CHICAGO—More than 200,000 people turned out in downtown Chicago on 18 October to join the “No Kings” demonstration against the Trump regime. At one point, the march from the gathering spot through the Chicago Loop (downtown) stretched two and a half miles (4km).
The Chicago protest was part of a national effort, organised by a coalition of liberal groups, that brought as many as 7 million people—one in 50 Americans—into the street to protest Trump. Protests occurred everywhere, from the largest cities to small towns in conservative parts of the country.
Democratic politicians boosted the national effort, and the liberal MSNBC network promoted it. This was a departure from earlier national “No Kings” (in June) and “Hands Off” protests (in April), when leading Democrats kept their distance. But protesters in Chicago didn’t need prodding. The Trump administration’s attack on the city and its surrounding suburbs, beginning in September, was more than enough motivation for hundreds of thousands.
Trump ordered “Operation Midway Blitz”, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other militarised federal police forces descending on Chicago on 9 September. Trump’s racist crackdown on immigrants picked Chicago because it is a Democratic Party-dominated city, in a Democratic-dominated state, <a href="https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/12/chicago-immigrant-population-growth-trump-immigration-enforcement">where more than one in five residents was born outside the US</a>.
Since 9 September, Chicago has been on high alert. Each day, a battle with marauding federal agents unfolds. ICE, Border Patrol and other masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) drive through neighbourhoods in unmarked SUVs and arrest immigrants (and many citizens) going about their daily business.
Parents dropping off their kids at school. Construction and landscape workers on job sites. Day labourers looking for work at Home Depots and Menard’s (“big box” hardware stores where contractors pick up building supplies and hire casual labour). People attending church services. Individual tamaleros/as (people who make and sell tamales from street carts) or vendors at neighbourhood swap meets (a flea market for multiple vendors). Even, seemingly, random people walking down the street or waiting at bus stops. 
Since the Supreme Court essentially <a href="https://eji.org/news/supreme-court-allows-stops-based-on-race-to-continue/">legalised racial profiling</a> at the Trump administration’s request, federal agents are making warrantless arrests each day. Apparently, having brown skin or speaking Spanish are the main pretexts that ICE is using for its stops and arrests. This, of course, gives the lie to Trump and his apologists who claim that they are focusing on criminals and dangerous individuals. As of 8 October, ICE <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/operation-midway-blitz-arrests-ice-crackdown-chicago-data-other-states/">had reportedly arrested 1,500 people in its Operation Midway Blitz</a>. Even <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Dq5IR_piZRT0%23:~:text%3DICE%2520says%2520at%2520least%252013%2520people%2520with,32%2520Chicago%2520Live:%2520https://www.fox32chicago.com/live%2520FOX%252032%2520Chicago&amp;ved=2ahUKEwi655zU7L2QAxX_GzQIHc2GBOIQ1fkOegQIAxAG&amp;opi=89978449&amp;cd&amp;psig=AOvVaw3dWlwP95KgYMFAB2fbraW1&amp;ust=1761430116144000">ICE admits that only about 1 percent of them</a> have violent criminal records.
ICE agents have already killed one man, who they tried to arrest after he dropped his son off at school. ICE and its mouthpieces at the Department of Homeland Security—one node of the Trump Administration’s “Ministry of Truth”—accused Silverio Villegas González of trying to run into ICE agents with his vehicle. Subsequently, video, including body camera footage <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;ved=2ahUKEwihider7b2QAxVQFDQIHZjCG-wQFnoECBkQAQ&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Fice-fatal-shooting-chicago-bodycam-footage-villegas-gonzalez-rcna233484&amp;usg=AOvVaw3rb4QZ9R6IV_iIBYHQOA2V&amp;opi=89978449">from local police department officers</a>, exposed DHS’s story as a fabrication. 
Another Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martínez five times while she was sitting in her car behind the agent’s vehicle in the Latino working-class neighbourhood of Brighton Park. Miraculously, she escaped life-threatening injury. But, again, video footage of the incident showed that the Border Patrol—which claimed Martínez had rammed the feds’ vehicle and threatened them with a weapon—<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bodycam-footage-conflicts-with-dhs-account-chicago-womans-shooting-by-border-2025-10-08/">was lying about the confrontation</a>. It’s becoming conventional wisdom among many in Chicago—activists, journalists and many everyday folks—that DHS’s statements are lying cover stories that unravel within a few hours.
Perhaps the pinnacle (so far) of the ICE theatre of cruelty was the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/us/chicago-south-shores-border-patrol-raid.html">30 September early morning commando raid</a> on an apartment building in the city’s South Shore neighbourhood. ICE and other federal agents stormed the building, some of them rappelling down its five stories from helicopters hovering overhead. DHS was treating a dilapidated apartment housing poor African Americans and Venezuelan migrants as a militia stronghold in wartime Iraq. And DHS filmed the assault to provide the likes of Fox News and MAGA influencers with images of “heroic agents” taking on what they said was a den for Tren de Aragua gang members.
The ICE agents marched dozens of people, in handcuffs, out of the building. They included barefoot children and adults in various states of undress. Agents racially segregated the detainees (Black people in one group, Latinos in another) before processing them. They arrested 37 people, only one of whom ICE alleges in court has any connection to a gang. And when people returned to their apartments, they found them ransacked, with doors torn off their hinges.
Because of these terror tactics, the ICE processing centre in Broadview, a small suburban town to the west of Chicago, has become a flashpoint for face-offs between protesters and federal agents. In previous periods of immigrant rights activism, the Broadview facility was a focal point for often symbolic civil disobedience actions, including politicians and clergy. With Operation Midway Blitz, hundreds have turned out regularly to protest and resist.
In response, federal agents have brutalised and tear-gassed crowds of unarmed people. In <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwixpoeH9r2QAxXvOjQIHWagJhwQtwJ6BAgHEAI&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_SbX0UbBFaY&amp;usg=AOvVaw27ufvJe-2NjumY3kvNdQ2O&amp;opi=89978449">one incident that went viral</a>, an ICE agent standing on the roof of the building fired a pepper ball into the head of Reverend David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, who was making a moral appeal to the ICE agents. This was yet another example of DHS’s gratuitous violence, as anyone watching the video could see that Black posed no threat to—indeed wasn’t even near—the agent who inflicted severe injury on him.
These repressive actions, and similar ones in city and suburban neighbourhoods, against unarmed civilians have prompted a series of federal lawsuits from immigrant rights advocates and the media against these tactics. Federal Judge Sara Ellis has issued rulings barring federal agents from using tear gas and other violent measures against demonstrators and the press. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/us/gregory-bovino-chicago-immigration-tear-gas-hnk">ICE has already flouted the judge’s orders</a>.
Yet the most important story in Chicago is one of resistance. Chicago was a centre of <a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/28/immigrants-marching-out-of-the-shadows">mass protests for immigrant rights in the mid-2000s</a>. Although the movement subsided, it produced thousands of activists and dozens of immigrant rights organisations rooted in communities across the region. As Chicago-based socialist <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/resistance-breeds-solidarity-a-report-from-chicago/">Sharon Smith wrote about the thousands</a> who attended the Chicago “No Kings” event:
“The demonstrations drew large numbers of people who had never attended a protest before, but also many who have already joined one of the ‘Rapid Response Networks’ that have been organized by immigrants’ rights activists, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the city and suburbs.
“These neighborhood-based networks have been around as long as ICE, but they have mushroomed since Trump took office in January—to serve the many needs of the fearful migrant population. People volunteer to help distribute copies of ‘Know your rights’ brochures in immigrant communities. They set up phone and internet hotlines to notify the network of a suspected ICE sighting; once they have verified it, they then broadcast it to the entire neighborhood. They also hand out whistle kits to everyone in the neighborhood, along with the different types of signals to use when ICE has been spotted in the area versus when ICE is attacking someone in the immediate vicinity. Those driving cars beep their horns if they see ICE goons in the area.
“Many migrants are too afraid to leave their homes to go grocery shopping, or to bring their children to school, so the network assigns volunteers to individual families to go and buy groceries, accompany their kids, and help with the other basic necessities of life.”
The activism in neighbourhoods around the city is yet another example of the fact that thousands of working people are willing to stand against the authoritarianism coming from the Trump administration in ways that elites at institutions like universities, corporations and the Democratic Party have not. 
For many liberals, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire scion of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is something of an exception to this elite capitulation. Pritzker has denounced Trump and his “lackey” Stephen Miller, the white supremacist White House domestic adviser who is thought to be the main architect of the anti-immigrant assault. Pritzker has warned federal agents of consequences if they violate Illinoisans’ civil rights.
But Pritzker’s image is mostly based on talk, rather than action. In fact, Pritzker has ordered the Illinois State Police to set up a “free speech zone” at some distance from the Broadview facility’s driveway. The state police themselves have already beaten and arrested protesters in multiple confrontations there. In other words, while Pritzker touts his support for peaceful protests against ICE, his police force is performing crowd control for ICE—allowing it to maraud throughout the Chicago area. The Democrats’ commitment to uphold the status quo renders them accomplices to Trump, rather than serious opponents.
At the time of writing, the Supreme Court is reviewing <a href="https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&amp;&amp;p=c9b1f1883d48acc275630ae224deb6ca6d8e6f5a734fd2ae86e3df47d3f34176JmltdHM9MTc2MTI2NDAwMA&amp;ptn=3&amp;ver=2&amp;hsh=4&amp;fclid=10f13388-b905-653b-2029-26d3b8816423&amp;psq=trump+appeal+to+supreme+court+illinois+national+guard&amp;u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy8yMDI1LzEwLzE3L254LXMxLTU1NzgyNjYvdHJ1bXAtc3VwcmVtZS1jb3VydC1uYXRpb25hbC1ndWFyZC1pbGxpbm9pcw">the Trump administration’s emergency appeal</a> of a district court ruling barring the federal deployment of the National Guard to Illinois. <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained">Under a 150-year-old law</a>, the federal government is barred from using the military for domestic law enforcement. But Trump’s order to deploy the National Guard in Illinois, following a similar deployment in Los Angeles earlier this year, is intended to usurp that authority. 
By law, Illinois’ claim that Trump’s order is illegal should be a clear-cut case. But the Supreme Court has been one of chief enablers of Trump’s effort to crown himself king. So, we shouldn’t expect that the court will stand in his way. A National Guard deployment into the streets of Chicago would mark another dangerous escalation. It would require the resistance to broaden and deepen.

