Against the New McCarthyism

The Trump administration is smashing the domestic and international order the U.S. set up after the Second World War. It is attempting a full scale authoritarian, nationalist transformation of our society, the U.S. state, and its position in the international order.

But it has faced mounting opposition from the majority of the U.S. population. Having lost the consent of the governed, Trump has turned to coercion to advance his far right agenda. He has seized on the assassination of Charlie Kirk and used his funeral to launch a McCarthyite witch hunt against the Left and liberal organizations, particularly the NGOs that have been central to the resistance.

Despite the loss of popular support, and amidst a slowing economy, with growing class inequality and intensifying oppression, the Trump administration is more, not less, dangerous. It has made clear its intent to turn to even more dictatorial means to impose its agenda. Remember, Trump promised to be a dictator on “day one” of his presidency.

Faced with this assault, the Left must argue for a united front of unions, social movement organizations, and political groups to defend all those under attack. We should be actively seeking opportunities for this type of organizing. For example, the Left should be supporting the call of the May Day Strong coalition to hold conferences to educate, train, and organize for mass disruptive actions, including political strikes to protect our democratic rights, along with our jobs, wages, and benefits.

Trump: authoritarian, incompetent, and unpopular

Before Kirk’s assassination, Trump’s regime was headed into a crisis. His attempt to implement Project 2025’s program ran into growing opposition, not from the Democrats and corporations, but in opinion polls and mass protests.

Overall, 57 percent disapprove of Trump and 62 percent think the country is headed in the wrong direction, record lows for a president at this point in their term. Majorities even oppose him on his two signature issues—immigration and the economy. They also disapprove of Trump’s tariffs, his support of Israel’s genocidal war, and his abandonment of Ukraine. That mass opposition in sentiment has driven people into mass protests, from Hands Off! to May Day, No Kings, Labor Day, and mass mobilizations against ICE and the National Guard in cities across the U.S.

Nonetheless, Trump has gone full speed ahead in implementing his authoritarian agenda. Abroad, he has trashed the so-called rules-based international order, treating both friends and foes in a transactional manner and imposing tariffs supposedly for the benefit of U.S. capital. He also sold Ukraine down the river to Russia, while he has greenlit Israel’s genocide in Palestine, all while lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize.

At home, Trump has purged the U.S. state of liberal bureaucrats, weaponized its retooled structures against workers and oppressed groups, and launched an all-out class war: cutting taxes for billionaires, shredding regulations on businesses, and gutting programs for workers and the poor. That has made a mess of an already crisis-ridden society of gilded-age class and social inequality with all their attendant maladies.

The combination of tariffs, mass deportation of migrant workers, and wild policy swings has produced the predicted results—labor shortages, increased prices, a drop in manufacturing investment, and a slowing economy at risk of recession. The nightmare of stagflation that plagued U.S. capitalism in the 1970s looks set to return.

The administration’s assault on the state bureaucracy threatens its competent provision of essential economic and social services. DOGE’s cuts have ravaged programs like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides early warning of hurricanes, putting people’s lives in jeopardy amidst growing climate catastrophes. And Robert Kennedy Jr. ‘s attacks on science, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, and vaccine protocols puts millions of people’s lives at risk.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill threatens a fiscal crisis of the state. It will drive up spending, especially on the Pentagon and ICE, while it cuts revenues through tax cuts for the rich. That will guarantee austerity measures from this and future governments, no matter which capitalist party is in power.

Every social institution has been put in the regime’s cross hairs, especially higher education, whose flagship institutions like Harvard that reproduce the ruling elite that staff the corporate elite and the state have been defunded and subject to political purges. And a growing number of cities starting with Los Angeles and Washington D.C. have had ICE and the National Guard deployed to carry out Trump’s racist war on migrants, stop an imaginary crime wave, and act as provocateurs to justify further repression.

Unpopular, split into factions, and mired in the Epstein crisis

This strategy of rule or ruin has not only turned the majority of the country against Trump’s regime and its domestic and international agenda. The Trump coalition has begun to splinter into factional conflicts, best symbolized by the president’s bitter divorce with Elon Musk. Other divisions have started to emerge over everything from the Big Beautiful Bill to foreign policy.

