South and not realize the barbarities that prevail here. You may be condemned for flamboyant methods; for calling a congress like this; for waving your grievances under the noses and in the faces of men.

That makes no difference; it is your duty to do it. It is your duty to do more of this sort of thing than you have done in the past. As a result of this you are going to be called upon for sacrifice. It is no easy thing for a young Black man or a young Black woman to live in the South today and to plan to continue to live here; to marry and raise children; to establish a home. They are in the midst of legal caste and customary insults; they are in continuous danger of mob violence; they are mistreated by the officers of the law and they have no hearing before the courts and the churches and public opinion commensurate with the attention which they ought to receive. But that sacrifice is only the beginning of battle; you must re-build this South.

There are enormous opportunities here for a new nation, a new economy, a new culture in a South really new and not a mere renewal of an old South of slavery, monopoly and race hate. There is a chance for a new cooperative agriculture on renewed land owned by the state with capital furnished by the state, mechanized and coordinated with city life. There is chance for strong, virile trade unions without race discrimination, with high wage, closed shop and decent conditions of work, to beat back and hold in check the swarm of landlords, monopolists and profiteers who are today sucking the blood out of this land. There is chance for cooperative industry, built on the cheap power of T.V.A. [Tennessee Valley Authority] and its future extensions. There is opportunity to organize and mechanize domestic service with decent hours, and high wage and dignified training.

“Behold the Land”

There is a vast field for consumers’ cooperation, building business on public service and not on private profit as the main-spring of industry. There is chance for a broad, sunny, healthy home life, shorn of the fear of mobs and liquor, and rescued from lying, stealing politicians, who build their deviltry on race prejudice.

Here in this South is the gateway to the colored millions of the West Indies, Central and South America. Here is the straight path to Africa, the Indies, China and the South Seas. Here is the path to the greater, freer, truer world. It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists and gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources. The oil and sulfur; the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; the lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, Black and white, and not to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you. They can be rescued and restored to the people if you have the guts to strive for the real right to vote, the right to real education, the right of happiness and health and the total abolition of the father of these scourges of mankind, poverty.

“Behold the beautiful land which the Lord thy God hath given thee.” Behold the land, the rich and resourceful land, from which for a hundred years its best elements have been running away, its youth and hope, Black and white, scurrying North because they are afraid of each other, and dare not face a future of equal, independent, upstanding human beings, in a real and not a sham democracy.

To rescue this land, in this way, calls for the Great Sacrifice; this is the thing that you are called upon to do because it is the right thing to do. Because you are embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, Black and white; the upbuilding of democracy; the breaking down, particularly here in the South, of forces of evil represented by race prejudice in South Carolina; by lynching in Georgia; by disfranchisement in Mississippi; by ignorance in Louisiana and by all these and monopoly of wealth in the whole South.

There could be no more splendid vocation beckoning to the youth of the twentieth century, after the flat failures of white civilization, after the flamboyant establishment of an industrial system which creates poverty and the children of poverty which are ignorance and disease and crime; after the crazy boasting of a white culture that finally ended in wars which ruined civilization in the whole world; in the midst of allied peoples who have yelled about democracy and never practiced it either in the British Empire or in the American Commonwealth or in South Carolina. Here is the chance for young women and young men of devotion to lift again the banner of humanity and to walk toward a civilization which will be free and intelligent; which will be healthy and unafraid; and build in the world a culture led by Black folk and joined by peoples of all colors and all races — without poverty, ignorance and disease!

The Center for Political Education is holding a three-part study and discussion for labor leaders, organizers, and activists on how to transform the US labor movement into an antifascist fighting force.

The study will be a space to:

• Assess labor’s response to the current threat.

• Learn from and discuss the relevant history of labor in left-right dynamics in the US and globally.

• Strategize about how to overcome existing obstacles to labor and the trade union movement becoming an antifascist movement.

Faculty include Bill Fletcher Jr., a long-time racial justice, labor, and international activist, scholar, and author (and frequent contributor to the New Liberator); Tej Nagaraja, Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University’s ILR School; Saba Waheed, director of the UCLA Labor Center; and Justin Gilmore, who is on the editorial board of Bay Area Current and teaches political theory at California State Stanislaus.

For more information and to register: bit.ly/laborvfascism

On April 29th, 2026, the rogue Supreme Court again attacked the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and in a 6-3 decision (Louisiana v. Callais) struck down section 2 of the VRA as unconstitutional. Callais has immediately led a collection of Republican-dominated state legislatures to redraw Congressional districts to favor right-wing rule. The Callais ruling risks leading to a historic collapse in Black representation in the US Congress. And with the pulverization of section 2 in 2013, the enforcement mechanisms for the VRA have been rendered hollow and empty.

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This attack on the VRA is part of the strategy of the reigning regime of the New Confederacy to roll back the revolutionary victories of the post-Civil War First Reconstruction and the civil rights-era Second Reconstruction. The brutal backlash against the First Reconstruction was carried out by so-called “redeemers,” who strove to restore elite white minority rule. As Michael Podhorzer and Thomas Zimmer have recently argued, we have now reached the apotheosis of America’s “Second Redemption”—a swift, brutal backlash against our fragile progress towards real multiracial democracy.

The restriction of the right to vote is one of the ways the New Confederate regime intends to breed pessimism among our organizations, within our movements, and in the communities of the oppressed. Pessimism is the general orientation to the development of history as being a site of unending defeat and suffering. Pessimism is a form of philosophical cowardice that does not allow us to turn and face history for what it is: a struggle of and by the oppressed and exploited that is at once both horrendous and victorious, depending on what we do.

Those of us who believe in freedom cannot afford to succumb to despair because that is precisely what our enemies want us to do. Yet the reaction to the Supreme Court ruling from left activists and social justice organizations has too often been one of stubborn pessimism. This kind of pessimism has the potential to lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of defeat: if we take massive attacks on the democratic rights of the people as a sign that the political situation is hopeless, we risk tacitly supporting the regime’s endeavors through our political non-response.

We need sobering analysis like Zimmer’s and Podhorzer’s to keep our eyes on the catastrophic situation we find ourselves in. But we also need to muster the courage to look at the future as a place of potential promise. That is the purpose of hope. Hope is the courage to have a generative expectation of whatever is on the horizon. Hope is not optimism, because those of us who hope also must be students of history, and there is no assurance of a victorious future because the future remains open. Hope is a social ethic and a political principle that gives us grounding and encouragement in the face of the unrelenting storms we find ourselves in.

What does it mean to approach this moment from a place of grounded hope? It means combining sober analysis with strategic audacity. For the New Confederacy’s aggressive gerrymandering, as devastating as it is, simultaneously offers us potential new openings and strategic possibilities.

Take the case of Tennessee. After the Callais decision, the assumption in many movement spaces is that we have irrevocably lost the state’s sole majority-Black Congressional district and with it the possibility of securing a single House seat. A more hopeful perspective might look at these new districts as a strategic opportunity. By dividing the state’s Black, Brown and progressive white voters across multiple districts, the Tennessee GOP has actually expanded the map of potentially winnable seats.

Below is the partisan lean of the state’s redrawn Congressional districts. This is how the new districts voted in the 2024 presidential, 2020 presidential, and 2018 Senate race:

Table source: the Tennessee Lookout, based on data from Dave’s Redistricting

While the 2024 results certainly look terrible, the 2018 midterm election is actually a much closer parallel to the political situation in 2026. Trump’s strength is that he brings out MAGA voters who only come out for him. But this coalition contracts when his name is not on the ballot. Meanwhile, midterm elections see gains for the opposition party in inverse proportion to the popularity of the sitting president.

The Tennessee GOP’s mistake is that they seem to have drawn the new districts on the basis of Trump turnout, not accounting for these changed conditions. Their error is an opportunity for us. In the place of one sure win (but eight certain defeats) they have offered us five or six contestable seats, and three that are solidly winnable.

Our historically unpopular president is shedding support left and right, while pro-democracy voters are galvanized, and this latest assault on voting rights will only add fuel to the fire. In other words, the political conditions of this year’s midterm elections could hardly be more favorable to the pro-democracy, anti-Confederate majority. In these conditions, the very gerrymandered districts that might otherwise hamstring us open up new strategic opportunities. There is every reason to be aiming to do as well or better than 2018. Which means districts like TN 4, 5, 9, and possibly 7 should be within reach.

The potential for a New Confederate overreach has ground elsewhere as well. It is significant that the New Confederate government in South Carolina, even with pressure from Trump and even given the momentum of Callais, has been conflicted about a potential “dummymander“—redistricting intended to help Republicans that could actually lose them seats.

The courageous defiance of the movements for liberation in Memphis and the leadership of people like Justin Pearson remind us that we need as much hope and courage within the institutions of electoral and political power as we do beyond them. The Callais decision, rather than sending us into a death spiral of pessimism, must serve as an opportunity for us to become even more clear about this moment: the New Confederacy is the enemy, the state legislature was and remains the principal staging ground for the full-frontal assault on the First and Second Reconstruction victories, and it is incumbent on our organizations to view the battle for control of these state governments as the key strategic and political intervention we must make in this period of struggle.

The power and promise of an abolition democracy rooted in a socialist politic is that hope can and must become both the ground that anchors us and the principle that sustains us.

Aaron Jamal is an organizer in North Carolina and is committed to the socialist transformation of the United States. Aaron writes regularly on his Substack, BLACKUNBOUND.

On April 23 in New York City, Vietnam’s United Nations Representative Do Hung Viet briefed US friends about the outcomes of the Communist Party’s 14^th Congress (held every five years) and the first session of the 16^th National Assembly. He also took a wide range of questions about Vietnam’s analysis of and responses to recent world events.

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By 2030, which is the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party’s founding, Vietnam aims to move from being a low middle income country to a high middle income country with a per capita GDP of $15,000. This will entail expanding beyond labor-intensive output (many of our clothes in the US bear “Made in Vietnam” labels) to more scientific and technical products, with incentives for an innovative private sector under the state’s leading role. And the congress vowed to do this while protecting the environment, a primary focus of the congress for the first time; improving workers’ lives and access to goods, education, and health care; and continuing to strengthen the party, fight corruption, and teach cadre to be maximally responsive to public needs.

Advancing these goals requires juggling many contradictory pressures. Ambassador Do noted the challenge of “creating a better playing field for the private sector in terms of interest rates and other guarantees, while not widening income inequality.” It’s encouraging that over the past 50 years, Vietnam has a better record on doing this than any other country. Data centers for technical production will require at least a 12% increase in power generation, so there are plans to increase the use of sustainable energies like solar and offshore wind as well as nuclear power. The vision is of a just energy transition and becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Vietnam is switching to electric vehicles and building the required infrastructure of charging stations. People working in fossil-fuel based, dirty energy will have retraining opportunities.

Of course, Vietnam has never been focused only on internal well-being. The 14^th congress explicitly elevated international integration and diplomacy to be on par with national defense and security. And in fact, as Ambassador Do noted, “Diplomacy and the international solidarity of people’s movements have played a crucial role throughout Vietnam’s history in defending the nation and gaining independence.”

At the end of the briefing, Ambassador Do addressed questions from those in attendance. When asked how the US-Israeli war on Iran was affecting Vietnam, he stated that “The worst effect of the US-Israeli aggression is undermining a rules-based international order, violating agreements like the UN Charter. This threatens the sovereignty of all nations and creates a precedent for more aggression.” Coming after punitive tariffs, the war has also hurt Vietnam’s economy by blocking much trade, especially in crucial energy and fertilizer. “Vietnam has oil but needs to import refined oil; we are trying to control the price internally so as not to hurt production and workers,” he said. The shortage of jet fuel has meant that many commercial flights won’t come into Vietnam because they fear not being able to refuel and leave.

Another attendee pointed out that Ambassador Do was about to preside over the 11^th Review Conference of the of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (April 23-May 22). Vietnam’s representative was entrusted to do this by the 191 States-parties (signers) to the Treaty, with the endorsement of the Non-Aligned Movement, in recognition of Vietnam’s consistent commitment to multilateralism, nuclear disarmament, and constructive international cooperation.

Ambassador Do emphasized that Vietnam is also deeply committed to extending international solidarity, especially to Cuba. “We’re sending equipment for four solar power plants that can power 80,000 households and we are helping them to start growing rice, for which Cuba has good conditions. We remember how the Cubans helped us with a friendship hospital, building the first new hotel after independence, and sending us dairy cows.”

A People-Centered, Sustainable Society is Possible

Amidst heightened US aggression, international hostilities, and rampaging capitalist greed, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam shows us that it’s possible to build a more people-centered, sustainable society—coming out of massive destruction and suffering. To secure its independence, Vietnam defeated two great powers, France and the US, which bombed it with more tonnage than dropped in all theaters of World War II combined, and poisoned its land and millions of people with defoliants (Agent Orange). Since then, Vietnam has established food self-sufficiency, over 90% literacy, and universal elementary and secondary education, and raised life expectancy to 75 years.

As our movements in US communities, campuses, and workplaces come to recognize the linkage of anti-human policies in the domestic and international arenas, it’s crucial that we support Vietnam’s right to self-determined internal development and unhindered participation in global trade, and unite with its efforts toward global peace and cooperation.

Juliet Ucelli helped to organize the NYC celebration of the 50^th Anniversary of Peace and Social Progress in Vietnam, and serves on the International Developments Work Team of Liberation Road.

“On April 9 podcaster Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, lamented on X that teen births are down 72%. ‘Our biological destiny is to have babies,’ she wrote. That same day, Fox News medical analyst Marc Siegel called it a “problem” that the birth rate for girls aged 15-19 has plummeted in the past couple of decades.” – Salon

I’m making a big decision. They say birth rates are too low and soon we’ll be a country where everyone is old, poor, and sad. Not enough young people to work and support the old people, not enough people to join the military, that type of thing. All because teenagers aren’t having babies any more.

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Have you heard Katie Miller? She says we shouldn’t “slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.” Mom says Katie Miller’s a grifter and her husband’s a fascist ghoul who wants to kick millions of people out of the country. Which kind of defeats the babymaking campaign? But Katie seems pretty smart to me, maybe someone to listen to…she’s got a master’s degree and has had a whole string of important government jobs. Without desks, I guess.

