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This Election Isn’t About a Perfect Candidate, It’s About Our Futures
Harris will never be my community’s liberator. But for right now, for this election, she is my target. My goal is to stop Trump and his MAGA allies from ever getting close to the White House again.
Oct 06, 2024
I remember seeing the pain in my dad’s eyes when Trump’s Muslim Ban took effect. As a daughter of Mexican-Iranian immigrants, the onslaught of Trump’s anti-immigrant, Islamophobic attacks over his four years in office served as a violent and constant reminder of the ways this country has ruthlessly attacked the lives of the people I love.
As one of the first people in my family eligible to vote, it feels as if I am holding the weight of my entire family, my generation, and my future on my shoulders when I go to the ballot box. Never has my vote been just about me. It’s about what gives my family and my community the best chance at survival.
This year’s election is no different. Each vote matters, and if recent polling shows anything, it’s that this alarmingly close race between Vice President Harris and Trump will come down to the margins. The very real possibility of yet another Trump presidency has left me grappling with what life for my family, friends, and community—many of whom are undocumented—would look like if Trump took office again.
I am under no impression that Harris is perfect; but I am not fighting with her. I am fighting to move her. I will vote for Harris on November 5, but my vote is not a profession of my love for Harris or my approval. It’s about making a deliberate choice to pick the playing field for the next four years that my generation and I will be forced, one way or another, to organize under.
Under Trump’s first term, undocumented people in my community retreated into fear because nowhere felt safe, not even a simple trip to the grocery store. The risk of being pulled over, targeted by the raging enforcement apparatus Trump’s administration fortified, was enough to force many back into the shadows. Thousands of families couldn’t escape Trump's attacks. The detention centers that have existed under both Republican and Democratic presidents alike, swelled under Trump. Everyone was a target: children, parents, grandparents, and more.
To this day, there are children who have yet to be reunited with their loved ones after being ripped from their parents’ arms under Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy. They have lived their childhood years tossed from courtroom to courtroom as many of their parents fight to regain custody.
When I think about this year’s election, I wish I didn’t feel the fear I do about a future life under Trump. But I have asked myself seriously: can my community survive that again, only this time worse?
As someone who grew up with a family of immigrants, I know this is not mere speculation or exaggeration—Trump and MAGA Republicans have a plan to hurt my community. Among many other atrocious policy proposals, the anti-immigrant policies outlined in Project 2025 are designed to tear apart families across the nation– both at the border and in the very states and cities we call home.
Trump is going after everyone. He would aim to strip legal status by ending DACA, TPS, humanitarian parole and other life-saving programs that have supported hundreds of thousands of people who already live, work, and care for their families in this country. The sprawling immigrant detention camps and deportations carried under his first admin were just a glimpse at what he could do under a second term, where he has promised to use the military to conduct nationwide raids in the places where we live, work, and pray to target anyone suspected of being undocumented.
This is the reality I am grappling with as a young voter from an immigrant community. For me, my decision to vote this year isn’t about rallying behind a perfect candidate who, unfortunately, does not exist right now. Vice President Harris is far from perfect. I am outraged by the ways she’s adopted Republican talking points and rhetoric when it comes to immigration, while also ignoring the calls to end the genocide in Gaza and stop sending weapons to Israel that American tax dollars have paid for.
Still, I know the ways I’ve seen how our progressive movement has successfully pushed Democrats before. In 2012, our movement forced the Obama administration to bend to our will when we successfully won the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has protected hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the threat of deportation. Obama didn’t do this out of the goodness of his heart. He did it because our movements demanded it and refused to let up the pressure even while he was in office. This year, we also forced the Biden administration to deliver healthcare access to DACA recipients through the Affordable Care Act and delivered a monumental achievement when we won protections for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens in order to keep mixed status families together. The reality is, these achievements did not come easily nor did they come overnight; they required relentless pressure, strategic maneuvering, and years of being able to move tactically against every political target who sat in the Oval Office. But they have also been achievements continuously targeted by the MAGA right who have stopped at nothing in trying to decimate these life-saving programs.
