November 21, 2024:
An American Catastrophe: Fascism Comes to America
The American Election 2024: a Capitalist Tyranny, Led by Donald Trump, aided and abetted by a servile, bankrupt two-party system
A Republican Party that is simply becoming a fascist party under Trump
vs.
The Democratic Party:
–too weak, hypocritical, and corrupted by its own billionaire donors/owners, incapable of Defending and Advancing Democracy and Equal Rights in America,
–Committed to arming the ethnic cleansing and genocide carried out by the Netanyahu government of Israel against the heroic Palestinian people
NO MORE NORMALIZING TRUMP!
NO MORE LEGITIMIZING FASCISM!
WE MUST DEFEND THIS –
We hold these truths to be self-evident: THAT ALL HUMAN BEINGS ARECREATED EQUAL, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
– BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY !!
Trump’s movement exists to undermine and destroy these democratic principles.
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THEMSELVES MUST RISE UP TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY!
1. An Undemocratic Election Against Democracy–the Two Party Road to Fascism
In the US presidential election of fall 2024, the American people found themselves faced with two unacceptable electoral options: two parties, each committed in different ways to policies abhorrent to the democratic, humane, and progressive principles most Americans have believed in since they were children. The two parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, presented, in effect, two different aspects of the American government of a movement toward fascism.
For the Republicans, this is the relatively simple, Trump-declared plan to move toward the creation of an authoritarian, fascistic government under the gang-boss-style, mobocratic leadership of Trump himself. For both parties, this fascist trend reveals itself in the fact that it is an increasingly central characteristic of American foreign policy to support authoritarian governments, and fear and oppose democratic movements abroad. This trend is exemplified now in its most extreme form by the Democratic Biden Administration’s absolute commitment to arming the genocidal, ethnic-cleansing policies of the fascistic Netanyahu government of Israel against the mass civilian Palestinian population of Gaza and the Palestinians’ heroic struggle for self-determination.
Having won the US presidential and Congressional elections, the Republican Party is now moving to take control of the American federal government as a mass leadership cult headed by Donald Trump–a narcissistic madman openly committed to authoritarianism, backed by a group of some of the world’s wealthiest and most tyrannically-minded billionaires–narcissistic madmen in their own right.
Of course, as a domestic electoral coalition, the outgoing Democrats are not a fascist party nor likely to become one. They are a weak center-left party of feeble reformist gestures.
However, since the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Democratic Party has been, by and large–often uncomfortably–embraced by the great majority of the American people who believe in the country’s founding principles of equal rights and personal liberty, who believe in the tolerance and diversity of a nation created through the cooperation of diverse peoples of every racial, national, ethnic, and religious origin, and who believe in the possibility of creating and endlessly building an economy and society based on the democratic power of the people and the actual realization of universal human rights.
Through its own troubled twists and turns, this party in 2024 faced the historic task of defeating the Trump monstrosity–and failed. For in America in 2024, it was only possible for the idealistic millions who brought their aspirations for democratic progress to the Democratic Party to enter the confrontation with Trump’s authoritarian mob as members of a political party that was as much a creation of the gargantuan billionaires of the American capitalist class as Trump’s fascist horde. Or rather, the progressive base of the Democratic Party–counterposed in almost every particular to the aims of a Trump dictatorship–were tied to a political party essentially funded by a different wing of the same ruling class that has been funding Trump’s antidemocratic counterrevolution.
History has shown that a movement like Trump’s can only be defeated by a bold, courageous, mass struggle comparable to–in fact, bolder and stronger–than the countervailing movement it must defeat. The watchword–the historic motto–for the defeat of Trump has to be the great declaration of Frederick Douglass:
…The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle….If there is no struggle there is no progress….power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
(“West India Emancipation,” 3 August 1857)
But the funders and the “leaders” of the Democratic Party know nothing of the reality of courageous struggle “for the progress of human liberty.” Essentially, the capitalists who funded the Democrats’ presidential campaign behaved in 2024 as if they were more afraid of building a movement courageous, bold, and powerful enough to defeat Trump than they were of a Trump victory. They are still behaving that way.