Then there’s a doctor on Fox News. He says we should have kids young because too many things will get in the way of having healthy babies when we’re older—things like obesity, polycystic ovaries, and ultra processed food.

I ran this by Mrs. Calhoun, my Bio teacher. She really wants me to finish high school. She says that teenage pregnancy is riskier than for adults—hemorrhage, fistula, maternal death, on and on, pretty gross, so I had to stop listening after awhile. Honestly, this pregnancy thing sounds like no picnic at any age. I’m thinking I’ll take my chances now, so I won’t have to worry about my ovaries or my addiction to Cool Ranch Doritos down the road.

Dr. Fox News also thinks girls shouldn’t wait till they have a stable life situation, financial security, and the right partner. That’s definitely on point. Most people my age figure they’ll never be able to afford a house or child care or health care anyway. And no, I won’t wait around for the “right partner.” Mrs. Calhoun says in most teen pregnancies the father is over 20. She says that like it’s a bad thing. I guess it is kind of perv, and technically rape in some cases. But it sure couldn’t be any boys my age. Ew. I’ll have to work out who the father would be, and how to deal with the whole STD thing (okay, Mrs. Calhoun). Details.

Some of my friends make fun of me for wanting to be a tradwife. Far from it; those bitches have husbands with money, or else they are totally fucking miserable. No thanks, no chickens or prairie bonnets for me.

Mom loves babies, so I’m sure she’ll warm up to the pregnancy idea and help me out. She always says I was the best thing that ever happened to her, even though she was only 17 herself. I’ll get work on a shift opposite hers so we won’t need daycare. I can help take care of Grammy too. A win-win for us all.

Grammy says in her day teenage girls who got pregnant were considered “sluts” and had their “reputations” ruined. But back then, no one realized civilization depends on girls’ life choices in high school. So if I can help the whole birth rate situation by having a baby, I say why not? I can’t think of anything better, practically speaking. I’ll overcome the hurdles, just like Mom did. It’s the least I can do.

Jennifer Thomas is an environmentalist, speculative fiction writer, and occasional New Liberator contributor. You can read some of her stories at jenniferthomas.net.

Reprinted with permission from New Labor Forum

For Iranian people who imagine a democratic future, 2026 began with thrilling promise: the largest uprising in a series of uprisings since the turn of the millennium. It began on December 28, 2025 with a strike of shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, a social stratum typically supportive of the regime, now fed up with a sharp decline in the national currency. As mass demonstrations spread nationwide, a work stoppage sparked by economic grievances reignited the smoldering political revolt against the Islamic Republic in its most significant eruption yet.

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But just as suddenly, two atrocities put a halt to the protests. First, under the cover of an internet blackout, the Islamic Republic’s security forces carried out an indiscriminate slaughter, turning the largest uprising in decades into the largest massacre. Weeks later, the United States and Israel launched an illegal war, killing civilians and destroying their infrastructure, including schools and universities, roads and bridges, hospitals and heritage sites. What began as a hopeful moment has instead become one of the darkest in modern Iranian history: when not one, not two, but three governments took the lives of thousands of Iranians over the span of mere months.

The struggle to achieve democracy in Iran in the face of domestic repression and foreign intervention—dialectically interrelated forms of violence—stretches back for more than a century. Throughout, Iranian workers and their labor movement have been central actors in that struggle.

In the early 1950s, workers at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (the precursor to British Petroleum) struck multiple times to demand better conditions and demonstrate support for Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh’s drive to nationalize the industry. In response, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain’s MI6 organized a coup d’etat to crush Mossadegh’s anti-imperialist democratic experiment and restore the primacy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The CIA’s 1953 intervention was one of the first of countless efforts to undermine progressive governments and labor movements throughout what used to be called the Third World (a project which the AFL-CIO directly supported using agency funding, prompting labor radicals to deride it as the “AFL-CIA”). The Shah dismantled independent unions, prohibited opposition political parties, and through his notorious secret police SAVAK, tortured, imprisoned, and executed proponents of democracy.

During the anni mirabiles of 1978-79, organized workers contributed to the revolution against the Shah and his alliance with US imperialism in three major ways. First, strikes across the public and private sectors, especially the oil fields, struck the decisive blow to topple the monarchy. Second, strike committees laid the groundwork for shop-floor councils known as shoras, many of which expelled managers and asserted worker control over production and distribution, forging a link between the radical democratization of the workplace and of the state and broader society. Third, the Iranian Left—made up of myriad older and newer radical organizations, both secular and religious—emphasized the strategic importance of the working class and, after years of repression and in some cases underground armed struggle during the Shah’s regime, expanded their base.

Soon after the Shah fled Tehran and Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in February 1979, however, conflict between the forces supporting the latter and the revolution’s most progressive forces heated up. One of the earliest examples of this tension burst out into the open a month later on International Women’s Day, a holiday invented by socialist women unionists in Europe and North America, when thousands of Iranian women protested against the imposition of the mandatory hijab at the workplace. While this early mass demonstration received uneven support from the Iranian Left, it proved a harbinger. Over the next few years, the Iranian Left fractured across and within individual organizations over the question of how to orient toward the emergent Islamic Republic. One side chose to back what they perceived to be an anti-imperialist state, but another side came to oppose what they perceived to be an essentially reactionary state wrapped in an anti-imperialist facade. Some of these oppositional forces took up the same method of armed struggle against the new regime that they had used against the Shah’s old one.

By the early 1980s, while Iran engaged in war with Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s invasion, a de facto civil war broke out within. The Islamic Republic made the bid to consolidate power through a violent crackdown on the opposition: liberals, women’s rights activists, oppressed national and religious minorities, dissenting clerics. In particular, the regime attacked the Iranian Left, first that side which had decided to fight it and ultimately even that side which had continued to support it, culminating in the mass executions of 1988. Crucially, this counterrevolution targeted the renascent labor movement by shutting down the shoras; imprisoning, torturing, and killing worker leaders; and banning independent labor organizations in favor of regime-approved “Islamic Labor Councils.”

Violent suppression of the independent labor movement is part and parcel of the distinctive kind of state that the leaders of the Islamic Republic entrenched over the following decades: a theocratic capitalist dictatorship. Into the 1990s, while continuing to deny the most basic civil and political rights, the regime assassinated dissidents inside Iran and in foreign countries in a campaign known as the chain murders. Neoliberal economic policies dramatically worsened living conditions, like the flexibilization of labor through the expansion of the contract workforce. Widespread privatizations riddled with corruption transferred state-owned enterprises to politically connected private families, religious foundations tied to the clerical establishment, and firms tied to the military apparatus, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The latter wields significant control over Iran’s political economy, pumping billions of dollars into the regime’s so-called Axis of Resistance across the region while enforcing austerity at home. Combined with the pressure of comprehensive U.S. sanctions, these policies have produced enormous suffering for working-class Iranians, millions of whom struggle with low and unpaid wages, poverty, unemployment, and inflation. Women and LGBTQ people, workers from national and religious minorities, and migrant workers from neighboring countries face compounded oppressions.

Yet wave after wave of uprisings have swelled in opposition to these conditions, including the student protests in 1999 and 2003; the Green Movement’s protest against election fraud in 2009-11; the concatenation of strikes and mass demonstrations in 2017-18, 2018-19, 2019-20, and 2021-22; the astounding Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022-2023 following the police killing of the young Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini, which revived the protest against the mandatory hijab articulated on International Women’s Day in 1979 and linked it with demands for other feminist rights, the rights of national minorities, economic security, and democracy; and the 2025 protests for worker rights, farmer rights, and water rights. Increasingly over time, these uprisings have foregrounded outright opposition to the Islamic Republic. In response, the regime has sought to obliterate them through shocking violence.

In the last decade in particular, Iranian workers have played a prominent part in these uprisings, altering their class composition and tactical repertoire. Teachers, truckers, nurses, steelworkers, oil workers, and many more have participated in major strikes, often connecting economic demands with political demands. Animating this labor upsurge are dynamic efforts to build independent labor organizations like the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company and the Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations. These efforts have elicited severe repression from the Islamic Republic, which routinely violates the International Labor Organization’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work to which it remains an official signatory. In one high-profile example, when workers struck after the privatization of the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Agro-Industrial Complex in 2018, independent union leader Esmail Bakhshi and sympathetic reporter Sepideh Qolian were tortured and imprisoned (where Bhakhshi remains; Qolian won her freedom last year). In another case, labor activist Sharifeh Mohammadi was arrested in 2023 and sentenced to death row, where she remains. But these are only a handful of examples. The list of Iranian unionists languishing in jail is very long.

This cycle of revolt and repression throughout the early twenty-first century synchronized with rising tension between the Islamic Republic and its regional allies, on the one hand, and the U.S., Israel, and their regional allies, on the other. This collision course came to a head with the U.S. and Israel’s destructive war. At the time of this writing, as the U.S. and Iran negotiate in Pakistan, the future of the Islamic Republic and the struggle for Iranian democracy is difficult to foresee. What is certain is that the vast majority of people inside Iran who still yearn for democracy will carry on their struggle, but against even steeper odds than before: a society gutted by U.S. and Israeli bombs, under the continued rule of a regime that will use—in fact, already has used—the horror of this foreign intervention as justification to accelerate domestic repression, just as it did in the 1980s.

Sadly, a sizable portion of the Iranian diaspora has cheered on the U.S. and Israel. Most vocal are monarchist supporters of the deposed Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, who has built a warm relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel and recently spoke about his mission to Make Iran Great Again at the Conservative Political Action Conference. While the danger of this faction should not be dismissed, the media has granted outsized attention to their perspective. In reality, there is a strong current within the diaspora which staunchly supports the struggle for Iranian democracy from below while staunchly opposing the U.S. and Israel’s heinous war. A number of organized efforts are advancing this viewpoint, including one in which I am involved, Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy.

For workers and the labor movement here in the U.S. who seek to support workers and the labor movement in Iran, we must oppose the Trump administration’s illegal war as well as its wider imperialist foreign policy by participating in antiwar actions, passing antiwar resolutions through our unions, and incorporating antiwar demands in our political action programs. At the same time that we must fight to end the war, we must stand in international solidarity with the ongoing struggles of the Iranian people, including our fellow unionists, to win a secular democratic republic rooted in civil and political rights, gender egalitarianism, freedom for the country’s oppressed national and religious minorities, and labor rights for the working millions. After all, that’s precisely the kind of state we’re fighting to defend (and expand) against MAGA here in the U.S.

Today we face a far right government in the U.S. moving fast to destroy the democratic struggles of the American people, joining forces with a far right government in Israel perpetrating ongoing genocide to destroy the democratic struggles of the Palestinian people, together initiating a war against a far right government in Iran which just committed the worst political massacre in its nearly fifty-year-history of destroying the democratic struggles of the Iranian people. Therefore, we must see ourselves as part of one global movement fighting against all varieties of fascism everywhere, fighting for democracy anchored in free and powerful labor movements everywhere. Although the massacre and the war may have interrupted it, the Iranian uprising that peaked at the beginning of this year was not the first and certainly will not be the last, no matter the deadly machinations of the president in Washington, the prime minister in Tel Aviv, or the ayatollah in Tehran.

Puya Gerami is a Distinguished Lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and the affiliated institute Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice. He formerly served as organizer and education director at SEIU 1199 New England and founding director of the statewide progressive coalition Connecticut For All. He serves on the organizing committee for Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy and on the National Executive Committee for Liberation Road.

Introduction by Bruce Hobson, co-founder of the Mexico Solidarity Project and Liberation Road member

On Saturday, April 18, Claudia Sheinbaum gave a statement at the Encuentro Internacional Progresista in Barcelona in which she offered Mexico’s stance on the world’s peoples’ struggle for peace and democracy. The statement immediately began to have a profound impact globally.

For me this is also personal. I have lived in Mexico for 30 of my 76 years. Two and three decades ago, when working with a rural, socialist health collective in Chiapas, I could not imagine that the right-wing of this country would ever be voted out. The oligarchy still, of course, wields tremendous economic clout, but since 2018 Mexicanos have had vastly greater freedom in their fight for justice, and millions are no longer in extreme poverty. We take inspiration from Claudia Sheinbaum’s words, and from the struggles and triumphs of Mexico’s people today and throughout history.

Vea aquí el video del discurso de la presidenta Sheinbaum en español.

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Remarks by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in the Barcelona, Spain, Summit in Defense of Democracy, April 18, 2026

Thank you very much, President Sánchez. Thank you for the invitation. Thanks to all my colleagues—presidents, prime ministers, Gabriel Boric.

I come to the Summit for Democracy on behalf of a hardworking, creative, and resilient people, but above all a deeply generous people—a people that has learned to resist without hatred, to defend its rights without ceasing to respect others, to believe in peace even when history has placed difficult trials and tribulations before it.

I come on behalf of a caring people, even amid adversity, a profoundly humanist people, that resists individualism, rejects discrimination, and refuses with dignity to look at others with contempt.

I come from a people that recognizes its origins in the great Indigenous cultures—those that were silenced, enslaved, and plundered, but never defeated, because there are memories that cannot be conquered and roots that can never be uprooted. I come from the Pyramid of the Sun; I come from Tlaloc, from Huitzilopochtli, from Coatlicue. I come from a millennial history that is not confined to the past, but a living presence in our communities, in our languages, in our way of viewing the world.

I come from a people with deep spiritual values, who know that their history is sacred, because in it they find the strength to rise up, to resist, and to continue forging their destiny with dignity.

I come with the legacy of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who in 1810 raised his voice for independence and days later had the courage to declare the abolition of slavery. I come with the legacy of José María Morelos y Pavón, who in the Sentiments of the Nation wrote words that still resonate: that sovereignty emanates from the people, that poverty and wealth should be moderated, that dignity admits no castes, only the distinction between vice and virtue.

I come with the legacy of Leona Vicario, who defied her epoch to defend the right of women to fight for their country.