Vice President Harris is far from perfect. I am outraged by the ways she’s adopted Republican talking points and rhetoric when it comes to immigration, while also ignoring the calls to end the genocide in Gaza and stop sending weapons to Israel that American tax dollars have paid for.
Harris will never be my community’s liberator. But for right now, for this election, she is my target. My goal is to stop Trump and his MAGA allies from ever getting close to the White House again. As a young person whose heritage comes from people who have crossed rivers, borders, and oceans to protect those we love, I have had to channel what it means to move with intention through turbulent waters. Our survival depends on our ability to out-strategize those who seek to oppress us.
I am under no impression that Harris is perfect; but I am not fighting with her. I am fighting to move her. I will vote for Harris on November 5, but my vote is not a profession of my love for Harris or my approval. It’s about making a deliberate choice to pick the playing field for the next four years that my generation and I will be forced, one way or another, to organize under.
This election has made me feel more determined than ever to fight for the future my community and generation deserve. We deserve to have candidates on the ballot who truly reflect our values. Who don’t take years and generations to deliver on our demands. Every day, I am committed to fighting for that future, where the conditions are in our favor, where we have amassed enough people power and political power to make the changes our communities desperately need only faster, on the timeline we set. I am casting my ballot for myself, my community, my generation, my country, and for the future I believe to be possible.Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Calls for a Real-Life Version of 'The Purge' and US News Outlets Yawn
The most dangerous myth is that Trump’s bizarre rants are nothing to worry about because they won’t lead to actual policies. Nothing could be more wrong.
Oct 02, 2024
This is not a test. This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge, sanctioned by the U.S. Government. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.
That’s how “The Purge,” an annual —and thankfully fictional, at least for now — event held in a dystopian 2040 America is announced in a sequel of the long-running film series called, fittingly, The Purge: Election Year. The run of action horror films first launched in the early 2010s has become something of a B-movie sensation. Its pretense about a troubled America that tries controlled mayhem to stave off non-stop anarchy surely alarms some viewers — and thrills others. One thing I’m pretty sure about is that the producers didn’t mean for The Purge movies to serve as a policy white paper.
And yet here was Donald Trump, ex-president and GOP nominee for the last three elections, telling a smallish rally crowd in Erie, Pa. on Sunday afternoon that if returned to the White House, he will write his own sequel to The Purge — treating a violent Hollywood murder flick like it was the lost 31st chapter of Project 2025. The plot twist is that in Trump’s remake, everyday folks aren’t committing the crimes, but instead getting a whupping from an all-powerful police state.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
“See, we have to let the police do their job.” Trump said, even if “they have to be extraordinarily rough.” That was the start of a long, hard-to-follow ramble in which the Republican candidate claimed to have seen TV images of shoplifters walking out of stores with refrigerators or air conditioners on their backs — for which he blamed the permissive left. Trump’s solution would be “one really violent day” by the cops. Or even just “one rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will be out. And it will end immediately...”
Well, as you can imagine, Trump’s call for a National Day of Violence — many commentators on X/Twitter compared it to an American Kristallnacht — caused an immediate frenzy. CBS News interrupted Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs for a special report: “Trump’s Day of Violence.” New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn ran down the newsroom’s iconic red stairs and screamed at his top lieutenants to rip up tomorrow’s front page. And...
And, who am I kidding with this tired bit? Of course those things never happened. Most news organizations did mention the Trump rant — it was hard to ignore — but treated it as the umpteenth instance of Trump being Trump, and not as a dangerous escalation of national rhetoric. The future 2024 Word of the Year — sanewashing — came back this weekend in a big way among the handful of media critics exasperated at the lack of urgency.
“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist, violent stuff can’t always be new,” the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote in an essay. “But it is always reality. Is the press justified in ignoring reality just because it isn’t new? Are we not allowed to consider his escalations as dangerous, novel developments in and of themselves? And should we not note the coincidence that his remarks seem more escalatory as the pressures of the campaign mount?”
America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally.
