The midterm elections are coming into sharper focus with each passing day. Before we know it, Labor Day will be here and the election energies in both parties will surge. 

Understanding what is at stake, both parties will spend tons of money and expend tons of energy either in hope of keeping control of Congress in the case of the Republicans or winning back control of Congress in the case of the Democrats. Allied groups and organizations on each side will do the same.

 Why? Because Republican control of Congress will give Trump, once again, free rein to impose his agenda, while Democratic control on the other hand will give Democrats leverage to rein in Trump, while fighting for their own agenda.

On our side, we can expect the labor movement, organizations in the Black and brown communities, women and immigrant groups, environmentalists, voting rights organizations, LBGTQ, and many more too numerous to mention to be engaged in this titanic election battle. 

On the other side is MAGA, which includes a motley amalgam, ranging from major sections of the billionaire class to christian fundamentalists to white people living in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural America to a section of white workers and trade unionists to white supremacist and neo-nazi organizations like the Proud Boys. All of them will join the effort to maintain Republican control of Congress and in doing so protect their “Great Leader.” 

What isn’t so clear is the attitude of the left, first of all, DSA and its 120,000 members, toward these elections? 

Will the left in its various interations lend its energy to the effort of the working class and people’s movement to elect a Democratic Party majority to the Senate and House. And, if successful, to join the working class and people’s movement after the elections to restrain the autocratic, imperial president on the one hand and on the other hand, to press for a people’s legislative agenda, but now with the Democrats in control of Congress.

Or, will the left sit out the elections, assuming that if elected, a Democratic majority in the House and Senate will sit on its hands rather than address the crisis at home and challenges abroad, including especially an end to the war with Iran, an immediate halt to the genocidal war against and freedom for the Palestinian people, and hands of Cuba.

Or, will the left support only selected candidates who have unimpeachable left credentials, while at the same time taking pot shots at the “neoliberal” Democratic Party and its candidates, even though many of the latter don’t fit the category of neoliberal. And even if some do, is that sufficient reason to withhold a vote given what is at stake in these elections? 

Or, will the left, or I should say some on the left, insist that elections are a fool’s trap and that only mass actions in the streets will lift the fascist cloud that hangs over the country?

Even though I’m not optimistic that a majority of people on the left will make good on their popular front politics, I hope I’m completely wrong. 

I hope that the left dives full bore into this election, not selectively choosing only candidates with left credentials to support. I hope it throws its energy into electing a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, which would include (has to include) a good number of centrist, moderate, and liberal Democrats. Left and progressive electeds are a growing center of power in the House and Senate, but they don’t constitute a majority yet. 

That said, I have little confidence for now anyway that most of the left will meet the challenges of this moment, preferring in effect to position itself by its actions, if not its words, at cross purposes to the popular coalition fighting to elect Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. And, in doing so, strike a forceful blow against Trump, MAGA, and neofascism. 

I’m well aware that this assessment is negative, but if the past is prologue, I’m afraid I’m probably right. 

Not since the 2008 elections in which voters elected the first African American president has the left (or I should say some sections of the left) lent its energy to an effort to mobilize voters to go to the polls on election day and cast their vote for Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats. In 2010, the left was a no show and the racist Tea Party emerged on the other side of the aisle becoming a force to reckon with. Two years later, the left, largely speaking, were observers in Obama’s reelection effort and in the Congressional races was a no show again. 

As for 2016 when Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton the support from the left for Hillary and Congressional Democrats was hard to find. The same script played out in the next two presidential elections and the midterms.

I would like to hope this fall, we will see a change of script in which the left joins the larger people’s movement in its effort to elect a Democratically controlled Congress, but I’m not holding my breath though. But I will hope.

Whatever the weaknesses of the Democratic Party, a Democratic Party majority in Congress would constitute a badly needed restraint on Trump and Trumpism as well as provide a launch pad (or the beginnings of one) to move the country in a different direction. 

