Can Socialists Govern a Capitalist State?
By Max Elbaum
Since the 2016 combination of Donald Trump’s election and Bernie Sanders’s breakthrough campaign, efforts to synergize grassroots organizing with electoral engagement have become a priority for both longstanding and new radical formations. The dominant strategy is for socialists and progressives to run as Democrats aiming to both block MAGA’s drive toward US-style fascism and to win a measure of Left “governing power.”
In the last year, such efforts have yielded impressive results. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is mayor of the nation’s largest city. Abdul El-Sayed, an outspoken advocate for Medicare for All and Palestinian rights, won the Democratic nomination for US Senator in Michigan. More than a dozen sitting Congress members are champions of Justice Democrats, theWorking Families Party, or Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and their number is likely to grow following the midterms. A serious conversation is underway about the broad Left rallying behind a movement-identified candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. That person (AOC is the most-talked about choice) would run not just to promote radical ideas or influence the eventual nominee, but to win.
It’s apromising start, and prospects are good for its momentum to continue. But it will take orders of magnitude more wins for this radical insurgency to match the strength of either MAGA or the longstanding Democratic Party leadership, much less exceed it.
Portions of the Left think this is a mistaken path. Some critics think electoral engagement is worthless. Others believe that fighting on Democratic Party terrain for any goal other than breaking off to form a workers’ party as soon as possible inevitably leads to compromises that undermine the working-class movement.
But these critics are on the defensive. Insurgent campaigns in Democratic primaries have clearly contributed to the spread of anti-capitalist ideas and the growth of radical and socialist organizations. Left-wing electeds—Mamdani in particular—have produced gains for (and mitigated harms against) workers and the popular majority while promoting immigrant rights, anti-racism, and opposition to US support for Israel’s Gaza genocide.
In contrast, electoral abstentionism and third-party-ism have failed historically and currently to gain mass traction or provide a practical way of getting MAGA out of power. The critics therefore lack an attractive alternative to offer.
Still, there is unease about pursuing a “governing power” strategy among some whose practical work meshes with it. For activists who have decided that only replacing capitalism with socialism can bring about a world of peace and justice, the recent hard-won electoral wins are gratifying but leave unanswered questions. For good reason, there is doubt that electoral victories, even when backed by powerful grassroots-based organizations, will get us to socialism. Isn’t the very structure of the capitalist state a barrier against working-class power? Don’t we need to dismantle, rather than govern, the US state? How does what we are doing today give us a North Star we can follow to a socialist horizon?
There are no ready-made answers to these questions. For more than a century, dedicated revolutionaries have grappled theoretically and practically with how to get to socialism in a capitalist country with a developed economy and electoral system. No one has succeeded. Anyone who says “this is the way” is over-promising.
“The modern state is an instrument of class rule, but it is simultaneously a terrain of class struggle.”
Still, much has been learned about which approaches hold the most potential. There is overwhelming evidence that the fight for governing power within capitalism is a stage of struggle that cannot be skipped. Rather, it is necessary to develop a working class–led movement broad enough, rooted enough, savvy enough, and positioned well enough to bring about a “revolutionary rupture” that dismantles the capitalist state if and when conditions to do so (a “revolutionary situation”) arise.
I make a case here for that perspective and point toward some resources that help us both navigate this stage and gain a clearer sense of what we will confront in the next one.
An underlying contradiction
The first step in making this argument is squarely facing the complicated dilemma that faces those of us pursuing a “governing power” strategy, even if we are only beginning to experience its concrete manifestations.
That dilemma is aptly characterized in a recent Jacobin article by Peter Frase, “Zohran Mamdani and the Contradiction of Democratic Socialism.” Frase points out that there is a contradiction “between Mamdani as a product of DSA, an organization at least nominally aiming to overturn the capitalist mode of production, and Mamdani as a politician attempting to operate the machinery of the capitalist state apparatus.”
The piece describes different Left approaches to navigating the Mamdani-in-office terrain. These vary from activists “who see the task of DSA as defending Mamdani’s policy agenda and building the base of popular support for it…. [to] those more concerned with calling out compromises or betrayals that separate the new mayor’s actions in power from the principles of a democratic socialist organization.” The debate between these poles persists because, as Frase points out, it is rooted in a contradiction that must be understood in “a Marxist sense: an antagonism that cannot be resolved without overcoming the larger system that gives rise to it, such as that between capital and labor.”
Given the messiness of that debate and, more fundamentally, the inherent problem of uncomfortable compromises, alliances, and governing policy dilemmas it reflects, there is an understandable desire to bypass the problem by refraining from participation within any component part of the capitalist state. But giving in to that temptation in a country with even a relatively weak electoral system (much less a rooted one like the US) is self-marginalizing.
The modern state is an instrument of class rule, but it is simultaneously a terrain of class struggle. Messy as it is, the Left must find a way to navigate the contradictions built into fighting for and winning a measure of governing power—including at the federal level, where the contradiction is especially sharp, since the US state remains an anchor of an imperialist system even in its period of decline.
With the state, against the state, beyond the state
A core component of this argument is that the fight for and deployment of governing power includes but is broader than contesting elections and winning office. It is a full-spectrum struggle that must include battle on the economic, cultural, institution-building, and narrative (ideological) fronts to build sufficient strength of the popular classes outside the state to drive the process.
The components of a comprehensive governing power strategy can be captured in a phrase taken from the South African Left: “with the state, against the state, beyond the state”:
- With the state: Contest elections. Become a force in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government at the local, state, and federal levels. Pursue a “co-governance” approach to create an ongoing and generative dynamic between elected officials and the social base that put them in office. By wielding accumulated strength inside and outside the state, deliver material gains, expand democratic space, minimize harm, and gain a deep understanding of what policies work in a complex society with a tremendously diverse working class.
- Against the state: Continue to make demands on the state and fight for them, which sometimes will mean pushing officials we support and sometimes opposing them.
- Beyond the state: This component has a double meaning. First, it means that building the organized, institutional strength of workers and all the oppressed outside the state (trade unions, community organizations, a media apparatus, narrative and cultural power, etc.) is indispensable. Second, it means that the most conscious portion of the popular insurgency understands that holding governing power in a capitalist state creates a contradictory and unstable situation. At some point it will be resolved either by the progressives and socialists being driven back or by a radical rupture that dismantles the existing state structure and puts a new structure in place.
A corollary to both of these meanings is that every possible step is taken to weaken the state structures that are most tied to maintaining capitalism, whatever amount of governing power the Left holds at a given time.
Purely outside will not work
The above is a bare-bones outline that needs a great deal of fleshing out as the Left gains experience in its practical application. At the moment, fighting for Left governing power in ways that facilitate building a front broad and strong enough to oust MAGA is a prime concern. If we succeed in pushing US fascism back, the challenges of fighting for and deploying governing power in a period more favorable for Left advance will come to the fore.
