War. Pollution. Famine. Death.

The Biden-Harris campaign website doesn’t have a single policy on it. Go and look. It urges you to donate, and nothing more. “Why should we tell you what our policies are?” they ask, their dead eyes mocking. “You know what our policies are: we’re not Trump.”

The political horizons of the Democratic Party have narrowed down to a single point. Once the party of “progressive” labor and struggles for racial recognition, the Democrats have jettisoned the last of their betrayed allies and have adopted a blank and stony face. They refuse to make the case for their administration, because they are no longer capable of doing so. As their policies and inaction increasingly alienate and repulse the masses, the only people still arguing on behalf of the Democratic Party are the so-called socialist parties of the United States Empire: the Democratic Socialists of America and CPUSA.

Why is this the case? Surely, there must have been a time when the Democratic Party had something to offer someone other than their ruling-class donors?

There was.

To understand what’s become of the Democrats, and why they have increasingly tacked toward war abroad and law and order at home, you have to understand the history of the 20th century from the point of view of the ruling class. Of course, we’re told one story — the one that we all learn in high school history — but the truth is quite something else.

The story we learn is one about Roosevelt and the New Deal, the incredible progressive dream of equality and freedom for all. We’re told that basically only racists opposed the New Deal programs, that FDR brought about an era of prosperity never-before-seen by the United States, and that he “saved” the country from the Great Depression. This isn’t just the story told by the Democrats, it’s also the one told by the so-called Communists of the U.S. The problem is, none of it is true.

The New Deal With the Devil

To understand the limits of the Democratic Party, we need to begin with the historical composition of the so-called Democratic coalition and how the party realigned at the beginning of the 1930s. Labor unrest had rocked the young settler-republic: in 1877, workers established the brief but influential St. Louis Commune during the 1877 General Strike; nine years later,  in 1886, the Haymarket Affair shook the country. In 1894, the Pullman Strike affected the railroads country-wide. The Coal Wars saw brutal repression of strikers by government troops and Pinkerton agents. In 1919, what came to be called the Red Summer reached  near revolutionary fervor in the major cities, spurred primarily by class consciousness in the Black Belt and returning Black soldiers amidst the shadow of World War I. Acts of white supremacist terror and lynchings, meant to maintain the status quo, were confronted with fierce resistance from Black communities. Hundreds died. Nascent Black liberation movements, such as the African Blood Brotherhood were born from the ashes. This was followed by the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in Greenwood as white supremacist capitalism asserted itself over the wealthiest Black neighborhood in America by razing it and killing between 75 and 300 people.

In the face of this labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the “man in the White House co-opted the left.”

But the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression. For white workers (and European workers aspiring to whiteness), it mitigated the worst harms of the economic collapse that we call the Great Depression, but it was only the outbreak of World War II that stopped the bleeding. Communists in the CPUSA went from accurately assessing FDR as a kind of fascist at the beginning of the ‘30s to openly embracing him by the end of the decade. In the process, they abandoned the revolutionary struggle and contented themselves with economic gains for the working class. The New Deal became the basis of an unsteady alliance between the officers of organized labor — the AFL and other unions, primarily — and the old Democratic party machine.

Government control of the centralized war production industry supercharged the U.S. economy and helped propel the settler-republic into the position of world hegemon. The U.S. stayed out of World War II as long as it could, letting the older empires slug out the fight, hoping that the USSR would be debilitated by their conflict with fascism. As a result, the ruined capitalist world was dominated in the post-war period by the U.S. Control over the complicated machinery of empire meant the U.S. imperial managers could funnel profits back into the domestic U.S. market — and keep funding the social democratic project FDR had promised.

“The traditional colonialist powers represented by Britain, France, Holland and Belgium labored heavily under the War burdens, while Germany, Italy and Japan labored heavily under the burdens of defeat, a situation that enabled U.S. capital to extend and penetrate into all these countries through the reconstruction process,” wrote the Marxist-Leninist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine in its 1968 analysis of the world-imperialist bloc.

Breakdown

President Carter repudiated the deal between the Democrats and organized labor as the U.S. economy stalled and stagnated in the 1970s. This tack to the right was fully realized by Bill Clinton and the “Third Way” Democrats of the 1990s. The Clintonite period is where we get the term neoliberalism. Like neoconservativism, neoliberalism was a rejection of the traditional left-wing policies the Democrats embraced between 1932 and 1970.

It’s easy to call policies neoliberal, but what does it mean? In content, neoliberalism is the shifting of state-sponsored programs into private hands so they can make a profit. The U.S. Empire never developed a strong welfare state like Europe — despite Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to do so, the security state and the military industrial complex demanded too much money and attention. Instead, it was always somewhat neoliberal, relying on private corporations to recognize their interests in forestalling revolutionary consciousness. These corporations invested in pensions, healthcare, programs, etc. for their employees… until Carter signaled the Democrats’ willingness to turn on their one-time partners, the officers and bureaucrats of the labor unions.

Between Carter and Clinton, the Republican Party became the main vehicle for ruling-class action. Having repudiated the old progressive deal, the Democrats no longer had anything to offer the ruling class in terms of mass mobilization. Carter and Clinton, the bookends to Democratic control, were both indistinguishable from Republicans in their economic policy; Clinton, in fact, ran to the right of former CIA director H.W. Bush in 1992 on almost every economic issue.

The Obama Administration, despite its pretensions to restoring the voided social contract of the 1950s and 1960s, increased the party’s commitment to neoliberalism and the degradation of unions. A financial catastrophe comparable to the stock market crash of 1929 put the Obama White House in a position quite similar to that of the FDR White House. However, since 1929, there had been major developments in the state’s repressive machinery. No one was afraid of labor unrest or a looming revolution; the Occupy movement was easily disarmed and countered. What was the answer of the 21st century Democratic Party to the New Deal? FDR provided relief to the working class. Obama provided relief to the owning class.

To prevent total economic meltdown, the federal government infused the economy with new money; it “bailed out” banks. Not one of the criminal bankers responsible for the crisis was ever held accountable. The banking system itself was put on life support as federal regulators eased restrictions on lending that have remained in this “foot on the gas” position until this very day. Interest rates were cut, reserve requirements were overturned, and the U.S. (and thus the global) economy was puffed up on “aid” while still remaining fundamentally unsound.

Bidenomics and the Working Class

The economy is unsound because the rate of profit is in decline. Despite its sharp recovery after the life-support system installed by the Obama regime, it once again began to tumble and continues to fall to this day. This is the law of capitalism: the concentration of capital leads to declining rates of profit worldwide.

