“Enough is enough.” “The time for change is now.” “Never again.”
These are some of the signs that have appeared at the protests that erupted since the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Their gut-wrenching urgency shows how deeply this nightmare has affected American politics.
But do what?
Socialists have traditionally been wary about many of the policies that are labelled gun control measures. For one thing, many anti-gun measures implemented in cities like New York City and Chicago have further criminalised entire Black and Brown communities, while exacerbating the social conditions that breed violent crime.
We also know from the history of Prohibition and the “war on drugs” – and it’s clear that guns are very much a drug for some Americans – that government crackdowns on individual activities, even when they are deemed harmful, don’t work so well.
Moreover, we recognise the right to self-defence in a violent, oppressive society, in which one in three women suffers domestic violence and hate crimes are rising against Muslims, immigrants and the LGBTQ community.
The American left has always had to organise its own protection from the Ku Klux Klan and other far right groups, knowing that police and the FBI certainly won’t do it for us – and that’s as true today as it’s ever been.
And finally, in this recent era of mass shootings, there’s a recurring pattern that is extremely frustrating: After each tragedy, politicians loudly debate gun laws – and nothing else.
This has had the effect of obscuring the many other contributors to violence in America – the most obvious one being that we live in a state of permanent war, and a generation of young men has been bombarded their entire lives by commercials, movies and halftime celebrations that celebrate young men using assault rifles to murder people.
All the above reasons for scepticism remain true. But they have also come to seem incomplete as a response, as right wing gun fundamentalism has become a central ideological and organisational component in the rise to power of the most reactionary wings of the Republican Party.
After the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida, National Rifle Association (NRA) leader Wayne LaPierre decried the shooting, but then warned about new gun laws with the same conspiratorial frenzy that seems to animate some mass shooters.
“They want more government control”, he fumed. “Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms, so they can eradicate all individual freedoms.”
For the NRA, wrote Patrick Blanchfield for n+1, “gun ownership isn’t just a civil right: it is the civil right upon which all other rights depend. Constructing barriers around it is unacceptable, striking at the heart of the polity and infringing on core individual rights”.
This gun fundamentalism that views all regulations as tyranny is an important glue that helps attach at least some rural white gun owners to Koch Brothers-funded economic libertarianism and its holy war on all labour and environmental protections.
The politics of radical individualism on display in these cases are inevitably about the rights of some individuals to dominate others. And for gun fundamentalists, those categories are colour-coded: The NRA and Republicans have been notably silent about African Americans like Philando Castile and Marissa Alexander, who were victimised for lawfully possessing and/or using their guns.
The NRA isn’t just the main player in the gun movement. With 5 million dues-paying members, it is the most important right wing organisation in the country.
Despite its vast influence, the NRA doesn’t come close to speaking for a majority of Americans, who support many gun control measures to varying degrees. Nevertheless, the NRA is a central player in the Republican Party and therefore the entire US political system.
Consequently, gun politics are emblematic of the larger democratic crisis of this country, where political power is disproportionately in the hands of an unrepresentative, hard right minority.
This failure of the US political system was what fuelled the student walkouts that broke out unexpectedly after the Parkland shooting.
And in turn, this emergence of anti-NRA protest as a vibrant new wing of the anti-Trump resistance should encourage socialists to accelerate our reckoning with modern gun politics and figure out our contribution to this moment.
This is a very violent country, and our widespread access to guns is both a symptom and a further cause of the violence, although the exact causal relationship is less clear than people think.
If you compare gun violence between the US and other countries, it seems obvious that more guns lead to more deaths. If you compare the numbers of guns and gun deaths within the US in 1968 and today, the truth is that there are fewer gun deaths proportionally in a current-day America with proportionally more guns.
In many ways, the fact that the current gun debate is driven by mass shootings is distorting because most gun homicides don’t take place in suburban high schools, and the measures specific to that setting will do nothing for Black youth ghettoised across the country inside heavily policed poverty zones.
But at the same time, mass shootings obviously represent something very real about our world.
Just as miserable young men who commit murder in the name of ISIS are a sign that the US empire can’t keep the violence of its wars from coming home, miserable young men who massacre under the influence of white supremacy, misogyny and other currents of American reaction are a sign that the gun fundamentalists are creating a world where nobody is safe.
So how should socialists use our political framework – which opposes increasing police powers and sees violence as rooted in the social conditions created by inequality, oppression and the alienation of capitalism – to contribute to what may become a new protest movement against the NRA and gun fundamentalism?
Among the many proposals and demands being put forward, we need to disentangle those that would lead to increased repression and surveillance and those that would reduce the power of weapons manufacturers and the gun fundamentalists.
The fact that guns are a commodity uniquely exempt from health and safety regulations is simply absurd. We should join calls to end – believe it or not, both of these are real – gun industry immunity from lawsuits and the gag order on public health research into gun violence.
Proposals for licences, waiting periods and safety and age requirements all have to be weighed on their specific merits. But in general, there’s no reason why guns shouldn’t be subject to the same level of oversight as automobiles. If a government agency were to take over gun training and licensing, that would also greatly undermine the primary recruiting tool of the NRA.
By contrast, we have to make the sometimes unpopular argument that background checks, though they may be proposed in the hope of blocking people likely to cause harm from getting guns, are generally regressive.
Such laws wouldn’t have kept a gun out of the hands of Nikolas Cruz or most other mass shooters. But given the undisputedly racist nature of the criminal justice system, people of colour would be disproportionately barred.
Socialists can – and I think should – also support prohibiting the manufacture of weapons like the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, although we should be clear that this would be more of a cultural victory than a measure to actually reduce the number of guns, at least in the short term. The immediate effect of an assault rifle ban being taken up and passed would surely be millions more AR-15s purchased before the ban takes effect.
We also must oppose what will surely be an attempt to turn the suffering and anger of the Parkland students into increased police powers. As Blanchfield wrote for n+1:
Many commentators who should know better conveniently forget that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was a mere subsection of the Biden-authored and Clinton-approved Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. That legislation allocated $9.7 billion to new prison construction and gave money to states to pursue harsher sentencing guidelines while eliminating prison education programs – effectively writing a check for the New Jim Crow to leap into the 21st century.
Not only do we need to argue that government criminalisation and repression aren’t the solution to gun violence – we must argue that they are part of that violence, and that the movement should fight for undoing mass incarceration and the militarisation of police departments.
Of course, there are many other demands that socialists should contribute to this discussion – from reducing military spending in order to fund public health programs, to ending the NRA’s school security program. But ultimately, the demands that take hold in this movement will reflect the strength of the social forces inside it.
Thousands of ordinary people have spent many years fighting gun violence, but for most of that time, the politics of gun control were dominated by people like billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who used his time as New York City mayor to promote gun control, even as his police force used the threat of their guns to stop and frisk thousands of young people of colour every day.
If people like Bloomberg and big city police chiefs continue to be the dominant voices about gun violence, then we will continue the same frustrating cycle.
The debate will remain polarised between a hard right wing of gun fundamentalists on the one hand, and elite centrists on the other, whose answer to every question is more policing, and who are determined to prevent a deeper questioning of the roots of violence.
Among these latter voices, the NRA will be continually denounced, while the Pentagon is never mentioned. Opinion pieces will declare that assault rifles belong on the battlefield, not the homeland – while ignoring the fact that the increasingly powerful guns in our communities are merely domestic versions of the models requested by generals to inflict maximum casualties on people in Afghanistan.
Instead, we should push for rallies against gun violence to be led – or at least include – those who know the most about the American violence, and the role of law enforcement in not preventing it but perpetuating it. That means activists in the Movement for Black Lives, the water protectors at Standing Rock, and anti-rape and domestic violence activists, to name a few.
If a genuine grassroots movement against gun worship develops in this country, it will take time for many of these debates to unfold. Socialists should recognise that while we discuss our approach, we need to listen to and learn from our fellow protesters.
The good news is the reaction from the classmates of the victims in Parkland, and from students across the country. The school walkouts are showing that a new generation – one whose teenage lives have been filled with active-shooter lockdown drills – is correctly holding school and political leaders accountable for the epidemic of mass shootings.

Danny Katch

How do socialists take on gun fundamentalism?

