AND
he day after the elections in the United States, the colleagues of the Institute of Political Studies (IPS), my trench for 16 years, met to share our perplexity and, after a kind of catharsis, we affirm that together we will manage to navigate this next presidential term!
But every ball hit in the face hurts. The appointments that Donald Trump is making suggest that he will fulfill his far-right promises, including expelling millions of undocumented immigrants and fight the internal enemy
who are those who oppose him.
The shock is double. Why didn’t Kamala Harris win? There is a plethora of analysis, even in this journal, and a combination of factors; the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has cost the American people billions of dollars, while rampant inflation impacts people’s pockets; the Democratic Party’s continued lack of understanding of the working classes and its alignment with the military industrial apparatus and Wall Street (see Saxe Fernández, The Day11/14/24); to Harris’ mistake of appearing on the campaign trail with Liz Cheney and her dad on hawk soldier and torturer Dick Cheney of the Republican Party, co-responsible for the war against Iraq.
Most likely it’s a combination of those and other factors, but painfully an element of misogyny also persists. My colleague John Feffer, editor of the magazine Foreign Policy in Focus, from the IPS, went to Pennsylvania to knock on doors to convince people to vote for democracy. He says he had unprecedented responses; “I talked to angry young people who said they were going to vote for Trump. They talked about him as if he were Tony Montana, the gangster played by Al Pacino in the film Scarface: violent, lawless and powerful […] and that he would take on America’s foreign enemies and get tough on crime at home. Several told me […] that a female president would be too weak to achieve that.” Likewise, he received responses with absurd notions, hurled by Trump and Fox News, that Harris is Marxist
and communist
. I agree with Feffer that the level of political understanding of the population is scandalously low
(https://acortar.link/V44AWG).
Accepting reality, we must avoid desolation. As Tope Folarin, director of the IPS, says, “everyone at our institute has friends, colleagues, loved ones and members of our community who will be at risk in the coming years. We know that fascism feeds on desperation. So there is only one way forward: ‘fight like hell,’ as legendary union activist Mother Jones urged us.” Folarin explains that In the US and around the world, voters feel abandoned by their politicians. They’ve endured a pandemic, weather disasters, and trying to make ends meet in an unequal economy, while companies rip us off and CEOs reap the profits. The extreme right has used that pain as a weapon to turn people against each other, and not against the real villains.
. Indeed, the IPS, which is the oldest progressive research institution in the country, has experienced many political storms in its 61 years and, according to Folarin, It is often there that movements find the most urgent, bold and creative solutions to the crises of our time.
. During the first Trump administration, IPS participated with hundreds of organizations articulating movements for racial and gender justice, immigrant rights, and economic justice, which managed to put a stop to the Trumpist chaos. IPS has allies in the caucus progressive Congress, in 17 state governments (where the majority of Americans live) and in communities across the country. “And with allies like the Poor People’s Campaign (https://acortar.link/V44AWG),” says Folarin, “we will work to pass transformative policies that tax the rich, make housing more affordable, protect our planet, and more” (https://acortar.link/8Lgit9).
Regarding taxing billionaires, Sarah Anderson, director of the IPS Global Economy Program, wrote the article In the midst of the darkness, some bright spots in the fight against inequality
. There he describes how Washington state rejected the repeal of the capital gains and payroll taxes that finance elder care insurance, and how Illinois voters supported raising taxes on millionaires. It highlights how pro-worker reforms have been passed in red states, such as Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska, including guaranteeing retirement from paid work (https://tinyurl.com/4au2euvm).
Trump’s terrifying threats to millions of human beings, in contrast to the eternal fight for human rights, leads me to conclude with a fragment of Albert Camus: “I discovered again in Tipasa that one had to keep intact within oneself a freshness , a source of joy; love the day that escapes injustice and return to combat with that light conquered […]. I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were younger than our construction sites or our rubble. The world began there each day with an always new light. Oh, light!, that is the cry of all the characters faced, in ancient drama, with their destiny. That last resort was also ours and now I knew it. In the middle of winter I finally learned that there was an invincible summer in me” (https://tinyurl.com/4ytxf566). From now on I will worry about what will happen with Trump, but I will read more Camus and humanists who help soothe the soul.
*Institute for Political Studies www.ips-dc.org
