Notes on the Aftermath

How the networks we built and skills we learned in 2024 may help in the battles for democracy and equal rights, now and ahead.

One: A few days ago on a Zoom webinar, I heard Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present and one of our leading scholars of fascism, make a very interesting and hopeful assertion: that the Harris-Walz campaign laid the foundation for a pro-democracy movement that will continue as we enter the second Trump administration. “Our organizing, messaging, fund-raising, canvassing, conversing, and strategizing was not in vain,” she wrote the day after the election.

“The new networks, circuits of communication, memes, slogans, and images that came out of this period will not disappear just because we did not prevail. The experiences and knowledge and connections we gained in this process will help us in the years to come as we organize to win back whatever freedoms we lose and remain vocal and visible in the face of attempts to silence us.”

I think that’s largely right. Every big political mobilization enables activists and organizers to form new connections and develop trust, and if they’re any good and/or lucky, some of those relationships will last and become the basis for stronger work. Ben-Ghiat is also right to point out that in the final weeks of the election, we saw the emergence of something close to a cross-partisan alliance for democracy, as hundreds of Republican officials and national security professionals declared their support for Harris-Walz.

That said, I think we need to recognize how little mainstream Corporate America as well as big civil society organizations chose to speak out about the Trump threat. Ever since major corporations voided their pledges to stop donating to Republican election deniers in the wake of January 6, and Big Tech companies chose to stop trying to block hate speech and political disinformation, it’s been clear that America’s capitalists, not to mention most of its leading oligarchs, were fine with the prospect of a second Trump term. And as historians Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in The New York Times two weeks before the election (gift link), the pillars of the religious community in America were also silent. Almost everyone hedged their bets.

Now, as the House of Representatives votes on a bill, HR 9495, that would give the Treasury Department the unilateral power to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations accused of supporting terrorism (without requiring any disclosure of evidence or due process), some parts of civil society are belatedly rousing themselves. The ACLU has pulled together 150 groups who signed a letter opposing the legislation, though truth be told they are mostly the usual suspects: civil liberties, reproductive health, immigrant rights, human rights, racial justice, LGBTQ+, environmental, educations and liberal religious organizations. The AFT and NEA were the only unions I saw on the ACLU’s letter, though the AFL-CIO itself also signed. Significant because HR 9495 is being pushed by rightwing Jewish groups hoping to shut down leftist organizations that they see as anti-Israel, a broad coalition of mainstream and liberal Jewish groups have also come out against the bill. And perhaps most important, four leading philanthropy organizations led by Independent Sector have voiced their dissent. But as far as I know, none of the “Republicans for Harris” or the national security professionals who were worried about the likelihood of Trump trampling on democratic rights have seen fit to speak out about HR 9495, even though it would clearly put a powerful new weapon for chilling speech in his hands.

While the bill is still likely to pass the Republican-controlled House, strong Democratic opposition should help the current Senate tank it. All bets are off after January 1, of course. But this is a first bellwether of who will speak up to protect unpopular speech, and who will duck. If you haven’t already done so, call your Member of Congress (the switchboard number is 202- 224-3121) and urge them to oppose HR 9495.

Two: It’s more than a little ironic that as the curtain begins to fall on free speech in America because of the Trump/MAGA victory, the main groups sticking their necks out to try to hold the line are at the same time being attacked by an array of Democratic officials, consultants and pundits for somehow being the main, or a main, reason for the Harris-Walz defeat. Adam Jentleson, a former top aide to Senators John Fetterman and Harry Reid, kicked off the attack on “the groups” with an oped a few days ago in The New York Times. As he wrote, unless Democrats wanted to become a permanent minority, it was time to “declar[e] independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.”

Jentleson goes on to offer a variety of examples of “the groups” going too far, like the ACLU asking presidential candidates in 2019 if they favored paying for surgeries for transgender prisoners, or other progressive groups pushing for decriminalized border crossings. But his diagnosis of the problem is backwards—it’s not that advocacy groups make tough demands on Democratic candidates; it’s that far too often the candidates can’t take outspoken positions on the kitchen-table issues that most concern voters (because they don’t want to offend wealthy big donors), so instead they try to signal their concern for social justice by telling those interest groups what they want to hear.

As many other observers have pointed out, Kamala Harris did not run a leftwing campaign. (But the GOP painted her that way anyway.) If anything, she signaled that she would be more business-friendly than her boss, Joe Biden. As the Times reported in a piece on Wall Street-approved stances, before she made any major policy choices, she asked her team, “Has Tony seen this?” – a reference to her brother-in-law Tony West, who took a leave from his job as Uber’s general counsel to advise her. Another top adviser brought in to help steer the campaign was former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who took a leave from his jobs advising the crypto firms Binance and Alchemy Pay as well as the tech platform TikTok in order to work for Harris. Whatever populist inclinations she might have wanted to display were well-squelched by the influence of Wall Street on her team. Finance, insurance and real estate interests gave $164 million to her campaign, as of late October.

See also: Janos Marton, “No Ezra, nonprofit leaders are not to blame for the 2024 election,” November 16, 2024.

Three: “I have two little girls, I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a Jew or formerly Christian athlete, but as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that….Look, I was just speaking authentically as a parent about one of many issues where Democrats are just out of touch with the majority of Americans. And I stand by my position, even though I may not have used exactly the right words."

