When news arrived on May 7, 2025, that YES! would be closing, I felt shock and sadness at the end of an organization I led as founding editor and at the loss to the progressive media world. But the outpouring of social media comments lifted my spirits, reminding me of the impact YES! had on so many people—some who started reading the magazine as young people, others seasoned activists who were introduced to work that inspired them to creative new approaches.

The responses got me wondering: Are there parts of YES! that can have continued life? While the current staff and board are doing heroic work to transition the organization and keep the archives available (see below for details on a new home for the YES! archive!), I want to offer something else—a look behind the scenes at the theory and practice of change we explored during YES!’s founding years and the first two decades, when I had the honor of serving as executive editor.

And I want to consider where the YES! approach fits, if at all, during the current rise of fascism. As I worked on this essay, I came to believe that these times call us, with even more urgency, to adapt and evolve the approach we developed at YES! in many different forms.

The Secret Sauce

People often asked about the “secret sauce” that made YES! Magazine what it was. Because of its exuberant name (including the exclamation point!), some believed our purpose was simply to make people feel good—to counter the doom and gloom in much of the news. Some labeled YES! as “feel good” journalism.

While we did hope to lift people’s spirits, we emphatically did not want to encourage complacency or offer journalistic antidepressants. Instead, we wanted to encourage readers’ active engagement in change by exploring realistic possibilities for a more beautiful world and by encouraging readers to take practical steps toward transformation.

Our starting point was clear: The world as structured harms working families, people of color, the poor, middle class, and future generations, while exhausting the natural world’s life and vitality.

Many believe our current system is the inevitable outcome of human evolution. But the exploitation of extractive capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy shatters relationships among people, undervalues individuals (especially people of color and other marginalized groups) and communities, exploits nature, and concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else.

Our question was this: If this destructive world order is failing us, what might replace it? Who is creating beautiful alternatives, liberated spaces, generative art and technology, economic forms that liberate creativity and cooperation, and better ways of life? What models from around the world, especially from Indigenous communities, can inspire us?

We wanted to be rigorous about real solutions. Well-intentioned acts aren’t real solutions unless they address the underlying structures—corporate capitalism, extractive treatment of people and nature, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other systems that keep groups oppressed.

Weaving New Stories

One way to approach these questions is to take a critical look at the dominant worldview that people today rely on to make sense of our world and to explore  emerging worldviews. A worldview is the set of beliefs most people accept without question. But, given the many ways the dominant worldview is failing people, we were looking for a new story about how we might live together on this finite planet.

Where could such a story come from? No single individual can dream it up, and we emphatically did not set out to create that story at YES! Instead, we set out to report on new stories of human possibility that are unfolding everywhere, woven from multiple experiences, from courageous visionaries, activists and community builders, and from diverse cultures—ancient and emerging. Making these stories visible could help bring to light the emergence of a new story.

We also reported on practical ways to make the changes in keeping with these emerging worldviews, especially lifting up community-scale stories, seeking out ordinary people who brought passion, imagination, and integrity to their work. We modeled approaches to change accessible to everyone that created possible avenues to transformation.

We always looked for ways to nourish our readers’ souls, realizing that all of us deserve healing and a chance to grow in wisdom and connection. We believed in unleashing our readers’ radical imagination and supporting their right and capacity to make change so that our society—rather than serving a few at the expense of everyone else—works for all.

Learning from History, Centering Excluded Voices

Understanding our current moment required understanding how we got here. Each of us inherited an unbroken chain of ancestral love and support, but also a legacy of trauma—slavery, massacres, land theft, colonialism, and shattered communities. And we inherited a dominant economic system and culture that treats humans and the natural world as resources to be exploited.

This history set in motion the huge disparities of wealth and power between those descended from Europeans and those from elsewhere, those descended from the ownership classes and working and landless classes, and between women and men, and it undermined our relationship with the natural world.

From the beginning, YES! prioritized excluded voices and stories, especially highlighting leadership by women, people of color, and Indigenous people. We sought practices that addressed historic harms while showing what reparation looks like and how a world based on justice might function.

In our early days, our staff was predominantly made up of white women, and we had much to learn about racial justice. Guided by our board, contributors, and an increasingly diverse staff, we prioritized voices of people of color and people from diverse cultures. We built strong relationships with Native writers, and some of us became active allies of the Suquamish Tribe—whose ancestral land we shared—and that relationship continues today.

This approach helped us break out of the dysfunctional dominant-culture worldview, and bring in fresh approaches and solutions across cultures and from the margins of society.

Respecting Readers as Change Agents

Our theory of change focused on encouraging ordinary people’s active engagement. We put readers at the center as people who are—or could become—leaders, visionaries, and creatives. We treated them as people with agency and dignity, avoiding condescension or jargon that few could access.

We encouraged the hard work of personal transformation by drawing on wisdom traditions and research about the science of human development. But we kept in mind a truth that was often missing from the self-help genre: our liberation as individuals is tied to the liberation of all life.

In our coverage, we recognized that people learn differently—some through stories, others through abstract reasoning, art, music, or how-to guides. Some want immediate action steps while others want to understand how their work fits into a multigenerational change process. We celebrated all forms of contribution and all styles of learning and engagement.

At the same time, we put a high value on humility, always respecting our readers and looking for grace in our own shortcomings and seeking opportunities to learn and grow.

Looking Back Over Three Decades

Over the three decades of YES!, each of us who were involved would have our own stories. For me, highlights included our coverage of social movements that challenged corporate capitalism and lifting up cooperative and sustainable economic alternatives. I was transformed by the weeks I spent at Standing Rock reporting on the work of water protectors from dozens of tribes and by what I learned editing issues of the magazine on the prison-industrial complex and restorative justice alternatives.

Traveling the country on the journey that resulted in The Revolution Where You Live (Berrett-Koehler), I was awed by people creating beautiful alternatives in rust-belt cities, Indian reservations, coal country, and other areas abandoned by corporate capitalism.

The best part was meeting extraordinary people—some famous, many more who, without fanfare, brought their passion, smarts, and hard work to making change in their communities and workplaces. These people gave me confidence that a better world is possible.

Why This Approach Matters More Than Ever

I write at a time when vulnerable communities are being surveilled and harassed, basic services are slashed, and our global climate emergency is undeniable. While mainstream political institutions fail to meet the moment, people everywhere are organizing, resisting, and reimagining.

Ending YES! amidst the nihilism of the Trump regime might suggest our efforts failed. But I’d argue that this disastrous time is a sign that — as we and others predicted — the status quo could not hold. Instead of struggling to return to the neoliberalism represented by the Biden Administration, we are called to go even further into creating a new story by building deeper connections to each other and to Mother Earth, resisting fascism and extractive corporations, opening up our imaginations, creating beautiful alternatives, and exploring multiple paths forward.

Fascism thrives when people give up hope and become isolated and fearful. Staying connected and building supportive communities is just what we need to get us through this dark time. We need courage, and we need to see courage modeled by others. More than ever, we need to see models of more just, compassionate, and sustainable possibilities at all levels of society, while we join with others to build power for change.

The Trump regime’s corrupt authoritarian policies are causing irreparable harm to all facets of society and to our global relationships.

We can’t go back, but we do have choices about how we rebuild. We can rebuild based on equity, sustainability, belonging, and community. We can recreate our economy so it serves all people while restoring ecological resilience.

We can encourage people to unleash their creative, wild, radical imagination—to dream about the sort of world they want for their communities and their children, to reach out to others, and to dare to build that world.

The Way Forward

The visionaries and practitioners featured in YES! explored what was possible then, and much of what they contributed suggests ways forward now. Articles originally published in YES! were placed in the Creative Commons — we encouraged their widespread distribution and re-use. There is great news about the future of those resources.

Thanks to the efforts of the current staff and board, the entire digital archive of YES! will now live on through Truthout, a like-minded independent news organization that will serve as the new steward of our digital content—ensuring ongoing access to nearly three decades of visionary journalism.

Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This is a crisis of global proportions that neither MAGA-style nationalism nor neoliberal centrism can fix. But we the people can—by making bold choices in our communities and joining together to exercise our collective power.

At YES!, we never spoke of certainties about the future — only about possibilities. But possibilities are powerful magnets, drawing us to the hard but deeply rewarding work of creating a world together where people and the planet come first.

The YES! approach offers a framework for this work: lifting up stories of people creating beautiful alternatives, connecting their efforts, unpacking the elements of success, and helping readers imagine and build the world we need. Whether through new media organizations, grassroots storytelling efforts, or whatever comes next, this approach remains not just relevant—but essential.

The creative energy of change is everywhere. Our job is to find it, share it, and weave it into the new stories our world desperately needs.

In other words, overloading us so we don’t know where to begin is the point. 

But the good news is people are fighting back with every tool at their disposal, from trainings and legal challenges to walkouts and strikes. Here is a non-comprehensive list of ways people across the United States are rising up against Trumpism. 

1. Immigrant Rights

“Know Your Rights” trainings are one of the most effective ways to counter Trump’s promised ICE raids against undocumented people and those suspected to be undocumented. Large networks such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and smaller local groups such as Empowering Marginalized Asian Communities (EMAC) in Stockton, California, are educating local communities about what their rights are in the event of raids by federal immigration officials. EMAC’s Anti-Deportation Tool Kit is available in numerous South East Asian languages as well as in Spanish.

Groups such as the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice in Southern California are also using social media to spread awareness of people’s rights, share ways to report ICE raids on a hotline, and learn how to identify different federal law-enforcement vehicles.

Additionally, students from immigrant and mixed-status families are flexing their grassroots power by leading walkouts at colleges and K-12 schools in protest of ICE raids.

2. Transgender Rights

Trump’s attacks against transgender people include an executive order that bans gender-affirming care for minors. This has caused chaos for those seeking care, as numerous hospitals and providers have abruptly stopped treatments. In response, advocacy organizations GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality and PFLAG have joined forces to launch a federal legal challenge against the administration. 

Some doctors are heroically providing care to their patients in the face of Trump’s ban, promising to continue until they are forced to stop. And State Attorney General of New York Letitia James issued an order for providers in New York to continue necessary care in line with state laws. 

Meanwhile, transgender-led media outlets such as Translash as well as individual journalists are rewriting narratives on trans rights.  

3. Workers Rights

Though labor unions are very popular among people in the United States, the Trump administration is still firing federal workers en masse and hamstringing the National Labor Relations Board, which became a bulwark against corporate resistance to unions under the Biden administration. In response to these actions, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 federal workers, has legally challenged Trump’s moves. 

Labor rights activists are also working at the state level to push attorneys general and governors to step in and fortify already existing protections. Additionally, workers at Amazon and Starbucks launched strikes in December 2024, in anticipation of Trump’s anti-labor stance. And unions are slowly changing the way they organize rank-and-file workers, making their institutions less hierarchical and more responsive to worker needs and concerns. According to labor writer Eric Blanc, that reorganization can make unions more resilient in the face of Trump’s anti-labor policies.

4. Reproductive Rights

Newly confirmed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has sparked deep concern among medical professionals because of his anti-vaccine stances and conspiracy theories on health. And, as Trump solidified his anti-abortion stance, Kennedy appears to have fallen in line. 

But access to abortion procedures remains popular throughout the nation, so much so that seven states passed ballot measures last November protecting abortion care, three of which voted for Trump. 

Meanwhile, state governors are also intervening to protect abortion access. North Carolina Governor Josh Stein has moved to ensure his state will not allow federal enforcement of abortion restrictions, and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced his state will begin stockpiling mifepristone, which can be used to induce abortion.

The Abortion Defense Network is offering legal support for abortion providers and the National Abortion Federation has a hotline for those needing abortion care. Individuals have also begun stockpiling abortion pills, obtaining them from groups such as Aid Access and Plan C.

5. Racial Justice and Equity

One of Trump’s most high-profile actions has been banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government and threatening private institutions to not implement such programs. Under his purview, the Department of Education has dismantled its DEI programs.

In response, a coalition of DEI advocates, including the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, has filed a lawsuit against the administration, saying the DEI bans are vague and unconstitutional. The ACLU has also taken similar legal action. 

While some schools and faculty are complying with Trump’s orders, others are holding firm and resisting. A network of community college leaders called Education for All is going further by educating its members on how to resist the DEI bans. 

As private corporations like Target have announced they will roll back DEI programs, many others plan to preserve them. Some consumers say they will participate in a one-day boycott on Feb. 28, in protest of corporate DEI rollbacks.

6. Climate Justice

The Trump administration pulled back on the United States’ global climate commitments while also launching an immediate and massive rollback of funding for climate and environmental initiatives, especially those aimed at assisting Black and Brown communities. 

Large environmental organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council have already planned legal challenges to Trump’s actions. These organizations have a track record of winning a majority of such cases during Trump’s first term. States like California are doing the same. 

Environmental leaders are also vowing to fight back and climate activists are promising disruptive, though peaceful, actions. 

7. General Strike

Americans are angry about Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to government. They’re so enraged, in fact, that millions have been making phone calls to their Congressional representatives, crippling phone lines. Unfortunately the opposition party is, in the words of The Nation’s Chris Lehmann, “floundering.”

In such a political vacuum, a grassroots effort has launched a general strike that is gaining traction. Based on research showing that 3.5% of a nation’s population striking from work can force leaders to meet their demands, the effort is calling on people to make a pledge to strike by signing strike cards. 

As of this writing, more than 200,000 people have signed strike pledges. The goal is 11 million people.

The shout came from a group of Proud Boys, a far-right street gang, while they approached a picket line organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in September 2018. While the IWW, a radical labor union that unionized a fast-food chain in Portland, Oregon, and Washington State, is certainly anti-fascist, this was a union action—not an “antifa” protest. But those facts mattered little to the right-wing agitators who had made Portland a flash point in political violence. As the Proud Boys sought to instigate, one IWW member, Sinead Steiner, remembers union activists pivoting in an attempt to de-escalate. 

IWW members engaged the Proud Boys in mundane discussions about labor law while other demonstrators began using silly chants to lower the emotional temperature. The method was effective, no one faced harm, and the union action continued. This was not the first time the far right had threatened the IWW, so members knew they needed to walk into any protest with a nimble plan that included employing some form of community self-defense. 

As Donald Trump ascended to power in 2016, there was dramatic growth in hate crimes as well as far-right and racist groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and militias, and other neo-Nazi formations. They stormed U.S. cities, often holding rallies intended to provoke counterprotesters whom they could attack. As a result, there was a rise in left-wing formations, including the John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association, that say armed community self-defense may be a necessary component of safety, which in this case means protecting activists from racist militants. 

The threats that the far right presented to Portland’s left—along with the historical repression of unions by racist foot soldiers—are why unionists were prepared in Portland that afternoon. In the 1910s and ’20s, IWW members, who were called “Wobblies,” invited coal miners and others to join “industrial unions” to win power by organizing as many workers as possible. Meanwhile, mine owners hired “Pinkertons,” private security contractors whose job was to disrupt strikes with force in the 19th and early 20th century. 

The Ku Klux Klan, which, like later fascist groups, despised the anti-capitalist and multiracial implications of the IWW, also showed up to crush labor. In June 1924, members of the Ku Klux Klan attacked IWW members in San Pedro, California, injuring 300 members while kidnapping, tarring, and feathering others. To be a unionist, and a leftist, was to be a target. 

Amid this rise in brutality and repression, some IWW members created the IWW General Defense Committee (GDC) in 1917 as a separate organization to support activists facing reprisals. Nearly a century later, IWW members in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota—some of whom had been involved in anti-fascist organizing across the 1980s and ’90s—re-engaged the GDC as an anti-fascist auxiliary to the IWW. GDC chapters then popped up around the country, including in Portland, to fight the fascist insurgency and to defend communities against a rash of street violence. 

These kinds of threats were nothing new. Historically, wherever working-class social movements grow, fascists see them as distinct threats both because of their politics and the marginalized communities they represent. To guard against this, self-defense projects—organized efforts where people from these communities are trained, and often armed—are formed to ward off these outside threats. Whether the appearance of self-defense squads is enough to scare off fascist attacks or if actual force is necessary to fight far-right militants back, these kinds of formations have been a reasonably common feature of how communities maintain their autonomy during escalating right-wing violence. 