We need to expect setbacks. But there are several reasons to pursue this course even at moments when we are confronted with how difficult it is.
The first is that attempting to overturn a developed capitalist state solely by acting outside the state is extremely unlikely to work. That course has been tried by substantial portions of the Left in the US and elsewhere over the last 100 years and never came anywhere near success. Such efforts have never gained as much strength as projects that have fought for influence inside as well as outside the capitalist state.
There is a structural reason for this: the effect that substantial electoral systems have on the dynamics of mass politics. These systems offer a route to changing the conditions of life and expanding the democratic rights of workers and the oppressed. That is why movements for workers and oppressed peoples have fought for universal suffrage and fair elections since Marx’s time. In the US, the fight for Black voting rights in the arc from abolitionism to Reconstruction, and then, in the 1950s-60s, the Second Reconstruction, has been among the most bitter, violent, and consequential in the nation’s history.
“Having champions in legislative bodies, from city councils throughs state legislatures to Congress, makes a difference. An even larger difference can be made if progressives or socialists can capture the executive.”
Most socialists, while participating in these fights, have concluded from their theoretical reflection and historical analysis that socialism will not be achieved via elections. But the mass of the working class and its allies learn that lesson through their own experience; that is, through traveling the electoral route and pushing it to its limits. Left propaganda plays an important role in driving home the point, but that role is secondary to the direct experience of millions in struggle.
This stage of mass engagement may be long or short, and it is possible that a moment of decisive confrontation with capital may come before the popular bloc attains all the governing power within capitalism that it aims for. But the point is, this stage of struggle cannot be skipped.
Social welfare programs via the state
An additional factor that pulls mass struggles into the quest for governing power is the evolution of the capitalist state since the debates over works such as Lenin’s The State and Revolution shaped the modern socialist movement. At that time, the operational components of capitalist states overwhelmingly if not exclusively consisted of the military, the police, and a bureaucracy for tax collection.
The modern state has expanded with many additional functions, including large-scale oversight and delivery of “welfare state” programs. Such programs are taken on by the state because it is pressed to do so by the struggles of workers and their allies. These struggles are ongoing; working-class movements almost universally demand the protection and expansion of such programs and introduction of new ones. This is a way for the mass of workers and the poor to win benefits that, even if they could be gained from specific employers, would only accrue to a limited number.
For example, today one of the most popular demands of the progressive movement is Medicare for All. To win Medicare for All as well as protect existing programs whose budgets are on the Right’s chopping block, there is a groundswell of energy going into electing its advocates to Congress. The drive to gain and protect social welfare programs (or to have a pro-union National Labor Relations Board, an Environmental Protection Agency actually concerned about climate change, a Justice Department that enforces civil rights, regulatory agencies that check untrammeled corporate power, etc.) exerts a strong pull toward contending for power within the state as well as building mass protest outside of it. What is the logic of demanding Medicare for All but refusing to fight for advocates of that program who can lead its implementation?
We need orders of magnitude more power
All versions of capitalism rest on exploitation. But they vary considerably regarding the conditions of life and levels of democratic rights of the subaltern classes. And what gains can be won within a capitalist system does not depend only on outside-the-state pressure; the capacity to battle inside the state is a major factor as well.
“The US Left is at an early stage of learning how to navigate these challenges. But there is experience to draw upon for lessons, from that of the Harold Washington and Zohran Mamdani administrations and from the still-young national effort to elected district attorneys who advocate deep-going reforms.”
Having champions in legislative bodies, from city councils throughs state legislatures to Congress, makes a difference. An even larger difference can be made if progressives or socialists can capture the executive. On the local level, the experience of the Harold Washington mayoralty in Chicago, and what Mamdani has been able to deliver in just a few months, illustrate this point.
A governing power strategy aims to take this process as far as it can go. A particular change high on the agenda is eliminating the many undemocratic features of the US electoral system. That means restoring the Voting Rights Act and then going further to abolish the electoral college, prohibit both racial and partisan gerrymandering, and mandate multi-member districts with proportional representation. Winning even some of these requires changes in the political complexion of all three branches of the federal government; that is, as WFP national director Maurice Mitchell puts it, “to get enough power inside a rigged system to unrig it.” We have a long way to go before achieving that level of “inside” power.
Police, prisons and the military-industrial complex
Even as the functions of the capitalist state have expanded, it remains true that “a standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power.” Dealing with the repressive arms of that state—the police, prisons, prosecutorial bodies, and the military-industrial complex which enforces Washington‘s will abroad—is where insurgent electeds face their biggest challenge.
And our problems on this battlefront are not limited to our relative lack of political power. The progressive movement lacks a compelling platform speaking to the working class’s concerns about public and personal safety.
There is all-but-universal agreement on the Left that the US justice system is permeated by racism, human rights abuses, and an obscene level of incarceration. But that understanding does not automatically translate into a set of policies concerning law, law enforcement, crime, and prisons that actually benefit, and can gain the durable support of, the multiracial US working class along the way. Formulating, implementing, and building support for such policies is both important in itself and indispensable for eroding the current strength of police unions, “law-and-order” demagogues, and the racist right in general. (The same we-must-learn-more approach applies to numerous other policy areas.)
The US Left is at an early stage of learning how to navigate these challenges. But there is experience to draw upon for lessons, from that of the Harold Washington and Zohran Mamdani administrations and from the still-young national effort to elected district attorneys who advocate deep-going reforms (Larry Krasner in Philadelphia). Another source of lessons is the experience of Black communities after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which led to the first election of a Black Sheriff in the South since Reconstruction and a substantial drop in racially biased arrests nationwide. And there are radicals exploring new frameworks for a public safety platform such as “law of the weakest” and “carceral minimalism.”
Further, anti-capitalists who have captured substantial governing power at the local or state level will almost certainly face situations where the government they lead takes repressive measures against the social forces that they represent. But this road must be travelled because two other things are simultaneously true: One, it is more possible to erode the power of these bodies if a radical movement has champions within the state as well as outside of it; and two, every step to weaken the repressive apparatus contributes to harm reduction and to increasing the space available for insurgent movements to organize for power.
Empire and the military-industrial complex
Dealing with the military-industrial complex and the related components of the capitalist state that enforce Washington’s goals abroad is similarly complex. But the extent of policy differences even between administrations that are not progressive shows how much room exists for an internationalist force with strength on both the inside and outside to make a difference in the conditions faced by peoples around the world. Cases in point: the difference between a period when the JCPOA nuclear weapons deal negotiated during the Obama administration was in force vs. one where Trump has torn up the deal, or between an administration expanding use of fossil fuels vs. one making even inadequate efforts to fight climate change.