But by far the largest conflict has been over the revelations of Trump’s long-term relationship with convicted pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. All this threw the MAGA base into turmoil.

Trump himself fueled this madness, promising on the campaign trail to release Epstein’s so-called client list. But after his attorney general Pam Bondi told him he was named in the files, he blocked their release. Feeling betrayed, MAGA leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced Trump, Bondi, and the addled FBI director Kash Patel.

The MAGA faithful even disrupted Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA Student Action Summit to demand the release of the client list. Desperate to divert attention from the metastasizing scandal, Trump staged an increasing number of “Wag the Dog” actions designed to re-galvanize his base, from state terrorist attacks on motorboats off the coast of Venezuela to threats to deploy the National Guard in Chicago and Memphis.

Kirk’s assassination: A political gift to Trump

Amidst this crisis, the assassination of Charlie Kirk was a political gift to Trump and his regime. Trump seized on it as an opportunity to galvanize the far right’s factions, turning Kirk’s funeral into a far right political rally to announce a holy war to avenge Kirk’s death.

With over 100,000 attending and millions watching on TV, Trump, Vance, and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller whipped the crowd into a frenzy. As the crowd waved “Never Surrender” placards, Miller declared war on “our enemies” with an “army” prepared to fight to “save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic” and “defeat the forces of darkness and evil.”

While Kirk’s widow forgave the alleged shooter, Trump contradicted her (at her husband’s funeral!): “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.” The last thing Trump wants is reconciliation; he wants revenge for the loss of one of his holy warriors.

Kirk was no run-of-the-mill propagandist exercising his first amendment rights to engage in debate on college campuses. As Ta-Nehisi Coates documents, he used “debate” as a cover to spew racism, sexism, transphobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, xenophobia, and every other imaginable form of bigotry against the oppressed.

He called George Floyd “a scumbag,” denounced Martin Luther King as “awful,” declared the Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake,” championed the racist “great replacement theory” that Democrats are replacing white people with immigrant people of color, and promised that Trump would “liberate” the country from “the enemy occupation of the foreigner hordes.” Kirk also proclaimed that “Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews.”

Kirk built his group, Turning Point USA—with its $80 million budget and 250,000 student members—to intimidate and coerce people, especially teachers. It established The Professor Watchlist and encouraged its members to document and expose instructors that “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

Kirk also endorsed and organized violence. For example, he encouraged groups of men to form a line to prevent trans swimmer Lia Thomas and say, “Hey, tough guy, you want to get in the pool? ’Cause you’re gonna have to come through us.”

He demanded Joe Biden be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” And he threatened that the new Trump administration would use state power to repress dissent, warning “playtime is over. And if a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might arrest you.”

He embraced racist vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two and wounded another in a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha Wisconsin. Kirk called him “a hero to millions” at the far-right conference, AmericaFest.

On top of that, he threw support behind Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th. He boasted that Turning Point was “Sending 80+ buses full of patriots to D.C. to fight for this president.”

Kirk was more than ideological hitman and organizer for Trump; he was an ex officio member of the regime deeply integrated into the daily operations of the White House. Trump looked upon him as a loyal consigliere who stood by him after the failed insurrection, helped attract 46 percent of the youth vote, and assisted him in winning the presidency for a second time. J.D. Vance even credited Kirk with securing his appointment to the Vice Presidency.

Trump has held the “radical left” responsible for political violence and even Kirk’s assassination. It is not. In reality, as even the CATO Institute documents, the far right, including both organized and unorganized individuals, is the main source of political violence. But Trump cynically ignored such facts, not even mentioning attacks on Democrats, including the murder of two politicians in Minnesota.

Trump’s claim to be combatting political violence reeks with the stench of hypocrisy. His regime is, to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”; he has inked a $1 trillion Pentagon budget, launched state terrorist attacks on Venezuelan boats, greenlit and armed Israel’s genocide in Palestine, hired thousands of new ICE agents to detain and deport migrants, and deployed troops to repress Black and Brown people in L.A. and D.C.

