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.

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

Join Liberation Road and Rising Majority for a webinar and panel discussion on the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, moderated by Bill Fletcher, Jr.

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

Tuesday, March 17, 2026 at 8:00 PM ET / 7:00 PM CT / 5:00 PM PT

Register: https://actionnetwork.org/events/stop-the-war-a-movement-call-for-self-determination-and-freedom-2/?source=liberationroad

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are waging a catastrophic war on Iran. Their governments’ escalating attacks are already bringing devastating consequences: civilian deaths, expanding regional conflict, and the real risk of another endless war that will cost countless lives.

This latest assault on Iran grows directly out of the ongoing war and genocide in Gaza and a decades-long US and Israeli imperialist project to reshape the Middle East. From Gaza to Lebanon to Iran, the same logic is at work: expanding US-Israeli military dominance while closing off the political space for democratic and emancipatory movements across the region.

For the Iranian people, the suffering did not begin with these bombings. Earlier this year, the Iranian regime brutally suppressed a wave of popular uprisings, adding to a long history of repression. The people of Iran have endured violence both from their own rulers and from decades of US-led sanctions, threats, and military intervention.

Rising authoritarianism inside Iran, Israel, and the United States both feeds and is intensified by this war between them. There is a deep connection between internal repression and external war: the same forces driving this imperialist war of aggression are escalating repression, racism, and attacks on democratic rights inside the United States.

That’s why we’re co-hosting a webinar with Rising Majority to discuss the war, what it means, and our movements’ response. Speakers include:

• Puya Gerami, Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy

• Sara Haghdoosti, MoveOn

• Samer Araabi, Arab Resource & Organizing Center

• Eran Efrati, Jewish Voice for Peace

• Bill Fletcher (Moderator), Standing for Democracy

Each of these speakers will offer a unique and much-needed perspective on the long history of Iranian people’s struggle against both domestic authoritarianism and foreign intervention; the regional implications of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, including the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza; and the entwinement of the U.S. imperialist agenda and Israel’s Zionist project.

As our movements mobilize to the streets to resist this war, pressure Congress to course correct on this reckless decision by the Trump and Netanyahu regimes, and get organized to save as many lives as possible, our hope is that this discussion can help strengthen our understanding of what’s at stake and what’s to be done.

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PS - You can also take action today by signing an open letter from Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy (IAPD), a new grassroots network. Formed in response to both pro-war voices in parts of the Iranian diaspora and apologism for the regime in some anti-war spaces, IAPD advances a clear alternative: reject both US bombs and the Iranian regime’s tyranny while standing with the Iranian people’s struggle for democracy.

👉 Read and sign the letter at https://iapd.net/

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1.

it is not refuge wanderers seek
weary, teary, hungry
they come for you and me
they come for life, 
and community.

2.

And the people will suffer war
because they will suffer their leaders, 
bars on shoulders 
bureaucracies 
nuclear nightmares
and worshippers of
murder and madness
on a planet
unmoored
determined 
to start over without us.
in a better world
the only restraints would be
the bonds of family
of camaraderie
of our ties to ancestors
of their love for us.
in this world chains, bars
guns and the clatter of war.
our task is justice
is love.
love in search of peace
we will know joy in struggle,
resolve, commitment.
we have eyes on our 
ancestors and our children
and their grandchildren
Dogon and Dragon
wrap ourselves with time itself
hands on history.
Our path could not be clearer.

Peter Hardie is a veteran member of Liberation Road, the trade union movement, the Black liberation movement, and other social movements of the 70s and 80s in the US. He is a poet, father, sailor, Buddhist, and abolitionist.

The murder of Alex Pretti, a union nurse who worked in the ICU at a VA Hospital in Minneapolis, set off a wave of outrage across the country. While mass resistance to ICE has been forming across the country since the start of the second Trump administration, many potential allies in the fight, including unions, have been far too dormant in this regard, distracted and frozen by the onslaught of manufactured crises from the New Confederacy.

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Something about the broad-daylight execution-style nature of Pretti’s killing tapped into a current of horrified energy that was waiting to be unleashed. As socialists working as staffers at a prominent nursing union, we immediately noticed a tangible shift in how everyone—staff, leadership, and rank and file members—was talking about ICE. A topic that had been previously seen as niche, or even taboo, suddenly became the main thing people were talking about.

We knew that we needed to capture the energy of this moment, and that we had an opportunity to mobilize our union to shift its orientation towards resistance to ICE.

The first thing we did was call an emergency meeting for all staff on Monday morning. For this, we did not ask for permission from union management, recognizing that because of the fire of the moment, we had a mandate to supersede management, who may have tried to quell or water down a response. A supermajority of staff, including many in administrative and non-organizing positions, attended the meeting. Some of the outcomes included forming several ad hoc groups to:

1. Partner with the existing ICE defense infrastructure in our state to put on healthcare-specific trainings for our members.

2. Push our local to donate thousands of dollars to immigrant defense organizations both in our own state and in Minnesota.

3. Create a rap of political education to be used by organizers in the field.

On the membership side, a few months before a Signal thread had been created between trusted, left members and staff. Using the Signal thread, some of the member activists began spontaneously organizing vigils across the state. These ended up being well attended, sites of connection, and necessary grieving for not just nurses, but other healthcare workers and working-class people looking for a place to be in community.

Then, using the sign-ins from these vigils as a starting point, the member activists began drafting a solidarity letter addressed to Alex Pretti’s family. There was some discussion about whether to have this be an informal letter, but we pushed to have the letter be sent to the board/elected leadership of the union for official approval. We identified that because of the level of mobilization and anger, even though we have plenty of ICE-supporting members who would be upset, we felt we had the power to push the board to make this letter an official union matter.

In this case, we were right—the board voted unanimously to endorse the letter, which allowed us to use union resources to send it to tens of thousands of union members across the state. Now, we can follow up with all signatories to plug them into ICE defense trainings, and continue to raise money and other resources for mutual aid projects.

We recognized that the killing of Alex Pretti was a trigger moment, and we couldn’t wait to let neoliberal elements of union leadership co-opt a response. We identified some of the available infrastructure we had to mobilize—calling an emergency staff meeting, communicating on the activist Signal thread, etc.—and pushed for material shifts in union resources, which have re-oriented the priorities of our union since.

Every union and community can expect to have an event that triggers exceptional outrage and shock. We cannot control what these events are, nor anticipate when they will arrive, but it’s our job as organizers to pay attention to the way moods shift on the shop floor, and be ready to contest for power.

Joanna Walsh is a queer, Jewish organizer and writer, who has worked for a decade as a union organizer and across social movements. They wrote this article along with a fellow nurse and organizer.

TAKE ACTION to stop US/Israeli imperial aggression and support the Iranian people’s struggle against brutal state repression. Call your lawmakers now, join a mass call TONIGHT (March 2), and sign and distribute a petition from Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy.

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On Saturday, February 28, the Trump regime launched an unprovoked and unconscionable war on Iran, joining Israel’s military in large-scale air and missile strikes across the country. Iran has responded with missile and drone attacks on Israeli targets and US bases across the Middle East. Civilian and US military casualties are already being reported, including more than 100 at a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran. The risk of rapid escalation is extremely high.

This is a reckless, destabilizing act of imperial aggression that threatens millions of people in Iran and across the region. It also poses serious political dangers here in the United States: foreign wars are a classic tool authoritarians use to consolidate power at home, distract from domestic crises, and further erode democratic accountability.