In the chart above, we can see the sharp spike in the rate of profit when the U.S. destruction of the Soviet Union brought markets back into the capitalist world, but even with this shot in the arm, the rate of profit continues to fall over time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of profit was appreciably higher than it is today.  The rate of profit began to decline in the middle 1960s. It was at this time that the social-democratic program of the Democrats gave way to Carter in the early 1970s, and the breakup of union power with the failed Chrysler strike and culminating in the PATCO strike of the air traffic controllers. PATCO — the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization — was a trade union operating from 1968 until it was decertified in 1981. Just like the railroad workers that Biden forced back to work, PATCO demanded a shorter work-week to increase safety. Carter instructed the Federal Aviation Agency not to give in to the demand to provoke a strike he knew was in the offing. Reagan took up Carter’s torch and, even though he had supported PATCO vocally during his election campaign, he followed the ruling-class line shared by Democrats and Republicans: the PATCO strike was declared illegal and the union was decertified.

The fact is that, as of Biden’s assumption of power, the progressive potential of the Democratic Party has been completely exhausted. The chair of the party is Jaime Harrison, a “former” lobbyist for the Podesta Group where he represented Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway, numerous pharmaceutical corporations, and Walmart. The main funding arm of the Democratic Party is run by the board member of a CIA cut-out, the National Democratic Institute, which often works with the infamous National Endowment for Democracy to instigate regime change in socialist or nationalist countries in order to make them palatable to American business interests.

This leads us to the Bidenomics of today: massive debt relief and loan programs for private businesses while the working class see only the steep climb of inflation. Prices have climbed 20% since the 2020 implementation of Biden’s relief plan for the rich. Wages have risen, but only roughly 10% in that time. That means every dollar in 2024 can buy what 80 cents could buy in 2020 — a devaluation that is now almost the equivalent of having robbed every working person in the United States of a quarter of their income. Getting paid an additional 10 cents on the dollar doesn’t make that much better.

There is no appetite among the Democratic Party’s ruling class supporters to budgeon any economic issue. We have seen Biden break rail strikes even when the rail workers repeatedly warned that the health and safety of the entire country was on the line. His administration is only interested in offering relief to one class: the ruling class. Since 2020, the concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires has increased 70%. This is under Biden’s watch.

What about social issues? These, too, have been surrendered by the Democrats. The Biden regime has failed to codify abortion at the federal level, failed to protect trans rights, which are under assault in the right-reactionary stronghold states of the South, failed to even try to hold the police accountable for violence doled out on oppressed communities (he’s worked hard to increase police funding and presence in the wake of George Floyd’s death), failed to stop the creeping entrenchment of crisis-fascism amongst the Republicans, and failed to step down from an aggressive, hawkish foreign policy that sees all countries and all realms of the earth as the prerogative of the U.S. Empire’s intervention.

There Is Nothing Left

The last of the progressive elements in the Democratic Party were sacrificed to the profit drive long ago. Social democrats are merely chum in the water for fascist retrenchment. Today, they serve as seductive sheepdogs, struggling to lead the working people away from the realization that the entire system is corrupt.

The bargain is a raw one!

For too long, we have been induced to trade our economic freedom in exchange for economic security. Now, even the lure of security has been taken away. All that remains is the threatened cudgel of Trump. For this, it is clear, the Democrats love him. Oh, not the rank and file, not the Democratic voter, for whom Trump is the expression of every foul and carnal urge, but for the Democratic politician there could be no more effective whip to mobilize those disaffected portions of their former electorate.

“We have nothing to offer you. Don’t look for us to offer you anything other than this: we aren’t Trump.”

That’s not enough, Mr. Biden. We must not stand by and allow the Democrats to bully us into another unholy bargain. We must stand up against them.

As we have warned, union organizing is the beginning, not the end, of class consciousness. This week, the United Auto Workers proved that it is a corrupt organization, its very bones riddled with the infection of political opportunism. Shawn Fain, mastermind of the UAW strike, hailed by the naive and undiscerning as a new labor hero, gave a full-throated endorsement of Butcher Biden and encouraged all UAW workers to vote for him. On the same day, protestors at one of Genocide Joe’s events were drowned out by UAW workers who support the murderous president of the current White House regime.

You heard that right! Butcher Biden, who spent a huge amount of his presidency breaking the backs of unions, endorsing anti-union legislation, and chastising workers for asking for too much, is the new darling and political ally of the supposed firebrand Shawn Fain. This man, who proclaimed his intention to organize toward a general strike and a shutdown of the U.S. imperial economy in favor of the workers, has come out in a full-throated endorsement of the genocidaire that his own rank and file denounced mere weeks prior.

Unionism, when untethered from the international struggle for the rights of the working people, is merely political opportunism. In 2018, the UAW president made $207,000 from his UAW salary alone — hardly the wage of a struggling proletarian — even after a voice vote from the union delegates voted down that 2018 salary increase. Fain has followed in the footsteps of the past presidents of the big business unions and accepted the crumbs of imperialist superprofits for his members while bowing to the unholy union of labor and capital that is represented by the Democratic Party.

Fain has abandoned the surging internationalism pressing him from below. Rank and file UAW members, ever staunch internationalists, have called for a ceasefire resolution from Butcher Biden. They’ve gone so far as to interrupt Biden speeches. “A president who supports genocide and is actively funding weapons to israel to kill children, families, that’s not something that I feel has earned my endorsement,” said member Johannah King-Slutzky. At least 500 UAW workers signed the ceasefire petition circulated internally in the UAW. Indeed, the union has its own committee called UAW Labor for Palestine. As recently as last week, Fain said “We don’t stop our fight for justice because it’s not the right time. When and where there’s a war, whether it’s in Vietnam or Gaza, we call for peace.”

But Fain can’t put his money where his mouth is. He’s constitutionally prevented from it! Only a resurgent internationalist movement from within the rank and file of the UAW can overthrow the stagnant slime of opportunism; if it is not swift and powerful, upsetting the entire order of the union and throwing off the old, Democrat-loyal chains for independent action, it won’t be long before the UAW lobbying arm is pouring union money — rank and file members’ money — into Genocide Joe’s campaign chest.

Merwan Beydoun, a 29-year member of the UAW in Dearborn, Michigan, withdrew his support of the UAW’s political arm ahead of the endorsement. “It is disheartening to note that some politicians associated with the UAW PAC have not actively called for a ceasefire…. I believe that endorsing and supporting candidates who prioritize the cessation of hostilities is essential for the promotion of peace and justice.”

Yet, there is Fain, on stage, parroting the lie that Biden has been a “pro-labor” president, all while the Butcher still stinks with the blood of the SMART Transportation and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, who he condemned through state action to continue to work without sick time. As trains crash and explode with increasing frequency on the U.S. rail lines, both parties celebrate the chaining of union expectations to the decaying political consensus of Washington. Why do we call for death to the UAW? Because its leadership is dead already. All rank and file members must recognize their necessary commitment not just to increasing the contract payments and benefits of their members, but to the international working class. Death to the labor bureaucrats and their lackeys! The UAW membership must kill the beast, and forge a new future!