Lance Selfa

Chicago rises against Trump’s deportation regime

Pass the sick bucket! You might have predicted that Anthony Albanese’s first White House meeting with Donald Trump would be bad, but it exceeded the worst expectations. 
What made the whole thing so dreadful?
Was it Albanese fawning over Trump and congratulating him for “the extraordinary achievement” of a ceasefire deal in Gaza, even as Israel continues to kill dozens of Palestinians daily with US-made weapons?
Was it Albanese hailing the countries’ military record, claiming the two had “stood side by side for freedom and democracy”? Did that include Vietnam, Anthony? Iraq? Afghanistan? Did that record include Australian and US backing for dictators across the Asia Pacific even as they murdered their citizens? Or their support for Israel as it wages its genocidal war in Gaza? 
Or was the biggest problem Albanese spitting in the faces of the 7 million Americans who had taken to the streets three days earlier in the “No Kings” protests against the right-wing authoritarian Trump regime?
It’s hard to pick which one of these is most offensive.
But that’s not how the national media saw things. 
There, it was celebration all around. The mainstream media praised Albanese to the skies for his achievements where other world leaders had failed. The prime minister had got into the good graces of the president and brought home the bacon. Trump had even called Albanese “a great prime minister”. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Koziol called Albanese’s trip “a raging success”. Opposition leader Sussan Ley initially tried to make ground by demanding Albanese sack Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd for disrespecting Trump, but within 24 hours she too was forced to join in the establishment’s hurrahs.
But what was it that they were celebrating? Nothing other than Albanese walking into the White House and coming out with an agreed plan to take the world closer to war.
Albanese and the Australian ruling class, and the capitalist media that fight for their interests, wanted two things out of this meeting: to get Trump to openly support the delivery of AUKUS nuclear submarines to Australia, and to confirm US involvement in mining and processing Australia’s extensive deposits of rare earths and critical minerals. They got both. 
China’s emergence as a rival hegemon in the Asia-Pacific threatens US domination and, by extension, Australian power. Dealing with the threat from China is now central to American imperialist concerns. But the US is also involved elsewhere, from the Middle East and Latin America to Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Australian government wants the US to prioritise the Asia Pacific to ensure China is prevented from controlling the region. Their job, therefore, is to tie America down in the region and to reinforce in the eyes of successive US presidents Australia’s value as an ally.
This is what the AUKUS pact is about, to convince the US (and Britain) to sell nuclear attack submarines to Australia with delivery to start in 2032 and, eventually, to build some in Australia. Their only purpose is to project Australian power into the South China Sea, the most likely arena for a clash with China, and to integrate Australia into US war plans. 
The cost of the submarines is already estimated at $368 billion, and given the whole history of military procurement, we can anticipate the final figure will be much higher. In the meantime, the Albanese government is paying $3 billion to US shipyards and $20 billion to build port facilities in WA to service the US nuclear submarine fleet. The cost to humanity if the submarines are deployed in a war with China will be incalculable.
Before this week’s meeting, Trump had, from the perspective of Australia’s ruling class, been disconcertingly silent about AUKUS. What’s more, he had sponsored a review of the whole program, to report by the end of this year. So, when Trump told the joint press conference that it was “full steam ahead” with the AUKUS program, there were whoops of joy from Australia’s defence and security establishment. They can keep banging the war drums. Tick one for Albanese.
Then there was the issue of rare earths and critical minerals which are an essential component in the production of a wide range of products, civilian and military. Over the past two or three decades, the Chinese government has invested huge amounts of money in securing for Beijing a virtual monopoly in processing these minerals. Two weeks ago, as part of the escalating tensions with Washington, China announced export controls, confirming US fears that China could cripple America’s military preparations. 
Enter the Albanese government. Over the past five months, Canberra has been working with Washington to expand the extraction and processing of Australia’s rare earth deposits as an alternative source of supply for the Pentagon. 
This week’s meeting saw Albanese and Trump sign off on an agreement to invest in or subsidise up to $8.5 billion into the industry to get things moving. This comes on top of $2 billion of public money paid or committed to two mines in the NT and WA, one of which is backed by Trump’s second favourite Australian, Gina Rinehart. The industry will be guaranteed a minimum price level to ensure the mine owners rake in profits. According to the White House, the agreement will achieve “critical mineral and energy dominance”, with Australia and the US having first pick of the minerals and control over exports, allowing Canberra and Washington to reward friends and punish enemies. Tick two for Albanese.
That the nation’s politicians with few exceptions, foreign and military policy strategists, military chiefs of staff and newspaper editors can all cheer Albanese on for a splendid job in Washington tells us a lot about their priorities. They are cheering for an escalation of war planning in our region, for the diversion of funds from social services, education, health and welfare to military build-up, and for a more repressive environment that comes with such developments. And all in the hands of our Labor government, which is demonstrating once again its devotion to the interests of the ruling class.

