Above photo: Charles Russo/SFGATE.
The U.S. state is going after the Left like it’s 1949.
Without solidarity and a united front against Trump, we’re cooked.
To the surprise of perhaps no one, the tragedy of McCarthyism is being played out yet again as farce by the unimaginative buffoons running the U.S. congress.
On Wednesday, June 11, The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counter-Terrorism, chaired by Republican Josh Hawley, sent what appears to be a slightly modified form letter to the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and several other organizations. In the letters, Hawley accuses these groups of fomenting civil unrest and demands that they immediately “cease and desist any further involvement” in the ongoing protests in Los Angeles. The letters also provided a bullet-point list demanding that the groups preserve records going back to November of 2024, including internal communications, emails, and text messages, suggesting that the groups may be formally investigated by the Senate in the near future. As of now it is still unclear exactly how many letters have been sent — Hawley’s office lists only one on its website and two on its X account — but so far they seem to be mostly immigrants’ rights groups actively involved in Los Angeles, including Union del Barrio and the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights.
Hawley’s letters to the PSL and other organizations that have supported the protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Los Angeles and across the country is a clear intensification of the administration’s ongoing attacks on democratic rights, the right to protest, and the right to organize. Just as J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s acted with the support of President Truman, who was convinced the country was being overrun by communists, Hawley and the U.S. Justice Department are obviously following the directives of President Trump. Like a dollar store version of Truman, Trump has been raving about the “enemy from within” for years, and has sought to use his administration’s powers to harass, investigate, intimidate, and punish liberal, progressive, and leftist institutions across the country. The difference however, is that Truman was acting from a position of power during the period of U.S. hegemony that followed the war, while Trump is acting from a position of weakness in a period of U.S. decline.
These letters are also part of a broader attempt by the Trump administration to paint the mostly spontaneous protests and outrage in Los Angeles — quite obviously caused by the invasion of ICE agents and the kidnapping of immigrants off the streets — as the astroturfed product of a few NGOs and radical Left groups who are supposedly seeking to create riots and sow insurrection. Trump wants to do this in order to justify his federalization of the California National Guard and his likely illegal deployment of U.S. marines to the city. Perhaps most of all, though, these attacks are meant to stir up fear and to intimidate organizers, activists, and all people of conscience who feel the imperative to act in this moment of oppression and violence against immigrants, who, like all working people, make this country run.
However, it’s obvious that this is about more than just the recent anti-ICE protests. It’s about laying the ground for a wider attack on the entire Left, the movement for Palestine, and the organizations of the working class and oppressed more broadly, including our unions. Indeed, Trump’s so-called “pro-union” Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-Deremer, wasted no time defending Trump’s attacks on immigrants, saying that the Department of Labor will cut federal funding to states that supposedly “incentivize illegal immigration.” As we saw with Trump’s attacks on the universities, the less resistance he encounters, the more these attacks will continue and escalate. Therefore, we must be absolutely united and clear in our commitment to defend the democratic rights of any person or group that seeks to organize to protect themselves against the attacks of the U.S. state.
Regardless of our strategic or political differences, the Left and all working people who care about democracy and democratic rights, including our unions, must loudly condemn these attacks on the PSL and immigrants’ rights groups and build a defensive united front to collectively protect our organizations. However, as Carl von Clausewitz explained in his classic work On War, any good defense must be composed of “a shield made up of well-directed blows.” As a weak Bonapartist, Trump is looking to divide and conquer sectors of the working class, to split industrial workers from immigrant workers, the unionized from the unorganized, the unemployed from the employed. But Trump’s overreach and these attacks by the state actually provide us with an opportunity to broaden and unify our struggles. In this sense defeating Trump’s agenda means not only bringing our unions and union siblings out to support the precarious youth fighting against ICE in LA; it also means uniting together to fight with the methods of the working class against police violence, against the repression of queer and trans people, against attacks on women’s rights, and against all forms of oppression and exploitation wherever they exist.