This is the first reason that this party could not defeat the movement that carried Trump to victory. The party’s funders and top leaders were more afraid of winning than of losing. They chose instead to conduct a campaign of “happy-talk”–a strategy of infantilizing the American people with “happy-talk.” They did not deal with Trump’s authoritarian plan by speaking the plain truth about the attack on democracy and mobilizing an outraged movement to defend democracy. Instead, they treated–and are still treating–Trump’s fascist aims as just another unsavory conservative election tactic. They constantly NORMALIZE Trump’s talk of dictatorship–trivializing it, calling it “weird”–not really dangerous. Trump’s extremist statements advocating the destruction of democracy have been treated as just campaign blunders–in fact, help to the Democrats. As if she had taken complete leave of her senses, the Democrats’ presidential candidate repeatedly called on people to attend Trump’s Nuremberg-style mass rallies.
Most Democratic politicians avoided using words like “fascist.” They found more polite, more tactful, gentler ways to talk about the death of freedom. Even when some Democratic politicians did suggest that the vocabulary of fascism was relevant, it was used to NORMALIZE fascism–not to arouse a movement to the courageous outrage necessary to defeat fascism.
This is one reason the Democrats lost–and lost badly.
The other reason, of course, is Gaza.
The Democratic Party government’s sickening determination to arm the Israeli government’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has been the Biden administration’s central foreign policy in the year leading up to the presidential election. The party’s progressive base could not possibly swallow support for Israel’s crimes against humanity–condemned by most of the rest of the world and declared war crimes by the world’s highest judicial body, the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Instead of enforcing the United Nations’ (UN’s) judicial efforts to defend civilized standards in world affairs, the United States conspired in a public gesture of outright contempt for the UN in arranging for Netanyahu–in de facto terms, an indicted criminal against humanity–to address the UN and the US Congress. American government officials, including President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, went out of their way to make clear their contempt for international standards of civilized conduct by personally meeting with Netanyahu on this occasion.
Liberal politicians, journalists, pundits, and commentators–paralyzed by their dependency on the Democratic Party to defeat Trump–could not even muster public indignation over their party’s government officials appearing to give their blessing to ethnic-cleansing and genocide. Meanwhile, Harris herself made boundless, unconditional arming of the Israeli military a central feature of her campaign rhetoric–as if utterly determined to drive the party’s most humane and compassionate supporters out of the election altogether.
This show of cynicism, racism, and sanctioning of mass cruelty by the Biden administration did not provoke a mass rebellion against the party by its rank and file–desperate to defeat Trump. But it did increasingly demoralize the party’s progressive base–rendering the party unfit for the historic task of defeating a fascist movement in America while embracing and arming fascist governmental policy towards the Arab peoples of the Middle East.
In fact, the impossibility of defending these policies with its own progressive mass base led the Democratic Biden administration and its university and local government supporters last spring to launch the largest and most chilling witchhunt against free political discussion since the 1950s McCarthy era.
So the Democrats–although obviously not an American fascist party like Trump’s increasingly authoritarian, extremist, bigoted, and violent movement–have nevertheless made support for fascist government and policies a lynchpin of American foreign policy. More than that–in general, in the Biden administration, as much as in the first Trump administration, American foreign policy has been increasingly typified by support for military and authoritarian governments–and increasing fear of and opposition to pressure for democratic reform, in particular pressures from elements of popular mass struggle. The Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has typically given US support and encouragement to civilian and military authoritarian regimes and opposed and undermined mass-democratic tendencies around the world–not only in India and Israel and the Middle East, but even increasingly, if unevenly, in Western Europe.
So while not a fascist party, the Democrats’ commitment to the global inequalities and oppression of an imperialist world economy and social order drives them to support authoritarian–including fascist–government around the world and even to bring pieces of fascism back home to America in the attempt to suppress democratic discussion of Palestine and Israeli atrocities, militarism, and authoritarianism.