Congress has not authorized the use of force against Iran, nor has the Trump administration made any serious effort to justify this war to the public. Instead, emboldened by earlier attacks on Iran and Venezuela, Trump has once again acted unilaterally, ignoring the War Powers Act, designed to check the president’s power to commit armed forces to hostile action without congressional approval.

Congress has the power to stop this criminal war on Iran. The House and Senate will both vote on war powers resolutions, possibly as early as Tuesday this week. We must demand that Congress act now to stop this from becoming another endless war.

TAKE ACTION: Call your lawmakers now to tell them to stop war with Iran. Demand Progress has a simple tool you can use. Dial this phone number: 1-833-STOP-WAR.

They’ll connect you to your lawmakers one after another. Please make as many calls as you can. You can press star to move from call to call or if there’s no answer. Once you’re connected to an office or an answering machine, you can say:

“I’m calling as a constituent to urge you to support an Iran War Powers Resolution to stop war with Iran.”

TAKE ACTION: Join a mass movement-wide call TONIGHT, Monday, March 2, 7 PM ET/4 PM PT.

Join Liberation Road and our partners for an emergency movement call hosted by MoveOn, 50501, and Win Without War to get context on what is unfolding and discuss a concrete plan for collective action. Click here to register now.

Congressional action is both winnable and critical. Democratic House and Senate leadership have signalled support for a war powers resolution, and MAGA is split on this issue. With concerted public pressure, we have a strong chance to win a vote in the House, and a real shot in the Senate.

Even if Trump ultimately vetoes such a measure, one or both chambers going on record against this war would change the political balance—raising the political cost for the administration, putting legislators on record opposing unauthorized war, and visibly broadening opposition across the political spectrum. In recent conflicts, war powers resolutions have acted as a brake on further escalation even when they have not passed, as a risk-averse and image-conscious Trump has pulled back from the threat of losing face, support, and votes. In this moment, every vote and every call can help save lives.

Stand for BOTH peace abroad and freedom for the Iranian people

Nothing about opposing US war requires minimizing or excusing the crimes of the Iranian regime, an authoritarian state that consolidated power through mass violence and has since repeatedly crushed popular uprisings. From the execution of tens of thousands of leftists in the 1980s to the brutal suppression of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, the Islamic Republic has responded to demands for democracy, women’s liberation, and social justice with imprisonment, torture, and mass killing. Yet Iranians have continued to resist. Their fight for dignity, democratic rights, and self-determination is legitimate, courageous, and deserving of international solidarity.

But war will not liberate Iran. US airstrikes will not advance democracy, women’s rights, or labor struggles; they will deepen suffering, strengthen the forces of reaction, and shrink the space for popular resistance. From Iraq to Libya to Afghanistan, US regime-change wars have produced chaos, mass death, and reaction—not freedom.

The US left must reject a false choice that has repeatedly weakened anti-war politics: the idea that opposing US imperialism requires silence about authoritarian repression by states targeted by Washington, or that condemning repression justifies foreign intervention. We can and must be anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian at the same time.

This false choice also divides the Iranian diaspora, pitting those who look to US power for salvation against those who defend the regime. But there are also many—inside Iran and across the diaspora—who reject both imperial aggression and domestic authoritarianism. We align with those forces, who insist that Iran’s future belongs neither to Washington nor to Tehran’s rulers, but to the Iranian people themselves.

TAKE ACTION: Sign and distribute the petition by Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy (IAPD) for peace abroad and freedom for the Iranian people, here.

Iranian-Americans for Peace and Democracy (IAPD) is an organization of Iranian-Americans who, as members of both the American people and the Iranian diaspora, commit to building both unequivocal opposition to the joint US/Israeli war, and support for establishing secular, multiethnic, multireligious democracy in Iran. Please circulate their online petition far and wide to unite all Iranian-Americans who believe in peace and democracy.

The most meaningful solidarity the US left can offer the Iranian people is to stop this war and confront the authoritarian project driving it, while supporting the Iranian people’s struggle against foreign domination and domestic tyranny. We can exercise solidarity by using every tool available to restrain Trump’s power to wage war and to defeat the political forces that make endless war possible. It is our duty to struggle against imperial aggression, to stand with people resisting repression everywhere, and to help build a future grounded in peace, self-determination, and democracy—for Iran and for ourselves.

As of February 28, Donald Trump has launched an unprovoked, illegal and unjustified war on Iran. Liberation Road condemns this act of imperial aggression and urges our members, allies and all peace loving peoples to take action to demand that the US stops this war now.

Take action:

• Join emergency protests in cities across the country

• Organize a protest in your area and register it here

• Call and email your Senators and Representative to say No War on Iran

Even as we seek to work with all those opposed to war with Iran, we note a critical difference with some other sections of the US anti-war left. Opposition to US imperialism does not require silence about—or support for—the authoritarian Iranian regime. Liberation Road unequivocally condemns US intervention and aggression, and we also stand in solidarity with the Iranian people as they struggle to determine their own future free from both foreign domination and domestic tyranny.

Below we reprint Liberation Road’s February 10th statement on Iran.

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Iran and the Global Fight Against Authoritarianism

By the International Work Team of Liberation Road

Liberation Road stands in solidarity with the Iranian people as they resist authoritarian rule and fight for material survival, dignity, and democratic rights. We condemn the criminal slaughter carried out by the Iranian regime against peaceful protesters and its ongoing repression of political dissidents, women, LGBTQ+ people, Kurds and ethnic minorities, workers, and other oppressed groups. At the same time, we unequivocally condemn US interference in Iran—past and present—which has brought war, sanctions, and collective punishment, not freedom. We call on the United States government to end its threats of military attack, lift sanctions that devastate working-class people, and respect Iran’s national sovereignty.

Opposition to imperialism and solidarity with the oppressed are not competing principles, but dual imperatives that all leftists and internationalists must consistently uphold. We affirm the inalienable right to self-determination of the Iranian people, and we stand in solidarity with them in their struggles against their own despotic regime. In alignment with these two principles, we call on US leftists and all peace-loving peoples to do everything we can to:

1. Prevent US aggression and interference against Iran. There are several Congressional bills that can blunt Trump’s military aggression against Iran, including S.J.Res.104 and S.2087 in the Senate, and H.Con.Res.38, and H.Con.Res.40 in the US House. US leftists must push Congress to use the War Powers Act to force votes and accountability when Trump threatens military action, while being ready to disrupt business as usual should the US regime attack Iran.

2. Support democratic and progressive struggles in Iran. One concrete, material step people in the US can take is to help Iranians bypass internet censorship. Iranian activists have called on supporters to download and run tools such as the Conduit app, developed by researchers affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which enables decentralized VPN access. Individually this is a small, low-effort action—but when thousands do so together, it can make a real and material difference for Iranian activists on the ground facing internet blackouts and surveillance.

Background and Context

The Iranian people have contended with many forms of authoritarian rule since the Second World War. In 1951, the Iranian people selected the progressive nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. In a coup backed by the UK and US, Mossadegh was overthrown and Shah Pahlavi installed. Then in 1979, a broad and multi-tendency movement overthrew the despotic regime of the US-backed Shah. Many left and democratic forces within Iran participated in the Iranian Revolution, and tens of thousands of Iranians returned from exile, hoping to rebuild a democratic Iran.