Tom Bramble

Albanese visits Washington in the service of imperialism and war

The cabinet secretary in charge of public health is an anti-vax crackpot implementing billions in cuts for medical research. The defence secretary is a third-rate TV host who, when he’s not receiving Botox injections, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hegseth-boasts-i-know-exactly-what-i-m-doing-after-stunning-war-plan-leak">must publicly insist</a>: “I know exactly what I’m doing”. 
The administration includes people who openly say that women should be in the home, not the workplace; some even think <a href="https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-voting/">the Nineteenth Amendment,</a> which guaranteed women the right to vote, was a mistake. Energy policy doubles down on fossil fuels and nuclear power, while abandoning successful renewable energy investments. Tariffs are raising consumer prices and hampering domestic firms, while impoverishing swathes of the farm economy.
It all appears to be a leap into irrationalism. Why would the US government destroy the country’s research capability, sabotage its economy, and put crackpots and incompetents in charge of some of its most essential functions? Why does the Trump administration appear to want to turn back the clock to the 1950s, if not the nineteenth century? And why would leading corporate, government and university leaders support all of this?
It's difficult to address these questions with one overarching explanation—unless it’s simply that all these factors historically have been associated with right-wing and authoritarian governments. In The Reactionary Mind, political philosopher Corey Robin defines modern-day conservatism as “that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammelled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth”.
The corollary is the political right’s defence of traditional social and economic hierarchies. In the Trump government, echoes of this defence of “tradition” can be found in support for policies that push women out of the workforce and encourage them to have more babies, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5371718/pronatalist-birth-rate-musk-natal-conference">to take one example</a>. These “neo-natal” ideas are closely connected to other reactionary ideas such as white supremacy and transphobia.
In some cases, Trumpist tropes are easy to explain. The fossil fuel industry is a traditional Republican constituency, and the government is heavily invested in economic and political alliances with petrostates, especially the Gulf monarchies. So it’s no surprise that the administration is stuffed with climate change deniers and is hostile to renewable energy. It appears not to care about the climate crisis’s impact on humans, nor, even from its narrow imperial mindset, 21st-century supremacy in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.html">solar power</a> and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/autos-chinas-electric-vehicle-juggernaut-is-reshaping-the-car-market.html">electric vehicles</a> being forfeited to the Chinese state.
Another reason for the seeming self-destructive irrationality of the Trump administration is that its 2024 electoral coalition, and the government it created, is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate right-wing elements. Analysts have described this shotgun marriage in different ways. <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-three-headed-chimera-of-trumpian-destruction">To liberal Josh Marshall</a>, the “three-headed chimera of Trumpian destruction” is an amalgam of MAGA loyalists, Christian nationalists and “Tech bro” authoritarians. <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/02/trump-seizes-power-in-d-c/">To socialist Ashley Smith</a>, the Trump regime is a combination of “three factions with totally different political programs—traditional conservatives, neoliberal tech bosses and MAGA nationalists”.
Smith is closer to the structural components of the Trump regime, while Marshall is more concerned with its ideological composition. But both emphasise, correctly, the unstable nature of the forces undergirding Trump’s government. These disparate elements are mostly pulling in the same direction because the administration is on the offensive against “enemies” that they share: immigrants, “wokeness”, federal workers and the like. But there are underlying tensions between these groups. And a political payoff to one could undermine another. We’ve already seen a foreshadowing of this in <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/1/16/bannon-vs-musk-how-trumps-u-turn-on-h-1b-visas-has-split-maga">the fight between MAGA nationalists and tech oligarchs</a> over the question of visas for highly skilled migrant workers.
Between 2020 and 2024, Trump expanded his electoral coalition with newly minted constituencies such as RFK Jr’s anti-vax followers. The MAGA right brought these forces inside the Trump tent. To maintain their loyalty, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services and the nation’s public health agencies was handed to Kennedy and other prominent opponents of vaccines and COVID-era policies. Trump knows nothing about health or science, as his ramblings about drinking bleach or linking common painkillers to autism, show. 
But even as his administration’s policies have caused upheaval in the public health infrastructure, Trump has stood by Kennedy. Surely one might think that business and the tech oligarchs would oppose such anti-science thinking. 
We should remember that the likes of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/climate-science-deniers-downplaying-coronavirus-pandemic">Koch network and the fossil-fuel industry</a>—in league with “<a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-elections">lumpencapitalist</a>” <a href="https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/210324-The-Disinformation-Dozen.pdf">supplement peddlers</a> (the online snake oil hawkers of the 21st century)—financed much of the opposition to COVID public health measures. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which focused on individuals’ health and diet choices, <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/make-america-healthy-again-aims-to-make-public-health-your-responsibility/">aligns with neoliberalism’s “blame the victim” approach to cutting social spending</a>. Why should the government spend money on health care for those who make poor lifestyle choices, this Social Darwinist approach asks. 
Finally, the tech oligarchs think that artificial intelligence (AI), on which they are spending hundreds of billions, will be able to replace biomedical researchers, administer social programs and usurp skilled health care personnel. They plan to profit from all of these “innovations”. So, from one perspective, the US destroying its biomedical research enterprise makes no sense. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/business/larry-ellison-oracle-philanthropy.html">But to tech billionaires</a> who plan to use AI to remake that enterprise, it makes perfect sense.
A large proportion of Trump’s mass support—the core of the one-third or so of the electorate that is the “ride or die” MAGA base—holds religious ideas that are <a href="https://prri.org/research/one-leader-under-god-the-connection-between-authoritarianism-and-christian-nationalism-in-america/">highly authoritarian and anti-modern</a>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm">Leon Trotsky’s observation</a> about Germany in the early 1930s comes to mind: 
“A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms ... Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters.”
These are not simply people susceptible to believing the various conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and MAGA influencers; They are an audience for various “culture war” issues the right uses to build support. While the US government has long supported Israel, the Trump administration’s embrace of the Israeli far right coincides with the increased influence in the Republican Party of Christian Zionist organisations, <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/christian-zionism-evangelicals-israel-trump-foreign-policy/">which cite Biblical prophecy in support of the Jewish state</a>.
And then there is the biggest wildcard, and source of chaos, in the administration: Trump himself. The president has longstanding ideological commitments that he refuses to drop, regardless of whether they make much sense economically or politically. Championing a tariff-driven, mercantilist economic policy is at the top of this list. 
Beyond a handful of commitments—mostly revolving around ways to boost his own power and to line his pockets—Trump is completely mercurial. Perhaps this is part of his self-promotion as a “strongman”, but it can also produce a situation in which, among his minions, “the knives are out for everyone”, <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/knives-everyone-author-michael-wolff-021305186.html">as Trump biographer Michael Wolff said earlier this month</a>.
That so much of what Trump and his administration does makes no rational sense doesn’t make them any less dangerous. And liberals who think that the 2026 midterm election or the end of Trump’s term will bring everyone “back to their senses” are deluding themselves.
US imperial decline, societal rot, and corrupt impunity at the highest reaches have paved the way for the confederacy of dunces and malefactors that have taken over the US government. The people who helped pave that path aren’t going to lead us out of it.

How did a bunch of crackpots get in charge of the USA?

A wave of censorship and political intimidation is sweeping the United States. Led by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president, the country’s vast far-right movement is pressuring employers to sack or silence left-wing workers and to purge outspoken political progressives from state and state-funded institutions. One of the latest casualties in this war on the left is a history professor in Texas, Tom Alter, who was fired last month for speaking, in his own time, at a socialist conference. 
A judge has since <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/27/judge-rules-for-tom-alter-as-battle-against-university-continues">ordered the university to reinstate Alter</a>, but management has indicated that it will continue investigating him. The following is the original statement and call for solidarity released by his organisation, <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org/">Socialist Horizon</a>.
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Defend free speech! No to fascists! Reinstate Professor Tom Alter Now! 
Beloved tenured history professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on 10 September by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme right-wing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist who tries to monetise exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people “chose to die in the Holocaust”, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s “exposure video” reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy, which requires a formal due process procedure.
What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable? 
The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed <a href="https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/">here</a>, in no way calls for violence. 
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favour of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organising politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx">reflect</a> those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40 percet favour socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive; they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists and capitalists. 
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer, Texas State University, that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom—a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the president of the Texas State University system so easily—who else will they go after?
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr Tom Alter to his teaching position. 
The termination of Dr Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in line with that of Donald Trump, who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents. 
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far-right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left. 
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Colour, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole. It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence, condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war, while a handful accumulates ever-growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe. 
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom and equality. We will also continue building the organisation that it will take to win it.
Dr Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organisations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as associate professor of history. 
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organisations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defence of free speech and against fascism.
Follow the <a href="https://socialisthorizon.org">Socialist Horizon website</a> for campaign updates.

Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign

Dissent and lose your job. That’s the principle of the campaign to turn Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr.
The second Trump administration has always placed a heavy emphasis on the repression of dissent. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he made good on his promise to attack the Palestine solidarity movement, using everything from masked ICE goons to suspension of federal university funding grants. He has campaigned to erase anti-racist ideas from public life under the guise of attacking the hated “DEI”. Even before Kirk’s death, Trump’s second term was the high watermark of the US right’s long war on “cultural Marxism”, which dates back at least to the war on terror, when Kirk’s predecessors like Ann Coulter tried to officially rehabilitate McCarthyism.
Kirk’s death opens a new phase, marked by one Louisiana Republican’s vow to “cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals”. (The phrase “cancel with extreme prejudice” originated during the Vietnam War in US military and spy organisations as a euphemism for murder.) Anyone who uttered a critical remark about Kirk would now be targeted by a campaign to sack them from their job, endorsed from the top by Vice President J.D. Vance: “Call them out. And hell, call their employer”.
This was not just about people in public life—university professors like those Kirk had targeted with his “professor watch-list” or public figures like Jimmy Kimmel. Academics, journalists and entertainers are important scalps in creating a climate of repression: their downfalls can provide a model for bosses to follow, and a threat for workers. 
But the movement to “cancel” aimed at workers with no real public profile: teachers, airline employees and all kinds of white-collar and retail workers have been targeted and suspended or sacked. Dissent has been punished everywhere from the Nasdaq to Freddy’s Frozen Custard &amp; Steakburgers in Quincy, Illinois, which sacked an employee for posting “another one bites the dust”. 
This is repression that goes beyond state power. Trump’s ICE agents rounded up Palestine solidarity protesters for deportation, and his National Guard has been sent on theatrical tours of major cities. But to repress dissent more thoroughly, the US right is turning to the fundamental form of oppression that defines capitalist society: bosses’ power over workers.
That basic power relation of capitalism shapes the production and distribution of ideas. That’s most obvious in the case of massive, privately owned media conglomerates, like those that organised the disciplinary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and are currently lining up to purchase TikTok. But it’s about more than the media. Capitalism represses dissent by making it dangerous to speak your mind if you want to keep your job.
Right-wing political activists know it, and they have always taken advantage of it to repress the left while claiming to be the champions of individual liberty. That’s why, immediately after Kirk’s death, the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” appeared to centralise the reporting and purging of anti-Kirk workers, and that’s why Vance pointed his MAGA followers to use the power of the capitalist class to control their opponents.
The model is familiar. The USA was never a fascist dictatorship, but up to the 1960s, it was an extremely authoritarian society. Figureheads at the top—FBI directors, members of Congress or conservative activists—would send the signal for repression, set the talking points and issue public denunciations. Intellectuals, artists and journalists could serve as public examples, denounced and blacklisted from public life. But whether it was the Red Scare or segregation, the grunt work of authoritarianism in the USA was often carried out by private employers and property owners. For millions of anonymous workers, their livelihood depended on keeping their heads down, fitting in and staying out of trouble.
What kind of authoritarianism is this? Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Then, having lost the election, she just disappeared, unseen until she got a gig at a real estate agents’ conference on the Gold Coast. But the Democrats’ hysteria in the 2024 election, followed by their astonishing passivity, shouldn’t be a cause for complacency. The US state may not experience an overnight transformation into a one-party dictatorship after a Reichstag fire, but Trump’s presidency represents a genuine attempt to establish a less free society.
This is more than a culture war. For socialists, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movement are still missing the key ingredients of working-class leadership and anti-capitalist politics that they need to challenge seriously the oppressions they aim to destroy. But for a conservative, they still look like a serious danger: a growing hostility to US foreign policy in elite institutions, mass hostility to the police in big cities. Trump and his allies are on a mission to wipe out basic ideas of social equality and anti-racism, to make them dangerous, to push them to the margins of society.
The truly odious nature of Charlie Kirk helps in that cause. In the aftermath of his death, the slightest scepticism about his far-right ideas has become the litmus test for the right.
In their new era of ascendancy, conservatives and bosses have gleefully adopted small-l liberal ideas. “Psychosocial safety” has become an excuse to attack trade union activists. “Anti-racism” is a major concern for right-wingers only when it comes to crushing Palestine solidarity. Now the Republicans have embraced “consequence culture”. 
Those liberal ideas mostly sidestepped the question of class. Now class must be absolutely central in the left’s response to clarify the repression that is unfolding. Trump’s war against “woke ideology” is an attack on the living standards and rights of workers. Those early days of Musk’s DOGE delegitimised the very idea that the state could ever regulate capitalists or redistribute wealth, and provided models for how to treat workers with cruelty, deliberately humiliating them before mass sackings. Now the sanctification of Kirk has provided pressure—or an excuse—to identify and purge any troublemaking employee.
The response to Kirk’s death is a bosses’ war on free speech, and it’s part of a broader turn in the West towards the silencing of dissent. Bosses’ power to sack and control employees is becoming a central plank of new right-wing authoritarianism. Workers’ power will be central to resisting and overturning it.

D. Taylor

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

CHICAGO—Donald Trump and the MAGA right wasted little time in capitalising on the gruesome 10 September murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Before authorities in Utah, where Kirk was killed, had even located a suspect, Trump and the MAGAverse were blaming Kirk’s death on an amorphous “left”. Within days, leading right-wingers—not just MAGA “influencers” but Trump officials up to the vice president—were calling for repression against the left.
Vice President Vance led the charge, encouraging right-wingers to monitor social media and to report to employers anyone who made light of Kirk’s killing. Because so few people really made light of Kirk’s murder, the dragnet changed to sweep in people who were insufficiently deferential to MAGA’s desire to turn Kirk into a martyr. The Washington Post
fired award-winning journalist Karen Attiah when she simply criticised Kirk’s legacy by quoting him in his own words.
The government-orchestrated attack on free speech reached a crescendo when Trumpite Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr suggested that the broadcast network ABC, a subsidiary of the Disney Co., could save itself from regulatory problems by removing late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air. ABC dutifully complied, announcing the “indefinite” suspension of Kimmel’s program on 18 September.
Kimmel’s offence, according to Carr and the MAGA right, was to imply that Kirk’s killer was “one of theirs”. Subsequent information—revealed after Kimmel’s monologue—cast doubt on that assertion. But no matter. Carr had achieved his purpose. It put media corporations on notice that the government would be policing their speech—in direct violation <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/what-the-constitution-says-about-free-speech-on-the-airwaves">of the letter of the law that created the FCC in 1934</a>. The ever oafish Trump then said he’d like other networks to fire their late-night comedians, for whom the president provides an endless supply of comedic material.
What MAGA didn’t anticipate was the pushback the Kimmel cancellation received. Most Democrats and even a few Republicans criticised Carr’s move. Boycotts and cancellations of Disney streaming service subscriptions increased. The unions representing writers, actors and musicians who worked on Kimmel’s show mounted protests. More than 400 well-known actors and performers issued a statement condemning ABC, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an ABC-sponsored event in protest.
Within a few days, Disney reversed itself and announced that Kimmel’s show would return to the air. Now, two networks of local ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, have also backed down. But we shouldn’t think that the battle for free speech is won.
First, the government pressuring private entities to censor speech it doesn’t like has been the Trump administration’s modus operandi
since it returned to office in January. It has cut billions in research grants to universities, leading many to discipline students or faculty who had protested Israel’s war in Gaza, or to scrap university programs that met with administration disapproval. It announced it would deny security clearances to law firms considering representing clients suing the administration. Trump filed frivolous lawsuits against CBS’s and ABC’s news operations—which he certainly would have lost if they had gone to trial—leading their parent companies to make multimillion-dollar settlements.
Second, the success of a wealthy, well-known and nonpolitical entertainer like Kimmel can obscure the larger attack on free speech and the left that MAGA will continue to prosecute. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/18/charlie-kirk-comments-prompt-firings-across-us/86216872007/">More than 100 people have been fired or disciplined</a> for comments made after the Kirk killing. That includes <a href="https://cwa-tseu.org/free-speech/">Dr Tom Alter</a>, a tenured professor at Texas State University, fired after a troll with fascist and antisemitic sympathies reported to Alter’s employer that the professor <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/13/defend-free-speech-no-to-fascists-reinstate-professor-dr-tom-alter-now/">had spoken at a socialist conference</a>.
Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa” (short for “antifascist”) a domestic terrorist organisation. Although no provision in US law permits Trump to do this, his action is a signal to federal law enforcement. Federal agencies like the FBI could conduct investigations, infiltration of organisations and arrests of people on the left—which, in Trump world, means just about anyone who opposes the administration’s policies. Given that “antifa” is not an organisation nor even a coherent ideology, the vagueness of the target is a weapon in the hands of law enforcement. 
Another way that the administration will attack liberal and activist organisations is by weaponising the tax code. US tax law provides educational, charitable, religious and social organisations an exemption from paying federal taxes if they do not engage in partisan politics or electioneering. The administration has also supported legislation that would allow the Treasury<a href="https://www.nonprofitvote.org/whats-the-nonprofit-killer-bill/">
secretary to designate any organisation as “terror-supporting”</a> without any proof or due process. The feds can revoke tax-exempt status and compel organisations to pay millions in fines. Merely the threat of those penalties could lead organisations such as immigrant rights groups, which are mounting opposition to Trump’s deportation regime, to curtail their activities.
One final, but by no means less important, aftershock of the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric since Kirk’s murder is the licence it gives to right-wing elements to wreak violence on their opponents. Trump’s and Vance’s claims that “the left” is a uniquely violent force in US politics is the <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states">exact opposite of the truth</a>, according to the libertarian Cato Institute—hardly a friend to the left. The “permission structure” that Trump, Vance and others in the administration are creating will make right-wing violence like the 2017 murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2020 vigilante murders of Black Lives Matter activists more likely, not less.
Developments since Kirk’s death should clarify some points amid the noise and social media vitriol. They have exposed the lie that conservatives and the far right are somehow champions of “free speech” against a censorious left “cancel culture”. When billionaires like X’s Elon Musk and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch own massive communications platforms from which they spread conservative and far-right ideology into the body politic, it’s hard to take the claim seriously. With few exceptions, the right’s pretensions to “free speech” were always phoney and mostly raised when others used their free speech to criticise the right’s bigotry.
But observing that the right’s free speech rhetoric is disingenuous shouldn’t let mainstream liberals off the hook. The attacks on university activists protesting the war in Gaza didn’t begin with Trump. They started under the Biden administration, with the support of the White House and most Democrats. And the liberal MSNBC network fired commentator Matthew Dowd for comments he made on live TV only a few minutes after Kirk’s killing.
In contrast, championing free speech has always been central to the left. From the abolitionist press in the pre-Civil War era to the Industrial Workers of the World’s free speech fights in the early 1900s to opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964, the best part of the left and workers’ movement has always defended free speech.
Free speech and freedom of organisation and assembly are crucial for defending and extending other rights. The first nine months of the Trump administration have demonstrated that elite institutions like universities and the corporate media are willing to “bend the knee” to an increasingly authoritarian government if they think their profits, endowments or investments will be served. On the other hand, ordinary people, organised to push back on the Trump administration’s predations, have shown a far greater willingness to defend our rights.
The actions of thousands of ordinary people across the country have impeded the administration’s efforts to kidnap our immigrant neighbours off the street. And ordinary people sitting on grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, have refused federal prosecutors’ attempts to criminally indict people arrested for protesting immigration authorities or the administration’s military deployments. The real defenders of democracy in the US are much more likely to be found at street demonstrations or at “know your rights” trainings than in the halls of Congress, the courts or corporate boardrooms.