2. An Undemocratic Election Against Democracy–the Tragic Pretend Democracy of the American Presidential Election
Despite the fundamental problems of the Democratic Party, it was inevitably to this weak reformist party that most Americans were forced to turn who were horrified by the prospect of a Trump authoritarian movement taking power. These millions of Americans cast their votes, sincerely believing that they were citizens of the world’s oldest functioning democratic republic–doing something decisive and historic to save their democracy.
Unfortunately–tragically–American elections are–for a variety of reasons–now even more than in the past, vast rituals of a sort of pretend democracy, in which the mass of people are allowed to go through a spectacle of voting as a movie-like background accompaniment to the actual, very tedious process by which a handful of the very rich and powerful people determine among themselves who is to rule America and the world as President of the United States. This description is not a “conspiracy theory.” It is merely a candid summary of the generally known facts of the American political system.
In the first place, even more than two hundred years after the framing of the original Constitution in 1787, the leading decision-makers do not trust and do not allow the American people themselves to determine by direct vote of the popular electorate who the President is. Rather, an arcane institution, the Electoral College, formally makes this decision, with votes counted as votes of the respective states. The effect of retaining this mechanism has always been to create an artificial electorate that favors a more conservative rural vote. Today this vote by the Electoral College creates a disproportionately rural, white, older, conservative vote–that is, in 2024, it favors a white-skin-privilege Trump vote.
Even taking into account the antidemocratic impact of the Electoral College does not adequately convey the undemocratic character of American presidential elections. Even more fundamentally, American politics today is essentially the bought-and-paid-for possession of the giant corporations and the wealthiest individuals who donate–or rather, invest–in political candidates, parties, and issues. In fact, in the decades since World War II, the structure of the capitalist system has become increasingly dominated by the historically unprecedented concentration and centralization of wealth in the hands of proportionally smaller numbers of overwhelmingly, tyrannically powerful corporations and individuals. This indescribable economic tyranny, which already effectively determines the character of the electoral options available to Americans to vote for, also owns or otherwise controls the major sources of information and opinion–and so both limits information and defines the parameters of political discourse.
Essentially, it is the decision of certain of these already economically powerful tyrants to attempt to match their economic power with direct tyrannical power over the American state that has determined the moves towards fascist government–not some mysterious, inevitable, spontaneous pandemic of authoritarian insanity rising up from the hearts and minds of the mass of the American people.
Despite the popular impression of the internet–and, in particular, social media–as a laissez-faire Wild Wild West of little-guy access and opportunity–it is clear that large-scale wealth and heavy-duty political power dominate and distort political information and opinion as much in the age of the internet as before.
Both parties–in this world of thorough-going, pervasive, fundamental determination of political thought and action by the wealth and greed and boundless lust for power of a small but immeasurably rich gang of corporate billionaire hoodlums–both parties are parties NOT OF THE PEOPLE BUT OF THE BILLIONAIRE HOODLUMS. To these economic dictators the mass of Americans are merely exploitable assets, whose prices need to be driven down and whose notions of democratic rights and equality are anachronistic nuisances to be done away with in good time.
Both parties, in different ways, have inevitably adapted to the needs, the interests, the very worldview of their respective corporate donors/investors/owners and moved away from the needs, the interests, the concerns, and the principles of the majority of workers and disadvantaged and oppressed people–that is, most of us, the great majority of the American people. Worse–the very facts and values available to us to make our own decisions in the midst of a world ever more alienated, ever more powerful, ever more oppressive–the very information and interpretation we have to understand the dehumanized world around us–are provided and controlled, packaged and distorted by the economic tyrants we need to gain control over.
It is hardly surprising then, in this American election year, alongside millions who voted to protect democracy from this economic and political tyranny–mainly voting for the weak, already corrupted Democrats–millions of others–especially younger Americans–saw two evils to choose between and refused to vote for either. Trump emerged as the victor from this contest between evils.
