Now Is the Time for Big Ideas

CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: It is good to be here with you in these extremely tumultuous times. We’ve all experienced this slew of executive orders flooding the zone. If you’re feeling kind of disoriented and confused, and you can’t catch your breath and can’t get your bearings, that’s exactly what the strategy is intended to do.

So how do we both stabilize and destabilize ourselves enough to actually have a chance to strategize and point the way forward?

ASTRA TAYLOR: The Debt Collective was pushing the Biden administration on student loan relief, literally up until January 19 — organizing actions, bringing protesters to the Department of Education, saying, ​“If you do not use the authority you possess, we are going to die buried in debt, because when the Trump administration comes, we’re not going to be talking about abolishing student loans. We’re going to be talking about abolishing the Department of Ed.”

We were asking them to use executive authority that had been clearly granted by Congress. And what we kept hearing from the Democrats was, ​“Well, we just can’t do it. It’s not done that way.”

Now there’s whiplash between the Democrats’ reluctance to use power to benefit people, and then this total Trumpian enthusiasm to use power to dispossess, to punish, to divide and conquer and to rob people. They’re very clear that they want to spin off and privatize the student loan portfolio.

Of course, they also went right after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is the only agency that was consistently pissing off financiers, bankers, predatory lenders. It delivered $21 billion into people’s pockets by tackling corporate power.

There’s a lot of uncertainty, but we know the Trump administration is going to mean more debt for ordinary people, because when you attack labor, when you take away public jobs, when you take away public goods, it means that people are going to have to borrow. So we know the problem we’ve been organizing around is more critical and urgent than ever.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: It’s been frustrating, frightening. The atmosphere on campus has been one of intimidation and trepidation. University administrators, in enthusiastically suppressing the Palestine protests, decided to paint themselves into corners with this institutional neutrality. In some ways, they have self-neutered to stay out of the crosshairs of the Trump administration. That strategy has failed miserably.

Everyone knows this kind of criminal administration will follow through on the threats of deportation, the threats to funding. It raises the level of calculation about how you intervene and what you do. It also raises the need for discussions that have been ongoing about solidarity, about organizing in much broader terms, [in a way] that truly encompasses everyone who is under attack. Given the wide scale of the Trump agenda, that includes many people.

NAOMI KLEIN: It really is this polycrisis, and I think that’s part of what feels so overwhelming. Because we start this already feeling like we’re not sure how much more we could take, right?

I don’t think we fully understood how much it pained our corporate overlords to make even the most minor changes. I think they feel like the contract was changed on them. If we’re thinking about somebody like Musk or Thiel, or even Zuckerberg, they came up in this age of absolute adulation for wealth. Just making tons of money in the dot-com boom was enough to have you lauded as the second coming. And then they start facing some accountability and they’re starting to wonder, well, ​“What is power for, if not for abusing?”

This is what I think Trump represents to billionaires everywhere. He’s the guy who never cared. He’s like pre-1990s political correctness. He’s from the 1980s. So, he is just the guy who never did anything but use and abuse his wealth and power.

I think we should understand Elon’s boys running roughshod over the U.S. government within a long lineage of boys who have done such things, like the Chicago Boys in Chile, the Harvard Boys in Russia, the Berkeley Mafia in Indonesia, the Heritage Foundation interns in Iraq. And this is kind of the boomerang coming home, as Aimé Césaire said [of fascism in Europe]. But I still think there is an apocalypticism to this stage of the project that is different.

So, we’re in this strange situation where we have a full-on counterrevolution, but we never got the revolution.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: This dynamic of the counterrevolution without the revolution is really important. And I think we have been living through a kind of unfulfilled radicalization, really from 2008, in terms of the financial crisis and the forces that unleashed, including a revulsion of capitalism.

In the American context, this is a few years after Hurricane Katrina, where the sort of underlying theme of that discussion was all the ​“ridiculous Black people” who didn’t evacuate. So instead, Black people were treated like refugees. Then the rebuilding, done completely on neoliberal terms, where it’s just a bonanza for the corporate elite.

So the 2008 crisis was a huge ideological transformation that opens the path for the Arab Spring, that opens the path for Occupy Wall Street, that brings the 99% and the 1% into the everyday parlance of Americans, which is unheard of. And this also opens discussion about inequality and creates pathways for the emergence of Black Lives Matter, which brings together racism and economic inequality as features of American capitalism.