There will be no easy victories on this battlefront. But every bit of progress we do make can alleviate the main source of economic bullying and threats of violence that currently afflict the nations of the global South. And the outpouring of bottom-up resistance to ICE, the unprecedented upsurge for Palestinian rights, and the unpopularity of the war against Iran has spurred a wider openness to fresh ideas about the US role in the world than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Add the growing sophistication of progressive and socialist electoral engagement, and it is possible to envision an administration that would have enough popular backing to abolish ICE, substantially cut the military budget, and take other initiatives that stem from a very different sense of what constitutes genuine security.
Vital for the fight against fascism
Pursuing a strategy of fighting both inside and outside the terrain of the state is also vital to stave off the threat of fascism.
In the US today, the main axis of conflict in the US is between a bloc of white Christian nationalists and oligarchs driving toward US-style fascism and a larger but more politically and organizationally fragmented opposition. The central task of the moment is to unite and galvanize the anti-MAGA majority so that it defeats the MAGA bloc and moves the country to terrain more favorable for working-class advance.
The elections since 2016, especially the 2024 balloting, demonstrated that it is not possible to do that — or to gain influence for the broad Left within the anti-fascist front — if we only campaign on opposition to Trump and MAGA. We need to advance a positive vision of what we are for as well as what we are against.
It is a governing power strategy that positions the broad Left not only as the most dedicated and combative opponent of MAGA, but also as a force offering a positive vision of what a post-MAGA government can deliver. And we cannot limit our “positive platform” to domestic issues while only saying what we oppose in terms of foreign policy. Only a positive vision for a transformed role for the US in the world will be compelling enough to sustain broad popular support and bind together movements and organizations whose main focus is “domestic” issues with those focused on peace, climate change, and international working-class solidarity.
Framing that vision as a Third Reconstruction roots anti-capitalist politics in the particularities of US history, especially the central role of the fight against white supremacy. It also signals that even if we achieve that objective, changing the country will still be a work-in-progress. As with the First and Second Reconstructions, a new round of gains could be thrown back, or a Third Reconstruction government could be a steppingstone toward the radical rupture needed to overcome capitalism.
“We have nowhere near the power needed to usher in a period of radical reform, much less overcome capitalism. But after many years of the US Left being marginal, we have become a force to be reckoned with in mass politics.”
It is by fighting for consistent democracy and maximum change within the capitalist system (whether we frame it as a Third Reconstruction or not) that the working class and its allies learn that capitalism must be transcended. It is also how the popular majority gains the experience of wielding power and learns how to rule.
Fleshing out the bare bones
We are living through the most intense phase of the 60-year backlash against the gains of the 1960s in which the Black-led Civil Rights Movement was the driving force. There is an all-too-real danger of that backlash leading to the consolidation of US-style fascism. But in the upsurge of resistance to MAGA and the longings of millions for a different and better world, there are the seeds of a new cycle of progressive advance.
Within this positive motion, a political trend committed to galvanizing a front broad and combative enough to defeat MAGA and to shaping a progressive post-MAGA administration is gaining momentum. It has a growing cohort of elected officials (most prominently Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani), radical organizations powering electoral work (WFP, Justice Democrats, and the growing “mass politics” wing of DSA), grassroots organizations rooted in issue-based and sector-based fights (a section of labor, Indivisible, the national community organizing networks, and much more), and a media ecosystem (ranging from The Nation to explicitly socialist publications and lefty podcasts). Its core organizers look to and are learning from the civil resistance of Minneapolis; the electoral sophistication that led to the recent “Mamdani sweep” in New York; the grassroots organizing that produced the Abdul El-Sayed-Donovan McKinney-Will Lawrence trifecta in Michigan and Angie Nixon’s win in Florida, and the internationalist passion of the pro-Palestine upsurge.
As in most early-stage radical awakenings, practical experience and experimentation run ahead of theoretical synthesis. Big-picture clarity is also hard to come by because the rapidly expanding cohort of self-identified socialists are faced with a challenge on which we have no successful models to draw from: how to overturn capitalism in a developed capitalist country with an established electoral system.
There is much to be learned from others who have grappled with this at other times and places, for example: from Antonio Gramsci’s thinking about hegemony, a historic bloc, and war of position/war of maneuver; from the practical and theoretical attempts by Communists to take Georgi Dmitrov’s advice to “search out forms of transition or approach to the proletarian revolution.” For the US experience, see especially the chapter “Notes on the Revolution and the 1930s” in Al Richmond’s memoir, A Long View from the Left; for a lesson-rich history of the Italian Communist Party, once the most vibrant and deeply rooted CP in Western Europe, see Lucio Magri’s book The Tailor of Ulm. Also valuable is a study of the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s “Meidner Plan” experience in trying to dismantle capitalism; likewise a look at the years Salvador Allende governed as Chile’s elected president and their bloody end at the hands of the Chilean military backed by Washington.
All these and more offer insights into how to fight effectively for governing power, what to expect if a measure of it is achieved, and how it can serve as a step on the path to socialism. Yet we are still traveling an uncharted path. We have nowhere near the power needed to usher in a period of radical reform, much less overcome capitalism. But after many years of the US Left being marginal, we have become a force to be reckoned with in mass politics. Making further headway will require a great deal of experimentation, and a consistent practice of honest evaluation and refinement—and we will need to harness all the tenacity, flexibility, and broad-mindedness we can muster as we go.
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First published in: Convergence Magazine and Jacobin Magazine.
No Time For Purity
By Fred B Kotler
Recently Mike Miller, a frequent contributor to the Stansbury Forum, and other outlets posed the following:
Question to socialists regarding the 2026 and 2028 elections:
Is your priority to defeat the right or to elect socialists? (Of course this assumes a tension between the two, which I assume.)
Here is Fred Kotler’s response
To answer your question, without question, the priority is to defeat MAGA and demand accountability for the nearly countless crimes of this regime. The stakes are too high to do anything else. It’s no time for a purity of politics or self-deception. Despite some recent victories in NYC and other solidly blue locales, there’s no emerging groundswell of support for what’s labeled “socialist” politics. So let’s not get carried away, folks.
One must think situationally. The United States today is not the Germany of the 1930s. There is barely the living memory of a popular mass based communist, socialist – or even social democratic – driven movement in the US. What McCarthyism didn’t accomplish, historical illiteracy did. Red baiting may be less potent as a strategy but it still has some cache. America’s working class is divided with significant support for Trump among white, especially male, blue collar workers. An estimated 40+% of union households voted for Trump in 2024.