3. The Emerging Face of American Fascism
In 2024 a layer of certain major billionaires–tyrants of capital–decided to adopt Trump and his authoritarian vision. They already commanded a monstrous concentration of economic power. Authoritarian, fascist government in America, under an authoritarian executive like Trump–with his obsequious hangers-on filling Congress and the federal courts–could rid them of any inconvenient governmental inspection or constraints, remove any significant threats of trade union struggle, eliminate the nuisance of the protection of local communities against corporate abuse, and gut once and for all the entire body of environmental regulations. To these would-be Caligulas and Neros of capital, a Trump dictatorship would be a Utopia for the most reckless and irresponsible (that is, Trump-like) narcissists among the rich and powerful–civil society turned into a permanent opportunity for an orgy of greed for the corporate Behemoths and Leviathans. Trump and his Billionaire Boys’ Club could command a tyrannical political power commensurate with the economic tyranny they already take for granted.
Surely such a nightmare vision is just some left-wing paranoid fantasy–right? But we must never forget that no one predicted Hitler would carry his antisemitic demagogy to the point of the Holocaust. But he did. Trump is continuing to swear he will carry out a holocaust of mass deportations: in practice a policy impossible to implement without an attack–a government war–against countless American-Latino and other immigrant communities. Further, in a sense, the most genuine, most consistent, most real, and most dangerous fascists of Trump’s authoritarian regime are likely to be–not Trump himself or his various political cronies–but these direct capitalist fascists for whom Trump himself is merely a means to an end.
The Republican Party headed by would-be American Hitler Donald Trump offers an American Constitution torn and twisted into the framework for the construction of a fascist system of government.
Trump and his party’s paranoid hate-mongering towards immigrants, black communities, Latinas/os/x, Arab-Americans and Muslims, Asian Americans, women’s rights, LGBT+ youth, any science committed to the truth, and their systematic attacks or refusal to defend compassion, tolerance, diversity, or enlightenment–all this–the “methodology” of “Trumpism”–in its actual role in history is the “modern American” equivalent of the whole Nazi ideology built up on hatred of “the Jews” and “Jewishness.”
It is with the inspiration of this philosophy of hate that Trump has persuaded his movement to embrace his new constitution–ripped out of the original–to be shaped in the first instance to serve the authoritarian fantasy life of Trump’s own various personality disorders, but then as well, his entire hate-mongering racist, paranoid vision of a country based on the institutionalization of white-skin-privilege. The ostensible name of his political movement–”Make America Great Again”–has never really meant anything other than “make America white again.” That has been Trump’s only real political slogan–a slogan in which “white” has exactly the same significance that “German” had to the Nazis.
Like the Nazis’ theories of German and European history, Trump’s visions of America’s past and future are equally false and crazed. But in their deranged falsehood, joined with the demagogy of hate-mongering and fear, they have mobilized a multimillion-headed gang of would-be thugs, ranging from the tyrannically-minded billionaires like Elon Musk to pathetic semi-lumpenized white plebeian masses, whose range of ignorant cognitive incapacity, and mental illness have marginalized them–in their very day-to-day lives–from facing up to many of the most ordinary challenges of life in the real modern world.
Of course, American society fails and marginalizes many of its people – a fact felt today especially by millions of American youth. But Trump’s marginalized, atomized, plebeian base is characterized by a mass self-hatred of the kind that drives an abused child to grow up to embrace and idealize all abusers. The oppressed youth who give hope to the American future – like the thousands of idealistic youth of the George Floyd movement – seek to end abuse, not empower it.
Trump’s ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, insanity, and brutal-mindedness merely make his self-hating mob feel special. His incompetence, his stupidity, his hate, his lies–are theirs. And he can be PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES–supposedly the most powerful person in the world! If Donald Trump, a hate-mongering fool, is running the world, THEN SURELY THE DAY OF THE FOOL HAS ARRIVED–and every WHITE fool will be king.
During the governments of Mussolini and Hitler, there were supposedly brilliant intellectuals and artists who created roles for themselves as intellectual apologists and artistic celebrants of Il Duce and Der Fuhrer and their regimes. These shameful careerists declared fascism and Naziism to be profound systems of thought and hailed the brutal despotic leaders as great historic way-showers to a New Glorious Age.