I come bearing the dignity of Josefa Ortiz Téllez-Girón, who reminded us that those who serve the nation should not be rewarded, but those who exploit it should be punished. I come bearing the legacy of the Benemérito de las Américas, President Benito Juárez, an indigenous Zapotec fighter who, along with Mexican liberals, separated Church and State in the mid-19th century, defended the Republic against foreign invasion, and when victorious left us with a truism that belongs to the entire world: “Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.” I come bearing the legacy of Zapata, Villa, Madero, Carranza, Felipe Ángeles, Adela Velarde, Hermila Galindo—women and men who in 1910 rose not because of ambition, but rather for justice; not for power, but for the right of the Mexican people to live in a democracy, to control their natural resources, and to decide their own destiny.

I come bearing the legacy of General Lázaro Cárdenas, who, when the world closed its doors to Spanish republicans, opened Mexico’s doors to those fleeing pain and war. I come from a country that embraced exiles and turned solidarity into action. I come recognizing the courage of Frida Kahlo, who despite physical fragility, filled the struggle for justice with color.

I come to remind you that Mexico has upheld its principles even in isolation, that it raised its voice against the blockade of Cuba in 1962 when others remained silent. To this day, speaking of that small Caribbean island, we believe that no people is small, but rather great and steadfast when defending its sovereignty and the right to a full life. I also come from the conscious youth who fight every day for a free, democratic, and fairer country—from women and men who believe in peaceful transformation, in social justice, and in human dignity as a universal principle. I come proud of my people, of their history, of their ability to resist, to share, and to never forget those who are most in need—a people who in 2018 decided that democratic development exists when we work for shared prosperity, or as we say in Mexico, “for the good of all, the poor come first.” I come from a people who in 2024 decided to break with a history of machismo and elected their first woman president so that all of us could advance.

I come to the Summit for Democracy to congratulate my fellow presidents who fight for it every day. I come to share what Mexico holds as constitutional principles, born from its history, democratic principles in foreign policy—principles that today resonate loudly and clearly and are more alive than ever on the world stage: respect for the self-determination of peoples, non-intervention, the peaceful resolution of disputes, rejection of the use of force, the legal equality of states, the need for international cooperation for development, respect for human rights, and the ongoing struggle for peace.

Because in a world suffering from war and inequality, these democratic principles remain Mexico’s contribution to the peoples of the world as a symbol of hope. Democratic principles also mean freedom.

But it’s worth asking: what kind of freedom? The freedom defended by conservatism? The freedom to submit to external interests? The freedom to turn nations into modern colonies? Or the freedom of an unregulated market that turns many into nothing and a few into everything? No.

We believe that democracy implies freedom. But freedom is an empty word if it is not accompanied by social justice, sovereignty, and the dignity of peoples. When we speak of democracy, it is not the democracy of elites, but of the people. Not the concentration of wealth, but its distribution. Not imposition, but participation. Not war, but peace. Not indifference and exclusion, but cooperation and inclusion.

When we speak of democracy, we refer to the democratization of culture, access to education, access to healthcare—and the ultimate purpose of governments, which is to ensure the well-being of their people. Democracy, as Abraham Lincoln said, is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. There is no democracy when there is no option for the poor, for the dispossessed.

Therefore, I would like to propose a concrete action that I presented at the G-20: a simple proposal based on a new vision of the United Nations—allocating 10% of global military spending, which amounts to billions of dollars, to promote a global program that would enable millions of people to reforest millions of hectares of land each year. Instead of promoting war, let us promote peace; let us promote life.

I would like to propose a declaration against military intervention in Cuba, so that dialogue and peace may prevail. I would also like to extend an invitation for this summit to be held next in Mexico, where we can engage in dialogue on an economy centered on well-being and on a democracy that responds to the real needs of the people. Because democracy means placing love above hate, cultivating generosity instead of greed, brother and sisterhood above war.

Democracy means that life is not for sale, nor are the freedom or dignity of peoples. Democracy means that only respect for diversity and love for others will make it possible to build a world where everyone belongs—every people, every language, every culture, every nation.

I am a woman of peace, and I represent a nation that loves freedom, justice, and fraternity, and that understands democracy as the great Benito Juárez expressed it: “With the people, everything; without the people, nothing. With the peoples, everything; without the peoples, nothing.”

Thank you very much.

By Bennett Carpenter

As the Trump regime accelerates its autocratic project, how should pro-democracy forces update our strategy to confront its speed, scale, and volatility?

This past week has driven home the dread of living inside an accelerating patronal autocracy. As we all refreshed our phones to see whether the president would follow through on his threats to annihilate an entire civilization, millions of Americans were left with the sickening sense there was little we could do to stop it. With Congress literally checked out, the courts sidelined, and no visible brakes between one deranged man’s impulses and world-historic catastrophe, it was hard to shake the sense that we were trapped on a runaway train without an emergency stop.

But that same week, Hungary taught us all a lesson in how to brake authoritarian acceleration. After 16 years in power, Viktor Orbán was swept out in a landslide, as record turnout overcame a rigged political system and won a new government the two-thirds majority needed to begin unrigging it. That process will not be easy, given how deeply Orbán’s Fidesz party has entrenched autocracy into Hungarian political and civil society: rewriting the country’s constitution to entrench its dominance, stacking the courts and key oversight bodies with party loyalists in semi-permanent positions, rigging election maps and rules, bringing both public and private media under regime control, and steering state resources and public contracts into a patronage network built to survive electoral defeat.

“We have only to win once, but then properly.” That was the strategic lesson Orbán offered, not only for Trump and Project 2025, but for aspiring autocrats worldwide. But that is exactly why these election results are so inspiring. Hungary has long served as a proof of concept for the global authoritarian right. If democratic reversal is possible there, after far deeper autocratic consolidation, it should give us hope here too.

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This is the second half of my update to last year’s three-part series on assessing, resisting, and reversing autocracy. In “Autocracy Update, Part I,” I revisited the core framework and reconsidered how far the United States had actually moved toward autocratic consolidation. I argued that Trump continues to operate on the standard patronal autocratic playbook, but now moving at warp speed and on a worldwide scale.

This installment turns to what that changed tempo and terrain mean for our strategy to reverse autocracy and restore democracy. I begin by revisiting the core strategic orientation I originally laid out, examining how well it has held up both theoretically and in practice. I then explore some risks and opportunities opened up by the changed terrain.

In closing, I argue that the regime’s increasing volatility means we must accelerate our strategic counter-offensive, treating 2026 as a critical year in which our entire hybrid strategy has to be run at full scale. The diffuse tasks of the midterm elections require us to find novel ways of aligning our efforts in the absence of a single unifying candidate—a role I argue can be played by the development of a shared governing program. The regime’s escalating attacks abroad, finally, mean we must more deeply engage the international arena as central to the fight for democracy at home.

Reassessing the Strategic Framework

The last part of my original series attempted to translate my diagnosis of autocratic inroads and democratic bulwarks into an overarching three-year framework to reverse autocracy and reconstruct democracy. (Elements of this were later incorporated, amended and expanded in Liberation Road’s collective 2025-2028 Strategic Orientation.)

Reassessing the strategy: what has held

In the face of the regime’s accelerationism, the core elements of the strategy continue to hold. This is by design. Drawing on comparative research into successful democratic transition in countries facing very different levels of autocratic consolidation, the orientation I outlined was explicitly intended to remain valid across a wide range of scenarios—from a still mostly intact democracy to conditions of much deeper authoritarianism than we yet face.

If anything, Trump’s accelerationist approach has only increased the importance of the strategy’s defensive components. As the regime has hardened around an explicit white-nationalist core, defense of immigrants and other first targets matters even more. And as pressure intensifies on the autonomy of the branches, levels, and levers of government, as well as the institutions of civil society, the importance of defending those institutions increases as well.

Almost every time Trump has launched some new escalation, people have asked me whether this means we need to reconsider the strategy’s counter-offensive and electoral components. Under intensifying autocracy, do elections even matter anymore? In a word, yes. Across very different levels of autocratic consolidation, the most consistent predicator of democratic transition is concerted electoral and extra-electoral mobilization before, during, and after elections.

In fact, under intensifying authoritarian conditions, elections matter more, not less—precisely because electoral organizing must then be fused with broad extra-electoral mobilization in order to successfully topple a regime. What changes is the relative importance between the two prongs of this hybrid strategy. The deeper the degree of autocratic consolidation, the more important mass protest, noncooperation, and nonviolent civil disobedience become to ensure a democratic transition. Likewise, the deeper the damage to political and civic institutions, the more there is to rebuild afterward, increasing the importance of the strategy’s “reconstruction” component.

So if Trump has accelerated his attacks on democracy, the implication is not to abandon the strategy but to lean further into the parts that grow more decisive under more deeply autocratic conditions: social and political defense; extra-electoral mobilization before, during and after elections; and serious preparation for the reconstruction agenda that must follow any successful democratic transition.

Assessing our movements: how well have we run the play?

But if the overall strategy holds, how well have pro-democracy forces done at carrying it out?

One year in, it’s still too early to fully evaluate our movements’ existing defensive efforts and our emerging counter-offensive. Still, early indicators provide enough data points to identify both strengths and weaknesses. At their best, our movements have translated mass mobilization into durable organization, institutional noncooperation, and social self-defense, while beginning to convert electoral openings into tangible gains. At our weakest, an over-emphasis on mass mobilization has confused scale with strategy, while too much of our electoral work still treats 2026 like a conventional midterm—or worse, a rehash of the 2024 elections.

Strategic defense: strengths and weaknesses

Where our strategic defense has been most impactful, it has connected mass mobilization to durable organization rooted in workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, and civil society. Minnesota offers one strong example. There, mass outrage was translated into organized pressure against key pillars of support that made ICE operations possible—from hotels housing agents to rental-car companies—while coordinated work, school, and shopping stoppages disrupted business as usual. These efforts helped reinforce noncooperation by city and state officials, which in turn strengthened social resistance. In these and other successful examples of strategic defense, mass mobilization functioned as one tactic within a broader strategy.

Where our defense has been less impactful, it has over-focused on mass mobilization as a tactic divorced from any broader strategic calculus. This seems based on a misapplication of the so-called “3.5% rule” formulated by Erica Chenoweth, whose research found that no autocratic government has withstood a challenge from a nonviolent movement that successfully mobilized at least that percentage of its population. Others have challenged Chenoweth’s empirical findings, or questioned their applicability to the US, and she herself has qualified them. But the deeper problem has less to do with the research itself than with a category error in its application. Drawn to that seemingly straightforward numerical goal, our movements have often pushed for bigger numbers (of protests, days of action, and participants) without asking what such mass mobilization is actually intended to accomplish.

For researchers like Chenoweth, protest size can serve as a useful indicator of whether a movement is gaining strength. But when organizers begin pursuing the metric as an end in itself, they risk confusing a measure of strength for the underlying work that generates it. In and of themselves, numbers in the streets are not a strategy. They are at best a tactical expression, and one possible indicator, of whether a movement is successfully widening legitimacy, accelerating defections, and building disruptive capacity.

Counter-offensive: early indicators

The electoral side of our strategic counter-offensive has not yet faced its most decisive tests. But early indications from the 2025 elections show real promise. In Virginia, Democrats expanded their House majority and flipped the governorship, then used their restored trifecta to raise the minimum wage, mandate paid sick leave, and and restrict cooperation with ICE, while advancing amendments to enshrine reproductive, LGBTQ and voting rights in their state constitution. In New York, Zohran Mamdani’s victory points to a parallel dynamic inside our own front: governing power already translated into real wins like universal pre-K childcare, major infrastructure upgrades, plans for 12,000 new units of affordable housing, and the creation of the city’s Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.

At the same time, these early examples also show the limits of our movements’ social power and our reconstruction strategy. In Virginia, Governor Spanberger has watered down new public-sector bargaining laws and refused to repeal the deeper anti-labor architecture of right-to-work. Her prevaricating attempts to be both “pro-worker and pro-business” point to an insufficient grasp of the relation between economic inequality and electoral autocracy—and more importantly, to the under-development of an independent base of social power capable of pushing past these limits. As a committed socialist, Mamdani does not share Spanberger’s subjective limitations; but objectively he may be unable to push past elite resistance in the absence of counter-power rooted in durable social formations: neighborhood assemblies, tenant organizations, unions, and other vehicles capable of carrying organized pressure beyond the election itself.

Meanwhile, many of our own forces have drawn the wrong lesson from these early election wins. Establishment Democrats interpret Spanberger’s victory as confirmation that 2026 should be focused on an “affordability agenda” narrowly focused on rising costs, while treating immigrant rights, racial justice, bodily autonomy, war, democracy and the environment as secondary concerns at best, or electoral liabilities at worst. More alarmingly, too many on the left have misread Mamdani’s victory in the same way, pointing to his field program’s messaging focus on “buses, rent and childcare” as confirmation—and ignoring how Mamdani’s bold stance on Palestine, trans rights and other issues beyond “affordability” energized the over 100,000 volunteers who powered that very field operation.

As I have written elsewhere, the point is not that we don’t need a popular economic agenda, but that we should not mistake people’s immediate economic grievances (or, worse, their responses to reductive polling questions) for the full terrain of political struggle and the need for a broader class politics. This economistic error risks reflecting voters’ immediate economic anxieties back to them, rather than offering a governing vision capable of naming antagonists, clarifying stakes, and projecting a path through the interrelated crises that we face. More dangerously, it produces a quiet drift away from racial, gender, immigrant, and ecological justice, recoding these as “non-winning” issues rather than constitutive components of the actual political struggle we are in.

Looking ahead: the 2026 strategic terrain

The terrain heading deeper into 2026 is at once more dangerous and more favorable than many of us would have predicted even a few months ago. The very crises eroding the regime’s support are both expanding the electoral battlefield and raising the stakes of how it may respond.

Strategic Opportunities

Even under conventional midterm dynamics, baseline models always favored Democratic chances to retake the House. But deteriorating support for the regime has begun to push conditions closer to wave territory. Recent polling suggests an electoral environment running seven points or more in Democrats’ favor, which if it holds would put us close to the +8 midterm swings of 2006 and 2018—the largest midterm “waves” of recent decades. In addition to delivering Democrats a sizable House majority, that would give them a credible path to retake the Senate, until recently widely seen as out of reach. At the state level, it would likely net Democratic trifectas in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps Pennsylvania. In the terms of conventional horse race politics, this would already be considered a “very good night” for Democrats.