One year ago on 8 November, Donald Trump was elected the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet, leaving many hundreds of millions of people in the US and around the world in a state of shock.
Pretty much every week since has confirmed our worst fears about Trump in the White House: blatant encouragement of white supremacists, terrifying Twitter threats against North Korea, criminal neglect of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and so much more.
There have also been many inspiring examples of resistance: from the millions who marched in Women’s Marches across the country on the day after the inauguration, to the brave athletes sustaining Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest against racist police violence, in the face of threats from Internet trolls, employers and even Trump himself.
Yet even after a year of this emotional roller coaster, we find ourselves in some ways in the same place we were a year ago – still in shock that this moral monstrosity occupies the world’s most powerful office.
The feeling lingers in part because Trump is a master at using shock as a tool of distraction and media manipulation – it’s one of the few things he’s actually good at.
But there’s another reason: Because Trump’s presidency shows that most of what we’ve been taught about American democracy is a lie – and that can take a while to sink in.
Trump is running the country the same way he got elected, by appealing to the relatively small minority of the population that supports him. That’s not how a democracy based on the principle of majority rule is supposed to work.
But the United States is a democracy in name only, and not only because our bizarre Electoral College system – created to keep give disproportionate power to the slave South – enabled Trump to “win” despite getting almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.
The even deeper problem with our dysfunctional democracy is that it’s so institutionally biased to favour the wealthy, the powerful and the reactionary that it enables the rule of a deeply unpopular hard-right minority, which has never been more apparent than today.
It’s useful to remember how Trump managed to get elected a year ago, because if we don’t build the left wing alternative that tens of millions of people are looking for, he might well remain in power, despite his breathtaking incompetence – for the same reasons he was able to win in the first place.
Trump has been widely disliked from the day in June 2015 that he launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists”, right through to today – even the exit polls on Election Day showed that only 38 percent of voters had a favourable opinion of him.
Trump started with a fervent base of support that included cops, small business owners and people who thrill in attacking the poor and vulnerable – and then spreading to the vast majority of Republicans after he won the party nomination.
But from the beginning, he’s been pretty horrible at broadening that base. Luckily for him, he never had to. At every turn, the expected opposition, at least in the political mainstream, has seemed to melt away before him.
Contrary to the impression created in popular culture that we are a nation irreconcilably divided over every issue, an Associated Press poll from April 2016 showed that hating Donald Trump is a great uniter:
“Seven in 10 people, including close to half of Republican voters, have an unfavourable view of Trump. It’s an opinion shared by majorities of men and women; young and old; conservatives, moderates and liberals; and whites, Hispanics and Blacks – a devastatingly broad indictment of the billionaire businessman.
“Even in the South, a region where Trump has won GOP primaries decisively, close to 70 percent view him unfavourably. And among whites without a college education, one of Trump’s most loyal voting blocs, 55 percent have a negative opinion.”
In the early Republican primaries, Trump had the support of about a third of voters. It’s disturbing that a campaign based on hard-right nationalism and quasi-open racism would get such high numbers, but that’s unfortunately nothing new.
Pat Buchanan’s similarly nasty 1992 Republican primary campaign had similar levels of support. The reason you probably haven’t heard of Buchanan is that, like most fringe candidates before and since, he faced a Republican Party establishment united around their choice: George H.W. Bush, then the incumbent president.
Trump fared differently than Buchanan not because, as many might think, of his reality show skills, but because in 2016 that same party establishment was in deep crisis – and poised to be sacked by the orange barbarian at the gates.
One of the most important themes of US politics in recent decades has been the Republicans’ transformation from the leading party of world capitalism to a motley mix of myopic zealots – Koch brothers-funded radical libertarians, racist reactionaries, anti-abortion fanatics and so on – who still command the enormous resources and power that go along with being one of the only two sanctioned parties in the world’s richest country.
The party’s hard-right shift has been in part a reaction to the Democrats’ own conservative shift under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to become the party of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, but also because world events have undermined many of the party’s previous strengths.
George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq invasion weakened the Republicans’ reputation as the party of national security, the 2007-08 global financial crisis and bank bailouts undermined the ideology of the free market, and the tremendous gains of the LGBTQ movement peeled away support for the Republicans’ anti-gay “wedge issue” strategy.
In response, the Republicans became politically vacuous – able to dominate many states through gerrymandering, voter suppression and mammoth tax breaks for leading local companies, but lacking any coherent national message beyond whipping up anti-Obama hatred.
Republican politicians increasingly became a collection of loudmouths and lowlifes competing for the attention of a shrinking but passionate base of pure reaction. This was fertile ground for con artists like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain to pose as presidential candidates for a few months, while auditioning for Fox News and selling their books.
Trump also, by many accounts, initially saw his presidential run as a simple exercise in brand-building, but his timing was different.
By 2016, the party diehards had moved too far to the right to accept another Mitt Romney type – and the strain of pandering to them while simultaneously appealing to the general public was too much for early favourites like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who came across like traumatised Ken dolls after years of rough play.
As a result, the same level of support that made Buchanan a clear loser in a one-on-one race with George Bush Sr. back in 1992 was enough to win Trump many of the early states in a comically overcrowded 2016 Republican field.
Trump only started winning more than 35 to 40 percent of the vote in state primaries when his opponents tried to unite against him and publicly floated the idea of blocking his nomination at the party convention.
Trump may not have been that popular among Republican voters, but the party leadership was liked even less. The strategy backfired wildly, allowing Trump to claim that, once again, the elites were conspiring against him. Trump was able to win majority support in the Republican Party as a protest vote against the crooked party leadership.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party was being rocked by its own internal rebellion, as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders came out of nowhere to seriously challenge what the entire country had assumed would be a yearlong coronation of Hillary Clinton as the party’s presidential nominee.
Sanders received equal or greater support in the early Democratic primaries than Trump – but unlike Trump, he faced a united party apparatus determined to keep him out. It’s now well-known that the Democratic National Committee engaged in unethical chicanery to help Clinton. But far more important was the fact that party insiders lined up almost unanimously against Sanders.
While the media reported that the Clinton-Sanders race reflected a “divided party”, the actual party was almost completely united – against Bernie. Hillary Clinton won 55 percent of the voter-based delegates in the primaries, but 92 percent of the “superdelegates” – officeholders, party apparatchiks and big donors – a stunning reflection of the chasm between the Democratic apparatus and the base.
Add in the fact that the political forces to the left of the Democratic Party were too small to build a strong third party campaign, and the result was that Trump was able to pose on Election Day as the only alternative to the Wall Street-funded status quo represented by Clinton.
Take a step back to look at the overall process, and you’ll notice a striking result.
The old-fashioned liberal program of Bernie Sanders was deemed too radical by the gatekeepers of American democracy to make it onto the ballot, but they left the door to the world’s most powerful office wide open to an erratic racist whose semi-fascist advisers spoke excitedly about launching a reign of chaos.
Sanders’ proposals for funding universal health care and college education through tax increases on the rich reignited the fire of protest that have made explosive appearances every few years for almost two decades – from the 1999 “Battle in Seattle” against the World Trade Organization, to the enormous protests against the Iraq War in 2003, to immigrant rights mega-marches of 2006, to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements in the Obama years.
But these movements have, for the most part, been defused by the Democrats’ recurring message that protesting is less important than entering the electoral arena to stop the latest threat of Republican apocalypse. Demands for amnesty for all immigrants and bringing all the troops home were dropped, Beltway talking points about bipartisan immigration reform and responsibly waging the fight against terror were adopted.
So Democratic Party leaders were far more united and confident than their Republican counterparts to shove an unpopular mainstream candidate down the throats of their base.
After all, they figured, even if Hillary Clinton was an uninspiring candidate, the Republicans were in such disarray that they were about to nominate a candidate who couldn’t possibly beat her in November.
That went well.
Since the election, Democrats of all stripes have freely admitted that Clinton was a terrible candidate who stood for little more than continuing the status quo and beating Donald Trump.
But the party as a whole – with the important exception of Bernie Sanders’ fight for single-payer health care – is continuing the strategy of her disastrous campaign: Standing for as little as possible and hoping that Trump will be brought down by his own incompetence.
The Democratic establishment’s dream is that its party will be rewarded as the more responsible one to oversee the grossly unequal and dysfunctional system that people revolted against in the first place.
Ask yourself a question: Can you name the Democrats’ plan – other than doing a better job than Trump – for Puerto Rico or North Korea? Police violence or rising rents?
If our democracy even vaguely represented popular sentiment, there would be at least three political parties right now: Trump’s Republicans to represent the nationalist right; Clinton’s Democrats along with some “moderate” Republicans to represent the multinational corporations; and a left wing party that might or might not call itself socialist to represent probably at least a third of the population that clearly wants a progressive choice.
The fact that we don’t yet have that party means that, unbelievable as it may seem, Trump – or a more competent right wing replacement – can continue to govern on his reckless path and maybe even get re-elected, unless the left is able to break through.