Escalating the New McCarthyism

Even before Kirk’s assassination, Trump had launched a purge of institutions and workplaces of the Left and liberal organizations. In doing so, Trump is building on the work of the Biden administration, liberal university bosses, and corporations who had initiated the New McCarthyism by repressing Palestine solidarity activists on campuses and in workplaces across the country.

Trump has escalated the Democrats’ attack, sending ICE agents to arrest, detain, and attempt to deport activists like Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mohsen Mahdawi. He has used the cover of charges of antisemitism to defund universities, compel them to suspend and fire faculty, and re-write their curriculum to conform to his far right agenda. After the assassination, Trump has thrown this McCarthyism into overdrive.

The hypocrisy of these attacks boggles the mind. In his inauguration speech, Trump promised to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring free speech back to America” and announced that “never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”

Despite this promise, Trump has declared war on the left, threatening to “beat the hell out” of “radical left lunatics,” whose “rhetoric is responsible for the terrorism we’re seeing in our country today.” He promised, “we’re going to get that problem solved.” He strangely singled out antifa, which is not a group and barely exists even as a movement, and designated it a terrorist threat as a prelude to an attack on all progressive organizations.

Stephen Miller went so far as to claim the Left is behind “a vast domestic terror movement,” and threatened, “we are going to use every resource we have . . . throughout the government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks.”

Vice President J.D. Vance expanded the target list to include liberal organizations, especially those backed by the Ford Foundation and George Soros, which he alleged get “generous tax treatment.” He raged, “we’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that “visa revocations are under way” for visitors, workers, and international students who are “cheering on the public assassination of a political figure.” He warned those found guilty by his personal star chamber, “prepare to be deported. You are not welcome in this country.”

On Charlie Kirk’s podcast, Vance called on people to spy on and report one another to the state and their bosses. “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” he raged. “And hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”

Thus, the far right, which campaigned against so-called cancel culture and used free speech as cover for their bigotry, harassment, and campaign of intimidation against oppressed groups, is now using state power to censor, fire, and silence their opposition. Already, Trump has issued an executive order designating antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.”

That is just the beginning of an assault on everyone in the resistance and the entire population. All our democratic rights are now in jeopardy.

Socialists oppose terrorism

Against Trump’s bizarre claim that the Left is to blame for Kirk’s assassination, we must state very clearly that no organized group on the Left and no liberal organizations support individual acts of terrorism and certainly do not condone Kirk’s murder. That is a lie that can find no factual corroboration anywhere.

As socialists we advocate collective organizing, protests, and strikes to advance our democratic demands. We exercise such popular power to win immediate reforms and to build confidence among the working masses to demand even more from our rulers. Socialism is fundamentally about deepening our collective democratic rights.

Individual acts of terror do not advance such organizing, but in fact set it back. State bureaucrats, corporate bosses, and far right zealots are all replaceable. And the established powers will use their murders to launch campaigns of repression like the one we are currently suffering.

As Leon Trotsky wrote, “the capitalist state does not base itself on government ministers and cannot be eliminated with them. The classes it serves will always find new people; the mechanism remains intact and continues to function.”

But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organization? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?

In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission.

In the case of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, had no relationship to the organized Left or liberal organizations. He was not trained by left-wing professors in radical ideas, having dropped out after one semester at one of the most conservative schools in the country, Utah State University.

He grew up in a conservative Mormon family, headed by a father who is “diehard MAGA,” that was awash in the gun culture of the far right. That intolerant and violent background trapped Robinson in a horrible contradiction between his far-right political environment and his relationship with his transitioning partner.

That seems to have driven him to kill Kirk, admitting “I had enough of his hatred.” These conditions, of course, do not excuse or justify the murder, but they do explain it. As Malcolm X argued when asked about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the context of U.S. imperialist war-mongering, especially in Vietnam, the chickens have come home to roost. The assassination was blowback triggered by bigotry. It had nothing to do with the Left.

Liberals fall for the trap of civility

Much of the liberal commentariat and Democratic Party politicians have capitulated before Trump’s witch hunt. They accepted the right’s framework that Kirk was a practitioner of civic debate, ignoring the fact that he used free speech as a cover to carry out bigoted harassment and intimidation.