However, the regime’s overreach—its fusion of executive lawlessness, white-nationalist escalation, economic volatility, and reckless war-making—requires us to consider the possibility of something even larger than a conventional “wave” election. If these compounding crises continue to deepen, we might be looking at something closer to Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, when he defeated Carter by a 9.7 point margin. At the outer limit of the possible, we should explore something even more dramatic, like Roosevelt’s 1932 election, when a +17.8 margin opened the road to wholesale political realignment.

What pushed those elections into realignment territory was the fusion of long-brewing legitimacy erosion with compounding crises that tipped the system into a full governing breakdown. The long recession following the 1929 stock market crash had already generated simmering discontent. But in 1931–32, a perfect storm of factors transformed the prolonged downtown into a full-scale economic breakdown, triggering a massive political realignment. By 1980, years of stagflation had similarly eroded confidence in the post-war order’s ability to deliver stability and rising living standards. But the oil shock of 1979 and the subsequent Iranian hostage crisis supercharged that simmering malaise into a more acute governing crisis, helping drive Reagan’s landslide victory.

I do not mean to suggest exact analogies; the point is that this period requires us to look beyond conventional midterm models toward other crisis moments of comparable magnitude. Mounting public revulsion over the Epstein files, ICE’s body-snatching dragnet, and the broader sense of executive lawlessness, corruption, and drift have already created a slow-burning legitimacy crisis for the regime. It is not hard to envision developments that could push that underlying erosion into a more acute governing breakdown. The war with Iran is one such possibility, with uncanny parallels to 1980. If it triggers a deep recession, oil shocks, or a wider conflict placing many more American lives at risk, the electoral map could shift well beyond the familiar contours of a “normal” wave election.

But here a key difference also comes into view. Both the 1932 and 1980 elections translated legitimacy crises into durable realignment because the victorious coalition arrived with a governing project equal to the breakdown of the old order. Roosevelt entered office with the broad outlines of what would become the New Deal, while Reagan’s victory consolidated a neoliberal counter-project that had been decades in the making. Our side today has no equivalent level of coherence. We possess fragments of a governing horizon, but not yet anything like the strategic and programmatic clarity required to reorganize political common sense at a comparable scale. That gap points directly to the underdevelopment of, and urgent need for, a Third Reconstruction program.

Strategic Risks

Yet the same dynamics that open opportunities also make the Trump regime more dangerous. The more conditions deteriorate for the regime, the stronger its incentives to counter-escalate. If economic and political crises deepen, we should anticipate increased temptations toward executive overreach, the invocation of emergency powers, and intensified state violence at home and abroad. And as the November elections near, the regime will move to block, narrow, or override electoral outcomes in proportion to the scale of its likely defeat.

Any such effort is unlikely to take the form of a single decisive action. It will come as a thousand smaller cuts. While much anxiety has focused on the “SAVE Act,” this and many other headline measures will not survive the legislative or judicial process. The greater risk comes from a barrage of overlapping, less visible, legally dubious actions. These could include:

• Before the election: state-level voter-roll purges, restrictive ID laws and other structural voter suppression measures in MAGA-controlled or capitulating states, carried out bureaucratically and quietly.

• During the election: the chilling effects on voter turnout of threatened, rumored or actual ICE presence.

• After the election: delayed counts, selective non-certification, attempted seizure of ballots, and/or bad-faith legal challenges or investigations used to stall, fragment, or delegitimize outcomes.

Such maneuvers are unlikely to appear everywhere in the same form. More likely, they will be scattered unevenly across key states and localities. But that very patchwork quality makes them harder to predict, while allowing the impact of isolated disruptions to be amplified. The regime’s bet here is cumulative: no single tactic needs to “work” on its own if the overall effect manages to suppress turnout at the margins, sow mistrust and confusion, and justify election denialism. We thus need to prepare, less for one dramatic coup attempt, than for a patchwork terrain of cumulative disruption.

Updating the strategy: reorienting for 2026

What are the implications of this analysis for our movement strategy?

While the overall orientation continues to hold, we must grapple with new challenges and opportunities. In closing, I want to tease out several possible strategic shifts—not as a final word, but a starting point for further discussion.

Run the full strategy now: 2026 is a make-or-break year

The speed-run of the autocratic playbook means we no longer have the luxury of treating the midterm elections as a conventional “set-up” cycle for 2028. 2026 is not a drill or a dress rehearsal, but a critical window in which the entire strategic counter-offensive has to be run at full tilt.

Given the possibility of larger-than-expected electoral openings, we should be expanding the battlefield now: supporting candidates in races that might only become viable under extraordinary conditions and investing in infrastructure beyond the usual tier-one targets. We also need to speak to voters at the level of the actual stakes. Pocketbook concerns are real, but this election cannot be reduced to the price of gas or the cost of healthcare. We need to connect those concerns to the larger crisis now facing the country—showing how rising costs are bound up with executive lawlessness, white-nationalist escalation, and reckless war.

At the same time, we need to plan for the near-inevitability that the Trump regime will attempt to narrow, block, or override the election results. Rather than treating election protection as an afterthought for November, we need to front-load election defense—making roll checks, (re-)registration, and voter education core organizing tasks now. We must also prepare to counter the dampening effects on voter turnout of real or threatened ICE presence, using mass education, public messaging, and visible solidarity to lower the perceived personal risk of voting for naturalized voters, voters of color, and other targeted constituencies.

Finally, every major action between now and the election needs to lay the groundwork for post-election action. Across the country, we need to ready people for mass mobilization and, in the event of an overt election steal, for sustained nonviolent civil disobedience. But the most critical task is to develop place-based networks for rapid response to localized threats to election integrity as and where they emerge. ICE-watch networks have become one of the clearest models of locally-rooted formations where ordinary people learn to move information quickly, verify threats, coordinate response, and build trust through practice. The skills and tactical creativity being forged through these efforts are precisely the ones we will need to bring into the coming fights around and beyond the election in November.

Build a governing horizon equal to the scale of the crisis

The midterm elections will not automatically provide a bold vision able to turn simmering discontent into sweeping political victories. If we want a governing program equal to this moment, we will have to build it.

US politics is unusually reliant on presidential campaigns to provide political coherence. The two-party system forces uneasy bedfellows into big-tent coalitions, while primaries turn candidates into free agents running on their own platforms, leaving parties without strong programmatic or ideological unity. In practice, that means whatever political coherence the parties possess usually comes from the top of the ticket. Something similar has been true of social movements. Whether we think in terms of Becky Bond’s “big organizing” or the Momentum model, our most successful examples of scaled social action have usually depended on a single unifying factor—either a charismatic candidate or a specific issue fight—to set a common direction and align activity across a wide field.

In 2026, that unifying force is absent. Instead of one candidate or a single issue fight, we face a fragmented terrain of interconnected battles. Yet that very challenge offers left forces a unique opportunity. Rather than relying on a candidate campaign to provide ideological and programmatic coherence, we can cultivate it deliberately—by developing a shared program rooted in social movements.

A number of forces on the US left have called for something like this in recent years. In the early 2000s, Jack O’Dell proposed a “Democracy Charter” to guide a new phase of democratic struggle, and Bill Fletcher Jr. has recently revived that call. There is a growing appetite across our movements to develop such a common national program.

There are historical precedents that we can draw on. The African National Congress’s Freedom Charter, forged through a mass, participatory process, translated the needs and longings of a diverse coalition into a clear and concise set of objectives that could serve as both a governing blueprint and a tool for mobilization. In the US, the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program played a similar role, linking immediate issues to a positive program and giving dispersed struggles a common language.

A shared program is what can give this moment direction, turning fragmented struggles into a coherent project capable of defeating autocracy and beginning the work of democratic reconstruction. Whether it is possible for a set of movement forces to cohere around such an ambitious project in the context of 2026 remains an open question. But the urgency of the moment suggests that we should try.

Internationalize the struggle for democracy

Trump’s attempted patronal rewiring of the international order requires us to expand the scope of our movement strategy. It is incumbent on us to build a mass movement capable of stopping Trump’s reckless assault on Iran, ending U.S. support for the destruction of Palestine, opposing regime-change threats against Venezuela and Cuba, rejecting coercive escalation toward Mexico, and blocking other coercive actions across the world.

We should use the cost-of-living crisis to widen the social base for antiwar politics—showing how rising prices, shortages, and instability are direct consequences of war and imperialism. We also need to make clear that the fight against US imperialism and the fight against US autocracy are inseparable, as the same forces driving violence abroad are reorganizing power, repression, and democratic breakdown at home.

Our movements also need to invest in stronger relationships with democratic and left-progressive forces in Mexico, Latin America, Israel-Palestine, Iran, and around the globe. One of the weaknesses of our current moment is the relative weakness of the global solidarity networks that defined earlier generations of movement struggle—from the global justice movement of the 1990s, to the Tricontental networks of the 1960s, to the older socialist and communist internationals. Part of the strategic task now is to begin rebuilding equivalents for our new terrain.

Finally, our strategy needs a positive international horizon, not only a defensive one. As Max Elbaum recently argued, it is not enough to oppose reckless wars and US imperialism abroad. We need to articulate a fundamentally different role for the United States on the world stage: one that breaks with both corporate globalization and nationalism, replaces zero-sum competition with shared development, and rebuilds the material basis for democracy at home and abroad.

Conclusion

One year in, the regime that Trump and MAGA seek to build still reads most clearly as a patronal autocracy, even as they have moved faster and further than comparative models anticipated. Yet that very acceleration has also exposed the regime’s underlying weaknesses. What looked at first like overwhelming momentum has created openings that may not have existed under a slower, more methodical authoritarian consolidation.

The question now is whether we can translate those opportunities into a coordinated democratic counter-offensive equal to the speed and scale of the crises we are facing. The tasks before us are not easy, and success is not guaranteed. But we also have more going for us than the mood of the moment sometimes allows us to see. The results from Hungary are just the latest reminder that authoritarianism is not inevitable. Let’s move forward with courage and boldness to fight for the world that we need.

Bennett Carpenter is a queer Southern organizer, trainer, and movement strategist. They are a member of the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road.

By Bennett Carpenter

One year ago, I published a three-part series attempting to make sense of the authoritarian threat posed by Trump and the MAGA right, and to sketch an orientation for how pro-democracy forces might respond. The series moved from conceptual framework to diagnosis to strategy: first defining the regime Trump aspired to construct, then assessing how far the United States had actually moved toward it, and finally outlining a path to restore and reconstruct democracy.

Those articles circulated more widely than I’d anticipated, in part because of the particular moment when they appeared. The speed at which Trump 2.0 was running the autocratic playbook, combined with the slower pace of developing analysis, created a time-lag in which our movements lacked a shared vocabulary for understanding what was happening. My series played a small but, I hope, not insignificant role in helping to plug that gap.

Since then, many more analyses of U.S. authoritarianism have emerged—from updated democracy indexes by V-Dem and other research institutes, to the Century Foundation’s new US “Democracy Meter,” to, astoundingly, an intelligence-style assessment by former US national security officials. Much of this scholarly and institutional work draws on richer data sets and deeper expertise than I could hope to match, even as it often remains shaped by the blind spots of conventional (dare I say, “bourgeois”) political science.

Meanwhile almost all of us in movement work have been forced to become amateur experts on authoritarianism. This has owed as much—or more—to practice than to theory, and lots of the key lessons have circulated informally. In terms of academic influences, the research of political scientist Erica Chenoweth seems to have had the most impact on movement strategy. Overall I think its effect has been salutary, although it has at times contributed to an unfortunate fixation on “3.5%” as some sort of magic antidote to authoritarianism. Still, I have been encouraged by the increasingly sophisticated—and shared—frameworks that have grown up across our movements as we skill up around how to both assess authoritarianism and combat it.

With so much theory (and practice!) developed since, I hesitated about whether it made sense to return to my earlier series. But ultimately I decided that revisiting the analysis was worthwhile. Authoritarian projects do not unfold on a fixed script, and strategy requires revisiting earlier assessments in light of new developments. I wanted to see to what extent my analysis has held, where it hasn’t, and what that might mean for our work ahead.

This two-part update returns to the original series in sequence. In this first installment, I’ll reexamine the conceptual framework and diagnostic claims of the original series. I first return to the concept of patronal autocracy to ask to what extent it has adequately captured the logic of the regime Trump has sought to impose. I then revisit my diagnosis of authoritarian advance: to what extent was I correct in my assessment of democratic regression and resilience, and where has the terrain shifted?

In the second installment, I’ll reexamine the strategic conclusions drawn from that diagnosis, asking what remains sound and what now needs to shift as we move toward the 2026 and 2028 election cycles.

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Conceptual Framework: Patronal Autocracy

The first installment sought to clarify the regime type that Trump and MAGA aspired to build, adapting a comparative framework that distinguishes regime types along two axes: the degree of authoritarian control versus democratic pluralism, and the degree of patronal domination versus impersonal, rule-bound governance.

What the framework got right

Overall, I think the core of the conceptual framework has held up well. Despite Trump’s periodic talk of “canceling” elections, it is now generally understood that the regime MAGA aims to build will preserve the formal trappings of democracy while systematically hollowing out its substance. “Autocracy” is just one name for this kind of hybrid regime midway between democracy and dictatorship (others call it “competitive authoritarianism,” “illiberal democracy,” etc.) but it has proven a popular one—a sign not only that the phenomenon itself has become more visible, but that the underlying analysis was broadly correct.

“Patronalism,” in contrast, has not caught on in the same way. Yet the dynamics it seeks to describe are everywhere evident. We see it in Trump’s expectation of absolute personal fealty, in his use of state power to reward allies and punish perceived enemies, and in the blurring of lines between public authority and private interests. It is visible, too, in the regime’s foreign policy, where relationships with other states are increasingly treated in personalized and transactional terms rather than through stable institutional or strategic frameworks.

Yet our movements have been less adept at grasping the regime’s patronal features than its autocratic ones. Part of the difficulty, I think, lies in how the left has historically understood the relationship between the state and capital. We are accustomed—correctly—to seeing the state as serving elite economic interests. But this can blind us to what is genuinely different about Trump’s patronalism compared to (crony) capitalist business as usual.

