Climate Migration + The Texas Catastrophe
Democracy Under Attack + Why Grief Matters + Fellowships and Jobs + Delights
Today’s issue revisits themes from prior issues — climate change and migration, right wing threats to rights and democracy, and the role of emotions in social change. We offer a few delights to bring you joy in these turbulent times. Today’s chart presents extraordinary data showing the relationship of Covid deaths to voter preference for Trump or Biden. And we have a few announcements: September 10th is the last day to apply for the early-career fellowship cohort with the Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice. The Leadership Center is also hiring – posting here. And the crucial and effective Congressional Progressive Caucus Center is looking for a new Executive Director.
Deepak has a new piece out in New Labor Forum, “Social Democracy or Fortress Democracy? A 21st Century Immigration Plan,” which argues for a radical new framework for future immigration policy. He writes
In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois observed that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”[1] Today, more than one hundred years later, the color-line endures. One of its most contentious manifestations is the worldwide debate about mass migration. Nativism is a leading edge of authoritarian politics and resurgent racism across the globe. In the United States, it has fueled the fire of Trumpism. Right-wing forces have a simple and emotionally resonant immigration story and agenda. They advocate restriction, foment racism, and fan fears of job loss and demographic “replacement.” In response, center-left and left forces in the United States and Europe have often been incoherent, ambivalent, and defensive about future migration. Unless we can develop a compelling alternative, rightwing forces will use nativism to energize their base and thwart core social democratic priorities such as redistributing income and wealth, expanding worker power and the welfare state. . .
We are unprepared for a world in which climate change and other factors compel millions more people to flee for survival. The choice we face in the U.S. of how to respond—with border walls or with a welcoming culture—will be a defining political fault line for our generation. A new paradigm for vastly greater levels of immigration must be a central priority on both moral and strategic grounds. Such an approach is critical to the well-being of immigrants and to the social democratic project itself. . .
The struggle for social democracy will likely be won or lost at the border. If we lose, we will need to look to novels like Octavia Butler’s apocalyptic The Parable of the Sower to imagine the barbarism that awaits us. But a radically welcoming immigration system is not a utopian dream. Not only the recent German experience but also moments in our own history suggest the viability of such a vision. Just twenty-five years ago, legalization of undocumented immigrants (then called “amnesty”) was a fringe demand in the Beltway. It is not yet law, but a movement of millions of people has made it mainstream. As the country is beginning to shed the deadweight of neoliberal and “colorblind” ideologies, we must also abandon the fortress mentality that has characterized the immigration debate. Skillfully engaged, a bold future migration agenda can provide galvanizing energy, moral purpose, and an enormous source of power to make a more just and humane world.
The piece draws from essays in Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions and Strategies for a Progressive Future, which Deepak co-edited with Ruth Milkman and Penny Lewis. The paperback edition is out September 8th. We hope you’ll buy a copy. Deepak and Ruth Milkman’sAmerican Prospect piece “Why Mass Immigration is the Key to American Renewal” tackles related themes, considering immigration from an economic perspective.
Could admitting millions more immigrants over the next decade be the jolt the U.S. needs to revive its economy, culture, and politics? After four years of restrictionism under President Trump, ongoing border controversies, and an escalating culture war led by nativists, this idea may seem counterintuitive or even far-fetched. But recent labor market trends, demographic changes, and even accelerating climate change all point to dramatically increased immigration as a logical catalyst for national renewal. Becoming the most welcoming country on Earth for migrants—breathing new life into our most flattering, if too often inaccurate self-image—could be our salvation.