One year after hell froze over

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two memos on February 20 laying out measures to implement Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant executive order, issued under the misleading title <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/25/presidential-executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united">“Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States”</a>.
In reality, Trump’s order is a clear-and-present threat to the safety of millions of people, undocumented and not – and DHS officials have drawn up a battle plan for carrying it out.
The DHS memos are chilling because of the directives they contain that could destroy the lives of so many people – but also for their language that directly imports the racist right wing myth of immigrants as a menacing horde directly into official government policy.
“Criminal aliens have demonstrated their disregard for the rule of law and pose a threat to persons residing in the United States”, <a href="https://www.dhs.govhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/publications/17_0220_S1_Enforcement-of-the-Immigration-Laws-to-Serve-the-National-Interest.pdf">one memo declares</a>, as if it was cut-and-pasted directly from a rant at Breitbart News.
The new guidelines call for an expansion of deportation priorities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that could include any number of people among the undocumented: people convicted of crimes, no matter how minor; others who haven’t been convicted, but merely charged; and still others who ICE itself determines have committed a crime, regardless of whether they’ve even been charged.
Included on the list are any people who have “engaged in fraud or wilful misrepresentation” related to any government matter (which could mean using a false ID, as many undocumented people do to get work), who “have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits” and who an ICE agent deems to be a “risk to public safety or national security”.
The memos go on to call for a range of other repressive measures, including:
 – Drastically expanding the powers of ICE agents to use “expedited removals”, which allow for quick deportations without a legal hearing. Until now, expedited removals could only apply to immigrants who are found within 100 miles of a border and who have been in the country for fewer than two weeks. Now, the policy can be used against immigrants anywhere in the US who have been in the country for up to two years.
 – Restoring the 287(g) program that deputises police officers to work as deportation agents inside local jails.
 – Hiring 10,000 more ICE officers and 5,000 more Border Patrol agents.
 – Increasing penalties for undocumented parents in the US who are caught trying to bring their children into the country.
 – Publicising crimes committed (or allegedly committed) by undocumented immigrants.
Trump spokesperson Sean Spicer <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/21/press-briefing-press-secretary-sean-spicer-2212017-13">claimed that the new measures merely “take the shackles” off agents</a> working for ICE and the Border Control so that they can properly enforce existing laws and policies.
But any talk of reverence for the law is a joke coming from an administration led by a serial tax cheat and sexual assaulter.
In fact, the Trump administration is aiming to free its agents from having to follow the cornerstone of the law, known as “due process”, which requires legal hearings and representations.
The new regime wants to further empower members of the two federal agencies who the strongest supporters of Trump’s racist and xenophobic presidential campaign – and his promise to be judge, jury and destroyer of families for millions of immigrants.
The week before the DHS memos were released, there were a number of stories illustrating the warped sense of justice among the very agents who will be given more draconian powers.
In Seattle, immigration officers detained Daniel Ramirez Medina, who has legal status as a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program covering those who came to the US as young people. Ramirez’s detention <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/20/daniel_ramirez_medinas_lawyer_absolutely_no">was justified on the basis of the unproven claim that he’s a “gang member”</a>.
In El Paso, Texas, ICE agents arrested Irvin Gonzales, a transgender woman who was <a href="http://www.kvia.com/crime/abc-7-at-5-6-transgender-woman-arrested-by-ice-a-zumba-instructor-domestic-worker/347486781">leaving a courthouse after filing for a protective order against an abusive partner</a> – the very person who is suspected of having reported her to ICE.
And in Virginia, <a href="http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/ICE-Agents-Arrest-Men-Leaving-Alexandria-Church-Shelter-413889013.html">ICE staked out a church hypothermia shelter</a> in order to nab six homeless immigrants on their way out in the morning.
It’s impossible to know how many immigrants have risked freezing to death or being beaten by their partner in the past week because news of these arrests kept them from seeking assistance.
A number of newspaper editorials objected to a “contradiction” in Trump’s immigration policies. <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/trump-deportation-crosshairs-article-1.2978688">As the New York Daily News put it</a>:
“On one hand, Trump continues to paint a hardened core of criminal undocumented immigrants – ‘bad hombres’, as he has called rapists, murderers and gang members – as an urgent threat that necessitates their swift and unforgiving removal. On the other hand, Trump is widening the net to prioritise expulsion of many additional undocumented immigrants – including millions who are law-abiding, contributing members of American communities presenting no danger to the public.”
But there is no contradiction for Trump and his minority base of hard right supporters. They see all immigrants – especially those who aren’t white – as inherently dangerous, violent and criminal.
These are the politics characteristic of European far right parties that Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart boss, are trying to impose from the White House – which could explain Trump’s bizarre reference to <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/19/politics/trump-rally-sweden/">a bogus Fox News report claiming that immigrants are causing a crime wave in Sweden</a>.
But the idea of mass deportation is deeply unpopular in the US. <a href="http://www.prri.org/spotlight/not-even-reddest-states-support-deportation-robert-p-jones-atlantic/">According to polling conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute</a> during the 2016 election, only 16 percent of people support mass deportations as the main immigration policy – including just 31 percent of those who identify as conservative Republicans – while 64 percent support what is generally known as a “path to citizenship” for most undocumented immigrants.
So we’re facing a hard right coup on immigration policy, carried out by a president and a Republican Party trying to claim a mandate that they don’t have.
But as millions of immigrants and their supporters figure out how to resist this onslaught, a look at how we got to this point over the last 10 years shows one thing that won’t help: relying on the Democrats.
<a href="http://cdn.static-economist.comhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20140208_FBC296.png">Deportations started to climb after 1996</a> when Democratic president Bill Clinton wanted to show he could be tough on “illegal aliens” by <a href="http://www.colorlines.com/articles/how-right-made-racism-sound-fair-and-changed-immigration-politics">signing the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act</a>.
They continued to increase under George Bush and a Republican Congress in 2000s, culminating in legislation introduced by Wisconsin representative James Sensenbrenner that would have classified all undocumented immigrants as felons, along with anyone who helped them enter or remain in the country.
The Sensenbrenner bill unleashed the sleeping giant of immigrant power in the spring of 2006. There were a series of “mega-marches” that <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2016/03/28/immigrants-marching-out-of-the-shadows">culminated in the May 1 “Day Without Immigrants” actions</a>, which amounted to one of the largest work stoppages in US history.
The mega-marches defeated the Sensenbrenner Bill, but the Bush administration responded with even more deportations, along with <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2008/07/29/solidarity-for-postville">highly publicised workplace raids designed to cause maximum panic</a>.
In the face of this repression, many immigrants and activists turned from protesting to campaigning in 2008 – they supported Barack Obama, the former community organiser <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe751kMBwms">who even used the immigrant farmworker slogan “Yes We Can!”</a> as his campaign slogan.
Their hopes in Obama were bitterly betrayed. For the first two years of Obama’s presidency, Democrats had control of both houses of Congress, but they didn’t pass any laws to reduce deportations or provide a chance at legalisation and citizenship.
Even after Republicans won Congress and blocked any chance at major legislation being passed, Obama could have taken pro-immigrant executive actions in the way that Trump is now. Obama could have pardoned most or all undocumented immigrants, or issued a moratorium on detentions and deportations until Congress came up with legislation.
Instead, he increased the pace of deportations – reaching a peak of 434,000 sent across the border in 2013 – while insisting that he didn’t have the legal authority to do anything without Congress. It was only when immigrant students were protesting him in 2011 as he began his re-election campaign that Obama discovered he did have some executive power and created DACA.
In his second term, Obama directed ICE to focus more on immigrants with criminal records and recent arrivals near the border – many of whom were refugees not given a chance to plead their case due to Obama’s <a href="http://blog.cyrusmehta.com/2014/04/obamas-paradoxical-deportation-policies.html">expanded use of the expedited removal policy</a> that Trump is now expanding even further.
Over the last few years, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-administration-seeks-to-prevent-panic-over-new-immigration-enforcement-policies/2017/02/21/a2a695a8-f847-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html">the number of deportations came down to “only” 333,000 last year</a>. That number is greater than any year before 2008, but, of course, Republicans find it to be scandalously low.
But even as Obama was slightly scaling back deportations, he did so using a reactionary – and false – claim that he was only going after “criminal” immigrants. Many liberals accepted this as a good compromise, without asking why people who have already been through the criminal justice system for their crime should also face a second punishment of deportation.
Obama called this prioritisation policy <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurenbrooke-eisen/felons-not-families-overs_b_6212550.html">“Felons, Not Families”</a>, a gross characterisation of people with criminal records as outcasts without loved ones and dependents.
In a country in which racism and mass incarceration have led to <a href="http://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Americans-with-Criminal-Records-Poverty-and-Opportunity-Profile.pdf">one in three people having a criminal record</a> – and even higher rates among Blacks and Latinos – Obama’s dehumanising of “criminal immigrants” laid the groundwork for Trump’s even more reactionary and racist campaign that all immigrants are criminals.
Now, Trump is trying to ram through much of the Sensenbrenner Bill as an executive order without even going through a vote of Congress. It’s a fittingly authoritarian way to try to implement what could turn out to be nothing less than a state of war against up to 11 million people living in this country.
By making massive policy changes via executive order, it’s unclear what this enforcement will look like. In the face of strong resistance, it’s possible that the Feds could back off some of these plans. That’s what appears to have happened with an idea floated in an early draft of these policies that called for mobilising the National Guard as a deportation force.
On the other hand, if the Trump regime is able to drive through these policies despite popular opposition, they can ramp it up even further – perhaps bringing back the National Guard idea, or rescind DACA, which in any case they can get rid of through attrition by not renewing people for the program over the next two years.
As if to underscore the cowardly nature of their plans, Trump’s latest immigration atrocity was announced by a faceless bureaucracy – via a DHS press release and a conference call with three DHS officials who requested anonymity.
On the call, officials claimed that they aren’t planning mass deportations. They had the nerve to claim that this was “entirely a figment of folk’s imagination” – as if Trump hadn’t said exactly that during the presidential campaign.
This is an existential attack on the estimated 11 million people living in the US without documents, the tens of millions more who love them, and everyone else who has in interest in fighting an authoritarian and racist government.
There will be resistance, both in the courts, and more importantly in the streets and workplaces. After a decade of failed lobbying, the immigrant rights movement is finally looking back to the protests it organised in 2006, with a hastily planned “Day Without Immigrants” nationwide action last week. <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2017/02/22/an-old-message-sent-to-a-new-president">As Orlando Sepúlveda wrote for SocialistWorker.org</a>:
“It’s notable that in contrast to the months and weeks of planning it took to accomplish this a decade ago, the February 16 action was organised with just a couple days of preparation.
“The next step for the movement to demand dignity and respect for immigrants will be International Workers Day on 1 May, and with more than nine weeks to get organised, these actions have the potential to be massive displays of resistance and solidarity.”
It will also be important to show that there are now millions of non-immigrants who are willing to take to the streets in support of equality – and to build community networks that can respond to ICE raids and pressure local politicians not to collaborate with the modern day slave catchers invading our cities. Around the country, millions of people want to show their resistance to Trump – it’s crucial that they understand the old labour movement slogan: An injury to one is an injury to all.
While we’re building this resistance to Trump’s onslaught, socialists should be arguing for our movement to abandon a decade of rotten compromises put forward by political leaders – and demand nothing less than full citizenship and equality for all current and future immigrants.