At the same time, the police—ostensibly defenders of peace and order—often have links to far-right organizations and rarely keep activists safe from right-wing assaults. For abolitionists who prefer transformative justice to incarceration, police are not the answer to community safety. “To me, community self-defense can be … an alternative to the police and courts, but it would depend on the situation—and for that matter the community,” says Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the anti-fascist One People’s Project and its news website, Idavox. “It means you do as much as you can to handle a situation as a community when one arises.” 

Community self-defense has become central to contemporary social movements. Just as their predecessors did, activists today seek a safety model that understands the threats they face and doesn’t reproduce the problems of the justice system. 

Deep Roots

Social movements have historically had a self-defense component. Many earlier left-wing political parties or organizations had a militant wing, in which members were trained as a defensive force that could keep their growing membership safe from violent right-wing counterefforts. 

In the early 20th century, the Jewish Labour Bund, a Jewish socialist movement involved in organizing labor unions and Yiddish schools around Eastern Europe and Russia, created self-defense squads to protect Jewish communities from racist attacks, known as “pogroms,” which were escalating during that time. 

By 1905 there were Jewish self-defense groups in 42 cities, and they were often a collaborative offshoot from various leftist groups. Because many left-wing revolutionaries saw both modern nation states and reactionary political movements as their enemies, they believed they had to take measures to keep themselves safe from both entities. 

Much of the postwar left emerged directly out of the need for community safety. Take, for instance, the Black Power movement, which formed in the 1960s and ’70s and considered resilience and empowerment to be central to their work. “I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense—and have acted on it,” wrote Robert F. Williams in 1962. Williams was an organizer who took control of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, grew it by hundreds, and chartered it with the National Rifle Association to teach members how to defend themselves against Klan terror. 

In 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded first and foremost as an organization to monitor and intervene on police violence, a project the party eventually saw as part of a “united front against fascism.” That slogan became the name for the Panthers’ 1969 conference that convened a range of other radical groups, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

In 1966, Panthers began armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods as a message to local police not to threaten the rights and safety of Black residents. They held rallies when police refused to investigate police killings, such as the 1967 killing of construction worker Denzil Dowell. The Panthers used these opportunities to teach community members how to build armed self-defense squads as both an alternative to the police and a deterrent against police violence. The Panthers inspired other self-defense efforts, including the Lavender Panthers (sometimes known as Purple Panthers), an armed defense group formed by the Gay Activist Alliance in 1973 to defend San Francisco’s LGBTQ community against homophobic attacks. 

“Something that the Black radical tradition tells us … is that we can’t organize in just one mode,” says Jeanelle Hope, Ph.D., an associate professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University who studies Black anti-fascist movements. Along with legal pathways, self-defense, and more radical anarchist tactics, Hope points to the myriad mutual aid programs the Black Panther Party organized to meet people’s daily needs, including offering free breakfast to children and running the Black People’s Free Store. 

This history creates what Ejeris Dixon described as a movement lineage, whereby she and others come from a tradition of radicals “who have dedicated our lives to our community safety.” This communal resiliency inspired Dixon to co-write “Get in Formation,” a community safety tool kit she created alongside the anti-racist organization Vision Change Win. The guide offers a number of ideas, including how to create effective protest formations. 

When people on the right talk about security, it often simply means firearms. But for those on the political left, community self-defense is a much bigger idea. “The most important part of how you frame community defense is to acknowledge that you provide something the state cannot … when you build a culture of community defense around you … you have a lot more protection from violence,” says Lucas Hubbard, communications director for Socialist Rifle Association, which does not advocate for forming militias but does support working-class people learning firearm skills and developing mutual aid networks. 

But as Hubbard notes, self-defense projects are only an alternative to the status quo if they match the community’s expressed desires. “First thing you do in providing community defense … is to ask what that means to them,” says Hubbard, pointing to issues like food insecurity and housing access as frontline threats. Community defense could mean developing strong bonds between affected people to better address their needs, employing armed security at queer youth events, or securing resources for those facing eviction, but it is just as likely to involve getting people the resources they need during a COVID-19 spike. 

“If you want to help a community, they have to trust you,” says Snow, a founding member of the Asian American self-defense group Yellow Peril Tactical (YPT) who goes by one name. The organization works to demystify community self-defense, including gun ownership and mutual aid organizing, in part by creating an alternative media infrastructure to shift perception about who owns firearms and why. 

“In moments where I have seen [community defense], it’s always been something that has been asked for explicitly,” says Snow. YPT formed in 2020 amid a slew of anti-Asian hate crimes. Organizers from around the U.S. met through activist networks and began supporting each other not just in learning self-defense and firearms skills but also in creating more visible networks of care and connecting their ideas about community empowerment to international struggles such as supporting anarchists fighting Russian aggression in Ukraine. 

YPT helped create educational programs around responsible firearm ownership and started a podcast, Tiger Bloc, that demystifies disaster preparedness and community defense in terms that avoid adventurism and right-wing cynicism. As Snow points out, firearms themselves are often less important to community safety than, for example, “good digital hygiene” (using security protocols in digital communication and taking measures to remove personal information from the internet), locating good de-escalators to intervene in tense protest interactions, and ensuring demonstrations have trained street medics who can save lives if needed. 

Community self-defense is directly intertwined with other social movements because all political causes—and their solutions—are tied with intersecting issues of race and class. Effective safety plans bring together a community’s struggles, identify what creates cracks in safety, and consider all movements to be potential tools for repair. 

A True Safety Plan

Because many potential harms and threats are distinct, a complete plan for community safety has to be broad enough to address everything from racist violence to incursions with the police. An expansive vision of community safety does not stop at the most immediate threats but offers some vision of an alternative to existing carceral options. 

Vision Change Win’s guide says a comprehensive vision of community safety includes “security, office and organizational safety, verbal de-escalation, physical de-escalation, personal safety, transformative justice processes, community safety neighborhood strategies, bystander intervention, and cop watch.” It helps to outline the different questions you need to ask about events you are holding, what roles are necessary to keep attendees safe, and how to align every security choice with the community’s values. 

While police often play similar social roles in repressing movements, they have different legal leeway and require different responses. This is why Vision Change Win’s training focuses on a range of situations, including what to do when police attempt to enter activist spaces and how to de-escalate nonpolice threats. 

An example is Vision Change Win’s section on dealing with Rebellion Containment Agents—“less lethal” weapons such as chemical gas or pepper spray that are used by police against protest crowds. While often presented by law enforcement as relatively safe, these containment agents were tied to major injuries during the 2020 racial justice uprisings. The guide instructs demonstrators on how to deal with incoming projectiles, how to care for someone who has been exposed to caustic chemicals, and how street medics and those providing on-site care can make medical remedies from common materials. 

In addition to responding to police arrests and ensuring people know their legal rights, community defense also includes strategies to mitigate COVID and other pandemics. Good safety plans take into account both a community’s values and COVID transmission so as not to replicate many of the harms activists are hoping to mitigate. 

“I think having vulnerable relationships with people … where if there is somebody in your life you can talk [to] about both survivorship and harm, I think that makes us safer,” says Dixon. This also points to what are often called transformative justice programs designed to, as Dixon describes, “prevent and intervene in violence, and repair and heal from harm without the use of prisons.” 

These can take the form of “accountability processes” that combat harm by addressing the behavior, demanding change and the admission of culpability, and supporting both the survivor and the perpetrator in their journey. This kind of vulnerability can exist in many kinds of communities, but especially those that are bonded. “Transformative justice is relying on the relationships … to leverage them into better behavior and accountability,” says Dixon. 

These are big, radical ideas—and that is part of the point: Community self-defense is not a singular solution but part of an ongoing project that seeks to address the fundamental unsafety of the society we currently inhabit. Through overlapping systems of inequality and oppression, many people feel isolated, targeted, and forced to face huge hurdles alone. But when members of a community see their struggles as interconnected and their issues as systemic, then modest responses become insufficient. 

Community self-defense is a piece of the larger work of building an equitable society, but it will only be truly realized if a larger mass movement confronts the entire system of structural inequity. “You have to believe in something bigger,” says Dixon. “You have to believe in transformation.” 

Election 2024 brought the lowest of lows—Donald Trump’s wildest, most fascist fantasies manifesting in a parade of hate—and the highest highs—the late-breaking entry of a multiracial woman of color who snagged the Democratic Party’s nomination. Vice President Kamala Harris launched a record-breaking billion-dollar campaign amid a tidal wave of young women progressives spurred by attacks on their bodily autonomy. 

Over and over, we were told this was the most important election of our lifetimes. We, the people, were asked to choose between an apologist for genocide, the specter of fascist insurrection, or a third-party option that had no serious prospects for victory.

Along the way to winning the election, Trump and his allies reduced so many of us to objects, to evildoers, to garbage, to the enemy. If we made it through these past months, it was with a sense of nervous hope that the insults and attacks had an expiration date. If we could just make it to Nov. 6, we could deal with the trauma, heal, and look forward to holding the centrist establishment accountable. 

Along the way to losing the election, Harris and her backers flirted with A-list celebrities and anti-Trump Republicans, repeatedly shunned Palestinians fighting for their rights, pushed back against demands to hold Israel accountable for genocide, and wrapped it all up with an appearance on Saturday Night Live. 

With both candidates’ approaches top of mind, I began monitoring election results on Nov. 5, feeling—to quote one woman I overheard say to another that morning—“nauseously optimistic.” As I anxiously monitored the New York Times’ election needle, coaxing it toward the blue-tinged left, I found myself reliving the trauma of Election 2016, when that same needle veered suddenly to the red-hued right. 

So, here we are again, waking up to a new chapter of the same nightmare we experienced from 2016 to 2020. Now, as we are still reeling from many months of abuse, we face the prospect of four more years of it. 

We need to understand what has happened and how to move from here. But we also need to take a moment to mourn—for ourselves; for our fellow Americans and especially immigrants; for our Black, Brown and queer sisters, brothers, and kinfolk; for our children’s imperiled future; and for our country’s fate. 

In the coming months, we’re going to read reams of analyses about why Harris lost the  election: the insurmountable polarization our country is experiencing, third-party candidates’ “spoiler” effects, the blind spots and failures of the Harris campaign, political amnesia, whether the nation is ready to elect a woman, and how Trump’s voters will regret supporting a demagogue. 

But maybe it’s not even that complicated. 

“In so many ways our leaders have failed us, and a lot of people are really struggling,” immigrant rights organizer and author Silky Shah said on a recent episode of my show, YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali. “And the easy thing that happens is blaming immigrant communities when, in fact, obviously we should be blaming those who have put in these policies that aren’t helping communities on the whole.”

Most Americans agree on their basic needs: good jobs and unions, affordable housing, and so on. They also don’t trust the government. Indeed, some of those who picked Trump might have done so because he’s promised to burn it all down, while others might be hopelessly invested in racist, misogynist, queerphobic, anti-immigrant hate—or both. Together they number more than 71 million Americans, or 51% of the electorate, with increased turnout of Latino men, younger voters, and first-time voters. 

The rest of us—about 67 million—who picked Harris, either did so holding our nose to keep Trump away from the levers of power, or genuinely believed she was a force for good. (It is this latter group that is probably most shocked and perplexed by the election results). 

Instead of a shift toward policies that prioritize collective care—which could unite Americans—what we got from the two major-party political candidates were false narratives that largely fell into two camps: Trump painted the nation as a dystopian quagmire that only a strongman like him could fix, while Harris’ campaign was based on the idea that we must preserve the booming economy she and incumbent President Joe Biden ushered in. 

But in truth, both parties have moved dramatically rightward. According to investigative journalist and YES! contributor Arun Gupta, “One is a hard-right Republican party known as the Democrats, and the other is a fascist party, a MAGA party known as the Republicans.” 

Shah concurred, saying she found it “actually really surreal to see how far to the right things have moved and how much Democrats aren’t even really advocating for immigrants in the way that they were before.”

Gupta attended Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City that made headlines for its speakers’ hateful comments. He saw a different reality than the one being reported in corporate media outlets. “You had lots of anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant bombast. But that is only half the equation,” he said, a week before the election. “What’s really going on at these rallies … is love and hate.”

He concluded that Trump supporters are “there as much out of hate as they are out of love. And they go there because these rallies make them feel good about themselves. They make them feel good about the country, that they’re part of a movement.”

What if we all seek a love-based movement that prioritizes us over the interests of elites? What if Trump’s election is a horrific manifestation of a nation cutting off its nose to spite its face? There are no easy answers to these questions, but since we have failed to stave off extremist hate from occupying the highest rungs of power, we know the most vulnerable among us will likely pay a heavy price in the coming years. The rest of us can’t give up. 

“Our power and our potential actually goes beyond the ballot box,” says Khury Petersen-Smith, co-director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. “We need to keep on pushing on all of those levers [of power], regardless of who wins, no matter what day—Election Day, the day after, Inauguration Day, the day after.”

We will—we must—get through this time by reminding ourselves that most of us want the same things: safety, security, stability, and—dare I say it?—love. But how we get there as a nation is a conundrum we must continue grappling with.

Not surprisingly, democracy is a very popular idea. A Pew Research Center survey of people in 24 nations in 2023 revealed that 70% of people support direct democracy, with the percentage rising to 77% support for representative democracy. However, since democracy is designed to equalize power among people, it tends to be a work in progress. Even in functioning democracies, the powerful may subvert democracy and use it to their ends, while those who have less power struggle for their fair share. 

The United States—the world’s second-largest democracy—was once regarded as a shining example of that form of government. But now, people around the world are disappointed in the nation’s approach to democracy. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of people in 34 nations concluded that only about 21% of those surveyed believe the U.S. offers a good model of democracy for the world, while 40% believe the U.S. used to be a source of inspiration but is no longer. The view from within is hardly better: Most people in the U.S. tend to distrust the government, with only about one-quarter of Americans trusting it at any given time since 2007. 

Their suspicions are justified, as Bastian Herre, a researcher at Our World in Data, explains: “The data suggests that the U.S. is less democratic now than it was a decade ago, even though it remains much more democratic than it was for most of its history.” 

Because of the incredible promise it holds, democracy is fraught with contradictions and often triggers deep dissatisfaction when it doesn’t live up to its ideals. Indeed, democracy is declining all over the world. Herre found that the number of people living in democracies fell from 3.9 billion in 2016 to 2.3 billion in 2023, and that more people are living in countries that are autocratizing. 

To understand why democracies are in decline, it’s worth examining how systems are enacted. The devil is often in the details. In the space between our decision-making and the enactment of those decisions, nefarious and power-hungry actors can hijack processes and sow the seeds of autocracy. 

There are many ways to strengthen democracy amid a rise in authoritarianism. It begins with voters making wise choices: “People can work toward making [the U.S.] more democratic by voting for pro-democracy candidates,” Herre notes. Indeed, we tend to equate democracy with voting—the most tangible way representative democracy is enacted and a critical step in choosing the public servants who make decisions on our behalf. Beyond that, Herre suggests that to make democracy more inclusive, what’s needed is “supporting pro-democracy organizations, and expressing their support for democracy in protests and conversations.” 

Unfortunately, contemporary systems of representative democracy have become popularity contests in which participants are called upon every couple of years to pick between exceedingly narrow choices. In the U.S. especially, the question of who gets to vote—and therefore participate in democracy—has been debated and legislated for centuries. 

Further, there are structural obstacles to voting baked into the U.S. Constitution, which is the definitive document laying out the rules of democracy and within which are embedded those devilish details that determine the responsiveness of the system. Even after adding various amendments to right historical wrongs, the Constitution still references “electors” rather than individual voters when it comes to electing a president, and allows for the undemocratic, racist, and complicated Electoral College system. The Constitution also specifies the undemocratic makeup of the Senate, a powerful body that allows smaller, whiter states to have the same power as larger, more racially diverse ones. 

In other words, as Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation and author of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, told YES! in 2022, the U.S. Constitution is “a flawed document that needs to be perfected in order to achieve a level of fundamental fairness and equality that was … missing from the initial draft of it.” 

