The dominoes of white nationalist fascism, set up over three decades, are falling in perfect form. SCOTUS’ reprehensible Callais decision against the Voting Rights Act 1 was followed by an instant racist gerrymander in nine southern states. Alabama even went back to the court to ask to institute the gerrymander right now, while 2026 primary voting is already underway. The court obliged them within a day. It was a breathtaking moment, the culmination of a huge coordinated attack on Black civil rights by our highest court in league with the states of the confederacy, 161 years after they lost the Civil War.
By killing the Black vote, the court, the Republican Party and these states intend to kill the Democratic vote, and return the nation to white male supremacy.
Representative James Clyburn (D, SC) managed to hold South Carolina back from joining the others, empowering South Carolina Democrats against the openly hateful people who would steal Black votes and freedom. Clyburn was able to do it, just as he was able to lift Joe Biden to the presidency (Biden is the only person who has ever beaten Donald Trump in an election) because he has immense power in his state and in the country, thanks to his many years of service. David Hogg tried to push Clyburn out of office last year, calling him ‘too old”. Thank God Clyburn is running for another term. His stature has grown through his many terms, and he knows what we are facing far better than most.
White media yawned, as did far too many politicians. Former DNC chair Jaime Harrison had this to say.
“Tired” is a very gentle way to put it. Harrison, former Chair of the Democratic National Committee, has the power to speak gently even in enraging circumstances. 2
I’m trying to follow his example, but it’s not easy. I’m just home from visiting my daughter in Tennessee, and to see the good ol’ boys of the Tennessee Legislature, red-faced, guts ballooning, one wearing a Trump flag as if it were the newest KKK attire, gleefully flaunting their racism… was a nightmare.
And they have help from the supposed ‘left’. On that same day I got a a fundraising email from Bernie Sanders bashing the “Democratic establishment” and promising to transform the party into “a party of the working class, not one dominated by wealthy campaign contributors.” He didn’t mention the Callais decision or its aftermath. He always loses the Black vote, so he doesn’t bother with it. As if he didn’t realize that we have to fill Congress with Democrats in November or lose any chance we have of beating back fascism.
It’s hardly all Sanders— pundits from Ezra Klein to the Podbros have spoken as if they had a strange blind spot when it comes to the Black voters who voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris in 2024. Instead of building that strength, the conventional wisdom has been that Democrats are losing white voters, especially white men, and we must bring them back. So would Black people, and women, just pipe down, please?
We call it conventional wisdom because it’s conventional….ordinary, ‘status quo’. Nothing could be more status quo than white men working to satisfy other white men. In fact white supremacist fascists have seized power in this country and we need to go beyond convention now.
The “Democratic Establishment” has been the engine of civil and human rights since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It outlawed segregation, something most young people today barely know about. And it became the force that allowed us to see the need for women’s rights, gay rights, the rights of the disabled, and so much more. Yes, it took decades of hard work, culminating in the election of Barack Obama and finally a solid majority of Democrats, who were able to institute nationalized healthcare. The Roberts court took huge bites out of the ACA, hoping to destroy it, and Trump and DOGE have carried on. But there are still millions of people eligible for health insurance today, who would have been shit-out-of-luck before 2010.
Janet Mills expanded Medicaid in Maine on her first day in office, so that 70,000 more Mainers were covered. In a day. Mills has also fought Trump with the kind of vigor we all want from Democrats: Janet Mills beats Donald Trump, Gets School Meal Funds Restored while Defending Trans Kids. But Bernie and his protege Graham Platner managed to cast her as ‘too old’, although she’s much younger than Bernie, and ‘anti working class’. I thought school lunch and Medicaid were important issues to the working class, but what do I know, I’m an old woman.
Respect for one’s primary opponent is a given in campaigning, but as Bernie showed in 2016, that doesn’t matter when you’re running against a woman. In fact denigrating women is one way to attract the attention of an unfortunate segment of men. Some will even be attracted by the sight of a Nazi tattoo. Platner has apologized for his casual misogyny and insists he didn’t know his tattoo, a ‘Totenkopf” which he wore for 10 years before his Senate run, was a Nazi symbol. Democrats have been sternly lectured to “accept Platner’s apology” and large progressive platforms have championed him.
But why is an apology all we need from a white man who has no experience in government and is so hapless that he walked around with a Nazi tattoo for ten years? I can forgive him. We all do dumb things. But lift him into a Senate seat, when the state’s historically badass Governor, who has won 6 successive elections, and gave it to Trump in exactly the way we are all asking of electeds, is running? NO. Platner is from the “working class,” we’re told, and we need to bring white men back to the party.
In a powerful essay on Facebook, author Peter Birkenhead addresses this:
I am entirely uninterested in centering, yet again, white working class voters — who have never, not once, voted for the Democratic nominee since the Voting Rights Act was passed, rather than the people who are not only far more relevant to discussions of strategy, but far more deserving of our national attention.
The demand that we cater to the needs of white working class men when they have shown over and over again that they are far more invested in increasing the suffering of Black people than they are in alleviating their own — when so much of that suffering is, as they themselves describe it, imaginary and self-inflicted (Yes, I know they are also experiencing real suffering. I wish they took it half as seriouly as they do the evils of pronouns) is beyond exhausting.
