Beating Trump While Remaining Committed to Our Highest Values

Gaza, the election, and building a powerful, anti-imperialist left with a “Block and Build” organizing strategy

The convergence of the upcoming presidential election and the daily US-backed atrocities taking place in Gaza, and now Lebanon, has elicited real fissures in the American left as it relates to electoral strategy. I deeply believe in the importance of a “Block and Build” approach in this political moment, one first developed by the socialist publication, Convergence, and subsequently adopted by groups like Liberation Road, North Star Socialist Organization, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Working Families Party, Seed the Vote, and many other progressive and socialist groups.

This means participating in a united front to block an ascendant far-right who, according to its rhetoric and published policy plans, seeks to amplify the worst policies of the Democratic establishment while also completing its 50-year crusade toward a hyper-repressive, anti-democratic, Christian nationalist takeover of our government. Challenging this force with a united front between the left and center allows us to carry out the second part of this approach: create a political terrain where we can more effectively build the power of independent, left-wing political organizations and labor unions to assert more and more influence and control within this political coalition, and ultimately, to lead this country as a progressive-socialist left.

In a moment in which so many of us feel powerless to stop this unceasing genocide and have an understandable disillusionment with electoral politics, this approach has given me hope. My belief that this strategy is the most effective way for those of us in the United States to challenge ever-growing economic exploitation, racism, heteropatriarchy, climate breakdown, and imperialism (especially our capacity to challenge our country’s backing of Israel’s genocidal government).

To understand the value of such an approach, we must first gather a full understanding of the distinct political realities of our world today.

Coming to terms with this political moment

We live in a moment in which capitalism is reaching social and ecological breaking points. Working people in the global north have been recipients of decades of union-busting, wage suppression, and gutting of social safety nets. Meanwhile, the ruling classes of North America and Europe have spent this same period crushing social democratic and nationalist movements throughout the global south, instituting a neocolonial economic system that allows for the hyper-exploitation of labor and natural resources in these parts of the world, waging wars and uplifting proxy-governments to maintain that system, and continuing to fuel a climate catastrophe that hits these populations the hardest.

Amidst the devastation of modern capitalism, two political currents have risen among this ruling class that function together in an interplay to effectively manage popular dissent in the north, the south, and between the two.

The first trend is demonstrated by far-right leaders like Trump, Netanyahu, Marine Le Pen of France, Giorgia Meloni of Italy, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, as well as some far-right rulers of the global south like Narendra Modi of India or Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. They strive to cultivate a collective identity within much of their population based on racial, religious, gender, and national supremacy while directing those in this in-group to see their economic security and safety as being threatened by a stigmatized “other,” be it Palestinians, migrants, leftists, Muslims, Black protestors, or gender-oppressed people—effectively channeling popular resistance away from themselves and toward these targets. These leaders aim to remove democratic checks to their power, criminalize protest, and harness their militaries, police forces, and courts to deliver mass violence toward these domestic and foreign target groups, all while padding the pockets of their oligarch friends and financiers with land grabs, oil and weapons sales, tax breaks, environmental deregulations, and union busting.

Yet the same financiers invest in liberal political elites as well, and so the devastation of late capitalism is carried forward under their watch, too, albeit differently, with different rhetoric and less domestic intensity. Under centrist-liberal rule in the global north, we have more room to freely organize and build worker and social movement power. Target groups within our borders have comparatively less hate channeled toward them. Yet we are also faced with consistent forms of gaslighting that can immobilize (or, in a sense, hypnotize) sections of our movements—co-optations of progressive language and claims of good intentions all while building walls, sending bombs, and militarizing police forces.

These leaders also fuel right wing authoritarianism by monopolizing the “left wing” of the mainstream political spectrum in their countries while offering no substantial solutions to the increased precarity in peoples lives. While the right validates the reality of growing economic insecurity and directs that pain toward false targets, the liberal-center does little to direct the public toward the real causes of this increased suffering, and thus allows the right to siphon off ever-greater portions of the 99%. At the highest levels of US politics, for example, “Make America Great Again” is too often confronted with the obviously false notion that “America is already great.”

A Red Line

For so many of us on the left in the U.S., the two-faced gas-lighting characteristic of many centrist-liberal elites today has come into full view through the actions of the Biden-Harris administration with regard to their unconditional support for Israel’s war crimes.