That’s Trump Round 3… after the attempted coup and all the damage wrought to union and worker and civil rights. So comparing the working classes of 1930s Germany with 2020s America just doesn’t make sense – culturally, organizationally, demographically, and politically. Do you put your faith in the DSA? The DSA membership is not based in the working classes and I doubt it ever will be. Not those guys. (See Thomas Edsall, “A Working Class Party Without Many Workers“, 6/30/26 The New York Times.
Americans in large enough numbers aren’t ready to embrace a particular “ism.” Particular issues with well-articulated social democratic solutions, around health care, housing, taxation and America’s grotesque inequality, when well-presented by competent people, potentially yes. It would be well for Democrats to revisit Roosevelt’s 1944 Second Bill of Rights address. That’s the vision of social democratic America.
MAGA must be soundly and overwhelmingly defeated. The grand issue is the survival of constitutional government. Without it, nothing moves forward. There is, fortunately, a deeply rooted, if flawed, political culture based on the rule of law in the United States. There wasn’t a corresponding, established tradition or a similar context or history in Weimar Germany.
Defeating MAGA means building a powerful consensus across a broad political spectrum – a majoritarian movement – against the crimes, the corruption, the treason, and the utter incompetence of the Republicans.
There is an encouraging shift underway. Trump is discredited. His power and health are on the wane. And he is down to the hard core true believers. Be realistic and clear headed about where we are and what’s possible. Act accordingly.
Look at the electorate as it is and not as we perhaps want it to be. And, on that basis, end this damned nightmare.
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UCLA IRLE Webinar Series
By Robert Gumpert and Peter Olney
How should the labor movement respond to the federal government’s attacks on immigrant communities, threats of election interference and the erosion of collective bargaining rights? Join the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) as multiple generations of organizers break down labor’s struggle–past and present–to advance multi-racial democracy when those in power resist.
Part 1: Proposition 187: Labor’s Fight for Immigrant Rights
Date and Time: October 9, 2026, 10-11:30 PDT
Location: Virtual
Against the backdrop of unemployment and civil unrest in the early 1990s, California Republicans offered voters a simple, brutal solution: criminalize undocumented immigrants. Proposition 187, a statewide voter initiative, threatened to exclude immigrants from all public services and to enlist teachers, neighbors and faith leaders into the machinery of deportation. Labor unions were initially unsure how to respond, but when unions joined the fight against Proposition 187, they changed the direction of California politics.
In this virtual panel event, three veterans of the campaign to stop Proposition 187 will discuss how the moment forged coalitions between immigrant rights and labor organizers that set the stage for a historic shift in organized labor’s policy on undocumented workers. Cristina Ramirez-Vazquez, Former Regional Manager and International Vice President of Workers United, Dave Sickler, former Western Regional Director of AFL-CIO, and Joel Ochoa, labor and community organizer, will share their expertise.
Part 2: Labor Strategies to Defend Immigrant Worker Rights Today
Date and Time: October 16, 2026, 10-11:30 PDT
Location: Virtual
Part 2 of the “Meeting the Moment” series brings together three leaders at the forefront of labor and community responses to the current militarized federal immigration in cities across the U.S. Facing the largest deportation campaign since the 1950s, labor unions and their members, alongside allies in the immigrant rights movement, are taking creative, nonviolent action to defend communities.
The virtual panel will welcome David Huerta, President of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West (USWW), Bernie Burnham, President of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, and Kurt Petersen, Vice President of UNITE HERE Local 11, to share their insights as leaders of the movement.
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Not Since The Summer and Autumn of 1864
By Stewart Acuff
Not since the summer/autumn of 1864 have these United States seen such an election season as this one.
The Civil War was raging. The Union had finally turned the tide of the war on the horrors of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Still, Lincoln feared defeat. But he won. Slavery was abolished. The Union was saved.
Today, there’s the same tension, nasty smell of fear in evil-doers, same taste of disgust in the flesh peddlers, bomb merchants and purveyors of hate.
Countered by a movement forged as people across America stood in her streets defying tyranny, the traitor and his cult and his private fascist street thugs, ICE, masked to hide the blame when they kill and maim, beat, mace, kick, dehumanize and kill Trump’s opposition in the streets of the USA.
The West Virginia Republican Party has bet the farm on being able to jam data centers down our throats to poison our water and raise electric bills for the greed of the high-tech elite out yonder in California. Somehow the GOP Governor Pat Morrisey thinks we’re too dumb to see what he’s doing.
Unlike the Civil War split on slavery, the issue of data centers is bringing folks together in opposition to them.
I’ve been happily surprised at how angry and discouraged rural West Virginians are at the data centers. As a result Gov. Morrisey is so unpopular that GOP Sen. Jim Justice is threatening to run against him for governor in the next election.
But the issue that will break the back of the Republicans is economic justice, the real economy, the kitchen table economy as folks try to make a budget work.
America is done with trump, maga, hatred of women, people of color and gay folks. We all now know that trump’s policies are punishing the working class.
Even our children see it. One of my best friends is a teacher in Martinsburg WV. He teaches leadership. Derek Gallagher talked to me about how teenagers see our growing economic crisis:
”When I graduate how will I do all this?” they ask. ” They feel frustrated and sold out.” “I’ll never have $400,000 for a family home. I’ll never afford a new car or truck.”
In other words, Trump has so driven up the costs of consumer goods with his idiotic war for Israel in Iran and the insane and ridiculous tariffs that our country is too expensive for our kids to live in, much less thrive in.
Forty-five years of stagnant wages has shrunk the middle class and sunk the American Dream for too many working class kids.
The Republicans don’t believe in a strong, deep, wide, sustainable middle class. Republicans believe in a hungry, weak and docile working class. That GOP strategy is gonna crash on the beach broken by the coming Blue Wave.
The Democratic Party isn’t perfect, but it believes in working class power, working families and our unions.
Our future must be rooted in a democracy that expands to include everyone, tax corporations and their owners for all they get from us, raises wages by encouraging unions, outlawing employer opposition from workers unionizing, forcing government work to be done with family sustaining wages, invest in America.
We are done with foreign wars for oil, for Trump’s financial empire, for old men’s egos and dead dreams of glory.
Time to cut the budget for killing here, there and yon. Raise the budget for caring and building and saving and honoring creation by preserving the work of creator.
If capitalism insists on a race to the bottom for workers, it has failed.
Democratic victory must mean worker power and security for working families. We must honor our allies and be a strong global advocate for human rights, for peace and an end to empire building and colonialism.
We must create policy and social expectations that families will be supported.
We will push policies to end inflation and cut costs for our families by ending the war in Iran immediately and ending destructive and inflationary tariffs.
All of us must put our shoulders to the wheel against prejudice, bigotry and unfair treatment of human being amongst us. Trump would never have been elected again except for racism and misogyny.