To deny, however, that the candidates are different — to simply and blankly shout at the masses that they should ignore the imperialist elections — is to make a different kind of mistake. We must analyze and consider the positions of each candidate, determine what class-forces they represent, and articulate actual responses to their policy considerations. To stop our argument a stage short, to argue flatly that the political system is worthless without explaining in detail why and how, is to surrender the entire battlefield to the liberals, who will do their best to rehabilitate it in our absence.

There are also those who call themselves Communists who believe that, first and foremost, the duty of a Communist to achieve real reforms, now, for the working classes, the poor, the nationally and sexually oppressed. They are wrong. Winning reforms is not an end in itself. This debate was already fought, many times, in the past two centuries — from Bernstein’s initial betrayal all the way up through the economists blasted by Lenin. We will fight it again now. Winning reforms is a goal only insofar as it assists the organizing of the revolutionary classes and prepares them for the final battle with their intractable enemy, the capitalist bourgeoisie. So, our question should never be, “how can we win reforms,” but must always be “how does this or that action further the cause of organizing the people for revolution”?

The political crises of the last decade have dealt sledgehammer blows to the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system. Debates over the Electoral College began as angry mutters from the Bernie supporters and took on new life after the 2016 general election when the Clinton dynast, Hilary, won the popular vote but lost the election. This breathed new life into the debate from 2000, in which Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election through the interference of the U.S. Supreme Court. We must not let up in our criticisms of the U.S. electoral process. Having shed its democratic disguise, we can’t afford to give the ruling class time to craft a new one.

In 2024, there are two “outliers” — candidates who have been thrown up by the “crisis in democracy.” These third-party candidates will run against the big machines, although in this case, like Bernie, one will run from “inside” the Democratic party. On the right flank we see another political dynast from a ruling house, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., our own little American Hitler; on the left flank, Bernie Sanders’ one-time vocal supporter, Cornel West.

How should we Communists treat the campaign of Dr. Cornel West? Our guest contributor, P. D. Goselin, wrote that Dr. West’s candidacy may “bring clarity on a wide range of political issues to millions of working-poor people.”

Dr. West is a bourgeois academic. West enrolled in Harvard in 1970, entering the social ranks of the ruling class, rubbing shoulders with the big, the “haute,” bourgeoisie. From Harvard, West went on to his graduate studies at Princeton. He is firmly ensconced in the world of ruling-class academia, and has worked as a professor at various Ivy-league institutions. That being said, he remains a left-wing public intellectual, and not a genuine progressive force. He was at one time an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and has claimed to be a socialist, although it’s not quite clear what trend of socialism he claims to follow. Materially, he appears to be another in a long line of imperial socialists or Revisionists, seeking minor social reforms to the domineering U.S. Empire.

He began his candidacy by a call for a “united front” strategy against fascism. This was a self-conscious reference to the United Front strategy of the 1930s Comintern. It’s not clear exactly what West wants to unite in his united front, since he has publicly recognized the Democrats as “milquetoast neoliberals,” but the sentiment is that all democratic elements, all radical elements, and all progressive elements — those bourgeois and capitalist forces dedicated to democratization, all anti-capitalists, and all socially progressive forces, regardless of class — must combine to stand against the encroachment of the Trumpist clique into mainstream politics.

Even since beginning the draft of this article, West has revised his campaign goals. Those he lists on his campaign website are Dismantling the Empire, Unleashing Democracy, and Saving the Planet, which sound vague and hopeful.

In a previous iteration of his website, he listed a goal to End the Wars, which included disbanding NATO. This version of his anti-imperialist platform was manifestly more politically advanced than the one that is now contained under Dismantling the Empire. Although his call for the dissolution of NATO and the end of the U.S. global military presence remains unchanged, he has added “increasing humanitarian aid to poor and vulnerable peoples,” which all Communists recognize as a neo-colonial stratagem in the U.S. Empire’s strategy of global domination.

Unleashing Democracy reads like a litany of late 1920s social-democratic programs: quality education, housing, a living wage, paid leave; curbing inflation, supporting unions, expanding social security, forgiving all student debt. These are all obviously desirable elements of a program, but on their own, again, do nothing to advance the cause of revolution. Still, they are political goals that Communists can, with some reservations, generally support. For our purposes, the most exciting part is the brief line that he will democratize unaccountable monopolies and oligopolies “with workers’ control.”

Lastly, there is a somewhat meaningless Save the Planet plank, which promises “invest[ment] in clean energy” and ending fossil fuel subsidies. Even if keeping such promises was possible, West’s demands are far too minor in the face of mounting ecological catastrophes.

In only a few days, West has reduced his demands from their previous iteration, which amounted to a meager but passable socialist minimum program, to nearly completely writing out any mention of economic justice. Further, West has no corresponding maximal program, a commitment to Communism, or any kind of socialist construction. This is no surprise, as he is not a Communist, nor, really, any kind of socialist. He has, in the past, made a number of anti-Communist remarks. In these things, Dr. West is not significantly different from the non-Marxist advanced masses — those workers who profess some degree of Marxist education or self-education, such as the membership of the DSA — of workers in the U.S. Empire.

To that end, if his candidacy attracts a widespread following in the intermediate working masses — the not-yet-Marxist but class-conscious — it would not be correct to ignore it. Because his minimal program has some policies with which Communist organizations can present principled, limited agreement; because his positions are not significantly different from the non-Marxist advanced masses who must be educated as to the correct, Marxist positions; because West can bring these issues to the forefront of public discussion, if West’s campaign is at all successful, it would not be incorrect for local and regional Communist organizations to support those initiatives while maintaining their revolutionary commitments. That is to say any truly Communist organization should not endorse him. To do so would be to join forces with our bourgeois class enemies. But we may loudly proclaim those parts of his program with which we agree — and just as loudly denounce those parts with which we disagree.

Of course Dr. West is not “correct” in any of his policies or positions. But if those policies and positions become topics of widespread discussion among the intermediate working masses, this will present an opportunity for Communists to explain the correct positions — so long as we: 1) are not seen as unduly pessimistic, 2) maintain operational and formal integrity apart from any campaign, and 3) maintain, at every turn, a commitment to a maximum program and never stray from explaining the necessity of revolution. It is not, therefore, that Dr. West can lead the masses. It is, rather, that Dr. West can be instructive for the masses. Through Dr. West, Communists can teach and help the proletariat and working classes to achieve that basic consciousness which they currently lack in the United States: consciousness of their class-in-itself, of their shared commonalities, of their shared economic, social, and political interests. Were our movement more developed, Dr. West would represent a regressive element that we would otherwise clearly shun, and clearly demarcate ourselves from. As it is, should a genuine connection between Dr. West and the masses manifest, and we have little reason to believe it will not, we should be prepared to make use of that connection and publicly state our agreement such as it is with his program. We should be preparing for the hour that Dr. West betrays the people or is betrayed by the bourgeois political class and be ready to make use of it to further help instruct the people.