Immediately after Israel’s genocide began, the administration downplayed the Palestinian death toll and defended the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure. After months of calling ceasefire proposals ludicrous, they began to claim they were working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire while continuing to fund and arm Netanyahu’s government. They then went on to hold their national convention and proclaim a politics of joy and social justice while rejecting the anti-war and Palestinian segments of their base, refusing to meet with Uncommitted Movement leaders, and denying even a two-minute speaking slot to Palestinian-American elected official, Ruwa Romman.

Late in the summer, in the face of this disrespect and with the election drawing nearer, Uncommitted Movement leaders chose not to formally endorse Harris, but they nonetheless spoke of the particular danger of a Trump presidency and gave their encouragement to voters to ensure his defeat by avoiding third party spoiler votes. Many Uncommitted leaders are now actively backing an organizing strategy akin to Block and Build. Yet other groups, like the Abandon Harris Campaign, have taken this red-line position and turned it into a political operation of its own. They are now explicitly working toward “the defeat of Kamala Harris at the ballot box” by organizing to ensure that she “loses the swing states.” Their stated strategy is that, “Punishing the vice-president for her genocide would send a clear signal to the political landscape that genocide is not politically viable. It would create a political earthquake, soliciting a reckoning in the political parties.”

Abandon Harris endorsed Green Party presidential and vice-presidential candidates Jill Stein and Butch Ware, who are themselves adding to this narrative on multiple fronts. In regular appeals to the left, Stein has said, “A vote for Democrats is a vote for genocide,” insinuating that refusing the Democratic ballot line is not only moral but also a strategic choice to bring us closer to the end of this genocide. She and Ware have repeatedly stated that there is no difference between the two parties and that our singular best strategic choice is to vote Green, thus soliciting this same notion of “political reckoning” while potentially securing more federal funds for the anti-war Green Party in 2028 if it can reach 5% of the popular vote in this electoral cycle.    

In addition to pushing notion of equivalency between the parties, some within this red-line cohort have asserted that warnings about Project 2025 are hyperbolic or a form of centrist fear-mongering. And in response to many participants in the Palestine solidarity movement expressing their intent to organize for a Harris victory with a Block and Build strategic approach, some in this camp, including people with big online followings, have shamed them repeatedly, calling them “genocide enablers.”

Throughout history, moments of rising political repression have often resulted in splintering and infighting on the left that has ultimately led to the destruction of once-promising movement-building efforts. Regardless of our political strategy in this moment, it is incumbent upon all of us to see one another as comrades and engage in good faith discussion about our political strategies. It is also essential that we not allow despair to allow us to tap out or give up, especially as people living in the belly of the imperial beast that is the United States. It is in this spirit that I share the flaws that many of us are seeing in this “red-line” approach and why, based on our political realities, “Block and Build” gives us the best chance to create the world we need.

The Distinct Threat of Trump and the MAGA Movement

In a moment I will discuss the indicators that tell us how Trump will likely enable the Israeli government further and suppress the Palestine solidarity movement at a grander scale than ever before. But first it is important that we paint a picture of the broader threat that he and his movement pose to our society at large and all of the social movements.

Parts of the left, including many of those in the aforementioned red line camp, often paint our politics as simply a struggle between centrist-liberals and leftists, often ignoring or minimizing the incredible threat posed to all of us by a far right project intent on reversing so many of the gains our movements have made over the past 100 years. Much of this comes because of a large-scale anger at Democratic Party elites’ continual efforts to pacify us with progressive rhetoric while, so often, remaining loyal to their corporate donors. Sometimes, a right-wing enemy who is honest about their agenda is less infuriating than an enemy who pretends to be your friend. However, we must not allow this infuriation keep us from seeing the incredible dangers our communities and movements face from a resurgent right wing.

The current Trump-Project 2025 Agenda includes vows to carry out “the largest mass deportation event in American history,” crush a reemerging labor movement, further slash corporate tax rates, further dismantle abortion access nationwide, remove the Federal Election Commission’s power to prosecute election law violations, harness the military to suppress left-wing domestic protest (which military experts remind us is fully possible under our current laws), eliminate the Department of Education, lay the groundwork for dismantling Medicare, Medicaid and public education as a whole, eliminate FEMA, replace thousands of long-time civil servants with MAGA loyalists, end all federal agency efforts to address climate change, including dramatically reducing the capacity of the EPA and NOAA, cut Federal funding for schools and universities that teach any form of racial and gender justice education, eliminate all Head Start programs, deeply restrict the human rights of trans people, increase businesses’ ability to discriminate on the basis of race and religion, and much more.