"I stand by them because importantly, I'm just trying to raise the debate. I'm not saying I have all the answers on this. It's not my area of expertise. But this is an example of a contentious issue that we have to be willing to take on as a Democratic Party. One, we got to start winning elections and we're losing on issues like this. And two, if we don't actually define the terms of the debate then Trump and the extremist Republicans will define it for all the rest of us." 

No, Congressman Seth Moulton didn’t say that he was afraid of Jews hurting his two little girls. He said that about “male or formerly male” athletes, affirming the fear-mongering and stereotyping about trans kids that is now spreading even further into mainstream society in the wake of Trump’s win. He later explained to The Advocate that what he was trying to do with his remarks was get Democrats to more forcefully respond to Trump’s fear-mongering, saying, “I know that the parents of trans kids are literally worrying about their children getting beat up every single day. And, of course, that’s gotten worse and probably will get even worse in the next four years.”

The fact is the number of trans kids playing high school or college sports is microscopic. Of half a million NCAA athletes, only about 40 are transgender. But the hysteria about “protecting girls’ sports” is widespread, deliberately fanned by a Republican party that constantly seizes on marginal issues to foster fear of “the other.” As transgender people gain visibility and acceptance, the backlash gets worse—as exemplified by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace’s choice on Monday to introduce legislation requiring lawmakers and Congressional employees to use bathrooms corresponding to their biological sex. Mace says she is definitely targeting newly elected Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride, telling reporters, “Someone with a penis in the women's locker room -- that's not ok.” “Just because a Congressman wants to wear a mini skirt doesn’t mean he can come into a women’s bathroom,” she has also said. “There is nothing the Radical Left can do to stop me from protecting women and girls.”

Normalizing these kinds of fears is what’s not ok. The law already protects women and girls from assault. Most women’s bathrooms already have individual stalls, and locker rooms and changing spaces can be modified to enable similar levels of privacy if wanted. Most bizarrely, Mace’s law would force transgender men, some of whom have beards and large muscles and look like other men to use the women’s bathrooms. But being sensible and looking to find ways to include everyone in our common public spaces is not what this is about.

Four: Returning to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s silver-lining theory of 2024, I want to lift up “Building power for resisting authoritarianism,” by Peter Levine, a Tufts University professor who is an expert on civic education and civil society. He points out that the first Trump presidency generated a counter-mobilization led mainly by women who marched on Washington or their home cities and then started thousands of local groups, many of them Indivisible chapters. But, he write, “the #resistance in 2017 proved evanescent because the nascent groups mainly encouraged their members to support other organizations.” And, he adds, national organizations were more than happy to harvest their dollars for their own operations.

“Inboxes filled with urgent fundraising appeals for national organizations. For example, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU in just one weekend during Trump’s first month as president. People also shared and encouraged each other to follow news from national outlets, and digital subscriptions for The New York Times and The Washington Post tripled under Trump. Finally, many people gave money and time to Democratic candidates in 2022. None of this generosity built power for the new groups themselves, and most–although not all–have faded away.”

The result: many grassroots activists became quite skilled, but no significant infrastructure was established at the local level. Here’s Levine’s counter-factual: “Imagine if the 350,000 people who gave $24 million to the ACLU in one weekend had instead (or also) formed 1,000 new local groups with an average startup budget of $24,000 and had set about raising enough additional funds and recruiting enough additional members to put 1,000 paid organizers at the service of half a million active volunteers in 1,000 American neighborhoods and towns. Our situation would be totally different today….no president would be able to trample over a robust civil society.”

Levine goes on to describe how this could work today. Rather than repeat it all here, just go read the whole thing. It’s brilliant.

Five: Writing in Jacobin, Liza Featherstone has a bracing response to everyone responding to the election by condemning the American people for being too stupid, racist, sexist or selfish to know that Biden and Harris were the real champions of the working class, not Trump. She writes, “elections are won by majorities. The same goes for white people. You also cannot win elections without men: they’re not a majority, but there are just too many of them to dismiss. You probably also can’t win elections without some people who have some bad opinions on some topics. To win, you need everyone. This liberal dismissal of millions is simply an innumerate approach to elections.” And this:

“If you don’t think that some people can be persuaded to change their vote in the future, you have no business opining about politics. Because that’s what politics is. Elections aren’t opportunities to count how many good and bad people exist. They aren’t excuses to cut off some of your family members or high-school classmates. They are serious political contests for power, won by persuasion and turnout.

If you don’t believe in the capacity of some people to change their minds, you don’t believe in social change at all, because that’s the only way it happens. You have no theory of change, because there is no theory of change without such persuasion. And without a theory of change, there is no politics: elections and other news become nothing more than a site of trauma, from which we must, out of self-care, protect ourselves and withdraw.”

See also:

—Rebecca Traister, “The Resistance is Dead. Long Live the Resistance?”, New York magazine, November 15, 2024.

—Janice Fine and Benjamin Schlesinger, “Where Did the Labor Vote Go?” Boston Review, November 18, 2024.

One cool thing

On Bluesky, someone has built a tool called Daddy’s Cash that adds a label to the accounts of British politicians and media personalities showing if they went to private school and how much that cost. That prompted another user (Daniel Sieradski) to suggest a similar labeler showing how much money American politicians have gotten from various special interest groups. And someone is now apparently building that. We may live in darkening times, but what’s going on right now on Bluesky suggests a better media ecosystem may still be possible. Stay tuned. (h/t Anil Dash)