Free speech under attack in the US

The death of Charlie Kirk has made me think about the growth of the right-wing presence on US campuses during the last three decades. The student right during these years morphed from Ronald Reagan boosters into the neo-Fascist <a href="https://threewayfight.org/what-charlie-kirks-life-and-death-can-tell-us-about-the-u-s-right-in-the-age-of-trump/?fbclid=IwY2xjawM4ESNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHu8PqzTEntFEztYxLQuEmyv4smjV33BW_JmQofQ3W6Q8P5lUO81PBwPWMsvq_aem_l9157vR0G7XvFPGl73RotA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Christian nationalists</a> of Turning Point USA. Yet one of the major reasons for the success of Charlie Kirk and his roadshow was the weakness of the campus left. Another was the financial and political backing from the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/turning-point-usa-donations-surged-pandemic-rcna37143" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rich and powerful</a> from its very founding, despite its origin mythology of starting out in Kirk’s family’s garage.
Scanning through many articles documenting the growth of Kirk’s “nonprofit” foundation during the past decade is like watching a well-capitalised media start-up with aspirations to become a global player. Turning Point’s <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023/202501359349304810/full" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IRS tax return</a> reported, for example, that it had revenues over $86 million in 2024. Kirk received a salary of over $285,000 and another $99,000 in compensation. Not huge in corporate terms. But, for student politics, this was unprecedented. This <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=WORO-OgThig" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gushy video tour</a> of Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019 gives an idea of the burgeoning confidence of Kirk and his entourage.
The post-sixties campus
Whether you date the decline of the campus left in the waning years of the Vietnam War or in the decade that followed, when the New Left turned to the working class, it was pretty clear by the late 1970s and early 1980s that the right had begun to build a significant presence on college campuses. Not everywhere at once, of course, it was a herky-jerky process. The Republican Party, however, took building their campus operations far more seriously than the Democrats, who, from my perspective, appeared virtually non-existent, disorganised and had little political appeal.
The Republicans drew many of their future leading cadres from battles within the College Republicans and against the student left, liberal faculty members, and administrators. Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, for example, future Republican presidential campaign managers and advisers, first cut their teeth in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/05/us/man-in-the-news-fierce-ambition-karl-rove.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">College Republican politics</a> in the 1970s. On campuses previously known for their liberalism and radicalism, typical of the media coverage of the time was a New York Times article from 1984, “Students Leaning to the Right”:
“In his freshman year at Princeton University, Peter Heinecke joined a campus organization so low key that hardly anyone knew it existed. It was the Princeton University College Republicans. ‘It was pretty much a dead thing’, Mr. Heinecke recalled. So much so, in fact, that nobody even bothered to renew the club’s registration with the Dean’s Office. That was last year.
“This year, in the flush of President Reagan’s re-election victory, the College Republicans is very much alive. Membership has grown from a mere handful of students a year ago to 200, with double that on the mailing list. As unusual as the conservative trend might seem at Princeton—a traditionally liberal school—it is hardly an isolated example. On campuses across the nation, students are increasingly becoming aligned with the Republican Party.”
The College Republicans were joined in their efforts by local initiatives that gained a national following, such as the <a href="https://dartreview.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dartmouth Review</a>, founded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1980. Anti-apartheid activists built <a href="https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/journeys.dartmouth.edu/dist/3/834/files/2016/05/DivestmentProtests-MandelaHall-1985.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“shanty towns”</a> on the Dartmouth campus to highlight the racial oppression and poverty of the Black majority in South Africa in 1986. Calling themselves the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival, twelve Dartmouth students—ten of whom were on the staff of the Dartmouth Review—attacked and destroyed the shanties with sledgehammers on Martin Luther King Day. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/13/us/at-dartmouth-the-right-borrows-the-protest-mantle-of-the-left.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According</a> to an article in the New York Times:
“But the shanty episode is only the latest part of a long campaign by The Review against most of the moves the college has made in the last decade to show sensitivity to women, nonwhites and homosexuals. ‘There is freedom of speech here as long as you’re firmly left of center’, said Roland Reynolds, the editor of The Review. ‘It’s the idea that you can’t criticize people who happen to be black, who happen to be women.’ He described the crew that attacked the shanties as ‘the Bernhard Goetz of Dartmouth’.”
Bernhard Goetz was the infamous New York City <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771433/fear-and-fury-by-heather-ann-thompson/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Subway gunman”</a> who shot four Black teenagers—and paralysed one of them—claiming they tried to rob him and he was defending himself. That a Dartmouth Review editor would openly identify with a racist vigilante, while its staff eagerly participated in a sledgehammer attack on anti-apartheid activists, speaks volumes about their racism and embrace of political violence against their opponents on the campus by 1986. The Dartmouth Review had rich and powerful friends, including <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ronald Reagan</a>. This was long before Charlie Kirk was around.
In the early 1990s, the campus far right received a boost from then-President George H.W. Bush with his infamous attack on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01kX1WGdJWc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“political correctness”</a>—a forerunner of the current attack on “woke”—during his commencement speech at the University of Michigan in May 1991. Bush was not known for his emotional displays, but he clearly enjoyed giving the speech, buoyed by the support of many students in the audience. Bush’s attack was enthusiastically taken up by the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mass media and intellectual pundits</a> with the broad support of the Republican establishment and a correspondingly weak response from the Democrats and most college and university administrators.
I was a member of the <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/international-socialism-is-my-north-star-c3730df819ba">International Socialist Organization</a> at the time, and we were one of the few socialist organisations that tried to build on a handful of college campuses despite our small size. We immediately recognised the threat that Bush’s attack on “political correctness” posed to the small, very limited gains made by African-Americans and other minorities, women and working-class students, who had suffered major setbacks during the two terms of Reagan’s presidency. Bush’s election triumph in 1988 was viewed by many of us as Reagan’s third term. The ISO <a href="https://archive.org/details/whats-behind-the-attck-on-politically-correct" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a pamphlet</a>, What’s Behind the Attack on Politically Correct?, by Lance Selfa and Alan Mass. They wrote in the introduction:
“No sooner had President Bush announced the end of the war against Iraq than he declared a new war at home. The battle wasn’t to be fought with weapons, but with idea. Its armies would be made up of right-wing ideologues, media pundits, university faculty, and students, not soldiers.”
The ISO was much better prepared to deal with this new witch hunt than many groups in the US left that had little to no campus presence. Even though we had a tiny number of members nationally in early 1990 (possibly 200), we bolstered our presence during the buildup to and war against Iraq during the latter half of 1990 and early 1991. We launched the National Network of Campuses Against the War, though short-lived, and we were able to project ourselves beyond a handful of campuses.
Under the perfect sun
In 1992, I was living in San Diego, California. An old friend and comrade, Phil, and I were trying to build a branch in a city that hadn’t had a previous branch of the ISO. I know that there were more than a few people who thought that our effort was more like a long vacation. I saw it as a fun adventure. San Diego had a reputation for being a <a href="https://archive.org/details/underperfectsuns00davi/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">major tourist destination</a> and very conservative. Our small ISO branch was largely active at the University of California at San Diego campus located in La Jolla, a rich, scenic seaside enclave. The campus felt more like a resort. Our campus club was called the International Socialist Club.
But San Diego had a radical tradition, despite being a Navy town with major Marine Corps bases nearby and having a large Christian evangelical presence. Socialist writer, novelist and historian Dan LaBotz <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-intellectual-autobiography-of-an-american-leftist/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recalled</a>:
“I finished high school in 1963, went to Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista, then to San Diego State, graduating in 1968, and a year later went to the University of California at San Diego where I studied literature with <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fredric-r-jameson-1934-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fredric Jameson</a>. I also sat in on <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Herbert Marcuse’s</a> undergraduate lectures on Marx and, on one occasion, convinced him to lead a discussion of the Paris Commune for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, of which I was a member. I helped to form a small IS chapter that engaged in strike support. Already a supporter of the United Farm Workers then organizing agricultural workers in California, we joined boycott picket lines at grocery stores, and also participated in strike support at a tomato ranch. We also supported a Greyhound Bus lines drivers’ strike.”
UCSD did have some radical legacy, including the New Indicator newspaper and its “Disorientation Manual”, a radical introduction to the campus, and a weekly film series with a political discussion after. Within the city limits, San Diego was pretty much like any other big American city, but it was surrounded by suburbs that were a bastion of the Christian right, replete with a <a href="https://creationsd.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creation and Earth Science Museum</a>. I remember my first night in the city—I was out jogging and paused to take a breath when a car stopped in front of me with a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “Rocks prove creation!”
In the early 1990s, historic changes were beginning to reshape San Diego. The post-Cold War and post-Gulf War reorganisation and downsizing of the defence industry, along with Bush’s recession that hit the city and county hard, especially housing construction, sent the economy into near depression. In 1992, however, it was the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/08/19/no-justice-no-peace" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rebellion in Los Angeles</a>, following the acquittal of three of the four police officers in the assault on Rodney King in April, that was a lightning bolt that shook up campus politics at the very end of the Spring.
President George H.W. Bush also faced a challenge from his right, first with fascist sympathiser Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries, and then an independent presidential campaign with the strange character of Ross Perot. All of this took the swagger of the UCSD Republicans, who increasingly gave off the aura of a defeated army. But some of the others on the right saw an opportunity. Three weeks after the LA rebellion, hundreds of posters were plastered across campus, along with hundreds of invitations on cards placed at the cafeteria dining tables, inviting the campus community to a lecture sponsored by the Objectivist Study Group, the followers of <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/garbage-and-gravitas/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">right-wing crackpot</a> Ayn Rand.
The speaker was George Reisman, an economics professor at Pepperdine University and a well-known figure among followers of Ayn Rand. The title of his lecture was “Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism”. Reisman wanted to target ethnic studies at UCSD, which he denigrated as “worshipping your savage ancestors”. He had a long involvement in far-right politics stretching back to the mid-1950s. At a banquet dinner honouring Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and mentor to Donald Trump, who was forced to resign from his committee assignments because of the swing public opinion against McCarthy, Time magazine <a href="https://time.com/archive/6869342/opinion-one-enchanted-evening/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>:
“The noise rose several decibels when 17-year-old Columbia University Sophomore George Reisman of Students for America called Cohn the ‘American Dreyfus’ and barked: ‘Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy will be redeemed when the people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers and the Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.’”
Four decades later, he was at UCSD to attack Black and Latino students, faculty and administrators. Reisman was one of the direct connections between the old and new McCarthyism. The UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies at that time was two years old. Walking across campus that day, I saw many people reading the posters but not knowing quite what to make of them. Was this some weird prank? The Objectivists were a campus club, but not known for such provocative behaviour; they were dismissed as a small group of marginal weirdos with little cache. This meeting had all the hallmarks of an outside and well-funded operation.
Our small ISO kicked into high gear. We talked to everyone and every organisation on campus that we needed to picket the meeting and fill the hall to challenge whatever vile bigotries were going to be spewed out that night. Despite our hard work, we weren’t sure how many people were going to turn out. The night of 13 May, we began our picket with fifteen to twenty people outside the lecture hall. Phil made one of his class flyers, “Fight Racism. Defend Multiculturalism!”
It appeared to us that most of the crowd going into the lecture hall was from off campus; they gave off the vibe of being rich weirdos from La Jolla. Reisman and his coterie were incensed that we were protesting. They came out of the hall to stare at us and shake their heads. The hatred in his eyes was incredible. He went back into the hall, and then we came in. Our numbers grew, but at the beginning of the lecture we were outnumbered about two to one. There were about 50 of us and a hundred of them. The chair of the meeting began by reminding us that this lecture was to be copyrighted and not to be quoted without permission. There was a burst of laughter from our section of the audience. Reisman was not pleased.
Right away, he denounced us as “commissars” who stifled “free speech”. By the time Reisman’s lecture began, our supporters in the audience were about equal in number with the Objectivists. Reisman’s speech, with his repetitive drumbeat of the phrases “savage ancestors” and “western civilisation”, along with his sneering tone, enraged the audience. People exploded. “Don’t call my ancestors savages!”, Reisman snapped back, “Who the hell are you? Shut up!”, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. A Gulf War veteran, who wore a gas mask and biochemical gear, rose every time Reisman said “western civilisation”, holding a poster of a slave ship over his head and turning to the audience. He later told me an older woman kept punching him in the back of the head the entire meeting.
It was the only campus protest where I thought a fight would break out because people were so enraged by the provocative racism of the speaker. The meeting got so rowdy that the campus police were called, and slowly the meeting dispersed. The Objectivists were enraged but defeated. Darlene Price, the president of the OSG, told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Everything we put into that meeting was destroyed. We received nothing”. Phil, who was also the faculty advisor to the International Socialist Club, told the disciplinary board: “When he [Reisman] mentioned savages, he was motioning toward the Black and Latino areas of the audience”. Despite their best efforts to get us kicked off campus and fine us, we prevailed in the disciplinary hearing.
Looking back three decades at the events that night, I see that all of the vile politics of Charlie Kirk were present then, and what was needed was the financial backing and political hustle to turn into a nationwide threat to us all. I also look back on it and think it shows that we can beat them.
Joe Allen is the author of <a href="https://authors.tertulia.com/allenojoe-draftv4iskv/books/teamsterland-reports-on-america-s-most-iconic-union-reports-allen-o-joe/B0FLDHKX48">Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union</a> and <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1441-the-package-king">The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS</a>. He lives in Chicago.

