The Right is not evil, stupid or overreaching. They have goals, plans and strategy, and they are executing them. Progressives need to do the same.
It’s hard not to spend time recoiling in horror each day at whatever fresh hell the Elon Musk/ Donald Trump administration is unleashing. Laying off critical aviation safety workers during an aviation safety crisis. Unlawfully shutting down entire federal agencies by fiat. Using a keyword search for “inclusion” as a blunt instrument to locate contracts and payments that might be related to antiracism.
Reading the news can be overwhelming, but there may be greater danger and it’s important not to get disoriented.
A politics of morality, of good versus evil, is easy to write. There are powerful actors— especially Musk, who relishes being viewed as master of the universe — whose interests are best served when they are seen on an axis of morality, obscured by the smoke and mirrors of modern finance and technology.
We lose the fight when we debate on the terrain the Right has chosen. The path forward must start with a clear-eyed view of what is happening, and a vision of a more humane future.
What we are watching unfold is the alignment of multiple long-term political projects, with the shock and awe of the immediate damage that each of them creates in their wake helping to mask their inherent weaknesses. As Tobita Chow lays out in his feature story for this issue, we are entering a new global era, unmoored from the U.S.-centered, neocolonial “rules-based order” that has defined the last four decades. The political forces in our country that have been fighting to relitigate the Civil War for almost two centuries have found common cause with tech oligarchs attempting to cement their power to shape the world in their own image, as well as those who yearn for a new assertion of U.S. hegemony by territorial expansion and imperial bullying. These forces have also found allies in the global march of the far Right, powered by reaction to migration and the failure of neoliberal capitalism to respond to the global financial crisis of 2008.
It’s a political moment we have to understand and develop real strategy to engage with.
The right is not evil, stupid or overreacting. They control the levers of power, but they are not infallible. Less than 20 years ago, the talk of the chattering classes was of a permanent Democratic majority. The next period needs to be one of contestation.
Progressives and the Left need to articulate the terms of that contest and what’s at stake, not get sidelined into the binary of wrong and right. It’s our responsibility not just to be correct — it’s our responsibility to win.
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.
