"US Supreme Court" | photo by Mark Fischer (CC BY-SA 2.0) The justices of the US supreme court – even its conservatives – have traditionally valued their institution’s own standing. John Roberts, the current US chief justice, has always been praised – even by liberals – as a staunch advocate of the court’s image as a neutral arbiter. For decades, Americans believed the court soared above the fray of partisan contestation. No more. In Donald Trump’s second term, the supreme court’s conservative supermajority has seized the opportunity to empower the nation’s chief executive. In response, public approval of the court has collapsed. The question is what it means for liberals to catch up to this new reality of a court that willingly tanks its own legitimacy. Eager to realize cherished goals of assigning power to the president and arrogating as much for itself, the conservative justices seemingly no longer care what the public or the legal community think of the court’s actions. Too often, though, liberals are responding with nostalgia for a court that cares about its high standing. There is a much better option: to grasp the opportunity to set right the supreme court’s role in US democracy. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Attention to the body’s legitimacy surged in the decades after the extraordinary discussion on the topic in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey _–_ the 1992 case that memorably preserved the abortion rights minted in Roe v Wade __ despite recent conservative additions to the court. “The Court’s power lies in its legitimacy,” former justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter explained in their joint opinion, “a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people’s acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands”. The fact of popular acceptance of the institution’s role was itself a constitutional and legal concern. Compared with the prior quarter-century, when they angled for just one justice (often Kennedy) to swing to their side, it was already clear as Trump’s first term ended how much was going to change with Amy Coney Barrett’s conservative substitution for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yet liberal justices generally proceeded as if their conservative peers would continue to take their own institution’s legitimacy seriously. They focused on warning conservatives against further eroding it. The __ dissent in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which removed the federal right to abortion, is a classic example. The liberal justices lionized Kennedy and other conservatives for refusing to overturn Roe v Wade out of the need they cited in Casey __ to maintain the supreme court’s image. That was then. In Trump’s second term, the court has ceded to him near total control over federal spending, even as the president is now openly threatening to withhold funds from “blue” states and projects not aligned with administrative “priorities”. Authorized by the court to engage in racial profiling, masked federal agents continue to descend upon “Democrat-run” cities, subjecting Latinos and now Somalis to ongoing abuse. Most recently, the court hinted at its plan to declare most, if not all “independent” agencies unconstitutional, allowing Trump to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board – though Chief Justice Roberts did suggest that the Federal Reserve might be different, drawing sighs from legal commentators (and sighs of relief from investors). The conservative justices appear wholly unbothered by the howls that the court is no more than a partisan institution, turning their destructive attention next to what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Yet with the conservative justices shattering the supreme court’s non-partisan image during Trump’s second term, liberals are not adjusting much. The liberal justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – have become much more aggressive in their dissents. But they disagree with one another about how far to concede that their conservative colleagues have given up any concern for institutional legitimacy. Encouragingly, Jackson pivoted to “warning the public that the boat is sinking” – as journalist Jodi Kantor put it in a much-noticed reported piece. Jackson’s fellow liberals, though, did not follow her in this regard, worrying her strategy of pulling the “fire alarm” was “diluting” their collective “impact”. Similarly, many liberal lawyers have focused their criticism on the _manner_ in which the supreme court has advanced its noxious agenda – issuing major rulings via the “shadow” docket, without full-dress lawyering, and leaving out reasoning in support of its decisions. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank What appears to matter for such respectful institutionalists, most prominently the liberal professor Stephen Vladeck, is that the errant, reactionary justices rationalize __ their disastrous rulings. But aside from the fact that few Americans read their opinions in the first place, the objection presupposes that a more enlightened despotism ought to be the goal – that the justices trashing the respect Americans once had for them merely need to explain themselves, instead of giving up their power to inflict so much ongoing harm. Some liberals worry that concluding the supreme court is beyond redemption is too close to “nihilism” about the constitution, or even about law itself. In the aftermath of Trump’s re-election, Professor Kate Shaw remarked: “I don’t think abandoning the constitution in the course of abandoning institutions is the right way forward or is something that we can survive.” Vladeck cautioned similarly against “doomerism”, warning the “rule of law” in the United States might “struggle to survive” the “emergence of any kind of popular consensus that law increasingly doesn’t matter”. Such qualms suggest some can’t imagine an alternative to a legitimate supreme court even once the institution itself has abandoned that role. Much like in the early 20th century, Americans today are responding to a series of institutional failures with an extended period of constitutional rethinking. Tracing many of those failures to the undemocratic features of our written constitution – the electoral college and the Senate, most notably – reformers are proposing creative solutions or workarounds that might move us in the direction of an actual democracy. Similarly, progressives are increasingly converging on the idea of both expanding and “disempowering” federal courts. Attentive to the reality that the supreme court especially is not and rarely has been their friend, left-leaning advocates are finding ways to empower ordinary people, trading the hollow hope of judicial power for the promise of popular rule. To label as “nihilists” those sketching an alternate, more democratic future is, in other words, not only mistaken but outright bizarre. Rather than adhere to the same institutionalist strategies that helped our current crisis, reformers must insist on remaking institutions like the US supreme court so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a parody of the democracy they were promised. In Trump’s second term, the Republican-appointed majority on the supreme court has brought their institution to the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off. _Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn teach law at Harvard and Yale_ __The Guardian__ _is globally renowned for its coverage of politics, the environment, science, social justice, sport and culture. Scroll less and understand more about the subjects you care about with the Guardian's_ __brilliant email newsletters__ _, free to your inbox._ * SCOTUS * rule of law * Amy Coney Barrett * Ketanji Brown Jackson * John Roberts Subscribe to Portside

‘The supreme court is at the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off’ | Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images The justices of the US supreme court – even its conservatives – have traditionally valued their institution’s own standing. John Roberts, the current US chief justice, has always been praised – even by liberals – as a staunch advocate of the court’s image as a neutral arbiter. For decades, Americans believed the court soared above the fray of partisan contestation. No more. In Donald Trump’s second term, the supreme court’s conservative supermajority has seized the opportunity to empower the nation’s chief executive. In response, public approval of the court has collapsed. The question is what it means for liberals to catch up to this new reality of a court that willingly tanks its own legitimacy. Eager to realize cherished goals of assigning power to the president and arrogating as much for itself, the conservative justices seemingly no longer care what the public or the legal community think of the court’s actions. Too often, though, liberals are responding with nostalgia for a court that cares about its high standing. There is a much better option: to grasp the opportunity to set right the supreme court’s role in US democracy. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Attention to the body’s legitimacy surged in the decades after the extraordinary discussion on the topic in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey _–_ the 1992 case that memorably preserved the abortion rights minted in Roe v Wade __ despite recent conservative additions to the court. “The Court’s power lies in its legitimacy,” former justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter explained in their joint opinion, “a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people’s acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands”. The fact of popular acceptance of the institution’s role was itself a constitutional and legal concern. Compared with the prior quarter-century, when they angled for just one justice (often Kennedy) to swing to their side, it was already clear as Trump’s first term ended how much was going to change with Amy Coney Barrett’s conservative substitution for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yet liberal justices generally proceeded as if their conservative peers would continue to take their own institution’s legitimacy seriously. They focused on warning conservatives against further eroding it. The __ dissent in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which removed the federal right to abortion, is a classic example. The liberal justices lionized Kennedy and other conservatives for refusing to overturn Roe v Wade out of the need they cited in Casey __ to maintain the supreme court’s image. That was then. In Trump’s second term, the court has ceded to him near total control over federal spending, even as the president is now openly threatening to withhold funds from “blue” states and projects not aligned with administrative “priorities”. Authorized by the court to engage in racial profiling, masked federal agents continue to descend upon “Democrat-run” cities, subjecting Latinos and now Somalis to ongoing abuse. Most recently, the court hinted at its plan to declare most, if not all “independent” agencies unconstitutional, allowing Trump to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board – though Chief Justice Roberts did suggest that the Federal Reserve might be different, drawing sighs from legal commentators (and sighs of relief from investors). The conservative justices appear wholly unbothered by the howls that the court is no more than a partisan institution, turning their destructive attention next to what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Yet with the conservative justices shattering the supreme court’s non-partisan image during Trump’s second term, liberals are not adjusting much. The liberal justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – have become much more aggressive in their dissents. But they disagree with one another about how far to concede that their conservative colleagues have given up any concern for institutional legitimacy. Encouragingly, Jackson pivoted to “warning the public that the boat is sinking” – as journalist Jodi Kantor put it in a much-noticed reported piece. Jackson’s fellow liberals, though, did not follow her in this regard, worrying her strategy of pulling the “fire alarm” was “diluting” their collective “impact”. Similarly, many liberal lawyers have focused their criticism on the _manner_ in which the supreme court has advanced its noxious agenda – issuing major rulings via the “shadow” docket, without full-dress lawyering, and leaving out reasoning in support of its decisions. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank What appears to matter for such respectful institutionalists, most prominently the liberal professor Stephen Vladeck, is that the errant, reactionary justices rationalize __ their disastrous rulings. But aside from the fact that few Americans read their opinions in the first place, the objection presupposes that a more enlightened despotism ought to be the goal – that the justices trashing the respect Americans once had for them merely need to explain themselves, instead of giving up their power to inflict so much ongoing harm. Some liberals worry that concluding the supreme court is beyond redemption is too close to “nihilism” about the constitution, or even about law itself. In the aftermath of Trump’s re-election, Professor Kate Shaw remarked: “I don’t think abandoning the constitution in the course of abandoning institutions is the right way forward or is something that we can survive.” Vladeck cautioned similarly against “doomerism”, warning the “rule of law” in the United States might “struggle to survive” the “emergence of any kind of popular consensus that law increasingly doesn’t matter”. Such qualms suggest some can’t imagine an alternative to a legitimate supreme court even once the institution itself has abandoned that role. Much like in the early 20th century, Americans today are responding to a series of institutional failures with an extended period of constitutional rethinking. Tracing many of those failures to the undemocratic features of our written constitution – the electoral college and the Senate, most notably – reformers are proposing creative solutions or workarounds that might move us in the direction of an actual democracy. Similarly, progressives are increasingly converging on the idea of both expanding and “disempowering” federal courts. Attentive to the reality that the supreme court especially is not and rarely has been their friend, left-leaning advocates are finding ways to empower ordinary people, trading the hollow hope of judicial power for the promise of popular rule. To label as “nihilists” those sketching an alternate, more democratic future is, in other words, not only mistaken but outright bizarre. Rather than adhere to the same institutionalist strategies that helped our current crisis, reformers must insist on remaking institutions like the US supreme court so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a parody of the democracy they were promised. In Trump’s second term, the Republican-appointed majority on the supreme court has brought their institution to the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off. * Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn teach law at Harvard and Yale * Supreme Court Subscribe to Portside

To view a video click an image below Sam Altman Is Shilling for OpenAI Sam Altman wants to make a deal with us: he'll give us a utopian future, if we give him... everything. $750 billion in investment. Electricity. Our data. And if that utopia never comes, he'll profit off of the damage. The DOJ's Epstein File Stunt The Justice Department redacts most of partially released Epstein files Europe's Great Power Move: Ukraine Funding The EU's decision to secure the funding of Ukraine's war for the next two years is one of the most important developments of the entire year. It is a disaster for Russia, and it shows what Europe exerting itself as a strategic actor looks like in practice. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Cover-Up | Laura Poitras Investigates Seymour Hersh Cover-Up is a political thriller that traces the explosive career of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, both portrait of a relentless journalist and an indictment of institutional violence. Geothermal Energy’s Massive Leap Forward Could geothermal soon overtake nuclear power? The new suite of technologies that could finally see it rolled out across the world. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank * Abu Ghraib * artificial intelligence * Department of Justice * documentary * Donald Trump * Epstein files * European Union * financial bubble * geothermal * investigative journalism * Jeffrey Epstein * Laura Poitras * My Lai * OpenAI * Pam Bondi * Renewable energy * Russia * Sam Altman * Science * Seymour Hersh * Ukraine Subscribe to Portside

Ship under construction at the General Dynamics Shipyard in Quincy, MA, 1971 | Photo credit: U.S. Navy photo from the USS Kalamazoo (AOR-6) 1973-1974 cruise book _“Here’s what’s wrong in this yard. Two white welders get fired and blackmailed into silence for their jobs. A third one, black, with an unblemished record, is fired for the same supposed offense and the company refuses to budge.”_ _“Ain’t right!” someone called._ _“But not one of the three welders should have lost a minute of pay, much less their jobs. And why? Because you can’t breathe carbon monoxide! They are all victims of this company’s core value: Production over safety!”_ Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail #### Goliath at Sunset By Jonathan Brandow Hard Ball Press; 330 pages November 29, 2025 Paperback: $22.00 ISBN-13 : ‎ 979-8989802586 Hard Ball Press Set at a shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts where Brandow worked for 9 years, he uses his experiences as a welder and a union officer to give**Goliath** an authenticity that is too often lacking in fictional depictions of labor. This is evident in his awareness of the complexity of the characters in the novel, in the picture he presents of union meetings, grievance handling, rank-and-file organizing. Set in the late 70s -- early 80s. at the time of the Iran hostage crisis and the racist violence that followed attempts to desegregate Boston’s public school, Brandow places his work in a wider context of events shaping the time without ever losing his focus on the shipyard. The novel**** centers on the life of Michael Shea, a Vietnam vet whose personal experiences lead to awareness of class injustice (fueled in part by his mother’s picket line assault that results in her death), and, unusual in the community in which he was raised, awareness of racial injustice and a rejection of the racial hatreds that surround him. Shea’s status as a veteran at a time when jobs were plentiful, enables him to find work as a welder. The hazards of shipyard work, the union’s unwillingness to fight back, lead him to become an engaged unionist and eventually, a shop steward. This is shown against the backdrop of personal challenges and difficulties that make this path anything but a linear march of progress. At the center of the novel is a conflict over the role of shop stewards. Do they serve the union leadership, doling out favors to the skilled, the “loyal,” those who are white; do they defend workers by compromising their rights; or do they fight management through unity, creativity, militancy, by organizing rank and file participation – and reaching out for support outside the workplace. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Behind those choices lies a difference as to how to relate to a changing workforce. A shipyard that in living memory had been almost all white men now includes Black Americans, West Indians, Cape Verdeans, Puerto Ricans, a small but growing number of women, all of whom the old leadership fears and resents. And many of the younger white workers don’t have the commitment to the job or union that older ones had. Thus a weakened union, a union that has become parochial, a union that still tries to represent the workforce but does so through compromises with management that allows for small victories at the expense of loss of rights. The price of doing so is at a cost that will come due. The battle over the quality of the work stewards perform is merged with the battle to have enough stewards. That conflict is central to all that follows as Bandow makes clear early on: _“[Shea] checked his contract … it permitted one steward for each two hundred hardhats in a department. Despite that, the union by-laws capped the number at a single steward [per department]. He couldn’t let that go. How could it be possible that the union – not the company – limited the number of stewards, the front-line protections guys had on the job? Shea realized it really was a black and white issue. The only truly affected department, the only one that qualified under the contract for additional stewards, was welding—the only department with a significant number of black votes.”_ That sparks a union meeting where the rank-and-file gets defeated by leadership afraid that opening doors might loosen their own authority. Subsequent battles – over racist graffiti in bathrooms, the lay-off of a pregnant worker, speed-up, safety & health concerns, company disciplinary policies, the conduct of a strike – show the shifting sentiment of workers, how prejudiced attitudes can be broken down and how they can resurface. In all of this, the fights and arguments that take place within the union are always presented in the context of the real problem, management policy that devalues the life of all workers. Bandow’s description of how a rank-and-file movement organizes demonstrates that understanding, its goal is to strengthen the union as a whole, not to attack or undermine it. Here too, his writing reflects what he lived, the meetings, arguments, tensions, celebrations, camaraderie, disappointments, harsh language flung back and forth even between friends, all contain the ring of truth. Those complications are also those of the characters who people the novel, all with lives outside the job, all facing the pressures of working-class life in which opportunities are few and (even in a more “stable” era) precarious. The violence in the air post-Vietnam, when reaction was raising its ugly head trying to push down progress toward social justice, the uncertainties as those changes were reflected in personal relationships, are very much part of novel’s depiction of workplace life. The multi-racial character of the shipyard and of Boston and its environs as much a part of the story as the reaction to it, just as is the assertiveness of women pushing back against silences that had prevailed. That reflects itself in the character of the “sell-out” union president, who remembers with nostalgia, the militancy, the willingness to fight, that built the union. He respects the new militancy of Shea and the others pushing for change, as much as he does all in his power to undermine them. He rationalizes the compromises with management he makes every day, for all he sees is a losing battle. His weakness is part of the problem, no doubt, but nonetheless, he is right – management holds the cards. For those who lived through those times, reading **Goliath** is a reminder of what happened when layoffs swept industry, fear of job loss leading those who had resisted to accept the unacceptable as safety regulations went out the window. The end result is a feeling Bandow well describes as he records Shea’s thoughts toward the end of the novel as the combination of permanent layoffs, unrelenting speed-up, breakdown of shifts and jobs assignments, leave workers demoralized, the old union leadership out in the cold, younger union activists with a sense of defeat. _“He knew they thought of their homes, fishing trips in New Hampshire, mythic fiberglass boats skimming over the water, the week, maybe two in a year that they prized as their own. They thought of their own little girls and their sons in their yards. All gone. They knew they would go to their graves with a rage they could never concede. They stood by the basin and yearned for a bright, free beginning. For a start they knew they would never be given.”_ That describes a reality that those newer to labor activism also need to know for no gain should ever be taken for granted, unity needs to be fought for again and again, struggles for justice at the workplace need to be joined to those taking place in the communities where people live and the broader forces pushing society in one direction or another have to be engaged. Perhaps the greatest strength of the novel lies in making clear that what matters is not just the outcome of a particular battle – for win or lose, it is transitory. Rather what matters is what we take away from each dispute, each organizing effort, how to integrate that in one’s own life. Shea reflects that challenge in himself, his personal weaknesses as much a part of the story as his strengths. The novel’s conclusion providing a good starting point for thinking about how to accept loss, which way to look for new beginnings, a search that – almost by definition, is never easy. _“Cotty and Lonny [two of the rank-and-file leaders] watched them go. They looked around, searching for Shea before they went in. He was the last to join the line. Cotty said, “You did what you could.” Shea nodded without hearing. “For real, man,” Lonny added, poking Shea in the chest. “I mean, we had men and women, black and white, every shift pulling together. That’s real. That’s something they can’t take from us.”_ _“Yeah, maybe,” he said as he followed them into the ship and headed for his worksite. Shea’s legs ached to skip down the stairs, to churn past the gates, to breathe in the freedom outside. Instead, he stumbled his way past slaggy mounds of main deck debris toward his gear. The last whistle blew._ **Goliath at Sunset** is published by Hard Ball Press. It will be available for sale December 15. To order a copy email [email protected] _[**Kurt Stand** was active in the labor movement for over 20 years including as the elected North American Regional Secretary of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers until 1997. He is a member of the Prince George’s County Branch of Metro DC DSA, and periodically writes for the Washington Socialist, Socialist Forum, and other left publications. He serves as a Portside Labor Moderator, and is active within the reentry community of formerly incarcerated people. Kurt Stand lives in Greenbelt, MD.]_ * Fiction * unions * shipyard workers * Boston * Boston schools * Vietnam veterans * white workers * Racism Subscribe to Portside