Joe Allen

Fighting the far right on campus: a small victory from the US in 1992

In April, US President Donald Trump announced, on what he dubbed “Liberation Day”, a regime of tariffs on every country in the world, based on a sketchy formula that assigned higher tariffs to countries with which the US has trade deficits.
Stock markets went into free fall, there was a huge sell-off of US bonds, and Wall Street and other business titans spoke out against the tariffs. Trump pulled back, said he would make multiple deals over the next 90 days, and the stock market returned to setting records. Wall Street coined a term for Trump’s move: “TACO” for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. 
In early August, with very few deals negotiated, the administration instituted broad-based tariffs. But unlike in April, the market took it in stride, even though they amount to the highest tariffs in a century: a 15-20 percent levy on all imports to the US. Trump carved out some countries for higher tariffs: Brazil at 50 percent, due to its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for trying to lead a coup after he lost the 2023 election. Trump set tariffs on <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/27/trumps-india-tariffs-take-effect-which-sector-will-be-hit-whats-exempt">India at 50 percent, reputedly to punish it for importing Russian oil</a>, but possibly also for refusing to <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/has-trump-lost-india-punitive-tariffs-and-nobel-peace-prize-insults-erode-once-close-relations">support his delusional bid for a Nobel Peace Prize.</a>
Then, on 29 August, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld an earlier decision declaring most of these tariffs illegal. Their fate will now be in the hands of the US Supreme Court.
A tariff is a tax on imports paid to the US government. US importers pay it. In fact, many of them are unable to claim their products until they pay the tariff. Ultimately, the cost falls on consumers who pay higher prices on imported goods such as coffee, or who pay higher prices on products containing imported inputs. Think, for example, of cars or household appliances whose prices increase because tariffs have increased the prices of imported steel and aluminium. Prices may not have spiked much yet, but if the tariffs remain in place, we will likely see prices increase by the end of the year.
The Yale Budget Project estimates <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-july-14-2025">that tariffs will add about US$2,800 to the average household’s costs over the next year</a>. And some estimates suggest they could add $4,000-$5,000 to the cost of a new car. So much for Trump’s promise to lower prices on day one!
Government statistics are <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/short-run-effects-2025-tariffs-so-far">starting to show a pick-up in inflation on particular goods and sectors that rely on imports</a>. There are three main reasons why most people have not yet experienced big tariff-fuelled price increases. First, many companies, anticipating that Trump would impose tariffs, “front ran”—meaning that they built up their inventories before the tariffs went into effect. It’s likely that the decline in the first quarter gross domestic product, which most economic analysts attributed to an abnormal increase in imports, reflected front-running behaviour.
Second, companies are eating the costs, eroding their profits, rather than passing them on to consumers. It’s possible that some companies were relying on the courts tossing out the tariffs, or a mercurial Trump deciding to lower them. <a href="https://moneymorning.com/2025/07/23/gm-and-stellantis-lose-billions-as-tariffs-reshape-u-s-auto-industry/">Both GM and Ford reported losses in the billions that they attributed to tariffs. They have yet to raise prices across the board.</a>
Finally, other countries have yet to retaliate with tariffs of their own.
But these strategies merely postpone the tariff shock to the future. Unless companies want to accept lower profits, or lay-offs or bankruptcy, they will be forced to raise prices. 
Much of the neoliberal commentariat treats Trump’s tariffs as an absurdity, akin to RFK Jr’s anti-vax demolition of science or the crackpot beliefs of flat earthers. But the left <a href="https://youtu.be/f1CdbCsetpw">Keynesian economist Yanis Varofakis, the former finance minister in the Syriza government in Greece,</a>
says we must take Trump’s tariffs seriously. Trump has been ideologically committed to tariffs and an autarchic or nationalist view of the US’s role in the world economy for decades. In recent decades, economic nationalism has been rising across the entire US ruling class, as administrations of both major capitalist parties seek to compete with China and to prod the European Union to increase its military spending.
Besides the fact that Trump seems to believe that tariffs will ignite a US “golden age”, he also views them as a way to wield his clout, both domestically and in foreign affairs. He has arguably been more successful on the domestic front, as his on-again, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5318785/tariff-dodging-companies-exemptions-engineering">off-again threats to levy tariffs on certain industries lead those industry CEOs to make concessions or donations to Trump.</a> The opportunities for corruption are endless.
On foreign policy, Trump has reset the US’s average tariffs on imports to somewhere between five and six times what they were in 2024, without yet experiencing widespread blowback from US trading partners. He and other tariff “hawks” in the administration calculate that other countries have more to lose from being locked out of the US than the US has to lose in trade with them.
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, elected in an anti-Trump “Canada </a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods"></a>strong<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">” campaign earlier this year</a>, recently lifted retaliatory tariffs against the US, the destination of 75 percent of Canada’s exports. Canada is now attempting to negotiate a deal that will limit US tariffs on certain targeted Canadian exports, such as lumber, steel and aluminium.
On the other hand, Trump’s impetuous decision to place a 50 percent tariff on imports from India threatens to undermine the decades-long US cultivation of India as a counterweight to China in Asia. The <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/india-alliance-jake-sullivan-kurt-campbell">symbolism of leaders of India, China and Russia meeting together in Beijing</a>
wasn’t lost on mainstream foreign policy hands.
<a href="https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/04/on-channel-4-is-donald-trumps-tariff-war-about-to-totally-backfire/">Varoufakis thinks that tariffs may slow the US economy, but the US is still sucking in massive amounts of capital from the world</a>. If that continues, Trump may get away with the tariffs, even if they don’t produce the things he promised: reshoring American industries or replacing income taxes, among some of the more far fetched. But if Trump succeeds in cutting the US trade deficit, other countries will have fewer dollars to reinvest in the US stock market and in other assets.
To Marxists, tariffs are neither good nor bad. They are no better nor worse than “free trade.” They are just one mechanism capitalist states use to gain an advantage over other capitalist states in the international economy.
“Free trade” is most often the policy of the global economic and military hegemon. Britain in the nineteenth century pushed for “free trade” as a way of expanding markets for its industrial economy. Similarly, since the 1930s, it has been a policy of the US government to expand free trade.
The breakdown of free trade today is part of the breakdown of the unipolar US empire that existed in the decades following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR-dominated Eastern bloc. Now that China is in a close competition with the US, the US government and its business leaders have embraced more protectionist measures against it. Here is where the politics of tariffs enters the discussion.
For now, if most people associate tariffs with higher prices, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-is-underwater-on-trade-in-40">they are among the most unpopular parts of Trump’s already very unpopular agenda</a>. But one place where they are not condemned—outside of MAGA world and a few favoured industries—is in the US labour movement.
Unfortunately, leaders like <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/04/uaw-fain-trump-tariffs-nafta">United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain</a>, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and the United Steelworkers of America have embraced the Trump tariffs. This isn’t anything new. “Buy American” has been part of the labour movement for decades. But for labour to buy into Trump’s tariffs now, when <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-parliamentary-cretinism-of-the-democrats-opposition-to-trump/">Trump and his administration are waging an existential war against labour</a>, is letting MAGA off the hook.
Industrial union leaders support tariffs to prop up US industries where their dwindling ranks work. But support for tariffs targets the wrong enemy. The socialist labour scholar Kim Moody has shown that declining jobs, unionisation and living standards in the US owe more to automation and speed-up than to trade.
Socialist labour activist Andy Sernatinger’s critique of the <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/04/nationalism-workers-power-and-the-myth-of-auto-tariffs/">UAW’s position, titled “Nationalism, workers’ power, and the myth of auto tariffs”</a>, showed that there are as many autoworkers today in the US as there were in 1992 (before the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA). But far fewer of them are in unionised jobs. That’s because the unions have conceded control of the shop floor and have only weakly competed for non-union workers in plants in the southern states, where much of the job growth in recent decades has occurred.
For labour to sign on with policies that are shot through with nationalism and anti-Chinese racism is extremely dangerous. Labour activists <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Vincent_Chin">should remember the 1980s case of Vincent Chin</a>, a Chinese American man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by an auto industry supervisor. Chin’s killing took place at a time when the UAW was leading an anti-Japanese car campaign that featured media events in which union members smashed up Japanese-made cars with bats and hammers. Chin’s killer shouted racial slurs at him while he beat him.