After the shah’s ouster, a fierce struggle for political leadership erupted between the most progressive and the most reactionary forces within the revolutionary camp. Though severely weakened by repression, left forces mounted a serious challenge. Ultimately however, Islamic fundamentalist forces consolidated power through massive state violence, crushing organized opposition and extinguishing hopes that the new order would evolve toward democracy. Throughout the 1980s, the Islamic Republic executed tens of thousands of leftists, imprisoned and tortured many more, drove hundreds of thousands into exile, imposed compulsory hijab on women, and extinguished basic civil liberties across society.

Since at least the turn of the millennium, Iranians have repeatedly risen up against the regime, each wave broadening resistance, but also hardening repression. The 1999 and 2003 Iranian student protests gave way to the 2009 Green Movement, which brought millions into the streets to contest electoral fraud, demanding free elections and constitutional reform. Subsequent protest cycles in 2011-12, 2017-18 and 2019-20 expanded the movement’s social base as well as its demands—with economic, social, and political grievances intermixing in heterogeneous protests that remained largely leaderless, due both to their spontaneous character and to ongoing repression of political opposition.

Then in 2022 the state’s killing of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, set off the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. Drawing on the lineage of the Kurdish Women’s Movement, the mass revolt situated demands for women’s rights, bodily autonomy, and ethno-national liberation at the center of a broader project of social, political, economic, and ecological emancipation. Though each of these movement cycles was beaten back, they form a living tradition of resistance that, despite its uneven and non-linear development, has seen an overall radicalization of rhetoric and tactics from reformist demands toward more open challenges to the regime.

The Current Wave of Protest and Repression

The most recent wave of protests began in late December 2025, amid a deepening social, political, and economic crisis. Years of sanctions, political corruption, state mismanagement, and ecological breakdown have all contributed to sharp inflation, currency devaluation, and widespread shortages of food, fuel, electricity, and water. Meanwhile the regime continued to pour billions into the military apparatus while neglecting to meet people’s basic needs, causing growing discontent. Notably, the protests were initially sparked by widespread shop closures among Iran’s bazaari—merchants and shopkeepers who have historically formed an important support base of the regime. The participation of these petty bourgeois strata signaled the depth of the crisis and the erosion of support for the Islamic Republic.

The movement soon spread beyond urban centers to smaller cities and rural communities, uniting diverse social forces. By early January, boycotts, closures, and walkouts had intensified into something approaching a general strike, which increasingly included explicit political demands. Claims of widespread monarchist sentiment—often amplified by Western media in ways that serve Israeli and American propaganda interests—should be treated with caution. Where such currents appeared, they often reflected political despair and the absence of credible alternatives after decades of repression more than a coherent project of restoration. What unified the protests’ multi-faceted political currents was a common repudiation of the Islamic Republic, rooted in a deepening rupture between Iranian society and the state.

The government’s response has been brutal and systematic. Although precise figures are difficult to verify, multiple human-rights organizations report death tolls in the tens of thousands, with Time, The Guardian and other media sources suggesting more than 30,000 people may have been killed. These are staggering numbers, dwarfing the death tolls from prior protests and likely even exceeding the 1988 mass executions, which the UN found to be a crime against humanity and a genocide of Iranian political and religious minorities.

The Bloody History of US Intervention

Trump has attempted to exploit the Iranian regime’s brutal despotism to justify his own despotic ambitions. Shedding crocodile tears for the thousands murdered in Iran, he has repeatedly threatened military intervention while attempting to negotiate a “deal.”

But US intervention has never served the interests of the Iranian people and has repeatedly strengthened authoritarian forces while inflicting immense suffering on civilians. From the CIA-backed coup in 1953, to the US government’s support for the Shah’s repressive regime, to military strikes, sanctions, and covert operations in the post-revolutionary period, US involvement has consistently undermined popular self-determination.

Today, US policy toward Iran continues this destructive pattern. Crushing economic sanctions function as a form of collective punishment, deepening poverty, accelerating inflation, and restricting access to food, medicine, and basic infrastructure. These measures disproportionately harm ordinary people, while political and military elites find ways to shield themselves from the worst effects. Meanwhile the repeated use or threat of naval deployments, air strikes, and proxy warfare increases the risk of catastrophic conflict while narrowing political space inside Iran.

Rejecting the False Choice of Interventionism and Campism

One response to the Iranian regime’s atrocities begins from a genuine moral horror at the scale of repression and bloodshed, but arrives at a disastrous conclusion: that US power must intervene to “save” the Iranian people. This view treats imperial intervention as a humanitarian instrument, ignoring its actual historical record. US military threats and economic sanctions do not protect protesters—they isolate them, discredit them as foreign agents, and provide the regime with justification for intensified repression. There is no imperial shortcut to liberation.

An opposing error begins from a justified revulsion toward US imperialism, but resolves that revulsion by excusing—or even celebrating—the crimes of the Iranian state. In this framework, any regime opposed to Washington is treated as progressive by definition, and popular uprisings against it are dismissed as foreign plots. This position abandons the Iranian people to their executioners in the name of “anti-imperialism.” Anti-imperialism that requires silence about mass repression is not anti-imperialism at all.

We reject the false dichotomy that forces us to choose between support for self-determination and solidarity with the oppressed. We agree with the position put forward in a statement signed by the Zapatistas and many other left forces around the world. As these groups note, this false choice is the product of people looking at the situation from outside, and above. “Up above against up above. Power against power.” Like them, we look below:

“Down below, the Iranian people struggle for life.

Down below are the women who challenge patriarchal control every day.

Down below are the workers impoverished by neoliberal policies.

Down below are sexual minorities, religious minorities, oppressed peoples, and those who live in the peripheries beaten by the water, housing, and employment crises.”

As we in the US resist state violence, political repression, and attacks on the rights and lives of immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, and the multiracial working class, we recognize that our fight against fascism is inseparable from the struggles of the Iranian people and of all peoples around the world confronting authoritarianism under different conditions. We stand in solidarity with them.

On Thursday, February 12, the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), representing 6,500 teachers, paraeducators, counselors, nurses, and school psychologists, declared victory after a four-day strike, the first one in 47 years.

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After 11 months of bargaining, the union not only won important economic demands, including wage increases and fully funded health care. It also won demands for “the common good,” which helped to mobilize parents, students, city officials, small businesses, and community members across the city and beyond. The new contract includes sanctuary protections for students and educators, by :

• Formally designating school campuses as sanctuary spaces.

• Prohibiting cooperation with ICE without a criminal judicial warrant.

• Requiring sanctuary policy training for all staff.

• Guaranteeing newcomer students and families access to legal, housing, health, employment, and food security resources.

• Limiting immigration status inquiries to what is strictly required by law.

UESF also won an extension of the “Stay Over Program” which allows unhoused families to stay overnight at school campuses throughout the city.

In addition, the union negotiated protections from the effects of artificial intelligence. The district is prohibited from using AI to replace union members or their work or to increase educator workloads; nor can it use AI for staff evaluations.

Solidarity made visible

The energy over the course of the four days the union was on strike was contagious and affected everyone. You couldn’t go anywhere in the city without hearing the singing, music, drumming, and noise on the picket lines—including from all the commuters, bus drivers, commercial truckers and others, continuously honking in support of the striking workers.

As a parent of a public school student, I saw and felt the solidarity—kids baking to feed and support their teachers and administrators on the picket lines; community groups organizing alternative childcare programs for the younger kids at urban farms and gardens; artists screenprinting signs and t-shirts at community print shops, and all the usual support for people on strike coming from members of other unions, as well as nonunion staff at schools, parents, and workers throughout the city.