_**‘Our Government May at Some Time Be in the Hands of a Bad Man’**_ **DECEMBER 17 IS THE 164TH ANNIVERSARY** of one of Frederick Douglass’s most well-remembered speeches, which has earned the appellation “Danger to the Republic”. Many of the issues that concerned Douglass more than a century-and-a-half ago are headline news at this very moment. On that day in 1866, 20 months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson’s becoming President, Douglass spoke passionately to a Brooklyn audience about how some aspects of Johnson’s tenure were evidence of flaws in the U.S. Constitution. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail For example, Douglass argued strongly that no President should have the power to pardon criminals at his sole discretion. He declared, “there is a good reason why we should do away with the pardoning power in the hands of the President, that is that our government may at some time be in the hands of a bad man.” If a bad man were to become President, according to Douglass, he could encourage his supporters to attempt a coup and tell them ‘I am with you. If you succeed, all is well. If you fail, I will interpose the shield of my pardon, and you are safe. . . . Go on,” and attempt a coup; “I will stand by you.” Another issue causing Douglass great concern was the President’s power to appoint so many government officials and to require them to resign whenever he wanted to. As he put it, “The Constitution . . . . declares that the President may appoint with . . . . the Senate’s advice and consent, but custom and a certain laxity of administration has almost obliterated this feature of the Constitution, and now the President appoints, he not only appoints by and with the consent, but he has the power of removal, and with this power he virtually makes the agency of the Senate of the United States of no effect in the matter of appointments.” Douglass delivered the same speech on at least a dozen occasions in as many U.S. cities between December 1866 and April 1867. To see the entire address, which includes many other criticisms of President Johnson that are surprisingly relevant to the concerns of 2025, visit _https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/18126_ **Cracking Down on Free Speech by Radicals** **DECEMBER 18 IS THE 230TH ANNIVERSARY** of a moment when the British government aimed a hard legislative blow at growing political unrest. On this day in 1795 – seven weeks after an extraordinary attack on George III’s carriage in central London (see https://portside.org/2025-10-27/week-peoples-history-oct-29-nov-4-2025) – Parliament passed two draconian laws, the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank The Seditious Meetings Act outlawed public meetings of more than 50 people. The Treason Act made it a crime to simply write or speak about doing harm to the King. The maximum penalty for violating either of the acts was death. The new laws were passed in an attempt to stifle the growth of anti-monarchist, pro-democracy sentiment that was being inspired by the success of the revolution in North America and the French Revolution’s overthrow and execution of Louis XIV and Queen Marie Antoinette. The antagonism to Britain’s rulers was also due to the unpopularity of their war against the radical French regime. The fighting against France had driven food prices so high that many workers with jobs could not afford enough to eat. Frequent demonstrations seemed to foreshadow the possibility of serious anti-government violence. Many of the organizations that were targets of the Seditious Meetings Act disbanded soon after it passed, so it led to few prosecutions. All three prosecutions for violating the Treason Act resulted in acquittals, another sign of the unpopularity of the King and his government. _https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3739 &context=clevstlrev_ _**Emancipation, What Good Is It?**_ **DECEMBER 19 IS THE 160TH ANNIVERSARY** of the South Carolina legislature passing a law that, as the Equal Justice Initiative reports “forced recently emancipated Black citizens into subservient social relationships with white landowners, stating that ‘all persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.’” For the complete account, visit _https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/dec/19_ _**Folk Music at the Library**_ **DECEMBER 20 IS THE 85TH ANNIVERSARY** of a folk music concert at the Library of Congress, a performance of the Golden Gate Quartet with Josh White on guitar. It was the Library’s first folk music concert, beginning a tradition that has become a regular feature of Library of Congress events. _https://www.loc.gov/research-centers/american-folklife-center/about-this-research-center/_ _**New Direction for Jazz**_ **DECEMBER 21 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY** of Ornette Colman and seven other musicians laying the foundation for the Free Jazz movement when they created the tracks that were later released by Atlantic Records as “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation.” The session personnel were alto saxophone – Ornette Coleman; bass – Charlie Haden and Scott LaFaro; bass clarinet – Eric Dolphy; drums – Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell; trumpet – Freddie Hubbard; pocket trumpet – Donald Cherry. You can listen to the album here: _https://youtu.be/iPDzlSda8P8?si=LBpCzRLfL6fpVRDc_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ * Frederick Douglass * Jim Crow race laws Subscribe to Portside

The MMR vaccine protects against measles, mumps and rubella The South Carolina Department of Public Health reported 27 new cases of measles on Tuesday, all identified since last Friday, bringing the total number of identified cases in the state this year to 114. There are currently at least 254 people in quarantine in South Carolina, though the problem isn’t just confined to one state. The latest figures from the CDC, which haven’t been updated in over a week and don’t include hundreds of recent cases, indicate there have been 1,828 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year as of December 2. Three people have died from measles in 2025, two kids and one adult, the first deaths from the disease in this country since 2015. The U.S. officially eliminated measles as an endemic disease in the year 2000, thanks to the widespread vaccination programs of the 20th century. But America’s federal public health infrastructure saw a hostile takeover by anti-vaccine activists in January, led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his so-called Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail There have been 46 measles outbreaks identified in the U.S. in 2025, and 87% of confirmed cases have been associated with outbreaks, according to the CDC. An outbreak is defined as three or more cases of the same disease linked to a common source. If the outbreaks continue into January 2026, it will mark a year since they began in West Texas. The U.S. will then officially lose its measles-free status. ## The latest confirmed cases in South Carolina The South Carolina Department of Public Health first identified an outbreak in the state’s Upstate region on October 2, starting with eight cases, mostly concentrated in Spartanburg County. That number has grown to 111 cases in the area, which makes up the vast majority of the 114 cases in the state. The public exposure sites in South Carolina have included Inman Intermediate School, where 43 students are currently in quarantine. Students at the school, which has kids in 4th-6th grade, first went into quarantine December 4 and will be able to return to class on December 15 if they don’t become ill. Sixteen of the new cases reported on Tuesday come from Way of Truth Church in Inman, with eight of those cases coming from household exposures to measles. One new case of measles came from “exposure in a health care setting,” according to the South Carolina Department of Public Health, though more details about that case were not released. The agency encourages those who’ve been potentially exposed to measles to notify their health care provider before coming in so that proper arrangements can be made to protect others. The age breakdown of South Carolina’s known measles cases in 2025 has included: Under 5 years old (20), 5-17 (75), 18+: 10. There have been 6 minors whose ages haven’t been disclosed to public health officials. Importantly, 105 of the measles cases identified in South Carolina have been from people who were unvaccinated. Three cases have been in people who were partially vaccinated, receiving just one dose of the recommended two-dose MMR shots. Just one person in the state’s outbreak was fully vaccinated. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank ## New cases in Utah and Arizona The Utah Department of Health and Human Services has identified 115 measles cases this year, with 26 cases identified in the past three weeks, according to the agency’s online dashboard. A new case was reported Monday at the Bingham Kooper Kids childcare facility, located inside Bingham High School in the city of South Jordan. The person was unvaccinated, according to local news outlet ABC4, and it’s unclear where the person was initially infected and whether they were a child or an adult. There’s a long list of potential measles exposure locations in Utah, including two elementary schools, a junior high school, a high school, two emergency rooms, a Walmart, and the Treehouse Children’s Museum in Ogden. Utah’s measles cases have been concentrated in the southwest region of the state, where it shares a border with Arizona, a state that has identified 23 of its own cases in the past two weeks. Arizona has seen 176 measles cases this year, with 97% of cases in unvaccinated patients, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. Sixty-six percent of cases in Arizona have occurred in people under the age of 18. ## RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine nonsense The U.S. government has been officially consumed by far-right activists ever since President Donald Trump took power in January. Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, and he quickly worked to radically alter the country’s vaccine policies. To take just some recent examples, Kennedy has claimed without evidence that peanut allergies are caused by vaccines, and he’s installed anti-vaccine activist Kirk Milhoan as the chair of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to remove a recommendation that all children be vaccinated against hepatitis B from birth. Kennedy is grossly unqualified for the job and quite literally doesn’t believe in germ theory. And as long as he and his MAHA buddies are allowed to continue dismantling the country’s public health infrastructure, we’re going to see more cases of measles, a disease that can induce something called “immune amnesia.” What’s immune amnesia? It’s when your immune system forgets how to fight the pathogens it successfully fought off before. _Matt Novak is a reporter at Gizmodo covering news and opinion, with a little history thrown in for good measure. Novak started at Gizmodo in 2013 and has been writing about past visions of the future at Paleofuture.com since 2007. Novak is fascinated with the history of technology and got his start writing professionally for Smithsonian magazine. Emails telling him to "stick to tech" can be sent [email protected]._ _Founded in 2002 as one of the internet’s very first tech news blogs, Gizmodo is dedicated to fiercely independent reporting and commentary on technology, science, and internet culture._ * vaccines * anti-vaxxers * measles * Robert F. Kennedy Jr * immune amnesia Subscribe to Portside

“You gotta do your job. And if you do your job well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many, many other issues.” — Bernie Sanders’s advice to his fellow elected socialists. _Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders spoke to the_ _How We Win conference_ _, a gathering of democratic socialist elected officials and their staff in New Orleans sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, Jacobin, the Nation, and other partners. Below is a transcript of his remarks._ Thank you for inviting me to say a few words. Let me begin by thanking all of you for having the guts to run for public office. It’s a lot harder to go out and knock on doors to represent constituents with the problems they face seven days a week. So I want to thank you very much for that. Despite the horror in the White House right now, they’re out there all across this country. We’re seeing strong progressive growth. It is not just Zohran Mamdani in New York or Katie Wilson in Seattle. From coast to coast, you are seeing progressive democratic socialists standing up, taking on the establishment and winning elections. And one of the great secrets of the corporate media is that right now in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has about one hundred members, including dozens and dozens of very strong progressives. That is the result of the hard work all us have done over the last number of years. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail I’ve been asked to give you some advice. What I’m gonna tell you is probably what you already know. Number one, here is a radical idea — do your job that you were elected to do. Now, I’ll tell you a story. Here is the story. I was elected to be mayor of Burlington, Vermont; won it by ten votes way back in 1981. We had a strong foreign policy. We had exchange programs. We dealt with national issues. But I’ll never forget there was an article in the local newspaper and the report asked some guy, “But what does it mean? What do you think about having a socialist as your mayor?” And the guy said, “Well, I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting the snow off of the streets a lot faster than they used to.” You gotta do your job. If you’re on the city council, the school board, the state legislature, you gotta do it. And if you do your job well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many, many other issues. But don’t lose focus regarding the job that you are elected to do. Second of all, establishment Democrats have the brilliant idea that the only people they can talk to are establishment Democrats. They literally have lists of people: “Don’t knock on this door; don’t knock on that door. Only on these.” I strongly disagree with that suggestion. Knock on every door in your district. And what you’ll find when you do that is you’ll have the right-wing people slam the door in your face. You’ll have some unpleasantness. But by and large, what you’ll find is that there is a lot more commonality of interest than you might have appreciated. In my view, the reason Donald Trump is president of the United States today is not because people voted for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1 percent or massive cuts in health care. He is the president of the United States because of Democratic establishment candidates’ failure to provide a real analysis and agenda that meets the crises that we face today. Establishment Democrats believe that you can tinker around the edges, you can tell the world how terrible Donald Trump is, and that’s fine. But right now, what the American people understand is that übercapitalism — an oligarchic form of society, which is what we have today — is a disaster for the working class of this country. We don’t have to tinker around the edges. We have to create a very new form of society. So for just your average person out there, you are in many cases going nowhere in a hurry. You understand that with real inflation accounted for, wages are basically the same as they were fifty years ago, despite a huge increase in worker productivity as a result of all of the expansion of technology. And almost all of the gains of that new technology have gone to the 1 percent. And ordinary workers know that there’s something wrong with 60 percent of our people living paycheck to paycheck while Elon Musk owns more wealth himself than about the bottom 52 percent of American society. They know that. They know that there’s something wrong when we have a campaign finance system that is totally corrupt and allows billionaires in both political parties to buy elections. That’s a broken system. I say these things because you’re gonna have Republicans who understand this as well. They understand if you look at the basic necessities of life — just think for a moment: you’re living in the richest country in the history of the world, and it cannot even provide the basic necessities of life for working people. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Just take a look at the health care in your community. Talk about health care. Everybody will tell you that despite spending twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation, the health care system is totally broken. Everybody knows that. The educational system is largely broken, and the childcare system is a disaster. Kids can’t afford to go to college, or they’re leaving school deeply in debt. Public schools are under enormous pressure. Teachers are underpaid. They’re dealing with all kinds of disciplinary issues, kids who come from troubled families or are acting out in school. We are dealing with a situation where our food system, just nutrition . . . we are the most obese and unhealthy nation on Earth because you have a food industry that makes huge profit by selling our kids crap, and the price of groceries is soaring. People understand that. I flew in from the National Airport in Washington; there was a four-hour delay because they couldn’t figure out how to de-ice the plane. All over the country you are looking at basic problems people are struggling with. The system is failing. Our job is not to run away from that reality but to offer a real alternative. Because in my view, what the future is gonna be about isn’t establishment Democrats. All over Europe, for example, the establishment parties are fading away. The struggle is going to be between the Trumpists of the world — right-wing extremism — and a democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working families. So what Donald Trump does is go, “Yeah, we got a lot of problems. And the problem is undocumented people, the problem is the trans community, the problem is that we have Somalians who are ‘garbage.’” That’s what demagogues do. They take the problems that we face — often that they cause — and then you blame a powerless minority. Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the _real_ cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country. So that’s where we’re at now. And it ain’t gonna be easy. Especially with Trump in the White House. To summarize, the American people know the system is broken. They are hurting. They can’t afford groceries. They can’t afford health care. They can’t afford education. They can’t afford a lot of things. And at the same time, the billionaire class has never had it so good. The establishment Democrats cannot talk about these things because, very often, they’re getting funded by the billionaire class. So what we have gotta do right now is get out into the streets. We gotta talk to our people — _all_ people, not just people within our zone of comfort. And we’re gonna be providing real solutions to the crises that we face. So once again, what you have done is extraordinary. I thank you so much and congratulate you for getting out on the streets, for winning elections, and for standing up for working people. * Bernie Sanders * socialist elected officials Subscribe to Portside

_**Free Speech for Students!**_ **DECEMBER 10 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of the day that 13-year-old junior high student Mary Beth Tinker and some of her schoolmates in Des Moines, Iowa, decided to show their opposition to the constantly escalating U.S. war against Vietnam. They decided to protest by wearing black armbands to school. Several days later, more than two dozen armband-wearing students showed up at several Des Moines schools. None carried signs or made speeches or caused any disruption, but school administrators declared that silently wearing a black armband as a means of expression was a violation of discipline. They singled out five students, including Tinker, and suspended them. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail That was the beginning of a 4-year legal struggle over the First Amendment rights of public school students. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Des Moines Five took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, where they established the precedent that, as the high court put it, neither "students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Today, more than 55 years later, the Supreme Court’s decision that “In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism,” remains the law of the land. Of course, the Supreme Court has recently made a regular practice of throwing precedents out, but one can always hope. For much more information about the case that established students’ rights, visit _https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/constitutional-rights-of-students/_ _**A Message from a Great American**_ **DECEMBER 11 IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY** of New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses’ decision to remind the thousands of Parks Department workers and the additional thousands of federal Works Project Administration workers on the city payroll that their continued employment depended on the continued good-will of their boss. Commissioner Moses arranged to have hundreds of copies of large placards printed and posted at every Parks Department work site bearing a handsome portrait of Abraham Lincoln over this headline: "A Message to Park Workers from a Great American”. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Under the headline appeared this text: “The habits of our whole species fall into three great classes, useful labor, useless labor and idleness. Of these, the first only is meritorious and to it all the products of labor rightfully belong; but the two latter, while they exist, are heavy pensioners upon the first, robbing it of a large portion of its just rights. The only remedy for this is to, so far as possible, drive useless labor and idleness out of existence." _https://www.nytimes.com/1935/12/11/archives/lincoln-message-to-spur-wpa-men-park-bureau-placards-quote-attack.html_ _**A Pandemic Meets Its Match**_ **DECEMBER 14 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY** of the first non-experimental use a Covid-19 vaccine in the U.S. The first U.S. vaccine recipient was Sandra Lindsay, an African-American nurse who was head of critical-care nursing at a large hospital in Queens, New York. The choice of Lindsay was fitting, because critical-care health-care workers were one of the pandemics’ worst-hit occupational groups, as were African-Americans in general. By the time Lindsay got her jab, more than 15 million people in the U.S. had been sickened by Covid-19 and at least three hundred thousand had died. Of course, at first the vaccine could only retard the rate of increase in Covid-19 cases and deaths. It was estimated that during the first 26 months of the vaccine’s availability, its use prevented 120 million infections, 18.5 million hospitalizations and 3.2 million deaths in the U.S. _https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/10.5334/aogh.4484_ _**Federal Lawman Kills Unarmed Sioux Leader Sitting Bull**_ **DECEMBER 15 IS THE 135TH ANNIVERSARY** of the death of Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull, who was killed by a federal lawman who was attempting to take the unarmed Sitting Bull into custody. More than 40 mounted federal police had arrived at dawn and unannounced at Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in what is now South Dakota. The officers had no legal grounds to arrest Sitting Bull, who was neither a fugitive nor criminal suspect. Federal authorities were said to believe that Sitting Bull was encouraging his fellow Lakota to participate in a Native American religious revival movement that officials called “Ghost Dance.” But even if Sitting Bull had been doing so, his alleged behavior would not have been a crime. Sitting Bull was not a criminal suspect, but he was one of the most successful defenders of the rights of Native Americans both by military means and otherwise. He had been one of the leaders of the most successful (for the Native Americans) extended period of open warfare between Native Americans and an experienced, fully-manned, well-equipped, U.S. Army occupation force in the Great Plains. These days he would probably have been described as Antifa. The period of Sitting Bull’s greatest military success, which U.S. forces called Red Cloud’s War, had ended when the U.S. government sued for peace after nearly two years of intermittent heavy fighting. The Army’s suing for peace was, for practical purposes, the Army’s admission of defeat. The treaty that ended “Red Cloud’s War” was a capitulation to the demands the Native Americans had been fighting for; it is said to have been the worst defeat ever for the U.S. Army fighting in North America, with the exception of Confederate victories during the Civil War. The 1890 incident during which Sitting Bull was shot to death, was, at best, according to the U.S. government’s own admission, a case of manslaughter committed by a U.S. official, and could reasonably be described as a case of premeditated murder. What occurred, according to U.S. officials, was that a large party of federal lawmen arrived, unannounced, to arrest Sitting Bull at his cabin, but they lacked an essential piece of equipment, a wheeled vehicle to carry Sitting Bull to police headquarters. The arrest party that neglected to bring a wagon, which was readily available, with them were fully aware that the only way they would be able to transport Sitting Bull to jail would be to force him onto the back of a horse. During the noisy effort to force Sitting Bull to mount a horse, a crowd of his Sioux neighbors gathered to demand the release of their leader. Eventually a member of the crowd fired a shot at the leader of the arresting party. As soon as the shot hit the arresting officer, the officer turned, and fired the shot that killed the unarmed Sitting Bull. The officer never explained why he shot Sitting Bull, but it clearly could not have been in self-defense. Two weeks after Sitting Bull was killed during a bizarrely botched arrest effort, U.S. forces killed more than 300 Sioux in the Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. https://www.pbs.org/.../an-account-of-sitting-bulls-death _**It’s Bigger than Baseball**_ **DECEMBER 16 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY** of Major League Baseball’s announcement that it would henceforth consider the Negro Leagues to have been Major Leagues just like the American and National Leagues, and would meld statistics of Negro League players into Major League statistics. Three-and-a-half years later, when the statistics had been combined, many new names had been added to the record books, including Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Satchel Paige and Charlie “Chino” Smith. Slugger Gibson, who died before the first Black player joined the National League in 1947, not only received official recognition, but he had the highest career batting average (.372), the highest career slugging percentage (.718) and the highest career on-base-plus-slugging percentage (1.177). _https://missouriindependent.com/2024/05/29/america-at-her-best-negro-leagues-museum-president-says-stat-recognition-is-bigger-than-baseball_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ Subscribe to Portside