And it’s worse than that. Because catering to those voters, reaching out to them always — ALWAYS — means “compromising “ on policy in ways that directly, materially harm Black, Brown and queer people and women. It ALWAYS means shoving so-called “social” or “cultural” or “identity” issues like reproductive rights, voting rights, affirmative action, SNAP benefits, and a thousand other life-and-death issues to the back burner in favor of things the beflanneled oyster farmers of the world supposedly care about. And I’m tired of foisting ever more suffering on Black people or trans people or Latinos in return for NOTHING — because that’s what it always ends up getting us. Nothing.
(The essay continues in footnotes3 and Birkenhead’s Substack is here. 4)
My sister, like Platner, is a shellfish farmer. My whole family is working class, and yeah, white. To quote Birkenhead again: “Joe Biden delivered a manufacturing boom, the greatest job growth in 60 years, the highest GDP growth in the entire world, wage growth of 19.4%, a lower deficit, more people insured than ever in history, and the lowering of prescription drug prices. And none of it mattered to [the majority of white voters].”
My family benefitted from the Biden economy in so many ways and is suffering, like most of us, now. I’m insulted by the idea that such a caricature as Platner would be thought to appeal to us. We don’t hire people who have no relevant experience. We know what our damned tattoos stand for. And we’re very grateful for the work of Democrats. I feel responsible to speak up before the primary, although people (white men) have been telling me not to. (Hi Guys— my lips will be sealed after the primary, as they were with John Fetterman! )
This era, this regime, represents a nuclear level backlash against all the civil and human rights Democrats have worked for. To see “leftists” join that backlash is nauseating. As Harrison says, Democrats are the only entity to hold the line against a tsunami of corruption and cruelty, in the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, magnified by the greed and dull amorality of the media, funded by billionaires and other nations seeking to buy power.
This ‘left’ champions the same ‘both sides are the same’ lie that helped sink the 2024 election. Those lies are picked up by anyone who’s looking to return to white supremacy, and that is a horribly large group. After foaming at the mouth against the billionaire class (and I foam beside him) Sanders has endorsed a billionaire for the California Governorship. Brilliant analysis of that race, and of the crisis of super wealth we face, here: “Why we Endorsed Becerra over Steyer” — LA Progressive.
This is a time for us to join together in outrage and hard work. This will be a weekend of action, the beginning of what I hope will be the overthrow of this fascist administration. All Roads Lead to the South is a huge protest planned for Montgomery Alabama, this Saturday. Black Power War Room is important to follow. Obviously the NAACP needs donations, as do Black Voters Matter, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Congressional Black Caucus.
No one who honestly believes in human rights and has the slightest understanding of the lives at stake here can attack Democrats in good faith. When you do you are risking the lives of everyone who has benefitted from our work. You are either an ally of the wide and diverse coalition that forms the Democratic Party, or you are our opposition. Build something else, write out your philosophy, show us how it would work for all. But don’t rely on lies and novelty candidates to draw support from the great diverse world of all Americans, back to the patriarchy.
As of election day, 2024, inflation, unemployment, immigration, crime, the deficit, teen pregnancy and the growth rate of China’s GDP were all heading steeply downward.
Even if those indicators were all pointing in the opposite direction, Trump voters, like all voters, should be held accountable for their choices.
There is nothing “condescending” about such accountability. After all, it would hardly be an act of respect for Trump voters to chalk up the election of a dedicated enemy of the working class to the working class’ inability to understand basic economics. Donald Trump, the original Birther, ran — in his first campaign, ten years ago — on an explicitly racist, white supremacist platform, one that included almost no specific policy proposals other than The Wall and The Ban, to which 60 million people said, “yes, sounds good, we’re okay with that.”
And then, a decade later, 70 million people said, “more, please.”
That doesn’t mean that each of those people is a bigot, that every Trump voter harbors racial animus in his or her heart, but it does mean they are guilty of racism. Voting for a racist is an act of racism. That’s true no matter what your station in life.
The people who voted for Trump have been voting that way a loooong time. They didn’t suddenly become conservative when their wages stagnated or their benefits disappeared. In fact it was quite the opposite. Their support of union-busting, trickle-down scam artists like Reagan and Bush is what MADE their wages stagnate. Sometimes a feeling of economic anxiety grows from the soil of racism, and not the other way around.
Joe Biden delivered a manufacturing boom, the greatest job growth in 60 years, the highest GDP growth in the entire world, wage growth of 19.4%, a lower deficit, more people insured than ever in history, and the lowering of prescription drug prices. And none of it mattered to them.
It is vital that we take this moment to put the suffering of people other than white men—the suffering of people who have been in fact, oppressed by white men and are now quite rationally fearing for their lives—at the center of our concerns.
Those people are not responsible for this moment. Blaming the suffering of marginalized communities on those communities is lazy, willfully stupid, cowardly and racist.
The blame does not belong with Kamala Harris or trans activists or AOC . It belongs to the voters who have, for decades, resisted — AS A VOTING BLOC, NO ONE IS SAYING THERE AREN’T LOTS OF INDIVIDUAL EXCEPTIONS — all attempts to bring them to the side of pluralistic democracy, no matter how many concessions are made to their odious beliefs.
We have chosen, over and over again, to look the other way, to sweep the truth about our neighbors under the rug, in the name of civility or comity or whatever other euphemism we want to apply to the acceptance of white supremacist ideology in our politics.
Until we stop treating that ideology as an acceptable point of view, a mere difference of opinion between brothers, we will get the election nights we deserve. We will never make any meaningful progress until we treat Trump voters and their hateful, racist, worldview with the alarm and revulsion they deserve, and the fierce, devoted, tireless people who make up the actual base of our party with the respect they deserve.”
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