To think of a united front against the Republican Party and the larger right wing authoritarian movement that fails to include President Biden and the Democratic Party is the worse kind of sectarian nonsense. It has the smell of radicalism and left wing polltics, I suppose, but not the substance. It’s a form of radicalism that, strategically speaking, gives little thought to what kind of coalition stands any chance of defeating the gathering white nationalist authoritarian juggernaut, while preserving our democracy and setting the stage for a new era of social progress.

At a moment like this, don’t blame Congress or Washington for the failure to pass gun control regulation. Pin the tail on the donkey – the Repubican Party and its legislative obstructionism. Even to blame the gun lobby or NRA or the right wing media becomes a dodge if in the same breadth the GOP and its central role in blocking gun control laws, isn’t highlighted.

How many children and people have to die from gun violence before we seriously address this social contagion and existential trajedy? One would think that we are better than this, but the evidence is thin so far.

If it takes a “village to raise a child,” it takes a very different kind of “village to raise a young racist terrorist, like Payton Gendron and others – and there are many – of like mind. In this village – and this village is more a metaphor than an actual place – are found Trump and Trumpists, Tucker Carlson and Fox, Repubicans, the Proud Boys and their like, social media platforms promoting racist hate and violence, gun manufacturers and lobbyists, more “Christians” than you would care to believe, angry white men of every class, jurists, like Samuel Alito, and, lest we conveniently forget, inaction by us – moderates, liberals, progressives, and people on the left.

To round things out though, I would include racialized capitalism, which is the fluid and embedded seedbed of the structures of racist inequality and exploitation and reactionary racist politics.

We sometimes forget that every movement in the direction of dermocracy, equality, and social progress – not to mention radical democracy and socialism – is accompanied by – or more accurately generates – a counter movement in the opposite direction. Think, for example, of the election of Barak Obama to the presidency in 2008. In breaking a seemingly unbreakable racist barrier, it not only catapulted an African American into the White House for the first time, but it also triggered a fierce racist counter offensive that caught many of us off guard.

Such an understanding of the dynamics of struggle should remind us of the necessity of sustaining, broadening, and deepening popular coalitions in the wake of its victories as well as counter any sense of self satisfaction and complacency. Freedom, as is said, is a constant struggle.