It should be no surprise that today there should be the occasional right-wing ideologue–some academic scribbler or fading singer or actor–who pronounces Trump and Trumpism as modern cultural battering rams against the supposed intellectual excesses of the left.
But it is shockingly shameful that in our painfully troubled times there are supposedly liberal–even “progressive”–intellectuals, political leaders, journalists, pundits, or creative artists–who are prepared to advance the notion that Trump’s mindless demagogy in America or the pathetic ideation of similar figures in other countries–that any of these boobs and bumpkins are serious contributors to a contemporary “culture war” or “historic political debate” between right and left. The only cultural contribution of Trump and his ideological ilk to modern civilization is the peculiar habit of creating a stink and then regularly and frequently declaring to the world how bad it smells.
4. The George Floyd Movement Shows the Way
BAMN (Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant RIghts and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary) is the author of this commentary and call to action in response to the Fall 2024 presidential election. On Tuesday and Wednesday, 5-6 of November, the activist-organizers of BAMN, like millions of people in America and around the world, watched the horrifying election returns being reported like some slow-motion disaster movie. We watched, like millions of others, with a mixture of shock, outrage, disgust, and depression. It had been widely supposed that Trump could win the vote of the right-wing-biased Electoral College. But it had been generally – if without confidence – predicted Trump would likely lose the popular vote – if by a close margin. Trump’s clear – if not really mandate-level – victory in both came as something of a shock. Still, there had been a general admission by journalists and the pollsters themselves that the vulgar empiricism of the polls was especially unreliable this time – both, presumably, because of the dubious methodology of the various polls and because many people being polled were – for a variety of reasons – lying to pollsters. In the end, it seems the polls significantly underestimated the support for Trump – as if many Americans were ashamed or afraid to tell a pollster how they intended to exercise their franchise.
In the wake of their national electoral defeat, the leading Democrats went through the traditional unenlightening ritual that has characterized the party on such occasions for the past half century. This center-left party’s two wings blame each other. The Democrats’ right declares its mild-mannered left wing has dragged the party too far to the left. The party’s ever-so-polite left wing offers the alternative account that the Democrats’ right wing has forced the organization too far to the right – away from the ostensible left-wing reformists, “workers,” “progressives,” “pro-labor, “ or populist voters.
For a few weeks after the votes are counted, the Democrats’ two wings flap away at each other – creating a somewhat unpleasant and ridiculous historical moment of rhetorical finger-pointing – and then go back to where they were before the unserious flapping around started.
This pretense of political debate never resolves anything, because the division of the Democrat Party – real as they are – cannot be resolved by a few weeks of rhetorical finger pointing. The Democratic Party – like its Republican partner in the clumsy, often apparently irrelevant, anachronistic dance of the American two-party system – is a product of long-range historical processes. Its overdetermined nature cannot be transformed by a brief orgy of self-serving finger pointing by its two equally tired, worn-out factions.
The reality is that the two tendencies within the Democrats are, at the present moment in history, merely two bad theories of how to fail to meet the present turning point in history that we are undergoing.
Fascism has come to America. Surely not in the form of an immediate transformation of our traditional constitutional institutions into a fascist Italy or Nazi Germany with a legal one-man dictatorship and the wholesale elimination of elections. No. But Mussolini and Hitler did not achieve their fascist transformation of their nation states overnight. They went through a years-long process of transition.
Our problem is that we are AT THE BEGINNING of such a process of fascist transition and transformation. In Italy in the 1920s and in Germany in the 1930s, the main “respectable” electoral parties, most “mainstream” journalists, and most leading intellectuals all dealt with THE BEGINNING of the process of fascist takeover by sticking their heads in the sand.
That is the problem of the American Democratic Party and of the bulk of liberal journalism and the liberal intellectual, artistic, and scientific leadership as a whole. In THE BEGINNING of the transition to a fascist political system – to authoritarian government and the ending of the legal and political protections of human rights – the policy of the Democrats and the bulk of our nation’s liberal, supposedly educated and enlightened leadership – is TO STICK THEIR HEADS IN THE SAND.