Communist Party leaders and Smith Act defendents Robert Thompson and Benjamin Davis surrounded by pickets as they leave the Federal Courthouse in New York City | World Telegram & Sun photo by C.M. Stieglitz **abstract.** For most of American history, the jury was considered an elite institution, composed of “honest and intelligent men,” esteemed in their communities for their “integrity,” “reputation,” or “sound judgment.” As a result, jurors were overwhelmingly male, jurors were overwhelmingly white, and jurors disproportionately hailed from the middle and upper social classes. By the late 1960s, an entirely different, democratic conception of the jury was ascendant: juries were meant to pull from all segments of society, more or less randomly, thus constituting a diverse and representative “cross-section of the community.” This Article offers an intellectual and social history of how the “elite jury” lost its hegemonic appeal, with particular emphasis on the overlooked radicals—anarchists, socialists, Communists, trade unionists, and Popular Front feminists—who battled to remake the jury. This Article offers a novel look at the history and tradition of the American jury, demonstrating how the Sixth Amendment’s meaning was—gradually, unevenly, but definitively—reshaped through several decades of popular struggle, grassroots mobilization, strategic litigation, and social-movement contestation. **author.** Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law. This project profited greatly from feedback received at faculty workshops at George Washington, Cornell, and Cardozo law schools; the Neighborhood Criminal Law Conference, the Vanderbilt Criminal Justice Roundtable, and the UChicago Constitutional Law Conference; and in the Juries, Race, and Citizenship seminar at Duke Law School. I am particularly indebted to Emily Coward, Daniel Epps, Brandon L. Garrett, Valerie Hans, David Huyssen, Joseph E. Kennedy, Nancy J. King, Anna Lvovsky, Kelly Orians, Mary Reynolds, Jocelyn Simonson, and Brad Snyder. Cyrus Khandalavala and the editors of the _Yale Law Journal_ deserve a special acknowledgment for their diligent work strengthening and sharpening the final product. All errors are mine. * * * ### **Introduction** In 1975, when the U.S. Supreme Court first held that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial necessarily contemplates a jury drawn from a “fair cross section of the community,” the outcome seemed like a “foregone conclusion.”**1** Congress had already declared in 1968 that federal defendants had a statutory right “to grand and petit juries selected at random from a fair cross section of the community,”**2** and the Court was gradually recognizing that “the essential feature of a jury obviously lies . . . in . . . community participation and shared responsibility,” which (“probably”) meant juries large enough to serve as “representative cross-section of the community.”**3** Notably, as it took shape, the Supreme Court’s fair-cross-section doctrine eschewed any focus on discriminatory intent: a jury drawn from an unrepresentative pool generally cannot be “impartial” within the meaning of the Sixth Amendment, regardless of whether the disparities are attributable to a clerk’s discriminatory animus or an accidental computer glitch.**4** True, the Supreme Court has never required any particular petit jury to be perfectly, or even roughly, “representative” of the local community. The Court has repeatedly rejected the suggestion that a defendant might have the right to be judged by jurors sharing some particular identity or trait.**5** But the ideal of the jury that constitutes a fair cross-section of the community—or, what I will generally refer to as the “representative jury” throughout this Article—has triumphed.**6** When a high-profile jury trial occurs, we are accustomed to asking whether the petit jury is representative of the community from which it is drawn.**7** Americans expect, and want, juries to mirror the demographics of the community—if not in every case, at least in the aggregate.**8** Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail But this conception of the jury, now common sense, is new. In 1925, only a handful of radicals would have recognized it.**9** Indeed, for most of American history, juries were _not_ “cross-sections” of the community, nor were they legally required to be “representative” in any meaningful sense. Most jurisdictions limited jury service to “honest and intelligent men . . . esteemed in the community for their integrity, good character and sound judgment.”**10** Judges, jury commissioners, and “key men” tasked with identifying suitable jurors populated their lists with upstanding citizens who, in their minds, satisfied these subjective statutory requirements and were “above average” in every regard. The predictable result: jurors were men, jurors were white, and jurors disproportionately hailed from the middle and upper social classes.**11** As Judge Learned Hand wrote in 1950, defendants could repeat the phrase “cross-section” ad nauseum, but it was “idle to talk of the justness of a sample, until one knows what is the composition of the group which it is to represent.”**12** Historically, jurors were citizens possessing “intelligence, character and general information,” so if a method of summoning jurors “resulted in weighting the list with the wealthy” (a disproportionate number of whom supposedly boasted such qualities), surely it could not be unlawful.**13** More recently, Justice Thomas has made a related point: the constitutional requirement that juries be drawn from a representative cross-section of the community “seems difficult to square with the Sixth Amendment’s text and history.”**14** The representative jury is not the inheritance of some unbroken tradition, but rather a deliberate, relatively recent departure from it. To be sure, the democratic promise of a jury as a body of one’s “peers” dates to the Magna Carta. “urors and voters were conceptualized as complementary legislators” at the Founding,**15** with the jury box giving “the common people as jurors]” a mechanism to wield control in the judiciary.**16** Throughout the nineteenth century, criminal defendants, often racial minorities and women, protested that unrepresentative juries denied them their basic constitutional rights.**17** But the “elite jury” still reigned.**18** In American law and culture, little incongruity existed between the idea of a “jury of one’s peers” (or the “impartial” jury guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment) and the dominant practice of elite juries.**19** And democratizing the jury box by taking affirmative steps to include those who lacked the superior qualities expected of jurors struck many as nonsensical.[**20** So, what changed? How did our popular, common-sense understanding of the jury shift so dramatically over such a short period of time? There are standard ways of answering these questions. The most superficial might stress the relatively late dates of landmark Supreme Court cases democratizing the jury— _Taylor v. Louisiana_ in 1975 and _Batson v. Kentucky_ in 1986, for example—and view these opinions exclusively as downstream (and belated) fruits of “the civil rights movement of the 1960s ca up with the jury.”**21** On this view, the law of the jury is something of a backwater, with the most important civil-rights developments occurring in the realms of public education, voting, employment, or public accommodations. A more nuanced, though still top-down, doctrinal account might locate the seeds of the Supreme Court’s mature “fair-cross-section” jurisprudence in cases decided somewhat earlier.**22** In 1940, for example, responding to an egregious record of racial exclusion of Black jurors in Harris County, Texas, Justice Black asserted for the majority, without citation, that “t is part of the established tradition in the use of juries as instruments of public justice that the jury be a body truly representative of the community.”**23** In subsequent cases, dicta endorsing “the concept of the jury as a cross-section of the community” began appearing in Supreme Court opinions.**24** On occasion, the Court used its supervisory power to vacate federal criminal convictions where incontrovertible evidence established that wage earners**25** or women**26** had been improperly excluded from jury service as a class. After the Warren Court incorporated the right to trial by jury against the states in 1968,**27** it was only a matter of time before dicta from these earlier cases—and the inchoate democratic principles they articulated—crept into constitutional criminal procedure. Looking beyond the Supreme Court, however, offers a far richer answer. From such a perspective, this Article argues that the “elite jury” lost its hegemonic appeal in significant part due to a forgotten struggle to democratize the American jury—beginning decades before what is classically viewed as the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement.**28** The protagonists of this story include not only litigators affiliated with well-known organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU, but also left-wing radicals—anarchists, Communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Popular Front feminists—who recognized the jury box as an important battleground in overthrowing capitalism, dismantling white supremacy, and expanding the horizons of twentieth-century American democracy. Their battle to remake the jury was waged not only in the courtroom but also through confrontational “mass defense” campaigns in the streets, often at substantial personal risk. Lawyers who raised jury-discrimination claims risked lynching and professional ruin; protestors supporting their efforts were sometimes met with police truncheons and tear gas.**29** In the short term, their combined efforts achieved mixed results in individual cases—but they were effective in exposing the yawning gap between America’s rhetoric of equal citizenship and the criminal-legal system’s inegalitarian reality. In the long run, they played a critical role in transforming a core American institution. This Article’s basic aim, then, is to recover the role of nonelite, nonstate actors—radical lawyers, civil-rights organizers, labor activists, and excluded juror-citizens themselves—in enduring forms of lawmaking. The central contribution of this Article is _not_ simply that the Supreme Court’s fair-cross-section jurisprudence reflects the ideological contribution of socialists or Communists, actors often regarded as external or even hostile to American democracy.**30** Nor does this Article contend that radical activists were the representative jury’s sole architects; the fair-cross-section requirement was propelled by a broad array of social, political, and legal developments alongside those this Article foregrounds.**31** Instead, this Article demonstrates that these radical litigants and the masses they mobilized—and, in particular, their engagements with the legal institutions they viewed with profound skepticism—comprise a missing and indispensable vantage point from which to understand the doctrine’s development. Following Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, this Article’s genealogy of the fair-cross-section doctrine is offered as a “demosprudential” case study in how popular participation and collective action—not just courts or legislatures—influenced cultural understandings of the jury, the development of legal norms, and, eventually, constitutional law.**32** Put slightly differently, while radical lawyers and high-profile criminal cases play an important role in this story, this Article is fundamentally concerned with how the Sixth Amendment’s meaning was—gradually, unevenly, but definitively—reshaped through several decades of popular struggle, grassroots mobilization, strategic litigation, and social-movement contestation. This Article proceeds in five parts. Part I is a prelude of sorts, briefly introducing the American jury circa 1925. It surveys the state of the law, the composition of juries in the real world, and the increasingly contested social understandings of what the jury _ought_ to be. During the 1920s, the embattled American labor movement modeled an alternative vision of the jury: in high-profile trials, unions would deploy racially diverse “labor juries” to monitor proceedings from the audience, eventually deliberating and rendering their own verdicts (which often conflicted with those returned by the bourgeois juries of the courts).**33** The post-World War I crackdown on Communists, anarchists, and other labor radicals, Part I argues, helped crystallize the importance of public “mass defense” campaigns and heightened the salience of jury-selection practices to those struggling to transform American society. Toward the decade’s end, as Communists came to recognize that white Southerners were “us the criminal justice system to enforce their political economy,”**34** the jury box became a central battleground for larger fights over citizenship, white supremacy, and economic inequality. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Part II focuses on the work of the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Communist-backed “mass defense” organization that emerged from the labor battles surveyed in Part I. While the ILD’s efforts on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama are well known,**35** its other major cases from the era have been overlooked, and the organization’s critical role in repeatedly pressing jury-discrimination claims, including in the Scottsboro case itself, has received no scrutiny whatsoever. Across the country, from Maryland**36** to Georgia,**37** the ILD established itself as the country’s most militant champion of Black citizens’ rights in the early 1930s, in significant part by scoring key legal victories against the all-white jury.**38** Apart from demonstrating that such legal claims _could_ be successfully brought, even in the Deep South, the Communists’ daring assaults on the all-white jury—and their inflammatory denunciations of their rivals—prodded more established groups like the NAACP to begin raising similar challenges, too.**39** But in the early years, it was the ILD that forced open a space for jury-discrimination claims in both the courts and the country’s political imagination—often through confrontational “mass defense” tactics that the NAACP eschewed. Part III turns to the prosecution and ultimate execution of Odell Waller, a Black sharecropper who shot and killed his white landlord in 1940. There are no historical markers commemorating Waller’s case in the town of Gretna, Virginia, today, but at the time, Waller was a household name across America. On the eve of his execution in 1942, Harlem went dark as residents turned out their lights in protest, and twenty thousand supporters rallied to save his life inside Madison Square Garden.**40** Behind the scenes, Eleanor Roosevelt was lobbying Justice Frankfurter on Waller’s behalf, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly appealed to Virginia’s governor to spare his life.**41** In many ways, the campaign to save Waller resembled the ILD’s efforts described in Part II: Waller was originally defended by a tiny Trotskyite group and later by the more mainstream socialists of the Workers Defense League (WDL); organizers embraced a “mass defense” strategy, litigating their cause both in court and in the streets; and the appeals in the capital case turned on a jury-discrimination claim. But whereas the ILD’s campaigns in the 1930s focused exclusively on race, Odell Waller’s appeals challenged Virginia’s use of “poll-tax juries,” which excluded both Black _and_ poor white citizens. The unprecedented use of the Equal Protection Clause to attack wealth-based legal discrimination thus advanced a more capacious understanding of what it meant for a jury to reflect a “fair cross-section of the community.” And it put a national spotlight on Virginia’s longstanding practice of limiting the political rights of the poor, raising uncomfortable questions about the United States’s commitment to democracy at home as the country geared up to fight totalitarianism abroad.**42** On the other side of World War II, jury-selection practices once again played a central role in the country’s highest-profile trial: the 1948-1949 conspiracy prosecution of the leaders of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Part IV revisits the Foley Square Trial, today best remembered as a landmark free-speech case in which the Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act against a First Amendment challenge.**43** But for its first eight weeks, the prosecution was derailed by the most comprehensive challenge to jury-selection practices ever seen in an American courtroom, going far beyond the type of discrimination claims at issue in Parts II and III. The Communists alleged that the ad hoc method of summoning jurors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) resulted in the unconstitutional underrepresentation of the “poor” and “propertyless”; manual workers; residents of “low rent” neighborhoods; “Negroes and other racial and national minorities”; women; Communists; and a variety of other groups.**44** In effect, the Communists asserted a constitutional right to a jury that was a true cross-section of New York, and they compiled droves of evidence demonstrating how SDNY’s juries fell short of this ideal. Once again, the proponents of the representative jury lost the immediate battle. The Communists’ “attack on the jury system,” however, gave pause to even the most anti-Communist liberals and effectively prefigured the model of random jury selection that would become federal law within two decades’ time.**45** Part V concludes by returning to Alabama, thirty years after the Scottsboro Boys’ convictions were vacated on jury-discrimination grounds, to reexamine another landmark case in the ascendance of the representative jury: _White v. Crook_.**46** While the campaigns and litigation examined in Parts II through IV had done a great deal to democratize the jury box, women were still regularly excluded from the “cross-section of the community” that juries were meant to reflect. Gardenia White, a Black female activist in “Bloody” Lowndes County, Alabama, served as lead plaintiff in a 1965 class-action lawsuit that aimed to change that. The litigation was pathbreaking in multiple regards: (1) the lawsuit was the first time that prospective jurors themselves, as opposed to defendants, had sued to vindicate their own rights as jurors, and (2) the plaintiffs advanced the novel argument that the Equal Protection Clause barred discrimination based on race _and_ sex.**47** The animating theory—that sex-based discrimination and race-based discrimination were not only analogous, but interrelated forms of subordination**48** —echoed arguments unsuccessfully advanced by Odell Waller twenty-five years earlier, and for good reason. The Alabama litigation was the brainchild of a queer Black lawyer, Pauli Murray, whose decision to enroll at Howard Law School was prompted by her work as the WDL’s lead field organizer on the Waller campaign.**49** In early 1966, a three-judge panel sided with Murray and White; it was the first time a federal court had held that sex-based discrimination violated the Equal Protection Clause. Linking these cases and campaigns, in addition to a recurring cast of key figures, is the enduring influence of a particular form of grassroots American radical politics—sometimes labeled Popular Frontism—that emerged as a mass social movement in the 1930s.**50** More than an ephemeral liberal-left political alliance against European fascism,**51** the Popular Front took shape as “a radical social-democratic movement forged around anti-fascism, anti-lynching, and . . . industrial unionism.”**52** It emerged in nascent forms in the United States before Moscow abandoned the ultrasectarian posturing of the Soviet Union’s Third Period in the early 1930s,**53** and it endured long after the Popular Front nominally ended by 1940.**54** For the people who shaped and were shaped by its culture, the Popular Front promoted support for a multiracial American national identity cast by] people of color, immigrants and radicals . . . insistence that political and labor movements be grassroots and rank-and-file led . . . and adherence to a revolutionary politics based in multiracial and cross-class campaigns for race, gender, and economic justice, simultaneously.[**55** And, in many ways, the campaigns and political program of the ILD (discussed in Part II) served not only as “the heart of the political and artistic energies of the proletarian avant-garde” of the 1930s,**56** but also provided strategies and an ethos that reverberated in legal fights over the subsequent decades.**57** It should come as no surprise, then, that the figures who emerged later in this history had formative political experiences in the jury struggles that preceded them. The roots of the representative jury are found in the democratic and egalitarian soil of this political milieu, which shaped the worldview and lives of so many of this Article’s protagonists.**58** The primary focus of this Article is to track how these efforts reshaped the American jury, but it also illuminates how fights over the jury box prefigured and sometimes directly influenced developments in other areas of American law. When Euel Lee’s Communist lawyer persuaded Maryland’s high court to vacate his murder conviction in 1931, for example, Lee successfully argued that the implicit biases of the white judge who compiled the jury lists rendered the process unlawful, decades before such terminology would enter popular usage.**59** Thurgood Marshall—who, as a recent law-school graduate, was tangentially involved in the case—would use strikingly similar language fifty-five years later in arguing for the abolition of race-based peremptory strikes in _Batson v. Kentucky_.**60** The jury challenge made by the Communists in the Foley Square Trial essentially anticipated the modern fair-cross-section doctrine that would solidify within two decades’ time. And, as mentioned above, the _Waller_ and _White_ cases both involved groundbreaking attempts to expand the scope of the Equal Protection Clause to classifications based on wealth and sex, respectively. Though largely forgotten today, feminist activists regarded the latter as the “ _Brown v. Board of Education_ for women” when it was first issued.**61** Far from a backwater, throughout the twentieth century, the law of the jury served as a key battleground for those contesting the subordination of workers, racial minorities, and women. It provided a foundational site of struggle for those who understood all three phenomena as intertwined features of American political economy. 1 Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 527, 535 (1975). 2 Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, Pub. L. No. 90-274, § 101, 82 Stat. 53, 54 (codified at … 3 Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78, 100 (1970). 4 Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 371 (1979) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (“nder Sixth Amendmen… 5 _See, e.g._ , Holland v. Illinois, 493 U.S. 474, 483 (1990); _Taylor_ , 419 U.S. at 538; Fay v. New Yor… 6 _See, e.g._ , People v. Wheeler, 583 P.2d 748, 759-60, 762 (Cal. 1978) (“he goal of an impartial… 7 _See, e.g._ , Calder McHugh, _How Much Do We Really Know About the Trump Jury?_ , Politico Mag. (Apr. 1… 8 Philip Bump, _The Chauvin Jurors Deserve Better than Partisan Armchair Assessments of Their Decisio…_ 9 _See_ Jeffrey Abramson, We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy 99 (1994) (“The c… 10 Ala. Code § 8603 (1923); _see also_ Hale, _supra_ note 9, at 140 (“In the traditional view, jurors… 11 _See infra_ notes 87-112 and accompanying text. 12 United States v. Dennis, 183 F.2d 201, 224 (2d Cir. 1950). 13 _Id._ 14 Berghuis v. Smith, 559 U.S. 314, 334 (2010) (Thomas, J., concurring). 15 Richard M. Re, _Re-Justifying the Fair Cross Section Requirement: Equal Representation and Enfranch…_ 16 Jenny E. Carroll, _The Jury as Democracy_ , 66 Ala. L. Rev. 825, 831 n.15 (2015) (quoting 2 Charles F… 17 _See, e.g._ , Thomas Ward Frampton, _The First Black Jurors and the Integration of the American Jury_ ,… 18 _See_ Abramson, _supra_ note 9, at 108. 19 For a rough contemporary analogue, many would recognize the federal legislature as “representati… 20 _See, e.g._ , _Veto It_ , Oregonian, Mar. 4, 1937, at 10 (“It is said . . . that the regi… 21 Abramson, _supra_ note 9, at 117 (“Matters stood in this mixed position until the civil rights mov… 22 Hale, _supra_ note 9, at 193-206; Abramson, _supra_ note 9, at 99-142. An important exception—one of… 23 Smith v. Texas, 311 U.S. 128, 130 (1940). 24 _See, e.g._ , Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 86 (1942). 25 _See_ Thiel v. S. Pac. Co., 328 U.S. 217, 225 (1946). 26 _See_ Ballard v. United States, 329 U.S. 187, 193 (1946). 27 Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 149 (1968). 28 On historical accounts adopting a “long civil rights movement” perspective, see, for example, … 29 _See infra_ notes 135, 148, 185, 196, 213, 348 and accompanying text; _see also_ Gilbert King, Devil i… 30 To be sure, the frequency with which radical litigants played a key role in important and high-pro… 31 To offer just one example, the advent of scientific polling techniques in the late 1930s, coupled … 32 _See_ Lani Guinier & Gerald Torres, _Changing the Wind: Notes Toward a Demosprudence of Law and Socia…_ 33 _See infra_ notes 66-77, 128-138 and accompanying text. 34 Gilmore, _supra_ note 28, at 99. 35 _See, e.g._ ,_id._ at 106-56. _See generally_ James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (1994) (providing the… 36 _See infra_ Section II.A. 37 _See infra_ Section II.B. 38 _See infra_ notes 144-244 and accompanying text. 39 _See infra_ notes 249-257 and accompanying text. 40 _See infra_ notes 316-320 and accompanying text. 41 _See infra_ notes 330-334 and accompanying text. 42 _See generally_ Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (20… 43 Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, 516 (1951) (holding that the First Amendment does not exten… 44 Joint Appendix at *13038-39, United States v. Dennis, 183 F.2d 201 (2d Cir. 1950) (No. 242). 45 _See_ Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, Pub. L. No. 90-274, § 101, 82 Stat. 53, 54-56 (codif… 46 251 F. Supp. 401 (M.D. Ala. 1966). 47 _See infra_ notes 471-478 and accompanying text. 48 _See_ Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution 3-4 (2011).… 49 _See infra_ notes 339-341 and accompanying text. I use she/her pronouns for Pauli Murray in this pie… 50 _See_ Reynolds, _supra_ note 28, at 2-3. 51 _See_ Joseph Fronczak, Everything is Possible 185 (2023) (“The older historiographical answer, sha… 52 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, at… 53 Barrett, _supra_ note 51, at 533 (“The Popular Front strategy had been evolving on a local and nat… 54 _See_ Denning, _supra_ note 52, at 21-27, 463-72 (discussing periodization); Reynolds, _supra_ note 28, … 55 Reynolds, _supra_ note 28, at 3. 56 Denning, _supra_ note 52, at 66. 57 _Id._ at 125 (“he Popular Front combined three distinctive political tendencies: a social democ… 58 Those figures include Ben Davis, Jr., profiled in Parts II and IV, and Pauli Murray, profiled in P… 59 _See infra_ Section II.A; _see also_ B. Keith Payne & Bertram Gawronski, _A History of Implicit Social …_ 60 _See_ Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 (1986) (Marshall, J., concurring). 61 _See infra_ text accompanying note 498. _For over a century, the_ __Yale Law Journal__ _has been at the forefront of legal scholarship, sparking conversation and encouraging reflection among scholars and students, as well as practicing lawyers and sitting judges and Justices._ * jury trial * History * Smith Act * Sixth Amendment Subscribe to Portside