The defeat of trumpism in the midterms will break Maga.
The amazing pop-up resistance movement called Indivisible will have GET OUT THE VOTE events across our country on October 17. I’m speaking at the Hagerstown Indivisible Rally across the Potomac. I will exhort folks to vote for fundamental human rights and values–love and compassion, justice and mercy, peace and understanding, unions and collective bargaining, family-sustaining wages, decent and dignified retirement and the freedom to live as we are and were created.
Make a plan to vote as early as possible.
Liberty is on the line.
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This piece originally ran in the Spirit of Jefferson
The Joy of Participatory Communal Politics
By Eric Blanc
A Crisis of Social Connection
My piece, first published in The New York Times on Friday, argues that the Democrats’ crisis with young voters is also a crisis of social connection. Decades of social isolation and privatization, combined with Democratic Party strategy built around ads, emails, and election-season mobilization has displaced the participatory social life that once made politics communal. Drawing on Milwaukee’s sewer socialists, NYC-DSA, and Zohran Mamdani’s rise, I argue that rebuilding political power requires rebuilding collective life itself.
That means more than better messaging. It means creating spaces where people actually enjoy things together—sports leagues, potlucks, block parties, organizing, and other forms of face-to-face association—while also confronting the corporate power that has made everyday life more isolated and less fun. Politics can become a source of belonging again, but only if it combines community with material fights over who gets access to the good life.
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With Labor Day behind us …
By Stewart Acuff
With Labor Day behind us the political season begins for the all important midterm elections.
Democrats are running on strengthening democracy, raising wages and lowering costs, empowering women’s rights, workers rights, climate justice, stopping official assaults on Black and Brown people in vulnerable communities…. And the Republicans are running on the status quo. Beyond that, President Trump is determined to make the election about himself.
Trump will make this election about him. That is the last thing most Republican candidates want with his poll numbers less than 40%, the lowest approval rating he’s ever had.
Both here in the Eastern Panhandle and Jefferson County and across West Virginia the issue that overwhelms any other issue and any ideology or other considerations is data centers.
Everyone, it seems, is opposed to data centers in West Virginia for several good reasons:
1) They use huge amounts of electricity and ground water forcing up costs for already rising utility rates and threatening wells and the aquifer.
2) After President Trump promised the high tech industry all the data centers they could use, West Virginia Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey made his first legislative priority an opening for data centers across our state. To rub salt in the wound, the legislation also prohibits towns, counties, cities or any local jurisdiction from regulating the data centers and prohibiting local protective regulations. The growing realization that the elites are behind the data centers just grinds the teeth of folks who voted for Trump and the GOP because they thought they were for regular, everyday people.
3) The 24/7 noise that never lets up at a minimum disrupts the peace of community, at worst is destructive and dangerous.
4) The return to or for the people who pay for the costs and suffer the consequences get nothing, nothing back. It is a straight up sell out that will cost real money for real people including Republicans.
Data centers are the unexpected, unforeseen issue that symbolizes the priorities for the Republicans and Democrats.
Data centers are exploitative and resource extraction like coal that invests nothing in the communities nor the people who live near them.
Both Jefferson and Berkeley Counties are facing planned data centers.
Because the data center legislation, HB 2014, was passed by the Republican legislators without any Democratic support, this issue is a defining issue, a single issue which will decide many votes angry about high tech data centers.
Data centers came up again inside Charles Town communities when door-knocking for Lanae Johnson for the Jefferson County Commission.
One young woman in a working class, very diverse neighborhood only had one question for Lanae: “Does she support data centers?” I happily responded absolutely no.
Lanae Johnson is a powerful leader, learning leadership in the United States Army where she served 23 years including deployment in the Mideast. She retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. Her life is settled. She is fulfilled and happy, but with the strong impulse to continue service.
Lanae Johnson is running to serve on the Jefferson County Commission which is dealing with lots of quality of life issues for all of us:
—Stopping the GOP data centers
— Overdevelopment eating up farm fields and wild woods
— Clean water preservation
— No suburbanization
The all Republican majority of the Jefferson County Commission is turning our precious piece of paradise into plastic tract lots where a pond once watered the cattle and the deer and fox in a pasture.
They’ve taken the side of developers and industrial machinery leading to the hated data centers.
The next few weeks will be frenzied in our county with the Republican status quo trying to stop a rising crop of wonderful young women running as Democrats and fighting for us.
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This piece originally ran in the Spirit of Jefferson
Review of the 2026 Book by Chuck Klosterman, FOOTBALL
By Gene Carroll
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Look at you,” said my father. “You’re done. Done!”
Those words were spoken to me late during an autumn night back in 1973 at Lock Haven hospital in the north central Pennsylvania river town by the same name that hugs the west branch of the Susquehanna River. My hard-working father drove four hours to witness the consequences of the vicious hit I absorbed at football practice earlier that day as a member of the NCAA Division III Lock Haven State College Bald Eagles. It was my final play as a football player. I had been injured before playing football—in little league and in high school—but this time I was lying in a hospital bed with a severe concussion and my head in traction due to pinched nerves in my neck.
Blows to the head are at the center of Klosterman’s rigorous new book, FOOTBALL. Reading it unlocked this painful, momentous memory of a football injury that changed the direction of my life. The author critically explores the cultural and social power of the most popular sport in the country. American football attracts more viewers than, well, than anyone or anything else. And while the game is a dominating force in American culture, the author believes there’s evidence sufficient to conclude that all the football fuss is going to fade over the next few generations—and for a reason akin to what happened to me in 1973.
Here’s the hurt (pun intended): despite all the hype and the billions and billions of dollars; the extravagant new stadiums (a few years ago, NYS Governor Kathy Hochul strong armed the NYS legislature to hand over $500 million in tax-payer dollars to help her hometown Buffalo Bills build the new stadium they are about to occupy); the political, economic and social media power and influence of the owners; the high-profile of star players; the zillions of dollars in broadcast contracts; the fading away of the old-school mentality (“no pain no gain”); and all the modern training techniques and game rules implemented to prevent and reduce injuries, the consequences of the game’s physical violence are profoundly more brutal than was understood until the past few years.
Ever hear of a disease of the brain called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)? It’s caused by—how to put this?—repeated blows to the head! It is a direct consequence of the violent way the game is played. Klosterman provides dramatic data on the first page of the book’s Chapter 9 that plainly put just zeroes in on the problem:
“As of this writing, 376 deceased NFL players have had their brain autopsied and 345 of those brains showed evidence of CTE.” (page 223)
Is it irony? Recently, just as I was close to finishing FOOTBALL and began to draft this review essay, a new study about CTE, beyond the data provided in the book, was described in the August 26, 2026 New York Times in an article by John Branch, “Study Links Brain Disease To at Least 1 in 4 in N.F.L.”