For all the flaws of the Biden’s, Harris’s, and Pelosi’s of the world, and there are so many, the current Republican agenda is unlike anything we have faced in recent history. It represents an anti-democratic, full-scale corporate takeover of our government powered by white, Christian, heteropatriarchal nationalism. The Harris campaign’s sounding of the alarm about Trump’s “fascism,” his commitment to root out the “enemy within,” his intent to harness the military to suppress left-wing protest, and the true extreme nature of Project 2025 are not “fear-mongering” or hyperbole. They are fact. As Naomi Klein, a scholar-activist who spent the last many years studying the growth of Trumpism and far-right movements in North America, reminds us, “It is really important that people take him at his word.”

Trump, Palestine, and the Democrats

When we work to discern an electoral strategy to best position ourselves to advance the Palestine solidarity movement, it is important that we not only observe the candidates themselves but also the party apparatuses and political bases surrounding each of them. To do this, we first have to ask ourselves what a rising Christian nationalist movement has to do with Palestine.

The largest bloc of Zionists in the US, by far, isn’t Jewish people. It’s Christian Zionists. Christians United for Israel (CUFI) alone has 11 million members, far more than the entire Jewish-American population, and there are far more Christian Evangelicals whose unconditional support for Israel has been cemented through decades of propaganda. A significant portion of the Jewish community in this country is also beginning to shift on this issue, leading “Israel’s former ambassador to the US [to say] that his country should worry less about what American Jews think and concentrate on Christian evangelicals as the “backbone” of support for the Jewish state.”

Christian Zionists “see Jewish control and settlement in the entire land of Israel as a requirement for fulfilling their end-times prophecies.” They are not “liberal Zionists,” as many American Jews are, but believe in the pursuit of “Greater Israel,” a vision shared by the Israeli political right to conquer significant amounts of the Middle East and North Africa to secure the entire land that they believe was “promised” to them.

To the liking of this base and its powerful leaders, Trump’s own Zionism has been unabashed and tied to these hyper-colonial ambitions. While the Biden Administration at least formally opposes Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Trump made a full endorsement when last in office of Netanyahu’s ambitions to annex the entire West Bank. In recent months, Trump has repeatedly proclaimed his ambition to allow Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza and his son-in-law and Middle East policy advisor, Jared Kushner, spoke of annexing Gaza and opening it to high-end beach-front real estate development.

It is for all of these reasons that AIPAC, the incredibly influential pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, is also a central part of the MAGA movement. While it has some influence on 80% of congress, AIPAC’s primary location is now in the Republican Party, where there is both a full consensus among elected officials and a massive political base backing right-wing Zionism.

At the same time, dramatic and unprecedented movement has taken place among elected Democrats and the Democratic base on this issue over the past year. There are over 100 ceasefire resolution endorsees in congress. All of them happen to be Democrats. Last spring, over 50 Democratic representatives, including Nancy Pelosi, signed a letter calling for the Biden Administration to condition military aid to Israel. Polling shows that 61% of Democratic voters support an arms embargo to Israel and 87% a ceasefire. Given the bipartisan consensus on Israel for decades, the level of impact that the Palestine solidarity movement has had on the Democratic Party is unprecedented and incredible. The fact that the most elite members of the party haven’t yet shifted is heartbreaking and a cause for alarm amidst the daily atrocities being carried out by the Israeli military. But that doesn’t mean that this momentum doesn’t hold immense promise.

Much of this momentum has been driven by the courageous actions of student activists on college campuses. And while a number of Democratic officials have backed horrendous efforts to legally suppress and police protest on these campuses, Republican aims to suppress and persecute the Palestine solidarity movement, both on college campuses and more broadly, take these Democratic threats to the movement to another level.

The Trump-allied Heritage Foundation that published Project 2025, took the opportunity on the 1-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s ensuing genocide to publish another policy plan, “Project Esther,” in which they outline how they will go after what they call “Hamas Support Organizations,” or “HSO’s,” which include groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and American Muslims for Palestine, among many others. This plan proposes to pass federal law to make anti-Zionist protest illegal. They also intend to use “counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws” to prosecute these groups in every way possible while “establish[ing] additional authorities” to surveil them, block communication between them, and advance criminal prosecution against them.

