Where do we turn now?
Here at The Progressive, we often turn to the most-read piece published in this magazine’s 115-year history.
“I know how black it looks today for you,” James Baldwin wrote in a 1962 letter to his teenage namesake nephew, remembering the day the latter was born in Harlem. “It looked black that day too. Yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other, none of us would have survived, and now you must survive because we love you and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.”
The outcome of the 2024 presidential election was not entirely unexpected by many of us at The Progressive. You might have noted that Kamala Harris looked nervous on our October/November edition cover. And she should have been—like others, we noted that Vice President Harris courted the “Never Trump” right and ran a Democratic campaign without the Democratic base. “Instead, Harris campaigned with billionaire celebrities, doubled down on war and genocide, embraced Biden instead of turning the page, and, most importantly, she did not provide credible and simple solutions for the economic woes afflicting most Americans,” Progressive contributor Arun Gupta summarized on Facebook. You may have read in that issue how Harris sold out climate commitments, immigrants, and Arab American and Muslim communities.
As a consequence, President-elect Donald Trump is poised to do more damage than he did during his first term. As Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker points out, fewer guardrails exist now than did then, whether via the media, the courts, or either of the two major parties. Many feel the weight of the Democratic Party’s crumbling moral authority over its support of the genocide in Gaza as heavily as its abandoned domestic promises. Where do we turn now? How are we supposed to understand ourselves in this context?
“They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it,” Baldwin wrote to his nephew.
In 2020, Yale University historian Greg Grandin won a Pulitzer Prize for explaining how we might understand and be released from this history. He argues in his book The End of the Myth that since the days of the Western frontier, the United States has been continuously expanding through war—whether against Indigenous peoples and nations or, once the frontier closed, peoples and nations abroad. Those in power sold the project of this continuous expansion outward through the promise of progressive gains at home.
Today, war remains the machine through which both major U.S. political parties operate. The Biden Administration spent more on military aid to Israel between October 2023 and October 2024, nearly $18 billion, than has been sent there in any other single year. Democrats in Congress approved billions more, and Israel’s aggression continues to expand across the region.
Some, like The Nation’s Jeet Heer, argue that the Democratic Party must “radically reform” and “become the party that aspires to be more than caretakers of a broken system but rather is willing to embrace radical policies to change that status quo.” Others, like Morgan State University professor and author Stacey Patton, are even less optimistic than that: “When you’ve seen history up close, laid bare in the archives, and you understand the brutal legacy that whiteness has perfected, the fall of an empire feels less like a crisis and more like an inevitable reckoning.”
Across the spectrum of reactions on the left, a common thread has emerged. Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, a co-chair of the 2017 Women’s March and co-founder of the social justice organization Until Freedom, took to Instagram from Detroit late on Election Night as a Trump victory looked likely. “This is the time to take your rage, to take your sorrow in this moment, or the many mixed feelings that you have, and to translate that into being productive in your local communities,” she said. “This is the moment to triple down.”
In this issue of The Progressive, you’ll find stories about what happens when we triple down on a transformative politics of the people at the ground level. These include labor writer Kim Kelly’s reporting on the worker wins once thought impossible at aircraft giant Boeing and Emily Markwiese’s coverage of union power growing in the most historically hostile of environments: Texas. Our former intern Nell Srinath reports on campus protest policies quietly rewritten in the wake of impactful pro-Palestine university encampments. Hannah Harris Green gives us a look at how the forces of venture capital are remaking cities at the neighborhood level—making local connections and organizing all the more difficult. Photojournalist Justin Cook’s dispatch from the Hurricane Helene-devastated mountains of Western North Carolina shows us how, despite festering political divides, mutual aid is flourishing. “Turns out climate resilience is just each other,” one Asheville resident tells Cook.
“We with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend,” Baldwin ended his letter, published sixty-two years ago as this issue hits newsstands. “Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.”
Where do we turn now? Toward each other. With accountability, justice, love, and in solidarity,
Alexandra Tempus