On the Texas abortion ban, we recommend a searing piece by Rebecca Traister, drawing on her experience going to a conservative Christian college. She explains just how sinister the forces behind the Texas abortion ban are — and what the stakes are for everyone in this fight. She writes:
It’s life or death. The anti-abortion movement actually believes this and behaves accordingly — liberals are the ones who dither. How often have we heard the refrain “Safe, legal, and rare”? Who coined it? Not a Republican. How diligently did the Democratic Party defend the incumbency of anti-abortion representative Henry Cuellar from a young pro-choice woman? If Ruth Bader Ginsburg of a thousand Etsy tchotchkes understood what was at stake, if she cared about abortion as much as she cared about her own career and reputation, she would have retired when Barack Obama could have replaced her. The Democratic big tent looks a lot like my campus. Maybe Texas will change things. Maybe liberals will wake up and realize which campus is coming for them.
There’s also the short and blistering dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which is worth reading.
And in her latest opinion piece, “Republicans Are Giving Abortion Opponents Power Over the Rest of Us,”Michelle Goldberg connects the dots between the fight for choice to the fight for democracy.
Over the last several years, Republicans have taken a number of steps to legalize various forms of right-wing intimidation. Several states have granted immunity to drivers who hit people protesting in the street. In some states Republicans have given partisan conspiracy theorists access to election equipment to search for ways to substantiate accusations of voter fraud. They’ve also passed laws empowering partisan poll watchers, who have a history of intimidating both voters and election workers. The Texas law should be seen in this context. It deputizes abortion opponents to harass their enemies. Texas Right to Life has already launched a “whistle-blower” website where people can submit anonymous tips. “One of the great benefits, and one of the things that’s most exciting for the pro-life movement, is that they have a role in enforcing this law,” John Seago, the group’s legislative director, told CNN. . . S.B. 8 may still be knocked down eventually. But already, in addition to eviscerating abortion rights in Texas, it’s sent a message about the Republican Party’s eagerness to give its base the ability to dominate the rest of us. It’s also demonstrated that the right-wing Supreme Court majority is willing to tacitly support that domination rather than restrain it.
Robert Crawford has an incisive piece in The Nation entitled “Go Ahead, Worry! A Worst-Case Scenario for American Democracy,” which takes stock of the full range of threats to multi-racial democracy and rightly concludes that the threats are very grave.
Republican voter suppression might be the tip of a much larger iceberg. Are Americans now be living in the last years of a hard-fought democratic project? . . .
The last six years have shocked many of us into a new apprehension. We need to listen to historians like Timothy Snyder and others who have researched the final years of democracy in Weimar Germany before the Nazi takeover. If the peril we face is remotely similar to 1933—a more apt comparison might be Orban’s authoritarian takeover of Hungary—all progressive movements should put this threat at the forefront of their strategic calculations. Yet, with some notable exceptions, what is lacking is a comprehensive grasp of the dangers we still face.
I offer here a tentative map of the multiple and interlocking dimensions of the threat from the contemporary far right. . .
My purpose in highlighting these 10 dimensions is to urge that we grasp the contemporary far right as a totality. No matter how loosely integrated or internally conflicted, today’s far-right movement aims to capture power and is frighteningly close to achieving that end. The far-right/white supremacist movement must be confronted in all its interconnected dimensions. If we fail to rouse ourselves to oppose the threat, we may easily fall into a racist and brutal autocracy lasting generations. Our present may come to be understood as “The Before”—the period when history might have taken a different turn but, because of inertia and lack of political will, did not.
It’s time to summon up that political will. The choice is still ours to make.
In his nonsite.org essay “The Whole Country is the Reichstag,” Adolph Reed takes a different path butcomes to a similar conclusion.
It’s time to be blunt.1 The right-wing political alliance anchored by the Republican party and Trumpism coheres around a single concrete objective—taking absolute power in the U.S. as soon and as definitively as possible. And they’re more than ready, even seemingly want, to destroy the social fabric of the country to do so. . .
