Preventing the US presidency from being captured by a racist authoritarian whose inner circle includes outright fascists depends on the “margin of effort” in the next 20 days.
Gaining the strength to translate an electoral win into a new progressive cycle in US politics requires that our all-out effort—from now through Election Day and long beyond —includes immediate action to embed internationalism into the entire social justice movement’s vision and practice.
There is no room for complacency on either point.
Biden passing the torch to Kamala Harris energized the anti-MAGA coalition, but the laws of political gravity have since made themselves felt. The billionaires who aim to shape a second Trump administration have financed a powerful organizing and fear-mongering apparatus. Tens of millions of voters believe that a racist authoritarian narcissist can and should be President. This election will still come down to a few thousand votes in six or seven battleground states—and then the capacity to protect a winning outcome.
And Washington’s might-makes-right policies designed to maintain US global power—so vividly on display today in its backing for Israeli genocide and regional escalation—have consequences even beyond the carnage inflicted on oppressed peoples across the globe. The US commitment to militarism undermines every component of a progressive agenda, and its consequences fall hardest on the communities of color and working-class communities essential to winning the fight against the Right.
Militarism sucks resources away from human needs, exacerbates climate change, and is linked with and strengthens racist stereotypes. It generates constant threats to the right to protest, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. Commitment to worldwide hegemony via militarism brings the spectacle of Biden giving Netanyahu a green light for mass murder even as Netanyahu persists in war-making at least in part to help Trump win the 2024 election.
Our “margin of effort” needs to be greater than ever.
Anti-MAGA majority up against a rigged system
The potential to beat MAGA—and to deny them control of both houses of Congress—exists because the majority of the US population is opposed to MAGA’s agenda. Analyses of the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections shows that when a specific election is about MAGA, a majority of voters turn out to defeat the MAGA candidate. (See Michael Podhorzer’s analyses here and here.) The challenge is to galvanize that majority, to make clear to tens of millions what the stakes are in this election, and then to motivate the maximum number of voters to cast their ballots.
This is no simple task. MAGA runs a sophisticated disinformation operation, keeps ginning up its core base while simultaneously mounting well-funded efforts to send different messages to target groups. A barrage of anti-immigrant messages target African-Americans, calls to “defend traditional masculinity” are directed at young men of all backgrounds. Trump promises to be “a protector of women” even as he and the GOP attack reproductive rights. He claims to be all in for the working class while he and MAGA work overtime to undermine trade union rights. Trump postures as the peace candidate when he cozies up to strongman militarists across the globe and says Israel should “finish the job.”
Beyond that, the anti-MAGA coalition is up against a political system whose structures are rigged against us. The Electoral College, for example, is a racist and anti-democratic arrangement. Like Jim Crow laws and the disenfranchisement of women in earlier eras – and extensive gerrymandering today – it prevents the US people from electing our most powerful leader by the basic democratic principle of “one person, one vote” where everyone’s vote counts equally. It is “legal, but not legitimate.”
Likewise, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and rejection of any kind of level-playing-field campaign finance laws by a stacked Supreme Court are major barriers to fair elections and majority rule. Voter suppression in 2024 (including via intimidation by militias and “lone wolf” right-wingers) is shaping up to be more widespread that at any time since the Voting Rights Act was passed. And mountains of cash given to MAGA campaigns by Elon Musk and other right-wing moneybags are another legal but illegitimate election-buying scheme.
The existence of these structural obstacles to democracy makes engagement in electoral battle challenging and uncomfortable. But these barriers actually provide even more incentive to go all out to widen the “margin of effort” in the next 20 days.
A MAGA victory would lead to reinforcing all existing anti-democratic structures and adding new ones. But a MAGA defeat will make it possible to maintain the democratic space that social justice movements—especially the Palestine solidarity movement, the labor movement, the voting rights movement, and the reproductive rights movement– need to grow substantially. And it opens up the possibility for strengthened grassroots movements, in combination with further electoral action, to gain greater strength both inside and outside the current political system. And only if we gain much more power inside as well as outside the rigged US system will we have the capacity to unrig it.
So even as this election is urgent for protecting the limited democratic space we now have, it simultaneously opens the door to expanding that space. That is, our 2024 electoral work has an offensive as well as a defensive dimension.
Genocide and the deep structures of empire
The last year has taught us a bitter lesson in how deeply embedded the commitment to imperial domination is in Washington’s halls of power.
Images of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza show up every day on the cellphones of people across the globe. Israeli leaders vow to do in Lebanon what they are doing in Gaza. The US sending arms to an Israeli government that is blocking humanitarian aid as documented by official government bodies is a violation of US law—but the Secretary of State lies about it and the administration sends the arms anyway.
In the wake of an unprecedented movement for Palestinian rights a majority of the US people want to see a ceasefire and a majority of Democratic voters agree that Israel is committing genocide. Fury at Biden and Kamala Harris is intense throughout a constituency – Arab and Muslim voters – who were crucial to Biden’s 2020 victory. Political strategists and pundits across the political spectrum argue that Biden’s blank check backing for Israel is likely to hurt if not totally derail Harris’ chances this year. But neither the Biden foreign policy team nor Kamala Harris’ campaign operation budges.
This is a blaring alarm bell and no one should cover their ears. It is a clarion call to keep up our pressure on the administration every single day including via support for the congressional resolution introduced by Bernie Sanders to block sale of offensive weapons to Israel. It is urgent to make Palestinian rights an integral part of our 2024 “margin of effort.” At the same time, we must consider all the potential harms of a MAGA victory, as 25 Muslim clerics urged in a letter to Muslim voters.
And we have two crucial points to consider for our long-term strategy.
First, the fight for Palestinian rights and an end to Israel’s current genocidal war-making is at the cutting edge of the fight for peace, for defense of international law, for the right to protest here in the US. It is one of the crucial flashpoints of the fight against racist dehumanization of peoples of color in the face of the racial scapegoating now surging throughout the US and Europe. Only by making further breakthroughs in Palestine solidarity will the fight against white Christian Nationalism and fascism stand on a durable foundation.
Second, this fight in all its dimensions will only be won if it is waged both inside and outside the electoral arena. Direct action, boycott and divestment campaigns, constant engagement in the battle for public opinion, and mass mobilization are indispensable. So is electing champions of peace, anti-militarism, and Palestinian rights. And so is work to get the Democratic Party leadership to respond to its voters’ growing support for Palestinian rights. AIPAC’s biggest nightmare is that the period of support for Israel being a “bipartisan” project will come to an end, and we need to make that nightmare come true.
Engaging in politics requires making tough choices and recognizing that there is no guarantee of victory. But on both beating MAGA and ending arms transfers to Israel we have public opinion on our side. It is our “margin of effort” that can translate this sentiment into election victories and policy change.