The Right Doubled Down on Dehumanization – What Should the Left Do Now?
Last Tuesday, U.S. Americans went to the polls in what has been called the most consequential election in a generation and possibly the history of the U.S.
Republicans have claimed control of the White House, the Senate, and as of Wednesday, they will retain the House of Representatives. Six of nine Supreme Court justices are ideologically aligned, some to the extreme right and a couple bought out by Republican megadonors and Nazi sympathizers.
On January 20, this transition of power may be peaceful, but I fear what follows will be anything but.
How can a man who has 34 felony convictions be re-elected to the highest office in the country in charge of what Kamala Harris said was “the most lethal fighting force in the world?”
President Biden, blocked by an obstinate Republican Senate and Supreme Court supermajority, managed to save lives during the COVID epidemic, kickstart the economy, and pass the most significant climate legislation and infrastructure bill. That said the Orange One did not go quietly, making alliances with centibillionaires like Elon Musk to rig the media, whipping up populist anger and ridicule against the U.S.’s oldest sitting president.
Faced with Republican intransigence and media portrayals, Biden was wildly unpopular. Despite this, Biden insisted on running in the primary race. DNC loyalists would “stand by their man” despite growing private concerns about fitness for office.
One after the other, Republican contenders bowed out before the would-be king. The coronation was complete, with Republicans completely in lock step with the felon. Republicans were on their second Speaker of the House since 2023, constantly hamstrung by MAGA extremists.
Because there was an actual race, the world and U.S. voting public were exposed to the Republican platform. Meanwhile, a grassroots effort in Michigan, with a sizable, resourced, and connected Arab- and Muslim-American community, was able to register their dissent against the genocide in Gaza that claimed over 40,000 lives, almost 70% of whom women and childrenfollowing the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack, as the “uncommitted.” This was followed in Minnesota where voters were able to grab a few delegates to the convention. However, there were no alternative visions being debated, plans for how to fix inflation, address Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, nor ease voters’ fears about anything except for reproductive freedom following the 2022 Dobbs decision that triggered abortion bans in 15 states.
So, the CNN’s first “Road to 270” on January 5 was a repeat from 2016. To be fair, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million. She lost the electoral college by a margin of 77,744 votes across three swing states.
More tellingly, Biden received over seven million votes more than Trump. However, had only 42,918 people across three swing states voted differently – or not at all – the electoral vote would have been a tie.
Biden went into the first debate on June 27 already behind, and his stumbling performance finally inspired people within DNC leadership to express their fears out loud. Groups like Sunrise Movement openly called for him to step down.
And finally, on July 21, three days after the Republican convention and four weeks before the Democrats’, Biden made the historic decision to put country over self-interest and bowed out of the race.
The enthusiasm was palpable: in the 24 first hours, the Harris campaign raised more money in one day than in U.S. campaign history, $81 million from 880,000 donors, to be matched during the DNC at $82 million. This enthusiasm was sustained for several weeks, and the Republican ticket was flailing, badly.
Immediately the polls started turning around. In her first month campaigning, Harris gained almost 5 percentage points in the polls to take the lead in the popular vote and six of the seven swing states. Having aimed their guns to blast the incumbent for incompetence and the general malaise about voters’ own sense of security and well-being, the GOP was totally unprepared for this surge.
The DNC, in my hometown of Chicago, was a lovefest. Mayor Brandon Johnson, progressive challenger, teachers’ union member/organizer, welcomed people to a perfectly staged media event complete with energetic Beyoncé interludes and high-production value commercials. The party was big enough to invite Republicans such as Adam Kinzinger, who used to represent my district in DeKalb, Illinois, also one of two Republicans to join the January 6 commission.
And yet – despite Uncommitted and well-organized street protests – the DNC tent was not big enough to include a single Palestinian on the podium, including Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman.
Endorsements came through from familiar Hollywood glitterati and the singular phenomenon Taylor Swift, and middle-of-the-roaders like Man Show’s Jimmy Kimmel and Republicans like Liz Cheney, who joined Kinzinger on the January 6 commission, also an out lesbian and daughter of former VP Dick Cheney.