Here is a key passage from Branch’s reporting:
“If the new study’s statistics were applied to today’s players—1,696 on the league’s 32 regular-season rosters, not including more than 500 members of practice squads and those ineligible due to injury—at least 400 of them would be diagnosed with C.T.E.
Experts say that the rate of brain disease represents an occupational safety hazard with little comparison in the American workplace.”
The article went on to quote former Obama Administration OSHA Director David Michaels who said, “I’ve never seen anything comparable” to the data about degenerative neurological disease even when referencing the high rates of coal miners succumbing to black lung disease or workers exposed to asbestos.
Corporations making lots of money while their employees, admittedly willingly and well paid, take huge risks with their health. Nothing new here.
What is not quite new but is on the rise, and it gets to the main reason Klosterman sees football’s future in decline, is the question at the grassroots of it all, the kitchen-table question which contains power sufficient to bring the entire enterprise down with it over time.
What’s a parent to do?
Klosterman’s main proposition is that American football is poised to decline over the next generation or two in a way similar to the reason for the steep decline of horse racing over recent generations. That is, people do not use or own horses anymore, as much as these beautiful creatures are admired and often loved. In the case of football, fewer teenage boys are playing it, and the reason is that it is demonstrably more dangerous than we knew. The blinders are coming off.
And this issue hits home again. An increasingly recognized family dynamic happening across the country is reflected in this interaction with my one of my dear sisters (I was blessed with three) some 15-18 years ago. Her son was about to become a teenager, and I began to gently pester him about signing up for football. His broad shoulders had me thinking “linebacker.” He was not a large boy, but solid, strong, healthy, and apparently with the intelligence and athletic skills and attitude to play a physically demanding sport. At some point my sister called me. Let’s say it was not a long discussion as she ripped me a new one by making it absolutely clear her son was not going to play football and I was to shut my face about it. Plainly, she said to me, “After I saw what my brothers endured playing football, especially you, there is no way I am going to allow him to play.” This is the power dynamic in our society that cannot be stopped if it continues.
There’s one passage in Klosterman’s tome that speaks to me now as I ponder whether or not to continue active fealty to my favorite NFL team, the Philadelphia Eagles—(or Iggles in southeast Pennsylvania and south-central New Jersey parlance):
“The risks inherent in football do not make football unique. What makes football unique is the colossal audience that views it as entertainment, making millions of seemingly uninvolved people complicit in whatever damage it incurs. (page 225)
The other major issue Klosterman deserves credit for diving into is the continuing racism within the NFL, despite the fact that a majority of active players are Black. True, the NFL has moved beyond the racist trope that prevented Black players from becoming NFL Quarterbacks. Their excellent play speaks for itself. But Klosterman’s identification of a certain caste system that still remains with regard to certain positions demonstrates how deeply he has studied the financial and racial politics of the NFL. Most NFL cornerbacks are Black, and corners are the most high-profile players on defense. When they make a mistake and a receiver they cover scores a touchdown, they are exposed. Everyone can see they were beaten on the play. As a former corner myself, I know this dynamic well. But unfortunately for me, millions of dollars of pay were not at stake. Many of the NFL’s defensive safeties are white. Their vulnerable high-profile position is the same as the corner. Yet their salaries are higher. Why? Fortunately, the players have a strong union, the NFL Players Association, which is seeking redress for this inequity. One passage from Klosterman’s text in which he examines race is one of the sharpest statements I’ve come across about the absurdity and stupidity of racism—one of the highlights of the book:
“Part of what makes social prejudice so demoralizing is the assumption that it’s inherently built in to human nature, and that the power of an illogical bias is the way it’s immune to all evidence contradicting its illogical premise. This is also why the volatility increases whenever a bias is overcome.” (page 177)
Another example of how the world is changing that may have negative long-term implications for American football has to do with the influence of language. Klosterman does not address this question, but I think it fits into the discussion. This summer I watched a soccer match for the very first time. Or is it a football match? It was the July 19 World Cup Final in which Spain, as literally the whole world knows, defeated Argentina 1-0. I was hesitant to do this. Because I once played football in high school and college—the serious head-bashing American version—I could care less about the World Cup.
Coaxing me to sit down and watch the game with her was my wife. Though not an active fan, she felt the World Cup electricity in the New York City air generated by the millions of soccer fans—sorry, I meant football—who reside here. (Indeed, a little more than one-third of NYC residents are foreign born. Over the three-week stretch of the World Cup games, I began to take notice. At my neighborhood bodega, the country-specific (Colombia) soccer—or rather football—regalia worn each day by the proprietors left no doubt about their sympathies. This vibe was everywhere in New York City. Taking a constitutional over the Brooklyn Bridge’s narrow walkway during the weeks of the World Cup (part of my exercise routine) involved squeezing by aggressive hawkers selling $30 t-shirts emblazoned with the football (soccer?) team logo of whichever UN member nation you fancied. Business was brisk; they operated on the bridge most days though it’s a no-no to do so according to NYC regs. Because of the joyous World Cup, no one cared, including New York’s finest. NYPD presence was at low tide on my walks, that’s for sure.
Since the constituencies of the World Cup represent the immense majority of humanity who describe the game they play as kicking a football, not a soccer ball, what do we do with the word football? In former times, where my roots are laid, football meant the American game played with the leather spiral. Are those days over here in the good ‘ole US of A? When referring to the stateside version of football, do we need to make “American” the adjective, as in, American football? Is this a subtle example of the waning influence of our post WW II global cultural and economic dominance? It’s just a question, but a new one to be sure.
It gets personal yet again. I am blessed with three granddaughters, two of whom live near the German city of Hamburg. The oldest, Jonna, who enjoyed playing football, told me that the word soccer is not used in Germany (or anywhere else in Europe). She was emphatic that the name of the game she was playing is called Fußball. To her, and again, for the vast majority of residents of planet Earth, the game I know as soccer is what is known elsewhere as football. Yes, the NFL is trying to develop a fan base in Europe and South America by showcasing occasional NFL games in major cities like London or Rio. What the heck does the NFL call the game when played overseas? Football? What? But the population outside of the US plays their version of football, not the NFL’s. If they don’t play the NFL’s game in their own communities then it is only a spectacle played in the soccer stadium—I mean in the football stadium. And it is only on television and streaming services, not backyards or playing fields.
Will that lack of personal, cultural and grassroots connection be sufficient to cement a fan base outside of the US? I think not. What, then, will be the long-term strategy of NFL marketing planners? And what then will parents do in Brazil or Germany or Ireland or Mexico or Australia when the version of football that requires repeated blows to the head wants to set up shop in schools and communities?