The threat is serious. Some of the reactionary, authoritarian tendencies that condensed around Trump and Trumpism have been festering and growing in American politics at least since the end of World War II. First Barry Goldwater, then Ronald Reagan brought them out of the shadowy underworld populated by such groups as the John Birch Society, the World Anti-Communist League, various McCarthyite tendencies, Klansmen and other white supremacists, America Firsters, ultra-reactionary groups with ties to shadowy international entities like Operation Condor that has specialized in state-centered terror and death squads in Latin America and its equivalent in other regions, Christian Nationalists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes. During the Reagan presidency the treasonous Iran-Contra operation3 illustrated these reactionaries’ contempt for democratic government. The guide-dog corporate news media sanitized it as a “scandal,” and dutifully shepherded public discussion of it away from the magnitude of the crimes against constitutional government and toward the puerile, soap operatic question “What did he [Reagan, etc.] know and when did he know it?” They’ve been joined in the Trump years by a cornucopia of more or less organized thugs, militant racists and misogynists, open fascists, reactionary libertarians, delusional conspiracists, damaged true believers, and utterly venal grifters—a category that cuts across all the others—and they’re bankrolled by the American equivalent of German Junkers.
In These Times published a brilliant piece by Malkia Devich Cyril entitled “Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It?”
To be Black, Indigenous or a member of any oppressed class in America is to know traumatic loss. As humans, we are hardwired for the fact that death is a natural part of life. While loss is deeply uncomfortable, we can learn to adapt to the natural phenomenon of loss. But when structural inequalities produce major and secondary losses, leading to widespread collective grief, death is out of balance with life. Individual and collective, repeated and generational, traumatic loss stacked on top of existing natural loss. We must tear down the systems, institutions and narratives that engineer death, fuel it and simultaneously distract us from it. This essential rebalancing act is the charge of 21st century social justice movements. What becomes possible when movements are brought more healthfully to grief, and what can we do to support leaders, organizations and movements to get there? . . .
Something is dying, and we are desperate for something new to be born. We can feel it, quivering with hope at the edge of a century. It is a firecracker dancing across a night sky. A languid score of Black music moving effortlessly in the street. The fires call to us like beacons across state lines, a collective grievance demarcating what was from what will be. Here. Now. Grounded grief is a vaccine against the morbid conditions bred by white supremacy, a patriarchy that has distorted our families and relationships, a concentration of wealth that has disconnected us from nature and directed everything brilliant and beautiful to profit. Only through the compassion and loneliness and love inherent in grief can we forge a world out of the fire that will not replicate ancient hierarchies.
Along my own journey, what surprised me most was the discovery that grief is not an enemy to be avoided. In fact, resisting grief led to my suffering, while becoming intimate with grief led me to the lesson that grief and joy are inextricably linked. Though generations of traumatic loss can become conflated with deformed expectations, standards and culture, grief in all its forms has the potential to bring us closer to the truth of the world, to make us more tender and more filled with delight. It is from this new kind of gratitude, this pandemic joy, that we can rise together in action, in democratic decision-making, in strategic vision. This is one part of liberation.
As we strip away the chains of nation-state to become true patriots to the nation that has not yet been born — the one beyond national borders and prison bars, the one forged in the fire of a deep, abiding love with an economy steeped in dignity and rights — we can come to know a richly resilient grief rather than a desperate, starving one.
When we bring our fights to the watering hole of grief, our political systems, natural environment, economic frameworks, civil society and culture all become living, breathing memorials to what we have lost. What we have lost becomes found, witnessed, honored. In this way, all social justice and human rights work is a collective act of gloried mourning.
To have a movement that breathes, you must build a movement with the capacity to grieve.
Delights
We were riveted by the series White Lotus, which examines with ethnographic precision the sociopathy of ultra-rich people, a topic we’ve examined in a previous issue.
We’ve been enjoying the work of Colombian pianist Claudia Calderón – joyous, virtuosic, soulful.
If you need a Labor Day pick me up, the movie Pride is a hilarious and moving tribute to solidarity — in this case, the unlikely partnership between gay activists in London and Welsh miners under assault in Thatcher’s Britain.
Provocations
Johnathan Metzl wrote a book called Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. This chart seems to substantiate the claim.