December 15, 1860, Harper’s Weekly illustration showing Boston abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, under attack _**Short Tempers Flare a Polarized Nation**_ **DECEMBER 3, 1860 – A LITTLE MORE THAN FOUR MONTHS BEFORE** the start of the Civil War**–** is the 165th anniversary of a day violent attacks on abolitionists by pro-slavery mobs in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time, antagonism between pro- and anti-slavery activists was running high throughout the U.S. During the four weeks that had passed since Abraham Lincoln won the Presidential election, slavery advocates in the South were openly discussing seceding from the United States to avoid having to answer to a federal government led by Lincoln. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Most of Boston’s population was opposed to slavery, but a significant minority was staunchly in favor of slavery, because many of Boston’s wealthiest citizens were heavily involved in cotton trading, and the production of cotton depended on slave-labor based agriculture. On December 3, 1860, abolitionists planned a gathering in Boston’s Tremont Temple (a large Baptist church with a racially integrated congregation). Almost as soon as the meeting began, it was swarmed by a well-dressed mob of anti-abolitionists, who assaulted several of the scheduled speakers, including abolitionist firebrand Frederick Douglass. Douglass viewed the attack on him as evidence of Northerners’ attempt to prevent the South’s secession by making him the sacrificial lamb. Afterward he wrote “I was roughly handled by a mob in Tremont Temple . . .headed by one of the wealthiest men of that city. The talk was that the blood of some abolitionist must be shed to appease the wrath of the offended South, and to restore peaceful relations between the two sections of the country.” For more, visit: _https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/frederick-douglass-speech-john-brown/_ _**Justice At Last for the Wilmington 10, Better Late than Never**_ **DECEMBER 4 IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY** of a federal court’s overturning the convictions of ten innocent anti-racist activists known as the Wilmington 10, who had been framed and convicted of arson and conspiracy. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank In 1980, when the federal court ruled that both a North Carolina trial judge and the prosecutor had violated the defendants’ rights, they had already been incarcerated for more than nine years. After they were released in accordance with the federal court’s order, they were never retried. In 2012, each of the Wilmington 10 received a pardon of innocence from the Governor of North Carolina. Unfortunately, four of the 10 had died before the pardons were issued. Nevertheless, the six surviving frame-up victims plus the families for the four who were deceased were qualified to receive $50,000 compensation for each year they had been incarcerated. _https://web.archive.org/web/20101018040247/http://triumphantwarriors.ning.com/_ _**Just How Bad Can the Federal Courts Get?**_ **DECEMBER 5 IS THE 115TH ANNIVERSARY** of this ruling by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia: If an 8-year-old girl has one, and only one, great-grandparent who is Black, she cannot attend public school in the District of Columbia. Not so pleasant to know, but important to not forget. For the details, please visit _https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/dec/5_ _**Witch Hunters Against Common Sense**_ **DECEMBER 6 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY** of a small, but hardly insignificant, triumph of anti-communist witch-hunters over common sense in the realm of entertainment. In 1950, one of New York City’s biggest television stations agreed to cancel a weekly broadcast of short silent films by Charlie Chaplin when it was told by an organization of anti-communist war veterans to “withdraw the series” because Chaplin was alleged to be “a man with very definite Communist leanings.” According to the veterans’ leader, “It makes no difference if the pictures were made five, ten, twenty or more years ago. Entertainment for art’s sake just does not exist when you talk about communism.” _https://progressive.org/magazine/charlie-chaplin-hollywood-s-political-exile_ _**War Crimes Are Common, But Not Convictions**_ **DECEMBER 9 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY** of one of the rarest legal phenomenon known: A court in Argentina found five of the leaders of the junta that seized power in 1974 guilty of war crimes and sentenced them to hard time. They were convicted in 1985 of murder, torture, kidnapping and forced disappearance in the first major war crimes trial to take place since the Nüremberg Trials in Germany and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo following World War II. Two of the war criminals were sentenced to life in prison, one to 17 years, one to eight years and one to four-and-a-half years. None served more than five years before being released. _https://web.archive.org/web/20160514035930/http://thenation.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/11197743.pdf_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ * slavery and abolition * Frederick Douglass * Charlie Chaplin * Argentina's Dirty War Subscribe to Portside

The painting “The Thankful Poor” by Henry Ossawa Tanner is shown. | (Image by Henry Ossawa Tanner) We live in a world that constantly tells us to “count our blessings.” Gratitude is praised as a moral virtue, a mental tonic, a gateway to happiness. Entire industries are built on it: journals, apps, workshops, and social media trends. But what if gratitude isn’t a virtue at all? What if, instead of elevating us, it functions as a quiet mechanism that traps, silences, and pacifies us? At first glance, gratitude seems harmless—even virtuous. A simple “thank you” can smooth social interactions, remind us of the positive, and cultivate humility. Yet much of our gratitude is coerced, performative, or socially demanded. We are expected to be thankful, whether or not we genuinely feel it. Miss the cue, fail to smile, or silently resent the “blessing” offered, and we are framed as ungrateful, even morally deficient. Gratitude often functions less as a choice and more as a social leash, compelling people to perform virtue on cue. Take the workplace, for example. Employees are often reminded to “be grateful for having a job” when faced with low pay, long hours, or toxic conditions. The intention may be to inspire appreciation, but the ultimate effect is control—gratitude becomes a tool for compliance. By teaching people to “be grateful” for injustice or minimal provision, society trains obedience under the guise of virtue. It pacifies dissatisfaction by framing fundamental rights and fair treatment as privileges rather than entitlements. In such cases, thankfulness isn’t just a moral exercise—it’s a mechanism to normalize inequity. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Gratitude can act as emotional camouflage. We are taught to appreciate our lives, our health, our families, sometimes even our misfortunes. Perspective is valuable, but the relentless pressure to be thankful can suppress genuine emotions. Anger, grief, frustration—signals that something is wrong—are nudged aside. We are told to “look on the bright side,” even when the side that demands closer scrutiny is dark. Gratitude, in this sense, becomes a velvet handcuff: soft, polite, yet restraining real feelings and masking problems we need to confront. The human psyche thrives on complexity, but “gratitude culture” encourages simplification: Everything must be filtered through a lens of thankfulness. The braver, wiser act is to stop counting blessings on command, to resist the soft tyranny of enforced gratitude, and to reclaim our right to anger, dissatisfaction, and honesty. Gratitude also carries a heavy psychological burden. Feeling obligated to reciprocate kindness or opportunity breeds stress and anxiety. Recognizing genuine generosity is one thing; living under a constant sense of debt—to friends, family, employers, or society—is another. Those with fewer resources bear this pressure more heavily: Expectations of gratitude are imposed when there is little power to refuse or negotiate social norms. For some, gratitude becomes an unspoken debt that never expires, a pressure cooker of stress and resentment. In these cases, it is not liberating, but a subtle form of coercion. We are also encouraged to turn gratitude inward as a self-help tool: “Practice daily gratitude, and you will be happier.” While brief reflections on what we value can improve mood, this framing risks individualizing systemic problems. Feeling unhappy? Focus on what you do have. Struggling with debt, illness, or social injustice? Count your blessings. Gratitude thus becomes a psychological Band-Aid, a quiet insistence that the problem lies not in circumstances or structures but in our own perception. It is both a pacifier and a distraction from meaningful action. It’s worth noting that gratitude, in its purest, voluntary form, is not inherently bad. Genuine, spontaneous thankfulness can deepen relationships, foster empathy, and anchor us in meaningful moments. The problem arises when gratitude is demanded, packaged, or weaponized—when it is less a personal reflection and more a social or institutional expectation. That is when it stops being a virtue and becomes a subtle tool of emotional and psychological manipulation. Consider the social media dimension. We post “thankful” photos, recount the blessings of our lives, and share curated moments of appreciation. These public expressions rarely arise from raw emotion—they are curated for approval, likes, and social validation. Such displays may appear harmless, even charming, but they reinforce the notion that gratitude is an obligation rather than an organic experience. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Even in intimate settings, gratitude can carry hidden pressures. Being thankful to a loved one can generate unspoken debts or expectations: a favor must be repaid, a kindness acknowledged, a gesture reciprocated. This is not always harmful, but it becomes so when gratitude is demanded or used as leverage. In this sense, gratitude is not purely virtuous; it is a social contract with emotional consequences. Step back, and a pattern emerges: Gratitude is often less about authentic appreciation and more about maintaining social harmony, suppressing discontent, and normalizing inequality. It is a quietly coercive force. And yet, we are rarely taught to question it. We are trained to assume that gratitude is inherently virtuous, morally neutral, or personally beneficial. What if, instead, we allowed ourselves to interrogate it—to ask whether our thankfulness is truly ours or imposed? The real question is not whether gratitude can be good. It can. The question is whether our culture has overvalued it, weaponized it, or confused performative thankfulness with genuine reflection. By unquestioningly embracing gratitude as a moral imperative, we risk ignoring discomfort, overlooking injustice, and silencing authentic emotion. Sometimes, the bravest act is not to be thankful—to allow ourselves anger, frustration, or dissatisfaction. Sometimes the healthiest choice is to withhold thanks, at least until we genuinely feel it. In rethinking gratitude, we are not rejecting kindness or appreciation. We are reclaiming the right to feel emotions honestly, without guilt or coercion. We are resisting the subtle pressures that tell us to be grateful for situations that do not deserve it. Authentic gratitude, like all virtues, cannot be commanded; it must emerge voluntarily, thoughtfully, and without obligation. Only then can it be meaningful. The braver, wiser act is to stop counting blessings on command, to resist the soft tyranny of enforced gratitude, and to reclaim our right to anger, dissatisfaction, and honesty. Gratitude should serve us—not the agendas of others. _Martina Moneke writes about art, fashion, culture, and politics. In 2022, she received the Los Angeles Press Club’s First Place Award for Election Editorials at the 65th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards. She is based in Los Angeles and New York._ _Common Dreams is a reader-supported independent news outlet created in 1997 as a new media model. Our nonprofit newsroom covers the most important news stories of the moment. Common Dreams free online journalism keeps our millions of readers well-informed, inspired, and engaged._ * Thanksgiving * gratitude * self-help * complacency Subscribe to Portside

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announcing the members of his transition team in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, on November 5, 2025. | (Shawn Inglima / New York Daily News) _On Saturday, November 22, Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara delivered the keynote at New York City Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) biannual organizing conference at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn. Below is a transcript of his remarks on why the Left must win real gains today — but also keep fighting for a socialist society beyond them._ I'm so excited to be here with you all. It feels to me that this is the political moment so many of us have been waiting for and working to build for years. We’re a month away from one of our comrades becoming mayor. We’ve built a network of socialist elected officials, we have a real organization to call home, and there’s a growing base of support in this city for our immediate demand of taxing the rich to expand public goods. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail This moment extends beyond New York — we have a huge political opening in the United States as whole. But we know that we have that opportunity because millions of people are living through hard times. We have an erratic and authoritarian president, we have an affordability crisis, with millions struggling to pay their bills and to live lives where they’re treated with dignity and respect. We’ve seen the return of forms of nativism and racism that should have been long vanquished by now. And at a social and economic level, things may get worse very soon. The country — not just this city — is crying out for principled political leadership. Not just a kind of populist leadership through great figures, though I’m grateful we have one of the greatest figures on our side. I mean class leadership through organization. The leadership that says that the disparities that we see in our country and the world are not the natural laws of God but the result of a world that human beings have created. The leadership that says that the interests of the working-class majority are distinct from the interest of capitalist elites, and that we need to organize around those interests to win not only a better distribution of wealth _within capitalism_ but a different type of society all together. **God’s Children Can Govern** Ijoined the Democratic Socialists of America when I was seventeen years old. I don’t need to tell you what DSA was in New York back in 2007. Some of you here remember it. I made so many good friends, but we were lucky if a dozen people showed up to a meeting. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank We made progress through the patient, steady work and commitment of those people and the many more who joined later. We were marathon runners for socialism. This, though, is a moment for sprinting. This is the biggest opening our movement has had in decades. The time we devote to political work in the next few months and years will have an outsize impact in our city and country — for now and for posterity. But what exactly should we be doing, and how should we relate to both the new mayor’s administration and our other comrades in elected office? In my mind, our tasks as organized socialists outside of government are both different and largely compatible with theirs. The key demands of our moment are around the affordability agenda. Our mayor-elect will be leading an effort to raise revenue to fund social programs and empower the city’s working class. If Zohran , our other electeds, and the grassroots movement around them deliver positive change in people’s lives, we’ll build a deeper social base for the Left. Right now, our electoral strength has far outpaced our base. But people are ready for our message and ready for results. But fundamentally, there are constraints to any sort of social democratic governance. Just as under capitalism, workers are dependent on having profitable firms for jobs. Cities are dependent on big corporations and wealthy people for tax revenue. Zohran needs to navigate these constraints. He can’t undermine the old regime of accumulation and redistribution without having a replacement for it, and certainly there can’t be a total replacement in one city. These concerns aren’t new. This is the dilemma of social democracy. This is the tension between our near-term and long-term goals that has existed in the socialist movement for 150 years. Our elected officials in the near term need to manage capitalism in the interest of workers, while our movement also has a long-term goal of constructing a new system through the self-emancipation of those workers. We need to see the constraints that Zohran will be under in these structural terms, rather than moral ones. But having patience and being supportive of him doesn’t answer how we reconcile the _near_ and the _long_ — social democracy and socialism. At the very least, it’s important that we remember the end goal. The great theorist of reformism, Eduard Bernstein, once said that “the goal is nothing, the movement everything.” I think that’s not quite right. If we don’t talk about socialism after capitalism, no one else will. The historic dream of our movement, a world without exploitation or oppression, will be lost. But we shouldn’t just avoid reformism because we want to feel pure as “true socialists” or as an intellectual pursuit. We should avoid reformism and remember the goal of rupture with capitalism because it can offer a compelling vision of the world to those we’re trying to reach. Socialism isn’t “Sweden” like Bernie sometimes says. Socialism isn’t even _just_ , as Martin Luther King Jr said and Zohran has beautifully invoked, “a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children.” Socialism means a better distribution but also democratic control over the things we all depend on — workers holding the levers of production and investment, and the state guaranteeing the basics of life as social rights. Socialism means no longer begging corporations to invest in our communities or the rich to stay and pay their taxes. Socialism means overcoming the labor-capital dialectic through the triumph of labor itself, not a more favorable class compromise. Socialism means that the people who’ve kept this world alive — the caregivers, the drivers, the machinists, the farmworkers, the cleaners — stop being an invisible backdrop and become the authors of their futures. Socialism means a society where those who have always given without having any say finally show their true capabilities. Where, as C. L. R. James said, every cook can govern. Socialism means replacing an economy built on hierarchy and exclusion with one built on the intelligence and creativity of working people themselves. That is the goal we keep alive. Not because it’s utopian, but because it is the only horizon equal to the dignity and potential of ordinary people. And because, it’s _compelling_. This isn’t just offering workers some of their surplus value back in exchange for their votes. It’s offering them _the future_ , a society that they can own, a chance to assume their rightful place as agents of history. Something like this is real socialism. It isn’t an interest group or a label to distinguish ourselves from other progressives. It’s a fundamentally more radical goal than those of our allies. It’s premised on a different analysis of the world around us and the world that can be built. Perhaps we can think of ways to bridge some of the gap between near and long through a set of demands that at least raise the concept of socialization immediately. Ideas that offer not just more badly needed social welfare but a taste of ownership and control. A hint at a different political economy. Just one example: when a business closes down or its owners are retiring, workers supported by a public fund could get the first crack at saving it by converting it into a labor-managed firm. At the city level, we can have a municipal office to help workers turn shuttered shops into cooperatives by providing the backbone of legal and accounting support and fast-tracking permits. We’ve already been talking about city-owned grocery stores and the need for public housing. We need more ideas like these. Reforms that fit within social democracy but gesture beyond it. Socialism in Our Time It’s been thrilling to meet people who’ve just joined DSA. It’s been nice to see old friends too. I’ve been complaining about missing the first half of the Knicks game, but even Jalen Brunson can’t keep me away from here. I’m really enthusiastic about what we can do in the next couple of years. We _will_ improve the lives of millions of people. And we will grow our movement. But in addition to enthusiasm, we need honesty about how far we still have to go to root ourselves in working-class communities. We need more power not just at the ballot box but at the points of production and exchange. And we need to be honest about the battles and constraints that Zohran will face, and be ready to support him when times get tough. Zohran’s mayoralty will be a fight for what’s winnable right now. Our job is to let that fight expand, not narrow, our horizon — and to keep alive the goal of socialism in our time. _Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin, the president of the Nation magazine, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality._ * socialism * fightback * Zohran Mamdani Subscribe to Portside

_**No Inflammatory Remarks About Genocide Will Be Permitted!**_ **NOVEMBER 26 IS THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY** of a celebration by the state of Massachusetts to mark the arrival, in 1620, of the ship Mayflower, which carried the first group of pilgrims to North America. The 1970 event was billed as the 350th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving. The event’s organizers, who conceived of the event as a celebration of brotherhood between the European settlers and the members of the Wampanoag Nation, invited the leader of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head to give a dinner speech. But when the organizers reviewed a draft of the speech, they refused to allow it to be delivered because “the theme of the anniversary celebration is brotherhood and anything inflammatory would be out of place.” Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Here are excerpts of the suppressed remarks. Below is a link to the complete speech. “This is a time of celebration for you - celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People. . . . We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people. . . . here were broken promises - and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned . . . Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently. . . .We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.” _https://www.uaine.org/suppressed_speech.htm_ _**‘You Can Protest, But We Can Ignore You’**_ If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank **NOVEMBER 27 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY** of a national day of protest against the U.S.war in Vietnam. It saw demonstrations in many U.S. cities, including an anti-war rally by some 40,000 in Washington, D.C., which was the largest demonstration against the Vietnam war up until then. The massive 1965 demonstration completely surrounded the White House. But the U.S. government doubled down on the commitment to trying to use its military might to stifle the Vietnamese desire for national liberation. On the same day, the U.S. announced a plan to more than triple the deployment of U.S. troops from 120,000 to 400,000. For the National Guardian’s detailed account of the Washington demonstration, visit _https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/community.39212702.pdf_ and scroll down to the middle of the page. _**State Department’s Embarrassing Secrets**_ **NOVEMBER 28 IS THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY** of the beginning of Wikileaks release of more than 250,000 formerly secret messages sent between Department of State headquarters and more than 270 U.S. embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions. The messages, which were dated between 1966 and 2010, revealed U.S. diplomats gathering personal information about top officials of the United Nations, sharp and embarrassing criticisms of U.S. allies, efforts to interfere with nuclear disarmament campaigns, and U.S. support for dictatorships and other oppressive regimes. The detailed information in the leaked messages, which was (and remains) fascinating and chilling, led Noam Chomsky to comment at the time, "Perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government – Hillary Clinton, others – and also by the diplomatic service". _https://wikileaks.org/plusd/?qproject[]=cg &q=#result_ _**Killing One of Robert Moses’s Many Bad Ideas**_ **NOVEMBER 30 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY** of a major and lasting victory by defenders of one of New York City’s natural gems, one of the wildest but also well-known areas in New York City’s Central Park, the 38-acre Ramble. Six months earlier, in May 1955, New York City Parks Commissioner (and highway-construction czar) Robert Moses announced had accepted a $250,000 donation (worth about $3 million today) to build a recreation center for the elderly that would occupy more than a third of the Ramble’s total area. Not only had he accepted the contribution, but he had already (secretly) contracted with a large architectural firm to design the building. Many park users were outraged, not because they had any objection to the construction of such a recreation center but because to build such a large and presumably heavily-used building at that location would go a long way toward destroying the park’s most renowned woodland. The lobbying campaign against the construction got so much attention the trustees of the foundation that put up the money for the project withdrew the offer because they “were upset over the fuss made by nature lovers in general and bird watchers in particular.” Not only was the plan killed, but 46 years later the Ramble was one of the first areas in the city to be designated “Forever Wild,” and exempt from any development proposals. _https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cate/vol16/iss1/5/_ _**Throwing Jim Crow Out of the Bus**_ **DECEMBER 1 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY** of a watershed moment for the U.S. civil rights movement, when police in Montgomery, Alabama, arrested Rosa Parks for her refusal to abide by the rules of Jim Crow public transportation. The effort to end Montgomery’s bus segregation had started eight months earlier with a court case, but the legal battle was far from its conclusion when Rosa Parks’ arrest was the signal for the NAACP to begin a very effective city-wide bus boycott by Montgomery’s very substantial Black population. The eventual success of both the court case after it reached the U.S. Supreme Court and the nationally publicized 61-week-long boycott in the very heart of the Confederacy’s one-time capital city forced the bus company to throw in the towel, and became the rallying cry for a sustained attack on racism throughout the country. _https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/montgomery-bus-boycott-1955-56/_ _**Wrist Slaps for Killer Cops**_ **DECEMBER 2 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY** of police killing an innocent and unarmed Black man with two shots in the back, and the beginning of an eventually unsuccessful cover-up of those events. The family of the dead man, Bernard Whitehurst, Jr., deserves much of the credit for uncovering the truth, as does the publisher of the Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser, who joined in the effort to prove that the police were lying, but no one can take much satisfaction in the slap-on-the-wrist quality of the final reckoning. Eight police officers were eventually either dismissed from the force or resigned. Montgomery’s Mayor and its director of Public Safety each resigned. The Whitehurst family never received a dime in restitution or compensation for the death of their family member. They were left to take what comfort they could from an acknowledgement of wrongdoing by the City of Montgomery and a City Council resolution formally expressing regret for Whitehurst’s death. The City also agreed to install to historical markers the provide an accurate description of the dereliction of duty that resulted in the killing of an innocent man and its aftermath. The Equal Justice Initiative has more information, here: _https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/dec/02_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ Subscribe to Portside