To be clear, my certainty was not based on any notion that the Democratic Party would choose a candidate for whom I could, in good conscience, vote. Any belief I may have once had in either the Democratic Party or in “lesser evil” politics vanished long ago. On the contrary, my decision to wait out the 2024 election cycle came from a growing sense that the Left, such as it is in the U.S., was incapable of a presidential campaign that would be worth an ounce of my energy. The 2020 Howie Hawkins Green Party campaign left a bitter taste, and confirmed my belief that an awful lot of otherwise good people who advocate for an independent Left political party are thoroughly out of touch with working and poor people — so much so that the presidential election has become for them a sort of escape valve, a place to promote their ideas, with no responsibility to organize locally around them.

Naturally, the announcement of an independent presidential run by one of this country’s foremost Black intellectuals grabbed my attention and captured my imagination. Several of Dr. West’s subsequent interviews did more: made me believe that he understands something critically important about where we stand in history.

Anyone who sees and listens to the world around them should be able to see and hear the level of discontent and desperation that so many people feel, as well as the deep cynicism and disgust they feel toward the existing political parties and the entire realm of public affairs in this country.

The moment of hope and sense of at least temporary relief many experienced with the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 only made the reality of this administration so much more horrible. If you were encouraged by a presidential candidate who invoked the memory of George Floyd, a Black man publicly lynched by police, how could you not feel nauseous when, once in office, that same president spent billions putting thousands more police on the street? If you felt relieved that the Democrats had at last come to understand the urgency of rapid climate change in November 2020, in the few years since you have certainly shaken with rage as Biden ushers in new drillings and pipelines and giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. If you had deplored Trump’s militarism and believed that at least “our” government was reorienting to diplomacy, how could you not be sickened by the Democrats allocating billions of dollars to fund a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, while promoting and gearing up for a new cold war against China?

The sudden entry of a widely respected voice like Dr. West’s into the cacophony of what has come to pass for political discourse in this country naturally compels attention. No matter the how or the why or the how well, it is certain that Dr. West’s run, his contribution to political discourse, stands to bring clarity on a wide range of political issues to millions of working-poor people, and might very well spark a consciousness-raising that in turn inspires a genuine working-class movement for a better world.

Dr. West is criticized by some people on the Left because he has supported and even campaigned for Democrats in the past, from Jesse Jackson to Bill Bradley to Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders. So it is important to hear him now when he declares that there are two major parties and political forces in the U.S. One is the neo-fascist Republican Party. The other is what Dr. West refers to as the “milquetoast neoliberal” Democratic Party. And a significant part of Dr. West’s motivation for running for president in 2024 is simply this: neoliberalism cannot forestall the triumph of fascism. If the Democrats refuse to articulate a compelling working and poor people’s agenda, millions in the U.S. will turn or acquiesce to a fascist government — no matter which party dominates it.

There is much, much more to say about the Democratic Party — including that its owners, the ruling capitalist class, keep it on a short leash, using it precisely to restrain the emergence of an independent working-class movement that combines organized labor with campaigns against oppression and imperialism. Some of it Dr. West says and some of it he does not say, or does not say clearly. But that is another discussion.

Dr. West is successfully articulating that only a broad, multi-racial, working-class movement can stave off the rise of fascism — as well as combat existential issues like rapid climate change and the U.S. war machine. Dr. West grasps this essential fact, and has the unique ability to explain it to millions of people who feel this reality in their bones, but do not yet have the words to express it.

2024 could be a turning point in U.S. history. It could be the year that millions of people rally around a political campaign that prioritizes radical demands for social equality, that recognizes and validates the experiences of oppressed people who want control over their own bodies, their own communities, and their own destinies. It could be the year that millions rally around a political agenda that reflects the interests of working-poor people — socialized housing, healthcare, and education; the right to organize in unions; world peace; a habitable future for our planet — and unconditionally puts those interests front and center.

Dr. Cornel West is not a messiah. He does not have all the answers. He will not — certainly not by himself — embody every change we need. In many respects, he is only a very eloquent figurehead. But he has appeared on the scene at a time, and in a manner, and with a message that could light a spark. And that spark, fanned by social movements into a flame, might grow into a fire that even fascism cannot extinguish.

Republished with revisions from the author’s blog, Tell No Lies. Claim No Easy Victories… We thank the author for his kind open-ended offer of republication.

The battle over gerrymandering has been fought since the introduction of the current political machine by antebellum Democrats in the early mid-19th century. In fact, the term comes from 1812 and the redrawing of Massachusetts electoral districts by Governor Elbridge Gerry, when he redrew a district in Boston to look like a salamander on a survey map. The practice is designed to combine various districts so that the voting population of the enemy — the party not currently in power, whichever that may be — is concentrated in the fewest number of districts or broken up so that they are counteracted by larger numbers of the party doing the drawing. Gerrymandering is nearly as old as elections in the U.S. and almost coeval with the founding of the U.S. settler-republic itself.

It has always caused righteous and justified outrage among the people who are actually doing the voting. By its very nature, Gerrymandering is anti-democratic. In electoral regions where the ruling party has a safe majority of the votes, there’s no reason to Gerrymander. It’s only where the ruling party is slipping from power or foresees a loss in voters that it goes to the district maps and tries to draw the borders in its own favor.

In 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States, stacked with right-fascist jurists, ruled that partisan gerrymandering, even when “excessive,” was “nonjusticiable” and involved “political questions.” This was the case of Rucho v. Common Cause, 139 S. Ct. 2484, 2491, 2507 (2019). In the everyday language of human beings, this tortured legal-speak means that, should a political party redistrict your entire state to make sure it, and it alone, can win elections in the future, the courts have no power to aid you. “Nonjusticiable” means there is nothing the court can do; a “political question” is one that the courts have decided must be fixed by elected representatives. Never mind that the gerrymandering itself makes it impossible to elect representatives who would undo the partisan redistricting.

Under a little-used and even less-granted rule of procedure, the legislature of North Carolina asked their state supreme court permission to re-argue a case that had been decided once already last year, when the judges of that court had held a Democratic majority. That case, Harper v. Hall, 380 N.C. 317, 390 (2022), had determined that the North Carolina constitution prohibited partisan gerrymandering.

On 28 April, 2023, the Supreme Court of North Carolina, newly-packed with pro-gerrymandering right-fascist Republicans, overruled Harper v. Hall. The new Harper v. Hall ruling explicitly mirrors the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause — that is, since the redistricting has already been done, there’s no way to fix it. The question is, in the twisted language of the law, “nonjusticiable.” In other words, to those who have lost the ability to have their voices heard in even the meager and anemic elections we’ve become accustomed to in this dying bourgeois republic, the answer is: “Too bad!”