He points out that none of the original authors of the Constitution or its amendments were women.“[T]he same goes for LGBTQ communities. The same goes for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in this country.” 

If U.S. democracy is exclusionary by design, is it even a democracy at all? 

Democracy for Some

The U.S. Constitution was inspired not only by ancient Greek ideas of democracy, but also by formations that had greater physical and temporal proximity to the nation’s modern founders. A 1987 Senate resolution acknowledged how the “original framers of the Constitution … are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and government practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,” which today is referred to as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. 

“Our ‘Founding Fathers’ based the U.S. Constitution on the Haudenosaunee Law of Peace,” says Fern Naomi Renville, an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota and Omaha nations, and a Seneca-Cayuga storyteller from Minnesota. Renville adds that Benjamin Franklin’s 1791 memoir acknowledges this debt to the Indigenous peoples of the land. 

“At the time when all of the ‘Founding Fathers’ were having conversations, there were Native people at the table who were consulting … [and] giving input to the colonists, who weren’t all getting along, and they were being advised to come together in the way that the Haudenosaunee Tribes had,” Renville says. 

Through their experience, Indigenous advisers showed the power in forming a union of disparate groups and modeled how settler colonialists could do the same to counter the power of the British Crown. However, Renville says some of the differences between the U.S. Constitution and the Haudenosaunee Law of Peace were deliberately designed to preserve power for those who already had it: wealthy white men. 

“When people learn about the actual inspiration for the U.S. Constitution, it changes how we think about inclusion in those rights,” says Renville. “It changes how we might think about the Bill of Rights, which enshrines what are basically Haudenosaunee principles for good governance. … Just learning that might prompt people to do some growing around how we include everyone … men and women, rich and poor.” 

Tribes centered women in their democratic structures, and did not operate as capitalists or enslavers. In contrast, the Constitution’s framers imported European ideas of women’s disenfranchisement, human enslavement, and even landownership and property rights. 

When white women in the U.S. eventually won the right to vote in 1920, they were strongly influenced by Indigenous women who enjoyed political power and decision-making authority over land and food. In 2016, women’s studies historian Sally Roesch Wagner told The Washington Post that early white suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton “believed women’s liberation was possible because they knew liberated women, women who possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination: Haudenosaunee women.” 

“The Haudenosaunee Law of Peace that the Constitution is based on relies on the power of the clan mothers as the ultimate authority,” says Renville. “That is the one piece that got left out in the application of these ideas on the U.S. Constitution and so that might be a part of why these ideas haven’t been as successfully applied in our country that we have now.” 

For example, the U.S. Constitution does not enshrine reproductive justice or the right to an abortion because, according to Mystal, “the Constitution did not treat women as full people.” 

People of color and especially Black people were also excluded from the writing and passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which ended enslavement, granted citizenship to African Americans, and legalized voting rights for Black men, respectively. And yet, white supremacist forces continued to curb the democratic rights of people of color until the civil rights movement forced passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

Calling it “the most important piece of legislation ever passed in American history,” Mystal attributes Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential win to the Voting Rights Act. “Forty years after the civil rights movement, we end up with the first Black president,” he says. 

U.S. democracy has suffered from constant push-and-pull factors, with excluded communities fighting for and winning rights, and reactionary forces working to undo those gains. Mystal laments how, after Obama’s election, the U.S. Supreme Court “eviscerated” the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and spawned a slew of Republican-led efforts to disenfranchise voters of color and dilute the impact of their votes. 

The exclusionary nature of U.S. democracy remains one of its central problems. Today, mass incarceration is seen as a continuation of slavery, with millions of people who are disproportionately Black and Brown forced to work for little to no compensation and nearly entirely excluded from voting. 

History offers many lessons in strengthening democracy: After the U.S. incorporated the poll tax, a pay-to-play patchwork system that required people to pay taxes in order to vote, women, people of color, and low-income people overcame the corruptive power of money. Eventually, Annie E. Harper, a retired domestic worker, successfully challenged the poll tax through the 1966 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections Supreme Court ruling. 

And yet, the overrepresentation of wealth in politics remains one of the greatest challenges to U.S. democracy. A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 83% of Republicans and Republican-leaning people in the U.S. and 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning people in the U.S. feel that big-money donors and special interest lobbyists “have too much influence on decisions made by members of Congress.” 

What Renville considers “most terrifying” today is “the rulings that recognize corporations as equal to people, so that economic structures have more legal weight than a human being.” 

Democracy is healthiest when there is greatest participation and power sharing, especially among those who have been historically excluded.”

Gerald Horne, who holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, agrees money has too much influence in politics. He offers a salient piece of advice to those seeking to strengthen democracy: “You would have to democratize the economy to begin with,” he says. “When you don’t democratize the economy, the malefactors of great wealth—as [Theodore] Roosevelt used to say—are able to use their economic strength to put a thumb on the scale with regard to politics.” A weighing scale is an apt metaphor for who has influence in U.S. democracy: The political power of historically marginalized people has been outweighed by the nefarious power of wealth and capital. 

Labor unions are microcosms of democracy and offer useful examples of how direct democracy via inclusive decision-making can counter the power of money. Horne says in the early part of the 20th century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) tended to organize skilled workers but not low-wage workers such as secretaries in their quest for labor rights and better wages and benefits. 

In contrast, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) “was organizing across the board, from top to bottom” in auto plants, Horne adds. “Obviously the CIO model was more democratic than the AFL model.” Ultimately, McCarthyism eroded the CIO, which was then absorbed by the AFL. “We have not learned that much from unions,” says Horne. 

Furthermore, unions are relatively small formations in which direct democracy is a more viable prospect than in nation states. Most of the world’s democracies are representative, which means that people choose leaders to make decisions on their behalf rather than making every decision themselves. In contrast, direct democracies allow people to directly choose policies that govern them. 

Direct Democracies Lead the Way

When it comes to large nations in particular, representative democracy seems more efficient than, say, how a small nation such as Switzerland—one of the world’s only direct democracies—is run. A nation of fewer than 9 million, the Swiss elect seven councilors every four years to carry out the day-to-day functioning of the government and participate in popular votes up to four times a year on specific measures. It is the closest to a direct democracy the world has today. 

At more than 333 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous nation on the planet, behind India and China. It is also the third-largest in size, behind Russia and Canada. By virtue of its sheer population and geographic size, U.S. democracy is complicated. A republic of 50 states and various territories, the federal government shares sovereign power with state governments. It makes little sense for residents of, say, Maryland, to vote on an issue that disproportionately impacts Oregonians. 

About half of all states have some form of Switzerland-like direct democracy, allowing residents to regularly cast votes on ballot measures—a sound approach, at least on paper, to ensuring state-level governments remain responsive to their voters. But there is no direct democracy at the federal level, even for something as simple as choosing the president. 

The Electoral College, where citizens vote for state-level delegates, is arguably one of the biggest tools used to dilute the power of democratic federal representation. Those delegates in turn cast ballots for the president. This is one step removed from representative democracy and could even be considered democracy by unfair proxy. 

The complexity of the Electoral College system becomes most apparent every four years, when adults attempt to explain to the children around them that the path to the White House winds its way through a handful of so-called “swing states.” Watch the face of a young person contort in confusion over the fact that a Michigan ballot is far more consequential than one from California, and try to explain why such a system is allowed to define itself as democratic. 

The fact that the Electoral College makes it possible for a presidential nominee to win office even if they lose the popular vote—which has happened five times in U.S. history, including twice in the past 25 years—has prompted many to call for its abolition. After all, minority rule is a hallmark of autocracy. About two-thirds of all people in the U.S. favor ending the Electoral College and want direct democracy—at least when it comes to choosing the president. 

“We don’t have to get into these complicated arguments about economic democracy and the power of billionaires,” says Horne. “You can just start with the Electoral College. It’s obvious that the Electoral College reflects a belief on the part of the framers of the Constitution that those small percentages of a potential electorate that could vote were not trustworthy and so therefore you needed this intervening force … to ‘correct’ any ‘mistakes’ that voters had made.” 

There are efforts underway to end the Electoral College system, the most promising of which is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state effort to end the winner-take-all electors system practiced by 48 out of 50 states. Although the Constitution specifies the use of electors, it doesn’t require states to award all electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote. Each state can therefore pass a law switching to proportional apportionment of electors and, as of April 2024, 17 states and the District of Columbia—representing 209 Electoral College votes—have done so. When states representing the majority of electoral votes—270—pass such laws, the Electoral College will effectively become a popular vote. 

Democratizing the Supreme Court

Another obstacle to people’s ability to rule themselves is the increasingly unaccountable U.S. Supreme Court, where only nine people with lifetime terms make decisions affecting hundreds of millions—a dynamic veering uncomfortably close to autocratic rule. 

The Court is prone to financial corruption, with justices having been found to accept lavish gifts from wealthy friends and then rule in their favor. It is also severely exclusionary in terms of race and gender—out of 116 justices since the nation’s founding, only eight have not been white men. Moreover, justices are increasingly setting policy instead of interpreting laws—in effect becoming proxy legislators. 

“One of the reasons why Republicans prefer to do certain things through the Supreme Court is that they can’t actually get them done at the ballot box, because they’re unpopular,” says Mystal, who sees the Supreme Court as one of the biggest counterbalances to U.S. democracy. “People support women’s rights. People, now, support gay rights. Taking those away politically is difficult. That’s why they want the courts to do it.” 

There are numerous ideas around reforming the Supreme Court, including setting term limits for justices—a popular idea—and creating a binding code of conduct. President Joe Biden has backed both these ideas, but so far, none of these efforts appear likely to come to fruition. 

Indigenous Democratic Principles

“I believe that how we treat land is how we treat people,” says Renville. The sentiment captures another major difference between the U.S. form of democracy and the Indigenous democratic principles on which the U.S. Constitution was loosely based: Landownership, which is the root of individual financial accumulation and capitalism, had no place in the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace. 

Per Renville, “the recognition of the ‘rights of nature’” is a critical piece of inclusion in the U.S. political system that can strengthen democracy. Humans exist within the context of their environment and consequently thrive when their environment is respected. Modern-day democratic systems tend not to consider the rights of nature. Yet, as Renville asserts, we need to begin incorporating “the right of a river or a forest or a mountain or so forth to exist and to be preserved and protected for the future” into our democratic system, as the Haudenosaunee did. 

There is precedent for such an idea. In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation in the world to vote on a new Constitution that centered the rights of nature and of natural systems to “exist, flourish, and evolve.” Remarkably, the idea originated in the U.S. and was pushed by a grassroots organization from San Francisco called the Pachamama Alliance, and drafted with the help of the Community Environmental Law Defense Fund, which is based in Pennsylvania. Today, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature is leading a worldwide effort to incorporate similar clauses in the constitutions of all democracies. 

Indigenous principles centering women and nature offer a pathway toward stronger democracy in the U.S. Renville cites the leadership of Frances Charles, the chairwoman of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in the Northwest U.S. Charles was “a huge part of the force that brought down that Elwha Dam successfully and restored their ancestral beach, and restored the salmon run” so that people could sustain themselves, according to Renville. “That kind of female leadership, I see it as being very connected to the ability to advocate for land and water, and to take care of our lands and people.” After all, care for people and the land is the ultimate measure of success in any democracy. 

Democracy is healthiest when there is greatest participation and power sharing, especially among those who have been historically excluded. Or, as Herre concluded in a 2022 analysis of democracies globally, “People turned previous autocratic tides by advocating relentlessly for governing themselves democratically. We have done it before, and can do it again.” 

A November 2024 ballot measure could change that for Rosas and thousands of other Santa Ana residents. If voters pass Measure DD, noncitizen residents will have the right to vote in Santa Ana’s local elections beginning in 2028. It would be the third jurisdiction in California to offer limited voting rights to noncitizens. Meanwhile, nationwide, the number of jurisdictions that have granted some voting rights to noncitizen residents is nearing two dozen, with Frederick, Maryland, joining the list just last September by a vote of the local Board of Aldermen.

The measure to expand voting rights in Santa Ana is the only one like it on any ballot nationwide in November 2024. It comes as voters are being asked to decide on constitutional amendments that will outlaw noncitizen voting in eight states to preemptively block any noncitizen voting measures from moving forward. Those amendments have been spurred by anti-immigrant rhetoric and former president Donald Trump’s repeated lies about immigrants violating voting laws.

Pro-democracy and voter education groups, such as the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, have condemned the proposed amendments for giving credence to conspiracy theories about voter fraud and Democrat-led ballot harvesting. 

“We don’t know what the outcome of the presidential election is going to be in November, but we do know that immigrants have lost regardless because of the rhetoric that has been spewed by both candidates,” says Carlos Perea, executive director at the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, which has helped drive the movement for Measure DD in Santa Ana. Not unlike Republican nominee Trump, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has also adopted a callous tone toward migrants during her campaign, including bragging about backing a bipartisan anti-immigrant bill that her campaign ads call “the toughest border control bill in decades.” 

“In an election year where immigrants have become the preferred boogeyman for both presidential candidates, we want to send a message that we are not going to stand for our communities being demonized,” says Perea. “We are defining our lives at the local level, and we want self-determination through political representation.” Perea, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who has lived in Santa Ana since he was 14, is also among the residents who could vote in local elections for the first time if Measure DD passes.

If the call to expand limited voting rights to noncitizens sounds far fetched or new, the suburban town of Takoma Park, Maryland, has news for you. “We just celebrated 30 years of noncitizen voting,” says Jessie Carpenter, Takoma Park’s city clerk responsible for election administration. Voters in Takoma Park voted to allow noncitizen residents to cast ballots in local elections in 1992. The change was implemented the following year and has worked smoothly for decades.

The movement is younger in California, where San Francisco became the first city in the state to grant noncitizens some voting rights in 2016 with a ballot measure called Proposition N. The change went into effect two years later. San Francisco’s measure, which is more limited in scope than Takoma Park’s, enables noncitizen parents of school children to vote only in school board races. In contrast, all noncitizen residents of Takoma Park can vote in all municipal elections. Oakland voters passed a measure similar to San Francisco’s in 2022.

Annette Wong, managing director of programs at Chinese for Affirmative Action in San Francisco, says the initiative to enfranchise parents in school board elections was important to the city’s Chinese American community and other immigrant communities because they wanted to be more involved in the politics of their children’s education. “It came from this desire by the parents that we had been organizing with for them to have a bigger say and a voice in their child’s education,” she says.

A similar sentiment has driven the movement in Santa Ana, where parents like Rosas want to vote in local contests based on what they believe is best for their children. The campaign for Measure DD also highlights how much the noncitizen community contributes to the local economy. Each year, noncitizen residents of Santa Ana pay an estimated $117 million in state and local taxes, according to analysis from the Harbor Institute.

That number is based on U.S. Census Bureau data and information from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “Regardless of immigration status, regardless of where we come from, today we live in this city … our children go to school, we contribute our labor, and we pay taxes,” Rosas says. “Simply, we [should] be allowed to participate just like any other person in this city participates in local decisions.”

The expansion of limited voting rights to noncitizen residents in parts of California has faced challenges from opponents who argue it burdens cities with additional costs and complexities in election administration and could contradict the state’s constitution. After Proposition N passed and was implemented in San Francisco, a conservative activist named James Lacy, who does not live in San Francisco, brought a lawsuit in a local court, alleging the program was unconstitutional.

A San Francisco Superior Court judge initially sided with Lacy in July 2022. However, the city appealed that decision to the California Court of Appeal, which reversed the lower court decision and upheld the legality of San Francisco’s noncitizen voting program in what city attorney David Chiu called “a wonderful victory for immigrant parents.”

The higher court ruled that California’s constitution, which states that “a United States citizen 18 years of age and resident in this State may vote,” only established a “floor,” meaning a lower limit on enfranchisement, rather than a “ceiling” or upper limit. Therefore, it does not preclude expanding voting rights to groups beyond what is named in the state’s constitution. (The ruling also paved the way for the enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year olds in some California cities.)

Julia Gomez, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, says the California Court of Appeal’s holding “highlights that it’s state specific,” and whether other jurisdictions can pursue similar noncitizen resident voting programs will depend on their state constitution. 