In some ways, the pandemic stymies this, but it also illustrates the greed, the recklessness, the kind of manufactured ineptness of the American state when it comes to the care and the health of the public of a country that can’t find scrubs for nurses in New York. So all of this sort of spills over into these massive protests. In this country, 26 million people. But you don’t win just because you’re right.

What is the social force that actually exists to stop these powerful people? They don’t care about the courts. They don’t care about Chuck Schumer waving his fist at some rally in Washington, D.C. They don’t care about tweets.

We could look at South Korea, we could look at any number of places that have mobilized in the face of political coups, administrative coups, however you want to categorize this, when the rich and the elite simply don’t care about the existing legal framework. And so when you think about it in those terms, mass movement comes into a different focus.

CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: We have to think about what winning messages are to build a mass movement. Defund the police is an interesting thing. One great thing defunding did was that it put funding on the table with policing. So, we weren’t just talking about a rogue cop with use of force. But it is true that that was not necessarily a unifier with all the bases that we wanted. And then those rifts were exploited by the Right.

It’s really hard to grapple with the fact that there’s incredible, innovative political education happening on social media all the time, and yet, off the dome, I would say, if all that social media stuff is not combined with actual leverage, you lose the ability to define the terms. When you have a real base that’s being disciplined and building the message together with real leverage, then your movement can’t be defused just because someone attacks your slogan.

ASTRA TAYLOR: ​“We are the 99%” was one of the greatest slogans and Occupy changed the conversation. But it did not change the balance of power in this country because the sort of DNA of the movement was ​“refuse to make demands.”

The right-wing coalition is like a whole motley wrecking crew — Silicon Valley tech bros, private equity stripping the country for parts, Christian social conservatives, Make America Healthy Again weirdos, MAGA die-hards, libertarians, all sorts of factions. But they wouldn’t have won the election without this veneer of faux economic populism, which is kind of, ​“We are the 99%.”

But that’s where the fracture in the right-wing coalition is — they’re not going to deliver to those folks who were really focused on daily, normal economic struggles. How do we take advantage of that? That probably does mean messaging in a way that speaks to those kinds of populist concerns that are overlapping among lots of different constituencies, but ultimately, how do we build organizations that hold those people?

We do need to reckon with the fact that we are on the back foot. The polls show the majority wants Medicare for all and Bernie is one of the most popular politicians in the country, but that doesn’t mean the Left is strong.

NAOMI KLEIN: Because the Left has not figured out how to be an actual Left and organize to capture that groundswell of public opinion; you have all these grifters who just come in and pivot and drain it.

I’ve been thinking about something that Richard Seymour, an editor at Salvage—who wrote a very good book called Disaster Nationalism—has been saying about thinking that we can only respond with the so-called bread-and-butter issues. A lot of MAGA media is really very apocalyptic. It’s all about these final battles and fighting for the soul of the country. I heard Peter Thiel compare Greta [Thunberg] to the Antichrist. So, yes, we need to be talking about meeting people’s most urgent needs, but it needs to be knitted together by a really prophetic voice.

This is why I’ve been talking about really understanding these people as traitors to humanity, if all they’re thinking about is, ​“How do we just grab what we need and then build our fortress?” I think we need to highlight the extent to which this is a deeply nihilistic project. They see atrocities as signs. They’re accelerationists.

I don’t think we should be afraid to animate our movements with a sense of that level of purpose.

KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: There’s a cultural aspect that Naomi is talking about that the Right has completely captured. Part of that is making the Left appear to be humorless — just gray and not very interesting. That’s part of the appeal of MAGA and of even the more global phenomenon. Fascism is the humor and the fun, which is often at the expense of other people. But there’s something cohering in that, in a world that has very little else to offer people.

CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: I think the struggle around Palestine has taught us a lot in that regard. Although these encampments were characterized as just angry people, I think part of the reason why they grew so rapidly is because they were spaces of people being recharged, people combining political analysis really sharply. I’m trying to get my students to read in class; they were out there in the middle of the night doing teach-ins. Then people were bringing maqluba, sharing faith traditions. In some ways, the encampments embodied everything the university tries to pretend to be, in ways that it never could do within the classrooms.