Trump declares of war on 11 million people

They came to Washington, DC, by the hundreds and thousands, packing trains, buses, vans and cars. They washed over streets and through parks as a torrent of humanity flooded into the National Mall to express their rage and sadness at the new presidency of Donald Trump – but also their joy at finding one another.
Similar scenes were repeated in cities and towns across the US, making January 21, 2017, the largest day of protest in American history – over 3.3 million people and counting, according to an Internet attempt to gather information on all of the protests.
And there were hundreds of thousands more marching around the globe, all seven continents, even Antarctica – from Berlin to Buenos Aires to Bangkok, from London to Lisbon, and from Rome to Rabat.
After a presidential campaign that put the question of sexual assault front and centre, one that most people figured would end with the inauguration of the first woman president, it was President Donald Trump who took the oath of office on January 20, to the dread and revulsion of many millions of people.
So it was only appropriate that millions upon millions of people raised their voices in a collective cry of outrage at the inauguration of a brutish, boastful sexual predator as commander in chief.
The sea of handmade signs expressed the point in countless clever and cutting ways: “Girls just want to have fun-damental human rights”; “You can’t comb over misogyny”; and simply “This is not normal”.
But it didn’t stop there. Women and men alike mobilised to stand for women’s rights, but they raised many other issues – climate change, racism and police brutality, free speech and freedom of the press, immigrant rights.
In their size and sweep, the most fitting comparison for this global outpouring of resistance would be to the mass protests on February 15, 2003, weeks before the administration of George W. Bush launched the US invasion of Iraq. Socialist Worker’s headline was “The whole world is marching”.
This time, it was the sense that Donald Trump had declared war on all of us – the undocumented, the environment, women and girls, Arabs and Muslims and all people of colour, the LGBT community – that left people saying they felt they had no choice but to march.
Isaura Amezcua, a student at Georgetown University who grew up in the Los Angeles area, carried a sign reading, “Respeta mi existencia o espera resistencia”. (“Respect my existence, or expect my resistance”) As she said in an interview:
“We are here to march for women’s equality. We are here to support a worldwide movement to bring women together. A lot of immigrants are domestic workers, and they don’t have a voice – they don’t have a union or the ability to join this march. So I’m here to be in solidarity with them. In my community, there is fear, but this march shows that we’re stronger together, and that if we organise together, there is potential to grow and take this country to a better place.”
The historic size of the protests should serve as an important boost for everyone horrified by the incoming Trump administration.
For two months, the world watched as the president-elect who claimed to stand for ordinary people assembled a new administration made up of reactionaries and establishment figures committed to an agenda of tax cuts for the rich, increased military spending, and attacks on health care and other social services – policies that serve the interests of the super rich at the expense of the rest of us.
The day after his inauguration, though, it was the basic decency of ordinary people all across the US that was on display. One group of six men and women in their 50s and 60s, for example, drove 18 hours from southern Louisiana after one of the group said she couldn’t stand the idea of not doing something to register her abhorrence of President Trump.
The man who reluctantly agreed to be the group’s spokesperson told us:
“I was sitting in front of the TV, and I saw that idiot come on, and I got to speaking in tongues. And my wife said, ‘We need to do something about this’. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s go’. This was on Monday before the inauguration. We got on the phone, and we had a bunch of people ready to go in a heartbeat. We started driving on Wednesday. We just wanted to throw a rock at that guy – metaphorically speaking, of course.”
A woman from the group piped up: “We’re against everything Trump stands for: women’s rights, abortion, his Supreme Court nominees, environment, climate change, health care, everything.” Another said: “When my 10-year-old woke up the day after the election and heard Trump won, he cried. I cried, too”.
Stories of this sort explain why Trump enters the White House with the lowest approval rating – around 37 percent – of any president in modern history.
It also explains why Trump’s spokesperson Sean Spicer lashed out at the news media for acknowledging the plain fact that something like 15 times more people demonstrated against Trump that came out to support him over inauguration weekend.
In a bizarre press conference in which the press wasn’t permitted to ask any questions, Spicer called the widely circulated photos showing the paltry crowd at Trump’s inauguration compared to the massive throng at Obama’s 2009 inauguration ”shameful and wrong”.
In contrast to the false unity of nationalism presented by Trump during his speech, the National Mall literally and symbolically pressed together an incredible diversity of people into a single, jubilant crowd brought together in a display of solidarity for the ages: women and men, people of all races and colours and ethnic groups and religious affiliations, LGBT people, disability rights activists, antiwar military veterans, and on and on.
Especially noticeable were the varied ages and fashions, reflecting the many times and places people have radicalised during the last four decades – anti-Vietnam War marchers, veterans of the women’s movement of the 1970s, anti-nuke activists from the 1980s, global justice activists, and the recent generation radicalised by immigrant rights struggle, the Occupy Wall Street movement and, of course, Black Lives Matter.
Scattered through the crowd were some formal contingents and more informal groupings of people who came to the march together.
Several labour unions, including the New York State Nurses Association, AFSCME District Council 37, United Federation of Teachers, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, United Auto Workers District 9A, Communications Workers of America and SEIU1199, organised buses and contingents. Then there were clusters of student groups, climate justice activists and other left wing organisations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America.
The International Socialist Organization contingent swelled to hundreds of people, attracting large crowds with energetic and left wing chants. Favourites included “Black, Latino, Arab, Asian and white! Unite, unite, unite to fight the right!”, “Trump, escucha, estámos en la lucha!” (“Hey Trump, we will fight you!”), “We do not consent, Trump is not our president!”, “Trump says build a wall, we say amnesty for all!” and “We don’t really want your borders, taco trucks on every corner!”
Also popular was a call-and-response chant in which women began, “My body, my rights!” and men answered, “Their bodies, their choice!”
Saturday’s protest wasn’t like some previous demonstrations in which the crowd was dominated by contingents mobilised by one or another organisation on the basis of a commitment to a particular issue or ideological orientation. The vast majority of the crowd in DC came with friends or family, bearing handmade signs variously expressing hope, snark, anger and dark humour.
It was still possible to identify different political currents flowing through the crowd. There were those still lamenting Clinton’s defeat. One handmade sign, for example, proclaimed, “Her Revolution Continues”, with the letters HRC highlighted.
There were also many supporters of Bernie Sanders, still disturbed by the Clinton campaign’s dirty tricks to torpedo Sanders’ campaign and shaking their heads at Clinton’s failure to offer anything positive to working class voters.
Louis Koutras, a resident of Silver Spring, Maryland, was one of more than 5,000 people who participated in the permitted Disrupt J20 march on Inauguration Day itself. The Disrupt march took place along a route running parallel to Trump’s inaugural parade.
Koutras placed the blame for the election result on the bankruptcy of the Democrats’ strategy, and particularly the neglect of the party’s working class base:
“Trump at least directly addressed that constituency, saying you don’t have jobs, and you have bad health care. He’s right – they don’t have jobs or good health care, and it’s because of people like Trump! But he was able to harness that, while all the Democrats offered was, ‘We’re not Trump’. The Democrats used to be the party of the common person and of labour, but they have abandoned their base.”
Later that night, a capacity crowd filled the Lincoln Theatre for “The Anti-Inauguration”, a forum co-sponsored by Jacobin magazine, Haymarket Books and Verso Books that featured independent journalists and activists who addressed many of these same themes.
Even the most brilliant master of propaganda – which Sean Spicer certainly is not – would have a hard time denying what this weekend’s protests have made obvious: that millions of people in the US and around the world are determined to stand up against the grave danger represented by Trump’s power grab.
The day after the giant antiwar protests on February 15, 2003, New York Times reporter Patrick E. Tyler famously wrote that the demonstrations were a reminder that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion”.
But those demonstrations, as big as they were, didn’t stop the Iraq War from taking place. The fact that the horrific results of the war vindicated all the warnings made by protesters doesn’t change that. We have to understand why the antiwar movement of 2003 wasn’t strong enough to achieve its goal.
The Bush regime was committed to pursuing its agenda of global domination – even in the face of widespread opposition – and so it was willing to endure a significant degree of public wrath.
Likewise, the cabal around Trump, the most unpopular president to be elected in memory, is obviously comfortable with being disliked – even if Trump himself gets testy about it – so long as they can achieve their smash-and-grab agenda of looting public coffers, driving down wages and reversing the gains of African Americans, women and LGBT people won through decades of struggle.
It has become commonly accepted on the left that protests don’t give our side the necessary power to achieve our goals.
But what type of power do we need? The default assumption is based on the way we’re taught that power works in a democracy: by working in official politics to get the right people elected.
But that plan has failed far more spectacularly than taking to the streets. Going back to the antiwar movement of the Bush years, after the early years of protest, most of the movement prioritised winning back Congress and the White House for the Democratic Party, which they achieved in 2008.
Yet the wars continued under Barack Obama, including a surge into Afghanistan, the dramatic escalation of drone strikes, and stepped-up use of US Special Forces around the world.
Obama also oversaw a dramatic increase in economic inequality, mass deportations and police violence, disillusioning many supporters and giving Republicans like Trump the opening to pose as anti-establishment populists.
Our problem is that the US is not a real democracy, but, as a recent study by two professors concluded, an oligarchy in which “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence”.
Only in a pseudo-democracy – where elites pull the strings and millions of ordinary people’s votes are discounted by the Electoral College, not counted outright by broken voting machines, and suppressed by racist election officials – could a despised creep like Trump win the presidency.
Now that Trump is in office, it’s true that protests alone – even enormous ones like the Women’s March on Washington and its sister demonstrations – won’t be enough to stop him. But they are a vital part of building effective organisations of resistance rooted in the strength of our numbers and our social power as workers, students and community members.
The great left wing author and art critic John Berger made this crucial point in a 1968 article called “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations”:
“Theoretically demonstrations are meant to reveal the strength of popular opinion or feeling: theoretically they are an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State. But this presupposes a conscience which is very unlikely to exist.
“If the State authority is open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary; if it is not, it is unlikely to be influenced by an empty show of force containing no real threat …
“The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality – the intensity of rehearsed awareness – may, on different occasions, vary considerably: but any demonstration which lacks this element of rehearsal is better described as an officially encouraged public spectacle.
“A demonstration, however much spontaneity it may contain, is a created event which arbitrarily separates itself from ordinary life. Its value is the result of its artificiality, for therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities …
“Demonstrations express political ambitions before the political means necessary to realise them have been created. Demonstrations predict the realisation of their own ambitions and thus may contribute to that realisation, but they cannot themselves achieve them.”
It’s the role of the socialist movement to advance the idea that we can’t fight Trump’s right wing agenda while we’re tied to the Democratic Party. Rather, it’s crucial to advance an unapologetically left wing agenda that millions of people actually support.
Mass protests are one part of a larger process of political radicalisation that is driven by economic and political events, some of which we may be able to influence, but many of which are outside of our control. The main task facing our side today is to build a larger and more influential political foundation so we have the best leverage in the face of the Trump administration’s assaults.