In New York City, where the city council passed legislation allowing noncitizen residents to vote in local elections in 2021, Republican officials succeeded in challenging the rule at the appellate court level. Unlike in the California case, a judge in New York ruled that the state’s constitution establishes a ceiling beyond which voting rights cannot be expanded. In March 2024, the city council filed a notice of appeal to the state’s highest court in support of the law. 

In spite of repeated conservative claims that widespread and illegal noncitizen voting threatens U.S. democracy, researchers conclude that there is essentially no such voter fraud in U.S. elections. Carpenter, who administers elections in Takoma Park, says the noncitizen voter program in her jurisdiction does not threaten the integrity of state or federal elections, in which noncitizens remain barred from voting. The city clerk’s office maintains its own supplemental list of noncitizen voters and does not feed any information into county or state systems, meaning there is no chance that noncitizen voters from Takoma Park could accidentally end up on the Maryland voter rolls. 

Other jurisdictions that pursue limited enfranchisement for noncitizen voters have put similar safeguards in place. For example, in San Francisco, the ballots for noncitizen parents are a different color and only feature the applicable school board races, so no one could accidentally vote in another contest. 

“The stories that noncitizens are voting [in federal elections] or we’re registering people so they can vote for Democrats—none of that is the case,” says Carpenter. “What it does mean is that people could feel like they’re really a part of the community and that they have a say in how the local government works.”

Plus, noncitizen voters themselves have no desire to commit voter fraud and risk disrupting their immigration status. “Folks in the noncitizen community, the immigrant community, they’re not trying to jeopardize things for themselves,” says Wong, whose organization also anchors the Immigrant Parent Voting Collaborative. That group provides outreach and education services to newly enfranchised immigrant parents to ensure they are familiar with the bounds of their hard-won rights and feel empowered to get involved in their children’s education, whether or not they decide to cast a vote in school board elections. Gomez says that if Measure DD passes in Santa Ana, the coalition there will launch a similar effort before the new rule goes into effect. 

As Republican-led legislation to preclude the enfranchisement of noncitizens gains steam amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide, proponents of noncitizen voting programs remain focused on the heart of the issue: “We see this movement as an acknowledgment that we are all a part of this shared society,” says Wong. “No matter where you are in the society, you have a stake and you should have a voice.”

When I turned 18, one of my proudest moments was completing my voter registration application. I grew up in a politically aware household. My grandma, who was raised with Jim Crow laws, discussed the importance of voting and being politically informed with me from a young age. She grew up in a time where voting was not a right extended to Black people, especially those living in the South, as she was. She instilled that history in me.

My elders wanted me to be an informed voter and to know more than just the names on the ballot. I also knew which issues I cared about and where candidates stood on those issues. As I developed my own understanding of the world and the societal and political issues that mattered to me, being informed was imperative so I knew which candidates aligned or misaligned with the world I hoped to see and be a part of. 

I voted in my first presidential election in 2004. During that time, the U.S. was embroiled in wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so I would attend campus events to better understand the concurrent conflicts and how we came to be at war to begin with. As I learned more about Islamophobia and colonialism, I began questioning our country’s role around the world.

Those events, coupled with the classes I was taking in African American Studies, broadened my worldview, allowing me to better understand how the U.S. interacts with other countries, especially those in the Middle East and Africa, and how political propaganda skews our collective perspective. I was already liberal about the “controversial” issues of that time, including supporting LGBTQ rights, but now my rose-colored glasses were off. I was no longer buying into the propaganda that the United States is the “greatest nation on Earth,” so I knew I would be more prepared when the next election rolled around.

In January 2008, I learned about a Black man who was running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew he was gaining attention among the other students on campus. When he planned a visit to my alma mater, I knew I had to attend. 

I had no idea I would be wowed by then Senator Barack Obama. I was mesmerized by his charisma, his intelligence, and his ability to work the crowd as he explained how his background led him to run for president. By the time the event concluded, I knew if he secured the Democratic nomination, I would be voting for him. I wasn’t the only person excited by Obama’s potential; my elders, all of whom were widows, never thought they’d see the day a Black man could be elected as president.

I haven’t been enamored by a candidate since Obama’s first presidential election. He imbued me with a sense of hope after living through George W. Bush’s disheartening presidency. We were electrified. And yet, the political veil I’d begun removing during Bush’s presidency came completely off during Obama’s tenure.

I began organizing in 2013 around policies that impacted the lives of disabled people and, more specifically, disabled people of color, including police violence, which disproportionately impacts disabled people. Through that organizing, I learned that the “trainings” police departments were using to better understand disability weren’t stopping them from harming and killing us, though these trainings were being heralded as “groundbreaking.” 

I came to better understand that laws that should protect disabled people are in desperate need of an overhaul in order to be truly significant in the times we lived in. All of these truths hit me and kept me from being omplacent with the mere presence of a Black president; I want a president that fully supports the people who do and don’t look like me.

“When you know better, you do better” has been a guiding light in my politics, but now, I know when we know better, we demand better. As I entered my 30s, my political understanding was not just shaped by my worldview but also by those I was now in community with. Finding and learning about candidates throughout the country who not just cared about the issues that mattered to me but had a strong track record of supporting them became pronounced. This view was the reason I dived deeper in supporting candidates whose values and politics aligned with mine.  

In 2020, I had the opportunity to be a consultant on the disability policy plan for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential run. Being a part of the movement to ensure every Democratic candidate that election cycle had a disability policy plan reignited my commitment to connecting with candidates who don’t overlook disabled people and figuring out what accountability looks like for me as a voter.

Now, as we face another presidential election, the awakening of Gen Z, many of whom are voting in their first election, has given me an extra boost of energy. Gen Z’s excitement is infectious. Even as they are watching a Black and Indian woman running for the most coveted position, they’re not losing sight of the issues that matter most to them—a reminder to me and others that we can and should demand better from our elected officials.

Nothing is perfect, and it never will be. But this election is pivotal for people in the United States and abroad. Every position on the ballot matters—school boards, city councils, state representatives—and it’s on us to use our votes to push for the causes we’re passionate about. As voters, we must remember that whoever is in office works for us; if we don’t like what they’re doing, then we can vote them out when their term is up. Gen Z is learning this reality and voting for the future they deserve to have, including one without genocide and without gun violence.

I hope Gen Z knows their presence at the polls matters and their work doesn’t end after they’ve dropped off their ballots. We the people have the ultimate power, and it is critical to remember that the government is much bigger than the White House. Know who the treasurer, sheriff, and coroner of your city is—it’s just as critical as knowing who the president is. Learn what policies are being enacted and blocked that will either improve or hinder the quality of life for yourself and those more marginalized than you. You are the adults now, in charge of ensuring Gen Alpha and the generation after them will live in a world where their rights are protected.  

And, most of all, keep that hopeful energy. Don’t dive deeper into the belly of despair. Hope and joy are our birthrights as humans to hold onto and find when we need them, and they are essential elements when organizing for the world we desire to live in. Use history as a guide. Even amid the most unimaginable circumstances, people still found ways to push forward, build community, and fight for a more just world.

If we don’t believe things can and should be better, then what will motivate us to not back down when beaten down (literally or metaphorically)? Every movement has had people who believe, are hopeful, and find joy among each other—and we need that in this moment, no matter who is elected president. Having hope is not a sign of disillusionment; it’s a reminder that every storm eventually runs out of rain. While we are in a storm right now with so much at stake, let us all do our part to demand more so that when this storm breaks, we will not be more broken. We’ll be as strong as we can be. 

Ashley Tchanyoum, a high school junior in Oakland, says she has been encouraging her classmates to register in the lead-up to the election and looks forward to exercising her right to vote for the first time. “It empowers students to have a voice in shaping the policies that affect them every day,” she says. 

The Oakland initiative is part of a growing movement in the United States to lower the voting age to enfranchise 16- and 17-year-olds. Proponents of the change argue that young people are already shaping the nation’s politics through influential organizing movements, including March for Our Lives and Sunrise Movement. Those student-led organizations respond to issues that disproportionately affect young people, including gun violence and climate change. With so much on the line, lowering the voting age would give young people a more direct means of intervening in the political process to shape policy on issues that affect them and their futures.

A dozen municipalities have already enfranchised 16- and 17-year-olds in either school board elections, such as in Oakland, or all municipal elections, meaning young people can also vote on local ballot measures and for municipal representatives. The majority of these municipalities are in Maryland. There are also ongoing campaigns to lower the voting age in Washington, D.C., and municipalities in New Jersey. This November, voters in Albany, California, will decide on a similar measure. Meanwhile, statewide campaigns to lower voting age in Missouri, Rhode Island, and Oregon are growing and have garnered support from both Republicans and Democrats. 

At the national level, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Representative Grace Meng of New York have introduced legislation to lower the voting age in federal, state, and local elections. When Pressley proposed it as an amendment to the House Democrats’ voting rights bill in 2019, 126 representatives voted in favor—a significant number, even though the amendment failed. More recently, Meng reintroduced an amendment to the Constitution that would lower the national voting age to 16 years old. 

“Over the past few years, we have seen the influence [that] young people in our nation have on trends, political movements, and elections,” said Meng in a press release announcing the legislation. “It is time to give them a voice in our democracy.” She first introduced similar legislation in 2018 and then reintroduced it in 2019, 2021, and 2023. Each time, it has failed to move out of committee.

While a federal move to lower the voting age might sound far fetched, Lukas Brekke-Miesner, executive director of Oakland Kids First (OKF), likes to remind naysayers that it has happened before. Less than six decades ago, in 1971, the 26th Amendment to the Constitution lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. “[The Oakland campaign] felt like a bit of an uphill battle,” admits Brekke-Miesner. “But understanding that there is a legacy and precedent of this having happened was a point of hope.” 

Today, the push to lower the voting age enjoys less popular support than half a century ago. Back then, both liberal and conservative politicians backed it, arguing that if young people could be conscripted and go to war at 18 years old, they ought to be able to vote then, too. Gallup polls from the era show that most Americans supported the change as early as the 1950s, following a change in eligibility for the military draft, which allowed Americans as young as 18 to be conscripted into World War II.

Today, those poll numbers are much different. One 2019 poll from The Hill/HarrisX found that 75% of registered voters opposed letting 17-year-olds vote, and 84% opposed voting rights for 16-year-olds. Opponents express doubts about whether people in these age groups are mature enough to vote and question whether their votes would differ from those of their parents. Some Republicans, who tend to oppose lowering the voting age in greater numbers than Democrats do, argue that campaigns to lower the voting age are just ploys to get more votes for their rivals. 

Studies on adolescent brain development suggest that fears of 16-year-olds not having the decision-making power to cast a vote are unfounded. Instead, research shows that what psychologists call “cold cognition”—meaning a person’s judgment in situations that allow for unhurried decision-making and consultation with others—is likely to be just as developed in 16-year-olds as in adults. While a person’s “hot cognition,” meaning their judgment in high-pressure or emotional situations, tends not to mature until later, the skills needed to make informed decisions at the ballot box are already developed at age 16.

“This idea that young people don’t have the maturity, don’t have the smarts, don’t have the intellect to vote, I think is not only problematic, but it does a disservice to young people,” says LaJuan Allen, director of Vote16USA, a national organization that supports youth-led campaigns to extend voting rights to 16 and 17 year olds at the state and local levels.

Research also suggests that if 16- and 17-year-olds were enfranchised, they would not necessarily vote the same way that their parents do. While there is little data on this phenomenon in the U.S., a study of Scottish voters conducted before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum showed that more than 40% of 16- and 17-year-olds planned to vote differently than their parents. According to Jan Eichhorn, the researcher who led that study, when young people did intend to vote the same way as their parents, they nonetheless came to that conclusion on their own. “They really make up their mind in quite a complex way themselves, and that is really encouraging to see,” Eichhorn told BBC.

In Oakland, the campaign to lower the voting age was a student-led one. Students were driven to organize around lowering the voting age because of issues they experienced and that adults seemed to overlook. First, in 2019, the Oakland School Board cut vital support programs for its students. Student organizers spoke out against the cuts, but the board pursued them anyway. “We could definitely see a disconnect between what students think is important and what school board members do,” shares Tchanyoum. More recently, Tchanyoum says students at her high school have been concerned about the lack of accessible bathrooms on campus and disparities in the amenities and extracurricular programs offered on different campuses in the district. Students would also like to implement programs to improve student–staff relationships and are concerned that their rights to speak about Palestine-related issues are being restricted.

To help get youth voting rights on the ballot in Oakland, Tchanyoum joined the movement as an organizer with Oakland Unified School District’s All City Council Student Union and the Oakland Youth Commission, both of which are part of the Oakland Youth Vote Coalition. That coalition was formed in 2019 with the goal of lobbying the Oakland City Council for a ballot measure to lower the voting age in school board elections. They succeeded, and in November 2020, voters were asked to decide on Measure QQ. 

Leading up to the vote, student organizers mobilized voters through phone banking, media interviews, social media, and other advertising. Measure QQ passed, with 67% of Oakland voters voting in its favor. The new rule is being rolled out for the first time this year after organizers worked with election officials, school board officials, and consultants to ensure its smooth implementation. Sixteen and 17-year-olds in neighboring Berkeley will also be voting in school board elections for the first time, following a ballot measure that passed there in 2016 but was slow to be implemented.

For those who argue that enfranchising more young people would be a power grab for Democrats, Allen of Vote16USA says that’s simply not the point: “Lowering the voting age is about enfranchising young people, prioritizing youth voting rights, and strengthening our democracy.” 

Plus, some research suggests that voters between the ages of 18 and 24 lean more conservative than voters between the ages of 25 and 29. When girls between the ages of 7 and 12 were surveyed about the 2024 election, the proportion who said they did not identify with either the Republican or Democratic party was larger than those who did identify with one. 

While it is unclear how future 16- and 17-year-olds would vote if enfranchised, evidence suggests that either way, enfranchising this group would have benefits for the nation’s democracy, including boosting low voter turnout. Data from Takoma Park and Hyattsville, Maryland, a pair of towns that allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote on all municipal matters, show that enfranchised teens tend to turn out at higher rates than the general population.

Plus, engaging young people in the voting process earlier could encourage long-term civic engagement. Reaching young, would-be voters for the first time when they turn 18 can be challenging because they tend to be going through significant life transitions, like moving from high school to college. However, according to Ava Mateao, president of the voter turnout organization 18by Vote, “If you reach a young person and engage them in the voting process [in] whatever capacity you can when they’re 16 or 17, they’re more likely to be a lifelong voter.” The group also supports lowering the voting age to 16 to boost turnout. 

Brekke-Miesner says these big-picture benefits are the ultimate goal: “Our young folks didn’t enter the chat to say, ‘Hey, voting is the end-all, be-all,’ but really because they wanted to have power within their communities,” he says. “That’s the ultimate drive—to get folks re-engaged, organizing in their communities, and engaging in local governance.”

As support for immigration has waned, Donald Trump, in his most tried and true political move, has stoked a moral panic over rising “migrant crime,” fearmongering and pitting communities of color against each other to gain votes. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has not only gone along with the narrative, but his administration has gutted the asylum system and outsourced immigration enforcement to Mexico, exacerbating the U.S.-manufactured crisis at the border and leading to more senseless deaths and precarity in the borderlands and beyond. Vice President Kamala Harris has followed the lead of the president she hopes to succeed.

I have organized around immigration for over two decades, during which Democrats repeatedly succumbed to their opponents’ playbook and positioned the issue as a national security and public safety issue. Yet even in this climate, there is no escaping how surreal this moment is. In Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, I write about how moral panics and so-called “tough on crime” policies have facilitated the expansion of immigrant detention. The Democrats’ play on immigration feels akin to the Clinton era in the ’90s, when Republicans took hold of Congress for the first time in decades. The 1994 crime bill, along with immigration laws passed by Congress in 1996, solidified the merger of the criminal legal and immigration enforcement systems, doubling the capacity of the immigrant detention apparatus.

