For the First Time in the Trump Era, a Key Opportunity Is Here
This month voters repudiated MAGA in elections large and small across the country. Those of us on the left need a clear-eyed assessment of the political terrain and a vision that can look beyond the current fight.
Alex Han
We have a storytelling problem on the Left, and right now there is an easy story to parrot about the Democratic Party leadership’s profound failure to meet the moment.
It’s an old and familiar story that has been written again and again throughout my life.
It’s a story where the only updates are changes to names and dates.
The MAGA Right has shown its inability to cohere its vision of American authoritarianism and win majorities to it. At the same time, Democratic leaders have shown their inability to lead a political coalition that can defeat the Right.
There is no tactical maneuver that will change these fundamental truths. So we should be wary of easy stories that misdirect us, no matter how satisfying it might be to dunk on Chuck Schumer, no matter how crass the Democrats’ latest capitulations feel.
For those of us on the Left whose desire is to both defeat authoritarianism and win the future, we need to step back, assess the terrain and create goals and a vision that can look beyond the current fight. We can express both our disappointment and excitement, but we need to be clear-eyed on the structural questions ahead.
Since our founding in 1976, the “neighborhood streets” for In These Times have been in Chicago, where we are still based. We are living now in a city under occupation, a fact of life that is somehow both hard to escape and eerily unnoticeable.
On Election Day, as millions of voters went to the polls to elect a democratic socialist as mayor of New York City and repudiate MAGA in elections large and small across the country, we saw the terror that has come to our neighborhoods spoken to in three federal courtrooms in downtown Chicago: One hearing was on the flouting of previous court orders intended to protect fundamental constitutional rights during Operation Midway Blitz.
Another was on the cruel and inhumane conditions that detainees are facing in the Broadview ICE facility, just a few miles from Chicago.
This terror is why Zohran Mamdani’s improbable victory in New York City was only the tip of the iceberg on Election Day, only one part of the story. As voters, regardless of ideology, went to the polls and handed decisive victories to Democrats of every stripe across the country, they were responding to the reports of resistance from Chicago.
Pundits across the spectrum, from center to Left, can crow about what this moment means for the “future of the Democratic Party.” The reality is that this election was a rejection of Trump’s economy and a rejection of ICE and its cruelty — not an endorsement of any of its particular replacements.
For progressives and the Left to win, we’ve got to step into the tensions between the reactions at the ballot box and our neighborhood streets.
For those of us who believe in freedom, our job is to take the energy that has shown itself all around this country — at the ballot box on Election Day, in the streets at thousands of No Kings rallies in October, in our communities as we do what we can to defend our immigrant neighbors from masked secret police — and fundamentally change this system.
For the first time in the Trump era, it feels to me like that opportunity is here.
Alex Han is Executive Director of In These Times. He has organized with unions, in the community, and in progressive politics for two decades. In addition to serving as Midwest Political Director for Bernie 2020, he’s worked to amplify the power of community and labor organizations at Bargaining for the Common Good, served as a Vice President of SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana for over a decade, and helped to found United Working Families, an independent political organization in Illinois that has elected dozens of working-class leaders to city, state and federal office. Most recently he was executive editor of Convergence Magazine.
