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Now Is the Time to Protect Progressive Organizations
Defending progressive nonprofits as Trump takes power again will help ensure the protection of civil liberties and democratic institutions over the coming months and years.
Dec 18, 2024
The coming year promises to be a dangerous time for progressive groups. Last month the House passed resolution 9495, which would grant the executive branch extraordinary powers to designate nonprofit organizations as terrorist supporting and thereby to revoke these organizations’ 501(c)3 status unilaterally and without due process.
The significance of this development is chillingly clear now that we have evidence of a right-wing plan to use the pretext of fighting terrorism to shut down more than 100 progressive organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
As reported on the progressive news site Truthout, in November a right-wing think tank with ties to the Heritage Foundation published a glossy report that purports to show how these and other progressive organizations are “pro-terrorism.” The report outlines a series of steps that the think tank, the Capital Research Center, believes should be taken to shut these 159 groups down, ranging from the revocation of their 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 statuses to the prosecution and deportation of their leaders. Such moves, if made by the Trump administration, could effectively shutter progressive civil society.
History tells us that right-wing authoritarian movements and governments begin by attacking leftist and progressive parties and organizations, and then proceed to target other opposition parties and civil society organizations.
The “evidence” provided for progressive groups’ supposed support for terrorism is highly suspect. In many cases, the Capital Research Center simply highlights statements made by these groups that are taken to be insufficiently condemnatory of Hamas. Groups’ use of language like “armed resistance” to describe Hamas’ actions is taken, in and of itself, to constitute active support for this Palestinian militia. We are in the realm here of “thought crimes.”
As a historian of modern Europe, I am alarmed by this call to shut down progressive organizations and parties en masse: The current push to do so resonates with the history of 20th-century fascism.
In April 1919, just weeks after the official formation of the Italian fascist movement, Benito Mussolini’s supporters violently attacked the offices of Avanti, a socialist newspaper. The Italian Blackshirts then carried out a campaign of violence against trade unionists and socialists.
More than a decade later, when Adolf Hitler was granted dictatorial powers through the March 1933 Enabling Act, among his government’s first actions was the outlawing of opposition parties, including the Social Democratic Party. Leaders of the Social Democratic Party were targeted for arrest, faced torture, and were detained in prisons. As had already happened to the Communist Party and would subsequently happen to other opposition parties, the German Social Democratic Party in May and June of 1933 was rendered inoperative. The Party was shut down by the new regime.
Today in the United States, the Capital Research Center is promoting a plan to shut down progressive opposition parties like the Democratic Socialists of America and to bring down a wide range of progressive organizations including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Council on Islamic American Relations, the Movement for Black Lives, the National Lawyers Guild, Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. These and other progressive organizations, while not nearly as powerful as the left in early 1930s Germany, nevertheless have the capacity to lead mass movements and to effectively resist regressive political transformations. This is why they are being targeted.
In the closing weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris indicated that she believes that now President-elect Donald Trump is a fascist and that he wants to rule as a dictator. To say that Trump is a fascist is to put forward a hypothesis, informed by historical comparison, about how he intends to govern. But would-be strongmen can only carry out their plans with the acquiescence of wider layers of the state and of civil society.
Donald Trump may want to forcibly repress progressive dissent—he has effectively said as much—but how much support will his efforts receive? Will the incoming Republican-led Senate follow the House in granting the executive branch extraordinary powers both to designate nonprofit organizations as “terrorist-supporting” and to revoke their 501(c)3 statuses without due process?
Will conservative commentators who have kept their distance from the MAGA movement nevertheless amplify and endorse the Capital Research Center’s report calling for the aggressive dismantling of Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Democratic Socialists of America, among more than 100 other organizations?
Will centrist politicians, media outlets, and commentators stay silent about attacks on the left, or will they speak out in defense of the right of progressive parties and organizations to exist?