Eric Ruder

Trump made America protest again

“History seems to be moving backward.”
That’s what a teacher in his mid-20s told me at a rally when I asked what had led him to come out to what he said was the first political demonstration of his life. The protest was about the Dakota Access Pipeline, but he was clearly referring to Donald Trump’s election, an earthquake that continues to spread shock waves of fear with each passing day.
The fears are concrete: mass deportations; a government “registry” for Americans who practice Islam; the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing legal abortion. The executive branch under Trump will be stuffed with reactionaries – from the anti-union and pro-business hacks typical of any Republican administration to the open racists and Islamophobes Trump has already installed in top positions.
The shock is the realisation that we don’t live in a world in which crude scapegoating isn’t acceptable in mainstream politics. Just because the calendar says 2016 doesn’t mean we can’t see a return to the open racism and thuggery of the pre-civil rights era of half a century ago, with Twitter being the new way for demagogues to spread their Big Lies and anonymous online threats the new cross burnings.
In truth, we were already moving backward – otherwise, there would have been no need for protest movements like Occupy Wall Street or #BlackLivesMatter.
But Trump’s victory is a warning that we could go a lot further back – both here and in many other countries where far-right forces are either already in government or on the rise – if we don’t fight for the history our children will inherit.
That’s why hundreds of thousands have already taken part in anti-Trump protests and vigils that started the night of his election and will continue through his inauguration on 20 January and after. Just as important as the protests has been the surge in interest in radical and socialist publications – like Socialist Worker – and meetings that followed Trump’s victory.
This is very different from the big election protests that happened in 2000, when Republicans stole the White House for George W. Bush by blocking a recount in Florida that would have made Al Gore president. Sixteen years ago, most protesters looked at the Democratic Party as victims of Republican wrongdoing. Today, the anger is far more widespread at the Democratic Party as a key element of a political system so rotten it couldn’t stop a wildly unpopular sexual predator from crashing right to the top.
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The Democrats’ role in this mess goes a lot deeper than Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate – though there were many of those. More fundamental is the party’s many betrayals of the working-class people it claimed to defend, from the broken promises to pass protections for unions and a health care system that guaranteed access and affordability, to Bill Clinton’s trade deals and Barack Obama’s bank bailouts. 2016 was like a concentrated version of many decades of broken promises playing out in one election cycle.
When Bernie Sanders galvanised millions of blue-collar workers and young progressives behind his call for taxing the rich to pay for genuinely universal health care and free college education, Democratic Party insiders and elected officials almost unanimously rejected him in favour of Hillary Clinton and her Wall Street-funded message of … wait, what was her message again?
At the same time, leaked e-mails from the Clinton campaign reveal that party leaders were working to “elevate” Trump to the top of the Republican race – in the belief, proven horribly wrong, that even a horribly compromised candidate like Clinton couldn’t possibly lose to that clown. In effect, the Democratic Party blocked Sanders’ “socialist” New Deal liberalism as too extreme, but helped to give the toxic racism of Trump’s campaign unprecedented legitimacy as the Republican presidential candidate.
Now that Trump has won, the Democrats have pivoted from their campaign posture about Trump being an unstable fascist who will start a nuclear war – to patriotic calls to unite behind the new president and accept his good intentions on faith. The alternative – let Trump know from the start that we will oppose with every fibre of our being the plans he laid out in his campaign – was dismissed out of hand.
The problem with the Democratic Party isn’t that those who manage it don’t have the courage to stand up to Republicans. It’s that they don’t want to stand up. The Democratic establishment wants to preserve the stability of a political system that will still work well enough for them and their big money donors, even under a Trump presidency.
So the problem is not only the victory of hard-right nationalists, but the accompanying self-satisfied liberals who accommodate them – leaving many people with the double shock of dealing with a Trump presidency and the realisation that no one in mainstream politics is going to protect us from it.
We’re going to have to organise the resistance ourselves – which means not only protesting Trump’s incoming administration, but building socialist organisations and parties that can pose a credible alternative to a 21st century capitalism that isn’t working for the vast majority of humanity – not to mention all the other species on this planet. If we don’t, the only “opposition” to Trump’s politics of bigotry and cynical self-interest will be the Democrats’ empty platitudes about how “America is already great”, which have proven to be a colossal failure.
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How can we fight Donald Trump’s agenda of scapegoating and victimising the most vulnerable when the Republicans control not only the White House, but both houses of Congress?
Let’s go back 10 years to early 2006. The Republican-dominated House had already voted for James Sensenbrenner’s proposed HR 4437, an odious bill that would have classified undocumented immigrants as felons, along with those judged to have helped them enter or stay in the country – in other words, anyone who didn’t report them. The Republican-dominated Senate was set to vote on the bill in March, and if approved, it would have been signed into law by Republican president George W. Bush. But before any of that could happen, mass protests erupted among hundreds of thousands of mostly undocumented, mostly Mexican immigrants in Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and dozens of other cities.
The immigrant rights “mega-marches” culminated in the historic 1 May “Day Without Immigrants,” when, as NBC reported: “More than 1 million mostly Hispanic immigrants and their supporters skipped work and took to the streets [across the US], flexing their economic muscle in a nationwide boycott that succeeded in slowing or shutting many farms, factories, markets and restaurants”.
But as Bridget Broderick and Orlando Sepulveda wrote for SocialistWorker.org earlier this year: “May 1, 2006, wasn’t a boycott. It was a general strike. One well-photographed placard held by a protester said, ‘The sleeping giant wasn’t sleeping – we were working’”.
The Sensenbrenner bill never even came to a vote in the Senate – and so the most abhorrent version of anti-immigrant legislation was beaten back.
There have been other examples in recent years of large-scale protests bringing about change in different forms – from victorious strikes by Chicago teachers in 2012 and Verizon workers this past [northern] summer, to the years of demonstrations and actions that stopped construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, to the ongoing struggle against racist police killings.
All of these are living proof that if you’re not a billionaire, the best way to work for change isn’t how we’re taught in school – Write your congressperson! Run for office yourself! – but by organising alongside many others to demand change from a political system that’s always been rigged.
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The power of large numbers of ordinary people working together in a collective political project of liberation is the potential strength of our side – and it exists on a scale Trump and his far-right followers can only pretend at.
The right has built a following around the message that ordinary people are victimised and powerless and need a strong leader to fight for them. Our message is that we ordinary people have power we normally can’t even imagine – the power to shut their system down and rebuild it on a basis of justice and cooperation.
Our task starts today by bringing people together – in the kind of numbers that came out against the Sensenbrenner bill – to protest any efforts at mass deportations, anti-Muslim measures or attacks on abortion rights. We need to organise the majority of people who reject Donald Trump’s agenda of bigotry and scapegoating and create a crisis of legitimacy for his new government – the exact opposite approach of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders included, who are talking about finding areas of common ground with the new president.
But just building an anti-Trump movement isn’t enough. We have to come up with an agenda that we are fighting for – from a $15-an-hour minimum wage to taxing the rich to pay for single-payer health care. We already know these are popular demands from the Sanders’ campaign. Now we need to free them from a party that is determined to sabotage them.
The only way to do this is to organise our own party, independent of the bankers and careerists who will always undemocratically run the “Democratic” Party. This understanding that workers need their own party is one of the distinguishing features of the revolutionary socialist tradition.
It’s what Karl Marx discovered when he was a young newspaper editor fighting for a democracy in Germany: the elites who complained about the monarch always backed down when things got hot because they’d rather stay with what they had than risk an upheaval that threatened their wealth and power. Only the workers in Germany were consistent fighters for democracy.
Fifty years later, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party came to the same conclusion in Russia: The most determined fighters against the anti-Semitic pogroms and all the other tyrannies of the Tsar weren’t the educated elites, but the workers, who truly wanted to see the end of the regime.
Workers’ power starts not from running our own party in elections – although that’s part of it – but from the power that we have to bring democracy into being everywhere we’re not supposed to have it: at our jobs, in our schools, and in the way we’re policed in our neighbourhoods.
It’s based not in the narrow minority that currently runs society, but a diverse majority class of workers – the undocumented day labourers who led the mega-marches; the drowning-in-debt college graduates at the heart of Occupy Wall Street; the rank and file union teachers and telecommunications workers who led the Chicago teachers and Verizon strikes.
Unfortunately, we can’t look to recent history for inspiration in this project. Among the protest movements I mentioned earlier, none built lasting organisations independent from the Democratic Party. As a result, many leading activists eventually followed the “realistic” path of working with and for the Democrats. This November, they were inside the empty Clinton campaign, and so the only seeming messages of rebellion that most voters heard came from Trump.
This is the treadmill that we have to get off.
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There are many different types of organisations that need to be built, from student clubs and coalitions, to workplace solidarity networks, to political parties that call protests and run for office.
In all cases, building democratic organisations is about creating collective bodies that can test ideas in practice and then debate and assess how they worked. It’s not easy for people who have never done it, and it helps to have people involved with organising experience, as well as an education in what radicals and revolutionaries have done before us.
The primary goal of the International Socialist Organization is to build leaders of struggle, trained in the Marxist theories that generalise lessons from the past and organised collectively so we learn how to debate with each other and recognise the balance of our own individual strengths and weaknesses.
This is an exciting time to be a socialist in the US. You can see the developing strands of resistance: the youth radicalisation, the protests for Black lives that refuse to be put down, the campaign that Sanders built almost entirely with small donations.
But there are also enormous challenges. Not only do we face a far-right government, but we do so at a time when strikes are at their lowest level in almost a hundred years, which means that the strongest muscle we have is the most atrophied.
“I feel like I need both urgency and patience right now.” Those were the words of a different person – a college student, talking to me after a socialist meeting the night after the DAPL protest. He was explaining that he wanted to fight this system and tear it down right now, but also realised that he needs to develop his ideas over time.
I completely agree, and there are other aspects of that urgency/patience dialectic. We need to fight with passion against Trump while being patient with those who are afraid or demoralised about taking part. We need to argue that the Democrats are part of the problem, but welcome all those who want to oppose Trump into our coalitions and engage in comradely debate, no matter who they supported in the last election.
We have to do everything we can to build a socialist movement while understanding that some necessary factors are not yet in place, like the willingness and organisation of workers to strike.
To get that balance right, you need to be part of collective organisations that assess our mistakes and learn from them. We are going to win some victories, but we are also going to experience some horrible defeats in the coming months and years. Both of those things we know. The question is if the socialist left in this country is going to get stronger through the process, or if we’re going to stay on the treadmill.
Now is the time for people not only to stand up and be counted against Trump, but to figure out what alternative to his dystopian vision of society they are going to organise for. If your alternative is socialism, you should find out more about joining the ISO.

Now’s the time for socialist organisation

Bernie Sanders wrote in an op-ed article in the Los Angeles Times that his “political revolution … continues as Hillary Clinton seeks the White House”.
I get the whole loyal opposition thing, but this is just embarrassing. The only revolution Hillary Clinton has ever supported is the planet Earth’s orbit around the sun – the one that leaves us all in the same place year after year.
Sanders’ article came at the end of a week in which Clinton recruited yet another billionaire for the “revolution”: Mark Cuban, who declared that, on the basis of what’s best for him “as an entrepreneur and investor”, he wants Clinton to defeat her Republican opponent Donald Trump.
After an endless Democratic primary battle against Sanders in which she was pressured to emphasise her supposed concern about economic inequality, Clinton is now running in the general election by proudly flaunting support from the mega-rich. That includes Democrats like Warren Buffett and George Soros, but also leading Republicans like former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and Meg Whitman, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard and former GOP candidate for Republican governor of California.
After an endless Democratic primary battle against Sanders in which she was pressured to emphasise her supposed concern about economic inequality, Clinton is now running in the general election by proudly flaunting support from the mega-rich.
Trump has some billionaires in his camp, too, but not the presentable kind who can give a good speech on the campaign trail. His campaign is attracting the likes of casino magnate and overall slimeball Sheldon Adelson and 87-year-old oil magnate T. Boone Pickens, who gave the endorsement of the year in May when he declared, “I’m ready to take a chance on [Trump]. And just in case it’s a mistake, [I’ll] be gone”.
Clinton has also opened up a sizable lead over Trump when it comes to support from war criminals – including some of the architects and cheerleaders of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, widely despised by nearly every single Democratic voter, though infamously supported by then-senator Hillary Clinton.
Earlier this week, 50 prominent Republican “national security” officials – many of them members of the Bush administration who made both this nation and every other far more insecure – signed a public letter opposing Trump. They were encouraged in their efforts, according to the New York Times, by the Clinton campaign.
Three days earlier, the Times published an opinion article, titled “I ran the CIA. Now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton”, by Michael Morell, a leading defender of the agency’s use of torture as an interrogation technique.
As left wing writer Fredrik deBoer asked on Twitter. “Whose endorsement would Democrats not treat as a benefit, at this point? Dick Cheney? How bad of an actor does someone need to be?”
It’s a fair question, given that the Clinton campaign has already won the support of former Homeland Security chief Michael “I oversaw the drowning of New Orleans and I support Hillary Clinton” Chertoff – and is reportedly seeking the endorsement of Henry Kissinger (who would thenceforth be known as Henry “I’m the most evil motherfucker of the late 20th century, and I’m #WithHer!!” Kissinger).
What’s the harm in Hillary Clinton winning the support of prominent Republicans, her supporters might ask. After all, isn’t it good that Clinton is, as the New York Times recently reported, getting more money from donors to former contenders for the Republican presidential nomination than Trump is?
The problem is something that Bernie Sanders used to say about Clinton back when she was on the other side of the “political revolution”. All of Clinton’s donations from Wall Street and Big Pharma, Bernie would say, are not simply donations, but investments that come with strings attached.
“Why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions?” Sanders said in the Iowa debate. “They expect to get something. Everybody knows that.”
Clinton isn’t just passively welcoming the support of leading Republicans gravitating to her because they don’t like Trump. She is actively courting them by doing what Clintons do – move the political centre of American politics to the right under the guise of building “unity” against an ultra-right Republican opposition.
As Arun Gupta recently pointed out at Telesur, this is the strategy of “triangulation” that Bill Clinton made famous in the 1990s, when he promoted himself as a new type of centrist Democrat who stood in between the rapid Republican right and the unreasonable and unelectable liberal left.
The Clintons triangulated their way to the destruction of the federal welfare system and to two draconian crime bills that kicked the era of mass incarceration into high gear. Those 1990s policies put Hillary Clinton on the defensive during the primaries, but now that she has the Democratic nomination in hand and is looking ahead to November, she’s free to jump back to the middle to court Republicans – because she can count on the Democratic Party base to vote for her, no matter what, as the “lesser evil” to Trump. As Gupta wrote:
“If determined, Democrats could enact legal and regulatory changes that provide unions with the tools to rebuild the labor movement. But that would alienate the corporate constituency the Democratic Party belongs to and relies on for its core support. The logical path, then, for the Clintons, Obama, and the rest is to look to the right for votes.”
Many people who are terrified of Trump’s naked racism and megalomania will grudgingly accept more triangulation if they think it will help prevent the orange bogeyman from becoming president.
But here’s the crux of the problem: left wing support for Clinton can actually make Trump-ism more powerful in the long run.
“Clinton Highlights Billionaires’ Support as a Way to Try to Undermine Trump”, read a recent headline from National Public Radio. But if Clinton hanging around with Bloomberg and Buffett might help “undermine” Trump support among some rich Republicans, it can actually bolster his racist populism among some workers.
And by teaming up with Bush administration officials who invaded Iraq, Clinton is rehabilitating one of the most criminal wars in recent memory – or, to be more accurate, the latest stage in a quarter-century-long war that her husband Bill led at an early stage.
What does it say that Hillary Clinton is winning over the people who engineered historic catastrophe that led to the creation of ISIS and produced tens of millions of refugees?
That’s the final point. I know it’s frightening to think about life under president Trump. But guess what? We recently lived through another monstrous idiot president who did incredible damage to the world – and now, a lot of the people from his evil administration are supporting Hillary Clinton.
If your political memory extends back a decade to when millions of us marched against Bush’s wars, this is mind-blowing stuff. It’s less surprising after nearly eight years of Barack Obama continuing, with some cosmetic changes, the Bush administration’s “war on terror”. But a decade ago, it would have been inconceivable to imagine a Democratic presidential candidate courting Bush family donors with the claim that she better “represents their values”.
This is the ultimate vision of the Democratic dream of being a “big tent” party – one that unites Occupy Wall Street anarchists with the billionaire mayor who crushed them, antiwar marchers with the neo-cons who crowed about 9/11 being an opportunity to take over the Middle East.
The Clinton campaign is excited about bringing some big Republican elephants into that tent – and as always, the Democrats expect their base voters to loyally follow around with a shovel.
At some point, though, it ought to become impossible to keep holding your nose and vote for these people. You’ve got to get out of the tent.

