Above photo: New York Democrat Senator, Chuck Schumer speaking at an AIPAC conference.
Or, Why Oppressed People Best Watch Your Backs.
Trump’s accelerated fascism is met with the silence of a compromised U.S. “left.” Its institutions, tethered to capitalism and the Democratic Party, reveal they are part of the machine they claim to fight.
Nearly one year into President Trump’s second term, residents of the United States and the world over have witnessed a louder and faster drumbeat towards full-blown and irrefutable fascism and authoritarianism. We have seen our streets and neighborhoods invaded by masked agents of the State from the Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security who are conducting wholesale roundups and pillage of non-white people from their families, places of employment, and communities, national guard troops patrol streets in many of our cities adding to a culture of fear and uncertainty, especially for non white poor and working class people. Trump is also extending his militarism initiatives globally as he is preparing the military for what appears to be an imminent attack against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, using a fallacious war on drugs as the impetus.
Prosperity in the U.S. economy is out of reach for increasingly more people, including many elements of the petit bourgeois who are struggling to keep their heads above water due to Trump’s manic, arbitrary and capricious use of tariffs as well as tax cuts for the ruling, bourgeois class, and Trump is putting the unitary executive theory to the test with a Supreme Court that continues to allow him to run roughshod over the concept of Constitutional checks and balances. And due to Trump’s all out assault on any semblance of climate action, while also quadrupling down on the extraction and burning of more fossil fuels at a time when the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warns of global temperatures projected to increase by 2.4C to 3.9C above pre-industrial levels this century – which would be cataclysmic for all life on the planet- we can only anticipate the climate crisis to intensify and take more lives globally. This all under the backdrop of ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine and other parts of the world.
Despite all of these factors, the president is facing no resistance from the legislative branch, nor the aforementioned judicial branch – and these are not the only elements that pose no converted opposition. In fact, I would posit that the most profound example of lack of resistance to Trump is the U.S. Left (which, for purposes of this piece, also includes liberals and centrists, especially those associated with the Democratic Party).
The U.S. culture of “resistance” has become a cauldron of despondence – this is especially true for younger folk who, for the most part, are checked out and feeling checkmated. This is largely due to Left and Centrist institutions that have not demonstrated a willingness to institute a praxis of clear opposition. When the only alternative, the Democrat Party and the vast majority of liberal and so called Civil Society Organizations that are now captured and dominated by the petit bourgeois, is not actually an alternative but, in many cases, an active participant in maintaining the status quo, stasis results and movements die or continue to operate bereft of efficacy on a form of life support. A recent opinion piece in The New York Times (NYT), of all publications, raised the issue of the lack of young people in the streets or displaying a willingness to take on this administration at a similar scale to that observed during Trump’s first term.
The piece, while reflecting on the October “No Kings” demonstrations, notes, “Only 8 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 say they took part in the protests in October, compared with 13 percent of those age 65 and older.” It continues, “The Rice University student newspaper counted only “about 30” students out of a crowd of more than 13,000 at a Houston protest, and Tulane’s newspaper documented “several” students at a protest of more than 10,000 in New Orleans.” Comparing this trend to those seen during the Summer of 2020 after the lynchings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor when 13 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds reported attending an event in the previous month, according to the Pew Research Center, and 40 percent of “George Floyd protestors” were under 30, the NYT opinion piece concludes there are not clear explanations for the precipitous drop in young people’s participation in protests and demonstrations under Trump’s second term.
Too Civil…Society Organizations
I would argue that the lack of organized resistance and defiance to Trump this time around, for all age groups, is directly due to the state of the sectors – Labor, Climate/Environmental, Human Rights, Reproductive Justice and Social Justice writ large – we are accustomed to taking the lead in the face of such interlinked and precarious crises. The so-called civil society organizations (CSOs), that is, the non-profit industrial complex, are showing us all that they are not equipped, nor contain the requisite principles and fitness to confront and dismantle the challenges of our time. And rather than actually adhering to, as opposed to insouciantly naming intersectionality—these sectors of so-called civil society form an intersection of what we will call the capitalist paradox complex (CPC).
The CPC is what connects all of these sectors, what allows them to operate in, far too many cases, opulence- yet it’s also capitalism that exacerbates the issue areas they purportedly seek to ameliorate (which, it should be noted, is quite different than eliminate). It’s as if all of these sectors have subscribed to their respective form of net zero harm, be it the specific area of greenhouse gas emissions, human rights, and other areas of social justice, none of these sectors have called for an abolishment of capitalism. This is largely due to the fact that these CSO sectors are, perhaps, the most conspicuous actors within the global petit bourgeois network. Their goal is to continue benefitting from capitalism while holding the belief that this extractive, sexist, classist, and racist financial system can be tweaked a bit to allow them to satisfy their superficial and largely unreified mission statements and theories of change – their ultimate goal is to feel better about themselves rather than make the world better for the masses.