When considering possible executive branch moves to shut down progressive organizations, those from different parts of the political spectrum might feel conflicted. Perhaps there have been statements made or actions taken over the last year by progressive organizations—including organizations that have protested in favor of a cease-fire in Israel and Palestine—that you have found objectionable. Perhaps you believe that the progressive movement has in some way taken the wrong tack.
Nevertheless, now is the time to think carefully about political principles concerning assembly, expression, and protest. Now is the time to consider the precedent that widespread attacks on progressive organizations would establish, and about the powers that should or should not be invested in a would-be authoritarian president.
History tells us that right-wing authoritarian movements and governments begin by attacking leftist and progressive parties and organizations, and then proceed to target other opposition parties and civil society organizations.
Defending progressive organizations in this moment will help ensure the protection of civil liberties and democratic institutions over the coming months and years. We are living through a historically dangerous moment. It is also a moment for clarity and courage.
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With Project 2025, the State of Future Elections Hangs in the Balance
Given the results of this election, future political contests in our country face heightened threat levels that demand our vigilance and action.
Nov 18, 2024
While votes are still being counted in some states, turnout for the 2024 general election continues to near (although not quite yet reach) 2020 records, despite our country’s incredibly polarized voting landscape. In our current environment, these levels of participation are a testament to the tenacity of organizers to overcome voter suppression and ensure all voters can fully participate in our democracy.
However, this success cannot lull us into a false sense of security in our push to make voting more accessible. The fight to protect unrestricted access to the ballot box is a year-round effort and responsibility. And now, given the results of this election, future political contests in our country face heightened threat levels that demand our vigilance and action.
The fight for voting rights is one of the greatest litmus tests for the health of U.S. democracy.
Over the last four years, anti-voting rights extremists have made their mission clear: to turn back the hands of time and further disenfranchise Black and brown communities and other historically targeted groups to ensure their continued grip on power. In nearly half of the country, it is now harder for people in Black and brown communities to vote compared with the most recent midterm elections. Yet, Black and brown voters persist. However, as the new administration prepares to reenter the White House for a second term, anti-democratic forces are, once more, being given an opportunity to radically dismantle and change election administration in our country.
And Project 2025 is their blueprint to do just that.
Project 2025 is the extremist playbook laying out the tactics to dismantle critical democratic infrastructures and rights, including the right to vote. Among its multi-pronged approach to accomplish this, Project 2025 would criminalize the voting process, shifting the responsibility for prosecuting election-related offenses from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division. This move would allow for ill-intentioned individuals and leaders to intimidate state and local election workers, and cobble up sham investigations that could lead to the prosecution of voters and election officials.
Policing voters to this magnitude would transform our elections into a system of fear and oppression, severely weakening our country’s electoral integrity.
Yet, that’s not all.
Speaking of lowered electoral integrity, another key provision of Project 2025 would end all federal-level measures to combat misinformation and disinformation campaigns online. These toxic narratives, meant to discourage voter participation, are already widespread and known to target Black and Latino communities disproportionately. By choosing to abandon any federal responsibility to protect these groups from falsehoods, extremists are choosing to make the truth an option rather than a right in election cycles so the outcomes can favor their camp.
Lastly, and perhaps most insidiously, Project 2025 would allow the federal government to access voter rolls by creating stipulations of eligibility that would force state and local recipients of Department of Homeland Security funding to turn over DMV and voter registration databases. This tactic would open the door to justifying aggressive voter roll purges that would further target Black and brown communities. Furthermore, based on the Supreme Court’s increasingly conservative and extreme ideology, we cannot rely on the court to hold the line and protect voters from such an egregious move.
In addition to federal rollbacks, we can also anticipate a flood of anti-voter bills to be introduced as soon as legislative cycles commence. Fueled by misinformation and this recent electoral win, these bills will more than likely work to chip away at voter access among the youth, people of color, those in rural areas, and those living with disabilities. These bills, like Project 2025 itself, aim to limit who can cast a ballot to dictate who has a say in the future of this country.