Gerrymandering: the Legal Landscape

The most prominent gerrymandering cases were, of course, all within the territory of New Africa — that band of fertile soil in the U.S. South where the biggest and most prosperous slave plantations were founded, which imported the most Black African slaves, and which are, consequently, today the regions where most Black people in the U.S. Empire live. The practice of redistricting to disenfranchise Black voters came under federal scrutiny in the 1960s and was explicitly outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Under the liberal order, any victory secured by the oppressed, by the laboring masses, is subject to reversal. Liberalism, and in particular the brand of left-liberalism popular among the functionaries of the Democratic Party, functions on the level of form rather than content. To the left-liberal, there is no higher principle than applying, however unequally, the same form to many situations and arguing, from the fact that the form remains unchanged, that this, in some abstract and metaphysical sense, represents equality. 

It was only a matter of time before this liberal mania of honoring procedure and process over results caused an utterly ludicrous shift in the very meaning of the law. Although the fight against gerrymandering had taken on an explicitly anti-racist cast, it would, in 1993, be used to deprive a Black population of its political power.

Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, was a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case that came up out of North Carolina. In the 1990 census, North Carolina qualified for a new electoral district. This district was drawn by the North Carolina state legislature in a “snake-like” manner to create what is called a “majority-minority” district; that is, the new electoral district was majority Black. North Carolina was under the rule of the Voting Rights Act, which meant any redistricting had to be approved by the federal government, which would approve or deny the redistricting based on a test as to whether the new districts jeopardized minority presentation. The Justice Department accepted this new district.

Ruth O. Shaw and a group of other white residents sued the U.S. Attorney General and various state officials over the plan. The Supreme Court, then under the conservative right-fascist leadership of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ruled that the electoral district, because it separated out Black voters, was an effort to segregate races and was therefore a violation of the white resident’s constitutional right to equal protection under the law. You’re reading that right: the redistricting was held to be unconstitutional because it violated the white resident’s rights by attempting to ensure that Black voters were heard in North Carolina, a state with a historical record of suppressing the Black vote.

Now that the reactionary elements had realized they could use the anti-gerrymandering rules to their benefit, a drive kicked off to make gerrymandering illegal on its face and reverse the gains made by the Black voters of the South throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This legal push has resulted in the modern division of gerrymandering into two categories: the legal, and the illegal.

Racial gerrymandering is still per-se illegal. But, thanks to a string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions culminating in Rucho v. Common Cause, politically partisan gerrymandering is not. That is, it is illegal to design an electoral district such that Black voters are concentrated and can form a majority, but it is not illegal to design an electoral district such that Republican voters can form a majority.

Under the hood of the bourgeois democracy under which we live, district-drawing is one of the mechanisms used by both parties to try to gain an advantage in the federal government. Both Democrats and Republicans aggressively redistrict to shore up seats where they’re weak. Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans have been pursuing a united strategy for redistricting since 2010. REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project) was founded in that year and the Republican party has poured some $30 million dollars into this project. Over the past 23 years, REDMAP has used computerized mapping software to help redraw hundreds of districts in each round of redistricting. By 2012, the Republican party had already received an enormous benefit in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, many states that were formerly controlled by Democrats are now bastions of Republican power thanks to this, and other efforts to control which votes are counted and which are neutralized.

Voting in the Bourgeois Republic

Once every few years, the workers in the United States Empire have been accustomed to being given the opportunity to engage in a piece of political theater: voting which wing of the great vulture will be in charge of our oppression. State ideologists, textbook authors, and talking heads on television cloak the bourgeois republic in the dizzy and eager language of democracy. We, the working people, know better. This is shown in every election in our lifetime. Voter turnout in the presidential elections, for instance, has hovered between 50 and 65% throughout the entire 20th and 21st century. Why don’t people vote? Because they know, both from history and experience, that their votes don’t matter.

Why don’t the votes of the working people matter? There are numerous ways and means used by the ruling class to denude, sift through, sort, and screen the votes of the working people. To address them all would be an involved exercise, but some of the ways the power of the democratic vote is reduced and winnowed away include: first-past-the-post elections, election days coinciding with work time, polling stations that are inaccessible, the electoral college, huge costs of running a campaign for office, and the worst and most potent tool of the ruling class of all: backroom dealing. We all know that the way politics works in this country is that moneyed interests talk directly with politicians outside of the view of the public. Even supposedly “progressive” politicians take pride in their ability to manipulate the system of deals, bargains, and secret handshakes that pervades the halls of power. The fact of the matter is, all the decisions made by our politicians are made in private. We are never in the room. The money is.

But because the power of the vote is often useless or meaningless, that doesn’t mean it’s always meaningless. There have been times when the vote has mattered. There have been times when the vote has shown an expression of collective rage, even of class power! Those times are few and far between.

More importantly, though, the franchise, the right to vote, has expanded significantly since the settler-republic was first founded. Initially, only propertied white men of English heritage could vote in most states (and, consequently, in federal affairs). As this changed, the power of the vote was reduced, to prevent what the liberal hysterics refer to as “mob rule” or the “rule of the many.” (Why are they so afraid of the rule of many? Because they are the few!) In liberal democracy, enfranchisement is not political power in its own right, but rather an indication of which segments of the population the ruling class deems important enough to placate. 

So why should we be up in arms about voting rights, which we have just agreed don’t mean much, being taken away? Here’s why: Those rights have been secured through bloodshed. They are the concession, wrung through the centuries of hard class struggle, that we have forced from the ruling classes. It’s not so much the fact that we begrudge the blood-suckers and parasites in our government or the bloated hypocrites that own the companies and thus the country the right to participate in their dog-and-pony show. But winning the vote was a step toward winning the political battle. Losing the vote — watching them strip it away from us with gerrymandering and other tricks — that demonstrates not only the disdain in which they hold the working people and the nationally oppressed, the disgust they have for you and I, but it is the worrying and dangerous call of the rise of open violence and reactionary attack.

What should stir our blood is not that our voices carried weight with the ruling class, but that we are now being told not to talk at all. The fact that they feel no need to operate under even the scant theater of pluralism and popular will should concern everyone.

The Sharpening of Partisanship 

Since the 2016 elections, following on the heels of Republican victories in redistricting in the early 2010s, partisanship has sharpened on the right side of the aisle. The GOP has been tilting steadily rightwards into more and more brutal forms of right-fascism since 2001, and in 2016 the far-right fascist element within the party won control, not only of the party, but of the entire country.

We are now in an era where the entire U.S. government at all levels stands divided between the left-fascists, who merely want to see a stabilization in the current capitalist world-order, and the right-fascists, who call for increased exploitation, white class collaboration, and much more vigorous suppression of the growing Communist movement within the empire.

The Supreme Court of North Carolina lost two of its Democratic Justices last year, and these were replaced by Republican Justices. This is what enabled the clever maneuvering by the North Carolina legislature to get the case in which gerrymandering had been rendered illegal under North Carolina law heard for a second time before a new, sympathetic — we might even call them co-conspiratorial — court.