To see what is genuinely new here, we need to think about capitalism as a mode of production, not simply “rule by the rich.” For as Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued, one of the key features that distinguishes capitalism from other forms of class rule is precisely the relative separation of political and economic spheres. In earlier class societies, rulers extracted economic surplus directly; political and economic command were fused. Under capitalism, in contrast, surplus value is extracted through market dependence and wage labor, while the state takes on the more mediated role of securing the conditions under which those economic relations reproduce themselves.

Patronalism fundamentally erodes the relative autonomy between the political and economic that has been a constitutive feature of the capitalist system. In this sense, what we are seeing is not simply crony capitalist “business as usual,” but a partial reversion toward a more personalized, patrimonial form of rule operating within—and deforming—the institutional shell of a modern capitalist state. The table below tries to highlight some elements of this distinction.

What the framework missed

So much for what “patronal autocracy” got right. What did it get wrong?

One limitation I’d already grappled with in writing the series is the blind spots of the political scientists Bálint Magyar and Bálint Madlovics, from whom I adapted the framework. Treating capitalist democracy as an unqualified good, they fail to consider the ways coercion and domination persist in nominally free market societies. As a result they overstate the divide between liberal-capitalist “freedom” and patronal domination, missing their deeper affinity. In a sense this is the inverse weakness of the socialist left, which can overstate the continuity between the two, failing to register the qualitative shift from indirect market coercion to direct patronal control.

What we really need is a framework that can grasp both continuity and rupture—seeing how patronal domination grows out of coercive dynamics already present within capitalist liberal democracy, while still registering the real transformation that patronalism marks. The Marxist tradition offers some starting points here, from Karl Marx’s analysis of bonapartism to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of caesarism, which I hope to return to in another article.

Another thing I underestimated is the degree of ideological coherence that the Trump 2.0 project has developed in practice. Again following Magyar and Madlovics, I distinguished patronal autocracy from ideologically-driven “conservative autocracies,” arguing that the former deployed primarily ideology instrumentally. I still think there’s some truth to that; Trump can’t hold a consistent idea together from one end of a sentence to the other, and that very protean quality makes him a kind of cipher onto which rival factions can project their own agendas.

But among the competing tendencies within Trump’s coalition, the regime has in fact consolidated around a coherent and ever-more explicit white nationalist ideology. This is nowhere more evident than in the regime’s widening dragnet of body-snatchers and the increasingly open fusion of immigration enforcement with a broader politics of ethno-national purification. In the run-up to the 2025 election, there were indications that Trumpism might evolve toward a more expansive, flexible form of ethno-nationalism. Instead, it has cohered around its most racialized, radicalized, and exclusionary core.

This ideological hardening is one expression of a more general dynamic of increasing radicalization in which the Trump regime seems to have settled on an “accelerationist” strategy, pushing the autocratic playbook harder and faster rather than consolidating more cautiously. In my opinion that makes it more immediately dangerous, but less likely to consolidate long-term hegemony. But that brings us to the next section of the series—assessing the pace of autocratic advance and democratic resistance.

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Checking the gauge: the autocrometer one year on

The second part of my series took patronal autocracy as a hypothetical endpoint and asked a diagnostic question: how close had the United States actually come to that state, and where did democratic bulwarks still hold?

What the autocrometer got right

Here too I think the analysis has held up well. Rather than a uniform national slide, the past year has seen uneven advance at the federal level, a growing divide between red and blue states, and a sharp bifurcation between elite capitulation and grassroots resistance.

Executive consolidation

At the federal level, the executive branch and administrative apparatuses have indeed proven the leading edge of autocratic consolidation. From the politicization of the nonpartisan civil service, to the unilateral shuttering of agencies and aid programs, to the weaponization of the Justice Department as a tool to attack opponents, it is hard to overstate the extent of the autocratic transformation of the federal government over the past year.

The patronal dimension of this shift is perhaps less obvious, but in some ways even more revealing. Across departments and agencies, decisions that once moved through institutional chains now increasingly turn on interpersonal competition among members of the president’s patronal network. Madja Ruge and Jeremy Shapiro have analyzed how this has played out around US foreign policy. The latter was long shaped through a technocratic process known as the interagency model, in which the National Security Council (NCS) coordinated proposals from the Department of State, the Pentagon, and the intelligence agencies, compelling them to hash out differences before presenting the president with a set of vetted options. But the regime has now gutted the NSC and replaced it with a process of direct, personalized competition for the president’s ear and attention, which Ruge and Shapiro term a “factional process.” The result is a more volatile, less vetted, and hyper-personalized decision-making model that reflects the administration’s distrust of bureaucratic autonomy and aligns with my analysis of patronal rule.

Judicial constraints

My prediction that the judiciary would serve as a check on autocracy has also largely held up. Over 530 cases have been filed against the administration in 2025 alone, far exceeding any past administration. (For comparison, Biden faced 133 across his entire four-year term.) Significantly, judges have largely abandoned the long-standing “presumption of regularity” extended to government officials in court cases, meaning they no longer start from the assumption that the administration is acting in good faith. This has contributed to the administration losing over 70% of cases at the district court level, an astonishing loss rate for a sitting president.'

It is true that those loss rates decrease upon appeal: circuit courts have ruled against Trump only about half the time, while the Supreme Court has actually ruled for the administration in over 80% of “emergency” rulings, making unprecedented use of the shadow docket to issue striking decisions without explanation. This had led to justified alarm about the compromised nature of the court’s 6-3 far-right supermajority and its long-term implications for our democracy.

But that appellate record should be read with caution, since, as Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith notes, the administration selectively appeals only a small fraction of the cases it believes it can win—just a few dozen out of many hundreds. That makes it all the more striking that the Court has still ruled against Trump in major cases, including his attempts to federalize the National Guard and to impose tariffs at will. Without diminishing the long-term dangers of right-wing judicial capture, I agree with Goldsmith’s conclusion that, in the short term, “The federal judicial system has done a remarkable job in the face of unprecedented challenges and hostility in standing up to the Trump administration.”

Congress captive, but competitive

In contrast, Congress has been even more servile than I anticipated. From tariffs to executive oversight, war powers to the power of the purse, Congressional Republicans have repeatedly prioritized patronal loyalty over institutional autonomy, accelerating the concentration of power in the executive. Congressional Democrats spent most of last year adrift and spineless, then rediscovered their backbone in last fall’s fight over the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, only to promptly lose it again. They have shown stiffer resolve around the ongoing DHS shutdown, though it still seems less like they’re leading the party than being dragged along by its base. In any case as a minority party they have largely lacked the power to function as a meaningful institutional counterweight. In the immediate term, Congress has thus for all intents and purposes vacated its position as an independent branch of government.

However, my argument that the legislative branch would resist autocratic capture did not rest on the immediate actions of the current Congress, but rather on the fact that Congressional control remains dependent on at least partially free and fair elections that the regime cannot fully corrupt. This is certainly not for lack of trying, whether we think of the dystopian SAVE act or Trump’s recent executive order restricting mail-in voting. But both of those examples actually point to the limits of the regime’s power; there is no Senate supermajority to pass the former, while the latter is blatantly unconstitutional and will almost certainly be struck down by the courts. The Trumpified federal government still poses real risks to election integrity, which I will discuss in section three. But because the US federal system leaves most core election powers to the states, election integrity depends above all on the balance of power at the state level.

A tale of two state trifectas

As predicted, the degree of autocratization has varied dramatically across the 50 states, as states with GOP trifectas consolidate authoritarianism while blue trifectas continue to function as meaningful democratic firewalls.

In red states, autocratic consolidation has deepened most visibly through a new wave of restrictive voting laws, proof-of-citizenship requirements, and election-interference measures designed to harden partisan control ahead of 2026. Red states have also expanded cooperation between local and state law enforcement and ICE and intensified attacks on bodily autonomy, targeting both abortion access and gender-affirming care while increasingly trying to assert coercive authority across state lines. Taken together, these measures point to the continued consolidation of red states as laboratories of authoritarianism.

In contrast, blue states have functioned as a democratic counter-power. A bloc of 23 Democratic attorneys general have emerged as one of the most significant fighting forces in the first year of Trump, filing more than 70 lawsuits and building a formidable multi-state firewall against federal autocracy. State and local officials have also repeatedly defended sanctuary policies, refusing incorporation into the federal deportation apparatus, while expanding shield protections for both abortion access and gender-affirming care. These are major exercises of state power that have become among the biggest barriers to nationwide authoritarian consolidation.

Civil society: capitulation above, resistance below

My original series grappled with a paradox: on paper, the US possessed an older, larger, richer civil societal infrastructure than almost any other country. In practice, however, many of these institutions had been hierarchized and hollowed out, making it harder to predict whether civil society would stand up to Trump or fold under pressure.

The answer, in the end, has been a bifurcation almost as sharp as that between red states and blue states. But here the fault line runs less left versus right than top versus bottom.

At the top, elite institutions, executive directors, and CEOs have repeatedly bent the knee to autocracy. Universities have rolled back DEI programs, disciplined protesters, and made unprecedented concessions in order to restore frozen federal funding streams. Major foundations have likewise begun to chill under pressure, with funders themselves describing a pullback from racial justice and pro-democracy work they now perceive as politically risky. Perhaps most alarmingly, legacy media has continued to consolidate into fewer billionaire hands, accelerating the hollowing out of long-standing institutions of independent journalism just when democratic society most needs them.

Yet the picture looks very different from below, where we have seen an astonishing surge of grassroots resistance. The leading edge has been the rapid scaling of immigrant defense infrastructure, as volunteer hotlines, neighborhood verification networks, and court-watch teams have proliferated in response to ICE escalation. Whatever the criticisms or limitations of “No Kings,” meanwhile, its record-breaking turnout has translated into a dense network of largely organic and geographically distributed local groups—one that is especially significant in rural communities, small towns, and red states. In labor, both strike activity and union membership actually increased in 2025, while formations like the Federal Unionists Network have helped pull major unions into a more confrontational stance. Across these cases, the common thread has been the ability of bottom-up grassroots efforts to adapt faster than elite institutions, with large NGOs and organizational leadership more often tailing than driving the resistance.

What the autocrometer missed: warp speed and worldwide scope

Last year, I argued that two variables could distort the autocrometer’s reading: speed and scale. Trump seemed to be compressing into months what had taken figures like Putin or Orbán years, thereby unsettling the assumptions of a model based on slower, more methodical trajectories. Those other cases had also involved countries far smaller than the United States, raising the possibility that an autocratic coup attempt from the commanding heights of a global superpower would carry risks of a different order altogether.

Since then Trump has indeed sped-run through the autocratic playbook. As the authors of the latest V-Dem report note, democratic decline under Trump 2.0 has proceeded far more rapidly than in any other of the so-called “third wave” of autocratizing countries. They estimate that Trump has compressed into a single year transformations that took four years in Hungary, eight in Serbia, and a decade or more in Turkey, India, and Russia.

This does not necessarily mean that Trump has been more effective. Indeed, I would argue the opposite. Speed can strengthen an autocratic bid in the short term, but beyond a certain threshold it begins to erode the very mechanisms on which durable consolidation depends. Authoritarian projects still require competent loyalists and a functioning administrative apparatus; when purges move too quickly and patronalization becomes too abrupt, the regime risks hollowing out the very pillars it needs to govern. At the same time, the faster it moves, the more it risks defections and inflames opposition. The result is a more dangerous immediate situation, but potentially a shorter window in which the regime can convert shock into stable hegemony.

Yet the most truly unprecedented element of this autocratic coup attempt has been its global ambitions. It was already clear, when I wrote the original series, that Trump sought to rewrite the rules of international trade, upend longstanding alliances, and intensify coercive pressure against the nations of the Global South. But the abduction of Venezuela’s sitting president and coercive threats towards Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland have shattered even the nominal norms that long mediated U.S. hemispheric power. The war on Iran marks an even darker threshold, as increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric suggests a willingness to degrade rival states as coherent territorial and institutional actors.

In hindsight, what I failed to appreciate is that the model that helped make sense of the Trump regime’s domestic project does not give us a framework for its international aims. The comparative model I adopted describes the attempted autocratic transformation of nation states embedded within a broader international order whose basic contours it assumes remain intact. Yet we now face a patronal autocratic project attempting to reshape the rules of that very order, from the commanding heights of a superpower that retains disproportionate influence over it. In other words, the Trump regime seems to be attempting to extend the logic of patronal autocracy to the level of the capitalist world-system as a whole.

What may be emerging, and what requires much further analysis, is not simply the addition of one more autocratizing nation to a growing list. The patronal autocratization of the United States risks transforming that quantitative trend into a qualitative shift in the structure of the international order itself. At the core of that possible shift is the growing fusion of executive power, oligarchic wealth, and personal loyalty inside the autocratizing states of the capitalist core and semi-periphery, while peripheral states are increasingly pressured into dependent relationships with one or another of these competing patronal blocs. This points toward an attempt to restructure the wider interstate order of nominally sovereign nation-states that has shaped international relations since at least the postwar era.

To be clear, that system was never truly one of equal sovereignty. Some states have always been “more sovereign” than others, and Western imperialism long rested on precisely that double standard. What feels new is less that hierarchy itself than the increasingly patronal form it now takes, as relatively rule-bound relations give way to more personalized structures of dependency across an unevenly weakening interstate order. The closest analog may therefore be less 19th-century imperialism than even older tributary or suzerain systems, in which formally distinct polities retained nominal autonomy while operating inside layered hierarchies of deference, tribute, and personal dependency.

Whether this amounts to the beginnings of a new mode of authoritarian accumulation or merely a more chaotic pattern of fragmentation and failed hegemonic rewiring remains uncertain. The point is that, unlike its domestic agenda, the Trump regime’s international project has no real precedent in the comparative frameworks from which the original analysis drew. Once the terrain shifts from the national to the international order, those case studies in autocracy become far less reliable as strategic guides. That raises an urgent question: what will it take, not only to reverse Trump’s authoritarian project at home, but on the world stage?

Conclusion

One year in, the core of the original diagnosis has largely held. The regime that Trump and MAGA have sought to build still reads most clearly as a patronal autocratic project. Aided by an obedient network of MAGA loyalists, and abetted by elite capitulation and a quiescent Congress, autocratic advance has moved fastest at the highest levels of federal and institutional power. But democratic resilience has persisted through the lower courts, blue-state firewalls, and the more distributed capacities of grassroots civil society.