Both State Voices and Common Cause are proud members of the Election Protection Coalition, a national coalition working year-round to ensure that all voters, regardless of their race, sex, and location, have an equal opportunity to vote and their ballots are counted. Our coalition is made up of more than 300 local, state, and national groups united under one profound belief: Democracy requires constant, committed protection. We understand that our democratic systems do not come under attack every four years, but every day there’s an opportunity to weaken them.
Now, with Project 2025, we have an opportunity to not only identify the threats but begin to mobilize against them. It is imperative that we remain vigilant in our fight against anti-voter legislation and work together to combat any proposed administrative changes designed to undermine how elections are conducted and how votes are certified.
The fight for voting rights is one of the greatest litmus tests for the health of U.S. democracy. We are only as strong as our willingness to protect the rights of all people and not just a few. This moment calls us to action—we cannot afford paralysis in any shape or form. We are called to stand on the shoulders of the activists who came before us so that the elections of the future remain fair and free. We know that Black and brown communities will, once again, lead the charge to protect this precious right, but the moment will call for all of us to do our part to push back against anti-democratic extremism. The future and everything we hold dear depends on it.
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With Trump’s 2nd Win, American Politics as We Know It Is Over
It’s long been clear that this country needs a new politics. To use a shopworn phrase, let’s build back better—after this third and most devastating hurricane of the season.
Nov 06, 2024
In Philadelphia this past weekend, I met a number of people who’d given up on democracy. They railed about politicians who make promises they don’t keep. They spun conspiracy theories about the government. A number of those who answered the door told me that they weren’t going to vote.
Then there were the grim young men who said, hell yeah, they were going to vote for Trump. They spoke of the Republican presidential candidate as if he were Tony Montana, the gangster played by Al Pacino in the film Scarface: violent, lawless, and powerful. Trump elicited respect laced with fear. According to his supporters, he’d stand up to America’s enemies abroad and be tough on crime domestically. Several said to me—with the usual preface of “don’t get me wrong but…”—that a woman president would be too weak or “mixed up by hormones” to do those necessary things.
If you cross celebrity culture with gun culture and add a few dollops of testosterone, you get Donald Trump.
Even as they wrap themselves in the American flag and the U.S. constitution, the American far right and its enablers are plotting against democracy itself.
Much has been written about the rise of the global far right (including by me). It’s important to understand that this global trend is not a type of politics. It is an anti-politics. The far right embodied by Vladimir Putin in Russia, Victor Orban in Hungary, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and others is determined to unravel democracy. They have contempt for elections. They revise, bend, or undermine the constitutional order.
And they despise the civic engagement at the heart of thriving democracies. They crack down on dissent. They target protesters. They ruthlessly purge the “enemy within.” This is what Donald Trump has promised to do this time around.
The Republican campaign in 2024 relied on anti-government rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and violent innuendo (against FEMA, against the border patrol, against Republican politicians that didn’t toe the MAGA line) in order to do two things. These strategies drew the disaffected to the polls. And they pushed others not to vote: to give up on politics altogether.
Rage and apathy are the two modes of right-wing politicking. This is a variation on Albert Hirschman’s famous “exit, voice, and loyalty” distinction. The loyalists are voicing their anger, the apathetic are exiting, and the dissidents continue to organize in the hopes of avoiding the Russian scenario: an entire opposition in exile or jail.
Other countries have managed to buck the trend. Even little Moldova was able to successfully beat back the anti-democratic, pro-Russian, billionaire-supported candidate in its presidential election last weekend. Brazil got rid of Jair Bolsonaro. The French teamed up to stop Marine Le Pen at the polls. It can be done.
Rich, prosperous, arrogant America failed to do so.
Let’s face it: American politics, as we know it, is over.