Speaking the plain truth – Frederick Douglass, in the face of the pro-slavery US Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, declared – “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Yet the principal Democratic Party leaders on both the Party’s right and left wings have declared the most important point is that the defenders of democracy should “stay off the streets” – that is, should avoid mass public demonstrations.
The question facing us is HOW TO STOP THE COMING TO POWER OF FASCISM AT ITS BEGINNING. BAMN’s point is not pessimism and certainly not despair. BAMN’s point is that AMERICAN FASCISM CAN BE STOPPED – BUT IT MUST BE STOPPED NOW AT ITS BEGINNING.
The movement in protest against the racist police murder of George Floyd was far larger and in fact far more powerful than Trump’s “make America great again” gang of racists. It transformed the consciousness of communities throughout America. Objectively, it had the power to create a new, long–lasting, civil rights movement. Trump could not stop it. Within his government, during his first administration, he urged the policy of police or federal forces shooting protesters in the legs to end this mass struggle for racial equality and justice. Within his own government, this policy was rejected.
All Trump’s efforts to suppress or intimidate the George Floyd Movement failed. Before this integrated mass struggle THAT ACTUALLY spoke for the idealistic principles of most Americans, Trump and his MAGA mob were ACTUALLY IMPOTENT.
What prevented the George Floyd Movement from truly winning the battle against racist police brutality was precisely the role of the Democratic Party, which told this mighty movement to get out of the streets and leave the struggle in the hands of the Democratic politicians – who proceeded to do nothing about racist police brutality once the streets were cleared and a handful of trials in especially extreme cases were held, with mixed results. This same Democratic Party is now dealing with the rise of fascism by urging its supporters NOT TO FIGHT. While its leaders whistle while they walk past the first graves in the graveyard of freedom, the two factions pathetically blame each other for the opening of the cemetery.
Both the left and right factions of the Democrats – who failed to carry on the demands of the George Floyd Movement – have failed to raise the alarm and mobilize the struggle against the rise of fascism in the Trump movement’s campaign. Now they tell rank-and-file Democrats not to build a movement.
Many people – in the U.S. and internationally – have understandably seen Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as the best – that is, the de facto leader of the left wing of the Democrats. Technically, Sanders runs as an Independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Vermont. However, Sanders ran for President in the Democratic Party primaries and has always caucused and voted with the Democrats in the U.S. Congress. It was, in reality, as a participant in the Democrats’ traditional post-defeat debate that Sanders issued a shameful self-serving statement on the November 5 election on the following day.
The basis of the respect for Sanders has been his long-time support for steps toward creating a true public-health system in America – in Sanders’ words, to make the U.S. a nation that would “guarantee healthcare to all as a human right.” BAMN, of course, supports this position on healthcare as a human right and defends Sanders against the demagogic attacks from the right he has suffered for maintaining this position for decades, for centering his presidential-primary campaign on this policy, and in reality making the advocacy of healthcare as a right the central basis of his entire political career.
Sanders’ reputation as a principled leftist on healthcare, however, makes the Vermont Senator’s disgraceful statement on the 2024 elections all the more dangerous. For he, like many other Democratic Party spokespersons at this critical historical moment, is maintaining a business-as-usual, head-in-the-sand position. In his November 6 statement, he analyzes the election in tired, standard, “left-democratic” rhetoric, not recognizing in the slightest that a fascist movement means the escalation of the attack on already existing public healthcare, and that the victory of this movement means ending the democratic right for the American people to fight for this or the whole of any “socialistic” and progressive measures. And he is as incapable of issuing the call for all-out mass mobilization to defend democracy as any politician on the right wing of his party. He clings to the bankrupt policies, institutions, and “debates” of the past while pretending to criticize his bankrupt party for not “recognizing” that “the American people are angry and want change. And they are right.”