The regime’s hyper-accelerationism has intensified its contradictions, increasing the immediate danger while reducing its chances of stabilizing domestic hegemony. In response, it has increasingly sought to displace those contradictions abroad, widening the conflict into a struggle over the shape of the international order.

As I will argue, these dynamics do not fundamentally alter our movement strategy. But they both compress the timeline and widen the terrain on which we must fight. The second installment turns to what it means to accelerate our counter-offensive, to build forms of leadership capable of learning and coordinating at the speed of events, and to link up struggles against authoritarianism, war, and domination at home and abroad.

Click here to read part two.

Bennett Carpenter is a queer Southern organizer, trainer, and movement strategist. They are a member of the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road.

Introduction by Bruce Hobson, Mexico Solidarity Project, co-founder; Liberation Road member; Guanajuato, Mexico

I believe that culture in its many forms is essential for revolutionaries to stay alive, to keep moving forward.

In the Reflections section of the Mexico Solidarity Bulletin, we post cultural pieces from time to time, which are most often written by the artist Vicky Hamlin, who is also a member of the MSP bulletin committee and a Liberation Road member.

Each week I translate the bulletin from English to Spanish. When I first read Vicky’s Reflections piece about Victor Quiñonez and the closure of his show I was struck by how familiar this art feels, as it reflects a part of Mexican/American reality.

See what these powerful pieces say to you.

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by Vicky Hamlin

Immigration fascism has shuttered and censored art across the US, from galleries to paper prints to digital platforms.

The latest chapter is the sudden shuttering of the Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez show at the University of North Texas, scheduled to be exhibited for three months. Titled Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (“Neither from Here nor from There”) the show is a tour de force (meaning great!) display of Quiñonez’s talent and heart. And they closed it. A week after it opened.

“It’s been a trend in this country to suppress any kind of expression that’s going against what this administration is doing to civilians and this regime that’s been harming and murdering people,” Quiñonez told Hyperallergic.

“They say ICE is supposed to be helping people, but detention centers are just another word for privatized prisons,’ he continued. ‘My work speaks to the vulnerability of the communities affected by that.”

Faculty members wrote a letter denouncing the exhibition's abrupt shuttering without explanation, noting the university’s federal designation as an Hispanic-Serving Institution. Nine graduating students in the Studio Art MFA class have committed to withdrawing their upcoming thesis shows in protest. One, Carla Hughes, told Hyperallergic,“We now understand that our administration does not actually care about what we have to say, so we’re more interested in taking our work to our community than keeping it in the institution.” Public records revealed the discussions that went on before the cancellation.

To Be Both Personal and Universal

This is my piece, called Elevar la Cultura. It’s constructed of 200 coolers. Inside nine of the coolers, you see different ofrendas [offerings]. The ofrendas are dedicated to multicultural backgrounds, all representative of street vendors from all across the world. When you first come to this country, you’re limited for your work options. So for me, the cooler represents survival. It represents that hustle. It represents the cultural authenticity that comes from a lot of these street vendors and the goods that they provide and that they sell. I chose that as the symbol for this Mayan pyramid. These are all just meanings that I’m putting together as an artist to express my feelings about what’s happening with today’s administration, the way immigration is playing a role in deportation and separating families and bringing people to detention centers. I wanted to create some artwork that speaks to that and creates awareness and empathy for the people that it’s affecting right now.

—Marka27

Strangely, given the struggles of immigrants here, the Mexican art diaspora is alive and well in the United States. Quiñonez has found real success with his “neo-Indigenous” (his words) style. He can read his audience, because that audience is, well, him — his story, family, friends, neighbors, idols. To be personal and universal at the same time in your chosen art is a gift, and it’s what makes Quiñonez (and Bad Bunny too, imho, just sayin’) so across-the-board popular.

Quiñonez includes portraits of men and women, cartoon characters and bits and pieces from daily life mixed together with modern abstraction, brilliant color and traditional indigenous patterning, as in these pieces from this closed exhibition.

From painting, sculpture, textiles, graffiti, graphic design, fashion to sound installation and more, he continues to embrace both his past and current cultures and communities.

His installation called “I.C.E. Scream” is particularly touching because the ice popcart crashes a very sweet image of childhood against the horror of the ICE raids.

The pieces that incorporate graffiti show restraint in the image on canvas (like a father’s gentle love) and then wild abandon in the spray can art surrounding the canvas.

Marka27’s huge murals have gotten attention all over the world. They are magnificent, detailed and glorious. They define and lift up any neighborhood they are in.

A tidal wave is happening — a tidal wave of rebellion against the Make-America-White-Again, make-us-all-good-soldiers-for-Trump right-wing storm that seemed frighteningly strong at the beginning. They were wrong, we did not roll over and die. Powerful voices of resistance like Marka27 show that we have the collective will and spirit to take back what is ours — our history, our lives, our art.

Activist Vicky Hamlin, a retired tradeswoman, shop steward, and painter, shines the light in her art on the lives of working people and the world they live in.

This article originally appeared in Convergence, March 25, 2026. Liberation Road and Convergence hope readers discuss and further develop the ideas it raises.

The joint US-Israeli war against Iran puts an exclamation point on the Gaza genocide. It sends a message to the world from the regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv that if you didn’t get it before, you better get it now: We will do absolutely anything that our military strength allows us to do. There are no rules or international laws we are bound to acknowledge, much less respect. You have two choices: capitulate or be destroyed.

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Most European governments, all too many regimes elsewhere, and major sections of the Democratic Party leadership here offer at most a few “process objections” to this level of ruthlessness but go with the flow.

This is a road to global catastrophe. It will accelerate a process that was already underway where every government in the world decides that their overriding priority must be increasing their military strength. And, like the US and Israel, they will conclude it is only prudent to crack down on opposition movements within their own countries.

New Thinking for the 21^st Century

To halt and reverse this course, it is essential but not sufficient to build mass opposition to the war on Iran and all the other evils perpetrated by Washington, The US Left needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a broader and deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.

Developing that vision starts with facing the reality of an interconnected world where humanity’s very survival is in doubt. Without in the least softening our critique of the US-dominated world order that is passing away, it entails assessing the heightened dangers in the new order that Trump 2.0 is driving us toward. It requires learning lessons from the most positive experiences of longstanding antiwar, anti-racist, solidarity, and climate justice movements.

A valuable step in that direction would be taking a fresh look at a brief period 40 years ago when discussion of global cooperation and de-militarization – including massive cuts in military budgets and complete elimination of nuclear weapons – moved from the margins to the center of global politics. The high point was a 1986 US-USSR Summit during which President Ronald Reagan, an arch-hawk, was forced to seriously consider a pact with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear weapons. This unprecedented development stemmed from both grassroots pressure for peace and bold disarmament proposals and a stress on humanity’s common interest in survival coming from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of “New Thinking” about foreign policy and perestroika (restructuring Soviet society).

In adopting “New Thinking” the Soviet leadership was not breaking new intellectual ground. As Gorbachev put it:

“New Thinking did not come out of the blue. It had its origins in the thought of Albert Einstein [“everything has changed except our thinking”] and Bertrand Russell; in the anti-war movements of the 1950s and 1960s…The core of New Thinking is the proposition that humankind’s common interests and universal human values must be the overarching priority in an increasingly integrated, interdependent world.”

What distinguished the Soviet initiative was that it was the first time that such a perspective was adopted as the official policy of a powerful state. And in a groundbreaking speech to an unprecedented meeting of Communist and other Left Parties and Movements on the 70^th anniversary of the October Revolution, Gorbachev specified the ways the new Soviet policy created more favorable conditions to struggle for democracy, national liberation and socialism:

“[there are] two especially dangerous manifestations of capitalism’s objective laws: militarization and non-equivalent exchange with the developing world. However, they are only possible if they are backed by an appropriate governmental policy. But that policy will continue to enjoy support only so long as fear of the “Soviet threat” remains… and so long as people continue to believe there are ‘subjects’ of world politics and there are ‘objects’ – that is, the sphere of neocolonialism.

“Our perestroika…is eliminating the fear of the ‘Soviet threat’ and militarism is losing its political justification…We will not in any way renounce the genuine values of socialism. On the contrary, we will enrich them, and at the same time get rid of everything that distorted the humanitarian idea of our system. We do not expect our class adversary to become ‘enamored’ by us. We do not need that at all…

“For socialism, this policy secures a merging of its class interests as a system and the interests of all humanity. And for capitalism too there is no other sensible way than coexistence and competition…Joint action alone can lessen and remove the global danger of an ecological ‘heart attack’.”

A positive pole of attraction

Coming off the heightened nuclear fears of Reagan’s “Second Cold War,” audacious disarmament initiatives from one of that era’s two superpowers moved the idea of a nuclear-free world from a utopian dream to a practical possibility. The first World Climate Conference in 1979 had been a major step in alerting the world to the threat from global warming. The notion of global cooperation in building a sustainable and nuclear-weapons-free planet resonated with millions. It linked a vision of a changed international order with the concerns of individuals, families, and peoples for their own safety. In tandem with the antiwar and disarmament proposals from Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, leading forces in the US resistance to Reaganism in the 1980s, these initiatives echoed the internationalist spirit that infused Dr. Martin Luther King, SNCC, and others in the radical wing of the Black-led 1950s-60s Civil Rights Movement.

The prospect of a post-Cold War “peace dividend” to boost economic development and a relaxation of tensions that would provide favorable terrain for popular movements gave the global Left a platform to offer “realistic hope.” Even socialism’s most ardent partisans realized in the 1980s that our North Star goal was not on any near-term horizon, and that goal appears even further away today. A Left that cannot offer any program for a safer and better world short of revolution will remain on the margins in this country.

A product of weakness as well as vision

The New Thinking vision captured the imagination of millions. But it was fleeting. This was because the radical shift in Soviet foreign policy, and the program of perestroika in general, grew out of the USSR’s deep economic and political weaknesses. Gorbachev was frank about this:

“Our country was sinking ever more deeply into stagnation. The economy was, for all intents and purposes, at a standstill. Ideological dogma kept intellectual and cultural activity in a straitjacket. The bureaucratic machine sought total control of society’s life while being unable to satisfy people’s basic needs….

“The militarization of the economy was a big burden for all countries, including the United States and its allies. Yet for our country, this cost was particularly high. In some years, total military spending amounted to 25-30 percent of gross domestic product, i.e., five to six times as much as in the United States and other NATO countries…. However, excessive armament did not make our security more reliable…. It was clear to me that continuing the arms race was not the path to lasting peace.”

While Gorbachev’s initiatives aimed at ending the Cold War made headway, his proposals for economic restructuring failed to yield positive results. The new openness in Soviet society (glasnost) succeeded in fostering a large-scale reckoning with the crimes of the Stalin era. But nationalist, chauvinist, and pro-capitalist movements rose and gained far more strength than working-class-based strivings to renew socialism. As the USSR hurtled toward collapse, Washington quickly returned to policies based on the worst of imperial ambition, using military force to show the world it was the global hegemon (via the first Gulf War) and vigorously pushing its recently initiated neoliberal economic model across the world.

The reasons for the Soviet collapse, which are of course connected to one’s assessment of the Soviet Union before 1985, remain a topic of sharp disagreement on the Left. But whatever one’s views in that debate, the so-far-unique experience of a powerful state taking Einstein’s “everything has changed” perspective as a starting point for a foreign policy stressing nuclear disarmament and environmental protection offers lessons for addressing today’s dangers.

Competing visions as the old order collapses

We’re in a moment when this quote from Gramsci is deservedly popular throughout the Left: “The old order is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born.” The different factions of the elite oligarchy are rushing into this “interregnum” to shape what comes next.

MAGA/Trump 2.0 argues that considering values like democracy or human rights when formulating policy are somewhere between naïve and treasonous, and that international agreements and multilateral institutions are simply shackles on US power. Staying number one in global “lethality” is the road to safety and prosperity for the “heritage Americans” who will dominate the country after solidifying white supremacy and removing or subordinating the various “others” who now live in the US.

The anti-MAGA wing of the US ruling class counters by arguing that the “rules-based” world order of the last 80 years was key to the wonderfulness of the American way of life. We just need to correct some of its “mistakes” (Vietnam, Iraq) to get back on the right track. Let’s preserve the “Western alliance of democracies,” keep China at bay, and use “soft power,” sanctions, multilateral institutions (where the US calls the shots), and “smart wars” to remain the world’s dominant power and bring safety and prosperity to the US people.

The Left has trenchant critiques of the racism and exploitation inherent in both variants of Washington’s imperial project. But we won’t win the majority of people to our side if we don’t go beyond critique to offer a positive vision of what the world can look like if we are in position to shape US policy.

Global cooperation as a powerful starting point

That vision has to address the hopes, fears, and pressing needs of the majority of US people. It has to be compelling enough to counter the American exceptionalist ideology that permeates US culture. Resting on the longstanding position of the US as the hegemonic global power and promoted unceasingly by the political class and mainstream media, the idea that the US is an inherently virtuous nation whose actions are those of the world’s “good guy” has long defined US “common sense.”

Antiwar and solidarity movements targeting Washington’s role in Vietnam, South Africa, Central America, Iraq, and most recently Palestine have spotlighted the destructive role the US has played in each case and at least temporarily won a portion of the population to an overall critique of US imperialism. At times, energetic social movements have convinced majorities of the importance of arms control agreements and aggressive steps to fight climate change. But we have yet to win a durable majority to a structural critique of imperial behavior and support for an alternative world order where all countries are on an equal footing, conflicts are resolved via diplomacy rather than violence, and a rapid transition away from fossil fuels is a worldwide priority. If we fail in that, a new incarnation of racist and authoritarian militarism may come roaring back even if we succeed in pushing MAGA out of power this time around.

The Left has always stressed the common interest of the global majority in fighting imperial exploitation. But in a period when the most dangerous threats to human life – climate change, nuclear war, global pandemics, obscene degrees of inequality – can only be addressed by joint action by all countries, the arguments against American exceptionalism and the way it makes US national sovereignty absolute become stronger and more urgent. This is why taking the concept of global cooperation based on common human interests from the “New Thinking” experience is the key starting point for formulating a radical foreign policy to put before the US people.