Columnist Ezra Klein penned a column entitled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Seriously? Kirk resurrected racist bigotry and antisemitism from the pre-Civil Rights era. Kirk and Turning Point, as Ta-Nehisi Coates argues, “endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.”

Barnard College’s President Loren Ann Rosenbury repeated Klein’s arguments practically verbatim in “Now is the Time for Colleges to Host Difficult Speakers.” Rosenbury argued for civil dialogue about differences including with hate mongers like Kirk, but she is no principled defender of students’ right to organize and speak. She like other university presidents across the country expelled scores of Palestine solidarity activists for protesting genocide. For such people Kirk is within the bounds of civility, whereas students protesting Israel’s neofascist government and its crimes against humanity are not.

Democratic Party politicians similarly fell for the Republicans’ civility trap, joining the chorus legitimizing Kirk’s bigotry. They started to do this even before his assassination as part of their lurch to the right to curry favor with centrist and right-wing voters.

Liberal heartthrob, Gavin Newsom, invited Kirk on his podcast. After his murder, the Democrats joined the sacralization of the hatemonger with moments of silence. Democratic senators, including Bernie Sanders, backed Republicans in a unanimous vote to make October 14th a “National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk.”

Rather than fight Trump’s McCarthyism, the Democratic Party establishment is adapting to it and throwing the oppressed groups targeted by Kirk under the bus. For instance, a former aide to Senate leader Harry Reid just launched a new think tank, the Searchlight Institute, that demands the party downplay issues like trans rights and limit the influence of progressive organizations.

Beware the bosses and bureaucrats’ opportunistic compliance

Instead of standing up for freedom of speech, state officials, bosses, and university administrators have obeyed Trump’s injunction to fire, suspend, and censure scores of workers for statements, articles, and social media posts. This should surprise no one. Most bosses and top bureaucrats are political centrists or conservatives.

They have only conceded better wages, working conditions, programs, and reforms under pressure from below. They are therefore predisposed to practice “opportunistic compliance” with Trump’s McCarthyism, just as they did during the 1950s when they purged the Left from workplaces and universities.

The administration’s threat of defunding, denying certification, and cancelling contracts has driven them to complete capitulation. The government put many state workers on leave; ABC temporarily suspended comedian Jimmy Kimmel; the Washington Post fired its only Black woman columnist, Karen Attiah; universities fired and suspended faculty and workers and also expelled students; airlines grounded pilots; and hospitals even fired healthcare workers.

And in one of the most ominous developments, Berkeley, the birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, forked over the names of 160 professors, including Jewish anti-zionist Judith Butler, and their investigation into them for alleged antisemitism. All this has sent a chill through higher education not seen since the 1950s.

Don’t adapt to the New McCarthyism

The Left must reject the right’s framework of civility, refute its preposterous allegations against our organizations, and win forces of resistance to a united defense of everyone’s democratic rights. Unfortunately, some on the reformist Left have conceded ground to the right.

In “Charlie Kirk’s Murder is a Tragedy and a Disaster,” Ben Burgis and Meagan Day initially make a straightforward case against political violence and rightly point out how such acts give the right an excuse and justification to carry out repression. But they then go on to mimic the liberal establishment’s call for civility, warn about the danger of “tit for tat violence” and “our political cultures descent into dehumanizing tribalism,” and chide people on the left for displaying “a lack of empathy” for Kirk and his family.

To characterize political polarization between the right and the Left as “tribalism” is problematic, not only because of the racist and colonialist connotations of the term, but also because it implies that the conflict between the regime and the Left could be resolved by more “adult behavior,” debate, discussion, and democratic elections. That is at best naïve.

To repeat, the right is not engaged in civil dialogue or any kind of normal bourgeois electoral politics; they are carrying out a political counter-revolution to establish an authoritarian state and roll back all the gains won by the labor and social movements in the 1930s and 1960s.