Not to see that, not to fight for that is politically shortsighted to say the least. END

“In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they (Communists) always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” (Communist Manifesto) 

Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected and popular Mayor of New York, is the leader of a diverse and powerful coalition that stretches across the city. It was this coalition that elected him and sent former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo into retirement. At the same time he is the (unelected) leader of Democratic Socialist of America here. When he speaks, New York DSA members listen. Said differently, he wears two political hats, representing two different and overlapping constituencies. In most instances — not least his victorious election campaign — it presents no problems.

But it can. And it did in the recent primary elections in New York in which two DSA members, Darializa Avila Chevalier and first term State Assembly member Claire Valdez ran against two progressive Democrats.

One was Adriano Espaillat, the leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who has served five terms and earned the endorsement of much of NY’s labor movement. The other was Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a former community organizer and New York City Council member. Reynoso also received labor endorsements and the support of Working Families Party. He had the backing as well of front line fighter against the Trump administration NY Attorney General Letitia James and the revered and long term progressive Nydia Velazquez, who is stepping down as the congresswoman in that district. 

Neither candidate was an “establishment” or “corporate” Democrat. To say otherwise is to empty the terms of any meaning and turn them into a specious slur against your opponents no matter what their politics are. Nor did either candidate support the ongoing genocidal policies of the Netanyahu government against the Palestinian people.

Although early in the primary process, there was an informal understanding that Mamdani would endorse Espaillat, who supported him in his successful run for Mayor less than a year ago, things changed in the closing weeks of the campaign when Mamdani swung his support to Chevalier and Valdez. Predictably this surprised and likely angered Espaillat and Reynoso and their supporters in the labor movement and Black and brown communities. 

As it turned out, both DSA candidates won, one narrowly, the other by a bigger margin, thanks largely to Mamdani’s endorsement and a turnout that skewed toward young and white college educated voters. What is more, it didn’t help that the turnout across the city was around 17 per cent, with significant sections of the Black and Latino communities not voting. No doubt this gave an advantage to the winning DSA candidates.

Not surprisingly, the outcome left some bitter feelings on the losing side. It caused some fissures in the coalition that elected Mamdani, that is, among sections of the labor movement and Black and Latino communities. 

How long these fissures will last is anybody’s guess at this moment. Unlike Senator Bernie Sanders who is from a small state and secure in his position, Mamdani is a new mayor of a city that is infinitely bigger, infinitely more diverse, and infinitely more complex. 

In these circumstances, the mayor’s success in moving forward his ambitious agenda turns, I would argue, on his success in maintaining, growing, uniting, and mobilizing the heterogeneous coalition that elected him, especially the Black, Latino, and labor communities. But in endorsing his DSA comrades, one has to wonder if he has made an unforced, if not long term, error. Sometimes you can lose by winning.

Let’s hope that isn’t the case and doesn’t come back to bite the mayor, DSA, and the larger movement he will depend on going forward. My guess is that it won’t.

The election of Trump and his embrace of white christian authoritarian governance couldn’t have happened without the intensification of racism. The two go hand in hand.What triggered such an intensification? There were, I’m sure, multiple causes, but three things immediately come to mind: The first is, ironically, the election of Barack Obama in 2008. His victory was greeted at the time with buckets of joy by tens of millions of Americans of different backgrounds. It felt like better days were ahead. A river had been crossed. Freedom bells were ringing.

But that wasn’t the only reaction to the election of our country’s first Black president. Less reported, millions of others, including representatives of the capitalist class, felt their world had been turned upside down, their way of life upended. Racial bitterness not joy were widespread in this crowd.This racially charged environment was the force field in which the Tea Party, a precursor to the MAGA movement, was born. While its ostensible target was the unfairness of the tax system, its racist venom was directed at Obama and his political agenda. Short of impeaching him, the hope of Tea Party leaders and activists was to sabotage his presidency.

While claiming to be a continuation of the spirit and traditions of the American Revolution, it’s more accurate to say that the Tea Party’s vile rhetoric and practice drew its inspiration from the bloody counterrevolution in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. That counterrevolution, beginning in 1877, violently overturned Reconstruction and its many democratic and working class achievements. It restored rule of the former slaveholding class and imposed by bloody force a system of systemic racism and heightened class exploitation — Jim Crow. This reign of terror came to a close nine decades later and only because of the heroic struggles of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement.