This battle between the left-fascists and the right-fascists is playing out not only in the political arena, where it traditionally has been fought, but also in the country’s courts. Long having pursued a project of planting arch-conservative lawyers into positions of high authority in both state and federal courts, the GOP is now poised, pushed by its dominant far-right wing, to deliver body blow after body blow to their political opponents. The reversal of Harper v. Hall is one such stroke; and because the Democrats had relied upon the oppressed Black masses to support their capitalist program, it is also a blow against the already-shaky structure of the bourgeois “democracy” enjoyed under the empire.

Harper v. Hall

The Democrats, and by extension (though of course, not by design) the people of North Carolina, won Harper v. Hall in 2022. This was a case brought in 2021 by the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters and individual voters joining together to file suit against the president of the North Carolina senate, the speaker of the North Carolina house, and the chairs of the redistricting committees, challenging the constitutionality of the redistricting maps that were drawn. The maps, of course, only got that far because the U.S. Supreme Court had repealed key sections of the Voting Rights Act, mentioned above.

On 20 January, 2023, the legislature of North Carolina filed a motion for rehearing before the new, right-fascist Supreme Court of North Carolina. The court gave no real reason for its decision to rehear the case (“a recently issued opinion appropriately is reheard if the petitioner makes a satisfactory showing that this opinion may be erroneous” was all the logic it provided). It needed none! The GOP-controlled court reheard the case because they wanted to reverse it. On 28 April 2023, they did exactly that.

In its new decision, the Supreme Court of North Carolina sneers, “such claims ask courts to apportion political power as a matter of fairness…. Individuals have no constitutional right as members of the public to a government audience for their policy views.” Harper at *48 citing Minn. state Bd. for Cmty. Colls v. Knight, 465 U.S. 271, 286 (1984). (emphasis added.)

The left-fascists still cling to a form of bourgeois democracy, but increasingly the right-fascists have determined that even the shreds of participation in government that have been won over the past century and a half are too dangerous to the ruling class. This is a naked, undisguised attack on democratic participation in government. We should read the decision of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in the same terms that they state it: 

As long as you get to cast a vote, the fact that it is purely symbolic doesn’t matter.

Federal prosecutors allege that Lammond aided Tarrio and his associates during the Capitol Hill putsch of January 6, 2021.

On that day, an armed mob of MAGA fascists, numbering 2,000 and primarily led by Tarrio’s contingent of 200 Proud Boys members, marched on the U.S. Capitol Building as part of a half-hearted putsch. Their ostensible intent was to reinstall Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election by a considerable margin, as President of the United States; in fact, this was an experiment in fascist mobilization — a training or staging exercise, test-run, or proof of concept, if you will. Trump had spent the weeks following election day in November 2020 mobilizing his most militant supporters with false claims of a “stolen” election. (The majority-Democrat House of Representatives would later impeach Trump for a second time in retaliation.) The rioters actually breached the Capitol’s inner chambers and drove elected officials and staffers into hiding. Still, the attackers failed to capitalize on their victory — apparently owing, in part, to legitimate surprise that they were so rapidly successful.

One rioter was shot and killed during the assault. In the months that followed, four police officers committed suicide. Many cops were distraught at the “family” infighting: They had been forced to confront their mostly white, mostly middle-class fascist paramilitary brethren with a modicum of the repressive violence they normally reserve for terrorizing Black and other colonized people and the desperately poor. 

Since January 6, 2021, more than 1,000 individuals have faced criminal charges, including “sedition,” relating to their participation in the putsch.

Federal prosecutors unsealed the charges against Lammond on Friday, May 19. They allege that Lammond aided Tarrio and his associates during the Capitol Hill putsch, specifically by supplying Tarrio with classified information via text messages. If convicted, Lammond, a “veteran” officer with over 20 years on the force, and a “decorated” “intelligence expert” (who was evidently not intelligent enough to avoid incriminating himself), faces a maximum of 30 years in prison.

One might ask, why would a “decorated” police officer such as Lt. Shane Lammond aid a terrorist like Enrique Tarrio? As a police officer, wasn’t it his duty to prevent terrorism and to catch terrorists?

Actually, the police exist for one reason, and one reason only: To maintain the existing social order by means of violent repression.

What is the existing order in the U.S.?

The United States of America was founded as — and remains, to this day, regardless of how our rulers brand it — a settler-colonial empire. This country was built upon the enslavement of millions of Black Africans and upon genocidal campaigns of land-conquest against this continent’s Indigenous peoples. Dispossession of the colonized remains the economic foundation of the U.S. Empire. In order to keep the oppressed peoples from rising up and overthrowing the colonialist order, the U.S. Empire must arm itself with a powerful repressive force — in fact, the most powerful military and police forces in world history. It is impossible to understand the ubiquity of police terror and brutality against Black and other colonized peoples today if one fails to recognize that the U.S. Empire’s police forces have their origins in settler militias, organized and armed by colonial governors, planters, and land-greedy settlers in order to massacre and drive out Indigenous communities, recapture escaped slaves, and terrorize ethnic and religious minorities.

The U.S. Empire is also ruled by a dictatorship of the capitalists. Originally, when the settler colonies that would later form the U.S. declared independence from Britain, they were ruled by three powerful classes: the big merchants, who owned massive fleets, and whose profits largely derived from the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the bankers, who financed the former; and the slaveholding planters, who grew rich by exploiting the enslaved labor of Black Africans upon their massive plantation estates. Capitalism, in its modern, industrial mode, developed in this country during the 19th Century, first in the “free” North; gradually, as the “frontier” West was colonized, it was transformed into a site of open battle between the capitalist and slave-plantation systems, which led directly to the U.S. Civil War; after the Union’s victory over the slaveholder-dictatorship Confederacy and the legal abolition of slavery, capitalism also began to develop in the South. The big merchants, bankers, and planters converted themselves into industrialists — the “barons” and “captains” of American steel, coal, rail, manufacturing, agriculture, and other industries — and financiers. As capitalism developed, so did monopolies, and the new monopolists retooled the country’s existing state machinery, including its police forces, to serve their new dictatorship.

Those police were reorganized and given an additional purpose: to act as the guardians of capitalist private property in the U.S. Empire’s developing industrial cities, and to crush any and all organized proletarian resistance, even as labor agitation and open revolt raged throughout the 19th century. But as the economic structure of the U.S. Empire changed, its colonial substructure remained intact, and the institution of U.S. policing never forgot or forsook its colonialist origins in slave-catching, plantation enforcement, “frontier” massacres, and white terror.

In sum, it is no accident that police in the U.S. Empire have deep links with civilian-fascist paramilitaries. This is not an unintended “flaw” in the way this country’s police forces are organized; it is a consciously reproduced “feature” of any colonialist police force. Police function, by design, as the crucible of U.S. fascism. As the saying goes, “Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand.”

But if that’s the case, if civilian-fascist paramilitaries like the Proud Boys ultimately serve to uphold the U.S. Empire’s settler-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist order, then why has the Federal Government cracked down in recent years on the fascists involved in the January 6, 2021 putsch?