War hawks and billionaires line up behind Hillary Clinton

Donald Trump drove out one rival for the Republican presidential nomination and built on his commanding lead, while Hillary Clinton withstood a second surge by radical rival Bernie Sanders to become an even stronger favourite, in what may be remembered as the pivotal day of the 2016 presidential primaries.
In different ways, fear defines the campaigns of both frontrunners.
From the start of his campaign, <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/12/10/why-does-anyone-support-this-racist">Trump has appealed directly to scaremongering and scapegoating</a>. More than anything else, he preys on despair and discontent among voters on the right, including with leaders of the Republican Party – and he directs the blame at the most vulnerable people in society.
Clinton’s manipulation of the fears of Democratic voters is more complicated. With a general election against Trump in mind, she is already trying to turn herself into a candidate of “hope” who can “make America whole again”, <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-quick-cuts/watch/clinton-let-s-make-america-whole-again-632828483536">as she claimed earlier this month</a>.
But first, Clinton has to overcome Sanders’ challenge by taming the enthusiasm he generated among millions of people who want to see a change in the Washington status quo. Despite her decades as <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/04/a-champion-for-the-other-side">a fixture in the leadership of Democratic Party as it galloped right</a>, Clinton now claims to be a “progressive” – but one “who likes to get things done.”
When Sanders threatened to make the Democratic primaries more than a coronation-in-advance by winning support for an agenda he unapologetically describes as socialist, Clinton and her supporters among party leaders stooped to smears and misrepresentations. <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/01/28/dont-vote-for-what-you-want-campaign">Their message was simple</a>: Don’t vote your hopes, but your fears – not for the candidate you agree with, but the one who claims she can stop the Republicans.
More protests against Trump are welcome but it’s important that the left recognise cynical attempts to whip up Trump-phobia in order to generate enthusiasm for Clinton that she is incapable of generating herself.
In the 15 March primaries, Trump drove out his Republican opponent who was seen as the strongest candidate against the Democrats in November – Marco Rubio suffered a humiliating defeat in his home state of Florida and suspended his campaign.
But the GOP race shouldn’t be considered over yet. Ted Cruz, the favourite of the Tea Partying Republican Right, kept pace with Trump in Missouri and North Carolina and is still within striking distance in the delegate count, while home-field advantage in Ohio came through for John Kasich. <a href="http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/delegate-targets/">Trump is on target to win a bare majority of delegates to the Republican convention</a> in July, but it’s a long time between then and now, especially with much of the party leadership still hoping that he will fail.
By contrast, Clinton has returned to status of prohibitive favourite to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sanders’ upset victory in the previous week’s Michigan primary stopped the media from writing off the rest of the campaign, but even then, Clinton was padding her substantial lead in convention delegates – and that’s before counting <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/02/23/the-democrats-versus-democracy">the Democrats’ undemocratic “superdelegates”</a>.
On Tuesday, Sanders tied Clinton in Missouri and managed a narrow defeat in Illinois, but Clinton won by double-digit margins in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. As in Michigan, Sanders did better than previously among African American voters, but the youth vote that propelled his biggest successes wasn’t as big a factor this time around.
The calls will continue for Sanders to drop out and unite behind the presumptive nominee, and Sanders will almost certainly reject them, as will supporters in states like Wisconsin, who will want to have their say.
But another moment is coming, just as certainly: The moment when Sanders honours his repeated promise to support the eventual Democratic nominee for president, despite his increasingly strident criticisms of Hillary Clinton. That same moment will put a question to all the people who voted for Sanders as an alternative to politics as usual: Will they be content to see their hope for a “political revolution” reduced to a vote for another “lesser evil” in November, or will they seek something more.
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Back in October, MSNBC predicted that the Republican race for the presidential nomination <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/marco-rubio-vs-jeb-bush-the-inevitable-gop-showdown-arrives">would be decided by an “inevitable showdown”</a> between two well-connected Florida politicians.
“After a campaign dominated for months by Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s various feuds, a new rivalry is taking centre stage that may ultimately have a far bigger impact on the GOP race: Jeb Bush versus Marco Rubio”.
Not so much.
Even by then, Bush was proving to be a human vacancy, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/us/politics/jeb-bush-sprints-to-escape-donald-trumps-low-energy-label.html">unable to stand up to Trump’s silly taunts</a> that he had “low energy” or – more to the point – prove that he had any solid answers to basic questions, like what he thought of <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/08/17/jeb_bushs_gigantic_iraq_fail_why_hes_handling_his_brothers_toxic_legacy_in_just_about_the_worst_way_possible/">his brother’s disastrous war in Iraq</a>.
When Bush wilted, Rubio became the candidate to beat according to convention wisdom, since Trump would surely fade away. A Latino who became a senator in the Tea Party wave election of 2010, Rubio was seen as an ideal candidate for a party looking to show that it could make its reactionary message appeal to a multiracial voting base.
Only the GOP dream candidate turned out to be useless. It began with the New Hampshire debate where Rubio did an excellent Saturday Night Live-style satire of himself, a <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/2/6/10929416/republican-debate-marco-rubio">computer-generated Republican candidate</a> capable only of repeating the same complaint about Barack Obama.
As his campaign began to tank over the coming weeks, Rubio tried to regain momentum by taunting Trump about his hair and the size of his … hands. Rubio’s idea of wit – “Donald Trump likes to sue people. He should sue whoever did that to his face” – actually made the billionaire reality TV star look presidential by comparison.
It’s doubtful that Rubio would have won even without these gaffes, and not only because he exudes phoniness from every pore. Rubio may well have cost himself a shot at the presidential nomination three years ago when he joined a bipartisan group of senators trying to pass “comprehensive immigration reform”, In a primary race where the GOP candidates competed at uttering the most offensive slurs against immigrants, Rubio was easily painted as a sell out.
The failed immigration legislation Rubio tried to sell was <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/15/a-comprehensive-lie-to-immigrants">incredibly draconian toward undocumented immigrants</a>. That it helped doom his presidential chances is another sign of just how far the one-time first party of American capitalism has been dragged to the right – though not without shifting the whole political spectrum along with it.
And now Donald Trump has crashed the party.
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The campaign among leading Republicans to derail Trump in recent weeks has been remarkable – in both its size and its utter ineffectiveness.
Among other luminaries, Mitt Romney and Michael Bloomberg warned of the dangers of Trump winning the presidential nomination, which seems only to have confirmed the confidence of Trump supporters that they must be doing the right thing. <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-attack-ads-are-finally-popping-up-but-they-might-be-too-late/">According to the FiveThirtyEight website</a>, more than 1,700 anti-Trump TV ads ran in Florida before the 15 March vote, yet Trump still won by almost 20 percentage points.
As Trump further cements his lead, it’s important to remember that he’s still only winning around 40 percent of the vote in each state. He hasn’t so much taken over the Republican Party as taken advantage – of the divide between the hard-core right wingers represented by the likes of Cruz, and the still-right-wing-but-slightly-less-fanatically-committed-to-obstructionism-at-all-costs wing of Rubio and Kasich.
Even now that Rubio has bowed out, the anti-Trump opposition will still be divided between Cruz and Kasich. So while it remains hard to imagine that the “Grand Old Party” would put forward a presidential candidate who considered <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/272822-trump-im-looking-into-paying-legal-fees-of-supporter-who">paying the legal expenses of a supporter who sucker-punched a protester</a>, it’s even harder to see how they will stop Trump.
In fact, the people who have been most effective at halting Trump’s momentum aren’t Republicans at all. They are the young Chicagoans who organised <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/14/how-chicago-dumped-trump">a protest of thousands that forced Trump to cancel his scheduled rally</a> earlier this month at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The Chicago protest was a classic case of a bully getting exposed, and it resonated across the country as an expression of disgust with Trump. It’s no coincidence that it took place in a city that was the site of the first of the immigrant rights mega-marches 10 years ago, the historic teachers strike in 2012 and the daily protests late last year against mayor (and close Clinton ally) Rahm Emanuel over the murderous actions of the Chicago police.
Liberal organisations behind both Clinton and Sanders are trying to use the momentum of Chicago to call on supporters to keep rallying against Trump – while simultaneously working to get out the vote against the Republicans in November.
More protests against Trump are welcome – <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/215738695442862/">including the rally planned for New York City this Saturday</a>. But it’s important that the left recognise cynical attempts to whip up Trump-phobia in order to generate enthusiasm for Clinton that she is incapable of generating herself.
Trump – who, after all, has no record of being passionate about any cause other than his own wealth and celebrity – might try to move to the centre if he is the Republican nominee in a general election.
But even if he doesn’t, the best way to combat the hatred he promotes is not to support a candidate like Hillary Clinton, whose defence of mass deportations and endless war in the Muslim world has helped make Trump more legitimate. The best way to fight back is to follow the lead of Chicago and organise our own resistance.
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So what about the Democratic side?
<a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/march-15-primaries-ohio-florida-results-presidential-election-2016/">According to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight</a>, the 15 March Democratic primaries were “great night for … polls.” After the epic fail on Michigan a week before, Silver was heaving a sigh of relief that the pundit industry’s chief export wasn’t needing to be recalled for being completely defective.
But for Sanders supporters, 15 March was a lousy night. The final returns in Missouri apparently gave Clinton a razor-thin victory, giving her campaign a clean sweep of five contests. Illinois was closer than expected, perhaps because of the energy of the anti-Trump protest – but Sanders was beaten badly in Ohio, where supporters hoped to duplicate the Michigan upset.
Still, it’s worth remembering just how far Sanders has come. Just two months ago, it was only dawning on the media and political elite that “the Bern” evident in the huge turnouts at Sanders campaign events <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/02/02/iowas-radical-message">might translate into a vote that could shake Clinton’s iron grip on the nomination</a>.
And as the primaries have gone on, Sanders has shown a greater combativeness toward Hillary Clinton and the party establishment.
In Illinois, for example, Sanders came out in support of the 1 April day of action for education justice called by the Chicago Teachers Union. And he <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/12/tough-words-from-bernie-sanders-on-rahm-emanuel">blasted Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel</a>, telling the New York Times: “Hillary Clinton proudly lists mayor Rahm Emanuel as one of her leading mayoral endorsers. Well, let me be as clear as I can be: based on his disastrous record as mayor of the city of Chicago, I do not want mayor Emanuel’s endorsement if I win the Democratic nomination”.
Sanders likewise <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/03/12/sanders-hatred-and-division-not-his-campaign-inspired-the-trump-protest-in-chicago/">refused to condemn the protesters at Trump’s Chicago rally</a>, putting the blame squarely on a campaign that “has promoted hatred and division against Latinos, Muslims, women and people with disabilities, and his birther attacks against the legitimacy of President Obama”.
That was a stark contrast to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/03/12/hillary-clinton-draws-criticism-for-her-response-to-violence-at-trumps-chicago-rally/">Clinton’s terrible statement</a> that basically conflated the pro- and anti-Trump sides at the rally.
In reality, Hillary Clinton isn’t a much better candidate than Marco Rubio once was. But as this primary season has demonstrated, Clinton’s overwhelming support from the Democratic Party apparatus, from top to bottom, gives her a huge advantage, despite the genuine enthusiasm that Sanders has generated.
Many Sanders supporters hope their candidate’s long-shot success can achieve more than kind words and a photo op at the Democratic convention in late July. As <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/21/bernie-hillary-and-the-new-democratic-party">Ryan Lizza wrote for the New Yorker</a>:
“If Sanders arrives at the Convention with a sufficient number of primary victories and between a third and half of the delegates, he will also be able to influence the Party’s platform. His advisers told me that Sanders will fight for more anti-free-trade measures, a commitment to campaign-finance reform, and breaking up big banks.”
The problem, though, is that convention platform planks mean nothing to Democratic leaders, whether elected to office or part of the party’s apparatus. Consider, for example, that the Democratic platform long favoured the kind of single-payer health care system that Sanders now advocates – and Clinton and other party leaders dismiss as utopian – but nothing was done about to achieve it.
The Democratic campaign isn’t over. Sanders is expected to do well in primaries to come over the next weeks, even if he is further than ever from stopping Clinton from becoming the nominee. And Election 2016 is likely to see continued protest against Donald Trump now that the Chicago demonstration has opened the way – and that’s not to mention the points of struggle beyond the election.
Nevertheless, 15 March has brought the test of Bernie Sanders’ real commitment to a “political revolution” closer: will he support – and urge his followers to support – a candidate who is the epitome of the two-party system against which he called on people to rebel?
It matters what socialists say and do now in preparing for the struggles ahead, when – as always – our enemies will be not only fanatical Republicans, but Democrats who claim to be on our side.

