Kamala Harris’s ill-fated presidential campaign centered the slogan “We’re not going back!” which, I confess, I found a bit confusing. Sure, going forward certainly seems better than retracing our steps, but it was unclear what the “back” we were avoiding returning to was, precisely. Jim Crow America? 2018, the middle of the previous Trump administration? Or perhaps 2014, when Harris as California AG was fighting to keep the state’s prisons catastrophically overcrowded?
I mean…
I don’t bring this up to gloat. In fact, I would like to take this opportunity to offer an olive branch to Harris/Walz 2024 presidential campaign:
We’re not going back is the most important slogan of our times.
It’s the slogan we need to embody in our movement work, our ideological orientation, our community connections, now more than ever.
The Democratic Party is currently publicly floundering in the least dignified ways imaginable. But they’ll find their footing eventually, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the Democrats’ pitch for midterms and 2028 will be some iteration of promising a return to normalcy.
With the one resonant rhetorical note of the 2024 campaign being Tim Walz’s reference to Republican weirdness, I have strong suspicions that the party will rebrand as the standard-bearers of the silent majority of good-ole-fashioned normal Americans. Vote Dem to retvrn to non-explicitly-dystopian, normal American tradition.
And to that we say: we’re not going back.
Because “border czar”/racist deportation demon Tom Homan was first appointed to lead ICE by President Barack Obama, who went out of his way to award the ghoul with the Presidential Rank Award. It’s not like Homan’s politics changed; he dreamed up the tactic of systematic family separation while on the Obama administratin’s payroll. (You can infuriate an electorally-inclined American anywhere on the political spectrum by referring to the man exclusively as “Obama appointee Tom Homan”… try it out!)
Because the DEI apocalypse is only the coda to political elites and the federal government offering no substantial reforms or concessions in response to the largest social movement in American history, the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020.
Because Trump’s fever dream Palestinian ethnic cleansing resort ad is simply the “and then as farce” iteration of decades of consistent American policy.
Because normal American politics is exactly what ushered in Trump’s unhinged authoritarianism, which would seem like quite the audacious claim except that it’s precisely what happened in front of all of our eyes.
We’re not going back to what got us here. We’re not going back to the normalcy of empire. The best way out is through.
Link up. Form networks. Get ready.
We want everything.
This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.