The war of “lawfare” raging in this country’s courts represents a factional struggle within the U.S. Empire’s ruling class of monopoly capitalists.

One of these factions is represented mainly by the “moderate” mainstream wing of the Democratic Party, currently headed by President Joe Biden, as well as by the vanishingly small and inconsequential “moderate” wing of the Republican Party. This faction’s main goal is stability: It wants to stabilize the U.S. Empire’s fascist regime at its present level of ascendency and brutality, because it believes (rightly so) that any expansion of fascism may provoke civil unrest. This faction remembers the Summer 2020 Rebellion that shook the country after the police murder of George Floyd, and it desperately wants to stave off any further mass uprisings for as long as it can. We refer to this faction as the left-wing of U.S. fascism.

The other faction is represented mainly by the recently ascendant extreme-right wing of the Republican Party, which has coalesced since 2016, and especially since 2020, around its political figurehead, Donald Trump. This faction’s main goal is expansion: It wants to expand the U.S. Empire’s fascist regime at all costs. It wishes to stave off the march of history, of progress, by intensifying the U.S. regime’s state terror and brutality against the poor and colonized masses, against women and LGBT people, and against other oppressed sections of the population. It stands for the openly terroristic dictatorship of the most depraved elements of the monopoly-capitalists, their allies among the predominantly white middle classes, and their lackeys in the military, police, and other institutions of the fascist state’s bureaucracy. We refer to this faction as the right-wing of U.S. fascism.

In the 2020 general elections, the Democrats won a majority in both houses of Congress and the presidency. The left-wing of U.S. fascism temporarily won power back from the right-wing. Since then, in order to consolidate their gains and carry out their program of fascist stabilization, the Democrats directed the Department of Justice and other arms of the Federal Government to carry out a minor campaign of repression against the most militant forces of the opposing right-wing faction. That campaign has even reached Trump himself; the former President is currently on trial for election-related criminal charges.

Such factional struggles are hardly out of the ordinary in a fascist regime. Take, for instance, the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

During the Weimar Republic era, a paramilitary force known as the Freikorps was instrumental in the rise of fascism. The Freikorps took in military rejects and veterans, indoctrinated them into fascism, and remilitarized them as shock-troop terrorists to be employed by the German state. When the proletariat of Germany, fatigued by the brutality of the First World War, but still highly organized and class-conscious, rose up in 1918–1919, the capitalist dictatorship employed the Freikorps to crush the revolution and assassinate its Communist leaders. The Freikorps retained their significance into the early 1930’s, and would be integrated in large part into the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel paramilitaries. But in 1934, a factional struggle broke out within the Nazi Party, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives incident, in which Hitler’s faction carried out targeted assassinations of prominent Nazi Party leaders and jailed others, including some Freikorps members, in order to consolidate the Hitlerite faction’s control over the Nazi regime. Hitler would go on to denounce the Freikorps as “degenerates,” reversing his earlier endorsement.

Fascism in the U.S. Empire has not yet expanded to the stage of absolute despotism and omnipresent terror reached in Germany in 1934. But fascism in this country is expanding, and the struggles between its factions are intensifying.

The Trumpite Republicans are amassing their forces, both political, in the Federal and state governments, and paramilitary, in the streets. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the whole variety of civilian-fascist paramilitaries that have coalesced and grown in recent years, especially under the MAGA banner, are of the same type as the Freikorps in proto-fascist Germany, and they will be made to serve the same ends by our American Hitlerites. In cities across the U.S. Empire, these rabid dogs, these cops in plain clothes, are assembling to terrorize oppressed communities: They stand across from LGBT bars and nightclubs holding rifles. They stand across from Movement for Black Lives marches, alongside their blue-uniformed brethren. They stand across from reproductive healthcare clinics, threatening the patients who seek abortions and other health services and the doctors who provide them. They are ready at a moment’s notice to open fire, to commit lynchings and massacres, to enact the chaotic-yet-organized terror that only a civilian-fascist paramilitary can — no questions asked. And when the time comes, when fascism is absolutely ascendent in the U.S. Empire, those civilian-fascist terrorists who prove useful will be absorbed into the American Schutzstaffel; the remainder will be discarded.

The “moderate” Democrats, the “moderate” left-wing of U.S. fascism, are carrying out the present lawfare campaign against Trump and his most militant supporters not because they care about “safeguarding our democracy,” as they claim, but because they are desperately clinging to what remains of their power. Faced with the ascendancy of a new variety of U.S. fascism, the Democrats have been compelled to use the repressive force of courts and police — even against other police. But this cannot last forever; the weight of this regime’s internal contradictions will inevitably bring it to the point of collapse. As fascism continues to expand across the U.S. Empire, the question is therefore not whether the Democrats will fold, but when.

And as for the oppressed masses? We are poor and exhausted by the everyday facts of our lives; we are horrifically outgunned by the enemy state. Our only weapon is organization, and organization on an independent basis. Let the capitalist parties vie for hegemony in this country’s halls of power. Our task is to organize, educate, and arm ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, and our communities — to build power where we stand. Only by building popular power among the oppressed masses will we find the power to defeat and eliminate the fascist cancer, once and for all.

While Title IX, which built upon and extended protections in the famous Civil Rights Act of 1964, represented a progressive step toward the legal equality and political freedom of women, its sex-based language has allowed for legal ambiguity with regard to its amendment’s application to the rights of transgender people in education.

Namely, some elected officials and judges interpret “on the basis of sex” to refer to some concept of “biological sex” — and more narrowly to the “female” or “male” marker on an individual’s birth certificate. In other words, this interpretation holds that only “sex assigned at birth” is protected under Title IX. The problem with this interpretation is that how “biological sex” is defined in law is at odds with advancements in science: It has long been accepted by experts that a “biological sex” concept of humans’ bodies that reduces to a simple male–female dichotomy oversimplifies the matter and fails to encapsulate a diversity of experiences.

Put another way, human gametes (eggs and sperm) are indeed binary, but human bodies, and human experiences, are much more complex. Sexual development is now understood as an extremely complex “dance” of genetic, environmental, social, and psychological factors that does not fall into a strict binary. Outdated legal definitions of sex (and thus also gender) in the U.S., and in most countries, fail to reflect this.

On the other hand, some elected officials and judges interpret “sex” in Title IX and other laws to be interchangeable with the related concept “gender,” and therefore also “gender identity,” a legal category that depends not on one’s “sex assigned at birth,” but the way an individual self-identifies, and the way an individual really lives their life.

In 2010, the Obama administration’s Department of Education, in response to growing popular support for the rising transgender rights movement, became the first to adopt the latter interpretation of Title IX’s “on the basis of sex” clause. The department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued non-binding guidelines to Federally-funded institutions, including colleges and universities, with regard to single-sex classes, and who is eligible to participate in single-sex spaces. The Obama administration’s OCR held that “All students, including transgender students and students who do not conform to sex stereotypes, are protected from sex-based discrimination under Title IX,” and that schools “generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity in all aspects of the planning, implementation, enrollment, operation, and evaluation of single-sex classes.”