The union’s organizing power inspired political activism by many students in the city. Just a few weeks earlier, students had organized a joyful school walkout, in defense of immigrants and in solidarity with the people of Minneapolis and all those impacted by ICE terror across the country. Now, students showed solidarity with the striking educators. My 17-year-old son’s school, the only public arts high school in the city, was particularly ebullient, with the school’s drummers and dancers taking over the street, sidewalks, and medians. Children and their parents brought their own handmade signs and banners to picket lines at over 100 schools, adding to the joyful feel.

Collective power forces the district to prioritize students and educators

From what I could see, the union leadership and members were unified (97.6% had voted yes to authorizing a strike) and incredibly resilient through what was clearly a very frustrating process with the Superintendent and Board of Education. Adding to the frustration was a millionaire mayor (not just one or two but hundreds of millions of dollars from the Levi fortune) who has little understanding and even less interest in how the issues leading to the strike impact governance in a state where public education has been eviscerated by austerity, privatization, and disinvestment, as well as ongoing attacks on the Ethnic Studies curriculum.

In a historic act of solidarity, the city’s two other school unions joined the picket lines in sympathy strikes: SEIU 1021, representing some of the district’s lowest-paid workers, including 1,000 custodians, food service workers, and clerks, as well as the union representing 250 principals and supervisors. The solidarity strike ensured a total work stoppage, forcing the closure of all San Francisco public schools. Meanwhile, the school district unnecessarily spent funds to get part-time contractors, including some paraeducators and noon-monitors, to cross the picket line into empty schools—and face the shouts of “scab” from the strike supporters.

After joining a few morning pickets throughout the week, I took a mid-day work break on Wednesday, day three of the strike. I rode my bike to join the human banner at Ocean Beach, standing with striking educators from my kid’s old middle school. (These human banners are becoming more and more common here in SF—recent ones include “NO KINGS, YES ON PROP 50,” “ABOLISH ICE,” and “IT WAS MURDER: ICE OUT.”)

The next day, Thursday, February 12, UESF announced a tentative two-year agreement covering 100% employer paid family health care benefits, special education workloads, improved wages, and sanctuary and housing protections for families in the district’s schools.

It was inspiring as a parent to see how the union’s broad and deep organizing, for public education and for the common good, led to victories for educators, students, immigrant families, and community members–the city as a whole. In UESF's words:

This historic strike built an unbreakable solidarity across our city, among families, students, educators and community…At a time when there are ongoing attacks on our profession and our communities, we stood strong in the face of adversity because our students deserve sanctuary schools, shelter in times of crisis, and classrooms staffed with trusted and committed educators who can stay.

Here’s to worker power and organizing for the common good that gets the goods!

Michelle Foy is a parent, member of Liberation Road, and through her day job and other organizational hats, is deeply involved in movement operations work to support power building for working class communities of color in California and beyond.

By the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road

Right now, 90 miles from our shore, the people of Cuba are facing the most extreme attack by the United States in at least a generation. The Trump administration has moved to choke off all remaining fuel access to the island. Venezuela and Mexico—the two countries that have supplied the vast majority of Cuba’s oil—have been compelled, through force and threats, to halt shipments. This has caused an escalating humanitarian crisis that threatens vital infrastructure, from electricity and water systems to food distribution. The intended result is clear: the end of Cuban sovereignty through economic strangulation, and the end of an experiment that has inspired socialists and anti-imperialists around the world.

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Trump’s hemispheric power grab

That Cuba has survived decades of political, diplomatic, and above all economic suffocation—the world’s longest-running economic embargo—is a testament to the resilience, organization, and defiance of the Cuban people. It is also a testament to international solidarity, especially from socialist and progressive governments that have refused to abandon the island, from the Soviet Union in earlier decades to Venezuela more recently. Mexico, the lone member of the Organization of American States to refuse to sever ties with Havana in 1964, has had a consistent record of solidarity in the decades since.

Now the Trump administration has escalated the United States’ long-standing, vindictive embargo by targeting even those allies that have most consistently stood with Cuba. First Venezuela, and now Mexico, have found themselves the target of concerted US aggression.

This past December, the administration launched a campaign of piracy, illegally seizing Venezuelan fuel tankers bound for the island. It then carried out the extraordinary kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, extorting the remaining leadership of the country into cutting off relations with Cuba altogether. While this assault on Venezuelan sovereignty appeared to serve multiple—perhaps conflicting—objectives from forces in the Trump regime, one clear aim was to assert control over Venezuela’s oil, both as a strategic asset in its own right and as a means of increasing pressure on Cuba.

Since then, Trump has attempted to use tariff threats to extend this chokehold. By threatening to impose punitive tariffs on any country that supplies Cuba with oil, the US is effectively trying to impose a universal blockade on the island. Though framed as a trade measure, this policy is illegal under international law and amounts in practice to an act of war. Under this pressure, Mexico—which provided almost half of Cuba’s oil supply—made the difficult decision to suspend its shipments. Against the backdrop of devastating tariff threats and the chilling precedent set by US military action in Venezuela, one of Cuba’s last sources of fuel was turned off.

The US Supreme Court’s February 20 tariff ruling dealt Trump’s plans a blow, invalidating this use of tariffs for economic warfare against Cuba. But the administration is likely to find other ways to impose more sanctions, and to continue its blockade of oil shipments, using the military to prowl the Caribbean and seize ships that support the island. A Russian tanker carrying diesel oil is now reported to be headed to Cuba, a potential geopolitical power play in the Western hemisphere.

The administration’s escalating attacks on Cuba, Venezuela, and Mexico cannot be understood in isolation. They are interconnected components of a multi-pronged offensive to reassert US dominance in Latin America through direct intervention and indirect interference in elections and economic policy. Left unchecked, these efforts risk destroying whatever vitality remains in Cuba, more deeply ensnaring Mexico, and forcing much harsher choices and narrower futures on progressive governments and social movements throughout Latin America.

Stopping US empire means building power here

The US left must stand for the sovereignty and self-determination of all peoples and against this period of increasingly illegal and violent US interference and intervention in Latin America wherever it is enacted or threatened.

Our solidarity with the Cuban people can take material form. As Cuba faces deepening shortages and humanitarian strain, initiatives such as the Nuestra América Convoy are organizing flotillas and aid deliveries to bring food, medicine, and other essential supplies to the island. We should support and contribute to these efforts, demonstrating that nations’ peoples can come to one another’s aid even when their governments seek to prevent it.

Ultimately, however, the most decisive arena of solidarity for US leftists lies here, inside the United States. For decades, Cubans have been clear about what solidarity means in practice. When asked what US Americans can do to help, their answer has been: go home and build the struggle for power there.

In the immediate term, we should urge Congress to act, including by supporting H.R. 7521, the United States-Cuba Trade Act, which would repeal the statutory basis of the US embargo. At the same time, we must be clear-eyed about the balance of forces: with a quiescent GOP majority enabling Trump’s actions and entrenched—if shifting—bipartisan hostility toward Cuba, neither congressional channels nor protest alone will likely be enough to stop these escalating attacks

Unless we are able to contest for power inside the United States—to restrain its capacity for economic and military coercion, and ultimately to transform US foreign policy towards more just ends—the peoples of Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, and Latin America will continue to face impossible choices imposed from Washington.