Third Party Strategy vs. Block and Build

Arguments for voting third party in 2024 have revolved around notions that 1. US presidential campaign runs should be used as a primary driver of third party growth; 2. there is a basic equivalency between the Republican and Democratic Parties (and that, therefore, striving to influence or assert leadership within the Democratic Party is futile); 3. that even if Democrats are “slightly better,” “our movements go to sleep” under Democratic administrations; 4. that third party support in 2024 will effectively move the needle toward stopping Israel’s genocide; and 5. that voting should be principally an act of deep personal conscience rather than an act of “choosing our opponent.”

Labor writer, Hamilton Nolan, describes how, especially in the US’s enshrined first-past-the-post, winner-take-all, two-party system, putting our weight behind left-wing third party campaigns in major US elections, puts the cart before the horse. Reforming various aspects of our election law should precede running such candidates whose presence, by design, as a “spoiler” enables the rightwing. Nolan suggests that, in some instances, these reforms aren’t necessarily as far off as we might think.

But, some might say, if these two corporate parties are “the same,” why should we care? Well, I hope that all I have mentioned thus far has illustrated the fact that they are not, in fact, the same. This truth unveils the power of a “Block and Build” strategy, which is also often called an “Inside-Out” approach to political organizing. While the Democratic Party is, in significant ways, captured by corporate interests, it is also, as my friend and long-time organizer Chris Crass has said to me many times, “a site of struggle.” Despite the naysayers, there is much evidence that an approach for building independent social movement and labor power while simultaneously striving to influence the Democratic Party, has begun to pay dividends. Our movements themselves, as well as the left-wing insurgent Democratic representatives that we have uplifted, have broken the party’s consensus on Israel. In the past four years, these same forces have moved the Democratic establishment to get on board with imperfect yet truly unprecedented climate legislation and significantly grow their support for organized labor and struggles against monopoly power.

Abandoning these efforts, especially as it relates to Palestine, by placing our faith in third-party-based movement building, will not shift the party further to the left by “punishing” party elites. It will remove the Democratic Party from power, undo our progress within it, separate our influence from it, and allow for an even more repressive force to attack our movements.

The notion that “our movements go to sleep under Democratic administrations” has not always been true and does not have to be true if we commit ourselves to the “Build” part of this strategy. Block and Build won’t work if we don’t commit to consistent organizing to build the independent power of the left, to awaken people to the corporate capture of many Democratic elites, and seek to assert our own leadership by challenging those forces. This notion of a “sleeping left” under Democratic leadership has also not always been true in the past. The Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and the Palestine Solidarity Movement itself all underwent significant growth under Democratic administrations. Additionally, the alternative to a trend of pacification of the left under Democratic administrations is continued mass organizing, not allowing a right-wing government to take power because of some accelerationist pseudo-theory of change that says things have to get far worse before masses of people will “wake up” and make them better.

Voting as a Radical Act

The Indigenous organization NDN Collective, Highlander Center, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), along with many progressive, socialist, and Palestine solidarity activists, recently created and shared a video based on April Rosenblum’s essay, “Vote Like a Radical.”   

In it they stated,

“You might be a radical but if you’re like most of us you never learned to vote like a radical.

Radicals remember three things: 1. All candidates, once elected, become our opponents; 2. We vote for the ones we’re best suited to fight; 3. We protect movements, our real source of power.

If you went to school in the United States you likely learned that a vote meant something special, expressed who we are, told the world what we stood for. But for radicals, voting isn’t personal. Because radicals know all presidents, once elected, become our opponents.

Which of these candidates deserves our vote? None of the above. But you don’t vote for who is deserving. You vote for the one you’re best equipped to fight.”

I believe that the radical analysis and strategy at the heart of this Block and Build approach can give us hope in this heartbreaking, overwhelming, often impossible-seeming political moment. It can reveal to us that the choice between violating our consciences at the ballot box and stopping MAGA is a false one, and that the vote is a tool to be used to protect and expand the only thing with the potential to get us all free: our movements themselves.

If there is anyone in your life who you think could be supported by the insights in this essay, you can send it to them by forwarding this email or clicking the share button here:

For those of you who still would like to phone-bank to block a Trump victory, you can find links to phone banking shifts today and tomorrow with Showing Up for Racial Justice, here.

And for those of you who would like to deepen your own engagement in the long-term movement-building so essential to securing a just future here in the US, in Palestine, and around the world, please check out these resource documents, “Joining a Political Organization” and “Building the Labor Movement Inside and Outside Your Workplace,” that I put together for past course participants and Toward Solidarity subscribers.