Alan Maass

Fear has a good day on the US presidential campaign trail

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders may have ended up in a tie in the Iowa caucuses, but the winner of the first primary contest for the Democratic presidential nomination was the socialist from Vermont.
Sanders was dismissed as a well-meaning but irrelevant protest candidate for much of last year, then <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/01/28/dont-vote-for-what-you-want-campaign">smeared for being too radical when he surged in opinion polls</a>. But the heir of a political dynasty and anointed choice of the Democratic establishment, who was thought to have Iowa wired for victory a year ago, couldn’t beat him.
Sanders’ showing in a “heartland” state against overwhelming odds is further evidence of the massive discontent with the political status quo in the US – and proof that the myth of America as an essentially right wing society is just that: a myth.
The results of the Republican caucuses in Iowa show a different face of the discontent with the status quo. Texas senator and Tea Party favourite Ted Cruz upset the frontrunner in opinion polls, Donald Trump, to win the GOP contest, and Florida senator Marco Rubio nearly pushed Trump into third place. Both Cruz and Trump claim to be right wing renegades, opposed to the conventional Republican Party establishment.
Cruz’s victory is the start of what is certain to be a long bruising battle for the Republican nomination.
But the more unexpected outcome is that the Democratic race will be drawn out, too. Sanders will almost certainly win the next primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday. He’s still a long shot to win the nomination of a party whose leaders are dead-set against him. But his campaign – based on calling attention to widening inequality, growing poverty and social injustice – is changing the shape of Election 2016.
Monday supposed to be the day that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush – remember him? – took the first steps toward coronation as the next in line for the American throne.
Days after Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83550_Page2.html">Politico reported that both Clinton and Bush had a cadre of backers</a> who were already discussing 2016 before the votes were tallied on Election Day.
Two years later, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/wall-street-republicans-hillary-clinton-2016-106070">Politico quoted Wall Street executives licking their chops</a> at the prospect of a Bush-Clinton election. “If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary, we would love that, and either outcome would be fine”, one Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer confided to a Politico reporter over lunch.
But the party insiders and Wall Street executives have lost their confident grip on this election.
On the Republican side, the first- and second-place finishers in Iowa, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, are generally loathed by party leaders. Not because the GOP establishment objects to either one’s right wing fanaticism, including their sickening racism and sexism, but because their open bigotry harms the image of the first party of American capital – and, probably more importantly, because both are willing to stab any other Republican in the back if it helps them get ahead.
Marco Rubio did much better than expected in Iowa, nearly pushing Trump into third place. That might be enough to make him the unity candidate for the party’s leadership to rally behind.
There’s a long way to go before the Republican convention, and plenty of time for Rubio or some other conventional candidate to take down Cruz and Trump. But for now, it’s a telling symbol of US politics today that the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination are two maniacs despised by the leaders of their party.
But as strange as that may seem, the shape of the Democratic contest after Iowa is more surprising in certain respects. In a state where she was supposed to have superior organisation and endless resources, Hillary Clinton, the Wall Street favorite and long-presumed nominee, couldn’t stop a formerly little-known Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist.
When Sanders announced he would seek the presidential nomination last spring, it was a clear and welcome sign of the discontent with the two-party status quo in general – and the triangulating, neoliberalified Democratic Party in particular – when he got huge crowds at his rallies and recruited hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers.
But pretty much no one – <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/27/an-faq-on-sanders-and-the-left">Socialist Worker included</a> – guessed that the wave of discontent could lift him to more than perhaps a single victory in New Hampshire, next to his home state of Vermont.
Now, Sanders’ near-victory in Iowa – and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/31/bernie-sanderss-campaign-says-it-raised-20-million-in-last-month/">the impressive $20 million that his campaign raised in January</a>, mostly from small donations – gives him a chance to win over the voting blocs in Southern states that dominate Super Tuesday primaries on 1 March, where Hillary Clinton has been expecting to lock up the nomination.
Like the Republican race, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Sanders first announced, the infinitely better funded and better connected Clinton almost welcomed him into the race – on the assumption that he would make his fiery speeches about economic inequality and energise the party’s liberal voting base, which would ultimately fall in line behind the “inevitable” nominee. After all, Sanders himself <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/05/problem-bernie-sanders">promised that he would support whoever the Democrats nominate for the presidency</a>, and oppose any third-party independent challenge.
But the Sanders crowds kept growing. When the Democratic National Committee <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/01/05/behind-the-dnc-attack-on-sanders">seemed to unfairly punish Sanders’ campaign over a mailing list controversy</a>, it galvanised supporters with a clear example of how the party leadership tilts the scales toward its preferred candidate.
In January, with Sanders continuing to rise in the polls in Iowa and nationally, panic set in. There was a wave of attacks on the Vermont socialist from leading Democratic liberals and media commentators. Sanders was criticised for a range of positions, from health care to fighting racism, but the overall message was that his identification with socialism and talk of a “political revolution” made him non-viable in the general election.
These articles were the first salvo of what will be many directed at left-leaning voters – demanding that they be “realistic” and support the strongest possible Democrat to defeat the greater evil of the Republicans in the fall.
The most direct and well-known application of the logic of “lesser evilism” comes in general elections pitting Democrats against Republicans. But the Democratic establishment wants its voters in the right mindset for the primaries, too – as the prime argument for why they should vote for the “pragmatic” choice, even though Hillary Clinton represents the kind of compromising that the party’s base is fed up with.
These pleas for “realism” are a remarkable statement about how the political system is rigged to preserve the status quo.
“In real life”, <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-18/sanders-s-siren-song-in-the-democratic-debate">claimed Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein in a typical article</a>, “all politicians in the US political system are going to come up short of their promises – not because they’re corrupt, but because the system is designed to favour of the status quo. Incremental change is all that is possible”.
This conventional wisdom is exactly why Sanders has generated so much excitement – his campaign represents hope for the opposite.
Over the coming weeks and months, some Sanders supporters may be persuaded to give in to “real life” and back Clinton – but many others will be bolstered in their conviction that a system designed to favour a rotten and unequal status quo truly does need the “political revolution” Sanders is calling for.
Sanders’ victory has demonstrated a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo – and an openness to radical talk of socialism and revolution, even when they’re used to describe far-from-revolutionary political positions that more closely resemble the Democratic Party’s liberal past. And that’s not to mention issues like foreign policy, where he is indistinguishable from conventional mainstream Democrats and even a few moderate Republicans.
Still, Sanders’ showing in Iowa blasts open the lie that America is a fundamentally conservative country – as will happen again if Sanders wins, as expected, in New Hampshire next Tuesday.
Even with a big win in New Hampshire, Sanders is still the underdog. The primary schedule is frontloaded with Southern states where Sanders will be starting from well behind – even further than he was in Iowa.
Then there’s the stark fact that one in seven votes at the Democrats’ convention to nominate a presidential candidate go to “superdelegates” – unelected party insiders <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/11/13/455812702/clinton-has-45-to-1-superdelegate-advantage-over-sanders">most of whom are already pledging their support to Clinton</a>.
Sanders will come under even more frenzied attacks from the party establishment, with plenty of well-known progressive voices enlisted for the cause. There will be an increase in slander and outright lies – but mostly an intensification of the lesser evil argument.
The more they attack Sanders and the more they rely on their insider advantages to give Clinton an edge, the more party leaders will show that there is nothing democratic about the Democratic Party.
<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/01/27/pelosi-dismisses-portions-of-sanderss-tax-and-health-care-agenda-saying-its-not-going-to-happen/">House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi couldn’t have made that clearer</a> when she declared that there is “no use having a conversation about something that’s not going to happen”. She was referring to Sanders’ popular proposal for single-payer health care, a far superior system to the disastrous Obama health care law.
But Pelosi and co. are making it clear that the “party of the people” won’t fight for a real transformation of the US health care system.
“God bless all the people who have gotten enthusiastic”, Pelosi condescendingly smirked about Sanders supporters. “The fact is that Bernie Sanders is enlarging the universe of people who are paying attention to the election, and we hope that he will bring them to the polls in November to support the Democratic nominee.”
Pelosi expects Sanders to demonstrate loyalty to a party whose leaders and ideological mouthpieces are shouting for all to hear that they wouldn’t support Sanders’ policies if he somehow did become the Democrats’ presidential nominee.
And unfortunately, Sanders has made it clear from the beginning of his campaign that if he does lose the nomination, that’s just what he’ll do – support the Democratic nominee, rather than turning his campaign into an independent run or supporting a genuine left wing candidate like the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
In the most unpredictable presidential election in at least a generation, there are undoubtedly more twists to come. Sanders may continue to mount a strong challenge and provoke bitter conflict within the Democratic Party – while the Republicans potentially coalesce behind a consensus candidate.
Or Clinton could take firm control of the race after the “Super Tuesday” primaries and caucuses, forcing Sanders supporters to ask themselves if they are going to follow their candidate behind support for Clinton, or try to continue the fight for a political revolution that he promised.
But for now, the biggest news of the night – bigger than Ted Cruz’s “upset” or Donald Trump’s underwhelming total or Marco Rubio’s surge – was that a democratic socialist candidate fought the previously presumptive Democratic nominee to a draw.