Tomasky and others noted that Trump’s hateful weekend comments about immigrants were just as troubling as his endorsement of violence. At a Saturday rally in the ironically named Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (ironic because Trump hates chiens, or dogs), Trump unleashed a flurry of the kind of dehumanizing language that typically precedes ethnic cleansing. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members,” the GOP nominee claimed. He called migrants “animals,” and, most bizarrely, claimed that they “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
Sanewashing? “Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’ border visit,” was the headline in Axios, while Bloomberg tweeted that “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Really? Trump’s words sounds more like they were sharpened in the flames of a cross at a KKK rally than any kind of serious policy. Is it a vulnerability for Harris that her speeches about the border don’t sound like they were drafted by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels? What different election are these journalists watching than the one that’s actually happening?
Trump also charged that Harris — the candidate who just trounced Trump in a nationally televised debate, according to 63% of the regular Americans who watched it — is “mentally impaired.” I know I sound ridiculous when I keep saying that I’m old enough to remember when the Howard Dean Scream or Gary Hart’s possible one-night stand were considered enough to end promising campaigns. But it’s much more ridiculous that Trump’s daily, career-ending comments get met with the America Shrug.
The simmering anger with the mainstream media’s Trump sanewashing is real, but it’s also about something much, much bigger. Trump’s increasing rage and extremism is, to many of us, the antithesis of how we see America. Yet poll after poll after poll continue to show that the Nov. 5 election is going to be a coin toss, with Trump backed by an immovable mountain of support, no matter what he says. There are still more books to be written on how we got here, but the current reality is that nearly 10 years of political Trump has created a toxic state of nihilism, the precursor to dictatorship.
The most dangerous myth is that Trump’s bizarre rants are nothing to worry about because they won’t lead to actual policies. Nothing could be more wrong. A potential Trump 47 might never impose a National Day of Violence, but he has pledged to expand legal protections for cops accused of brutality on the job, and threatened other Orwellian actions such as sending troops into Democrat-run cities to fight crime. On immigration, Trump’s Hitlerian language is the precursor to his stated policy of mass deportation, which would turn America upside down with military call-ups, dead-of-night raids in immigrant communities, and mass detention camps.
That’s why America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally. The only “purge” that the nation needs is the one that rational and empathetic Americans can carry out through the ballot box and not at the end of a nightstick. This is not a test.
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A Coup or Authoritarian State Capture? On Conceptualizing Trump's Project 2025 Program
We don't need to call it a coup, but a sinister advance of authoritarianism in the United States it certainly would be.
Sep 26, 2024
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion as to what a Trump victory in the November election portends. There has been talk of a Trump coup since the 2020 election, with January 6th serving as one of the main events in that narrative. In their efforts to understand and explain, observers have called that event an attempted coup. Recently, Donald Trump referred to the effort to get Biden to step aside as a coup. Such confusion.
In a recent Portside article, Jonathan Winer, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, details three phases of mischief-making on the part of Trump and his minions. Winer characterizes the MAGA effort to implement Project 2025, should Trump win, as a "coup." However, most activities that Winer discusses in his article take place before the winner is certified. All that pre-certification activity involves legislative, electoral, and judicial maneuvering and mischief—but precedes actual office holding. It seeks to influence who wins electorally and that is not the process that one follows in a coup.
A coup is a militarized assault on the institutions of power. It seeks to overthrow through violent means what is recognized as a legitimate government. It involves organized force, capture of key institutions, including the military, security establishment, Information institutions, media outlets, executive); and removing incumbent officials (legislators, judges, administrative personnel, military, and security leaders). These are summary dismissals; they do not come about through an orderly process. Some come with additional burdens that might include imprisonment, exile, or execution. It also involves suspension and/or rejection of the existing constitution and governing structure. It usually results in a military-led administration and governance by decree. That is not what we are considering here.
The mob on January 6th did not seem to have meaningful plans to take over the government, or much of an idea of what they would do on day two. Nothing they did extended beyond Congress. What little coordination there was did not include mobilizing an armed force to overthrow the government, nor did they have any plan for governing. They clearly did not have the support of the military leadership and, bluster and bravado aside, they did not have the wherewithal to withstand a frontal military assault. Their main goal seems to have been to disrupt the legislative process which was to confirm the winner of the election. It was disruptive of congressional business. It was, no doubt, an insurrection, which is a violent uprising against the government. That concept suffices to characterize the January 6th events.