To be sure, it was always possible for American politicians to win with dirty tricks. But then there’d be a course correction of sorts: Nixon followed by Watergate, Trump 2016 followed by impeachment and electoral loss. That loss in 2020 should have been an inoculation against outlandish lies, threats, and manipulations. Instead, the Republican Party doubled down. It abandoned the few remaining guardrails governing the conduct of a campaign, which is a preview of how the next administration will skirt the few remaining guardrails it reluctantly observed in the waning days of its previous term in office.
The political game is now fundamentally different. Forget “ground game.” Forget strategic messaging. Forget polling. In other words, forget about those traditional methods of mobilizing political sentiment in a democracy.
Never bring a knife to a gunfight, the pundits warn. The Democrats brought a computer to a gunfight. Those computer models of how to win an election now lie in ruins.
A funereal pall has descended over half of America, and naturally there is a lot of finger-pointing in the wake of the Democratic Party’s loss of the presidency and the Senate. It was misogyny. It was Black men abandoning the Democratic Party. It was poor whites voting against their economic self-interest. It was the Electoral College, Elon Musk’s money, and Russian disinformation. It was Joe Biden’s decision to run again, and Kamala Harris’ failure to explain her positions clearly.
It was all of that, of course. But it was also the failure of the Democratic Party to understand the rage coursing through the body politic. The Democrats failed to translate the economic gains of the last four years—the infrastructure bill, the watered-down version of the Green New Deal, the CHIPS Act—into populist language. Put another way, the ordinary gains of an ordinary political process did not prove inspiring because this is a post-political moment. And the Democrats were playing by the rules of the old era.
Here’s an instructive story.
A friend confessed to me before the election that he didn’t pay attention to politics. “They’re both bad,” he said “One’s a fascist, the other’s a communist.”
“Harris is a communist?” I said, surprised. “That’s ridiculous. She’s just a run-of-the-mill politician, straddling the center. I could understand if you were criticizing Bernie Sanders as a communist. He, at least, is a self-professed socialist. He’s not a communist, of course, but at least he’s–.”
“Oh, Bernie?” my friend interrupted me. “Oh yeah, I really like Bernie!”
There are several lessons here. Even for the apolitical, the lies of Trump (“she’s a Marxist!”) penetrated the population with the brutal repetitiveness of state propaganda. The level of political understanding in the populace is shockingly low (a fifth grader should be able to put Trump, Harris, and Sanders on a political spectrum). And Bernie’s populism transcends ideology. Like the Vermont senator, a successful political party must be able to channel anger as well as aspiration.
As the opposition regroups, it’s useful to repeat some truisms. Character is forged in adversity. Previous generations have successfully fought fascism to rescue democracy. And democracy is all about learning lessons and moving forward (especially after slipping backward). It’s long been clear that this country needs a new politics. To use a shopworn phrase, let’s build back better—after this third and most devastating hurricane of the season.
In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagined the alternative past of a fascist takeover of the United States. Charles Lindbergh, a pro-Hitler isolationist, wins the 1940 election with his slogan “Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war.” In office, he fulfills his promise by keeping the United States out of World War II. But when Lindbergh’s plane mysteriously goes missing, Roosevelt gets reelected to the presidency in 1942. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and history resumes its well-known course.
It’s a chilling book that resonates with today’s headlines. It was a reminder, well before the political rise of Trump, that it can happen here.
But the current situation is different. This is not just a battle over the soul of America. This is a much larger confrontation. This conflict is being waged against Russia in Ukraine and against Israel in Gaza. It is being fought in polling places in democratic nations around the world. And it is being sustained by anti-authoritarian dissidents in streets, jails, and exile communities.
Even as they wrap themselves in the American flag and the U.S. constitution, the American far right and its enablers are plotting against democracy itself. It didn’t look promising in 1940 either, in Roth’s alternative reality or in the actual history. So, let the finger-pointing end and a new era of creative and savvy political organizing begin.
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