The right has made this abundantly clear. Stephen Bannon raged on his podcast, the War Room, “people are contacting me saying, ‘Hey can you get on here to debate about the First Amendment?’ We ain’t debating anything. We’re taking action.” He went on to warn, “now we have a scalp in Jimmy Kimmel. And there are gonna be many, many, many more scalps.”

We should not be debating people like Kirk as Newsom and Burgis did. We are not having a reasoned exchange of ideas with them; we’re in an existential struggle with a far-right regime that is weaponizing the state to carry out a McCarthyite war against the Left and the remnants of democracy. We should instead stage protests and strikes to defend our rights and jobs.

Moreover, the Left should not be demanding empathy from the oppressed for their oppressors, especially ones like Kirk who spewed bigotry, engaged in harassment and intimidation, and supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Nor should we by chiding people for making angry social media posts, especially when the right is using those as justification to fire people en masse. We should be clear, the overwhelming majority of political violence comes from the right’s organized forces and unorganized individuals inspired by the destruction of democratic norms.

Authoritarianism without consent

Our task is to build the resistance. Trump may now have a re-galvanized base and a solid minority of support in the country, but we have the majority, and the polls especially among young people prove that on everything from immigration to the economy and even Palestine.

That dissatisfaction will only grow over time. Why? Because Trump has and will make the lives of the vast majority worse. As the Center for American Progress has documented, his policies will only benefit the top one percent at the cost of the lives and living standards of the 99 percent.

Thus, Trump is in a weaker position than other autocrats like Viktor Orban, who swept to power with 68 percent of parliamentary seats in 1998 and maintained support until recently for his authoritarian transformation of Hungary. Trump, by contrast, is profoundly unpopular, has razor thin majorities in congress, and his support has further declined since the assassination of Kirk.

Yet, while Trump’s authoritarianism and his policies will only deepen the crises in U.S. society there is no guarantee as to which forces will benefit most from popular discontent.

Instead of fighting Trump, the capitalist establishment and its political representatives in the Democratic Party have capitulated, either currying favor with the regime or adopting James Carville’s possum strategy of playing dead and hoping to reap the benefits in the midterm elections. But it is far from certain that they will win.

The Democrats are in fact less popular than Trump. And even if they did secure a majority in the House or Senate—no shoo-in given the regime’s plans for gerrymandering and voter suppression—the bulk of those elected would be clones of Hakeem Jeffries and Harry Reid. These are forces who are at best committed to restoring the status quo ante and, in order to secure centrist votes, have adapted to and in some cases adopted the right’s positions.

Even if Democrats’ miraculously find the will to fight, Trump has shown that he’s willing to override the Constitution’s so-called checks and balances and rule by executive order. And the Left politicians that do want to fight are a tiny minority trapped in a hostile Democratic Party.

We also can’t assume that the Left, unions, and resistance will fill the vacuum. That depends on what political positions, strategy, and tactics we adopt. The bulk of the trade union officialdom, NGO leadership, and most of the Left remain predominantly focused on elections.

They assume that holding office is the same as having the power to enact reform. In reality, when elected even the most genuine reformists find themselves trapped by the confines of the capitalist state and its dependence for revenue on capitalism’s growth and profitability. As a result, they find themselves unable to deliver on their promises.

That applies especially to those elected to executive office like mayors of cities. Chicago’s mayor Brandon Johnson, for instance, has been unable to deliver on most of his promises, initially accommodated forces to his right including the police, and now faces relentless attacks from Trump and the business class.

All this has caused Johnson’s approval rating to plummet to 26 percent. Thus, it is not at all clear that the experience of the Johnson mayoralty has strengthened the forces of the Chicago Left. Without mass class and social struggle from below, and the type of organizing that this presupposes, anyone elected to executive office will face the same sad fate, including Zohran Mamdani if he wins the New York’s mayoral race.

For mass class and social struggle

That’s why the organized working class—unionized workers—and social movements are of decisive importance. Only our class power—our ability to shut the system down with strikes—can stop Trump, defend democracy, and secure reforms.

But some unions, rather than fight, have accommodated Trump, most significantly the UAW and Teamsters. UAW president Sean Fain has mistakenly backed Trump’s protectionism in the hopes of securing jobs, while the Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien went so far as to speak at the far right hate fest, aka the Republican National Convention.

