Jennifer Epps-Addison, Network President and Co-Executive Director, The Center for Popular Democracy
I’ve learned that it’s not enough to say what we’re against. Our resistance isn’t just about defeating Donald Trump, it’s about creating a world where we all have the freedom to thrive.
We need to be as unapologetic in our politics of abundance and inclusion as Trump is in his agenda of scarcity, white supremacy, and suppression.
Our resistance helped deliver the most progressive and diverse Congress our country has ever seen. While Trump’s attacks have targeted marginalized communities, our secret weapon has been fighting his administration collectively. This moment requires us to go beyond solidarity. Our greatest form of resistance is rejecting Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy and deciding to become co-conspirators fighting together to advance our shared values.
Medea Benjamin, Co-Founder, CODEPINK
Resistance to Trump’s foreign policy excesses involves a coordinated inside-outside strategy. The best example is Yemen, where Trump’s embrace of the grotesque Saudi bombing campaign is being countered on the inside by Democrats in the House and Senate, with a sprinkling of decent Republicans. Pushing from the outside are a dazzling array of anti-war groups and humanitarian organizations, along with libertarians and anti-interventionist conservatives. This big tent coalition, from the CATO Institute to CODEPINK, is successfully using the 1973 War Powers Resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen.
With trigger-happy National Security Adviser John Bolton in the White House, resistance also means stopping new military entanglements, including in Venezuela and Iran. In the case of Iran, there has been a successful push to get the Democratic Party on record supporting U.S. reentry into the Iran nuclear agreement. Progressives have to fight not only rightwing Republicans, but also mainstream Democrats who line up with them to uphold U.S. militarism and exceptionalism.
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Co-Executive Director, Highlander Research and Education Center
We must analyze the conditions that got us here. Key among them is the almost complete concession of territory by the left of people of faith and of rural communities. This also goes for the abandonment of incarcerated people and, until it’s convenient, black communities and viable black women candidates. Running on watered-down, neoliberal platforms and remaining unaccountable to movements and the most marginalized in our communities is a losing strategy. So is blaming these marginalized folks for their electoral failures.
Now is the time to follow the leadership of the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project, Black Voters Matter, the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People and Families Movement, and others leading the way on what electoral justice can and should look like in our lifetime. Now is also the time to build infrastructure for us to govern ourselves like the Southern Movement Assembly and the Jackson People’s Assembly in Mississippi. Now is the time to be, as historian Vincent Harding would say, the midwives that will birth a new America.
Jesse Hagopian, Seattle Educator; Steering Committee, Black Lives Matter at School
Lesson Plan for Liberation
Lesson objective:
Stop Trump’s agenda—and the political and economic establishment that enables him.
Materials Needed:
Unions
Parents, students, and educators
Anti-racist and anti-xenophobic social movements
Anti-sexist and anti-homophobic social movements
Working class struggle
Solidarity
Lesson Overview:
In response to the question, “How do we stop Trump’s attacks on the working class, people of color, and immigrants?” Los Angeles educators wrote the correct answer on the chalkboard: “Social movement unionism.” It’s time we pay attention. Their recent massive six-day strike won a nurse in every school, limits on racist “random” searches of students, commitments to capping the number of charter schools, standardized testing reductions, enforceable caps on class sizes, a 6 percent pay raise, a $1 million legal defense fund for immigrant families, and much more.
By uniting with Black Lives Matter at School and the immigrant rights movement, educators demonstrated the immense power of combining social movements with labor’s strike weapon. This is the force needed to stop Trump and the richest 1 percent.
Assessment:
Imagine mass strikes around the country demanding reunification of immigrant families, demanding free health care for all, demanding a $15 per hour minimum wage, demanding equal pay for women, demanding prosecution of police for murder, demanding a Green New Deal.