White House/Pete Souza
U.S. President Barack Obama greets U.S. troops at a mess hall at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, March 28, 2010. White House Photo by Pete Souza
Liesel Kershul fiercely opposed the war in Iraq. She’s been a Bernie Sanders acolyte since the early aughts, and she spent her high school years organizing on-campus protests against police brutality.
Then she married a Marine. While her views didn’t change, her expression of them did.
“I felt like, oh, I need to keep my mouth shut because I love this man and I don’t want to interfere with his career,” Kershul says in an interview.
Military spouses often take their cues from the military, where service members are generally discouraged from openly discussing politics, especially if they fall on the left end of the spectrum. Ask any service member what news station plays in the chow hall, and chances are they’ll say Fox. Progressive views tend to stand out, and those who hold them keep quiet.
But after Donald Trump was elected President in November, Kershul couldn’t keep her politics to herself. In a post inviting friends and family members to join her at the January Women’s March in Washington, D.C., the 34-year-old “completely came out on Facebook as a progressive.”
After posting, she was surprised to learn that there were many other women in the military community like her.
Progressive affinity and political action groups have popped up in online spaces in the wake of the November election to engage, embolden and rally liberal military spouses, veterans, and service members.
“For many of us, it feels like a sea change,” says Kershul.
While marching on the National Mall, she met Angie Drake, co-founder of Homefront Progressives, an online networking group that grew out of a military offshoot of the wildly popular, pro-Hillary Clinton Facebook group Pantsuit Nation.
Drake gave Kershul a pile of yellow sashes to hand out to military families in attendance, a reference to the yellow ribbons commonly tied around trees and outside of homes while family members are deployed. They disappeared like hot cakes.
“Looking around that crowd, I thought, wow, I am definitely not alone here,” says Kershul.
“There is a strong push to get people to volunteer to help change the 2018 elections, to get more military community members involved in politics, to get more veterans and spouses to run for office,” says Drake, describing the work of Homefront Progressives.
As the 2018 election nears, Homefront Progressives will focus on voter education, registration, volunteering, and “how to do so as a military community member without stepping on a lot of toes at the local base,” she adds.
Drake, who has been an Air Force spouse for about 27 years, said she operates public and private pages for the group. On the private webpage, military progressives give each other the encouragement to speak out in their communities. On the public page, members have shared stories about sexual assault, economic insecurity, and their decisions to publicize their political views after years of silence.
Kershul is a regular contributing writer. “I, for one, am no longer willing to wear a muzzle,” she wrote in an April post.
Kat Howell, who is married to a Marine, started a private Facebook group, Liberal Military Network, after the recent presidential election. Through a string of connected Facebook groups, she met Kershul, who invited her to blog for Homefront Progressives.
“There are more people coming forward, and it gives me a lot of hope that maybe at our next duty station I'll actually get to meet [some] in person,” Howell says.
Another organization, Common Defense, was founded during the 2016 presidential campaign by veterans opposed to Donald Trump. Run by an all-veteran staff, members of the group organize locally to stand up for social, economic and environmental justice. Co-founder Alexander McCoy tells The Progressive he believes it’s the first progressive organization to be run by veterans.
McCoy, who left the Marine Corps in 2013, says the impetus for Common Defense came during the 2016 presidential campaign. After he read in The Washington Post that Trump had lied about donating money to veterans charities, he put together an impromptu protest in front of Trump Tower, inviting veteran friends he knew in the city.
“The next thing I knew I was on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC that night,” McCoy says. “That’s when we realized, we’re onto something here. It’s so important and so powerful that we speak out as progressive veterans.”
One of the Common Defense’s first actions was a partnership with MoveOn.org to call on Senator McCain to withdraw his endorsement of Trump following the candidate’s attack on the Khan family.
“We were shocked and dismayed at the outcome and realized this is going to be a longer fight,” McCoy says of the election. The group now has 150,000 members, including military family members and supporters.
The grassroots group recently participated in the Our Revolution People’s Platform, mobilizing members to confront senators over the proposed ObamaCare repeal.
“You can’t separate this President's agenda from the impact it has on real people who have served in uniform,” says McCoy.
Asked about the group’s stance towards military and defense policy, McCoy says the membership is “a big tent.” Some members are explicitly anti-war, while others are simply critical of defense overspending.
“Most people would say we need a military,” says McCoy. “And that military, if you have to have it, should be filled with people who represent the United States. And it should be filled with people with moral integrity. I don’t see a contrast there.”
Many members of Homefront Progressives agree. Jessica Hall, an Army spouse who manages the group’s social media account, doesn’t see a contradiction between supporting her husband’s work and progressive causes. And she rejects the notion that it’s unpatriotic to consider cutting the defense budget in order to support social programs for all.
“We all want a strong military. But do I think it’s already really strong? Yes I do,” she says. “How can we support our military in a better way but also support these programs that help the rest of America?”
Stephanie Russell-Kraft is a Brooklyn-based freelance reporter covering the intersections of religion, culture, law and gender. She has written for The New Republic, The Atlantic, Religion & Politics, Religion Dispatches, among others, and is a regular contributing reporter for Bloomberg Law.