Gene Bruskin’s father before entering military service in early 1940s My father, John Bruskin, served in WWII, and received two Purple Hearts when he was blown out of the tanks he was driving. While in the military he used a service they provided to record a series of “45s”, 7-inch vinal records, and send them to my mom, Gertrude. This “poem” is a compilation of his messages to my mom from France and other military locations. His hopes and anguish are palpable. He had been a young Jewish activist in the Communist Party in Philadelphia in the late 30’s but left the Party, disillusioned by its top-down structure. Working in a radio repair shop when WWII broke out, he entered the service to fight fascism and ironically endured antisemitism while being trained in Georgia. Although the notion of PTSD didn’t exist then, my father was clearly impacted for the rest of his life. He died young at 61 having been a TV repairman his entire life. The war never left his consciousness. I remember while growing up our summer “vacations” were yearly trips to gatherings of The Fourth Armored Division, held in a variety of cities, giving my father a couple days with the guys to reminisce and leaving me and my sisters bored and playing on the elevators. He read every book he could find on the war and watched every news reel documentary shown on TV. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Like many from the “greatest generation” the defeat of Nazism and the ascendancy of the US as the world’s superpower didn’t do him much good. He essentially worked himself to death, died without health insurance or even a bank account. The hypocritical notion of “Thank you for your service” continues today and vets struggle to earn a living and recover from service in endless US initiated wars. The best we could do as “patriots” is to end US militarism and thank the teachers and nurses and many others for their service in making our country function. * * * ## **The Dangers of Doing Away with Monsters** **(RECORDED WORDS OF JOHN BRUSKIN DURING WW II)** Gert, Monsters are roaming the earth Dinosaurs, leaving anguish, pain, death and sorrow in their wake That’s why I’m somewhere far away Fighting to get rid of these creatures So our children will never see such things It has to be done now, right? It’s not an easy life We all try to keep our chin up Millions of us No complaining No getting sad, you know Don’t worry I’m going to survive Get that one-way ticket home Some day Pretty sure If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank We can start over where we left off Like that wonderful day when we were so excited When we permanently joined as man and wife The nicest day of my life And yours too, huh? Sure, we’re poor But we’ll manage A little place of our own, our dream spot Our beautiful little baby gal Francie Maybe another one later And I have you. That’s what makes life worth living. So that’s it We don’t want much The simple things in life We don’t ask for more But it’s out of the question today And that makes me very sad Especially after seeing the baby for the first time She’s so cute She’ll be a fine girl Like her mother is Like her mother always was So be a good soldier Gert Keep your chin up You are strong You got common sense You understand what’s taking place I feel from the bottom of my soul This thing will be over We will be together and never be separated. Perhaps it’s inevitable for many of us to go. We all hope and pray it don’t happen. But if it happens Well, you understand. Don’t you Gert? **…** _**Gene Bruskin is a retired 45 year veteran of labor and international solidarity work. He has served as a USWA Local president, spent two years as Jesse Jackson’s labor director in the 1990s and 10 years as Secretary Treasurer of the Food and Allied Service Trades of the AFL-CIO. He was the UFCW Justice@Smithfield Campaign Director organizing 5,000 meatpacking workers in North Carolina in 2008. During the Iraq war he was a founder of US Labor Against the War and has done extensive international labor solidarity work for struggles in Central America, South Africa, Cuba , the Philippines, Iraq and Israel/Palestine . He recently helped establish the National Labor Network for Ceasefire in Gaza. He is currently mentoring Amazon workers in various locations Since retirement from AFT in 2012 he has written and produced 3 musicals, and his current production is called The Return of John Brown. (www.thereturnofjohnbrown.com)**_ * World War 2 * military service * Veterans Subscribe to Portside

A rattled President Trump tells a female reporter, "Quiet, piggy" aboard Airforce One | screen grab At several points in the past few months, it looked as if Trump had gone too far and that resistance to his incipient dictatorship had reached a turning point. But each time, it didn’t quite happen. In mid-September, I wrote a moderately optimistic piece for the _Prospect_, taking stock of the various elements of resistance, most notably courts and elections. Many readers felt I was being a little too hopeful. _**More from Robert Kuttner**_ Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Since Election Day, however, there has been a notable shift. And each aspect feeds on the others. They include: * A Democratic wave election that is likely to be repeated and intensified in 2026 * Lower courts becoming even bolder in striking down Trump’s excesses * The Supreme Court likely to overturn three key Trump cases: tariffs, his efforts to fire Federal Reserve governors, and birthright citizenship * At least some states, such as Indiana and Kansas, resisting Trump’s redistricting demands * The continuing fallout from the Epstein files * Republican defections. The most important sign of impending lame-duckery is Republicans finding that they can defy Trump with impunity. The examples are legion. They keep cumulating and nurturing each other. Trump kept pressuring House Republicans not to sign the discharge petition to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. He threatened to punish Republicans who resisted, but in the end it was Trump who was thoroughly humiliated. The White House, by trying to delay release of the files by launching a whole new investigation, is miscalculating again. This only keeps Epstein in the headlines: What is Trump hiding? But the Republicans’ Epstein revolt is only the beginning. Republican legislators have defied Trump’s demand to end the filibuster, his scheme to engage the cost-of-living issue by sending everyone a $2,000 “tariff rebate” check, his proposal for a $10,000 subsidy for people to buy private health insurance, his idea for 50-year mortgages, and more. They are not taking him seriously. Republicans have joined Democrats in expressing unease about his illegal demolition of fishing boats as alleged drug smugglers, his plan for a splendid little war on Venezuela, and his latest pro-Putin scheme to sell out Ukraine. His threats to primary disloyal Republicans are going nowhere. And the more Republicans are willing to stand up to him, the more his threats ring hollow. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank There is also the sheer incompetence of Trump’s efforts to use selective prosecutions to punish political opponents. Trump’s effort to prosecute former FBI director James Comey has turned into an embarrassing fiasco. The Department of Justice admitted that it never presented the two-count indictment to the full grand jury. The appalled magistrate wrote, “If this procedure did not take place, then the court is in uncharted legal territory in that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.” The whole case may be thrown out. And Trump’s crony, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, who has combed mortgage records to find ways to prosecute prominent Democrats, is now on the defensive himself, as lawyers challenge his flagrant conflicts of interest. Trump’s minions even managed to bungle a slam dunk by admitting the sheer racism in the Texas redistricting plan, which was then overruled by a three-judge panel, with the most indignant comments coming from a Trump appointee. Appellate Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote that “it’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors. Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General—who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration—describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally[] unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’” Meanwhile, the Republican victory in forcing Democrats to reopen the government with no concessions on health care is looking more and more like a defeat because it keeps the issue of unaffordable health insurance front and center. In the most recent polls, approval of Trump is underwater by 17 points. Even among Republicans, his approval is 68 percent, sharply down from 92 percent in March. As we head into an election year, with Democrats flipping both Houses a distinct possibility, more and more Republican legislators are looking to save their own skins—which gives them more reason to distance themselves from Trump, and the process keeps intensifying. So are we out of the woods yet? No, we are not. The more Trump is on the defensive, the more hysterical he becomes. The latest example is his call to execute Democrats who pointed out that the professional military has an obligation to defy illegal commands. Even the White House press office had to walk that back. But Trump is continuing to use carrots and sticks with the corporate parents of media organizations to destroy a free and critical press. And as an increasingly desperate Trump tries to keep changing the subject and the headlines, watch out for even more reckless foreign-policy adventures. However, something fundamental has shifted. Trump is not a dead duck yet, but he is increasingly a lame one. And the more he proves impotent to punish defiant Republicans, the more they will keep acting to distance themselves and to weaken Trump. We may yet redeem our democracy. That seemed a long shot just a few months ago. Not a bad cause for Thanksgiving.\ _**Robert Kuttner** is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is _ __Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy__ _. Follow Bob at his site,___robertkuttner.com__ _, and on [email protected]_ _Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024. All rights reserved. Click_ __here__ _to read the original article at Prospect.org._ __Click here__ _to support The American Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism._ _Pledge to support fearlessly independent journalism by_ __joining the Prospect__ _as a member today._ _Every level includes an opt-in to receive our print magazine by mail, or a renewal of your current print subscription._ * Donald Trump * Jeffrey Epstein * elections Subscribe to Portside

The November 4 elections give the opposition to MAGA—and its progressive contingent especially—a huge boost. But in the coming year, the fight against US-style fascism will only intensify, as will contention over how to wage it and what ought to come next. The election results showed the scale of public disapproval of MAGA’s agenda. They indicated that a substantial majority is willing to turn out to defeat MAGA candidates. And the readiness to not only vote but to actively campaign is strongest among those enthused by progressive standard-bearers like Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani, whose big win in New York City was the highlight of the day. But the next year’s challenges are going to be harder. MAGA’s assault on democratic rights and working-class living standards has already included steps to rig the electoral system. The administration is escalating its election interference efforts and preparing to use all means, up to and including outright theft, to ensure that it keeps control of Congress in the 2026 midterms. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Landslide anti-MAGA ballot totals will be necessary but not sufficient to block those efforts. Preparation for mass action to protect election results—large-scale non-violent civil resistance—must be part of this next year’s to-do list. Most of the progressive movement already understands that non-compliance and disruptive protests are needed both to reduce harm and to lay the basis to push MAGA out of power. Many are already practicing that level of militancy in defense of immigrants and resistance to National Guard occupations. Now is the moment to recognize that the 2026 election is likely to be another “this-is-not-a-drill” test of strength. It will present huge challenges but also opportunities to engage millions in participatory political action. Other experiences in anti-authoritarian resistance have shown that attempts to steal elections can be the trigger for a popular uprising (including something approximating a general strike) that topples an anti-democratic regime—and provides millions with a rich lesson in class struggle in the process. ## Election winds at anti-MAGA’s back By now readers are familiar with the list of major contests that added up to an overwhelming rebuke of Trump 2.0: Zohran Mamdani scoring more than 50% of the vote to become Mayor-elect of New York City; Democrats winning landslides in races for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia and the Virginia Attorney General’s office, and capturing two statewide offices in Georgia for the first time since 2006; all the liberal State Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania retaining their seats; a two-to-one majority voting for California’s temporary redistricting measure to counter the GOP’s Texas gerrymander; and the GOP losing its supermajority in the Mississippi Legislature. ### **A few other important points have received less attention:** #### **The GOP candidate for Governor of Virginia made anti-Trans messaging a centerpiece of her campaign.** Her effort tanked so badly even Republican post-mortems admitted it was a losing strategy. And the racist, anti-LGBTQ group Moms for Liberty, which stormed into School Board seats in numerous places after its founding in 2021, lost every one of the 31 contested races its candidates entered. It’s long past time for those who have been silent or wavering on defense of trans rights to get off the fence. #### **In every contest for which there is data, evidence is strong that****Latinos swung heavily toward Democrats****this year.** This is a big opportunity for anti-MAGA and for progressives in particular, but taking advantage of it requires abandoning all “demographics are destiny” myths and organizing at the grassroots with a working-class economic agenda as well as an anti-racial-profiling one. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank #### **“The Mamdani victory is the revenge of all the campus protesters”** Zohran Mamdani’s win was due to many factors, and several excellent pieces have been published analyzing his victory, the challenges his administration will face, and the lessons to be drawn for work in other localities. (See here, here, and here). Given less attention but crucial is this insight from Mark Naison: “The Mamdani victory is the revenge of all the campus protesters that powerful Israel supporters pushed out of area universities…those protesters and activists who powerful Zionists thought they had neutralized became the heart and soul of an extraordinary get out the vote effort… this election was about Gaza, validating all those who warned, 2 years ago, that a ceasefire was necessary and a genocide was going to take place if people didn’t mobilize to stop it.” ## MAGA election interference already underway In a best-case voting scenario for 2026, MAGA candidates lose the votes for the majority of House seats, possibly enough Senate seats to flip that chamber, and numerous positions at the state and local level. But due to MAGA voter suppression, interference with fair vote-counting, and potentially outright refusal to certify anti-MAGA victors, those results, especially for federal offices, could well be nullified. Election rigging has been part of the Right’s playbook for many years, even before MAGA. Under Trump 1.0, racist gerrymandering became more naked and voter suppression more widespread. Trump 2.0 has now gone further. A 2020 election denier has been appointed to head the “election integrity” office at the Department of Homeland Security, and Justice Department probes and FBI investigations have been launched in attempts to intimidate election workers, who have faced direct threats of violence since 2020 from right-wing non-state actors. Current National Guard and ICE deployments are, among other things, testing grounds for the use of armed force to intimidate voters. The full list of MAGA plans to steal future elections is documented in _The Atlantic_. The Brennan Center has published a timeline of all steps already taken to rig elections, and states: “Since day one of his second term, the Trump administration has attempted to rewrite election rules to burden voters and usurp control of election systems, targeted and threatened election officials and others who keep elections free and fair, supported people who undermine election administration, and retreated from the federal government’s role of protecting voters and the electoral process.” All MAGA election-rigging moves are being challenged in the courts. But even if lower courts follow the law and the Constitution and rule these measures illegal, the Federalist Society hijackers who have taken over the highest court in the land are bent on ruling the other way. Most recently, this Gang of Six signaled they will gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act, reinforcing the denial of political representation to people of color, African Americans in the first place. ## Fierce primary battles will shape the general The first necessary step in stopping the steal is defeating MAGA candidates at the ballot box, with special emphasis in 2026 on flipping the House. Numerous labor, community, and issue-based organizations have already been focused on this and will be intensifying those efforts. The 2026 midterms will be shaped by the outcome of the fight over direction currently underway in the Democratic Party. A combative posture toward the Trump administration and MAGA in general characterized the winners from all parts of the party in 2025, from “moderates” like the governors-elect in Virginia and New Jersey to Mamdani in New York. But there are big differences between the programs of those two tendencies. And there is a layer of Democrats who either choose caving over fighting (evident in the shutdown surrender supported by more Dem Senators than those who voted with the GOP) or stay silent when MAGA and the Left square off (Chuck Schumer) or outright ally with MAGA (Cuomo and the big money donors and elected heavyweights who backed him). Several organizations are throwing down to support challenges to the business-as-usual Democratic Party. Justice Democrats has so far endorsed four challengers to incumbent mainstream Democrats and is supporting nine progressive incumbents against anticipated challenges from corporate and AIPAC-funded opponents. “Run for Something,” which recruits young progressives to run for office, had 3,000 people sign up since November 4. Democratic Socialists of America, which played the anchor role in Mamdani’s campaign, is energized by his victory and will almost certainly back socialist challengers for numerous House seats in 2026. The Working Families Party will build on important candidate victories in 2025 by recruiting and training candidates for House seats in 2026; two new WFP endorsements have just been rolled out. Corporate and centrist Democrats are going to have mega-donors behind them in these battles. But outpourings of people power, like the volunteer energy galvanized by Mamdani, can defeat big money. And only if progressives gain enough strength to shape the 2026 campaign and shape Democrats’ action agenda in its aftermath can the millions alienated from politics as usual be motivated to turn out against MAGA and fight for a post-MAGA government that will deliver for the working class and popular majority. Mamdani’s campaign models the kind of program insurgents can win on: economic populism, an “affordability agenda” that substitutes big ideas for tinkering around the edges, and an “injury to one is an injury to all” stance that throws no constituency under the bus in the face of MAGA’s racist, sexist, nativist, or homophobic dehumanization. Even on what has long been a third rail in US politics—backing for Palestinian rights—Mamdani’s victory showed that taking that kind of a firm stand is not just morally right, it is a political winner. The movement for Palestinian rights not only was a key factor in Mamdani’s win, it is showing its strength in the number of centrist Democrats who are now saying they will not take donations from AIPAC. Not only Palestine, but US militarism and foreign policy in general is likely to be a topic of heightened struggle between progressives and mainstream Democrats in the next year. Under Trump 2.0, US military interventionism is increasing, not diminishing, with murder on the high seas and threats to attack Venezuela in a regime-change operation the latest flashpoint. Besides this being a case of immoral aggression, there is a long sordid history of strongmen going to war to suppress dissent and “unite the nation.” With leading Democrats still hesitant to take on the National Security State, it will fall to insurgents to prepare the electorate to understand that fearmongering about foreign enemies is a tool used to weaken and divide movements of the popular classes and facilitate a transition to fascist rule. ## Year-round organizing and civil resistance On the non-compliance and direct-action front, the last few months have seen a dramatic expansion in the number of people being trained and taking to the streets. In July, Indivisible launched its “One Million Rising” campaign to train a mass cohort of people in non-cooperation, civil resistance, and community organizing. The October 18th No Kings demonstrations exceeded the July turnout by several million. Thousands have since taken newly acquired skills to work in community-wide resistance to ICE kidnappings and National Guard occupations. In the group’s November 6 post-election call, Indivisible’s coordinators stated that, “we’re going to build the kind of popular mass mobilization muscle that is necessary on the back end to resist and repel any [2026 election] sabotage effort.**”** These initiatives and others, such as those launched by Choose Democracy, operate on the idea that “protests ask, resistance refuses.” Building on them and similar efforts month after month is a way to construct a well-prepared body of people located throughout the country and ready to swing into action before, during, and after Election Day 2026. Of special importance: efforts to build support in the labor movement for protests, including workplace actions against authoritarianism, overlap with and can feed into overall election protection work. Based on a Workers Over Billionaires agenda, May Day Strong, along with numerous partners, organized well-attended protests last Labor Day; plans are for consistent organizing over the coming years on May Days and Labor Days, leading up to coordinated workplace actions by as many unions as possible on Mayday 2028. There are also efforts to get a conversation about calling a general strike going in the labor movement. At present, unions and other organizations with a genuine base in the working class are not ready for anything on that scale. But a blatant attempt by MAGA to steal the 2026 election could cause a shift in sentiment and sense of urgency. And whatever was galvanized in 2026 would be important not just for that year but as a valuable “stress test” for 2028. Intersecting with all of the above are a set of post-No Kings Day suggestions from Eric Blanc for specific action campaigns that could steadily escalate in size and militancy. And a group of organizations have launched the We Ain’t Buying It economic pressure campaign, calling for a boycott of major retailers—including Amazon, Target, and Home Depot—that have caved to Trump and reneged on pledges to support diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. These, or similar ideas, are ways to build protest muscle between now and November 2026, and beyond. ## Defeating the steal The essential point is that a MAGA attempt to steal the election—if it is called out forcefully as such—has the potential to trigger whole new levels of political action on the part of a majority who voted against MAGA candidates. But that trigger will set off a powerful grassroots explosion only if a contingent of people prepared to engage in disruptive but non-violent protest step up to monitor polling places and protest at vote-counting sites, and provide on-ramps for large numbers of new people to join them. MAGA is likely to go all out with its steal—we need to appreciate Steve Bannon’s message to the faithful: “as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms, if we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison—myself included.” Under those circumstances, defeating their power-grab will require action of sufficient size, and militancy to convince decisive sections of the ruling class, the military and other armed agencies of government, and the political class that the country will be ungovernable if MAGA’s steal stands. For the US, this would be uncharted territory; the only comparable moment would be the lead-up to and then the waging of the war against the Slave Power. It—fascism—can happen here. But the 2025 election results remind us that the potential is there to oust MAGA and push US fascism back to the margins. _¡No pasarán!_ _Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board and the author of _ _Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che_ _(Verso Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of_ _Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections_ _(OR Books, 2022)._ * 2026 Midterms * Election sabotage * fightback Subscribe to Portside

_**Don’t Mourn, Organize!**_ **NOVEMBER 19 IS THE 110TH ANNIVERSARY** of the cold-blooded murder of labor organizer and Industrial Workers of the World activist Joel Hägglund, who is almost universally known by his pen name, Joe Hill. The bosses hated Hägglund and everything he represented, including his ability to set new pro-worker lyrics to popular tunes, such as his "There is Power in the Union," which uses the tune of "There is Power in the Blood of the Lamb," and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab" Hägglund was found guilty of a murder he did not commit and martyred because he refused to rat on a friend. Neither he nor his friend had anything to do with the murder, but the friend, who had shot Hägglund in a fight, was saved from a long prison term by Hägglund's refusal to squeal. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Anyone who wants to learn the details of Hägglund’s fascinating life and also get the best insight into what made him tick ought to consider two books that were published on the centennial of his death in 1915. The two volumes were informatively reviewed for Portside by Paul Buhle in 2015. You can read that review here: _https://portside.org/2015-12-24/joe-hill-again_ _**There Is an Important Lesson in the Anti-Racist Organizing of 1835**_ **NOVEMBER 20 IS THE 190TH ANNIVERSARY** of the founding of the New York Committee of Vigilance, a non-governmental effort to prevent slave-traders from kidnapping African-Americans and selling them into slavery. The would-be kidnappers had the backing of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which made any self-emancipated slave a fugitive, and subject to arrest, anywhere in the U.S. And, of course, the kidnappers were highly motivated to falsely assert their victims were fugitives, a practice they often attempted. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank The New York Committee of Vigilance and similar groups in Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse and also a NY state-wide organization operated in a manner akin to anti-ICE groups now. They raised the alarm whenever they got wind of slave-catchers’ presence, harassed and interfered with slave-catchers, and tried to ensure that anyone accused of being a fugitive had all the legal help possible to prevent their removal to the South. On any number of occasions, vigilance committee activists and their supporters used brute force to rescue the slave-catchers’ victims and spirit them out of the country. Sometimes the activists were arrested for such defiant acts, but they were often acquitted by juries who refused to convict those who had defied laws that were widely considered to be immoral. _https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/new-york-committee-vigilance-ruggles/_ _**Women Rise Up Angry Against Police Sexism**_ **NOVEMBER 22 IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY** of a fierce demonstration by some 500 supporters of Leeds Women Against Violence Against Women, who were protesting a shambolic, 6-year-long police effort to capture a serial killer of women in West Yorkshire, England. In 1980 the demonstrators were reacting not only to the inability of the police to arrest a man who had killed at least 13 women in the vicinity of the Leeds and had also grievously assaulted at least seven others, but also to the authorities’ proposal to impose a nighttime curfew on women in the area, instead of a curfew on men. The demonstrators blocked downtown traffic, beat on cars and buses, smashed windows, and vandalized two movie theaters that were showing pornographic films, including one about a killer of women. Less than six weeks after the anti-police rampage, Yorkshire police arrested the man who was eventually convicted of 13 murder charges and sentenced to life in prison. _https://secretlibraryleeds.net/2019/09/13/the-leeds-women-against-violence-against-women-march/_ _**Judge Slams Homophobic Police**_ **NOVEMBER 23 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY** of a little-remembered early legal victory for civil liberties and gay rights. On this day in 1955, Baltimore Criminal Court judge James Cullen dismissed all charges against 162 patrons of the gay-friendly Pepper Hill Club, who had been arrested for allegedly disorderly conduct, but actually for no reason other than their presence in the club. When he dismissed the charges, Cullen said the police had no right to make such a mass arrest in a public place. _https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045462/1955-11-23/ed-1/?sp=21 &r=-0.119,1.136,0.914,0.378,0_ _**Deadly Brutality Backfires**_ **NOVEMBER 25 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY** of what turned out to be the beginning of the end for Rafael Trujillo’s brutal dictatorship over the Dominican Republic. On this day in 1960 Trujillo’s thugs attacked and beat to death the Mirabal sisters, Minerva, Patria and Maria Teresa, three of the country’s best-known anti-Trujillo activists, The public revulsion over Trujillo’s brutality was the last straw; six months later, after more than 30 years in power, Trujillo was assassinated. The Mirabal sisters have been permanently memorialized by the United Nations, which designated the anniversary of their killings as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabal_sisters_ For more People's History, visit _https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/_ Subscribe to Portside

