By the League Basic Needs Electoral Committee
PHOTO: iStock
Turnout in the 2024 elections will be decisive for at least temporarily stopping American fascists from destroying the little democracy we still have left. Would-be corporate dictators are organized, well-funded, and have plans to seize power at every level, from cities and towns to the federal government. Their blueprint is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Donald Trump is just the figurehead for a much larger, long-term movement for the domination of private property over people. Contributions to the Heritage Foundation jumped by 26 percent in 2022, and the group distributed over $2 million in support of its fascist goals.
As a result, voting in 2024 is both more urgent then ever and more complicated than just selecting candidates, especially when all the major candidates are unacceptable. In the face of fascism, however, non-voting is not an option. The great 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass called the vote “the keystone in the arch of human liberty.” Elections create opportunities to build power and defeat evil. Over time, Douglass came to understand that what is important is not so much the political positions of the candidates, but the opportunities their campaigns create for the growth of the social movement.
Just as in the pre-Civil War era, the 2020s are a time of increasing social polarization and “irrepressible conflict.” The rising social struggle compels revolutionaries to move from understanding voting ideologically to using it as a strategic and tactical weapon. Elections are not really about who we vote for, but what WE do and how WE build class power. Our goal has to be both political democracy – the right to choose government priorities and policies – and economic democracy – elevating the just demands of the working class for its basic needs.
The burning question today is how to defeat Project 2025. Losing even our limited democracy will make it incomparably more difficult to secure our basic needs and fight for the beautiful, better world that is possible – a world that provides the housing, health care, reimagining the police, justice for migrants, reproductive freedom, and public education we need. Losing democracy will only even more completely stonewall the demands of the new peace movement for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and freedom for Palestine.
ECONOMIC DESPERATION
The drive toward fascism is an inevitable result of the collision between modern, automated technology and the capitalist private property system. The spread of digital, laborless production is making life unsustainable, as more workers get separated from steady employment in the formal economy. When the people’s growing resistance becomes a threat to their control, the ruling class is forced to take fascist measures to protect its corporate private property. The only way to defeat fascism permanently is to create a new system that meets people’s basic needs regardless of the ability to pay. The very technology that spreads misery in the private property economy makes it possible to create peace and abundance for all in a cooperative society.
In 2022 and 2023, Americans experienced the expiration of the eviction moratorium, the end of enhanced child tax credits, the reduction of food stamp benefits for 32 million people, the end of supplemental WIC payments and childcare assistance, and the termination of the student debt moratorium. Nearly 6.8 million people lost Medicaid health coverage when federal pandemic protections were unwound. Private corporations ramped-up inflation, by escalating rents, grocery prices, gasoline and other essentials. According to the New York Times, the official poverty rate rose from 7.8 percent to 12.4 percent in 2022, the highest one-year jump in history, while the official poverty rate for children more than doubled. Actual poverty rates were even higher.
While poverty has been increasing the government has chosen to shift more funding to policing, incarceration, border oppression, and above all to the military, for supporting unpopular wars in Ukraine and especially Gaza. U.S. support of the genocidal Netanyahu regime is pushing us toward a wider war in the Middle East and closer and closer to nuclear holocaust.
RISING RESISTANCE
Recent election outcomes have proven repeatedly that people can defeat fascist campaigns when the issues are made clear. In 2023, abortion rights prevailed in Ohio, and fascist candidates were defeated for governor in Kentucky, for general assembly in Virginia, and for Supreme Court in Pennsylvania. Progressive candidates won mayoral elections in Pittsburgh, Oakland and Chicago. A progressive group founded in 2021 to push back on conservative education activism, said 19 of its 23 endorsed school board candidates won in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia.
The rising popular movement repeatedly defeated abortion controls, book banning, censorship, attacks on African American History, scapegoating LGBTQ+ folks, and other measures targeting marginalized communities. When we link our demand for political democracy with economic democracy, we win. These victories also underscore the key role of state and local elections as part of the fight for our vision of a better world.
However, fascists are using their money and political power to overturn people’s electoral choices even as they make them. In Jackson, Mississippi, the majority-white state legislature stripped the majority-black city of control over its own police and court system. In Oakland, billionaires have launched recall efforts against the recently elected Mayor and District Attorney, and challenged a progressive City Councilwoman up for re-election.
ROLE OF REVOLUTIONARIES
Revolutionaries need to be clear about the dangers of a victory by Trump or any other Project 2025 candidate. These people are making serious, detailed proposals to ban books, ban abortions nationwide, drill-baby-drill for fossil fuel, strip people of their citizenship, expel Palestinians from Palestine and round up literally millions of migrants, unhoused people, and protesters.
However, we cannot defeat fascism by simply paying lip service to democracy. We cannot defeat it by talking about the “lesser of two evils.” We cannot defeat it by trying to defend the brokenness and corruption of the Democratic Party.
We cannot defeat fascism either by sitting out the election. Non-voting will only lead to fascist victory. Voting has real and immediate impacts. Otherwise, the ruling class would not spend billions of dollars in every election cycle, and try so desperately to take away the right to vote from working people altogether, especially people of color.
Fascism can only be defeated by changing the narrative. Just as the Industrial Revolution changed life in America, creating big cities and ending family farms, the digital revolution and artificial intelligence is making possible an abundant new world where all people can have their basic needs met and enjoy lifelong pursuit of happiness. The possibilities become amazing when digital production is used for public benefit instead of private profit. Voting today can help lead us to this better world tomorrow.
Frederick Douglass faced the dilemma of how to vote in the period before the American Civil War. He was an abolitionist firmly committed to ending slavery, but also worked with larger coalitions. In 1856, he campaigned for the new Republican Party that opposed expanding slavery, but refused to call for abolition. He urged people to stop seeking purity, start with what is possible, and vote for what the country could become.
There is no need for revolutionaries to endorse a candidate in 2024, especially this early in the campaign. We may be called later on to work for a campaign if effective strategy and tactics require it. Messaging will be key to keeping the movement on track to preserve democracy, in spite of political betrayals along the way. Strategic and tactical clarity is an antidote to cynicism.
At the same time, we dare not disrespect non-voters or third-party voters. Our enemy is not each other, it is the system. We will need everyone, voters or not, if the election aftermath leads to another January 6-style insurrection, as is likely. Even as we cast our votes against fascism, we have to remember that voting alone cannot defeat fascism. We need to vote, protest, organize, and educate.
Our victory in the long run is inevitable, and in the short run it is possible. We dare not be distracted by the corporate media doomsayers who also predicted our demise in 2022 and 2023. The defeat of Trump in 2020 helped create an enormous apparatus of unions and progressive 501(c)(4) organizations that still exist. This apparatus is increasingly committed to the basic needs of the American people and significant sections of it have spoken out forcefully for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Voting is a tool for building political power. Sometimes it can win real policy changes to benefit the basic needs of the people. It can lead to expanding Medicaid, or reproductive rights, or electing progressive district attorneys to help get innocent people out of prison. When we connect voting to ongoing organizing around burning social issues, we transform non-voters and occasional voters into a social and political force. It is the thinking and consciousness of the rising forces of new generations, not the billionaires, that will determine the future of America and the world.
Published on February 1, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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