Later during President Barack Obama’s tenure, his administration expanded collaborations with local police and ramped up border enforcement to make the case for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. As a result, deportations skyrocketed, earning him the moniker “deporter in chief.” But as I write in the book, years of accepting border militarization and criminalization as a strategy to bring relief to “innocent” immigrants in the United States have only resulted in more dehumanization of migrants in general, thus creating more barriers to securing legalization for the 11 million undocumented people living here. Despite this lesson, many organizations are falling back into the “good immigrant versus bad immigrant” frame—or in this case, the old immigrant versus the new immigrant, making the case for some at the expense of others.

It all feels incredibly bleak. But I try to remind myself that there have been numerous moments when anti-immigrant sentiment has ruled the political discourse only to retreat as movements fought back: California in the ’90s after the passage of the harsh ballot measure Proposition 187; the 2006 immigrant rights marches that brought millions to the streets in response to the post-9/11 immigration crackdown; and more recently the boycotts of the state of Arizona protesting SB 1070, the “show me your papers” law that gave the state unconstitutional immigration enforcement authority. In some of our most dire political moments, immigrant communities, organizers, advocates, and ordinary people have stepped up to fight back, opening space for crucial movement victories.

After the gut punch that was the 2016 election result, organizers and advocates have more seriously engaged in scenario planning. Sometimes these sessions only serve to cause more anxiety. But they have also been critical spaces to figure out how our movements can prepare. It is important to recognize that we have lost ground since the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the near-simultaneous mass uprising for Black lives, which produced significant leftward shifts on mass incarceration, policing, and immigration enforcement. Since then, the backlash has been building, and opportunities for major victories are now out of reach. In many ways, the current conditions require us to return to the basics of organizing and movement building. There are no easy solutions, and broadening the base of support is our best bet for combating the harmful narratives about immigrants and immigration.

Since the release of Project 2025, much has been written about what a second Trump term would look like on immigration. His administration would strip status from millions of undocumented people who benefit from programs such as Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to live and work in the United States. This would make them even more vulnerable to deportation. Along with local, state, and federal police forces, a second Trump administration plans to deploy the National Guard to round up immigrants already residing in the United States and warehouse them in detention camps across the country. The proposals conjure up images from World War II, when Japanese Americans were labeled “enemies of the state” and incarcerated in “relocation centers.” In addition to the full-on attack of immigrants currently living in the country, the plans include a more robust Muslim and African ban and other efforts to shut down the border to people seeking refuge. Other proposals that have been floated, such as ending birthright citizenship, are more outlandish and difficult to accomplish, but the intent is clear. Right-wing politicians have embraced the racist “great replacement” theory, and the goal is to end immigration as we know it.

In the case of a Trump election win, demanding that the Biden administration dismantle the detention and deportation systems and rescind harsh border policies will be imperative. So far Biden has received a pass from liberals and even some immigration advocates on his ramping up of enforcement, but the short period of time between the election and inauguration will require a united front to make Stephen Miller’s dark agenda that much harder to implement. Once Trump is in office, there will no doubt be a relentless onslaught of executive orders requiring rapid response. Many will turn to litigation, but there are obvious limitations given the makeup of the courts. And if we want to build for the long-term, it is critical that we invest in organizing and base building.

It may seem difficult to imagine a Trump administration being affected by mass mobilization, but in 2018, after widespread public outrage, he ended the zero-tolerance policy separating families at the border. Separations continued, but not at the same scale. As immigrant communities are targeted, going local in our strategies will also take center stage to mitigate the harm of his administration. Creating spaces for sanctuary and community defense networks, limiting collaboration between police and ICE, and waging campaigns to prevent detention expansion will be essential to throwing a wrench in their plans. We must also create on-ramps for those newly engaged or returning to the fight, fortifying the movement to protect communities now and build for the future when there may be openings.

As for Harris, her recent trip to the border made clear that she is positioning herself as tough on immigration and will continue to campaign around what both parties like to call “border security.” Depending on the makeup of the House and Senate, an immigration bill could move in Congress in 2025. The bipartisan Senate border bill proposed earlier this year, and scuttled by Trump, created a new floor for how much Democrats are willing to trade off to get something passed. Before this point, legalization for a large portion of undocumented immigrants was always on the table, but in this instance the tradeoff was more funding for military aid to Ukraine and Israel, and nonpunitive reforms to the system were minimal.

The border panic has divided the movement, but it’s imperative for us to understand that anti-immigrant sentiment is driven in part by rampant and widening social inequality. Solidarity across movements for racial and economic justice and against U.S. militarism will be essential as we tackle the rightward lurch on immigration. Now is the time to offer an alternative approach, one grounded in a vision of a world without cages that embraces the freedom of movement—one in which all our communities can thrive.

In addition to border policy, we should anticipate a Harris administration to follow Biden’s approach to interior enforcement. Despite Biden proclaiming a hundred days into his presidency that there should be “no private prisons, period,” his administration is still contracting with private prison companies and expanding their use. As of this summer, ICE has put out feelers for at least seven new detention centers in the Chicago, El Paso, Harlingen, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle jurisdictions. Much as if Trump were to win, similar strategies of ending ICE–police collaborations and preventing detention expansion would be paramount.

Already sanctuary policies are being attacked, as a moral panic is stoked over “migrant crime.” In an attempt to debunk these claims, many organizations have emphasized data showing that immigrants commit fewer crimes than do citizens. But this only serves to accept public safety as a metric for immigration and ends up throwing those with criminal records under the bus, effectively pitting working-class communities against each other. A better understanding of the criminal legal system and its intersections with immigration enforcement has helped the movement limit deportations. Given the backlash moment we’re in, we must continue to challenge the whole system and not fall into the moral panic over crime.

Just as concerning is how conservative states have acted under Biden, which we can expect to continue under a Harris administration. From Texas to Florida, states across the country are enacting some of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation we’ve ever seen. Through these efforts, such as Operation Lone Star and SB 4 in Texas, states are commandeering state-level criminal legal systems to target and prosecute migrants as well as people providing aid to migrants. SB 4, for example, includes a 10-year minimum sentence for “human smuggling” or “harboring” undocumented immigrants. Governor Greg Abbott and Texas officials are essentially dictating immigration policy for the whole country. By filing lawsuits against forms of administrative relief such as DACA, deploying its own deportation force, and busing migrants to sanctuary cities, Texas has gone on a rampage, and Biden has done very little to intervene. If Harris wins, the question remains whether, given her history as a state attorney general, she will be more likely to push back on Texas and other states. But based on her recent comments on immigration, it is clear that she will need to be pushed, and we need to prioritize building up grassroots capacity to protect immigrant communities and fight back in these states.

The coming months will undoubtedly bring more heartache and confusion for immigrant communities. Regardless of who is president, educating people about their rights and expanding our base will be essential to building power toward longer-term change. Across the country, organizers and advocates are already planning for either outcome, hoping to be more prepared than we were in 2016. Dozens of organizations have gathered in multiple forums, such as Democracy 2025 and the Immigrant Movement Visioning Process, to develop strategies for preventing mass deportations if the worst were to happen. In this environment, abolition is a helpful tool for analysis and guidance. We must reject the reduction of immigrant lives to “public safety” and “national security” frameworks, and we must instead put forth a narrative of belonging and collectivity that helps bridge our struggles for racial and migrant justice. In this moment of political fervor, now is the time to start planting the seeds for a more grounded and accountable movement.

This article was originally published by Inquest. It has been republished here with permission. This essay was written in the author’s personal capacity. The views expressed are her own and and do not necessarily represent the views of Detention Watch Network. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance seem to be recognizing that a campaign whose gendered messaging has consisted almost entirely of overt misogyny is not doing them any favors with women voters. The last few weeks have seen the Republican ticket making a host of promises to women: to “protect” them, to give them “choices” that will help them withstand “cultural pressure,” and to ensure a world where they will “no longer have anxiety.” 

This women-specific messaging from Trump and Vance reflects an important shift in our political culture. Feminism has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity. In a time when 61% of women in the United States identify as feminists, it has become difficult to reach women without making some kind of claim about understanding their plight.

Yet Trump and Vance—who oppose abortion rights, have no plans to raise the federal minimum wage, and who seem to think tariffs will solve the nation’s childcare crisis—cannot present themselves as advocates for women without undermining their own policy positions. Yet they are now addressing what have traditionally been thought of as feminist issues, such as sexual assault, Title IX, and the struggles of moms. Their gloss on the issues is, unsurprisingly, racist, transphobic, and indifferent to economic inequality. But they seem to be banking on the idea that elite women will mistake the candidates’ investments in oppressive systems with investments in the fate of women.

There is a preexisting reservoir of arguments available to help Republicans accomplish this confusion, and it comes from a surprising place: from within feminism. As I argue in my new book, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon Press, October 2024), feminism has always had many strands within it, and some of these have sought to advance the interests of privileged women at the expense of less privileged ones.

Trump has, in recent weeks, repeated the message that he will be women’s protector. This position has been roundly criticized for being condescending to women, and for being creepy coming from an alleged rapist. But less has been said about which women Trump and his surrogates claim to be protecting, and whom he claims to be protecting them from. 

Trump’s original protector comments were embedded within a set of dog whistles about men of color. His specific promise was to make (presumably white) women feel “safe at the border” and on “city streets.”

This is part of a longer-running theme in which Trump has repeatedly attempted to associate rape with Latinx and undocumented people, in spite of the fact that the prevalence of sexual assault is high among all racial and ethnic groups, and in spite of the fact that many rapes of migrant women are perpetrated by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. 

This strategy of associating Black and Brown men with rape also has a longer history within white feminism. Feminists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries actively argued that “other” men’s treatment of women was a reason that countries in the Global South need to be colonized. The dominant feminist response to rape in the U.S. until quite recently was what is known as “carceral feminism,” an approach that proposes widening the reach of a racist criminal justice system as the solution to gender-based violence.

Trump’s and Vance’s borrowings from white feminism extend to another domain in which they are using the language of “protection”: women’s sports. Vance recently claimed that excluding trans women in sports would prevent his daughter from being “brutalized,” repeating a false image of the trans woman as a violator of women’s “safe spaces.” This concept has recently resurged since its initial popularity in feminist separatist circles in the 1970s. Feminists of color were vocally critical of the idea of “safe spaces” at the time, because it assumed that there was one way to be a woman—usually, implicitly, the white way.  

Vance’s recent rhetoric around family and childcare draws on another, “softer” side of white feminism. The sarcastic tone of his “childless cat ladies” comments and his participation in banter about the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” seems to have vanished, replaced with a man who wants to defend moms from “cultural pressure” and judgment, and instead give them “choices.”

The idea that feminists are enemies of stay-at-home moms has its roots in the “mommy wars” of the 1990s. Conservatives of the time managed to block feminist efforts to secure free childcare by portraying the feminist as a judgmental career woman who looked down her nose at motherhood. 

The legacy of this period endures in the popular feminist claim that the aim of feminism is to respect individual women’s choices—that women should be able to make decisions about their lives without fear of judgment. Yet a feminism focused on non-judgment continues to serve only the most privileged women, since the “choice” not to work outside the home has only ever been available to the well-off. Across a range of issues—childcare, abortion, and sexual harassment—what women actually need is not the false guise of options, but also material support.

Whether these strategies of appealing to privileged women will win Trump and Vance the election remains to be seen. But the lessons from these appropriations of seemingly feminist arguments extend far beyond what happens this November. Unless we achieve greater moral clarity about the goals of feminism, it will remain easy for privileged women to confuse their interests with the interests of women and gender-expansive people as a group.

Fortunately for feminists, arriving at this clarity does not have to mean starting from scratch. White feminism, and its sister ideologies such as neoliberal feminism and femonationalism, have never been the only games in town. These ideologies, I argue in the book, are united by an understanding of feminism as a movement to increase women’s individual freedom. 

But feminism should really be understood in the way bell hooks famously described it in 1984—as a movement against oppression. Oppression is not the same thing as restrictions on what individual women can do; it is a set of social structures that brings down women as a group. It is only by reclaiming this heart of feminism that we can fight against the proliferation of faux feminisms that serve the interests of the powerful.

Wearing a dark blue suit and a broad smile, he walked out of his naturalization ceremony holding a small U.S. flag and his citizenship certificate. The timing was no coincidence; he aimed to become eligible to vote before the Nov. 5 presidential election. 

“I am very excited that I will be able to vote,” says Garcia, 57. “We can express our voice and, more than anything, we can make ourselves count.”

In swing states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and large states such as California, the influence of Latino voters like Garcia could be key to choosing the next president in the race between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Newly naturalized citizens and an influx of young Latinos reaching the voting age of 18 boosted the estimated number of eligible Latino voters to 36.2 million in 2024, up from 32.3 million in 2020.

A poll released in mid-October by Phoenix-based advocacy group Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) and Data for Social Good shows that a majority of 1,028 registered Arizona voters surveyed between April and May are highly motivated to cast a ballot. While immigration remains important for many Latinos, the poll found they are also deeply concerned about the economy, health care access, and affordable housing. The findings track with results from national polls examining the issues Latino voters are thinking about less than a month before the election.

The shifting demographics of Latino voters reflect the nuanced distinctions within an evolving population often characterized as a monolithic voting bloc. “We’re a diverse community with a wide range of political views, experience, and priorities,” says Alejandra Gomez, executive director of LUCHA.

Canvassers have been knocking on doors all over the state since March to encourage voters—Latinos in particular—to cast a ballot and hopes are high that they will turn out en masse, says Stephanie Maldonado, managing director at LUCHA. “I definitely do see our community showing up and showing up big this November 5th,” she adds.

Garcia says he’s looking forward to making his vote count. For years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, he worked in construction. In the 1990s, he started his own landscaping business, which he still operates. These days he worries about inflation because his earnings don’t go as far as they used to when buying necessities. “Prices have gone way up, for food and gasoline and other items,” he says.

Garcia is hopeful the next president will take on issues related to the economy, but he also would like the future commander-in-chief to push for immigration reforms. What’s needed, he says, is an orderly, speedier process that gives eligible people already in the country or waiting to apply for U.S. asylum south of the border an opportunity to live here legally. “People come here to improve their lives and to achieve the American dream, as I did,” he says. 

Dustin Corella, who was born in Tucson, is among a generation of young Latinos coming of age in 2024. Soon after turning 18 in June, he registered to vote and is eager to cast a ballot. “It feels like a big responsibility,” he says.

The issues motivating Corella to vote include his desire to elect politicians who ensure appropriate funding for public education as well as after-school programs and other resources aimed at youth in the community. And he says there’s a need for elected officials who can better address the impact of climate change, adding, “Those are the things that I care about, and I’m looking for leaders who can tackle them and create opportunities for the next generation.”

Corella is one of 1.3 million eligible Latino voters in Arizona. The state, along with California, Texas, Florida, and New York, is home to about two-thirds, or 65%, of all Latino eligible voters in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.

For Latinos and immigrant communities across the country, the stakes are high this election, says Nicole Melaku, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans. The coalition of immigrant and refugee rights organizations is working to encourage the nation’s naturalized citizens to vote, especially in the face of anti-immigrant attacks. For example, a slew of Republican campaign ads focuses negatively on immigrants.

“With the likes of Project 2025 looming about in the background, of family separation and of attacks to our democracy, I think it was important for us to make sure that our communities, and naturalized voters especially, are aware of the power that their vote and their voice has to shape the outcome of the election,” Melaku says.

Project 2025 is a policy agenda of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that aims to radically restructure the federal government in a conservative administration. Experts caution that the project threatens voting rights and promotes a litany of anti-immigrant measures with far-reaching implications.

Trump has distanced himself from the project, but he has made immigration a key part of the race. In one campaign stop after another, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric against immigrants punctuates his speeches. Should he win, he promises to quickly launch a mass deportation of immigrants living in the country without legal status—and even some with legal status.

Instead of countering him with pro-immigrant rhetoric, Harris has responded by taking a tougher stance on the issue, including a proposal to toughen asylum restrictions implemented by the Biden administration. She has also endorsed comprehensive immigration reforms. Trump blames Harris for a record number of migrants—many of them asylum seekers—entering the U.S. from Mexico, even as entries have declined sharply in 2024 amid policy changes on both sides of the border. 