Once the authoritarians have taken power, they use their democratic legitimacy to justify a series of restrictions on democratic forms of governance, such as voter and polling restrictions.
With the coming election we are hearing commentators refer to the Project 2025 document as a prescription for a coup. I find this conceptualization to be problematic. We are witnessing political developments that may have never occurred before in this country. We have no ready ways of conceptualizing those events, so, like Procrustes, we fit them into preexisting conceptual categories. This is what I see happening with the effort to understand what a second Trump administration might portend.
If Trump wins the election and proceeds to implement Project 2025 it will be via the existing political process, even if they massage, manipulate, misinterpret, and cajole to get the results they seek. And they will. Observers cannot accept that the political system can produce outcomes such as those that Project 2025 promises because that would require condemning a flawed process—one that is open to manipulation. This would be a process that can produce an elected administration, however controversial, with a different (and dangerous) policy agenda. Understanding this process requires seeing that such a power grab can happen in the system through its normal workings.
So long as they stay within the operational framework that requires Congress to codify and fund their initiatives, and a Supreme Court to sanction what they do, they will be a legitimate, if not popular, government. We might not like what they do but it will fall within the framework of the American constitutional order.
It is important to be clear about what we are confronting—which is an attempt to consolidate Authoritarianism through the mechanism of State Capture.
We are witnessing an attempt to capture the instruments of the government to institute policy and personnel changes that will resonate for decades.
Contemporary Authoritarian regimes concentrate power in a leader or an elite to undermine democratic institutions to the extent that those institutions become more performative than substantive. Once the authoritarians have taken power, they use their democratic legitimacy to justify a series of restrictions on democratic forms of governance, such as voter and polling restrictions. They neuter the political order while allowing a level of social and economic freedom. These regimes will tolerate social and economic institutions not directly under governmental control so long as they stay in line. The practice of authoritarian regimes is to rely on resignation in the face of lawful, though repulsive measures, and passive mass acceptance rather than active popular support. So long as Trump is in play, authoritarianism will have a populist cast. Thereafter, right-wing Authoritarian forces expect to have their dominance institutionalized through State Capture.
A simple definition of State Capture assumes that elections occur, and officials hold office. It is a matter of how and who. State Capture is a systematic process to advance narrow group interests by taking control of the institutions and processes that produce and implement public policy. Once in control they proceed to direct policy away from the public interest and instead begin to shape policy to serve their own interests more effectively.
We are dealing with a process that has antecedents in Hungary, Türkiye, India, and elsewhere where an authoritarian regime captures the government through formal channels and then begins to populate the administrative structure with partisans, preferably in secure civil service positions. They then implement policies that further consolidate their power. We are witnessing an attempt to capture the instruments of the government to institute policy and personnel changes that will resonate for decades.
The make-up and character of these “narrow interest groups” can differ from case to case. So, in India it can be Hindu nationalists, capitalists, and the landed gentry. In Türkiye, Islamists, and capitalists. In South Africa party cadre, domestic and international capitalists and landed interests. The one thing they all have in common is that capitalists always factor. The narrow interests served by a Trump presidency includes the monopoly sector, neoconservatives, white nationalists, Christian evangelicals, and isolationists. Regimes on the right exist, as in this case, to advance the interests of Capital.
The make-up and character of these “narrow interest groups” can differ from case to case... The one thing they all have in common is that capitalists always factor.
We see the phenomenon of winning elections to legitimize authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left. The difference being that the regimes on the left are doing so under extreme duress from covert destabilizing forces, in the face of punishing international sanctions, and as acts of survival. It does not excuse them, but it does place them in a different context. Among them are regimes that came to power through other means such as coups and revolutions. In those cases, they already have control of the state. The goal is to continue in power.
The main similarity is that State Capture regimes deploy the electoral process to maintain their positions and power. The process of gaining and staying in power involves winning elections. Much can be said about the veracity of those elections. No matter how flawed they may be, though, the regime still gets to check the Democracy box. That is what will happen with Trump if he wins- they will modify the instruments of the state to remain in power and serve capital...forever, if possible. That plan can be delayed but not derailed by the outcome of the November election.
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