But Sanders’ own statement is entirely in the “status quo” he claims to criticize. There is nothing angry about it. The most he calls for is “some very serious political discussions.” Head firmly in the sand, Sanders confronts the catastrophe of Trump with the impotent, polite, talk-shop proposal of “coming weeks and months” of “very serious political discussions.” Trump could ask for no better “left-wing” friend than “Bernie” and his “very serious political discussions.”
Worse. In making in reality meaningless criticisms of a party “which has abandoned working class people,” Sanders used language that fed racist demagogy against so-called “identity politics.” This is a misleading euphemism – coming from the right – for expressing any consciousness or concern for racial, sexual, and other forms of oppression in America that cannot be understood in terms of economic inequality alone. Sanders thereby gave aid and comfort – perhaps a blunder – to the argument which is common within the Democratic Party that all opposition to inequality should be limited to economic issues alone. This ignores the history of the inequality, victimization, and oppression in the country from its colonial origins, which has been caused and shaped by issues of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, sexuality, and the host of other qualities inherent in the human condition and the subject of anti-democratic and cruel divide-and-rule methods to secure the submission of the exploited to the exploiters and the oppressed to the oppressors – in other words the fundamental basis of Trump’s politics.
Sanders – and he is indeed not the worst misleader – is obviously not intending to lead any struggle against Trump or fascism. Stuck in a cynical, anachronistic, electoralist fantasy world, Sanders can think no further than trying to fund and organize the next election campaign to repeat the mistakes and defeats of his last campaigns, presumably with a younger candidate. Since he has no intention of defeating fascism, he prefers not to see it.
BAMN’s response to the 2024 election differs from this and other tendencies to adapt to Trump’s divide-and-rule ruling class message. As we have said, we watched the election returns, like millions of people, with dismay and disgust. But our activist organizers also watched with outrage and determination to fight back. Unlike the Democrats, with the counsel in reality, to stay at home and weep, BAMN is responding, first – as always, in this moment of confrontation by speaking the plain truth. This alone creates a stark contrast between BAMN and the liberal misleaders, who appear in their majority to have adopted a policy of never speaking the plain truth about the fascist character of Trump and the Trump movement and the real dangers the progress of that movement pose to the democratic rights and struggle for equality of the American people. Second, this means – also as always for BAMN – reminding the forces for democracy, equality, and justice in the country of the real power we have when we unite the struggles of the workers and all oppressed people against the actually politically weak and ignorant forces of our opponents, who can only survive in a world of lies and only if the defenders of democracy fail to use their own objective power in FIGHTING TO WIN.
It is true that the methods of Sanders and his Democrats – struggle without courage, boldness, or militance, STRUGGLE WITHOUT STRUGGLE – cannot affect the defeat of Trump’s racist mob now. But if the mass of people in this country who actually want democracy defended, themselves mobilize to defend democracy, such a movement certainly can win. The George Floyd Movement shows that kind of movement is still a part of American history and shows us the way forward.
The question is leadership. We must reject the tepid, self-serving, self-defeating methods of cynical electoralism, as the counsel of passivity and despair.
The voice of Tom Paine and the first American Revolution speak to us; the voices of the brave abolitionists: Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown; the voices of Abraham Lincoln and the countless heroic officers and rank-and-file soldiers of the Union Army; the voices of the thousands of Americans who built our labor movement; Dr. King calling for victory in the struggles for civil rights and ending the war in VIetnam; the voices of the women’s movement throughout our history – these voices call to us. THIS IS OUR HISTORY – NOT THE PATHETIC, SICK, HATE-MONGERS and not the ever-recurrent misleaders and non-leaders who preach passivity and cowardice in the face of every real challenge.
BAMN calls now for the renewal of the determination and the militance of mass-democratic struggle. We welcome all and wish to unite all believers in democracy and equality, prepared to face the plain truth of the challenge facing us, and find the boldness and courage we need in an independent collective movement fighting to win.
No Normalizing Trump!
No Legitimizing Fascism!
No giving up without a fight!
When we fight we fight to win!