The radical message coming out of the US presidential race

Danny Katch writes from New York City on the aftermath of the shooting of two NYPD officers, the pro-police backlash and the impact on the anti-racist struggle.
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The backlash following the murder of two New York City police officers by an emotionally troubled gunman has posed a difficult challenge to the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement.
This movement – which emerged only a few months ago, led by young people of colour and taking shape in large part through social media and spontaneous participation – now confronts a vicious reaction orchestrated by police unions and conservative political networks.
The instantaneous shift in media coverage and public opinion following the two officers’ deaths shows the difficulties that any struggle against racism and police power will inevitably face. But as protests against police violence have continued – albeit in smaller numbers – in New York and across the country, it has became clear that this movement, however raw and inexperienced, is fuelled by deep reserves of anger and determination that make it too powerful to be bullied off the streets.
On 20 December, NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were shot dead in their patrol car in Brooklyn by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had just arrived from Baltimore after shooting his girlfriend Shaneka Thompson earlier that morning. After killing the two cops, Brinsley walked to a subway station and killed himself.
Though Brinsley had a long history of depression, emotional turmoil and suicide attempts, the killing of Ramos and Liu was immediately described by the media and city officials as an “assassination” – a term normally associated with calculated acts of terrorism rather than the more random violence of the many emotionally disturbed (and usually white) gunmen of the recent past.
There was no comparable national frenzy in June year when a white couple with possible ties to Clive Bundy’s white supremacist militia movement shot two Nevada police officers and <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/06/09/las-vegas-shooting-officers-dead-possible-white-supremacists/">left a note on one of their dead bodies</a> proclaiming “the beginning of the revolution”.
Yet within hours of a Black person shooting two cops, the national conversation shifted from demonstrators’ demands for justice for the many people of colour unjustly killed by police – <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/179-nypd-involved-deaths-3-indicted-exclusive-article-1.2037357">over 150 in the past 15 years in New York City alone</a> – to the supposedly equal or greater threat faced by police officers on what is routinely described by the media as one of the country’s most dangerous jobs.
In fact, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-americas-police/2014/12/05/35b1af44-7bcd-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html">according to Radley Balko</a>, author of Rise of the warrior cop: the militarization of America’s police forces, “The number of cops killed on duty has been falling since the mid-1990s”, down to 27 nationwide in 2013. This is “consistent with the overall drop in violent crime in America”, Balko says.
The <a href="http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf">Bureau of Labor Statistics reports</a> that police work is not even among the 10 most dangerous jobs in the US. Police officers are significantly less likely to be killed on the job than loggers, fishers, construction workers or taxi drivers.
In the same 15 years that 150 people of colour in New York City were killed by on-duty cops, a total of <a href="http://www.odmp.org/agency/2758-new-york-city-police-department-new-york">15 on-duty cops were killed in non-accidental deaths</a> – not including the 24 who died in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
By contrast, almost four times as many New York City officers died from the chemicals they inhaled in the search-and-rescue attempts after the 9/11 attack. Ironically, it is the person most responsible for not giving cops and other rescue workers adequate protection from those chemicals – <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/nyregion/14giuliani.html?pagewanted=all">former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani</a> – who is playing a leading role in orchestrating the chorus blaming the Black Lives Matter movement for creating a dangerous climate for cops.
Giuliani’s return to prominence during this backlash is just one of the echoes of the political atmosphere after 9/11.
From the relentless drumbeat of media coverage of the officers’ deaths – the Daily News ran headlines about the shooting on its cover for 11 of the next 12 days – to the proliferation of NYPD baseball caps on local athletes and coaches, and blue ribbons and blue porch lights in towns across the country, police departments have been bathed in an adulation similar to the “support the troops” campaign for the US military.
Just as in the days after 9/11, there was <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/25/us/new-york-police-threats-arrests/">a flurry of fear-mongering reports about the possibilities of future attacks</a>, most of them based on half-cocked threats against police posted on social media or even angry outbursts on the street by homeless people.
By contrast, there has been little media attention paid to the horrific things posted by current and retired police officers in online forums – including the suggestion that <a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/emails-and-racist-chats-show-how-cops-and-gop-are-teaming-undermine-de-blasio?paging=off&amp;current_page=1#bookmark">officers plant drugs on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter</a>, who has struggled with addiction.
A Fox TV station in Baltimore <a href="http://gawker.com/slimy-baltimore-fox-affiliate-caught-faking-kill-a-cop-1674040381">doctored the video of an anti-racist demonstration in Washington, DC,</a> to make it appear that protesters were chanting, “Kill a cop!” – an eerie echo of media attempts to portray the majority of Muslims around the world as cheering for the September 11 attacks.
The most troubling part of the 9/11 déjà vu has been the “if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists” effort to smear anyone who protests police violence as being responsible for Brimley’s actions.
“There is blood on many hands”, declared New York police union chief Patrick Lynch in the aftermath of Brimley’s shooting. “From those who incited violence under the guise of protest all the way to the mayor’s office at City Hall.” Rather than stand up to Lynch’s slander, Bill de Blasio went along with it, urging New Yorkers to stay out of the streets and “put aside political debates and protests” in the wake of the deaths of the two officers.
As political leaders across the spectrum, from the conservative Giuliani to the liberal de Blasio, shifted hard to the right, protests grew smaller – although some of that was due to the holiday season. Some activists felt pressure to shift their rhetoric from the powerful “Black Lives Matter” slogan to the “All Lives Matter”.
But protests did continue, organised by a core of activists determined not to back down. On 23 December, many hundreds defied de Blasio’s call to stay off the streets with an action that disrupted holiday shopping on Fifth Avenue. Hundreds more rallied four days later at the East New York site where Akai Gurley was killed by in a housing project stairwell by officer Peter Liang.
That protest took place on <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/12/28/protesters-stage-anti-cop-rally-at-akai-gurley-slay-site/">the same day as the funeral for Rafael Ramos</a>, infuriating those who called for the city to “unite” in memory of the murdered officers. In fact, by demanding justice for a murdered Black man whose death prompted no cries for citywide mourning and unity, the Gurley demonstration showed just why the slogan “Black Lives Matter” is more relevant than ever.
The pro-police backlash has organised itself around the slogan “Blue Lives Matter”, with its ludicrous implication that cops are oppressed by a society that lavishes their departments with additional funding and military-grade weaponry – not to mention portrays them as heroes in movies and television shows.
Actually, the nationally orchestrated response to the deaths of the two officers demonstrates precisely the opposite – that “blue lives” already matter far more than those of ordinary working class people, especially if they are Black.
Most of those who publicly mourned Ramos and Liu have shown little sympathy not only for victims of police violence, but even for the Brimley’s first victim in Baltimore, Shaneka Thompson – despite <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/nyregion/ismaaiyl-brinsleys-many-identities-fueled-life-of-wrong-turns.html">reports indicating that Thompson may have been Brimley’s primary target</a> and the two men he killed later were relative afterthoughts.
Of course, there is no such thing as “blue people”. Instead, there are people of many races, though most are white, who become untouchable when they put on a police uniform. <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/23/us-usa-police-nypd-race-insight-idUSKBN0K11EV20141223">A recent Reuters article provides telling evidence of this reality</a>: In interviews of current and former Black members of the NYPD, all but one said they had been racially profiled by other cops when they were off duty. But while these officers had either filed complaints about the harassment or wanted to, many were themselves accused in court of crimes ranging from false arrest to excessive force.
The backlash is about making sure the oppressive institutions of law enforcement are even more protected from scrutiny and challenge. <a href="http://www.ebony.com/news-views/nypd-blues-the-anti-police-brutality-movement-didnt-kill-any-cops-405">As Jamilah Lemieux of Ebony put it</a>:
“We know that ‘Blue lives matter’, because when an officer of the law kills an unarmed civilian of colour, that officer is almost guaranteed to escape any punishment, because his life matters. Why? Because the presumption is that most of us, especially Black men, are capable of the horrific act committed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley and that officers have a duty to defend themselves first.”
“Blue Lives Matter” is a call for Black lives to matter even less. It is a justification in advance for the murder of more Mike Browns and Eric Garners. The calls, whether from outside or inside the movement, for protesters to mourn all lives equally misses these basic points.
There’s more of the backlash to come, too. The pro-police side has an organised counter-offensive in the works, with plans for months of protests against Bill de Blasio and Black Lives Matter activism.
At the heart of this reaction are police unions, led by New York’s Patrick Lynch, who has battled de Blasio ever since his mayoral campaign in 2013 tapped into the anger among Blacks and Latinos at the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” tactic. Police union officials encouraged officers to turn their backs on de Blasio as he addressed the funerals for Ramos and Liu, and they are overseeing <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/12/29/arrests-plummet-following-execution-of-two-cops/">a police slowdown</a>, in which arrests have declined by 66 percent, and tickets and summons are down by 94 percent.
Initially at least, the slowdown may have backfired. Crime has remained at historically low levels, calling into question just what it is that cops do all day beyond harassing people of colour and issuing bogus tickets.
But like Lynch’s declaration that the NYPD will now be a “wartime police department”, the slowdown shows that cops – even more so now than usual – see themselves as a force removed from and opposed to the neighbourhoods they patrol. That’s an ominous development for people of colour who face the brunt of racial profiling and police harassment.
Right wingers, led by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post and Fox News, eagerly took up the “Blue Lives Matter” cause as a way to bash Bill de Blasio. Speaking on Fox News a day after the shooting of the two officers, Giuliani declared that Barack Obama, attorney general Eric Holder and reverend Al Sharpton “have created an atmosphere of severe, strong, anti-police hatred in certain communities. For that, they should be ashamed of themselves.”
Obama, Holder and Sharpton – who, of course, all happen to be Black – have become <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/12/21/conservatives_sick_reaction_to_nypd_officer_killings_blame_obama_and_de_blasio/">an unholy trinity for conservatives</a>, along with de Blasio, who has spoken often about how racism affects his biracial family.
As vile as the attacks on de Blasio have been, activists need to challenge the New York City mayor to take on the police department that he is, by law, responsible for controlling.
Like most liberal politicians, de Blasio wants to have it both ways. He promotes some reforms like ending stop-and-frisk to appease the millions of people who voted for him, while <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2013/12/19/we-dont-want-bratton-back">appointing as police chief William Bratton</a>, the man who initiated the “broken windows” policing practice of cracking down on minor offenses, which led to stop-and-frisk.
Now de Blasio is trying to walk a tightrope of showing sympathy with those protesting police terror, while maintaining the allegiance of those same police – as well as the support of New York’s 1 percent, which is frightened at the prospect of a city where the police don’t have the unquestioned authority to intimidate the 99 percent.
That’s the job de Blasio signed up for – which is why no activist should see it as their job to make his easier by making concessions or letting up on the pressure to confront the NYPD.
By continuing to resist in New York City, Ferguson and around the country, Black Lives Matter protesters have asserted that this isn’t going to be another 9/11 moment for the left. But the challenge remains to build a movement with both the size and militancy to win lasting change in a country built on racism and state violence.
Two powerful forces with deep roots in this country are squaring off: the Black freedom struggle against patriotic, militarised racism. The past few weeks in New York City are a taste of what that conflict will look like in the years to come.
[First published at <a href="http://www.SocialistWorker.org">SocialistWorker.org</a>.]

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