For a few years, between 2010 and 2017, transgender students, particularly in public colleges and universities, enjoyed a modicum — but only a modicum — of non-binding legal protection in education. Transgender students would at last be institutionally recognized as their self-identified gender, and thus afforded protection against sex-based discrimination — a long-awaited and long-fought-for reprieve. 

But the reprieve was never consolidated or expanded, and was not to last. Democrats in Congress never passed an amendment to Title IX, clarifying its protected categories in line with the Obama administration’s interpretation, during Obama’s presidency. Thus, when Obama’s second term as president ended and Trump entered office, the new extreme-right Department of Education eliminated the modicum of protection afforded by the previous administration’s guidelines. In 2020, the Trump administration’s Department of Education began to withhold Federal funding from colleges and universities that upheld the Obama administration’s guidelines, or which otherwise protected the rights of transgender students.

Internal documents leaked to The New York Times in 2018 showed that the Trump administration was preparing to “define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with,” and planned to institute rules whereby “Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.”

Again, it should be noted that genetic testing alone is wholly inaccurate in determining sex. As with previous and existing pseudoscientific policies, such as phrenology and blood quantum, the point is not to make “scientific sense” of social phenomena and their legal aspects, but to systematize bigotry and codify it in law.

Parallel battles over Title IX have been fought through the U.S. judiciary.

In the notable recent case Adams ex rel. Kasper v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida, the plaintiff, a mother of a transgender boy, sued the county school board, which had prohibited her son from using the boys’ bathroom; he was instead forced to use either the girls’ or gender-neutral bathrooms. The plaintiff argued that this constituted sex-based discrimination as prohibited under Title IX. A district court judge ruled in favor of Adams, finding that his right to be protected from discrimination, under Title IX and under the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, had been violated by the school board. The ruling represented a small, fleeting win for transgender rights. But the St. Johns County school board appealed, and in 2022, the 11th Circuit Court overruled the district court. The court’s 7–4 majority held that transgender students are protected neither by Title IX nor by the Fourteenth Amendment, and may be legally discriminated against by schools and other institutions.

The U.S. judicial system has become increasingly reactionary in recent years, stacked both with Trump-appointed extreme-right fascists and with Obama- and Biden-appointed “law and order” “moderate” fascists. A diminishing number of liberal judges, and vanishingly few “progressives,” are issuing a proportionately smaller number of legal “wins” for LGBT and women’s rights. In the meantime, the extreme-right conservative crusade, waged by the Trumpite faction of the Republican Party against LGBT people and women, especially in the domains of marriage equality, reproductive healthcare, transgender legal recognition, and care for transgender youth, is gaining traction in state legislatures and Federal courts.

What are the purportedly pro-LGBT, “progressive” Democrats doing to counteract and fight back against this extreme-right fascist Republican crusade? Unfortunately for us, next to nothing. At most, the Democrats are using their one-seat majority in the Senate and their hold on the presidency to block the Republicans from instituting a regime of wholesale elimination against LGBT people, and a regime of absolute repression against women. But the Democratic Party is far beneath the task of fighting for our civil rights and liberties, and that is proven by the fact that, during the two years it maintained majorities in both houses of Congress, and the presidency, from 2021–23, it did next to nothing to convert popular will into law.

The Democratic Party, by and large, represents not progress, not advancements to civil rights and liberties, but merely the “left-wing” of U.S. fascism. It functions as a weight on one “side of the aisle,” that “balances out” the “right-wing” of U.S. fascism, represented by the Republican Party. In the aftermath of every Republican expansion of fascism — take the many extreme-right laws and policies introduced under the Trump administration, for instance — the Democrats assume control of the sinking ship, stabilize the wreckage, and, most importantly, consolidate the expansion. The Democrats do not fight the fascism of the Republican Party; they enable it.

Now, in line with this purpose, the Biden administration’s Department of Education has proposed a new interpretation of Title IX with regard to transgender students. One might expect the outwardly pro-LGBT administration to propose an expansion of Title IX to unequivocally and fully protect transgender students at every level of the U.S. education system.

Unfortunately not. The Biden administration instead proposes a compromise with the fascist Republicans on the “question” of transgender rights.

A document published by the Department of Education on April 6, 2023, titled “FACT SHEET: U.S. Department of Education’s Proposed Change to its Title IX Regulations on Students’ Eligibility for Athletic Teams,” states the following:

The [Biden administration’s] proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.

So far, so good. Except,

The proposed rule also recognizes that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation. The proposed rule would … [give] schools the flexibility to develop their own participation policies.

This is a highly euphemistic, weasley way to say that, under the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX rules, “in some instances,” schools will be allowed to discriminate against transgender students. The proposed regulation reads:

If a [Federal Government-funded school] adopts or applies sex-related criteria that would limit or deny a student’s eligibility to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity [i.e., more correctly, “that would discriminate against transgender students”], such criteria must, for each sport, level of competition, and grade or education level: (i) be substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective, and (ii) minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.

What this complicated jumble of words means, what the Biden administration is really proposing, practically and bluntly speaking, is this: Discrimination against transgender students in schools is permitted, so long as the school officials are nice about it.

So much for the “most pro-LGBT presidential administration in U.S. history” — as some gullible liberals have lauded Biden. So much for the “party of LGBT rights.”

What we really have is the party of “compromise” — compromise with fascism. What we really have, in the Democratic Party, is the left-wing of U.S. fascism — a left-wing that continually makes overtures to the extreme-right, that routinely sells out the most oppressed for momentary bumps in opinion polls, and that, in the long-run, serves only to consolidate the rise of U.S. fascism in its most brutal, militaristic, terroristic form.

Our only response to the Biden administration’s half-measured, two-faced, compromised “protections” of transgender rights must be an emphatic “Not good enough!”

We must always demand more. We must demand full equality before the law, full and unequivocal legal protections for transgender people, absolute guarantees for our civil liberties. We must demand no compromises with fascism.

And we must not ask nicely. We must rid ourselves of the illusion that we can “vote in” the change we need; we must dispense with the idea that “our” representatives will listen to us, if only we call their offices and write them “firm, but polite” letters.

Comrade Assata Shakur rightly said, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

No, we must win our demands from our oppressors. We must force them to concede to popular will. Pleading will accomplish nothing. We must speak with the force of the only language our oppressors understand — the language of the unheard oppressed, of mass demonstrations, boycotts, occupations, and more. We must speak the language of organized mass political struggle, and we must not relent until our popular demands are met in full.

Only then will the civil rights and liberties of transgender people be converted from a political ideal to a political reality. Only then will we win the justice we seek.