The Trump regime’s foreign policy mirrors its domestic project: the consolidation of white-supremacist rule, the plunder of working people and poorer nations to enrich oligarchs, and the use of militarized violence against all who resist.

Progressive internationalism must therefore be a central component of the program with which we unite the broadest possible front against Trump. As we build mass opposition to authoritarianism at home, we must integrate political education about US foreign policy into our organizing and bring demands to end economic warfare and military aggression against our Latin American neighbors into mass mobilizations and campaigns. In doing so, we can both defeat MAGA and shift the balance of power within the pro-democracy united front toward forces committed to a Third Reconstruction and a genuinely progressive foreign policy.

Jesse Jackson’s passing has engendered many articles about his life, work, and place in history—including Bill Fletcher’s piece here in the New Liberator. In this post we give space to personal memories and reflections by organizers who worked directly with Jackson or were significantly influenced by him and the Rainbow Coalition.

We invite New Liberator readers to contribute their own personal reflections about Jackson and his work in the comments.

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Bill Gallegos— veteran activist in the Chican@ Liberation Struggle and the environmental justice movement:

One of my fondest political memories is going to San Antonio in 1988 with a delegation of Los Angeles “Latinos for Jesse Jackson.” We worked with some wonderful gentes from San Anto, and we focused on the public housing development on West Side, right across from the incredible Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. We received an overwhelmingly positive response from the Chicanada living in the development. The co-chair of the Texas Jackson campaign was “Little Joe” of “La Familia” fame. He called for a rally for Jesse at a west side park and 48 hours later 5,000 people showed up. Little Joe welcomed the crowd and did a nice baile with Jaqueline Jackson—the Reverend’s spouse—and she gave a rousing speech. When introducing her, Little Joe reminded the Chicano crowd about the importance of Black-Brown unity with the phrase “we are only a shade away.” What an evening and what a memory.

Jeff Crosby—worker at General Electric in Lynn, Massachusetts, for 33 years; president of his local union and the area Labor Council:

What I remember specifically about Jackson and learned from him is the way he could make very complicated arguments into a simple powerful educational statement. I was forever trying to figure how to build a movement against free trade which was killing my union local and community, without contributing to xenophobia and potentially war. What I took from Jackson I used again and again: “China didn’t take your jobs. GE took your jobs to China.”

The other phrase I remember and used a lot is “the people who take the early bus.” There is a whole world of working class life that starts at 4:30 to 6:00 in the morning as people take public transportation for a half hour or an hour and a half to get to their jobs, or even the people who deliver your newspaper with their kids asleep in the back seat at 3:30 in the morning on freezing unplowed winter roads (for those of us who still get papers delivered). Middle class people don’t even know that world exists. But Jackson spoke of and for them.

I will miss that.

Meizhu Lui—former president of an AFSCME local; community health and economic justice organizer:

Jesse Jackson’s passing made me remember others too, who were, unlike the Barack Obamas, willing to name racism and turn inclusion into a unifying message.

Let’s not forget that wonderfully scrappy black woman, “Unbought and Unbossed” Shirley Chisholm, who in 1968 became the first black woman to be elected to the US Congress. Racism and sexism didn’t quiet her down, they pepped her up. She ran in the Democratic party primary for the US Presidential candidate in 1972, promising to bring marginalized peoples into places of power, and winning 152 delegate votes.

And there’s Mel King, who formed the first Rainbow Coalition — before Jesse — when he ran for the Mayor of Boston in 1983. I was working in the kitchen at Boston City Hospital, and was president of our AFSMCE local; we always tried to get our members, the majority African American, to go vote. But it wasn’t until Mel and then Jesse that they did. Having candidates who they knew shared their lived experiences and who would not abandon them after the election finally lit them on fire. We campaigned like our lives depended on it. Which they did.

David Bacon—California writer, documentary photographer, and former union organizer. See davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com:

For a while it seemed like Jesse was everywhere. In the last years I worked as an organizer he ran for President, and the first picture I took of him was speaking at a Labor Day picnic - all the big labor leaders behind him - Jimmy Herman, then president of the ILWU, Jack Henning, our rebellious leader of the state labor federation, and others. We organized our labor committee of the Rainbow Coalition, and it was not hard to convince our unions that he was the one. The idea of running for president by bringing in the excluded, enfranchising the disenfranchised, was our touchstone from then on.

But I remember him best because he came out for workers again and again, long after he wasn’t running for anything anymore. I’m sure it’s the workers who remember him best, because the photographs show it. The nurses with Rose Ann De Moro at Summit Hospital, the members of my own union, the then-Northern California Newspaper Guild and the other unions of our conference facing the Chronicle, and the farmworkers in that huge march in Watsonville. You can see the way the hotel workers look at him, during the lockout of Local 2. Barbara Lee, then Congresswoman (the only one with the courage to vote against the Iraq war) and now Oakland Mayor, is there with him fighting for the workers in the nursing homes.

He didn’t come just for labor, of course. He came for the students, battling the University of California to keep affirmative action. He walked with the women at the head of the National March to Fight the Radical Right. And amidst it all, I sometimes found a man lost in his thoughts, perhaps grateful for a moment out of the crowd.

You were there for us, Jesse.

Jamala Rogers—long-time organizer, feminist, and political strategist with deep roots in the Black Liberation Movement

Rev. Jesse Jackson was undeniably a transformative civil rights figure. He was charismatic, strategic, and analytical. For those of us who were in organizing spaces with the reverend, we also saw another dimension of the iconic leader.

Rev. Jackson’s ambition for recognition and influence matched his dedication to racial equity and economic justice. He maintained a healthy balance between the two and for the most part, avoided being labeled a “movement opportunist.” Sometimes the label was inescapable, like when he came to Ferguson, Missouri, during the uprising after the murder of young Mike Brown. However, during the Ferguson uprising after Mike Brown’s murder, some young activists criticized his visit as self-serving. Actually, Jackson had been asked to lead the fundraising effort at a particular event. Jackson was pretty adept with the ole Baptist church practice of raising monies by denominations: If you have $1000, come forward. If you have $500, and on down to $5. I saw him raise thousands of dollars using this method.

Jackson understood how to motivate people and move them in a strategic direction. He was an eloquent speaker and astute at taking complex concepts and rolling them into language that the masses could understand. Jesse already knew what he would say, how to say it, and what its impact would be.

My fondest memories of Jesse Jackson are from his 1988 presidential run on Super Tuesday. As a member of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) and a contributor to its newspaper Unity, I spent six weeks with a fellow LRS member, a professional photographer, traveling through the southern region as part of the campaign’s advance team. The LRS was heavily invested and involved in both Jackson’s presidential campaigns and the Rainbow Coalition.

As a journalist/organizer, I embedded myself in communities to capture the vital work of dedicated volunteers who tirelessly registered voters, educated the public on critical issues, planned fundraisers, and implemented security-conscious Get Out The Vote efforts (GOTV).

Two key organizing lessons I learned during that Super Tuesday stint. I recall asking Ms. Mabel, one of the team leaders, why they were not wearing Jackson buttons. Anyone who knows me knows that I proudly wear my political T-shirts and buttons to raise awareness. She explained that they needed to be able to move freely through the community without being targeted by the local white power structure. After all, it was the South, with its ugly history of racial terrorism against Black voters. I witnessed firsthand what true organizing looks like in oppressive political conditions and the unspoken realities of second-class citizenship that persistently shape these communities. Lesson (re)learned: Understand the material conditions you face in a given situation so that you use the appropriate organizing tactics.