In the border state of Arizona, the immigration debate is ever present. On Nov. 5, voters will reject or approve Proposition 314, which would give the state authority to enforce federal immigration policies. The initiative, Maldonado says, “specifically targets immigrant communities and continues to push racial profiling, which we know is a top concern among the Latino community. And I think that this election for us is pushing back against policies that continue to criminalize our families and communities.”

Immigration hits close to home for Maldonado, who comes from a mixed-status family. She and her two siblings are U.S.-born citizens and her father is a legal resident. However, her mother is undocumented, says Maldonado, and returned to Mexico some time ago. Her mother’s departure was the catalyst for Maldonado to become more involved in electoral and civic matters. “We need a permanent solution on immigration, not just for my family, but millions of families across the country and many diverse families that are living in these complexities of being separated,” she explains. 

The Latino vote in the upcoming election could mean a shift in the usual narrative about the nation’s second-largest group of voters, Maldonado says. “If we didn’t have this much power, there wouldn’t be so many attempts at trying to strip away our rights.” She adds, “We just need to come together and make it happen even greater this year.” 

“I understand why young people are really angry and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States. … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”

Fonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative Covering Climate Now and conducted by The Guardian, CBS News, and Rolling Stone magazine.

Making major social change requires massive, nonviolent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of activism, from her anti–Vietnam War and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights, and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”

During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it” or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”

Scientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by the next decade, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling and fracking and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: Do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”

Fonda launched the Jane Fonda Climate political action committee three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state, and local. “The PAC focuses down ballot—on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”

Forty-two of the 60 candidates the PAC endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the PAC is providing money, voter outreach, and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state,” she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California.”

Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency.” She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our PAC candidates” as well.

Her PAC has a strict rule: It endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said. Polls show that most Americans want climate action, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “We’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry. … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”

Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the climate emergency and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris–Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well.” But she “was very disturbed that the No. 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour and a half to come up and was not really addressed,” she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”

Given her years of anti-nuclear activism—including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979—it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.

“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these small modular reactors are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: No nuclear reactor of any kind—the traditional or the smaller or the modular, none of them—has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “Solar takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”

The reason that solar—and wind and geothermal—energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it.” Noting that air pollution from fossil fuels kills 9 million people a year globally, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it! We pay $20 billion a year [in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying. … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet—but they run the world.”

The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds Taylor Swift for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris–Walz ticket.

“I think she’s awesome, amazing, and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”

“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience. … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central Valley and Kern County and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”

Climate activism is also “so much fun,” she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.

“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘Everything’s gonna be fine,’ but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is ‘I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.’”

This article by The Guardian is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

Alongside get-out-the-vote efforts that happen right before elections, long-term policy-oriented campaigns are underway nationwide to boost voter turnout in the U.S., including making Election Day a national holiday to give voters time off to cast their ballots, rolling out automatic and pre-registration options, and expanding vote-at-home options. “Generating higher voter turnout is critical toward building a healthy democracy that works for everyone,” says Andrea Hailey, CEO at Vote.org.

Several factors influence voter turnout in every nation, including voter enthusiasm; candidates and issues; and whether the election is a presidential, midterm, or local election. The U.S. is unique in its complex and patchwork state-led voting system, which creates stumbling blocks for would-be voters at every turn. “One of the largest contributors to low voter turnout in the U.S. [are] the laws that govern voting,” says Gayle Alberda, a professor of politics and public administration at Fairfield University.

Depending on where a voter lives, they must navigate a series of hurdles, including registering to vote, requesting an absentee ballot or locating a polling place, and ensuring they have the documents required to cast a ballot before they even get to the ballot box. These burdens are multiplied for some groups, including individuals with limited English proficiency, students attending college away from home, those in rural or low-income areas, and disabled people to whom registration processes or polling locations may be inaccessible. “This process places the burden of voting on the individual,” says Alberda, making it less likely people will turn out to vote.

Organizations focused on voter education and mobilization, including community groups and national giants such as Vote.org and VoteRiders, backed by tens of thousands of volunteers, help eligible voters navigate these complexities each election cycle. Their efforts are vital, but the groups are fighting an uphill battle. The nation also needs policy interventions to streamline the burdensome election system and ensure more Americans can access the democratic process. 

Making Election Day a national holiday is one such intervention that has gained steam and even Congressional backers in recent years. “Work-related barriers hold back as many as 35% of non-voters from going to the polls,” says Hailey, citing data from a Pew Research Center survey conducted after the 2014 midterms. Currently, “time off to vote” laws vary widely across the country, and fewer than half of U.S. states require employers to provide paid time off for employees to vote.

Representative Anna G. Eshoo introduced the Election Day Holiday Act in 2024 to standardize state rules by making Election Day a federal holiday. Hailey says her organization hopes the bill is passed “so every voter has the flexibility they need to vote.” In the absence of a federal mandate, in August 2024, Vote.org launched a national campaign challenging businesses to guarantee paid time off for their employees to vote on or before Election Day. 

While making Election Day a national holiday is a simple way to signal the importance of civic participation, researchers and voting rights advocates say the intervention should be coupled with changes to how people register to vote and cast their ballots. Research from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University suggests that automatic and pre-registration options significantly positively impact turnout, especially among young voters. 

With automatic voter registration (AVR), eligible voters are automatically registered when they utilize the services of a state agency, such as when they apply for a driver’s license or identification card at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Those who do not want to register to vote can opt out. “Studies show that automatic voter registration does increase voter registration and slightly increases voter turnout as it does eliminate a key barrier to voting, the registration process,” says Alberda. 

Oregon was the first state to implement AVR in 2016, and data from the first year of implementation showed that AVR added more than a quarter of a million voters to the state’s rolls. Of that group, 36% were first-time registrants, and the group was younger and more ethnically diverse than the population of voters who had registered before automatic registration went into effect. A total of 22 states nationwide have enacted AVR policies so far. From Oregon’s introduction of AVR in 2016 to the 2018 voter registration deadline, Oregon and seven other states with new AVR programs added a combined 2.2 million voters to the rolls.

Another innovation in voter registration is pre-registration, which allows young people to register to vote before reaching voting age. Many states allow 17-year-olds to register to vote as long as they will turn 18 before the next federal election. Some go even further and allow those as young as 16 to pre-register. This approach eliminates the challenge of reaching would-be voters for the first time when they turn 18, an age at which many are transitioning into college life or new jobs away from home.

Pre-registration also allows young people to become familiar with the election process while still in school and rooted in a community. These factors encourage an enduring sense of civic responsibility and can turn teenagers into lifelong voters, according to Ava Mateo, president of voter organization 18by Vote. “Pre-registering to vote not only provides pathways for younger people to be involved in the civic process earlier, but it also, through our experience, has shown to have a positive impact on youth voter turnout,” she says.

Expanding vote-by-mail is another way to boost voter turnout. With this method, which resembles absentee balloting, the government mails ballots to eligible voters, and the voter marks their ballot at home and returns it before a deadline. Currently, eight states and Washington, D.C., mail paper ballots to every registered voter before every election. Many voters also got a taste of this system when in-person polling locations had to be closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and states temporarily shifted to mail balloting. 

Alberda says that shift helped drive “record-high turnout” in the November 2020 election. Most states only offer vote-by-mail for absentee voters in limited cases, and moving toward universal mail balloting could give turnout another boost. Similar to making Election Day a national holiday to ensure paid time off for voting, allowing people to vote from home eliminates work-related barriers that prevent so many Americans from getting to the polls. Recent research from the National Vote at Home Institute, a research and advocacy nonprofit, suggests that implementing vote-by-mail could boost turnout by as much as 3 to 4 points in some jurisdictions.

For Barbara Smith Warner, executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, expanding vote-by-mail is not only a matter of engaging more voters but also of showing respect for voting as a fundamental right. “If you think voting is a right, it should be as convenient and voter-centric as possible, and nothing is easier than sending everybody their damn ballot.”

Some innovations to expand voter access have faced criticism from conservatives, who claim they could open the door to voter fraud. However, there is no evidence to back assertions that mail balloting leads to illegal voting. Errors with automatic voter registration programs are also rare and mitigable. In Oregon, where it has recently come to light that some voters were mistakenly registered through the automatic system without showing requisite proof of citizenship, the state is following up on individual cases. The Oregon Secretary of State’s office emphasized that the records show evidence of clerical errors, meaning that clerks had mistakenly identified people as U.S. citizens when they obtained a driver’s license, even though they had not provided proof of citizenship. Previously, in cases such as this, many of the registrants were, in fact, citizens and only needed to provide a missing document to update their registration.

While pro-democracy organizers fight to protect the right to vote and boost the nation’s relatively low voter turnout on multiple fronts, they are also forced to confront harmful conservative narratives that paint expanding voter access as potentially leading to fraud. They are also up against regressive legislation from Republican lawmakers to restrict rather than expand access to the polls. The nonpartisan research group Voting Rights Lab has tracked a surge in restrictive voter identification laws, restrictions on mail voting, and other policies undermining voting rights in the last decade. 

Advocates argue that the struggle to expand access and boost turnout is nonpartisan, and legislation to restrict voting is a threat to all. “Voter suppression threatens the constitutional rights of every American,” says Hailey. “The best way to safeguard the foundations of our democracy is to empower the electorate and ensure every voter has the opportunity to make their voice heard.”

That the United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than most countries in the world is, by now, a truism.

But that’s not the only way in which the country is an outlier. The vast majority of people locked up in prisons throughout America cannot vote. In many democratic nations, including Canada and most of the European Union, voting rights for incarcerated citizens are not revoked. Imprisonment itself is seen as sufficient punishment. 

The exclusion does not stop at the prison walls. There are over 2 million other Americans who have served their time but remain barred from voting because of a felony conviction. 

In total, 4.6 million people are locked out of the democratic process in the United States. Nearly half of them are Black and Latino. That’s a fundamental flaw in this experiment called democracy. 

Restoring our right to vote would make society safer. It would give incarcerated people a means of pushing back against a system that controls our lives. And it would help America realize a truer, more inclusive version of itself. 

People in this country have a long history of fearing the other. I wonder what people might fear about currently and formerly incarcerated people voting? Is it that we might vote against the interests of fellow Americans? 

Maybe some of us would vote in humane policymakers who mandate air conditioning in prisons, or who challenge forced prison labor like picking cotton, the major cash crop of U.S. slavery. Others might mark their ballots for lawmakers committed to creating more green spaces and reducing food deserts in under-resourced communities.

Or maybe that wouldn’t happen. We are not a monolithic, single-issue voting bloc. In fact, inside I have noticed that it’s the working class, across all demographics, who overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. Those with more formal education tend to support Kamala Harris.  

We probably care a lot about what you care about. We want our kids to grow up healthy and safe. We want fair politicians reelected and corrupt ones voted out. We want to fund and strengthen our communities, but not waste money.

For me? I would throw my support behind school board members who would allow my daughter to read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of Texas’ most frequently banned books. I would advocate for safe and clean drinking water in rural towns, where prisons are often located. And I would rally behind leaders who protect a broad range of reproductive rights because I don’t believe my daughters should have fewer reproductive rights than their grandmother. 

Meanwhile, by letting us have a say in politics, you are helping us become reinvested in our communities, where most of us will someday return. The Sentencing Project released a report last year that argued restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions can improve public safety. The right to vote and the act of voting are linked to reduced recidivism for Americans who have been involved with the criminal legal system, according to the report. 

Instead of getting involved in our communities, we’re forced to sit on the sidelines and let the state do with us what it pleases.

A few years ago, Texas began digitizing all incoming mail. Before then, I was able to hold letters from my loved ones. I remember tracing the pink crayon-heart indentations of my daughter’s script, and taking in the signature scent of my mother’s perfume, which she sprayed on the page. Now, that simple but profound moment of physical connection is gone, and I can’t do anything about it.

Larger, attacks on our rights and dignity are also occurring while we cry out into the abyss, hoping someone will hear us. Failed forms of three-strikes laws continue to extend sentences for convictions, no matter how old. Marijuana possession is still criminalized in many states, including Texas, a fact responsible for countless ruined lives. And elderly folks with dementia, who in some cases can’t even recall their convictions, are routinely denied compassionate release. Shouldn’t those of us most impacted by these policies have an opportunity to influence them?

Some people think “no.” Supporters of felony disenfranchisement laws tend to argue that incarcerated people gave up their privilege to vote when they chose to break the law. But this view ignores the fact that our legal system treats the poor differently than the rich. 

Consider the financial crisis of 2008. None of its bank CEO architects, who ruined millions of lives and cost the country an estimated $23 trillion, went to jail or prison. Same for members of the infamous Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma created Oxycontin and marketed the fatally addictive drug under false pretenses, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths nationwide. Neither the bank CEOs nor the Sacklers lost their privilege to vote, despite breaking the law. 

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump, who was found guilty on 34 felony counts earlier this year, continues his run for re-election to the highest office in the land.

But my neighbors incarcerated for bouncing grocery checks at Walmart are left without the right to have a voice in our government? 

More than anything, restoring our right to vote would honor the spirit of our democracy. It would signal to everyone inside and out that all voices matter, no matter what.

That would be a novel but no less essential development in the history of America. Since the end of the Civil War, the United States has found ways to disenfranchise Black voters. It started with literacy tests and poll taxes and threats of racist violence. Now, it’s through voter suppression laws and mass incarceration. 

“We the People” includes we the incarcerated. It’s long past time to allow all voting-age Americans the freedom to vote.

I was incarcerated for more than eight years in Florida. I’ve been free for 18 months and just recently got the bug to vote again. Problem was, I didn’t know if I was eligible to register. I wasn’t debriefed on the matter when I left prison, and I’d heard different things from different people. Some said: “Felons can’t vote in Florida. Ever.” While others claimed: “You can vote as long as you’re done with your sentence.”      

I needed guidance. And clearly I wasn’t the only one.  

A new proposal by the Florida Division of Elections seeks to end confusion around restoration of voting rights. If passed, the update to its existing advisory opinion process would provide people with felony convictions the chance to request a formal opinion stating definitively whether their voting rights have been restored. In so doing, it will clarify a complicated state statute that governs the process of reinstating voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. 

“We wanted to figure out a simple question: Whose job is it to determine voter eligibility?” Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told Spectrum News 13 in August in support of the proposal. 

Confusion Over the Law

The state statute in question, SS 98.0751, dictates that for all crimes other than murder or sex offenses, restoration of voting rights is contingent upon sentence completion, including parole or probation and the satisfaction of all court-ordered fines and fees. People convicted of murder or sex offenses must seek additional permission in the form of clemency from a state-appointed board.

But this alone doesn’t definitively answer the question of eligibility. Many people are not even aware of all the fines they owe post-incarceration, let alone the offense-specific guidelines laid out in the statute.   

Meade said the proposed process, including a special form, would affirmatively address these issues. He added, “The other thing, which I think is huge, is that it provides protection for people against” being arrested for voter fraud. 

Forty-one formerly incarcerated people were arrested in 2022 and 2023 for voter fraud in Florida, according to Southern Poverty Law Center. At least some of them had attempted to vote based on honest misunderstandings of the state statute—yet their prosecutions proceeded. 

In response, some critics charged that Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Republicans were deliberately suppressing the voting rights of felons. 

“Instead of fulfilling its role to enable Floridians to vote, the state has made it more difficult, which is anti-democratic,” said Courtney O’Donnell, a senior staff attorney for voting rights with the Southern Poverty Law Center, in an article posted on the group’s site.

Florida does indeed make it hard for felons to vote. A 2023 fact sheet by The Sentencing Project states that Florida disenfranchises nearly 1.5 million people with felony convictions, more than any other state in the nation.

A History of Controversy

The latest saga in the battle over felony disenfranchisement in Florida began heating up in 2018. 

That’s the year voters in the state approved Amendment 4, which automatically restored voting rights to anyone with felony convictions—minus those convicted of murder or sex offenses—upon release from prison. DeSantis opposed the measure. Not even a year later, thanks to legislative support by his fellow Republicans, DeSantis signed SS 98.0751 into law.   

Legal battles ensued. Opponents of the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said it effectively instituted a “poll tax,” whereby only those who could pay could vote, echoing similar attempts from the Jim Crow era. 