Meanwhile around the time of the rise of the Tea Party, new demographic studies were released showing that the country would be “majority minority” by the century’s midpoint or sooner. While these studies went unnoticed by many people, they set off alarm bells and white panic among the mass base and leaders of the extreme right.

If all this wasn’t enough to churn the racist stew, right wing extremist ideologues like Tucker Carlson began peddling the discredited “Great Replacement Theory.” According to this theory, the immigration of people from the global south will sooner rather than later “replace” white people, turning them into a subordinate and shrinking group assigned to the edges of a society in which people of color are dominant and occupy every position of power.

If this theory were confined to the narrow fringes of society it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But that isn’t the case. According to one study nearly a third of white Americans were on board with it. And when combined with the election of a Black president and the prediction of a majority minority population, it fueled the intensification of racism and greased the political skids for Trump’s successful presidential runs.

In Trump, this far flung, multiclass coalition (with the billionaires in the driver’s seat) found a self aggrandizing and resentful demagogue who deployed racism to press for an authoritarian white christian nationalist agenda, while enriching himself, his family, and his corporate friends in the process. If his election in 2016 signified a fracture in and assault on the existing democratic order, his reelection eight years later turned into a systematic, racialized, fascistic onslaught on the whole panoply of democratic rights and structures of governance at the national and global level.

The good news is that this onslaught is meeting growing resistance at the ballot box and on the street.

Entwined with the unprecedented turn of politics in a fascistic direction is the emergence of a broad people’s anti-fascist coalition that stretches from Angela Davis on the left to Never Trumpers on the right.

While it doesn’t — actually never does — develop fully formed, it brings together a diverse array of people and organizations that share, notwithstanding their differences, the political objective of defeating Trump and his fascist designs.

Said differently, it’s not a coalition of the left (although some on the left act as if it is) or a coalition of left and progressive activists (although some on the left believe it is) or a coalition of the left and the center. To narrow its reach is a prescription for defeat in November and beyond.

Of course, struggle within this broad and diverse coalition won’t cease. It would be politically harmful and unnatural if that were the case. But struggle should take place in the context of the unity imperative if we hope to defeat the fascist danger.

And yet, it strikes me that this rule of thumb hasn’t been fully digested by many on the left.

Memorial Day (I post this on my blog every Memorial Day to remember my two friends who died in the Vietnam War. SW)

Today, I will again drink a glass of beer in memory of my two friends and their comrades who died in Vietnam.

I honor them without honoring the unjust war in which they fought. I don’t know their reasons for joining the military, maybe it was simply that the draft gave them no choice, but it really doesn’t matter now. What I do know is that their lives were cruelly cut short.

As a young peace activist in the late 60s, I probably didn’t always make a distinction between the soldiers fighting the war and the war itself. The soldier and the general were equally responsible as I saw it. But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and, when necessary, make war.

Ricky and Cotter were near the bottom of the food chain of war making, nothing but cannon fodder. They were working class kids whose lives didn’t count for much in our government’s war plans. Neither was born with a silver spoon in their mouths, which is why they ended up with a gun in their hands, far away from their hometowns.

I will always wonder what kind of lives they would have lived had they safely returned. With no hero’s welcome, no counseling waiting for them, no easy slide into a well paying job, I can’t help but wonder if they would have had the internal resources and external support to come to terms with their war experience and live productive lives?

After all, they were not that much different than me, and I have no confidence that I could have. It was hard enough to grow up at that time without a tour of duty in Vietnam on my emotional resume. I wish, though, that they had that chance. I wish their lives hadn’t been senselessly erased doing things that no one should do. I wish they had the opportunity to live long and joyful lives.I miss them. I celebrate them. They were “my buddies.”

I wish they could join me for a beer today, although knowing them a single beer wouldn’t quite satisfy them. Or me.

I also hope that we could toast to the millions in our generation who opposed the war as well their comrades who also never made it back from Vietnam. Both deserve to be honored.

Finally, I like to think that the three of us could clink glasses to the people of Vietnam who suffered so much during and after the war, and are now rebuilding their country in conditions of peace. Maybe that would be too much to expect. Unfortunately, I will never know. They will join me only in memory this afternoon, as I wash down a glass of beer.