In this February 13 photo, US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks to the 2025 Supreme Court Fellows Program at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. | Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/Getty Images As she oversaw President Donald Trump’s emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, case this past week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson once again proved she isn’t beholden to Supreme Court custom. The least senior justice, who has been the court’s most **consistent critic of the second Trump administration**, appeared to be sending signals not only about the technicalities of the SNAP case but also more subtle messages about the way the court has handled a litany of short-fuse appeals on its emergency docket this year dealing with presidential power. She did all that, oddly enough, **by siding with Trump**. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail “She’s modeling the way that the emergency docket should be used,” said Elizabeth Wydra, the president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center. Since joining the court three years ago, Jackson has drawn attention for a sharp pen. That has been particularly notable**** in**** a series of cutting dissents she has written this year calling out the Trump administration for what she has framed as “**lawlessness**.” And she has not spared her colleagues for acquiescing to the White House in some of those decisions. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote in August when the court allowed the **Trump administration to halt about $800 million** in research grants. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.” That pointed prose and her unflinching willingness to criticize her colleagues**** has made Jackson, who was nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, a divisive figure. “Even before the SNAP case, Justice Jackson had already emerged as the most vocal, most frequent, and sharpest critic of the majority’s inconsistent, difficult-to-justify, and often unjustified behavior in Trump-related cases,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. Her machinations in the case, Vladeck said, underscored “a justice who is using every possible strategic and tactical maneuver behind the scenes to try to push the court toward what she believes the right answer is, but who is unafraid of sending increasingly loud public signals when those efforts are, as they so often have been this year, ultimately for naught.” If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank The appeal on funding for SNAP emerged as the highest-profile legal case of the government shutdown. A lower court **ordered the US Department of Agriculture** to transfer $4 billion from another fund to pay full SNAP benefits for November – an order that the administration appealed as an overreach of judicial power. With a midnight deadline approaching – and benefits for more than 40 million Americans hanging in the balance – the case landed in a rush at the Supreme Court on a Friday evening. Trump wanted the justices to temporarily block the lower court order, known as a “stay.” Because she handles emergency appeals from the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, the case went to Jackson. The “circuit justice” generally plays a straightforward role, setting a briefing schedule and – in big cases – ultimately referring the matter to the full court. But as he has raced up to the Supreme Court this year in case after case, Trump has been asking for something else as well: An even shorter-term order known as an “administrative stay,” which freezes the lower court decision while the justices review the written arguments in the case. That administrative decision, usually, rests with the assigned justice – in this case, Jackson. A former trial court judge who recently took up boxing as a way to relieve stress, Jackson **ultimately granted Trump’s request**, a move that initially raised anxiety among liberals and cheers from conservatives on social media. But Jackson also took several steps that were a departure from how other justices have handled administrative stays. First, Jackson included a few paragraphs of written explanation in her order, breaking from the**** boilerplate-only language usually found in administrative stays. She wrote that she was granting Trump’s request “to facilitate” the appeals court’s “expeditious resolution” of the appeal. The Supreme Court has faced enormous criticism this year for regularly overturning lower court orders on its emergency docket without explanation. While there are **sometimes good reasons** for brevity in those cases, some justices – such as Justice Elena Kagan – have said the court could **provide a little more explanation**. Second, rather than leaving the timing open-ended, Jackson set her administrative order to lift 48 hours after the appeals court ruled. Jackson likely understood – or at least assumed – there would be a majority to grant Trump’s request if she didn’t do so. By granting it herself but limiting the timeline, rather than sending it to the full court, she had the effect of bringing the case back to her chambers for a second look in an unusually short order, Vladeck wrote in **widely circulated post** over the weekend. Wydra said Jackson handled the case as should be done on the emergency docket. Justices, she said, should deal with the requests “quickly, as transparently as possible, and for logistical reasons, not…make what amount to significant substantive decisions.” Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston who also wrote about Jackson’s maneuvers, agreed that she appeared to be going “her own way.” “She has a clear vision of how she wants the shadow docket to be run,” Blackman said. But, he suggested, it ultimately didn’t work. In the end, as Congress **drew closer to an agreement** to fund the government, the full court extended her administrative stay for a few days without writing to explain why. Jackson wound up in dissent, which she also registered without explanation. And the Trump administration ultimately got what it wanted. **Trump signed the spending measure** late Wednesday, reopening the federal government and funding the food program. Hours later, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Supreme Court noting that it was abandoning its appeal – an anticlimactic end to a case that had significant real-world consequences. On Thursday, as the court announced it was reopening its doors to the public, a single line was added to the docket in the SNAP appeal: “Application withdrawn.” * Ketanji Brown Jackson * Supreme Court * SNAP * emergency docket * Donald Trump Subscribe to Portside

Workers leave the Stellantis Windsor Assembly Plant, in Windsor, Ont., ahead of a shutdown linked to US auto tariffs. Canadian autoworkers have faced many crises over the years, but the present threat is distinct. Lana Payne, President of Unifor, has warned that “If we don’t push back hard against him [US President Donald Trump] and against these companies, we’re going to lose it all.” So far, the debate over what to do has started and stopped with Trump’s tariffs. But the threats go deeper, both for auto companies and for our ability as workers and citizens to determine democratically what kind of society we want – that is, for Canada’s substantive and not just formal sovereignty. Taking on these larger challenges demands coming to grips with some tough realities. The starting point for a response must be that the tariffs are only a symptom of Canada’s larger dilemma: the over-dependence on the world’s dominant global power. We may be America’s long-standing ‘closest economic partner and most loyal ally’, but that hasn’t prevented Trump from treating us as a vassal state. ### Beyond Tariffs No-one would know, hearing the Trump Administration’s justification for tariffs against Canada, that the US actually has a trade _surplus_ with Canada in manufactured goods, including auto. The tariffs were imposed in spite of this and driven, as US Secretary Treasurer Scott Bessent brazenly asserted, by the US determination to apply ‘the most America-first policies that are possible’. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Bessent added that the only qualifier was not ‘incurring market wrath’. This declaration that the only constraint America accepts is the US stock market, overwhelmingly the property of the rich (10% of the US population owns more stock than the other 90%), offers a remarkably bleak – if accurate – view of not just America’s international vision, but of US internal democracy. Whatever the long-standing frustrations of many Canadians with our subordinate relationship to the US and a pervasive unease with what America represents, dissent was historically muted by the economic seduction of US goods, US markets, US investment, US technology and the alleged security of the US military umbrella. But today, a good many Canadians have learned – or relearned – that clinging to the US is a liability. Though Trump has brought antipathy for US unilateralism to a head, what we confront isn’t reducible to Trump. The problem preceded Trump and will remain after he’s long gone. Canada is, of course, not alone in its dependence on the American Empire. Other countries, including other US allies, face similar anxieties. In Canada’s case, however, the dependence is however especially extreme and in the auto industry uniquely so. In auto, moving major Canadian assembly plants to the US is disruptive and costly, but comparatively easier than in other sectors and other countries. This is an effect of being part of a highly integrated continental industry with the main market being the US, and with the core research, development and planning decisions concentrated in the US. Canada does have lower labour costs than the US, largely because of our lower dollar and the American stubborn refusal to adopt a universal public healthcare system. But unlike the huge labour cost differential between Mexico and the US (Mexico’s labour costs are about one-sixth that of the US) Canada’s labour cost advantage is not large enough to over-ride the uncertainties put in play by Trump’s pressures to relocate to the US. Seeing corporations exiting Canada and the growing bias against future investment in Canada is appalling, but it should not be surprising. It’s precisely what Trump intended with his tariff threats. Even if the tariffs end and Trump and our Prime Minister hug each other, US corporations won’t forget this experience very easily. Caution in placing new work and production facilities in Canada will persist. ### The Threat to Jobs on Both Sides of the Border A second reality affects workers on both sides of the border. Autoworkers are in the firing line between an environmental crisis that can’t be avoided and an industry that, obsessed with its short-term profits, has failed to prepare for the evolving planetary climate catastrophe. This too predates Trump, though he has done everything he can to make it worse. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank The contrast with China is stunning. While the North American corporations are actively delaying conversion to EVs (electric vehicles), China charges ahead. While the North American industry dithers, China has established secure access to the necessary EV supply chains and the required rare-earth minerals for EV batteries. While China subsidizes EV research, battery innovation, assembly costs, and constructs a national network of readily available recharging stations Trump doubles down on keeping gas prices low, reinforcing dependence on environmentally costly oil. The North American based corporations shed crocodile tears about there being no demand for EVs, but China has demonstrated that if the price is right and if the recharging stations are readily at hand, consumers will come. As China’s production ramped up, economies of scale lowered the cost of EVs to the point that EVs in China now sell for about $20,000 – less than half the price of EVs here and elsewhere. EVs now account for about 50% of the market in China but only 10% of the US market and 15% of Canada’s. To put these achievements in historical perspective, at the turn of this century the US vehicle sector was assembling more than six times that of China (even Canada was assembling about 50% more). China’s production was then only 3.4% of the global industry. Yet today, with electric vehicles being the future of the industry, China accounts for 7 of every 10 EVs produced globally. That’s the same ratio the US was producing of the world’s gasoline driven vehicles at the height of America’s postwar economic dominance in the mid-fifties. The China-US contrast in the transition to EVs extends to their respective responses to energy renewables; China is far and away also the leader in solar and wind power. Acknowledging China’s impressive response to a fundamental threat to nature and humanity isn’t a matter of being ‘pro-China’. China clearly has its share of drawbacks, notably its weak worker and union rights and its undemocratic top-down rule. The point rather is to shift blame from the alleged disinterest of North American consumers in EVs to the astonishing economic and technological failures of American capitalism to make EVs a practical consumer option. Given this historic failure it is incredulous to imagine corporate America and the American state leading the world out of the broader and far more complex environmental catastrophe before us. ### Auto Can No Longer Deliver Jobs the Way it Once Did A third reality is that the auto industry in the developed countries is not going to be – can’t be – the job creator it was in the past. The hundreds of thousands of auto jobs lost in Canada and the US over the decades are not coming back and, at best, only some of the existing jobs will be saved. The reasons for this are clear: the environment won’t sustain further maximizing the cars on the road; the market for new vehicles in the developed capitalist countries is relatively saturated; whatever growth there is, is offset by productivity gains; and the shift to EVs will require significantly less labour per vehicle unless battery production also occurs in Canada. (There is as well the fact that international competition is shifting vehicle production away from the developed West, with China and Mexico being the main beneficiaries.) In the US, motor vehicle jobs have fallen by over 20% since 2000, a loss of almost 300,000 jobs. This obscures the far larger impact on the American Mid-West, since it includes job _gains_ in the American South. Since the turn of the century motor vehicles jobs in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana fell by 46%, more than double the national US decline. Asian and European corporations had come to the US to counter protectionist threats, but they avoided going where the auto jobs were being lost and went instead to the overwhelmingly non-union US South. Tariffs alone did little for manufacturing in the Mid-West. Though US jobs losses have flattened in the last half-dozen years, insecurity for autoworkers remains a permanent reality. For Canada, jobs have declined by close to 30% – worse than in the US as a whole, but not as high as in the Mid-West, though the latest data predates the impact of the tariffs. In 2000, the US-based Big Three – GM, Ford, and Chrysler (now Stellantis) – had nine assembly plants in Canada. In spite of the massive subsidies over the years, no new plants have been added by the Big Three; four facilities have since closed; three are in limbo, waiting for products; and one has lost a shift and there is uncertainty about its future. Only two Big Three assembly plants are currently assembling motor vehicles (one expecting the addition of a third shift in 2026). Canadian Big Three Assembly Plants since 2000 --- No. | ASSEMBLY PLANTS 2000 | CURRENT (November 2025) 1 | GM St Therese | Closed 2002 2 | GM Oshawa car | Closed 2005 3 | GM Oshawa truck | Closed 2009 4 | Ford St Thomas | Closed 2011 5 | GM CAMI, Ingersoll | EV product suspended 6 | Stellantis, Brampton | No product 7 | Ford Oakville | EV truck dropped, gas-driven truck 2026 8 | GM Oshawa truck Silverado | 3 shifts, down to 2 in 2026, gas-driven 9 | Stellantis Windsor | 2 shifts up to 3 in 2026 Toyota, with three non-union facilities (one of which is the only added assembly plant in the industry over this period) is now assembling more in Canada than the traditional Big Three _combined_. Add Honda’s two Canadian facilities and the assembly capacity of these two Japan-based companies will exceed that of the Big Three even if the Big Three plants in limbo get products. The message here, which Unifor is very aware of, is that unionizing the Japanese transplants has become as crucial today as unionizing GM and later Ford and Chrysler was in the 1930s. ### Resistance is Paramount No resistance essentially means giving up. Moving to tripling our military expenditures to make Trump love us only led, as should been expected, to Trump adding other demands. And the only thing more absurd than Ontario thinking of no better ads than praising US President Ronald Reagan is hearing that our Prime Minister ‘apologized’ to Trump for a Canadian jurisdiction putting out an ad that Trump didn’t like. The boom in military expenditures, as is also the case in Europe, will mostly be spent buying US equipment and will divert government revenues from funding health, education, and social services for the poor, as well as from adequate investment for addressing the environment. In surrendering to US pressure, Canada is essentially trying to defend its sovereignty by becoming more like the US. When unions began to accept, under duress, corporate demands for concessions in the eighties in exchange for promises of job security, an instructive lesson emerged. Giving in to bullying only reveals weaknesses and invites more concessions. The jobs didn’t come, unions lost credibility with their members, and workers and their unions were weakened for the battles to come. ### Immediate Responses What then can be done to salvage the reeling Canadian auto industry? Various immediate steps have been proposed to stop the hemorrhaging of the Canadian auto industry: fighting for products in suddenly idled plants, counter-tariffs, diversifying Canadian trade, joint-ventures with China, and an industrial strategy. Each is important yet even together they are limited. Getting immediate product for existing facilities, rather than being brushed off with a ‘possibility’ of a future product down the road, is critical. As Unifor has insisted, passively leaving facilities idle reduces pressure on the corporation to deliver and risks such facilities fading from public attention. Moral outrage about broken promises is however unlikely to get the union very far. Every form of protest, including a revival of the union’s historical legacy of plant takeovers, has to be part of its arsenal. Introducing counter-tariffs against the US, as Canada’s Prime Minister originally threatened, is unlikely to work as a tactic. On its own it would likely have little or no positive impact on Canadian jobs and no doubt lead to more US threats. But imposing counter-tariffs would nevertheless be a defiant assertion that we won’t be walked over without a fight. It might also rally other US allies to respond more aggressively. If Canada, the most dependent of US allies, has concluded it must challenge the US then why not them as well? Diversifying our trade, including with China, now seems like straightforward common-sense. Doing so isn’t a matter of replacing our subservience to the US with a new dependency, but simply an overdue rebalancing of our overdependence on the US. Yet, here too, we should have no illusions that modest steps will solve Canada’s auto crisis. Canada has, for example, neither the leverage of China’s massive market and its vast pools of low-cost labour, nor China’s technological foundation. What space exists abroad is already occupied by China, and Europe also is looking to exports to offset the limits imposed by the US. As for joint EV ventures with China, the US would surely block significant numbers of these vehicles flowing to the US market from Canada. In fact, it is already doing this even against US companies operating in Canada. Without assured access to the US market and with China not wanting to risk further overall US retaliation, it’s hard to imagine China considering such cooperation with Canada. An ‘industrial strategy’, with the government playing a larger role in the economy, has long been raised and is now being resuscitated for auto and other sectors. But given the scale of the problem, some qualifiers are elemental. If the leadership role remains in private hands, with governments meekly trying to influence the direction through ‘incentives’, it won’t work. There is long experience to back this up. The government must lead, and public ownership will have to play a significant role. Furthermore, focusing on the supply side is not enough. Markets for the output from an industrial strategy must be found and this again raises the planning role of the state as a purchaser of goods (more on this below). Above all linking an industrial strategy to markets can’t be left to corporate decisions on profitability and ‘competitiveness’. Such prioritizing of the corporate freedom to do what is best for their stockholders undermines _our_ freedom to address our needs. The newly created markets must be reserved for our newly developed domestic productive capacity. Among other things this highlights inevitable conflicts within industrial strategies. Worker and popular concerns may not, and generally will not, converge with business interests. As in all capitalist countries such differences in goals shape the policy responses. Working people may feel torn about how to respond – not surprisingly, since the issues are complex and the ‘Big Questions’ have for so long been obscured. But Canada’s economic elites and their state allies are clear. Their singular priority is returning to the pre-Trump trade status-quo which also brought pressures on Canadian workers and governments to ‘match’ (that is, be competitive with) the US, the country with the worst labour laws and weakest social programs amongst the core capitalist states. Nationalist rhetoric can therefore be a trap – a vehicle to co-opt the labour movement into a ‘jointness’ within which labour is a subordinate player and its particular interests are defused. Notably, the opposition we would face in any serious alternatives posed from below would not be restricted to American corporations. Canadian businesses would in general be just as or even more antagonistic to unravelling the dependence of the Canadian working classes on the US. ### Setting Our Sights Higher The crippling point about political and economic dependency is that you can’t just snap your fingers and escape historic chains. If we look to counter what we are up against, there is no way out except to think bigger, much bigger. The immediate can’t be ignored but this must not come at the expense of developing and preparing for a longer-term response. Significantly breaking the chains to the US would disrupt _everything_ in Canada’s capitalist economy. Coping with this would demand a comprehensive degree of planning; as emphasized, it could not be done by tweaking markets and corporate incentives. And since you can’t plan what you don’t control it would also mean increased regulation of corporations and the development of state-owned companies to realize the plans. Overcoming Canadian dependency on the US consequently also forces overcoming our dependency at home on both major Canadian and American capital. The new planning capacities would have to be _democratic_ capacities in terms of whose interests they serve and how decisions are made. Economic restructuring, formerly a threat to workers, would potentially become an opportunity. Such historic transformations can’t happen overnight but raising them now provides markers – guideposts – to where we should be heading. In struggling with how to come to grips with what we’re up against, a number of points are fundamental. First, while the union must fight to save what still has possibilities, if the corporations have decided to leave, it is no longer a realistic strategy to beg them to stay. It is then the _productive capacities_ – the industrial spaces, flexible equipment, multi-purpose tool and die shops, the varied component capabilities – not the companies themselves that must become the target. These are assets we must not waste. Repeating the failed history of bribing them to stay is futile. Some corporations may stay and invest in Canada, but we can’t depend on this to solve the overwhelming threats we confront. Here especially the tactics will have to include reviving labour’s history of sit-ins and plant takeovers. Second, we must set our sights beyond making vehicles. Making vehicles, especially ones more compatible with the environment is not to be dismissed, but the larger challenge lies in converting our rich productive potentials and developing them to produce the myriad of goods we need beyond auto. Third, linking transformation in the production capacity in transportation to the environmental crisis may make the points more concrete. To address the environment, we will have to fix everything about how we live, work, travel, and play. For those asking what we will produce if we rely significantly less on the US market, the answer is that tackling the environmental challenge holds out a good part of the answer: accelerating the shift to EVs; converting all public vehicles to EV fleets made in Canada (postal vehicles, utility vehicles, ambulances, school buses, police cars); expansions in public transit vehicles and their infrastructure; retrofitting houses and offices; transforming workplace machinery; immense investments in renewable energy alongside the phased retreat from oil production. Fourth, a National Conversion Institute could monitor developments, develop plans for needed goods and facilitate conversions and investment in new facilities. It would coordinate financing with local governments and their specific municipal environmental projects and with businesses supplying components. Provincial governments could set up local technology hubs in various communities where thousands of young engineering workers would research community and business needs and initiate or support engineering adjustments to produce new goods, services, and production methods. Fifth, union locals, in the public as well as private sectors, could set up workplace committees to monitor whether their employer is planning cutbacks or closures, prepare for the worst if it does happen, and bring in the proposed National Conversion Center to address alternatives to maintaining production and services. Trade would still take place, but it would be integrated into the needs of the new, far more inward oriented domestic economy, not left to the free trade of private corporations. Manufacturing has, for decades now, been downplayed as a fading part of the economy. But fixing and sustaining the environment can’t be done without manufacturing capacities. This includes meeting people’s yearly necessary social needs, such as the shortages in collective goods like housing, education and senior care, and reversing the erosion of community healthcare clinics, sports facilities and community centers. There is also the very considerable and urgent load of fixing and sustaining the environment. Rather than wondering what will happen to our excess labour, we may very well face a _shortage_ of labour if we can achieve a political and social turn to meeting social needs and not market imperatives. ### Conclusion: The Necessary Challenge of ‘Thinking Big’ In the early 1980s, Canadian workers confronted an acceleration of globalization, ruling economics and political elites looked toward closer integration with the US, Ottawa driving what came to be called neoliberalism (aptly summarized by Adolph Reed as ‘capitalism without a working-class opposition’). The UAW parent union to autoworkers in North America reluctantly accepted that there was no option but to give in to concessions demanded by the auto companies and was looking to impose this same defeatist position on its Canadian members. Canadian autoworkers were in an historic bind. The parent union represented 90% of the Big Three workers in a uniquely integrated industry. The certifications recognizing the union were formally with the parent union. A split from the US would therefore mean losing not just the weight and resources of the far larger US parent union. It would also require recertifying all its hundreds of bargaining units. In choosing to defy the UAW central that had once inspired their own breakthroughs, Canadian autorworkers were also challenging some of the largest corporations in the world, their own government, and the trend to ever deeper integration with the US. In spite of this, the union leadership in Canada understood that if it didn’t want to ‘lose it all’ it had to win its members over to breaking away from its American parent. Led by its President, Bob White, the confidence to take this necessary risk prevailed. The credibility this established for the newly independent Canadian Autoworkers (CAW) union in the wider society subsequently allowed it to lead, along with other Canadian unions and social movements, to fight against free trade, neoliberalism, and deepening integration with the US. It was not, however, then clear to the CAW and Canadian autoworkers, nor the larger union movement, how much further they would need to go to succeed. Today that dilemma of the relationship to the US is back. Among the significant differences in the context today is that the weakening of the labour movement over the intervening years has left the labour movement no longer coping with the extent of our dependence on the US but primarily arguing for ending the tariffs and, effectively inviting _greater_ integration with the US. Building a different kind of society on the edges of the American empire is obviously an intimidating historical task. It’s easy to understand why people shy away from it. Yet thinking bigger is ultimately the only _practical_ option if we want to escape our present impasse with its frustrations and demoralization. The exact steps and timing in soberly moving in this direction will ‘depend’. But what should not be avoided is at least starting the discussions – in our workplaces, union locals, communities, and nationally – on what we face, where we stand in response, what needs doing, and how we might do it. Electoral politics will inevitably be necessary but past experience tells us that leaving this to the politicians will fritter away decisive action. The electoral world is only relevant if a social base has been built outside of parliament with the vision, commitment, solidarity, and confidence to drive the politics. This demands an institution laser-focused not on the next election but on building the social force that will one day make electoral activity truly relevant. The creation of such an institution – a ‘party’ of a different kind – is, ultimately, the critical missing piece in our struggles. • _The Socialist Project is especially interested in responses to the direction laid out here. Do you think it’s on the right track? Are you interested in hearing more? Interested in setting up a committee in your local or community and if so, what further information might be useful? Interested in helping organize a public forum on all this and if so, getting suggested speakers? Contact:_ [email protected] Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974–2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism (Verso), and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today, the expanded and updated American edition (Haymarket). * autoworkers * Canadian auto workers Subscribe to Portside