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The History of The Goito Street Urban Gardens in Livorno, Italy
By Carlo Banchieri
A 6-Hectare Urban Oasis With a 1700s Well Threatened By Overdevelopment
LIVORNO, ITALY – A remarkable story of urban green protection, archaeology, and biodiversity is unfolding in the heart of Livorno.
The “Goito Street Urban Gardens” are a 6-hectare public green oasis.
They are famous in the city’s history for a major protest where citizens physically blocked heavy machinery. Today, this space faces a critical moment after the land was recently sold at a bankruptcy auction to a private developer.
The story began in 2013, when residents of Livorno recovered a huge piece of land that had been abandoned for over twenty years.
Many elderly people and regular citizens found a vital community space here. Together, they rolled up their sleeves and took care of the greenery day after day. They cleared the overgrown areas, farmed the land, and watered the plants.
In this way, they transformed an illegal dumping ground into a thriving social garden, an open-air cultural center, and a vital green lung for the entire city.
The 2016 Bulldozer Block and the Late-1700s Well
The defense of this green space has deep roots. In March 2016, residents and activists formed a human shield to block three large bulldozers that had entered the area for a construction project. They successfully stopped the destruction of the park and saved it.
In the following years, the ecological and historical value of the site became even more clear.
Excavation work done by the citizens brought to light an extraordinary ancient well dating back to the late 1700s.
This adds a deep and objective historical and archaeological value to the area.
This site holds an irreplaceable cultural heritage that requires protection under national cultural heritage laws to prevent it from being erased by real estate projects.
The 2026 Auction Sale and the Project that Erases the Woods
Despite the immense social and historical value of this natural area for Livorno, the 6-hectare park was recently put up for auction by the court. In July 2026, the land was officially sold for over 1 million euros to a private developer.
This puts this precious natural space at risk with a massive construction project.
The plan uses an “80/20” split, where 80% of the area would theoretically remain green and 20% would be built upon. However, this proposal brings a destructive reality. To build that 20%, the project plans to completely cut down the entire woods present in the area. This compromise would erase the true natural heart of the park, its rich biodiversity, the protected animal species that find shelter there, and the fruits of years of community care. Citizens are asking the Municipality of Livorno to step in with an expropriation to officially turn the entire area into a 100% protected public park.
This Story Has a Global Value
The story of the Goito Street Gardens reflects the battles of local communities worldwide to protect natural spaces and urban ecosystems from the spread of concrete and from construction projects that sacrifice trees and ancient woods. It shows how vital it is to keep green areas accessible and alive inside cities for the health and well-being of all citizens.
A total of 120 self-managed urban gardens have been created, along with small picnic areas under the trees, equipped with benches and tables. The site also hosts cultural and political initiatives.
In 2016, the former owner, a construction cooperative named CLC, tried to enter the area with bulldozers. They were blocked by a wall of activists who prevented them from entering. The activists were all reported for private violence but were later acquitted by a judge.
On July 30 of this year, the area was sold at auction for 1.2 million euros to a local businessman from Livorno, Stefano Frangerini. Over the years, his company has won numerous contracts from the Municipality of Livorno. The Court must hand over the land “free of people and property” within 120 days, so an eviction is expected in the coming weeks.
In recent days, highly attended public meetings have taken place. A large protest march took place on September 5, starting at 4:00 PM from the green space on Via Goito and heading to Piazza del Municipio. The demonstration was accompanied by three days of free camping, running from September 3 to September 6. Shortly, four permanent garrisons will be set up at the four entrances of the land to prepare to resist the eviction by any means.
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Cancel Thanksgiving? A Progressive Guide To Handling The Holidays
By Steve Early
It’s a good thing that labor journalist and author Matt Witt was not running for governor of Wisconsin this year like DSA candidate Francesca Hong.
Democratic primary rivals and Republican opposition researchers would have badly distorted the message of Witt’s new book Make Holidays Your Own (Common Ground Press). It encourages creative rethinking of family gatherings and community practices on major holidays.
In their effort to discredit Hong, her foes in both parties created what the New York Timescalled a “social media kerfuffle” over old social media posts dissing Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween. The outspoken state legislator and former restaurant owner from Madison lost her August 11 primary despite polling very strongly beforehand. Given the annual sense of foreboding that overtakes millions of Americans when tense family re-unions draw near in late November, Hong’s past call for Thanksgiving to be “canceled” — because of its connection to “colonialism” — probably had its local fans.
Under fire on the campaign trail, Hong did concede that bringing people together around a table can be “a good thing.” But, according to the Times, she also courted controversy by “questioning the value of Valentine’s Day and Christmas trees.” So not only Wisconsin turkey farmers, but gift card sellers and Christmas tree growers — if sufficiently miffed — might have voted instead for the moderate Democrat from Milwaukee, David Crowley, who won the primary.
And even if Hong had prevailed, according to the Times, she faced the challenge of winning over voters like John Wilson, a 61-year old pharmacist from Platteville, WI., who usually “leans Democratic.” However, when asked whether he favored Hong or U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, Wilson chose the latter because “you have to take people at their word” about serious matters like Thanksgiving.
Tiffany has strong views on holidays too; in 2021, he was one of 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth Day a federal holiday, which won’t be popular with African-American voters statewide.
Just A Few Days Off
In the future, left-leaning candidates can avoid even momentarily distracting flaps like this by reading Matt Witt’s book — hopefully, before pulling the trigger on Twitter, in a moment of pique. The few paid days off that most Americans get to enjoy should not be cancel culture targets, when, as the author argues, they can be celebrated in ways “more historically accurate, meaningful, inclusive, and fun.”
In Make Holidays Your Own, Witt offers much creative advice about dealing with that day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, the 4th of July and eight others; his focus is on countering their crass commercialization, historical baggage, stultifying traditionalism, or exploitation by the right.
See, for example, the garish 250th birthday party staged on July 4 of this year in Washington, D.C. by the White House and its corporate funders. While no doubt critical of that, Abdul El-Sayed, the successful Democratic Senate primary winner in Michigan is definitely tip-toeing around the issue of fireworks on the 4th.
As the Times notes, “he has deleted a number of videos and posts where he floated the idea of abandoning fireworks on Independence Day.” El-Sayed’s press spokesperson is now reminding voters that he “is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander.”
In other words, he’s an All-American guy! As Witt explains, “In every culture, holidays matter. They come with a message and symbols — with a story that reinforces a certain way of looking at society and passes on certain values to the next generation.” According to the author, what’s good about remaking holidays, in ways that send a different message “is that you don’t have to convince everyone in your community who doesn’t agree. They can celebrate however they want and so can you.”
A Labor Day History Lesson
And sometimes the development of alternative celebrations — such as the reclaiming of May Day by the modern day, more immigrant influenced U.S. labor movement — can lead to two opportunities to picnic, protest, and march, rather than just one!