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress”
October 25, 2024:
End the War Against Iran!
End All Military Aid to Israel!
ISRAEL’S WARS OF ETHNIC CLEANSING THREATEN THE GLOBAL CATASTROPHE OF WORLD WAR III!
ONLY THE INTERNATIONAL ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT FOR PALESTINE CAN PREVENT WORLD WAR III!
No Support for War with Iran! No More Attacks on Iran!
Withdraw all US military personnel out of Israel! No US military advisors to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza or anywhere else!
Block All Military Aid to Israeli Genocide By Any Means Necessary!
No Electoral Support for Any Pro-Israeli Genocide Politicians or Parties! No Vote for Ethnic Cleansing! No Vote for Genocide!
Victory to the Palestinian Struggle Against Israel and Imperialism By Any Means Necessary!
Victory to the Lebanese Resistance to All Israeli Attacks By Any Means Necessary!
Expose the Full Dangers of Netanyahu’s War Drive:
No to Total War in the
Middle East!
No to Out-of-Control Slide
into the Catastrophe of
World War III!
Contact BAMN and organize in your area!
Read BAMN’s statement “Victory to the Palestinian Struggle! By Any Means Necessary, End the Israeli Genocidal Invasion and Occupation of Gaza!” issued October 15, 2023
August 19, 2024:
BAMN files federal court motion demanding right of BAMN and diverse group of Palestinian, Jewish, and pro-Palestinian activists to intervene in University of California free speech lawsuit
*Watch the Press Conference on YouTube
*Watch the KGO-7 story
*Read the Daily Cal article
*Read the Press Release
*Read the Motion and Brief for Intervention (including declarations and exhibits)
On August 19, 2024, BAMN filed a Federal Court motion on behalf of itself, Berkeley Law Jewish Students for Justice in Palestine, Berkeley Muslim Student Association, Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary, and 33 individual Palestinian, Jewish, and other pro-Palestinian students and activists, demanding their right to intervene as co-defendants in the lawsuit of Brandeis Center v the University of California, Berkeley.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN AND SHARE THE PETITION TO THE UC REGENTS AND THE COURT
OUR VOICES WILL BE HEARD:
- Defend free speech and academic freedom for supporters of the Palestinian struggle!
- Support the pro‐Palestine student‐defendant intervention to defeat the pro‐Trump Brandeis lawsuit against UC Berkeley and the UC System
The pro-Trump Brandeis Center has filed a lawsuit against UC Berkeley and the University of California System to deny free speech for students, faculty, and organizations who oppose the Israeli government’s ethnic-cleansing and genocide in Gaza and who support the Palestinian struggle. The Brandeis Center seeks to force the UC Regents and campus administrations to discipline, remove funding, and remove official recognition of students and student organizations who voice support for the Palestinian people, and to create a legal justification for further censorship and repression of speech on college and university campuses.
Pro-Palestine student-defendant intervenors have a right to defend themselves, independent of the University of California administration, against the Brandeis Center’s lawsuit in the UC System. The UC administration has made clear that they cannot and will not adequately defend the free speech rights of pro-Palestine students. This legal intervention, sponsored by BAMN (The Coalition to Defend Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary), is made up of pro-Palestine supporters and activists of the movement around the country.
Therefore, we the undersigned:
Call on the UC Regents and presiding Judge James Donato to support the pro-Palestine student-defendant intervention to defeat the pro-Trump Brandeis Center’s lawsuit against UC Berkeley and the UC system.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
* Become an Intervenor – use our contact form
*Invite us to speak at your school or organization – use our contact form
*Circulate the petition to US District Court Judge James Donato
*Reach out to us via our contact form to have an organizer get in touch with you
*DONATE to the legal intervention! Money goes toward legal costs, expert witnesses, etc. Make a contribution to our non-profit affiliate United for Equality and Affirmative Action Legal Defense Fund (UEAALDF)!
Read BAMN’s full statement “Hands Off Our Encampments! Drop All Charges and Student Conduct Violations Against Protesters!” issued May 15, 2024