The mood among progressives was confident, even smug. Memes about being brat and “childless cat ladies” dotted neighborhoods across the country on lawn signs.
Then, on September 10, the day of the only presidential debate with Harris, VP nominee JD Vance spread the ugliest of rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, in his home state of Ohio. Founded upon no evidence at all, he claimed that they were eating cats. The Republican standard bearer repeated this on the debate stage, along with a particularly vitriolic word salad about prison inmates getting transgender surgeries.
Vance openly admitted to CNN that the story was false: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
It stuck. The far-right seized upon this attack against Haitians, particularly targeted not only as immigrants, but Black, and heritors of rebellious enslaved people who ended slavery, a beacon of freedom as the second independent country in the hemisphere. As Gina Athena Ulysse commented, Haitians are a certain kind of Black… in Bertin Louis’s words, “Blackest of the Black.”
These weren’t just words. Physical attacks against Haitian people in the U.S. rose sharply. During Republican rallies that followed, people carried signs saying, “deport them all” and racial slurs specifically targeting Haitian people. The candidate now promised immediate, mass deportations.
Steadily, the gains that Harris made slipped away. She peaked in the following days: in Wisconsin on September 11, North Carolina on September 14, also when her deepest slide in Georgiabegan, and Michigan and Pennsylvania on September 19, followed by the nationwide popular vote on September 21.
The Republicans found their wedge issue, energizing their base.
It should also be pointed out that Musk poured $119 million of his money into the campaign and devised a scheme to bring out new voters to the polls, giving away $1 million a day to individuals. And this is just the world’s richest individual. Billions in dark money poured in as a result of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision. An unprecedented $400 million was poured into the Ohio senate race to unseat Sherrod Brown.
Faced with this clarity of message – demonizing, dehumanizing, and blaming this particular “Other” – the Democrats basically ran on Not Being Him. Saving democracy from fascism. What do Liz Cheney and Bernie Sanders have in common, after all? The presidential debate offered a chance to highlight the differences but Harris, no doubt advised by the DNC pollsters and billionaire donors, ran ‘to the middle,’ supporting fracking in Pennsylvania and continued military support for Israel.
Harris, who owed her place on the ticket to her boss stepping aside, also had to tiptoe lightly. In addition, not having to campaign against any fellow Democrats, she had to rush to come up with her own platform: capping drug prices, going after price gouging, and what she called the “opportunity economy.”
On the campaign trail the former president himself badmouthed the largest cities in the swing states he was trying to win, calling Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia “dirty” and “disgraceful.” Not coincidentally these cities are majority Black, with sizeable LGBT communities.
Kicking off the final week was a rally at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden where commentators made explicit comparisons to a 1939 Nazi rally, with an opening speaker heckling a Black audience member using the N word and calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The deposed despot who fomented an insurrection on January 6, 2021 rather than accept defeat was preparing his troops for battle, to Take America Back… from Black and Brown people, immigrants, queer people, and other Others.
And battle they would. In Georgia, there were 32 bomb threats in majority Black precincts. Not only closing the polls for hours and suppressing the Black vote, these acts of domestic terrorism are violent aftershocks of the of the Klan at the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s Civil Rights Era.
In the end, it didn’t matter. As of Saturday, Trump still holds the lead in the popular vote. And as I wrote this, the election was called in Arizona, completing the swing state sweep.
Vindicated, with unchecked powers granted by the Supreme Court and with the specific roadmap Project 2025, the violence, white supremacy, misogyny, corruption, greed, and planet-killing policies from 2017-21 now feel like the dress rehearsal. The real horror show will be unleashed by an administration fully prepared and ready.
Pundits are likely to talk about this historic election for decades to come. Already the misogynoir is evident in blaming Harris herself.
As Bernie Sanders tweeted, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them… people are angry, and they should be.” Instead, they gave their votes to a populist whose policies are increasingly hostile to actual working-class interests, with tax breaks for billionaires, union busting, spiraling housing costs, and letting for-profit health care deny coverage and increase costs.