DeSantis said the measure was a safeguard against giving “violent felons” certain societal benefits “without regard to the wishes of the victims.”  

Ultimately, the fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2020 decided against intervening in a lower-court ruling that upheld the new law. In a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the law “prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor.”

Moving Forward

SS 98.0751 is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. In my case, once I did my homework, the registration process ultimately went smoothly. However, I credit this to my relative privilege in being resourceful enough to conduct such research and pay my fines, coupled with my not being convicted of murder or a sex crime.  Sadly, many others aren’t so lucky.   

The special opinion process proposed by the Florida Department of Elections is not expected to go into effect before the Oct. 7 deadline to register to vote in the fall election, according to CBS News Miami. 

For more information on voting in Florida, visit the website of the supervisor of elections in your county or myfloridaelections.com. You can also review this fact sheet from the ACLU of Florida.

Since the 1960s and the election of President John F. Kennedy, younger voters have supported Democratic candidates, while older voters leaned Republican. But that dynamic has been evolving, and now, in 2024, large numbers in both groups are bucking traditional assumptions about their political affiliation.

This shift challenges the age-old political adage that youthful idealism gives way to conservative pragmatism with age. As pollsters and pundits scramble to explain the phenomenon, one intriguing theory emerges: It may come down to happiness.

The Unhappy Vote for Change

I am an interpersonal communication researcher and the co-founder and co-director of the Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet Political Communication Lab. Our lab investigates and analyzes public opinion and political trends nationwide. With the upcoming election, I’ve been specifically examining the potential influence of happiness on voting patterns.

Research worldwide indicates that happy people prefer keeping things the same, and they tend to vote for the incumbent in political elections. Voters who aren’t as happy are more open to anti-establishment candidates, seeing the government as a source of their discontent.

These findings may help to explain the Democratic Party’s waning support among young people.

This group is still reliably blue. Vice President Kamala Harris has an edge among voters under 30, with 50% favoring her over former President Donald Trump’s 34%. U.S. voters ages 18 to 35 mainly prefer Democratic views on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Yet they are more likely to vote Republican than they have been in the past, especially young men.

Youth Are No Longer Carefree

Declining life satisfaction and happiness levels among young Americans may help to explain their changing political preferences.

Our March 2024 poll found that 55% of respondents ages 18 to 34 reported dissatisfaction with their lives, compared with 65% of the general population.

These findings, as well as other national polls, challenge the common belief that young adulthood is one of life’s happiest periods.

Recent polling data suggests that older voters, long a Republican base, are trending blue in 2024. As of September 2024, Harris leads among older voters, with somewhere between 51% to 55% favoring her over Trump.

These happy seniors appear to be concerned about sweeping changes that could occur under another Trump administration, like ending even more abortion rights. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 erased what was seen as a major milestone and accomplishment for that generation.

Older Americans are also focused on retaining Social Security benefits, a Democratic priority that Trump has wavered on, and maintaining lower prescription drug costs. Both of these programs help keep older Americans happy and healthy. They barely register for young people.

Polls are notoriously slippery, and they’ll keep changing. But, increasingly, age is no longer a very good indicator of party affiliation.

Happiness Matters at the Ballot Box

I am not suggesting that happiness drives all voting behavior or explains changing political preferences in the United States. But I am saying that it should not be ignored.

My research indicates that to understand why people vote the way they do, it’s essential to examine happiness alongside other key factors like the economy and personal experiences. By studying how happiness connects with age, life experiences, and engagement with social media, researchers can gain clearer insights into the changing voting behavior of both young and old voters.

The 2024 presidential candidates seem to have intuited this. The Harris campaign is all about “joy” and celebrating happiness and community. The Trump campaign adopts an angrier tone and a grievance-filled approach.

Ultimately, happiness is more than just a mood. Just as much as ideology, the literal pursuit of happiness may be shaping decisions at the ballot box.

This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been republished here with permission. 

Maali’s family comes from the occupied West Bank. She says, “My father is older than Palestine,” when it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1948. Wearing a long keffiyeh-patterned dress that skimmed the grass, Maali was joined by several friends waving Palestinian flags and holding up posters denouncing President Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe.” They were among 3,000 demonstrators that drew heavily from Chicago’s “Little Palestine,” the largest Palestinian community in the country.

When asked how the movement for Gaza could pressure Democrats and presidential nominee Kamala Harris to end the Israeli genocide, Maali says, “Hold out our votes.” She asks, “What else do we have besides our votes? That is our only power.” 

Nearby was Satnaam Singh Mago, who wore a T-shirt with a T. rex grasping a Palestinian flag. Like Maali, Mago has voted for Democrats faithfully all his life. Now, however, he rejects the idea of “the lesser of two evils” and “voting based on fear.” But he is also hopeful. “We have the power to change an election. … What we are trying to tell Kamala Harris is you have to earn our vote.” 

I interviewed a couple dozen people the week of the DNC and asked protesters about pressing issues like abortion rights, Project 2025, and the dangers of a second Trump presidency. Almost all protesters told me things like, “Genocide isn’t a single issue, it’s the only issue,” “I can’t vote for genocide,” and “Trump is worse on some things, but there is nothing worse than genocide.”

The protesters reflected my own thoughts. We have real power. The more voters declare, “No arms embargo, no vote,” the more pressure it puts on Harris to capitulate to our demands ahead of the election on November 5. 

Let’s not kid ourselves. Harris supports the genocide of Palestinians. On four high-profile occasions she has declared, “Israel has a right to defend itself”: after meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in July, during her DNC speech, during her interview on CNN, and during the presidential debate on September 10, when she also reiterated the widely debunked claim that mass rape was committed by Hamas during its attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. American politicians have long invoked Israel’s “right to defend itself.” In the context of Israel wiping out Gaza in the name of “defending” itself from Hamas, that phrase is a dog whistle for genocide.

It’s hard to accept that we are complicit in genocide. It’s easier to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame, that we are not responsible, that Biden cannot end arms transfers with a phone call, that Harris will end them after she is elected.  It’s also easier to treat genocide as a transactional issue: Gaza is bad, but the threat to abortion rights and democracy and Project 2025 are bigger risks. Or, Trump will enact a worse genocide in Gaza.

We need to hear other perspectives. Outside the DNC I talked to one woman, who didn’t want to give her name, who told me she had lost more than a hundred relatives in Gaza to Israel’s attacks. She said, “Every morning I wake up in anguish. I don’t know who survived last night. Many days I can’t get in touch with anyone. I have cousins whose families have been wiped out. One aunt is in a wheelchair with a heart condition. A cousin has diabetes and can’t get medicine. They’re dying.” She burst out crying while speaking to me.

Can we honestly tell her to vote for the party slaughtering her family? Why is it that we won’t save her from a violent America, but we expect her to save us from a different face of that same violence? If this was happening to you, would you be telling people to vote for the party wiping out everyone who knew and loved?

In Chicago, protesters showed us what solidarity looks like. It means seeing the world through the eyes of the people you are supporting, and to work to achieve their goals. Palestinians are being crushed by the American empire. We benefit from the empire in terms of wealth, power, jobs, and lower-cost goods and resources. Solidarity means putting the needs of oppressed peoples before our own.

The defeat of the American empire by the Vietnamese inspired international solidarity movements of all types. A mass movement of Americans in solidarity with the people of Central America likely stopped Reagan from invading Nicaragua. The anti-apartheid movement helped bring down the brutal Afrikaner regime in South Africa. 

Now we need to be in solidarity with Palestine and say, “End the genocide immediately.” 

Genocide is the worst political act possible: the extermination of an entire people. “Never again” does not mean “never again except for Palestinians.” If we think we can’t stop this, then we are nihilists. We are saying politics is useless.

It starts with hope. Student protesters for Gaza last spring had a rock-solid conviction they could force universities to divest from Israel. While only a few schools have divested so far (it is always a trickle before it is a flood), the protests worked. They triggered an avalanche of divestment and academic, cultural, and scientific boycotts that have made Israel an international pariah. With students returning for the fall, pro-Palestine protests are back in session despite universities imposing new methods to crush free speech and assembly. 

By continuously emphasizing ironclad support for Israel, Harris is revealing that support is actually fragile. This gives us an opening to force her to earn our vote by making it contingent on an arms embargo and an end to the genocide. This is hardball politics. It’s what billionaires do. They cut million-dollar checks to candidates and demand much more in return. Harris recently caved to pressure from billionaires to drop a proposed tax on the ultrawealthy.

We have something more precious than dollars. There are millions of us horrified by the genocide and who want it to end immediately. But many of us are scared to use our power. Right before the DNC, a poll was conducted of nearly 1,500 Democratic and independent voters in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. It found that 34% or more of voters in those states would be likelier to support Harris if there was a permanent cease-fire or an arms embargo on Israel.

In Chicago, a protester named Chris, a member of the Starbucks Workers United union, says, “It’s a genocide happening in real time, and people don’t want to call it that.” Still, he plans to vote for Harris, saying, “I will make sure to hold her accountable the whole time she’s in office.” When asked how he can hold Harris accountable after the election, Chris says, “I don’t know. It’s tough.” 

This is the problem. Instead of using our power over the Democrats before the election, when it is most potent, we surrender to them. It’s because they have perfected a formula to terrorize us. Every four years they hold a gun to our heads and say, “The world will end if you don’t elect us.” The name on the gun changes—Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, McCain, Romney, and Trump—but the threat remains the same.

The Democrats have trapped us. We vote them in. But then not only do we get nothing in return, they do the dirty work of Republicans. And we ignore it.

This strategy was honed during the 1964 campaign with the infamous “Daisy Ad.” The commercial shows a little blonde girl plucking petals off a flower as she counts. She freezes as a loudspeaker at a test site starts counting down. A thermonuclear blast fills the screen, and President Lyndon Johnson intones, “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live. Or to go into the dark. We must either love each other. Or we must die.” 

Subtle, it wasn’t. Johnson was saying a vote for Barry Goldwater was a vote for annihilation, and that he, in contrast, was the candidate of love. Except exactly one month before the ad aired, Congress handed Johnson a blank check for a U.S. war that eventually killed 5 million people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. 

They have been using this trick for 60 years. Democrats have us so terrified of the right that we will sign off on any atrocity as long as Team Blue does it. Bill Clinton fulfilled the Reagan Revolution, Obama supersized the war on terror, and Biden is to blame for the Gaza genocide, not Trump. 

Democrats have sat in the White House for 20 of the past 32 years. They deregulated Wall Street, bailed it out after it blew up the economy, and protected criminal bankers from prosecution. Democrats sabotaged climate change accords and enabled a historic oil and gas boom that has baked in climate catastrophe. They gutted welfare, passed NAFTA, allowed the far right to capture the courts, supercharged mass incarceration, created the “most intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world,” and built a massive immigration prison system.

Harris promises more of the same: more border cruelty, more global warming, more genocide. More of the same threats we hear every election: “This election … is the most important of our lives.” 

Instead we should beware that Gaza is a threat of genocides to come.

I have reported from border cities such as Tijuana and Matamoros that have become killing fields as a result of our policies that have spawned brutal wars, criminal cartels, and climate chaos. By 2050 climate refugees could number 1.2 billion, according to one estimate. Harris’ vow to be “tougher” than Trump on the border means more violence, deaths, and racism. Ratcheting up anti-immigrant policies as their numbers increase could bring genocide to our borders.

We cannot throw 90% of humanity under the bus. If we don’t end the razing of Gaza, we will throw open the gates of hell. Genocide is like COVID-19 and climate change: Borders won’t stop it. 

We can succumb to defeatism and believe Harris will never agree to an arms embargo and permanent cease-fire. 

Or we can remember that every movement that has made the world better—labor, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights—had an absolute belief they would win. They refused compromises, half measures, and surrendering. 

There can be no compromise in the fight for Palestine. If not now, when?

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

Harris walked directly up to Trump, extended her hand, and leaned in, even after it was clear that he had no intention of greeting her. In introducing herself, Harris pronounced her name, “COMMA-LA,” clearly and correctly, leaving him no excuses to ever mispronounce it again. 

Harris was confident, in control, and in command of the night. 

Gender dynamics were on display for much of the high-stakes debate, which Trump spent showing and telling his brand of masculinity to voters. He was divisive, demeaning, and distracting, much of his behavior a reminder of his four years in office and his continued words and actions on the campaign trail. During most of the 90-minute exchange, he ignored the two Black women on stage—avoiding eye contact with Harris and rarely addressing moderator Linsey Davis—intentionally choosing to largely engage the only other white man present, moderator David Muir. 

When Harris addressed Trump, she referred to him respectfully as “the former president.” But at no point did he address Harris by her first or last name, nor by her title. Instead, Trump made frequent references to “her boss” when mentioning President Joe Biden in an effort to diminish Harris’ leadership and agency. 

The candidates’ microphones were muted while their opponents spoke, a rule set when Biden was the candidate and one that Harris unsuccessfully fought to reverse. But her facial expressions, ranging from exhausted to incredulous to amused, did the talking as an often scowling Trump made various false statements on abortions and infanticide, immigrants eating pets in Midwestern communities, and his repeated claim that he won the 2020 election. 

He tried to control the stage—and at times attempted to dominate Harris. “I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please. Does that sound familiar?” Trump said sarcastically at one point when Harris attempted to interject, referencing Harris saying “I’m speaking” to Vice President Mike Pence in a 2020 debate after he tried to interrupt her. Toward the end of the debate, Trump essentially tried to shush her again, simply saying, “Quiet, please,” during an answer on how he would handle the war on Russia. 

There was also no live audience at the debate, but the audience Harris was speaking to was clear. She had two goals on Tuesday: to speak directly to voters who may just be learning about her candidacy, which is still barely 50 days old, and to expose Trump to viewers, reminding them of his temperament and tone.

She did both with a smile and a laugh, which he has also ridiculed, while using Trump’s own tactics to draw him out. When asked a question about immigration—a thorny issue for her as vice president—Harris’ response quickly shifted the subject from one that inflames voters to one that inflamed Trump: his rallies, and in particular, the implication that his crowds are starting to dwindle. 

“He’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight even when it’s not the subject that is being raised,” Harris said before proceeding to change the topic herself.

“I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies, because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said. “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”

Instead of responding to Harris’ claims that Trump intentionally sabotaged federal legislation to reform immigration or attacking her record on the issue, Trump impulsively launched into a defense of his rallies before repeating a bizarre, racist, and false claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in small-town communities across the country. Contrast shown. 

Heading into Tuesday night, Trump had referred to his opponent as “crazy,” “dumb,” “crooked,” a liar, “grossly incompetent,” “low IQ,” and “weak.” While it was initially unclear whether he would show his contempt for Harris on stage, he was ultimately unable to resist. 

By the end of the night, Harris shut down every stereotype he has tried to pin on her. When he doubled down on questioning her Blackness, Harris pointed to the response as part of a stale playbook rooted in racism and sexism that should be a relic of our politics. 

Ahead of the debate, Trump insisted on Truth Social that “no boxes or artificial lifts” be allowed during the debate for the shorter Harris, implying that to do so would be a form of cheating. In the end, it was the former president, almost a foot taller than Harris, who came across as smaller.

This story was originally published by The 19th and is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. This column first appeared in The Amendment, a biweekly newsletter by Errin Haines, The 19th’s editor-at-large.

Almost no one has asked what men need to do in order to remedy the problem that the job has been off-limits to more than 50% of the talent pool since … forever.

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, that changed. Democratic men made choices that were entirely new, or exceedingly rare, in support of a woman presidential candidate and in service to the nation. It was unprecedented.

As a communication scholar who studies gender and political leadership, I’ve argued that the biggest impediment to electing a woman as president is not a dearth of qualified woman candidates but a collective inability to recognize them as such. The fault is not in the candidates but in American culture.

As it turns out, men in politics were also to blame.

When faced with competitive women as presidential candidates, many men historically have leveraged their power and privilege in ways that undercut women’s candidacies. But the Democratic convention was different.

For the first time in history, men in a major political party offered unified support for a woman candidate. They refrained from strategically deploying the stereotype that strong women are not likable, as Barack Obama did with Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

They accepted the party’s overwhelming support for a woman candidate, instead of insisting on being entitled to superdelegates, as Bernie Sanders did in 2016.