In cities across America, a new generation of left-wing mayors is confronting the same dilemma: What do you do when you inherit institutions designed to crush left movements like those that carried you into office? Socialist campaigns promise to challenge the power of capital, but upon taking office, left executives find themselves constrained by police unions, business interests, and state politicians eager to appear tough on crime. Does anyone have a good plan to push back? In New York City, we’re about to find out—starting with the cops. In the run-up to his election as mayor, Zohran Mamdani said he would keep Jessica Tisch—a billionaire heiress who has rolled back police reforms and collaborated with ICE—as NYPD commissioner. He repeated that pledge after his victory last week. Five years ago, Mamdani called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer,” “wicked,” and “corrupt.” After being forced to apologize for these comments, and pledging his support for the police, he’s now saying that he and Tisch can work together. This decision has drawn criticism from Mamdani’s supporters, and leftists have good reason to be concerned about Tisch’s record. Yet instead of viewing this as a betrayal, we should think of it as proof of how much power police have in local politics—and how little power the left holds. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Business elites demand aggressive policing because it establishes what they see as proper order, a prerequisite for commercial investment. To quote former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, police “flush” homeless and other ostensibly disposable people “off the street” to fuel development and displacement. The ultra-rich aren’t being subtle about this. “Public safety is the number one fiscal stimulus,” one hedge fundie told _Bloomberg_ just after Mamdani’s election. The playbook is national. In San Francisco, Big Tech and real estate money toppled reform DA Chesa Boudin; in Minneapolis, defunding efforts were defeated in part by business and police union advocacy (though the full story is more complex). The message travels: Undermine police power, and capital will move to punish you—at the ballot box, in the press, and through state preemption. Because Mamdani’s campaign is now the test case for progressive governance, how he manages the NYPD will have enormous consequences for left organizing across the country. But ultimately, what happens will be less down to Mamdani’s choices than to ours. Without movements strong enough to either pressure or protect them, any left politician is bound to yield to these interests—and Mamdani is no different. We won’t be able to push Mamdani, or anyone else, to undermine police power unless we become a force to be reckoned with. Who is Jessica Tisch, anyway? An heiress of the Loews Corporation, Tisch entered public service in 2008, working within the NYPD intelligence division that helped build a vast surveillance network targeting Muslims. Adams tapped her as commissioner in late 2024 after his earlier picks fell afoul of federal corruption probes. Tisch rooted out some cronyism in the department, and she has taken credit for subsequent declines in shootings, though New York may only be following a nationwide trend. But Tisch has also practiced a firmly old-guard version of policing in ways that underscore just how strange a bedfellow she is set to be with Mamdani: adopting Bill Bratton’s broken windows policing practices, defending the city’s racist gang database, overseeing a training that labels the keffiyeh antisemitic, and collaborating with ICE to crush pro-Palestine protests. Against the available evidence, she blamed modest steps like bail reform and Raise the Age for post-pandemic crime spikes. She is also a staunch Zionist who has defended the NYPD’s brutal policing of Palestine protests, whereas Mamdani is an advocate for Palestinian liberation. And Tisch’s family members spent over a million dollars opposing Mamdani’s election. So what explains their fragile alliance? In a word: power. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank After Mamdani won the Democratic primary, the richest New Yorkers threw tantrums and lit money on fire. When Mamdani set out to assuage their fears, the scions of capital settled on one demand: Keep Tisch in her job. Adding to the pressure, Democratic party leaders initially stayed silent. Figures from Kathy Hochul to Hakeem Jeffries reportedly conditioned their endorsements on keeping Tisch. Faced with this onslaught, Mamdani yielded. If he wanted to turn his upstart campaign into a bona fide Democratic coalition, it seemed, he had no other choice. Fulfilling their end of the Faustian bargain, Hochul awkwardly yet earnestly joined Mamdani at campaign rallies, and Kathy Wylde, one of the local ruling class’s most influential power brokers, began saying that perhaps all sides could find a way to work together. Now we will all see whether that’s true. How should leftists interpret these developments? Writing in _The Nation_ last July, writer and policing expert Alex Vitale discouraged Mamdani from keeping Tisch, arguing that she would “never truly ally with him.” After Mamdani confirmed that he wanted to keep Tisch, journalist Ken Klippenstein said Mamdani had chosen a “straitjacket,” while Spencer Ackerman called the decision a “big mistake,” noting that “Tisch cooperated with ICE to lock up Leqaa Kordia.” I also do not see Mamdani and Tisch as natural allies, and I agree that Tisch’s collaboration with ICE was repugnant. Yet there is a clear explanation for Mamdani’s decision: There was no organized opposition. There wasn’t even a rumored alternative to Tisch, let alone a concerted campaign to propose one. The left doesn’t build talent pipelines for police brass, and I’m not arguing that we should start. We want to reduce police resources, staffing, and technology. Yet our inaction meant Mamdani saw no constituency for another choice. More broadly, the left has yet to recover from the backlash against the George Floyd uprising, and any honest observer would admit that regaining the momentum that crested in 2020 will require quite a bit of organizing. The consequence of all of this is that there was no significant counterweight to the immense forces urging Mamdani to stick with Tisch—and to repudiate his former stances on policing. Is it any wonder that he gave way? The core battle over Tisch—and the political necessity of conceding, at least in part, to police power—appears to have been lost. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing the left can do. Instead of expending energy on battles we already decided not to fight, we should scrutinize what Mamdani’s NYPD does differently in 2026. We must ensure that Mamdani stays true to the promises he made: abolishing the Strategic Response Group (SRG), cutting overtime spending, and creating a Department of Community Safety. (SRG’s top officer filed for retirement the day after Mamdani won.) Mamdani apparently recognizes that Tisch is a savvy politician. Her mentor and former top cop Bill Bratton describes himself as a political broker—it’s part of the job description. But he has political skills of his own. When _Hell Gate_ asked Mamdani how he reconciled Tisch’s agenda with his own, his response was wry: “I think everyone will follow my lead—I’ll be the mayor.” Time will tell whether can stay three steps ahead of Tisch and her backers. The first major hurdle for this relationship may come alongside any major Palestine-related action in 2026. Mamdani’s support base overlaps with Palestine activists—he started a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter in college—so it’s hard to imagine that he would be enthusiastic about police cracking student skulls or swarming Bay Ridge, as they did under Eric Adams. At the same time, Tisch is committed to brutal protest policing. Mamdani’s coalition will be severely, perhaps fatally, damaged if he winds up overseeing that kind of assault. He’s already working on an alternative protest-policing approach, but implementing it will be an early, defining test. One constituency was remarkably quiet amid the battle to control the NYPD: the NYPD’s largest union, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA). The PBA endorsed no one in the mayoral race and stayed silent on Tisch. Given the PBA’s outsize influence on New York politics, its silence is deafening—and cannot be expected to last long. How might we expect the PBA to greet its new Muslim socialist boss? Its relationship with New York’s first Black and democratic socialist mayor provides some clues. David Dinkins clashed with the PBA over his proposal to make the Civilian Complaint Review Board an independent, civilian-controlled agency. In 1992, the PBA organized an opposition rally of thousands of cops that devolved into a drunken riot, complete with cops shouting slurs and storming City Hall. Bill de Blasio, whose campaign emphasized police reform more than Mamdani’s, also fought the police unions (and lost). Cops turned their backs on de Blasio and walked off the job—a classic police tactic, given that work slowdowns generate headlines reinforcing the myth that police pullbacks endanger residents. The nadir of the relation between police and de Blasio came during the 2020 protests, when a police union gleefully posted a report of Chiara de Blasio’s arrest—an incident likely on Mamdani’s mind, as he hired additional security after Islamophobic threats. The battle over Tisch may not be a primary focus for police unions (though the Sergeants Benevolent Association thinks Tisch should stay). The only major play that the unions have made so far is forcing Mamdani to apologize for calling them racist—hardly a controversial claim, as Eric Adams famously founded an organization drawing attention to the issue, but one Mamdani walked back nonetheless. On the one hand, perhaps police see Mamdani’s modest reform promises as tolerable. On the other hand, perhaps they are waiting for an opportune moment to press for what they always want: more money and less accountability. Could the proposed Department of Community Safety cause a fight over city resources? Mamdani often notes that police are stuck with work they don’t want, like mental-health crisis response. But across the country, police fight to maintain their professional authority. In Baltimore, violence interrupters work to stop retaliatory violence. Because they won’t share real-time street information with cops, relations are tense. Police view interrupters as criminals, and interrupters feel that they have become targets of police sabotage. If the new department competes for dollars, expect police backlash—the NYPD arrested two interrupters last year. Maybe Mamdani keeps Tisch and compels her to carry out reforms; maybe she storms off and the press calls it a crisis. Either way, what happens next will measure the left’s real strength. If she walks, organizers should move to block any consensus around a status-quo safety agenda. The task will be to give Mamdani political cover to appoint a commissioner actually willing to implement his program. If she stays and complies, we should be ready to push for more ambitious demands: reduced NYPD technology and surveillance capacity, the end of the gang database and status-quo approaches to gang policing, and budget and headcount reductions. We are in the unfortunate position of needing to organize like hell just to claw back the status quo we enjoyed in 2019—the city jail population nearly doubled under Adams. In either scenario, we will need to become stronger. The defund movement in NYC was ruthlessly crushed and co-opted—this is part of why the billionaires are able to choose what happens with the NYPD. Organizers focused on criminalization may need to engage in electoral work more often. Mamdani is ostensibly accountable to NYC-DSA, for example. Mamdani’s allies have also created a nonprofit to continue the momentum of his campaign, which is focused on affordability—but has made no mention of organizing around safety. There may be a case for joining such organizations to push internal decision-making to address policing and incarceration. Labor action is another important tactic. Across the country, police and corrections officers use wildcat strikes to resist accountability and retaliate against criminalized people. Strikes work! Aligning labor with anti-police organizing magnifies leverage. Twentieth-century movements succeeded by disrupting capital to force politicians’ hands. The New Deal and the Civil Rights Act were the result of militant, disruptive mass action. Effective tactics may seem uncivil or illegitimate—that’s too bad for the respectability police. Organizing efforts could dovetail with Mamdani’s agenda. The Department of Community Safety will demonstrate the potential of non-police approaches. That said, the administration’s ability to move towards abolitionist horizons depends on our power. In an ideal world, Mamdani’s coalition would be so robust that we could insulate him from the fallout of calling the NYPD’s bluff when it walks off the job—or firing Tisch if she refuses to budge on more ambitious steps. Indeed, throwing Tisch under the bus at an opportune moment could be a great play to undermine the prospects of a potential threat in the next election. What we learn from the billionaires’ insistence on Tisch is that, while they’ll merely grumble about a leftist agenda on the cost of living—and, potentially, higher taxes—they are not prepared to brook dissent on the running of the policing machine. This is true in every city where progressives are gaining power. To build a government that serves working people, police power must be challenged. Winning the election was an accomplishment, but the NYPD didn’t even see it as a fight worth joining. That means the real battle still lies ahead. Now is the time to find a political home for that battle. Everyone has skills that can contribute to the cause. Perhaps it’s taking notes in union meetings, signing up for ICE-watch training, or phonebanking to keep voters engaged. Even one small task matters. Mamdani can’t beat the NYPD alone. No politician can. The only way to break the cops’ choke hold on city politics is to become stronger than them. Tisch’s tenure should remind us what’s at stake: Until the left can build and sustain real power in the streets, the billionaires will keep theirs in City Hall. _Jonathan Ben-Menachem is a PhD candidate in sociology at Columbia University, where he researches the politics of criminalization and crime journalism._ _Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted without_ __permission__ _. Distributed by_ __PARS International Corp__ _._ _Please support progressive journalism.___Get a digital subscription__ _to The Nation for just $24.95!_ * Zohran Mamdani * Jessica Tisch * NYPD * police unions Subscribe to Portside

The leadership of the Democratic Party wanted to preserve the filibuster for one reason: it checks anyone who defies party orthodoxy. | Photo: Daniel Heuer / Bloomberg // Jacobin Why did the Democrats cave in on the shut down? It seems clear that the main issue was not electoral backlash, since most of the senators who caved are not up for reelection, and the politics were trending in the Democrats’ favor, or at least not against them. The main issue was the filibuster. There was growing pressure from Donald Trump on the Republicans to get rid of it, and the Democratic leadership had every reason to fear its elimination. Why? It has very little to do with preserving their power while they are in the minority; that ship has obviously sailed. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The Democratic leadership doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster for the same reason the Republican leadership doesn’t want to get rid of it: The filibuster allows the leadership of both parties to keep their radical flanks at bay. Chuck Schumer needs the filibuster to protect himself from the Bernie Sanders wing in the Senate and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) wing in the House: if you can’t get to sixty, Bernie and AOC, we have to follow the lead of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Same goes for John Thune to whoever inhabits the radical role at any given moment in the GOP. You have to read the media coverage on this issue carefully. Usually, the blah blah blah of filibuster reportage is about the party worrying what happens when it is in the minority or individual senators worrying about losing their individual power. That’s the buzz of Broderism, a style of reporting that’s a holdover from the last century. The real moment of truth comes in a nugget like this, from an article in the _New York Times_ on November 4, which got lost amid the excitement about the Zohran Mamdani election: > In reality, the filibuster also serves Republicans as a handy check on a president who sometimes takes stances that carry substantial risk or defy party orthodoxy, an excuse for Senate Republicans to avoid doing things they don’t see as sound policy or politics without infuriating Mr. Trump. For Trump, swap in Trump’s most rabid allies and foot soldiers in the Senate and the House — or Schumer’s and Hakeem Jeffries’s enemies in the Senate and the House — and you get a pretty clear sense of why the leaderships of both parties need the filibuster: It checks anyone who “defies party orthodoxy,” while providing “an excuse to avoid doing things.” If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank _**Corey Robin** is the author of _[_The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump_ _and a contributing editor at Jacobin.]_ _Jacobin_ ‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out now. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to _our beautiful print quarterly._ * Chuck Schumer * Senate * Democratic Party * Bernie Sanders * AOC * Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez * Hakim Jeffries * House of Representatives * Democrats * Government Shutdown * Shutdown * filibuster * Elections 2026 * 2026 Midterms Subscribe to Portside

Homemade signs support the candidacy of Democrat Peter Hubbard for Georgia’s Public Service Commission, July 9, 2025, in Atlanta. | Kate Brumback/AP Photo Donald Trump is an unpopular president. He has always been an unpopular president. Every time America has held an election while he is in power, his party has lost. That includes off-year elections (even in 2019, Andy Beshear flipped a gubernatorial seat in red Kentucky and Democrats took over the Virginia legislature). When he takes over, he governs badly, people get angry, and they take it out on his party. It’s really that simple, and I don’t understand why this isn’t conventional wisdom. Given that reality, I don’t know that all the effort to lay out what Democrats must do to win has accomplished much of anything. The iron law of 21st-century politics, beyond Trump’s incompetence, is that in nine of the last ten elections, the parties have traded power, with at least one chamber of Congress or the presidency changing hands. That’s likely to happen in 2026 as well. The party that actually responds to public needs will break this cycle, and Donald Trump resoundingly isn’t up to that task. _**More from David Dayen**_ Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Will Democrats take this opportunity, or will they be content to negative polarize their way back to power, without planning what to do when they get there? The power of Zohran Mamdani’s message came from finding the right problems to address, which is the necessary step to finding the right solutions. But if we zoom in a little closer, we can see a through line that has rapidly become a top-tier issue in U.S. politics: electric bills. The Georgia Public Service Commission determines what customers pay for electricity by regulating utility rates. Georgia is one of only ten states where utility commissioners are elected. The five commissioners, all Republicans, approved investor-owned Georgia Power, the largest utility in the state, for six rate increases over the past two years. Georgia Power’s profit margins are now the second-highest in the nation, with a return on equity of 12 percent, far higher than their counterparts. I’ve written about how investor-owned utilities use complex models to bamboozle public utility commissioners and get the rate hikes they want. Two of the commissioners (Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson) who made those decisions were up for re-election on Tuesday. Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson ran on reducing the return on equity and saving ratepayers $700 million annually. They each won by 26 points, making them the first Democrats to win a statewide race in Georgia in two decades. You might assume that these districts must be skewed to Democrats, but no: These were statewide races, even though each commissioner represents a particular part of the state. We only had elections in 2025 because they were canceled for the previous two election cycles due to a multiyear legal battle that preserved statewide elections for the PSC. So one of the biggest swing states in the country saw total blowouts on the level of statewide Democratic wins in California. Sure, part of this is a function of turnout: The preliminary numbers show about 20 percent turnout statewide, compared to around 50 percent for the last midterm election in Georgia. Low turnout favors the more motivated party, and Tuesday’s results show that Democrats were far more motivated. But this is such a giant victory that it’s reasonable to suggest something else is going on: People are really, really angry about skyrocketing utility bills. It’s no surprise that the election where that was the central issue showed the biggest loss for Republicans. The dynamic was not limited to Georgia. Democrat Mikie Sherrill defied the polls and won a double-digit victory to become governor of New Jersey. In the final weeks of the campaign, she hit on a key promise: to declare “a state of emergency on day one, freezing utility rate hikes … I’m not doing a 10-year study. I’m not writing a strongly worded letter, I’m not going to convene a group, I’m declaring a state of emergency to drive your costs down.” Promising something tangible in the state where utility rates have risen 22 percent in one year clearly paid political dividends. (Republican Gov. Brian Kemp happened to cut a deal with Georgia Power recently to freeze base rates for three years, but when you do that _after_ six rate hikes in two years, and when you exempt fuel and storm damage costs, it lacks punch.) If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank The other major governor’s race this week was in Virginia, home to more data centers than any area on the planet. The build-out of the computing power needed to generate AI models is seen as responsible for widening energy demand and therefore soaring costs. Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger said during the campaign that she wanted to see Big Tech companies “pay their own way and their fair share” of costs for data center energy. Democrat John McAuliff, a former clean-energy staffer in the Biden administration, flipped a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates that Trump won last year by running against the data center explosion. In one campaign ad, he accused his opponent of personally profiting from hundreds of data centers. “I’m tired of losing family farms to data centers,” McAuliff says in the ad. The evidence is pretty strong that electricity has jumped the line over some other affordability issues and now sits near the top of the list. And Democrats have a pretty good plan to execute to counteract this. First, they can stress reducing the profit margins that utility companies argue they must have in order to stay in business. As much as anything, this is an anti–Wall Street stance: It’s the investors demanding double-digit returns. Utility regulators don’t have to accept that. In addition, data centers are clearly a fat target from a campaign standpoint. Forcing a choice between food and electricity so someone can make a video of a cat in a sombrero dancing isn’t a trade-off most people will accept. And then there are the tools that align with environmental imperatives. Amid high energy demand, no power generation facility should be arbitrarily disfavored. Clean energy like solar and offshore wind is vital if the finances are available to build them; Trump’s war on clean energy is totally counterproductive. The situation offers that long-sought way for Democrats to sell the energy transition: It’s actually to reduce costs over the long term. One of the reasons New Jersey’s utility rates shot up this year was the closure of several power plants; there’s a direct line from Trump denying permits to offshore wind projects that would help New Jersey because he doesn’t like how wind turbines look from his golf course and how much residents are paying for electricity. Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican challenger to Sherrill in New Jersey, aligned with Trump on offshore wind; he got pummeled. Connecting these power generation projects to the grid, which has become a flashpoint with the grid operator that serves New Jersey and Virginia (PJM), could be another plank of the agenda, along with reconductoring to minimize the loss of energy through power lines. Democratic solutions on energy affordability neatly connect to Trump’s refusal to allow energy projects to move ahead. And there’s a populist streak to taking on powerful utility monopolies and their financial backers. Delivering success here will build trust in an electorate that has already rejected laissez-faire solutions. It feels like a real opportunity to reset the climate debate as a cost-of-living debate, and reverse the structures of power that have made a basic necessity of life unaffordable. * * * _Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2025. All rights reserved._ _Read the original article at Prospect.org._ __Click here to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism.__ * electric power * cost of living * elections * Georgia * New Jersey * Virginia * Data Centers * wind power Subscribe to Portside