And yes, it is about racism and misogyny. As Showing Up for Racial Justice shared in their public meeting the day after the election, attended by over 6,000 people, since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Democrats have never received a majority of white voters. Faced with the real possibility of our first woman president, a woman of color, the Right fomented anxieties that surfaced as ‘replacement theory’ and other patently racist conspiracy theories.
Particularly white folks have our work cut out for us, talking, listening, engaging, and educating others. Standing up also requires working on issues that unite white and BIPOC workers, neighbors, and students.
On a Zoom call with over 1,000 members and supporters, also on Wednesday, Sunrise shared a similar analysis. Missouri had ballot initiatives about a living wage and reproductive rights. Listening to voters, and engaging them, a cross-racial coalition of activist groups won both ballot initiatives.
If anything, this election should have taught us once and for all that progressives need to have something to fight for, not just against. The depths of fear of fascism did not inspire people, enough people, the ‘right’ people to vote. While votes are still being counted, the Republican ticket fared only slightly better than in 2020, however 10 million people who had voted Blue in 2020 stayed home.
An anthropolitics, the politics of humanity, is needed now more than ever… Humanizing trans and immigrant people, protecting humanity from polluters heating up the planet and increasingly destructive disasters, putting people over profit, and identifying the human that unites us, dismantling racism that divides us, identifying common cause. Listening to people in Pennsylvania, and Haiti, this is a politics worth fighting for.
Disarming this dehumanization of the Other requires real-time engagement. I joined dozens of volunteers at Pennsylvania United knocking on doors in suburban Pittsburgh. Our job as canvassers – as organizers in general – is to actively listen and together help clarify interests. Engaging in conversation long enough, with a radical empathy, it is possible to work with people to identify racism and xenophobia as distractions. Is it more important to you that your mother has health care, or that someone you don’t know used a public restroom facility where they felt most safe? Was it this hardworking Haitian medical resident who recently fled the country and willing to work third shift at a warehouse, or was it the CEO and the billionaire investors who took away your father’s job?
Talking with people I heard what concerns they raised. As individuals, working white people seeking answers and feeling insecure about their lives and uncertain about the future, are more susceptible to the barrage of disinformation and distractions. I heard many of the worst, dehumanizing, lies repeated by people who told me they were still undecided.
When organized, in collective spaces, as workers or neighbors or faith community members, these one-on-one conversations can lead to transformation, analysis, and a collective identity. Through organizing, people can begin to see that they have more in common with one another than the billionaire class trying to divide us along racial lines, to confuse and demobilize us. It is not coincidence that this gaslighting is possible when union membership is at historic lows, around 10 percent.
This is the work that lies ahead, and frankly those of us endowed with white privilege have greater obligation to engage “our own.” And we can’t wait until the next election.
As we organize our communities to rise up and resist fascism, hate, white supremacy, xenophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, we will need to start local. Engage the police on reminding them about sanctuary cities and not collaborating with ICE. Reframe issues of safety from the bottom up. As we work locally, bringing new folks along with us and creating relationships of trust, breaking down barriers, we need to educate ourselves on specifically how this issue connects with other groups’, especially those led by marginalized or targeted communities. Which banks are funding the genocide, building private immigrant detention centers, or polluting Black neighborhoods? Where are we complicit, and how can we break these chains?
Sunrise was clear about the road ahead, acknowledging that all three branches of government pledged to fossil fuels for four of the five years left to stop climate catastrophe. “At the end of every night, the sun rises. And so will we.” On Friday, youth led dozens of climate strikes across the country.
As the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights said in their Wednesday press conference: “We got us.” We have been here before. We have been resilient before. ICIRR pledged to work in solidarity with other marginalized and targeted groups.
Milwaukee activist Venice Williams, speaking back to people who did not face genocide, enslavement, internment, forced migration asking her, a Black woman, “How do we get through the next four years?” her response is “to continue doing the good work. Continue to build bridges and not walls…” and if you’re not continuing because you never began, “what are you waiting for?”