It was fascinating to watch Jesse Jackson in his element. I saw volunteers puff up with pride when he thanked them for their efforts. He convinced them that they were part of something bigger. When there were multiracial teams, especially if there was going to be a photo opportunity, I watched him literally rearrange bodies so that the image would reflect a visual rainbow, not just a hodge-podge of people grouped together by race and gender. Lesson learned: A rainbow coalition is about both image and substance.

A significant part of Jesse Jackson’s legacy is the acknowledgment that organizing the multiracial working class was critical to winning political power under U.S. capitalism. The need for a national strategy that embraces the principles of a rainbow coalition is still relevant. Radicals and progressive reformists have been given the groundwork and the framework for achieving multinational unity through the electoral arena. Now it’s time to intensify the work—and keep hope alive.

Also see reflections by:

Gene Bruskin in The Stansbury Forum, Jesse Jackson was a Labor Leader

Carl Davidson in LeftLinks, Jesse Opened a Rainbow Path Forward, Now We Must Build and Walk a New Road

As of February 28, Donald Trump has launched an unprovoked, illegal and unjustified war on Iran. Liberation Road condemns this act of imperial aggression and urges our members, allies and all peace loving peoples to take action to demand that the US stops this war now.

Take action:

• Join emergency protests in cities across the country

• Organize a protest in your area and register it here

• Call and email your Senators and Representative to say No War on Iran

Even as we seek to work with all those opposed to war with Iran, we note a critical difference with some other sections of the US anti-war left. Opposition to US imperialism does not require silence about—or support for—the authoritarian Iranian regime. Liberation Road unequivocally condemns US intervention and aggression, and we also stand in solidarity with the Iranian people as they struggle to determine their own future free from both foreign domination and domestic tyranny.

Below we reprint Liberation Road’s February 10th statement on Iran.

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Iran and the Global Fight Against Authoritarianism

By the International Work Team of Liberation Road

Liberation Road stands in solidarity with the Iranian people as they resist authoritarian rule and fight for material survival, dignity, and democratic rights. We condemn the criminal slaughter carried out by the Iranian regime against peaceful protesters and its ongoing repression of political dissidents, women, LGBTQ+ people, Kurds and ethnic minorities, workers, and other oppressed groups. At the same time, we unequivocally condemn US interference in Iran—past and present—which has brought war, sanctions, and collective punishment, not freedom. We call on the United States government to end its threats of military attack, lift sanctions that devastate working-class people, and respect Iran’s national sovereignty.

Opposition to imperialism and solidarity with the oppressed are not competing principles, but dual imperatives that all leftists and internationalists must consistently uphold. We affirm the inalienable right to self-determination of the Iranian people, and we stand in solidarity with them in their struggles against their own despotic regime. In alignment with these two principles, we call on US leftists and all peace-loving peoples to do everything we can to:

1. Prevent US aggression and interference against Iran. There are several Congressional bills that can blunt Trump’s military aggression against Iran, including S.J.Res.104 and S.2087 in the Senate, and H.Con.Res.38, and H.Con.Res.40 in the US House. US leftists must push Congress to use the War Powers Act to force votes and accountability when Trump threatens military action, while being ready to disrupt business as usual should the US regime attack Iran.

2. Support democratic and progressive struggles in Iran. One concrete, material step people in the US can take is to help Iranians bypass internet censorship. Iranian activists have called on supporters to download and run tools such as the Conduit app, developed by researchers affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which enables decentralized VPN access. Individually this is a small, low-effort action—but when thousands do so together, it can make a real and material difference for Iranian activists on the ground facing internet blackouts and surveillance.

Background and Context

The Iranian people have contended with many forms of authoritarian rule since the Second World War. In 1951, the Iranian people selected the progressive nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. In a coup backed by the UK and US, Mossadegh was overthrown and Shah Pahlavi installed. Then in 1979, a broad and multi-tendency movement overthrew the despotic regime of the US-backed Shah. Many left and democratic forces within Iran participated in the Iranian Revolution, and tens of thousands of Iranians returned from exile, hoping to rebuild a democratic Iran.

After the shah’s ouster, a fierce struggle for political leadership erupted between the most progressive and the most reactionary forces within the revolutionary camp. Though severely weakened by repression, left forces mounted a serious challenge. Ultimately however, Islamic fundamentalist forces consolidated power through massive state violence, crushing organized opposition and extinguishing hopes that the new order would evolve toward democracy. Throughout the 1980s, the Islamic Republic executed tens of thousands of leftists, imprisoned and tortured many more, drove hundreds of thousands into exile, imposed compulsory hijab on women, and extinguished basic civil liberties across society.

Since at least the turn of the millennium, Iranians have repeatedly risen up against the regime, each wave broadening resistance, but also hardening repression. The 1999 and 2003 Iranian student protests gave way to the 2009 Green Movement, which brought millions into the streets to contest electoral fraud, demanding free elections and constitutional reform. Subsequent protest cycles in 2011-12, 2017-18 and 2019-20 expanded the movement’s social base as well as its demands—with economic, social, and political grievances intermixing in heterogeneous protests that remained largely leaderless, due both to their spontaneous character and to ongoing repression of political opposition.

Then in 2022 the state’s killing of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, set off the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. Drawing on the lineage of the Kurdish Women’s Movement, the mass revolt situated demands for women’s rights, bodily autonomy, and ethno-national liberation at the center of a broader project of social, political, economic, and ecological emancipation. Though each of these movement cycles was beaten back, they form a living tradition of resistance that, despite its uneven and non-linear development, has seen an overall radicalization of rhetoric and tactics from reformist demands toward more open challenges to the regime.

The Current Wave of Protest and Repression

The most recent wave of protests began in late December 2025, amid a deepening social, political, and economic crisis. Years of sanctions, political corruption, state mismanagement, and ecological breakdown have all contributed to sharp inflation, currency devaluation, and widespread shortages of food, fuel, electricity, and water. Meanwhile the regime continued to pour billions into the military apparatus while neglecting to meet people’s basic needs, causing growing discontent. Notably, the protests were initially sparked by widespread shop closures among Iran’s bazaari—merchants and shopkeepers who have historically formed an important support base of the regime. The participation of these petty bourgeois strata signaled the depth of the crisis and the erosion of support for the Islamic Republic.

The movement soon spread beyond urban centers to smaller cities and rural communities, uniting diverse social forces. By early January, boycotts, closures, and walkouts had intensified into something approaching a general strike, which increasingly included explicit political demands. Claims of widespread monarchist sentiment—often amplified by Western media in ways that serve Israeli and American propaganda interests—should be treated with caution. Where such currents appeared, they often reflected political despair and the absence of credible alternatives after decades of repression more than a coherent project of restoration. What unified the protests’ multi-faceted political currents was a common repudiation of the Islamic Republic, rooted in a deepening rupture between Iranian society and the state.

The government’s response has been brutal and systematic. Although precise figures are difficult to verify, multiple human-rights organizations report death tolls in the tens of thousands, with Time, The Guardian and other media sources suggesting more than 30,000 people may have been killed. These are staggering numbers, dwarfing the death tolls from prior protests and likely even exceeding the 1988 mass executions, which the UN found to be a crime against humanity and a genocide of Iranian political and religious minorities.