And they put their career on hold to support their spouse’s candidacy instead of undercutting it by offering support to primary campaign challengers, as Bob Dole did when Elizabeth Dole sought the Republican Party’s nomination in 2000.

“Relinquishing Male Power”

Rhetorical choices reveal the underlying motivations of individuals and groups. The messaging of Democratic men at the 2024 convention signaled that their party was finally ready to do something that no major party has ever done. They were not only nominating a woman candidate but relinquishing male power and privilege.

Biden surprised everyone when he pulled out of the race in response to pressure from flagging poll results, skeptical donors and party leaders, and nervous down-ballot candidates. Any resentment he may have felt, however, did not turn into pique or pettiness at the convention.

When the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Joe,” he instructed, “Thank you, Kamala, too,” and promised to be “the best volunteer the Harris and Walz camp have ever seen.” He didn’t just give up his candidacy. He ceded his authority—to the people and the party, but also to Harris, specifically.

Although Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg angled to be Harris’ running mate and may still harbor his own presidential aspirations, he did not use his convention speaking slot to audition for the 2028 campaign. Instead, he performed the role that historically has been reserved for women at political conventions: pitching the party’s message via the perspective of a parent whose primary concern is “kitchen table” politics, issues that affect children and families most directly.

The convention speech given by the presidential nominee’s spouse has historically been an opportunity for prospective first ladies to portray their husbands as patriarchs of an ideal American family. In his speech, second gentleman Doug Emhoff painted a picture of a “complicated” and “blended family” with no patriarch but two active partners, equally capable of professional success and deep commitment to family.

When Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate, she defied many pundits and the oddsmakers who deemed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro the best strategic choice. Walz’s convention performance was described by one news outlet as the message of a “Midwest ‘man’s man’” and the “antidote to toxic MAGA masculinity.” Even Ms. magazine touted it as a “Masculinity-Themed Populist Pep Talk.”

But Walz did something Americans are not used to seeing “man’s men” do. He made it clear that he could work not just with, but for, a woman. And that everyone should.

After informing the crowd that the election was in the metaphorical “fourth quarter,” the team was “down a field goal,” and the offense was “driving down the field,” Coach Walz made it clear that, as in his high school coaching days, he was the assistant coach. Their leader was Kamala Harris, and “Kamala Harris is tough. Kamala Harris is experienced. And Kamala Harris is ready.”

Contented Second Fiddles

To be clear, Harris’ early success as a presidential candidate should be attributed, first and foremost, to her skillful and dexterous response to a series of unprecedented events and to the savvy support of the Black women who have long sustained the Democratic Party.

But the men of the convention made a collective choice to embrace “their second-fiddle roles,” as an Axios reporter described it, and treat Harris like a commander in chief. That should be unremarkable. Women have been doing it for presidential candidates since … forever. But to see so many white men stepping back so enthusiastically for a woman of color was almost unbelievable.

Stepping back is not the same thing as stepping away. That’s important, because the broader message of the convention was about how to create an inclusive, democratic community. When you need to make a circle wider, and let more people in, you step back. That doesn’t leave you out of the circle. It makes your circle bigger.

The convention offered an expansive circle that includes gay dads raising strong-willed toddlers, blended families that attend synagogue and church, football coaches who bag pheasants and serve as faculty adviser to the high school’s gay-straight alliance club, and presidents who give up their power for the good of the country.

It also includes a presidential candidate who looks like no other president in U.S. history. That’s a big step forward for the country.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the debate floated among leftists on social media, the argument shifted from whether this well-known neo-Nazi slogan is acceptable to use to whether it is an accurate reflection of our current reality. “[It] would appear we have a Zionist Operated Government,” a Marxist Twitter account with more than 40,000 followers suggested. “Has anyone ever noticed that?”

White nationalists fashioned the term “ZOG” to refer to an antisemitic conspiracy theory in which “Zionist” is used to reference a shadowy global cabal of Jews who have infiltrated the United States. According to this conspiracy theory, this ethnic other has now taken the reins of power to undermine national sovereignty, racial integrity, and refashion the U.S. to act in the interests of a demonic power. 

Though this idea is overwhelmingly found on the right, this term’s brief revival also lends credence to concerns over antisemitism on the left and reveals a key misunderstanding of Israel’s role in global empire. Israel is not controlling U.S. policy. Instead, it is global Western empire itself determining the future of Palestine.

A Western Colony

The claim that Zionists control the U.S. can sometimes emerge from the “Israel lobby” thesis, an unfounded allegation that a network of pro-Israel lobbying groups are primarily responsible for manufacturing America’s Zionist consensus. This theory is often highlighted to critique real pro-Israel lobby groups such as AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who use their influence to push public policy.

But this framework is also often used in more dubious ways, suggesting a small, elite cadre (usually of Jews) are pulling the strings of geopolitics. However, that framing misunderstands the way both historical Zionists and Western political leaders view Israel as an outpost for Western interests in the Middle East.

While the earliest Jewish Zionists were motivated by what they saw as perennial antisemitism, they always acknowledged their success required imperial sponsorship. Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, always wanted Israel to be a client state of Western empires, even reaching out to South African colonialist Cecil Rhodes to aid this quest.

As Derek J. Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University, notes in an interview with Open Democracy, Herzl “was not wedded to the notion of a Jewish state.” Instead, he “wrote about many different forms of political organization” ranging from “an autonomous province in the Ottoman Empire” to “a crown colony,” and even “a protectorate under European control.” Ultimately, Herzl and the overall Zionist movement desired “a Jewish national home … secured by international law.” Similarly, Zionist theorist Leon Pinsker never envisioned Israel as an independent country but as simply one component of a European imperial arrangement.

While Zionism often used the language of national liberation movements, which were popular at the time, this was again part of the re-nativism common to colonial movements: to imagine yourself as the land’s new indigenous people. In reality, Ashkenazi immigration was intentionally allowed by the British during their mandate between 1917 and 1948, who also positively affirmed the creation of a Jewish state as a way of maintaining a stronghold in the formerly Ottoman-controlled region. This was not out of an abundance of care for Jewish immigrants escaping pogroms and the Holocaust, but as a way of maintaining British interests in perpetuity.

In 1920, Winston Churchill, who was soon to be prime minister, noted in the Sunday Herald that supporting Zionism was a way of subverting communism. He thought he could use Zionism to refashion Jewish identity and challenge the Bolshevik revolution in Russia by offering Jews Israel instead. Since Herzl wanted to create a European-style country in the Middle East, this could become a trade hub to move Western economic interests and control the increasingly important oil trade.

The logic harkened back to European political ideas, with figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte urging Jews to “return” to Zion during his Palestine Campaign as a way of undermining British trade pathways to India. Laurence Oliphant, a Christian Zionist who encouraged survivors of the 1881 Kiev pogrom to head to Palestine, argued in 1879 that if Ashekanzim created settlements in historic Palestine (which he originally called the Plan for Gilead) then he could secure “the political and economic penetration of Palestine by Britain.”

This process became clearer after World War I when the political and economic importance of the region came into focus for Western powers, and especially so after World War II, as the U.S. became an economic hegemon. The U.S. began looking to Israel as its own outpost, acknowledging in 1966 that it could no longer remain a global watchdog and would need friends in the region. As Arab countries experienced decolonization that often challenged U.S. corporate interests, the U.S. knew it would need a regional ally they could flood with defense spending.

This became a form of “military Keynesianism” through which the Foreign Military Financing could fortify domestic consent, and then push back on the growth of Arab nationalism and insurgent movements across the Global South. “Israel proved its ability to militarily overpower its neighbors,” writes Jason Farber in a 2021 Jacobin article. “If made an ally, American power brokers realized, the United States could use Israel to exert control indirectly.”

U.S. support for Israel only escalated after the Six-Day War, when Israel became an even more important part of the U.S. strategy in the region, pushing countries like Egypt into economically subservient partnerships. By 1973 the U.S. had offered more than $492 million in aid to Israel. In 1974, Pres. Richard Nixon increased that sum to a staggering $2.6 billion. Since then, aid to Israel has steadily increased, with $3.8 billion being offered in 2023 and an additional $14.3 billion offered in April 2024. The War on Terror only further motivated a direct U.S. investment in Israel, and the U.S. has sent a slew of military leaders to Israel to train them on the methods of counterinsurgency that were then used to squash uprisings in Palestine.

As the dollar amount increased, Israel became a lynchpin of Western domination in the region. As Egyptian-born scholar Abdel Wahab El-Messiri pointed out in 1969, when the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights were newly captured, the majority of Israeli companies that invested in Africa were “owned by Western monopolies,” such as those in the U.S., Britain, France, and West Germany. “Israel as an outpost of Western capital and neo-colonialist ideologies fulfills the prophecies and aspirations of the imperialists,” El-Messiri wrote.

One Empire, Many States

If pro-Israel forces were occupying the U.S. government, that would imply there are two different interests at play, but this misunderstands the relationship between Israel and the U.S. Rather than the U.S. and Israel operating as two independent states brokering a self-serving relationship, the U.S. and Israel operate as a single hegemonic system that mobilizes the Zionist project to stabilize profits and Western interests.

All the while, the far-right movement in Israel—birthed by a colonial situation and modeled on Germanic romantic nationalism—is being allowed to decimate indigenous Palestinian communities because political leaders have decided that having a compliant Israel is better than having a rebellious Palestinian republic. The U.S. therefore ensures a state of perpetual conflict, one that has further empowered the defense sector to escalate its investments and profits.

Since 1990, Lockheed Martin, one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the U.S. and a key supplier of arms to Israel, has spent more than $330 million in lobbying efforts. In contrast, AIPAC, the Israel lobby of record, has been a minor player in lobbying, only spending $60 million during that same time period. Lockheed’s stock price skyrocketed over the past year, with one of the biggest jumps happening between Oct. 5, 2023, and Oct. 10, 2023, a trend seen among several other weapons manufacturers.

Even AIPAC has evolved, becoming less a single-issue lobbying group and more of a vessel for corporate and conservative interests, of which Israel is a piece. In the end, a pro-Israel political vision is one that fits nicely in the world of hegemonic transnational corporations that would rather provide their friends with overwhelming control over the future of the Global South than enforce universal human rights.

The strength of the “Israel lobby” actually comes from a decidedly non-Jewish source. Evangelical Christians are the largest pro-Israel constituency in the United States. In fact, Christians United for Israel is the largest pro-Israel lobbying organization in the U.S., though these Christian Zionists support Israel based on an eschatological belief that Jews must return to Israel so they can face genocide or forced conversion when Jesus returns.

As support for Israel’s genocidal mission in Gaza declines among U.S. voters, there may come a time when the U.S. will need to seek a new ally in the region. If that were to happen, it would force massive shifts in the war through the loss of unquestioned loyalty and military aid, thus opening a window to a new future in the region.

But even that positive change says nothing about the overarching political reality that the U.S. and other powerhouse countries would simply look for other potential allies that will enact their interests across the Global South. In order to get to the heart of this crisis we have to look at the ongoing systems of colonialism and capitalism themselves, which are baked into the country we live in and drive its foreign policy. We have not been captured by an alien power; this is who America has been all along.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:00 a.m. PT on September 27, 2024, to acknowledge the existence and influence of Israel-focused lobbies. Read our corrections policy here. 

In a quip that launched a million memes, Minnesota Governor–turned–VP candidate Tim Walz referred to his right-wing political opposition as “weird people” in a July 23, 2024, interview on MSNBC.

Since then, the barb has stuck, with leading Democratic party figures, from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to presidential nominee Kamala Harris, branding their Republican opposition with the moniker.

Of course, in a classic deployment of the “I know you are, but what am I?” retort, the Republicans have tried to flip the script.

“You know what’s really weird?” Donald Trump Jr. opined on X. “Soft on crime politicians like Kamala allowing illegal aliens out of prison so they can violently assault Americans.” And in an interview with conservative radio host Clay Travis, former president Donald Trump said of Democrats, “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.”

While I get why both sides are hurling weird bombs at each other, I’m nevertheless not on board with all the “weird shaming.” It isn’t just hypocritical for each party to claim to speak on behalf of the forgotten and marginalized while mockingly calling the other side “weird.” It’s also deeply regressive.

The weird, I would argue, deserve respect. As someone who has spent the past three decades researching, writing about, and teaching topics including vampires, ghosts, monsters, cult films, and what gets categorized as “weird fiction,” I should know.

“Wyrd” History

When politicians use the term weird, they’re trying to depict their opponents as odd or strange. However, the origins of the term are much more expansive and profound.

The Old English wyrd, from which the contemporary usage is derived, in fact was a noun corresponding to fate or destiny. “Wyrd” signified the forces directing the course of human affairs—an understanding reflected, for example, by Shakespeare’s three prophetic “weird sisters” in Macbeth. An individual’s “weird” was their fate, while use of the term weird as an adjective connoted the supernatural power to manipulate human destiny.

Despite the progressive generalization of the term to refer to all things strange, fantastic, and unusual, resonances of the weird’s “wyrd” origins are retained by what has come to be called “weird fiction,” a subgenre of speculative fiction.

The weird tale, explained early 20th-century writer H.P. Lovecraft in his 1927 treatise “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” is one that challenges our taken-for-granted understandings of how the world works. It does this through—to use Lovecraft’s characteristic purple prose—a “malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguards against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

The weird tale pushes back against human pretensions of grandeur, hinting at just how much we don’t know about the universe and just how precarious our situation truly is.

Meanwhile, the freaks, geeks, outsiders, misfits, and mavericks are weirdos who push back in a different way. They are the nonconformists whom, as Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out in his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” “the world whips … with its displeasure.”

Where would we be, I wonder, without the artists and scientists and thinkers developing “weird” ideas and unorthodox ways to see and appreciate the world?

In this sense, nearly all progress is part of weird history, propelled by visionaries frequently misunderstood in their own time.

From Denigration to Celebration

Of course, not all weirdos change the world through grand gestures and history-altering interventions; sometimes weirdos just do their own thing.

That, too, has been a large part of the story of the past century, as Western culture has increasingly—if reluctantly—made room for once-unorthodox or even taboo forms of self-expression, from tattoos to drag shows.

Proliferating subcultures, gender identities, and forms of self-expression—although no doubt propelled by capitalist market forces—nevertheless demonstrate the premium placed today on individualism.

In fact, pop culture has been keen to invite historical weirdos back into the fold—so much so that vampires, ogres, and fairy-tale villains such as Maleficent from “Sleeping Beauty” now enlist audiences’ sympathies by telling their side of the story.

The true villains are now often seen as those who demonize difference and insist on straight-jacketing individual freedom of expression. Many contemporary monsters aren’t bad, they’re just misunderstood—and their monstrous behavior results from being bullied, excluded, insulted and rejected for being “weird.”

Reclaiming Weird

However sincerely felt, the Democrats’ deployment of the weird characterization is, of course, strategic.

Walz’s barb clearly managed to get under the skin of a crowd for whom the idea of not being “normal” is apparently distressing—and it is for this reason, I believe, that the Democrats have repeatedly tried to make the idea stick.

Historian of political rhetoric Jennifer Mercieca told the Associated Press, “The opposite of normalizing authoritarianism is to make it weird, to call it out and to sort of mock it.” Said another way, to refer to your opposition and their policies as “weird” is to denigrate it as abnormal.

Political expediency, however, comes with consequences—and here, much to my dismay, I find myself agreeing with Vivek Ramaswamy—the conservative entrepreneur who unsuccessfully ran for the Republican presidential nomination.

Ramaswamy wrote on X that the weird insults are “a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity & inclusion.’” Ironic puts it mildly.

This whole “they’re weird” argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile. This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest. It’s also a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches “diversity & inclusion.” Win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please.

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 29, 2024

While there may well be utility in deploying the term “weird” to frustrate political opponents, I’d prefer to reclaim the weird as something to appreciate, respect, and celebrate.

The weird is that which introduces cracks into the edifice of the status quo, liberating possibilities for different futures and forms of expression. There are many different, more specific adjectives politicians and others can use to characterize their rivals.

Let’s keep America weird.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.