As a former communications director for the United Mine Workers and Service Employees International Union, the author delves, most informatively, into the political agenda behind the creation of Labor Day, as a counter to nascent working-class internationalism in the late 19th century.
Readers will learn that it was a corporate Democrat President — rather than any anti-union Republican — who first tried to erase the memory of May 1, as an international workers holiday born in the U.S.A., and replace it with an end of summer day-off out of step with the rest of the world.
To add insult to injury, May 1 then got officially rebranded, during the McCarthy era, as Law Day — although nobody, even corporate lawyers, get time off for that. Yet, thanks to multiple MAGA threats to the “rule of law” since Trump got re-elected, more than a thousand California bar members used their lunch hour to stage a first-time ever May Day-style protest in downtown San Francisco.
As Witt recounts, massive demonstrations seeking shorter working hours, occurred in Chicago and other U.S. cities on May 1, 1886; when repeated on May Day four years later, workers in “dozens of countries in Europe and Latin America also held rallies and marches to support the 8-hour day demand.”
Thereafter, much to the alarm of “robber barons” here and abroad, May 1 protests became “an annual event for workers all around the world” and an expression of cross-border solidarity between labor radicals of varying stripes.
Forget May Day?
By 1896, however, a business-backed resident of the White House named Grover Cleveland needed a “sop to unions.” He had, after all, just called out federal troops to crush the Pullman strike organized by the American Railway Union, a pioneering alternative to craft unionism led by future Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs (who was jailed for his role in the strike).
At Cleveland’s request, Congress declared that workers should be given a day off, every year, on the first Monday in September so, as Witt notes, “actions taken by U.S. unions would not be coordinated with their counterparts in the rest of the world.”
“Today, Labor Day is a paid holiday for about 3 in 4 workers in the U.S. Ironically, the lowest paid workers are the least likely to have the day off with pay. That includes non-union workers in food service, retail, hotels, agriculture, delivery and janitorial services, as well as part-time workers, or those whose companies claim are ‘independent contractors’ rather than employees.”
On the holiday counter-programming front, the good news is that May Day (as noted above) has made a major come-back over the last two decades. There is also “the shining example of the transformation of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day as now observed in many cities and states.”
Thanks to the efforts of progressive veterans’ groups like Veterans for Peace and Common Defense, at least some commemorative events on Memorial Day and Veterans Day now focus on peace and justice issues, rather than uncritical celebration of past wars.
In his chapter on Martin Luther King Day, the author suggests a range of activities that “can be about the movement and not just the man.” (This is advice that venerators of Cesar Chavez are taking, but only belatedly, after recent revelations about his history of sexual abuse while president of the United Farm Workers.)
Witt reports that all proceeds from his book are going to Rethinking Schools, a “national nonprofit organization that supports social, economic, and environmental justice teaching at a time when the very idea of public education is under attack. Rethinking Schools’ materials have been used by tens of thousands of educators and have reached millions of students.”
Let’s hope that Make Holidays Your Own also gets into the hands of many educators who have to come up with fresh ideas for in-school celebrations of holidays, that cannot be cancelled even in blue states. But, of course, don’t want their personal creativity in the classroom (or pet peeves) unleashing a conservative backlash of the sort that did not help Hong.
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Door Knocking For Democracy In The Eastern Panhandle
By Stewart Acuff
Andy and I were working the doors on River Road just downstream from Shepherdstown – walking, hustling, climbing stairs, door knocking for democracy. It was a day along the Potomac made even more fun because everyone I meet was already supporting Jenny Thacker!
West Virginians and Americans know that our national and state leaders are working hard as they can to steal everything we have that ain’t nailed down.
West Virginians are already suffering unnecessary, cruel stress, tension and anxiety from Gov. Morrisey’s brutal promise to build data centers, creations of destruction in our communities.
We know the GOP Governor Morrissey and his GOP majority passed HB 2014 which opened West Virginia up to all data center pollution and poison. The legislation also outlawed local officials and jurisdictions – eg towns and counties – from doing ANYTHING to protect local residents.
Berkeley County Indivisible is working hard to organize a town hall September 12 at 6pm at the Spring Mill High School.
Data centers are known community busters taking our ground water, poisoning our soil, dirtying our air and raising electric rates.
WITH NO POSITIVE RETURN FOR US
President Trump did a deal and made a promise to the high tech stupid rich who want us to serve them like serfs on medieval manor.
Our New Jersey Governor (Morrissey came from NJ and he and his wife were DC lobbyists) wants to turn us from Wild, Wonderful West Virginia to Industrial West Virginia with data centers all over our beautiful, glorious natural creation.
Our president is focused on anything but us. He lost his war in Iran and all we got was 4 dollar gas, 5 dollar diesel and the danger of a world war.
Trump uses America’s people, its strength, military, wealth and good will to leverage hotel deals, real estate deals and crypto currency. He and his kids are taking what belongs to us.
Now is the time we regular folks stand up and step out to take justice and fairness and a better life for everyone personally.
Seven of us on the last Sunday of August gathered with Jenny Thacker to learn to door knock and then go do it so she and we can elect good folks.
Jenny is great. She is us. Everyday folks. She’s whip-smart, very hardworking for us, and wonderfully humble. A joy to work with. After we door knocked for a couple hours, I asked her what the door knocking means to her. This is her response:
“I wanted to make a difference. The more I talk to people, the more I realize how much this community needs someone to step up who cares about our issues. I didnt know if I’d get support. I didn’t know that friends would join me. I just knew I had to do something. So I went to events almost every day. Tree plantings, town councils, festivals–every place where I could meet constituents and find out what they need from Charleston. And I started knocking on doors. It’s really intimidating the first time you knock on a stranger’s door. There have been lots of firsts. First time launching a campaign, first debate, first time talking at a fundraiser, first time asking for help with it all.”
“That Sunday afternoon was the first time a group of people came out to canvass with me. What a feeling of warmth when a bunch of people show up because they believe in you.”
“These people add to the movement that will make it possible to make change in Charleston. These people give me the support that will allow me to support the community.”
“THIS IS THE FORCE THAT POWERS THE MOVEMENT.”
Thank you for standing up and stepping out, Jenny Thacker.
Labor Day is the traditional begin of serious campaigning and ground operations in neighborhoods, towns and counties.
So we’re already rolling on country roads and small town streets door knocking ahead of the old-fashioned beginning of campaigning.
We will bring you more stories from the streets. I’ll be out every week with Eastern Panhandle candidates who oppose data centers and oppose the Valley Link transmission line, will fight inflation and bring costs down and fight Trump’s inflation and fight for real freedom for all people. Aka Democrats.
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