Not only does this sort of politics sow divisions among workers, but it also contributes to the general racist and nationalist climate that the Trump administration is leading from the top. It lays the foundation for political support for further economic, political and military confrontation with China.
Even if tariffs don’t have the catastrophic effects—like COVID-era empty store shelves and price gouging—that many predicted, they will still contribute to a slowing economy, higher prices and potentially mass lay-offs. The jobs economy <a href="https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/hiring-slowdown-spells-a-weakening-labor-market">is already weak</a>—the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/03/job-opening-data-falls-to-levels-rarely-seen-since-pandemic.html">number of job openings is around the level it was during the COVID recession</a>.
It’s not clear that Trump’s tariffs are the cause of all these problems. There is solid evidence that consumer spending was tapped out at the end of last year, before “Liberation Day”. But tariffs are not going to improve the situation. And in the current context, Trump’s tariffs are just another attack on the working class.
First published at the <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-trouble-with-trumps-tariffs">International Socialism Project</a>. Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a>
(Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a> (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.

The trouble with Trump’s tariffs

CHICAGO—Two events that occurred within days of each other in early August speak to the state of the opposition to President Trump’s assaults on working people and democracy. 
On 1 August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (supposedly the most liberal circuit in the US) upheld Trump’s March executive order that used “national security” as a pretext to void union contracts in several federal government agencies. Within days, managers across the federal government—most significantly, the <a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/veterans-affairs/2025/08/va-says-its-ended-most-collective-bargaining-agreements/">Veterans Administration</a>—ripped up their union contracts.
The second noteworthy event came a few days after the union-busting court decision. All Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state to deny Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican legislative henchmen a legislative quorum to implement a Congressional gerrymander that would reduce the number of Democratic Congress members from the current thirteen to eight. That would leave the Texas Congressional delegation at almost 80 percent Republican in a state where Trump won 56 percent of the vote in 2024.
Most liberals and Democrats viewed the court-sanctioned union-busting with a yawn, if they noticed it at all. But the threat of losing seats in Congress sent Democrats to battle stations.
California Governor Gavin Newsom pledged a referendum to give the California legislature the power to gerrymander to net at least five and as many as nine new Democratic-friendly districts. Newsom electrified partisan Democrats who viewed him as a rare Democratic politician who would stand up to Trump. Even the ever cautious former President Barack Obama backed Newsom’s plan.
Aside from the details of the redistricting battles that could unfold in multiple states before the 2026 midterm elections, we should ask why Democrats and many of their liberal supporters are so exercised about gerrymandering, but passive about most of the other depredations of the Trump regime.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians would be more concerned about their jobs than about the jobs and rights of their constituents and voting base. But it’s also an indication of the degree to which the logic of what Karl Marx called “parliamentary cretinism” has captured so much of the opposition to Trump.
The liberal opposition to Trump can conceive of defeating him and Trumpism only at the ballot box. So, anything that might impede Democratic electoral gains is an existential question for them.
To return to the labour example, it’s clear that, aside from heroic efforts by the still-small group of activists in the Federal Union Network, the labour movement has hardly responded to Trump’s union-busting. The lawsuits labour leaders have filed and supported have slowed down, but not stopped, Trump’s determination to de-unionise the federal workforce. 
In a labour movement that still counts 14-16 million members, including more than 1 million working for the federal government, the potential exists for mass protest action, including strikes, slowdowns, occupations, organising the unorganised, days of action and the like to galvanise a real opposition to Trump. But for most labour leaders, this is not even part of their thought process. As long-time labour activist and socialist <a href="https://mronline.org/2025/07/16/hard-truths-about-the-us-labor-movement-an-interview-with-chris-townsend/">Chris Townsend put it in a recent interview</a> with Monthly Review: 
“We have slid into a period in our labour movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The ‘leadership’ today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience.”
The atrophy of social movement organisation and reflexive fealty to the Democrats among most non-government organisation leaders have led us to this point. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fears that the US Supreme Court would overturn legalised abortion led to protests in the hundreds of thousands in Washington. <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-history-of-planned-parenthood-v-casey-and-pro-choice-activism-roe-v-wade/">This mobilisation stayed the hand of the Supreme Court majority—then, as now, </a>Republican-appointed.
But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, no major abortion rights group called a national demonstration, and protest organising fell to under-resourced groups of dedicated activists in different localities. The implicit (and often explicit) message from the national groups was for supporters of abortion rights to put faith in the electoral process of state-level referenda and the election of Democrats to Congress and the White House. This was during a time when even <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/why-doesnt-congress-just-make-roe-v-wade-federal-law">pro-choice Democrats struggled to articulate simple promises of passing a national abortion rights law</a>, especially if it required (as it almost certainly would) getting rid of the Senate filibuster.
American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley’s response to the anti-union court decision showed how union leaders are also captive to the Democratic Party’s liberal proceduralism: 
“For sure, we are going to fight for our existence. It’s very unsettling and very disturbing that the Ninth Circuit issued the ruling that they issued. I don’t think that any president should have any unfettered authority that goes unchecked”, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/unions-battle-for-survival-hit-new-wave-with-trump-termination-of-bargaining-agreements">Kelley told The Hill</a>. “That’s a portion of the reason why unions exist, to make sure there’s checks and balances inside of the agencies.”
Unconsciously, Kelley is echoing the rhetoric of Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who regularly appeals to Congress and the courts to honour the age-old constitutional system of “checks and balances” against the autocrat in the White House.
In a Boston Review essay, “<a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-dead-end-of-checks-and-balances/">The Dead End of Checks and Balances</a>”, political scientist Lisa L. Miller points out how much of Trump’s authoritarian power grab is following the US Constitution’s empowerment of a wealthy minority at the expense of the broad working-class majority. Miller argues that the “checks and balances” that figures like Schumer cite—federalism, the courts, division of the Congress into two houses—have historically served capitalists and the rich to veto popular initiatives like national health insurance, rather than helped ordinary people. 
Periods of popular reform have come only when mass movements have forced the political system to break free from the straitjacket of “checks and balances”.
Some of the more activist sections of unions understand this. A recent article in Convergence magazine co-authored by three leaders of the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions <a href="https://convergencemag.com/articles/labors-strategy-must-lean-into-synergies/">makes the case for reviving the general strike</a> as part of labour’s strategy to defeat Trumpian authoritarianism. So far so good. But it’s clear that the authors view labour activism as a way also to resuscitate the Democratic Party in time for the 2026 and 2028 elections. So the article notes: “Strikes and electoral work reinforce each other”.
This makes their call to militancy less a bold break with the current labour leadership than a refashioning of the standard “inside-outside” strategy to reform the Democratic Party. That is, organise “outside” the Democratic Party to pressure for reform “inside”. 
The long <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/whatever-happened-to-political-independence/">history of these efforts to reform the Democratic Party</a> has mostly served to accommodate radicals and activists to the Democrats’ status quo rather than shift the Democrats to the left. We saw it last year when self-described democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders went “all-in” for Kamala Harris, despite Harris’ corporate-friendly politics and support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. (By the way, it’s noteworthy that the article by the three teachers’ union leaders and a labour studies professor—all self-described radicals and socialists—doesn’t mention Gaza.)
It’s clear that the left and the labour and social movements are in a very precarious state, and debates about how to fight back against Trumpian authoritarianism will be crucial. But elections and the courts won’t save us, as Townsend pointed out:
“The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.”