Such accommodation will backfire, opening desperate workers worried about their jobs and living standards to Trump’s racist and xenophobic arguments, sowing divisions in our class. Even worse, without the power of organized workers, the social movements and the broad resistance will be weaker.

Instead, we need mass disruptive protests and most importantly political strikes like those in South Korea that blocked their president’s attempted coup and similar actions currently shutting down France to block Emmanuel Macron’s undemocratic appointment of a prime minister to impose austerity on workers. We must make this country ungovernable to stop Trump’s authoritarian power grab.

But we are not yet in a position to stage these kinds of political strikes. The most promising development that has the potential to organize such mass working-class resistance is May Day Strong; it is the key united front of unions, social movements, and broad resistance formations like 50501.

It played a critical role in supporting May Day and Labor Day demonstrations nationally, both of which were among the largest in recent history but still far from the size and militancy needed for this moment. To deepen and expand its network, May Day Strong has called for regional conferences to bring together unions, social movements, and resistance formations for education, training, and coalition building.

The plan is to forge an even larger and more rooted united front capable of calling mass disruptive protests in the run up to job actions and even political strikes on May Day 2026. Everyone on the Left and in the broad resistance should heed their call.

If we fight we can win. Take Jimmy Kimmel as an example. After his suspension, five Hollywood unions protested in defense of freedom of speech and planned mass rallies while actors signed a mass petition, and consumers threatened to boycott Disney. After its stock dropped by 2.39 percent costing nearly $5 billion in market value, the company relented and placed him back on air.

Eyes on the prize

May Day Strong is not without problems and debates. At this point, the coalition’s calendar of action only extends through May Day 2026. This likely reflects the unions’ and NGOs’ orientation toward the midterms, which will go into full swing after May Day.

Socialists inside the May Day Strong coalition, and within all the resistance formations, must argue against shifting our strategy away from building mass struggle to campaigning in the midterms. We must keep our eyes on the prize of organizing mass protests and strikes right through the election calendar.

Such actions must be our top collective priority, no matter what individuals do at the ballot box. Any time, money, and energy diverted from struggle to campaigning for the Democratic Party will set the resistance back, not advance it.

The Left must also challenge the argument that the resistance must downplay issues like Palestine and trans rights to broaden the movement. Such accommodation to the right is based on a mistaken reading of mass consciousness and an assumption that taking up these issues will divide us.

In fact, polls show that most people have shifted radically to the left on these so-called wedge issues. Take Palestine. In August, a Quinnipiac poll found that 60 percent of Americans oppose the U.S. sending arms to Israel, and 77 percent of Democrats believe Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

Based on these facts, we should challenge class-reductionist arguments that claim that we can only build a mass working class movement by putting forth so-called “universal class demands” and downplaying the demands of the oppressed. In reality, the working class is made up of oppressed groups from trans people to people of color, migrants, and our siblings in other countries, especially Palestinians.

An injury to one is an injury to all

The only way to unite such a multigendered, multiracial, and multinational class is by championing the demands of the oppressed. If we do not, we risk excluding key contingents of the class struggle, alienating whole social movements, and making our side vulnerable to Trump’s strategy of divide and conquer.

Trump is using attacks on Palestinians and trans people to carry out class war on us all. Therefore, we must be symmetrical in opposition, defending all those targeted and embracing their demands. We must bluntly declare, if you try to attack any of us, you have to come through all of us.

We must debate all this out in a manner that does not burn bridges and that resolves disagreements in democratic formations of struggle. Solidarity, even amidst differences, is essential, because no one is coming to save us, but us—our unions, social movements, and the Left we have inherited from the past with all their strengths as well as faults and weaknesses.

We are in the fight of our lives. We must unite, argue, organize, and wield our power in mass protest and strikes to defend our democratic rights, along with our jobs, wages, and benefits.

We must build the working-class resistance based on the classic slogan of the labor movement, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Only such solidarity with all those under attack and without exception can unite us to defeat the Trump regime.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”