The Bloody History of US Intervention

Trump has attempted to exploit the Iranian regime’s brutal despotism to justify his own despotic ambitions. Shedding crocodile tears for the thousands murdered in Iran, he has repeatedly threatened military intervention while attempting to negotiate a “deal.”

But US intervention has never served the interests of the Iranian people and has repeatedly strengthened authoritarian forces while inflicting immense suffering on civilians. From the CIA-backed coup in 1953, to the US government’s support for the Shah’s repressive regime, to military strikes, sanctions, and covert operations in the post-revolutionary period, US involvement has consistently undermined popular self-determination.

Today, US policy toward Iran continues this destructive pattern. Crushing economic sanctions function as a form of collective punishment, deepening poverty, accelerating inflation, and restricting access to food, medicine, and basic infrastructure. These measures disproportionately harm ordinary people, while political and military elites find ways to shield themselves from the worst effects. Meanwhile the repeated use or threat of naval deployments, air strikes, and proxy warfare increases the risk of catastrophic conflict while narrowing political space inside Iran.

Rejecting the False Choice of Interventionism and Campism

One response to the Iranian regime’s atrocities begins from a genuine moral horror at the scale of repression and bloodshed, but arrives at a disastrous conclusion: that US power must intervene to “save” the Iranian people. This view treats imperial intervention as a humanitarian instrument, ignoring its actual historical record. US military threats and economic sanctions do not protect protesters—they isolate them, discredit them as foreign agents, and provide the regime with justification for intensified repression. There is no imperial shortcut to liberation.

An opposing error begins from a justified revulsion toward US imperialism, but resolves that revulsion by excusing—or even celebrating—the crimes of the Iranian state. In this framework, any regime opposed to Washington is treated as progressive by definition, and popular uprisings against it are dismissed as foreign plots. This position abandons the Iranian people to their executioners in the name of “anti-imperialism.” Anti-imperialism that requires silence about mass repression is not anti-imperialism at all.

We reject the false dichotomy that forces us to choose between support for self-determination and solidarity with the oppressed. We agree with the position put forward in a statement signed by the Zapatistas and many other left forces around the world. As these groups note, this false choice is the product of people looking at the situation from outside, and above. “Up above against up above. Power against power.” Like them, we look below:

“Down below, the Iranian people struggle for life.

Down below are the women who challenge patriarchal control every day.

Down below are the workers impoverished by neoliberal policies.

Down below are sexual minorities, religious minorities, oppressed peoples, and those who live in the peripheries beaten by the water, housing, and employment crises.”

As we in the US resist state violence, political repression, and attacks on the rights and lives of immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, and the multiracial working class, we recognize that our fight against fascism is inseparable from the struggles of the Iranian people and of all peoples around the world confronting authoritarianism under different conditions. We stand in solidarity with them.

Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns (1984 and 1988) represented the pinnacle of the Black-led electoral upsurge which began in the late 1970s. This upsurge symbolized a transition in the struggle for Black political power, but also much more. Arising at a point when neoliberalism was beginning to cohere, the Black-led upsurge challenged the failure of the “1960s” movements to introduce substantive structural reforms.

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The Jackson campaigns represented an introduction of what we have come to understand as “Third Reconstruction politics.” At the time, some of us described the politics of Jackson and the Rainbow as “pro-equality populism,” i.e., a mass, progressive populist movement that saw the battle against social injustice—including but not limited to race and gender—as central to a re-envisioned US.

The Jackson campaigns and the Rainbow Coalition articulated the need for a mass democratic movement that was truly inclusive. Though Black-led, the campaigns reached out to various constituencies, especially those sectors of the population that had been regularly marginalized. Jackson’s working-class orientation was a marked contrast with mainstream Democratic Party politics. But it was the way that Jackson could speak to the people—white workers in Jay, Maine; Chicanos in Los Angeles; African Americans in St. Louis; farmers in Missouri—and articulate a common, progressive message, that was almost mind-bending.

The 1988 campaign drew together many forces on the Left, some of which—like the Democratic Socialists of America—had shied away from the 1984 campaign. It articulated messages on domestic and foreign affairs that broke new ground, including but not limited to the Palestinian liberation struggle and the relationship to Cuba. On so many levels the 1988 Jackson campaign was one of the closest we have seen to a social democratic effort within the context of US electoral politics, at least in the era since the beginning of the Cold War in the 1940s. In that sense, the Jackson campaigns and the Rainbow Coalition felt like an obvious home for the broad Left.

After 1988: The Rainbow at a Crossroads

The National Rainbow Coalition (NRC), which held its first convention in 1987, was to be a mass democratic organization and operate as an organization working inside and outside of the Democratic Party. During the 1988 campaign, the question of the future of the NRC was put on hold, but after the election discussions unfolded regarding the future. Between November 1988 and March 1989, it became clear there were two very different visions developing regarding the future of the Rainbow. One, represented by much of the Left and by certain Rainbow chapters, was to advance the Rainbow as a mass democratic organization, fighting for both local and national political power. The other vision, which struck so many of us as incongruous, was that the Rainbow should become the personal organization of Rev. Jackson. In March 1989, apparently on the recommendation of some of his key advisors and, particularly, Democratic Party establishment individuals, the decision was made to transform the Rainbow into Jackson’s personal organization. At that moment, the Rainbow began its slow path towards death.

In the 1980s Rev. Jackson and the Rainbow, through his campaigns and through the initial work of building the Rainbow, demonstrated the possibilities for Third Reconstruction politics in the US and an alternative to the rising right-wing populist movement which would ultimately become neofascist. But the moment was lost.

Lessons for 2028 and Beyond

Today, we must learn from the Jackson campaigns’ strengths and weaknesses. A progressive presidential campaign can have a catalyzing effect on the growth of a social democratic politics rooted in a “pro-equality populism” that brings together struggles for racial, gender, and economic justice. But we need this politics to be much more than just a candidate campaign. We must cultivate a genuine mass democratic organization capable not just of winning elections, but of growing the social and political power needed to win a Third Reconstruction.

Absent such an orientation, the Rainbow faded. Icarus flew too close to the Sun. The Left must learn from Daedalus and reach the shore of the Third Reconstruction with all deliberate speed.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade unionist, and international solidarity activist. For more on lessons regarding Jackson and the Rainbow, please see my article in Convergence.

The 2026 midterm elections will be a turning point in the American experiment. Will we continue facing military occupation of cities, Klan-level racism in the White House, pillaging of federal agencies, foreign wars, and an unsustainable affordability crisis? Or can we return to the normal problems we used to worry about, like climate change, run-of-the-mill police violence, school shootings, foreign wars, and an unsustainable affordability crisis?

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Like you, I’m concerned. I’m asking my friends, neighbors, and family members to commit to voting in November, but they keep bringing up questions. I’m compiling the ones I’m hearing, with an eye toward a FAQ on the subject at some point. Here’s what I have so far. I’m guessing there will be more the closer we get to the midterms.

1. An ICE agent took a picture of my license plate when I stopped behind him at the Circle K. He said I was following him so I would be added to the database of domestic terrorists. Will I still be able to vote?

2. My boyfriend spends too much time with his loser friends on Discord and says women shouldn’t vote. He says even Pete Hegseth agrees. What should I do?

3. My Congressman spends too much time with his loser Republican colleagues and wants to pass the SAVE Act. Then my voter registration would have to match my birth certificate or passport. I don’t have a birth certificate/I don’t have a passport/I changed my name last year when I got married. How am I supposed to track down all the paperwork?