Democratic electoralism won’t defeat Trumpism

Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to become the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate in New York City struck a chord with many people who want a political alternative to the pro-business, pro-war status quo. 
The task for US socialists is to translate this potential into a real movement capable of winning its demands, cutting down the rich and powerful and advancing a radical world view. Unfortunately, only a month after his shock victory, there are clear signs that Mamdani is moving in the opposite direction. 
With the mayoral election set for November, Mamdani is trying to shore up the support of the city’s business leaders. In closed-door meetings with top executives, he has walked back his statement that “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, equivocated on his plans for a rent freeze and repudiated the pro-Palestine slogan “globalise the intifada”. 
He has distanced himself from past criticisms of the New York Police Department and indicated openness to retaining current police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a billionaire heir and ardent defender of police murder. Mamdani’s pledge to maintain current NYPD funding levels is no small problem for a candidate who harnessed the hopes of anti-racists and Palestine solidarity activists. The NYPD is a massive force for repression: with 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees, it’s larger than some national armies. This is the force that was brought onto the city’s university campuses in 2024 to crush the Gaza solidarity encampments.
Mamdani’s brand pivot from leftist firebrand to safe pair of hands for Wall Street is a predictable product of his political strategy. Mamdani isn’t running for mayor as a stunt to raise the profile of socialist ideas; he’s serious about winning the position. But the whole notion of a “socialist mayor of New York” is a contradiction in terms. Anyone in this position would be responsible for the actions of the country’s largest police force, and would be one of the city’s largest employers, in charge of negotiating wages with 330,000 government workers. They would have to maintain attractive conditions for business to invest in Wall Street, home to the most predatory corporations on the planet. In short, Mamdani seeks an executive position crucial to the functioning of US capitalism. 
The recent experience of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, propelled by the city’s left and labour movement into office, should serve as a warning. Johnson induced unions to sign a no-strike pledge for the duration of 2024’s Democratic National Convention, while his police force attacked Palestine solidarity protesters outside it. The Chicago left that supported his candidacy has emerged from the experience discredited and demoralised. That was Chicago—the pressures exerted by big business and state bureaucrats will be far more intense in New York City.
Mamdani’s political program doesn’t express any real desire to confront these forces. Though he promotes supportable ideas for social reform, none of this is backed up by class struggle politics, even at a rhetorical level. Compared to previous prominent democratic socialists, Mamdani’s messaging lacks the combativity and sense of struggle that is the basic heart of socialism. 
Whereas Bernie Sanders framed his 2016 campaign as a confrontation with the power of the billionaire class, Mamdani implores the left to be “passionate about public excellence ... how we can make government more effective”. One of the objectives listed on his website is to “make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business”. His demands for rent controls and free bus rides, while progressive, are well within the parameters of traditional liberal conventions in New York. In fact, free crosstown buses were previously proposed by billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. None of Mamdani’s proposals involves wresting away significant wealth and power from the ruling class. 
Mamdani declared in his victory speech that he hopes to be a “model” for the Democratic Party, pushing it to the left. This is the political approach championed by his organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America. In the US’ restrictive two-party system, leftists who prioritise office-holding above other objectives naturally gravitate toward working inside the Democratic Party, which offers the most immediate avenue for electoral success. But experience shows that instead of pushing the party to the left, participation in the Democratic Party pushes people like Mamdani to the right. They end up being coopted as part of the tamed “progressive” wing of a profoundly undemocratic party run by millionaires and billionaires. 
We’ve been here before. Wave after wave of progressives and self-described socialists have run insurgent campaigns inside the Democratic Party, which generate excitement and a sense of possibility, before quickly disappointing the hopes of their followers and finding a comfortable place in the establishment. 
In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory unleashed an avalanche of expectations on the left. But rather than “burning it down”, as one of her staffers promised, AOC instead championed the Biden administration’s right-wing domestic and international agenda, from voting to impose a unilateral employment contract on railway workers and quash their right to strike, to funding Israel’s Iron Dome. Politicians like AOC move swiftly from raising people’s political horizons to restraining them. There’s no evidence that Mamdani’s trajectory will overcome the pitfalls of his predecessors. 
His political strategy, promoted by the DSA, gets things completely back-to-front. Democratic Socialists recognise that public sentiment can be well to the left of the establishment. They see left-wing positioning as a means to win office, useful to the extent that it advances electoral gains. This is why DSA member and Jacobin magazine writer Eric Blanc lauded Mamdani for abandoning the demand to defund the police, which Blanc said would have affected his electability. This whole approach contrasts the radical view that participation in elections is important only to the extent that it can promote left-wing politics and social struggle. 
The DSA strategy envisions socialist organisations as cheer squads for elected officials, not vehicles that can act independently of whoever is in government. A co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America made this explicit in a recent interview: “The fate of DSA, and honestly, I think, the progressive movement in New York, is tied to Zohran’s administration, and we’re aware of that”. 
If the fate of the socialist movement in the heart of world capitalism relies on an individual who’s clearly ready to adapt to the structures of New York’s government, then the movement is in for a world of disappointment and demoralisation. 
Socialists can initiate movements for the demands Mamdani raised, such as rent controls, higher wages and taxes on the rich. But this has to start with a commitment to win people to a distinctly socialist strategy, separate from the major parties of US capitalism. 
Mamdani’s popularity reflects mass enthusiasm for left-wing politics, but this sentiment won’t go anywhere positive if it’s funnelled into yet another attempt to radicalise the Democratic Party.

Chicago rises against Trump’s deportation regime

Albanese visits Washington in the service of imperialism and war

How did a bunch of crackpots get in charge of the USA?

Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign

Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech

Free speech under attack in the US

Fighting the far right on campus: a small victory from the US in 1992

The trouble with Trump’s tariffs

Democratic electoralism won’t defeat Trumpism

Can Zohran Mamdani advance socialism in the United States?

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