On election night, **Zohran Mamdani** stood before a crowd of campaign volunteers in Bronx and said something that, in another century, might have come from the steps of Tammany Hall. “We will fight for you, because we are you,” he began. “Ana minkum wa alaikum.” Then he called the roll of his coalition: Yemeni bodega owners, Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, Ethiopian aunties, South Asian delivery drivers. It was a moment of recognition—for communities that had long kept the city running without ever feeling like the city was theirs. New York’s political life has always been a nexus of immigration, xenophobia, and realignment. Each new wave of arrivals has transformed the city’s parties and power structures, from the Irish Catholics who captured Tammany Hall in the late 19th century to the Jewish and Italian tenement workers who built the unions and socialist movements of the early 20th to Black and Latino transformations during the civil rights movement. Mamdani’s rise comes amid its own modern strain of suspicion—Islamophobia, anti-immigrant politics, and the quiet bigotry that still shadows those whose faith or surnames mark them as foreign. It rhymes with the 19th-century fear of Catholic immigrants and the early-20th-century hysteria over “radical” Jews and Italians—each era finding new language for the same anxiety about belonging. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail The first great breakthrough came in **1880** , when **William R. Grace** , an Irish-born Catholic shipping magnate, became New York’s first immigrant mayor. His election was a crack in the wall of Protestant dominance that had ruled the city since its founding. Only a few decades earlier, the Know-Nothing Party had treated Catholic immigrants as a civilizational threat. Grace’s win was the city’s quiet answer: the immigrant could not only belong, but lead—a rhyme Mamdani would recognize in a new century. For the first time, an ethnic and religious minority—despised by xenophobes as “drunkards and papists”—had seized control of City Hall. Within a decade, Tammany Hall had remade itself in Grace’s image, transforming from a genteel club into an Irish-Catholic machine that traded favors for votes and delivered something like democracy through patronage to people who’d never had it. For poor immigrants, Tammany wasn’t a story about corruption; it was proof that the system could finally see them. By the **1920s** , Irish immigrants became the political establishment, embodied by **Mayor Jimmy Walker** , the silk-hatted son of the machine. Walker was rakish, funny, and entirely at ease in the moral gray zone that had once scandalized elites. Under his reign, politics became a jazz-age spectacle of favors and excess. But his glamour disguised decay. The machine that had once fought for immigrants had become a gatekeeper against newer ones—Italians, Jews, and Eastern Europeans—whose sweat powered the city’s factories but who rarely saw their reflection in its politics. Those white ethnic newcomers found their voice in **Morris Hillquit** , a Jewish socialist lawyer who, in **1917** , ran for mayor on a platform of rent control, union rights, and opposition to the First World War. Hillquit’s 22 percent of the vote shocked the political establishment. He didn’t win, but he proved that a tenement-based working class—Jewish seamstresses, Italian dockworkers, the radical press—could function as a political bloc. For his trouble, he and his allies were branded traitors. Five Socialist legislators from immigrant districts were expelled from the state assembly. Yet the genie was out of the bottle: class solidarity and immigrant politics had become a political movement of its own. In 1922, during a bruising congressional campaign, Fiorello La Guardia was accused of antisemitism by a rival who assumed the charge would stick. La Guardia’s answer was pure theater and pure New York: he dictated a reply in **Yiddish** , the language of his accuser’s own voters, and challenged the man to debate him in it. The invitation—audacious, funny, and devastating—went unanswered. It was La Guardia at his most revealing: turning the politics of identity into a performance of fluency, using wit to remind New Yorkers that he was not an outsider looking in but a reflection of the city itself. La Guardia’s mother was Jewish and his father an Italian Catholic who had long since drifted from faith. He grew up navigating a world of languages and neighborhoods—Italian in the kitchen, Yiddish on the street, English in the classroom. Yet despite his mother’s Jewish roots, La Guardia never publicly identified as Jewish; historians suggest he avoided doing so because he believed it would be “self-serving” and preferred his identity to be rooted in his immigrant background rather than a single faith tradition. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank When La Guardia finally became mayor—after the Seabury Investigations had shredded the old party machine and the Depression had destroyed the old ethnic and political loyalties—he drew on that same fluency. He built a coalition made not only of tenement renters but of middle-class reformers, spanning Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Polish neighborhoods. Backed by the New Deal, he transformed city government from a dispenser of jobs into a provider of public assets. As fascism darkened Europe, La Guardia turned his multilingual empathy into policy—denouncing Adolf Hitler, promoting boycotts of German goods, and making City Hall a kind of civic refuge for the city’s persecuted immigrants. Every phase of political transformation in New York City was met with a wave of bigotry. Grace faced anti-Catholic hysteria; Hillquit, the Red Scare; La Guardia, whispers that he was too foreign to be trusted. But the city’s demographic tide kept rising, and each wave of immigrants redrew the boundary between outsider and insider. Each of these figures widened New York’s circle of belonging, though never evenly. Grace’s rise gave Irish Catholics a seat at the table but left the city’s Black residents and Caribbean migrants untouched. Hillquit’s Socialists built interracial alliances with Black labor organizers like A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, even as their broader movement still treated race as secondary to class. La Guardia, decades later, went further—appointing Black and Puerto Rican officials, investigating discrimination in Harlem, and campaigning in Spanish—but even his reform coalition operated within a segregated city. The city’s circle of belonging widened in fits and starts, stretching to include new voices even as old hierarchies tugged at its edges. Nonetheless Mamdani’s Queens feels like it rhymes with La Guardia’s base in East Harlem and the Lower East Side—blocks of working-class renters who keep the city humming and yet pass invisibly through it. The tenement floor now lives on a scooter and in an app: delivery riders with plastic ponchos, rideshare drivers orbiting JFK at 2 a.m., home-health aides and night-shift nurses catching the dawn train. Many are immigrants; most are tired. They’re the heirs of the garment cutters and dockhands who once packed Socialist rallies and crowded Tammany ward halls, the same stubborn coalition of people who make the city run before the city remembers their names. In his victory speech, Mamdani named them. “To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know this: this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.” New York has never changed by polite inheritance. Each coalition elbows its way in, and in doing so redraws the borders of “we.” Grace cracked the door; Walker swung it wide and nearly lost it; Hillquit mapped the immigrant tenement workers; La Guardia built a floor sturdy enough to stand on. Now, in a city remade by migration once again, Mamdani’s bloc—bodega owners and nurses, young socialists, cabdrivers and the children of immigrants who bring your groceries to the fifth floor—is testing whether the city can still renew itself from the bottom up. History’s answer tends to be yes. When New York seems sealed, someone new finds the key. _Waleed Shahid is a Democratic strategist and movement organizer. He played a key role in launching the Green New Deal campaign and successfully recruiting and electing working-class progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Summer Lee.___Waleed’s Substack__ _is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber._ * Zohran Mamdani * Fiorello La Guardia * New York City (406 * Immigrants Subscribe to Portside

Zohran Mamdani speaks during victory speech at a mayoral election night watch party, Tuesday, November 4, 2025, in New York. | Credit: Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo // The American Prospect The watch party was packed full of Zohran Mamdani supporters, some of whom had just finished a canvassing shift that ended when the polls closed. When the results were announced, sooner than expected, the room broke into excited screams, hugs, and chants of “Fuck you, Cuomo.” Some were in tears. Many seemed relieved and ready for sleep. But as the evening’s speakers said, the fight isn’t over. Rest? “No, there’s too much to do. We’re facing the national guard, and ICE,” Jews for Racial & Economic Justice organizer Lexi Sasanow told me an hour earlier in Manhattan, 11 miles away. Standing with two others outside a polling place off 110th Street beneath the bright full moon, Sasanow described what people should do today: Find a political home, be it a nonprofit, mutual aid group, or a community garden, so you “have a network of people you want to be with as things get harder.” JFREJ, for example, is hosting a mass call tomorrow to talk about what comes next. Sasanow and fellow organizer Alessia Milstein, the organization’s digital and communications fellow, urged people to sign up. “We don’t elect saviors,” Milstein said. “We elect comrades.” And while progressive organizations may have more power under a Mamdani administration, the city is going to face real, material threats from President Trump that must be fought. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Mamdani beat former governor and sex pest Andrew Cuomo, 50.4 percent to 41.6 percent as of late Tuesday night. The 8.8-point lead meant that even if Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa had dropped out and sent his 7.1 percent to Cuomo, Cuomo still would have lost. “We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn,” Mamdani said in his acceptance speech. “We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.” _**Mamdani’s 104,400 volunteers took nothing for granted, canvassing until polls closed.**_ More than 735,000 people cast ballots during early voting alone, quadruple the number of voters who did in 2021. By 3 p.m., voters had already surpassed the turnout of any mayoral election since 2001, casting 1.4 million votes. By the end of the night, the tally was up to two million, the highest mayoral race turnout since 1969. At the Synod Hall polling site, where JFREJ organizers were getting out the vote, a poll worker said the turnout was the most intense she’d ever seen in her 15 years on the job, and that it was especially busy at lunchtime. “It’s like five times the amount of people coming out,” she said shortly before polls closed, as voters stood beneath the prayer house’s vaulted ceiling and candelabra. Mamdani’s 104,400 volunteers took nothing for granted, canvassing until polls closed. The campaign knocked on another 1.4 million doors across all five boroughs as of 2 p.m. yesterday, on top of the 1.6 million during the June primary. Now they vow to continue organizing to help Mamdani achieve his agenda. **ELECTION DAY WAS CLEAR AND COLD.** Mamdani’s army of volunteers began before dawn, turning out for 6 a.m. shifts near polling places, subway station entrances, and cafés across the city. Some supporters had already been thinking about the day after the election, and were intent on heeding the lessons from other headline-grabbing campaigns built by volunteers. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank Obama for America, for example, organized 2.2 million volunteers to get Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. But in the months after he became president, volunteers said they felt discarded and disenchanted because he had no further use for them, even though they wanted to keep fighting for health care and other policy proposals. “The failure of the Obama era was , ‘Oh, he’ll take care of it from here,’” David Duhalde, former political director of Our Revolution, said ahead of the election. A better move is to keep organizing. Duhalde suggested that anyone who volunteered to get Mamdani elected should rest first, then keep pushing. “You want to keep fighting the hard battles,” he said, such as flipping seats to progressive candidates, and continuing to agitate for progressive policies until they are implemented. Much of Mamdani’s agenda hinges on cooperation with the state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul, and persuading Albany will be instrumental to the mayor-elect’s success. But Hochul herself is up for re-election next year. “It’s not lost on her that a mandate for a Democratic Socialist agenda focused on affordability has grown in the city,” said Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of NYC Democratic Socialists of America. “I think that will be on her mind when she’s campaigning, that hundreds of thousands of people have made their views clear and will be expecting the governor to deliver.” Several organizations that helped elect Mamdani were already organizing for policy changes similar to his major planks, and leaders told the _Prospect_ yesterday that they intend to keep going. That’s the plan at CAAAV Voice, a New York Communities for Change coalition member that organizes to build working-class power for Asian immigrants, tenants, and young people. Speaking on Election Day, CAAAV Voice organizing director Alina Shen said her group decided to help get Mamdani to Gracie Mansion as a tactical move in the long battle to make New York more affordable, especially on housing. His candidacy was an opportunity for CAAAV Voice to highlight its priorities, and engage community members who didn’t previously want to get involved in politics. One of its first volunteer efforts for Mamdani was canvassing small businesses in Chinatown, Shen said, where multiple owners were initially not all that interested in what they had to say. But because some of the volunteers spoke Fujianese and had lived in the neighborhood for years, it was possible to build small, skeptical interactions into trusting relationships. “We had to earn people’s trust,” Shen said. “There are instances where we’ve had to transform and move people, because we need every single person in this city to move towards this vision together.” Isaac Kirk-Davidoff, a DC 37 union member and Crown Heights Tenant Union volunteer, also has housing on the mind. Like CAAAV Voice, volunteering for Mamdani was a chance for him to advance his goals of activating renters and getting closer to the goal of organizing across the entire city. “We don’t just need a new mayor, we need a new system,” he said yesterday. “It’s a window of opportunity and I really want to seize it and see what we can push through.” Continuing to organize is not as simple as just saying you’ll do it, he said; long-term organizing takes time and stamina. His day-after suggestion is to find or stay with a group and to talk to neighbors, especially for those living in a building with problems. “My advice is to find that space where you can think, act, and do politics,” he said, “and build from there.” _**Whitney Curry Wimbish** is a staff writer at The American Prospect and can be reached at _[[email protected]__ _. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletter division for 17 years and before that was a reporter at The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey.]_ _Read the original article at_ _Prospect.org._ _Used with the permission. ©_ _The American Prospect_ _,__Prospect.org, 2025_ _. All rights reserved._ _Support the American Prospect_ _._ _Click here_ _to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism._ * Zohran Mamdani * New York City mayoral election * New York City * New York * Andrew Cuomo * Democratic Party * DSA * Democratic Socialists of America * WFP * Working Families Party * 2025 Elections * Politics * Elections 2026 * 2026 Midterms Subscribe to Portside

NEWS 31 October 2025 Powerful new antibiotic that can kill superbugs discovered in soil bacteria Surprise discovery could pave the way for new treatments against drug-resistant infections. By Miryam Naddaf Twitter Facebook Email Close up of a colony of St | Dr Jeremy Burgess/Science Photo Library By studying the process through which a soil bacterium naturally produces a well-known drug, scientists have discovered a powerful antibiotic that could help to fight drug-resistant infections. In experiments described in the _Journal of the American Chemical Society_ on Monday1, the team studied the multi-step pathway that the bacterium _Streptomyces coelicolor_ uses to make the antibiotic methylenomycin A, which was first identified in 19652,3. They discovered an intermediate compound — called premethylenomycin C lactone — whose antimicrobial activity was 100 times stronger than that of the final product. Tiny doses of it killed strains of bacteria known to cause hard-to-treat infections. The discovery was a ‘surprise’, says study co-author Gregory Challis, a chemical biologist at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. “As humans, we anticipate that evolution perfects the end product, and so you’d expect the final molecule to be the best antibiotic, and the intermediates to be less potent,” he says. But the finding “is a great example of what a ‘blind watchmaker’ evolution is. And it’s a good way of exemplifying it in a very molecular way,” adds Challis. Share this article on * __Facebook * __Mail Antimicrobial resistance is a growing threat, projected to cause 39 million deaths worldwide over the next 25 years. Researchers say that the discovery of a potent antimicrobial compound might lead to fresh drugs to tackle resistance. The work underscores “the potential of such studies to identify new bioactive chemical scaffolds from ‘old’ pathways”, says Gerard Wright, a biochemist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. ## **Accidental discovery** In 2006, Challis and his colleagues began studying the molecular pathway through which _Streptomyces coelicolor_ produces methylenomycin A. To do this, they deleted the genes encoding enzymes involved in each step, one by one. Their work built on earlier efforts in 2002 to sequence the bacterium’s genome4. By 2010, the team had mapped the mechanism that the bacterium used to make methylenomycin A and identified several intermediate molecules that it produced along the way. “We were just doing very fundamental blue-sky research,” says Challis. “We discovered these intermediates, and we left them for a while because we didn’t quite know what to do with them.” It was several years later — around 2017 — that a PhD student at Challis’s laboratory tested these intermediate molecules for antimicrobial activity. If you like this article, please sign up for Snapshot, Portside's daily summary. Email (One summary e-mail a day, you can change anytime, and Portside is always free.) Leave this field blank These tests revealed that two molecules, including premethylenomycin C lactone, were much more effective than methylenomycin A at targeting seven strains of Gram-positive bacteria, including _Staphylococcus aureus_ , which infects skin, blood and internal organs, and _Enterococcus faecium_ , which can cause deadly bloodstream and urinary infections. The lowest concentration of premethylenomycin C lactone needed to kill drug-resistant strains of _Staphylococcus aureus_ was just 1 microgram per millilitre, compared with 256 micrograms per millilitre of methylenomycin A. The compound could also kill bacteria at much smaller doses than those needed for vancomycin, a ‘last line’ antibiotic used to treat infections caused by two _Enterococcus faecium_ strains, to be effective. The team then tested whether _E. faecium_ could develop resistance to the newly discovered antibiotic. They treated bacteria with increasing concentrations of premethylenomycin C lactone for 28 days and compared the results with those of vancomycin. Vancomycin-treated bacteria mutated and developed resistance — after 28 days, eight times higher doses of the drug were needed to stop their growth. But the amount of premethylenomycin C lactone that was effective did not change over the course of the experiment, suggesting that _E. faecium_ does not easily develop resistance to the new molecule. The work “is a lovely example of how basic research on a chemically interesting antibiotic can have unexpected benefit”, says Christopher Schofield, a chemist who studies antibacterial resistance at the University of Oxford, UK. ## **Future directions** Earlier this year, another research group collaborated with Challis’s team to develop a cost-effective way to synthesize the antibiotic using commercial materials5, which might help to produce it at scale. But the researchers first plan to explore how exactly the molecule works against bacteria. “We still don’t really know where it targets. We think it targets the cell wall in some way,” says study co-author Lona Alkhalaf, a chemical biologist at the University of Warwick. Challis adds that further research is needed to test the molecule’s toxicity in mammalian cells. Understanding the mechanism of action and toxicity could allow researchers to engineer analogues “where we retain the activity against the target in the bacteria, but we engineer out any other activities that might be causing toxicity in humans”, he says. _doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03595-3_ ## **References** 1. Corre, C. _et al._ _J. Am. Chem. Soc_. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.5c12501 (2025). **Article********Google Scholar****** 2. Wallhausser, K. H., Nesemann, G., Prave, P., & Steigler, A. _Antimicrob. Agents Chemother._ **5** , 734–736 (1965). **PubMed********Google Scholar****** 3. Huber, G. _et al._ _Antimicrob. Agents Chemother._ **5** , 737–742 (1965). **PubMed********Google Scholar****** 4. Bentley, S. D. _et al._ _Nature_ **417** , 141–147 (2002). **Article********PubMed********Google Scholar****** 5. Wright, A. _et al._ _J. Org. Chem._ **90** , 11230–11236 (2025). **Article********PubMed********Google Scholar****** **Download references** **‘Tis the Season** **Jess Steier, DrPH, Amy Gragnolati, PharmD, and Elana Pearl BenJoseph, MD, MPH** **Unbiased Science** New vaccines and antibodies mean fewer hospital stays and more holiday celebrations October 29, 2025 * Science * Medicine * antibiotic-resistant infections Subscribe to Portside