In the United States, at least, we must discuss the relationship between these CSO sectors and the Democratic Party. In many cases, these CSOs are essentially nothing more than tentacles connected to the larger body of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and they wholeheartedly believe that their success is inexorably tied to the electoral success of the Democratic Party. The contradictions with such an approach are lucid and revealing at once – for it’s ironic, for instance, that some of the biggest defeats suffered by the U.S. climate network (and therefore the entire planet and those who are adversely impacted first and worst by the climate crisis) occurred during Democratic Party presidencies. There are many examples including elimination of the crude oil export ban under Obama, more oil and gas leasing under Biden than Trump 1.0, elements of the Inflation Reduction Act, and, by many accounts, the act itself that is largely responsible for catalyzing the “permitting reform” discussion, which is poised to pass with bipartisan support in some form, which, in turn, will have deleterious results for bedrock environmental policies like the National Environmental Policy Act – ironically signed into law by a Republican president.
The most salient issues of this moment in history are fleeting from our collective conscience in large part because there is no concerted and legitimate opposition to the forces that uphold genocide, ecocide, and a global order of racial capitalism that is demonstrating it has absolutely no qualms with sacrificing as many lives as necessary to maintain its existence and operation. The only way that this trend can be reversed is through the consolidation of oppressed and colonized people of the Global South and the Global North, who are best positioned to establish and administer the alternative systems to confront and dismantle Empire through principled and revolutionary initiatives.
Losing While All Not Lost
It’s curious to see more liberals and liberal institutions beginning to, at least seemingly, come to the realization that the existing governing institutions are not what the masses can rely on for liberation. For instance, following the failure of the 30th Conference of Parties global climate summit that just took place in Brazil (COP 30), Legal Planet, a publication of the University of California, Los Angeles, proclaimed, “But we’re going to have to look elsewhere for productive international action. Basically, that’s going to have to rely on something less than the international consensus that drives COP. That means doubling down on some other options: bilateral climate agreements between countries, action by coalitions of interested countries, and subnational agreements including states, provinces, and cities around the world.” While Legal Planet doesn’t go nearly as far as the COP 30 People’s Summit Declaration that makes the case oppressed and colonized people as well as the rank and file of CSO sectors to more frequently collaborate and determine the best ways that they can support each other to usurp power and leadership from the petit bourgeois and neoliberal elements of their ranks, it’s encouraging to see liberal institutions admit that something needs to drastically change.
Even Ben Rhoades, one of the architects of Barack Obama’s failed, myopic, and deadly foreign policy, has been publicly calling for the Democratic Party to take a different approach to the zionist ethnostate. In a recent piece he wrote, Rhoades declares, “ It is not healthy for a party to be this out of step with its own voters and stated beliefs. The simplest thing to do would be the right thing: refuse to provide military assistance to a government that has committed war crimes; support the International Criminal Court in its work…oppose any effort by Israel to annex the West Bank or ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip.” Ben Rhodes’ recent take on Gaza proves that even some neoliberal, centrist capitalists have been moved by the Zionist ethnostate’s culture of carnage against Palestine being witnessed, in real time, by the entire world. Yet this should not be seen as a reason to trust these individuals, these institutions, and certainly not the Democrat Party, At the same time the recent analyses of Legal Planet and Rhoades can be used as strategic propaganda to make a larger case to the masses for the need for more independent organizations and social/political power to reverse the trend of despondence and anemia we are observing with the U.S Left.
We can stop the trend of salient human rights issues from the genocide in Palestine to the climate crisis from rapidly shrinking within our collective rear view. It’s the duty of the masses and all people of conscience to ensure that these geopolitical objects are closer than they appear and apply this ethos not just in the context of the forthcoming 2026 midterm elections, but in a larger context of maximum morality as a function of movement building and maintenance that includes electoral politics without excluding the long-term organizing necessary to influence electoral politics and various other aspects of the larger polity in the U.S. and globally.
As we commemorate International Human Rights Day in 2025, a perfunctory exercise at best given all of the unchecked and unmitigated violations of human rights and international law perpetuated by the West, must strive to ensure that at this time next year we are not measuring our success or failures by the outcomes of elections, but by the collective efforts of the poor, working class, and colonized/oppressed to re-enter the global fight in a larger effort to confront, dismantle, and deracinate all forms of oppression and liberate all oppressed people.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