4. My last name is Díaz. Will I be removed from the voter rolls?

5. My last name is Díaz. Will ICE agents go to my home and abduct my family while I’m out voting?

6. I look Latina. Will ICE agents pull me out of the voter line and send me to a detention camp in Texas?

7. My last name is O’Connell. I plan to accompany my neighbor Maya Díaz to the polls to help keep her safe. Will ICE agents pull us both out of the voter line

   and send us to a detention camp in Texas?

8. If ICE agents surround the polls, wouldn’t that be illegal? Who would I call to make them go away?

9. My grandpa says when he went to register to vote in Alabama in 1949, he was asked questions like “How many windows in the White House?” If they ask me that, I feel like it would be a trick question—before or after the East Wing demolition?

10. My grandpa also says it would be nothing new for armed thugs to surround the polls to stop certain people from voting. But didn’t the Voting Rights Act of 1965 take care of that?

11. What do you mean, the Supreme Court is about to put the final nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act? What’s next, attacks on voting rights of naturalized citizens?

12. If Republicans lose in the midterms, or in 2028, will the shit hit the fan? Is there some way we can be prepared?

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

On February 14, 2026, Liberation Road’s Standing Committee for the Study of Comrade Valentine issued new slogans to guide celebrations of one of the great holidays of the international working class. See the original post here. This page provides the slogans in more languages to help disseminate Comrade Valentine’s revolutionary message of love and resistance to the masses throughout the world.

English

Workers, Peasants, Youth of Every Nation:

Answer the cheesy capitalist commodification of February 14 with greetings of love and solidarity in the revolutionary romantic spirit of Comrade Valentine (they, them)!

Unite all to resolutely reject the brutal fascist drive to re-pollute every arena in society with archaic and fictional norms of heterosexism, misogyny, and racism!!

Comrade Valentine’s teachings on the revolutionary spirit of love and care for the masses live on in the last actions of comrades Good and Pretti and in the heroic community in which they were martyred!!!

Spanish

Obreros, Campesinos, Jóvenes de Todas las Naciones:

¡Respondemos a la mercantilización capitalista del 14 de febrero con saludos de amor y solidaridad con el espíritu romántico revolucionario del camarada Valentín!

¡Unámonos todas/os para rechazar el brutal impulso fascista de contaminar todos los ámbitos de la sociedad con normas arcaicas y ficticias de heterosexismo, misoginia y racismo!!

¡Las enseñanzas del camarada Valentín sobre el espíritu revolucionario de amor y cuidado por las masas siguen vivas en las últimas acciones de l@s mártires Good y Pretti y en la heroica comunidad en la que fueron asesinados!!!

Italian

Operai, contadini, giovani di ogni nazione:

Rispondete alla banale mercificazione capitalista del 14 febbraio con saluti d’amore e solidarietà nello spirito romantico rivoluzionario del compagno Valentino (pronome di genere, loro)!

Unitevi tutti per respingere con determinazione la brutale spinta fascista a inquinare nuovamente ogni ambito della società con norme arcaiche e fittizie di eterosessismo, misoginia e razzismo!!

Gli insegnamenti del compagno Valentino sullo spirito rivoluzionario dell’amore e della cura per le masse vivono nelle ultime azioni dei compagni Good e Pretti e nell’eroica comunità in cui sono stati martirizzati!!!

Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian

Radnici, seljaci, omladino svih naroda:

Odgovorite na jeftinu kapitalističku komodifikaciju 14. februara/veljače pozdravima ljubavi i solidarnosti u revolucionarno romantičnom duhu Druga Valentina!

Ujedinite se da odlučno odbijemo brutalni fašistički pohod da se iznova zatruje svaki sloj društva arhaičnim i vještačkim normama heteroseksizma, mizoginije i rasizma!!

Lekcije Druga Valentina o revolucionarnom duhu ljubavi i brižnosti prema narodnim masama zauvijek će živjeti u posljednjim aktima drugarice Good i druga Prettija i u herojskoj zajednici u kojoj su žrtvovani!!!

Danish

Arbejdere, bønder og unge i alle lande:

Stå op imod den smagløse, kapitalistiske kommercialisering af den 14. februar med kærlige og solidariske hilsner – i kammerat Valentines (de/dem) revolutionære og romantiske ånd!

Lad os stå sammen og beslutsomt afvise det brutale, fascistiske forsøg på igen at gennemsyre samfundet med forældede og opdigtede normer om heteroseksisme, kvindehad og racisme!!

Kammerat Valentines budskab om kærlighedens og omsorgens revolutionære kraft for masserne lever videre – i kammeraterne Goods og Prettis sidste handlinger og i det heroiske fællesskab, hvor de gav deres liv!!!

Norwegian

Arbeidere, bønder, ungdom over heile kloden:

Når kapitalistklassen kommodifiserer 14. februar på klisjéfullt vis, svarer vi med kjærlighet og solidaritet i den revolusjonære romantiske ånden til kamerat Valentin!

Forén alle krefter i bastant avvisning av den brutal-fascistiske kampanjen for igjen å tilsvine alle samfunnets arenaer med arkaiske påhitt-normer for heterosexisme, misogyni og rasisme!!

Kamerat Valentins lære om den sanne revolusjonære ånd om kjærlighet til og omsorg for massene lever videre i de siste handlingene til kameratene Good og Pretti og i det heroiske samfunnet der de fant sitt martyrium!!!

Issued by Liberation Road’s Standing Committee for the Study of Comrade Valentine and translators throughout the world.

For more than two decades, our organization has given scientific guidance to comrades for celebrating one of the great holidays of the international working class: Comrade Valentine’s Day. We strive to present slogans that take into account the exact conjuncture of the class struggle each year. This year we see legions across the country, in the spirit of Comrade Valentine, put themselves in harm’s way to protect friends, neighbors, schoolchildren, and strangers from the violent onslaught of MAGA thugs and policy-makers. We urge comrades to go forth with these slogans under the revolutionary banner of love and resistance, on February 14th and every day!

Below, in English and Spanish, are this year’s slogans. Because Comrade Valentine’s Day is a holiday of great import for international solidarity, more translations are available here.

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Workers, Peasants, Youth of Every Nation:

Answer the cheesy capitalist commodification of February 14 with greetings of love and solidarity in the revolutionary romantic spirit of Comrade Valentine (they, them)!

Unite all to resolutely reject the brutal fascist drive to re-pollute every arena in society with archaic and fictional norms of heterosexism, misogyny, and racism!!

Comrade Valentine’s teachings on the revolutionary spirit of love and care for the masses live on in the last actions of comrades Good and Pretti and in the heroic community in which they were martyred!!!

Obreros, Campesinos, Jóvenes de Todas las Naciones:

¡Respondemos a la mercantilización capitalista del 14 de febrero con saludos de amor y solidaridad con el espíritu romántico revolucionario del camarada Valentín!

¡Unámonos todas/os para rechazar el brutal impulso fascista de contaminar todos los ámbitos de la sociedad con normas arcaicas y ficticias de heterosexismo, misoginia y racismo!!

¡Las enseñanzas del camarada Valentín sobre el espíritu revolucionario de amor y cuidado por las masas siguen vivas en las últimas acciones de l@s mártires Good y Pretti y en la heroica comunidad en la que fueron asesinados!!!

Issued by Liberation Road’s Standing Committee for the Study of Comrade Valentine with help from translators throughout the world.