Building on that foundation, additional dimensions of international relations need to be addressed in formulating a comprehensive Left foreign policy: Among them are:

• A framework for global rules for trade, debt, and other economic interactions among countries that tackles global inequality both between and within countries. There are a host of penetrating critiques of the neoliberal model of capitalist globalization to draw upon for this, as well as positive proposals for what Focus on the Global South calls “a healthy balance between national and international economies, diversity in economics and governance, and strengthening local and national economies.” (While Focus on the Global South uses the term “deglobalization” to describe such proposals, others offering thoughts in a similar vein use the terminology of “progressive globalization.”) There are also useful ideas to draw upon here from the 1970s proposals for a New World Economic Order and a New World Information Order put forward by the Non-Aligned Movement at a time when that alignment of governments in the global South had considerable unity and political initiative.

• A set of proposals for reforming and strengthening international organizations, conventions, and treaties. The damage being done by Trump’s withdrawing the US from a host of global institutions is considerable, but a Left program must go beyond advocating a return to those institutions as they were structured pre-Trump. The demands of ongoing campaigns to reform the United Nations in a way that ends the Security Council veto power now held by the US, Russia, China, the UK and France, and to put the US under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and others need to be considered and many adopted.

• Renewal and enforcement of the International Convention on the Rights and Protection of All Migrant Workers and Their Families. Racist assaults on the rights of immigrants are a key part of the global Right’s drive for political power, and defense of migrants’ rights by figures, organizations and parties of the center and center left has been uneven at best. This is intimately linked to the need for cooperation to mitigate global inequality and the climate crisis, because those are among the strongest drivers of migration. But a positive vision of a “new immigration order” also needs to be part of the foreign policy platform of the US Left.

As the last point on immigration indicates, in today’s world the boundary between “domestic” and “foreign” policies is very blurry. They are interconnected, and we will need to continue to make that intertwining visible and concrete for people—for example, contrasting the bloated military budget with gaping holes in programs that meet human needs; looking at the way the global spread of bird flu spiked the price of eggs, pointing out how climate change has intensified floods, blizzards, and fires that have ravaged communities; stressing the way militarism abroad comes back home in the form of militarized surveillance and valorizing a toxic version of masculinity. In that sense, a Left vision for a post-MAGA foreign policy is a necessary component of an overall program for a Third Reconstruction that moves the country toward a durable multiracial, gender-inclusive democracy on a peaceful, sustainable planet.

Amid a continuing genocide in Gaza and a killing-spree-of-choice war against Iran, the numbers of people saying “stop” to the guardians of empire is growing by the day. Fanning those flames of opposition and offering these millions a vision to fight for is the combination needed to accumulate the political power to transform the US role in the world.

Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board and the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (Verso Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections (OR Books, 2022).

Tomorrow, people across the country will take to the streets with a clear message:
No Kings. No Billionaires. No ICE. No War.

More than 3,000 events are planned all around the country. Our partners at Rising Majority have put together materials you can use. Check them out here.

Over the past year, we’ve seen what MAGA is trying to build, and we’ve seen that it can be fought. When they flooded the zone, we pushed back and forced limits. Now they’re escalating again, at home and abroad. The question is whether we show up at the scale needed to stop them—and turn the tide again.

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They Flooded the Zone, We Turned the Tide

Over the past year, we’ve been living through a deliberate strategy to overwhelm and disorient opposition. In the opening months of 2025, the Trump administration moved fast: sweeping executive orders, mass firings and purges across federal agencies, aggressive ICE raids in major cities, and open threats to deploy the military domestically. The goal was to move so quickly, on so many fronts, that no one could keep up. Or as Steve Bannon memorably put it, to “flood the zone with shit.”

But last June’s No Kings protests marked a turning of the tide. Millions of people refused to be paralyzed. And that surge didn’t just dissipate. It fed directly into organizing on the ground in the months that followed.

Across the country, resistance took root. Communities mobilized to block ICE raids and defend their neighbors. Labor actions and campus organizing picked back up. And politically, we saw real breakthroughs. The election of Zohran Mamdani and other socialist and left-progressive candidates showed that there was a growing base for something beyond both the radicalized fascist right and the exhausted center.

Just as important, the aura of inevitability around the Trump regime began to crack. By the end of 2025, even some of Trump’s own allies were acknowledging internal divisions and mounting resistance. What had looked unstoppable in January was already running up against real limits by December.

Flood the Zone 2.0: International Edition

Now, in the first months of this year, we are facing a new escalation, a sort of “flood the zone 2.0.” This time the main focus is international. The Trump administration has abducted the sitting president of Venezuela, escalated economic warfare on Cuba, and launched a war in Iran that threatens to spiral into another endless conflict.

This turn outward is not accidental. It reflects the limits MAGA fascism ran up against at home. With courts slowing them down, Congress no longer a blank check, and mounting opposition from states, cities, and civil society, the terrain inside the US became much harder for them to dominate. But those constraints don’t operate in the same way when it comes to foreign policy.

Over decades—and especially since the War on Terror—presidential power in this arena has expanded dramatically. Multiple presidents have repeatedly launched airstrikes without a vote, imposed sweeping sanctions by executive order, and carried out covert operations with little public oversight. It’s one of the few areas where this administration can still move fast, act unilaterally, and reshape reality before anyone can effectively respond.

This is a dangerous shift. Blocked at home, MAGA has moved onto terrain where they can act faster, with fewer checks, and potentially with far greater consequences. Wars are much easier to start than stop. With no obvious off-ramp, the US and Israeli war on Iran is already expanding into a region-wide quagmire. The same pattern risks repeating in all the places Trump has threatened—from Cuba, where a US-imposed blockade is pushing the country into crisis, to Mexico, where he has floated military action against cartels, and even China—each one another front that could ignite beyond anyone’s control.

Time to Rise Again

That’s why tomorrow is critical. We have a chance—again—to turn the tide.

Mass protests like those planned for tomorrow won’t, on their own, defeat authoritarianism. But they do something essential: they break the sense that what’s happening is unstoppable. They make opposition visible. They give people renewed hope.

That that only happens if we show up at a scale that can’t be ignored. Not thousands. Millions. Bigger than last June. Big enough to force every institution in this country to take a side.

And then we need to channel that momentum into something durable. We need to plug people into organizations. Build campaigns where we live and work. Turn protest into tenant organizing, labor fights, immigrant defense, and electoral contests. That’s how mass mobilization transforms into durable, place-based people power.

We will need that power to retake the House—and, if possible, the Senate—in November. To primary Democrats who enable ICE and war. To stop the body-snatchers targeting our communities. To defend and expand bodily autonomy. And to stop a war that is already killing thousands and threatening millions more.

Show Up—and Change It

It’s easy, for many of us on the left, to feel cynical about protests like this.

Some activists look at them and see liberals who aren’t radical enough. Some organizers see a one-off mobilization that doesn’t build real power. Some Black and Brown folks see spaces that don’t reflect them. And the same is true for other marginalized communities.

And the thing is, there’s truth in all of that.

But that’s not a reason to sit it out tomorrow. It’s a reason to show up—and change it.

We change it by bringing bolder and more militant demands into the streets—against war, against ICE, against the targeting of our communities. We change it by showing up and refusing to shrink ourselves. By making protest spaces Blacker, Browner, queerer. By asking who else is missing, and how they can be brought in.

We change it by doing the work to connect this moment to something lasting. By showing up not just as individuals, but as organized forces: with our unions, our DSA chapters, our feminist collectives, our immigrant justice groups, our political organizations. By joining local coalitions and planning committees. By bringing clipboards and gathering numbers. By following up.

Tomorrow can be just another protest—or it can be a turning point. That depends on what we do with it.

So I’ll see you in the streets.

Bennett Carpenter is a queer Southern organizer, trainer, and movement strategist. They are a member of the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road.

• Bill Fletcher (moderator), Standing for Democracy

• Puya Gerami, Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy

• Samer Araabi, Arab Resource & Organizing Center

• Sara Haghdoosti, MoveOn

• Eran Efrati, Jewish Voice for Peace

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The discussion situated the war on Iran within a broader regional and global “polycrisis.” While the immediate focus was on stopping the current escalation, participants pointed to the wider dynamics shaping it—from the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s expansion of regional war, to Iran’s own regional ambitions, to the broader trajectory of U.S. intervention, sanctions, and military dominance.

Across the call, there was strong unity on several core points. Panelists emphasized the urgent need to stop the war immediately, while standing in solidarity with the Iranian people’s long-standing struggle for democratic, social, and economic rights. Many rejected the false choice between opposing U.S. and Israeli military aggression and acknowledging the Iranian regime’s repression—insisting that a principled anti-war position must do both.

At the same time, the call did not paper over real disagreements. Participants differed in how to balance opposition to U.S. imperialism with criticism of the Iranian regime, particularly around questions of emphasis and positionality. These differences were engaged directly, in a spirit of principled struggle, rooted in a shared commitment to do everything we can to stop this war.

Strategically, the call pointed toward the need to build a broad anti-war front capable of exerting real pressure—through mass mobilization, efforts to cut off war funding, and longer-term struggles to contest for political power. Participants also emphasized the need to link opposition to war abroad with the fight against authoritarianism, racism, and repression in the United States.

Despite the enormity of the crisis, the call underscored that this is also a moment of possibility. The war is deeply unpopular and has exposed fractures within the ruling bloc. Our challenge—and opportunity—is to turn that opening into sustained, strategic organizing to stop the war and strengthen an internationalist movement capable of confronting empire and authoritarianism in all its forms.

Watch the full recording to hear the discussion and join the conversation about how we organize to meet this moment.

Lists. Not everyone is into lists of this or that: the 50 best films of all time (The Matrix #3); the 10 worst presidents ever (low bar); 100 greatest guitarists (Derek Trucks #16); 100 most beautiful cities (San Francisco #19); and on and on. These lists are totally subjective. As Jerry Garcia responded to complaints about the Dead’s long jams, “Some people like licorice, and some people don’t.”

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Many, though not all, sports fans are fans of top ten lists. Below are the authors’ agreements and differences on the US athletes who have most radically impacted their sports and society. We all agreed on the top six, tried without success to keep the list at ten, but couldn’t stop. We hope you will enter the fray with your own choices.

1. Muhammad Ali

Widely regarded as the greatest boxer of all time and beloved around the world, many forget that Ali’s 1967 refusal to be drafted for the Vietnam war was highly unpopular. Mercilessly attacked, Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship belt and had his passport revoked. He responded: “I’m not going to run away. I’m not going to burn any flags. I’m not going to Canada. I’m staying right here. You want to send me to jail? Fine. I’ve been in jail for 400 years…If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow.” Upon return from his banishment, Ali’s rope-a-dope victory in Zaire over the heavily favored George Foreman was most likely the greatest upset in boxing history.

2. Tommie Smith and John Carlos

On October 16, 1968, two black US track and field athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, stood on the medal award podium at the Mexico City Olympics, heads bowed, wearing black socks, no shoes. As the US national anthem played, each raised a black-gloved fist. No words were spoken, but the moment made history. Smith, who had set a world record in the 200-yard sprint, raised his right fist to represent Black Power. Carlos, wearing a bead necklace to symbolize the lynchings of Black Americans, raised his left fist to represent Black Unity. The Black Power salute, as it came to be known, was a defiant statement against the systemic oppression of Black people in the US and marked a defining moment in the history of civil rights activism.

3. Billie Jean King

Among the greatest tennis players of all time, King lived a life of accomplishments. She brought women’s tennis out of the dark ages and successfully fought to win equality with men’s tennis, who were then earning eight times more than women players. Billie Jean secretly organized 60 women players to form the first women-only tournament and tour and led a threat to boycott the US Open unless the women received equal pay to the men. The threat was wildly successful, and as a result, women players today earn full and equal pay. Billie Jean also became the first major female athlete to come out as gay. Despite losing all her endorsements, she stood by her decision and paved the way for so many other athletes, including Martina Navratilova, to come out as well. Later in her life, King also mentored and advised several of the women’s national soccer team such as Julie Foudy and Megan Rapinoe in their long and largely successful fight for equal pay for women soccer players.

4. Colin Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick is an American civil rights activist and former NFL football quarterback. In 2016, he gained national attention for kneeling during the national anthem at the start of NFL games to protest police brutality and racial inequality in the US. During one post-game interview, Kaepernick, who kneeled during the national anthem throughout the entire season, explained his position, stating, “I’m not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.” As a result of his action, Kaepernick was excluded by every NFL owner. Yet he powered on and inspired many other pro athletes to raise their voices and actions in protest.

5. Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson was the first African American in Major League Baseball in the modern era. Robinson’s major league debut, made at great personal cost and sacrifice, brought an end to 60 years of segregation in professional baseball, known as the baseball color line. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that Robinson was “a legend and a symbol in his own time, and he challenged the dark skies of intolerance and frustration.” Robinson won personal honors as the most valuable player and led the Dodgers to multiple world championships. Not surprisingly, during the rising anti-communist crusade in 1949, the ruling class sought to use Robinson to their own ends, pushing him to testify against Paul Robeson, a communist sympathizer, a star athlete, and a great singer/actor who was subsequently barred from performing. Robinson came to terribly regret his testimony. For more on this, check out this book review.

6. Jack Johnson

The son of former slaves, Jack Johnson became the country’s first Black heavyweight boxing champion in 1908. Throughout his life, Johnson defied and thumbed his nose at white supremacist society which could not accept a Black champion, never mind a Black man who flaunted his success and publicly dated white women. Desperate to “take back the title for white America,” the ruling class recruited white boxer Jim Jeffries to take on Johnson in what became the “Fight of the Century.” Jeffries aimed “to prove that a white man is better than a Negro.” Even Jack London, a rugged individualist writing at the time who later became a socialist, stated that “the White Man must be rescued.” The “rescue” never happened and Johnson won in the 15^th round. Soon after, authorities arrested for Johnson for violating the Mann Act, a law meant to stop sex trafficking but widely used to prosecute those who had interracial relations. After being convicted by an all-white jury, Johnson defied Jim Crow laws and fled to Europe and Mexico.

