“If we do not hang together, we shall most assuredly hang separately,” says actor Howard da Silva as Benjamin Franklin in the original Broadway cast of the 1969 Tony-Award-winning musical 1776. Da Silva knew whereof he spoke—in 1951, the actor had been a victim of the infamous Hollywood blacklist when he and hundreds of other performers, writers, and directors lost their livelihoods in the 1940s and 1950s on account of their political beliefs.
This issue of The Progressive is all about people hanging together in difficult times. Sometimes you do not know who your community is until you start building. Sometimes your allies and comrades are people who come from very different places than you. Sometimes we are bound together by experiences, common values, or common threats. Sophia Piña-McMahon tells the story of a mostly Black and Latine community in North Richmond, California, long exposed to pollution and toxins from a nearby refinery, that is working to build a sustainable urban farm; Tina Kelley examines two towns in New Jersey where people of different races and backgrounds are working together to build space where residents can “interact, form friendships, and participate fully” in community life; and Melinda Tuhus chronicles a community and farm for unhoused people being built near a wealthy suburb in Connecticut.
Henry Craver’s “On the Line” photo essay, and Tausif Sanzum’s “Further Comment” describe the difficulties faced by thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers as they try to navigate a broken system. And John Nichols looks at hopes for the 2026 electoral year as new alliances and political platforms are being shaped, while Erik Gleibermann reports on the various resistance efforts underway in the streets to respond to Trump Administration policies. Book reviews by Eleanor J. Bader and Zach D. Roberts visit some moments of organizing in past history, and Nael Hijjo gives his first-person account of growing up in Gaza and learning the spirit of Palestinian resistance.
Our interview with historian Aviva Chomsky analyzes what’s new in U.S. imperialism and what’s been built in from the beginning, and the Reverend David C. Couper, a former police chief, asserts that the role of local police can and should be to protect our democracy from the excesses of an imperial presidency. Finally, in what may be the newest area of contention around the United States, Michaela Brant and Kaitlyn Salazar report on the grassroots opposition growing—and the new coalitions forming—to oppose the siting of huge, unaccountable data centers that use water and other resources while leaving local communities high and dry.
This issue marks our first during the semiquincentennial year when the United States is celebrating the Declaration of Independence that Franklin and others put forward in 1776. As Abraham Lincoln would say some eighty-seven years later in his dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, we are now “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Donald Trump’s vision of this 250th anniversary commemoration includes directing the Smithsonian Institution to review its exhibitions and materials with a goal “to celebrate American exceptionalism” and “remove divisive or partisan narratives.” But that vision has also included the surging of an increasingly militarized but undertrained Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence in U.S. cities, which on January 7 resulted in the killing of an unarmed mother of three in her car on a Minneapolis, Minnesota, street. The shooting led to more than 1,000 protests in cities and towns across the country under the banner of “ICE out for Good” (using the last name of the woman who was shot by an ICE employee). But it has also led to a stepped-up ICE presence in Minneapolis that has included searches of private homes without a judge’s warrant—which sounds a lot like one of the twenty-seven grievances enumerated against Britain’s King George III in the 1776 Declaration of Independence.
In 1969, the political folk singer Phil Ochs recorded his song “Another Age,” which contains the line, “We were born in a revolution and we died in a wasted war.” Hopefully, that will not be the ultimate theme of this year’s semiquincentennial. We have a difficult time ahead of us, but if we can all hang together, we have a good chance of success. As the French paleontologist and theologian the Reverend Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote, “The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.”