7. Bill Russell

“On the court, he was the greatest champion in basketball history,” President Obama once said. “Off of it, he was a civil rights trailblazer.” Russell led the Boston Celtics to an amazing 11 NBA championships in 13 years, always giving the team what it needed most—defense, shot blocking, and rebounding. “[Yet] none of my medals or championships could shield my children from white supremacy,” said Russell. Russell marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stood by Muhammad Ali over Ali’s refusal to enter the draft, and helped to initiate the first official boycott of an NBA game to protest racism. Russell stood up to vulgar racism in Boston where his home was vandalized and white neighbors petitioned to keep him from moving in. After doing a series of integrated clinics for the brother of the recently assassinated civil rights activist Medgar Evers, Russell received multiple death threats. Russell responded, “I wasn’t scared of the kind of men who come in the dark of night. The fact is, I’ve never found fear to be useful.” As the first Black coach in the National Basketball Association, Russell won two more championships as a player-coach for the Celtics.

8. Dr. Bernice Sandler

We’ll make an exception here on our required bona fides. Sandler was not an athlete but an activist and researcher who used existing civil rights law to encourage many hundreds of complaints against universities for sex discrimination in education. This led to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a landmark federal civil rights law in the US that prohibited sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that received funding from the federal government. This had a transformative effect on girls’ and women’s sports. Although Title IX has been criticized for being “toothless” in adequately addressing sexual harassment in sports, its introduction changed the entire landscape of high school and college sports, notwithstanding recent court rulings intent on rolling back much of the amendment.

9. Jesse Owens

Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin in an attempt to prove Nazi propaganda about White Aryan supremacy. Jesse Owens was a Black track and field athlete who made history at those games by winning four gold medals, setting Olympic records in each event. He was credited by numerous sports outlets and news organizations with “single-handedly crushing Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.” Owens’s career broke many racial barriers that no man before him had accomplished. However, to no surprise among Black Americans, Owens came back to a Jim Crow America that was still racist to the core. Unlike his white teammates, Owens was uninvited to the White House to meet President Roosevelt. Nor was Owens given any endorsement opportunities. Owens spent the rest of his life working as a gas station attendant and playground janitor, and being exploited as a man racing against horses.

10. Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994) was a Black American sprinter who overcame polio to become the first US woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games (Rome 1960). As a vocal figure of the Civil Rights era, she famously refused to attend her 1960 homecoming parade in Clarksville, Tennessee, unless it was integrated, marking it as the city’s first desegregated event. Throughout her life, Rudolph continued to use her international fame to challenge social inequities in the segregated South, paving the way for many Black women athletes.

Rest of the Best?

Oscar Robertson

Before Lebron James and before Michael Jordan, and even during the era of the NBA’s great behemoths of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, there was one player considered the GOAT: Oscar Robertson. The Big O averaged a triple double over his first five professional seasons. In addition to being an outspoken critic of racism in sports, the Big O’s most important legacy was his role as president of the NBA Players Association, where he fought for player pensions and to win free agency. During the 1964 NBA All-Star game, players refused to leave the locker room until they received a guarantee that the league would create players pensions. The Big O remains one of the great towering figures in sports for justice, fairness, and strong unions.

1966 Texas Western NCAA Champions

Texas Western’s 1966 men’s basketball team demolished numerous racial barriers in society and sport when its all-Black starting five was the first to win the NCAA’s national championship. Beating the all-white blueblood University of Kentucky, and its establishment Jim Crow standard bearer coach, Adolph Rupp, Texas Western stunned the basketball world and paved the way for the integration of intercollegiate sports and the recruitment of black players to all major college sports programs. Prior to Texas Western’s historic upset, many college athletic programs fielded all-white teams and only recruited white players. Texas Western changed its name to UTEP (University of Texas – El Paso) but their 1966 victory still stands as one of the great watersheds for racial justice in American society.

Curt Flood

Curt Flood was a great center fielder during the 1950s and 1960s, a three-time all-star, and vital cog for the St. Louis Cardinal championship teams of the 1960s. But Flood’s legacy as an athlete came when he refused to accept his trade from the Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies, claiming “I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several states.” Though Flood was exiled from baseball, he opened the door to players winning the right to be free agents, a victory since spread to most major (and now college) sports.

Earvin “Magic” Johnson

One of the greatest point guards in NBA history, Magic was drafted by the Lakers in the 1980s at a time when the NBA was on life support and accused of becoming “too Black.” Through his great playmaking abilities, his huge personality, and his competitive rivalry with Celtics great Larry Bird (derogatorily referred to as the “great white hope”), Magic turned the Lakers into “Showtime” and helped forge a revival of the NBA before Michael Jordan arrived. At the height of his career, Magic disclosed that he had HIV at a time AIDS was considered a death sentence that only affected gay men and drug addicts. Though forced to retire, Magic became a leading voice in the fight against HIV/AIDS, helping to educate the public—especially the Black community—about the disease and the need for safe sex. Magic came back to play in one all-star game that season. He received a standing ovation from the fans and hugs at center court from his fellow all-stars. Today, Magic is alive, and due to progress in the fight against AIDS, free of the HIV disease.

Roberto Clemente

A great hitter and an even better outfielder, Roberto Clemente was born in Puerto Rico in 1934. He led his Pittsburgh Pirates team to two World Series titles and was the most valuable player in the National Leage in 1966. Clemente had a throwing arm like a cannon. He played at a time when less than 9% of ball players were of Latino heritage—a figure now close to 30%. He refused to be disrespected (“Don’t call me Bob”) and openly confronted racism against Black and Latino ball players by demanding equal access to restaurants and hotels. Clemente led a successful fight to postpone baseball’s season opener due to the assassination of Martin Luther King and constantly paid tribute to Jackie Robinson. Tragically, Clemente died five months after his retirement when his plane crashed while he was shepherding food to help the people of Nicaragua after a massive earthquake.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was one of the greatest basketball centers of all time, famous for his ‘sky hook” that made him close to unstoppable as a scorer. Like Bill Russell, Kareem did not bow to expectations of white society. He changed his name from Lew Alcindor to KAJ in 1971, declaring that he was originally named after a French man who brought slaves to America. While in college at UCLA, the rules were changed to eliminate dunks in order to limit his success. He protested the Vietnam war and wrote that “disagreeing with those in power is never met with beneficent approval and hearty handshakes but rather with blood, batons, and bullets.” “Yet if we all stayed quietly at home,” Kareem wrote, “there would be no Boston Tea Party, no United States…and we’d still have slavery and segregation. “

Paul Robeson

Robeson makes the list as one of the greatest athletes of his time who went on to become the greatest individual American force for change during the first half of the 20^th century. In 1915 becoming only the third African-American to ever enroll at Rutgers University, and despite encountering pervasive racism at every turn, Robeson went on to become, in the words of legendary football coach Walter Camp, the “greatest end to ever play that position.” He sang and spoke out about the twin evils of racism at home and fascism abroad and supported the anti-Franco forces in Spain. In 1943, he launched his Broadway production of Othello to a 20-minute standing ovation. In 1950, the US State Department revoked Robeson’s passport, calling him “the most dangerous man in America.” When called before HUAC for his activism, Robeson refused to leave the country, name names, or apologize for his political activities including his sympathies for communists and the Soviet Union. Ultimately, he was perhaps the greatest American voice for freedom and equality during the 1930s and 1940s.

Final Overtime

Yes, there were no votes Caitlin Clark (transformative, maybe, but apolitical), Babe Zaharias (too obscure), or Renee Richards (predated trans politics and had little social aftereffect). Those who did receive some votes but didn’t make our list included Joe Louis, Jim Brown, Serena Williams, Jim Thorpe, Martina Navratilova, Bill Walton, Babe Didrickson, and Mahmoud Rauf.

We hope you enjoyed the list and we welcome you to do better.

C. James was a Division 1 basketball player in early 70s till his involvement in the new communist movement. He recently retired from teaching at the University of Illinois.

Bill Silver is a community activist who recently retired after 40 years as a union member and staff organizer. Bill traces his early socialist beginnings to a high school walkout following the killings at Kent and Jackson State. He is an avid athlete and sports fan who has currently found a new home on the pickleball courts.

Richard Saks is a 1976 Rutgers-Livingston College alum, who upon Paul Robeson’s death in 1976, helped spearhead a valiant struggle by students and faculty to rename the school as Robeson College.

Tomorrow, Liberation Road is co-hosting a movement call we hope you can join:

Stop the War: A Movement Call for Self-Determination and Freedom

📅 Tuesday, March 17

🕗 8:00pm et / 7:00 pm ct / 5:00pm pt

Click here to register now

In preparation for that conversation, Liberation Road is sharing a short strategy memo outlining four commitments that guide our approach to the war on Iran and the broader crisis unfolding across the region.

Here are four core commitments—shaped in dialogue with key movement partners—that we think can help anchor a principled internationalist response to the US/Israeli war on Iran.

1. We defend Iranian self-determination and unequivocally oppose the US/Israel war of aggression.

• We demand an end to violence and a return to diplomacy, the rule of international law, and political solutions, beginning with the immediate cessation of attacks by the US and Israeli governments.

• We affirm Iran’s right to self-determination against US, Israeli and all foreign military aggression, sanctions, and regime change — without endorsing the Iranian regime.

• We recognize the United States and Israel as the initiating aggressors in this conflict, wielding dominant military and economic power as part of a broader imperialist project.

• We acknowledge Iran’s own regional imperialist ambitions and reactionary alliances are real—but they do not justify this war.

2. We stand in solidarity with the Iranian people in their struggles against domestic repression.

• We center the Iranian people—not the state—and their long history of resistance to both domestic tyranny and foreign domination.

• We stand with workers, women, LGBTQ+ people, Kurds, and other oppressed nationalities, groups, and movements in Iran.

• We reject campism and “enemy of my enemy” logic. We oppose US imperial aggression and condemn the Iranian regime’s domestic oppression at the same time.

3. We stand for Palestinian liberation as part of the same struggle.

• We understand the war on Iran in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza and the broader US and Israeli imperialist projects.

• We affirm the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination as a stateless and oppressed nation.

• We stand in solidarity with progressive forces in Palestine and Israel, while recognizing that questions of resistance strategy and political leadership for the Palestinian people belong to the Palestinian people themselves.

• We recognize that decades of US and Israeli intervention have weakened secular, leftist and democratic forces across the region, strengthening reactionary currents.

4. We organize to defeat authoritarianism and empire at home and abroad.

• We affirm that our primary responsibility to the peoples of Iran, Palestine, and the world is to restrain and weaken our own government’s capacity for war and imperialism.

• We understand that imperialism abroad strengthens authoritarianism at home—especially against Black, Brown, immigrant, LGBQT+, feminist and working-class communities.

• We commit to building a broad anti-war movement that rejects both imperial aggression and authoritarian apologism, wherever they occur.

• We organize to defeat the forces of war and repression and to shift the balance of power toward principled internationalism and democratic renewal.

Tensions and contradictions in our movements

Our approach should aim for the broadest possible anti-war front while clearly articulating our position on those points—and strengthening a left current aligned with them. As we do so, here are some tensions and contradictions to navigate within our movements:

• Campism vs. principled internationalism
  Some sectors of the anti-war movement frame global conflicts through a “campist” lens, treating any state opposed to the US as objectively progressive. This can lead to apologism for authoritarian regimes such as the Islamic Republic. We reject this logic: opposition to US imperialism must go hand-in-hand with solidarity with oppressed peoples around the world resisting repression by their own governments.

• Liberal anti-war politics vs. structural critique of empire

  Another tendency limits opposition to Trump’s war to procedural arguments (Congressional authorization, constitutional violations, lack of defined war goals) without confronting the deeper imperial structures driving US policy in the region. While these arguments can help broaden opposition, they do not by themselves challenge the regional order shaped by US and Israeli military dominance.

• Iranian diaspora divides around war and regime change

  Within Iranian diaspora communities there are deep and understandable divisions: some currents support US/Israeli intervention in hopes of toppling the regime, while others defend the Islamic Republic as a bulwark against Western imperialism. These divisions can spill into movement spaces. Our aim should be to align with forces that oppose both US war and regime tyranny, and that center the self-determination of the Iranian people.

• Breaking the false divide Between Iranian and Palestinian liberation

  Some forces opposing the war on Iran hesitate to foreground its connection to Israel’s war on Gaza and the broader regional project of US and Israeli power, fearing that Palestine remains polarizing in US politics. At the same time, in some movement spaces solidarity with Palestine becomes conflated with uncritical support for states that claim to back the Palestinian cause, such as Iran. Our task is to connect the dots between the struggles of the Iranian and Palestinian people.

• Narrow anti-war framing vs. broader anti-authoritarian struggle

  Some US anti-war organizing focuses exclusively on stopping the immediate military escalation without connecting it to the domestic political terrain. In reality, imperial war abroad strengthens authoritarian politics and repression at home. The fight against war and US imperialism is inseparable from struggles against racism, sexism, repression, and oligarchic power inside the United States.

Implications for our Work

• Build the broadest possible anti-war front against escalation with Iran, including forces whose analysis differs from ours, while maintaining political clarity about imperialism, self-determination, and democracy.

• Deepen the political analysis of the anti-war movement from procedural anti-war arguments toward a structural critique of empire, situating this conflict within the wider imperial structures shaping US and Israeli power in the region.

• Strengthen a principled internationalist pole within the anti-war movement—one that rejects both imperial aggression and authoritarian apologism, wherever it occurs.

• Clearly link opposition to the war on Iran with the struggle for Palestinian liberation, situating both within the broader regional project of US and Israeli military dominance.

• Stand in solidarity with the Iranian people’s struggles against repression, emphasizing that democratic change in Iran must come from internal mass movements rather than foreign intervention.

• Connect opposition to war abroad with struggles against authoritarianism, racism, and repression inside the United States, particularly as militarism strengthens attacks on Black, Brown, immigrant, LGBTQ+, feminist and working-class communities.

• Center movements and peoples rather than states and regimes in our political analysis, strategy, and solidarity.

If these questions are on your mind, we hope you’ll join us for tomorrow’s movement call. Stop the War: A Movement Call for Self-Determination and Freedom.

Click here to register now