GenZ on the Rise: The GOP Is Pushing to Steal Students’ Votes, Rolling Stone, 11.28.23

This Nov. 28th Rolling Stone piece by Tessa Stuart made me think of this quote out of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Doesn't this resonate for the moment we're all experiencing right now? I know it does for me.

GenZ youth are a clear force in state and national politics. Born sometime around 1996-2012, they are between the ages of 10 and 27. Many of these are our students in our classes in high school or college. They're the younger ones in our graduate, especially master's, programs. 

They're unlike any previous generation. They are, for example, the most generationally diverse age-generational cohort in U.S. history (e.g., as compared to Boomers, Gen X, or Millennials). The generation following them, "Gen Alpha," will be even more diverse. Key quote:

“Young people are the reason why Biden won in 2020 and Democrats up and down the ballot won in 2022 and 2023,” says Abhi Rahman, national communications director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “If Gen Z continues to vote, we’re on the cusp of the most progressive era in our country’s history. Republicans know this as well, and that’s why they’re doing everything they can to stop young people from voting, including the fight for restrictions that we’re seeing play out in states like Wisconsin today.”

Yes, they are progressive and within GenZ, this attribute applies more strongly to females than males (Twenge, 2023). I can't help but think about reproduction rights and resistance to macho, misogynist culture playing into this. GenZ youth are also "digital natives." At least in developed countries, they only know this digital, online world that we have created for them—for better and for worse. 

To their credit, Gen Z has normalized greater openness on mental health and illness. That's also a good thing so that folks don't suffer from stigma or fail to get the mental health services and supports they need.

The pandemic, curiously, gave not only a bump to Boomers and Gen X-ers with expanded computer skills like Zoom conference calls, but GenZ did, too, albeit from a different, more skillful starting point. 

We also got pronouns from GenZ. The right, and some on the left, decry this, but it's probably because this generation, more than any other one prior, has simply shown more of themselves and who they are by virtue of social media. I've been studying this for awhile. I find it all so fascinating. Pronouns are not at all about political correctness, but about inclusion in being one's full self and that's a great thing.

What works for GenZ is the one-on-one. They pay attention to people they know and trust and who are authentic with them. So they take in information not just differently, but, I think, with a modicum of healthy skepticism. Tik Tok, specifically, I hear, is also huge for information sharing within this generation and for younger millennials—and for strategizing their next moves, too. Incidentally, older Millennials prefer Instagram and Facebook. I got this specific information from a friend who works at the UT library.

My message to GenZ and younger Millennials is the following: 

First, you are genuinely feared. This Rolling Stone article attests to this.

Second, no matter what, do not let the GOP or anybody or anything try and keep you from voting. Your vote is precious, now more than ever. If all of you vote, you WILL get the outcomes you seek and you WILL position the planet for its most progressive era in human history.

Third, yes, we need world peace and I'm with you on prioritizing the environment.

Fourth, your best resistance to oppression is to resist anyone or anything that seeks to take away your right to an abundant, fulfilling life—even as you always seek justice so that all may share in this abundance.

Fifth, get grounded in community and build ethical relationships that nurture your sense of self and that speak to the value you add just by being exactly who you are. 

Finally, always be ethical and responsible in your uses of power, considering always a role that caring adults, family members and elders play, or can play, in your life as mentors, advisers, and role models. Your thriving depends on your being in community. It's great for your health!

Much love and cariño to all of you in these worst and best of times.

Peace/paz,

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Twenge, J. M. (2023). Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future. Simon and Schuster.

The GOP Is Pushing to Steal Students’ Votes

Instead, they're seeing increased turnout and lawsuits challenging new restrictions

Instead, they're seeing increased turnout and lawsuits challenging new restrictions

LAST WEEK IN Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could invalidate the state’s comically, ludicrously, preposterously gerrymandered maps. If the court strikes those maps down, it will likely mean the end of the GOP’s decadeslong domination of the statehouse — and it will be because of what happened in Dane County in April.

Almost a quarter million voters turned out in Dane, home of University of Wisconsin, for a spring special election — several thousand more voters than turned out in Milwaukee, a county with almost double Dane’s population. A staggering 82 percent of Dane voters cast ballots to elevate liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court. Protasiewicz — whose vote could decide the gerrymandering case — ended up winning by 11 points.

Coming on the heels of the 2022 midterms — when Wisconsin led the nation in youth turnout in the country — the GOP judicial candidate’s April humiliation stunned the party. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker put it plainly: “Young people are the issue.”

“We’ve got to turn it around if we’re going to win again,” Walker, now the president of a conservative youth organization called Young America’s Foundation, told Fox News. The power that young voters wield was not exactly a revelation to Walker; as governor 12 years earlier, he signed a law making it harder to use a student ID to vote, prompting universities in Wisconsin to offer IDs that met the state’s new standards for free.

Student engagement has only soared in Wisconsin in the years since, but that hasn’t stopped the GOP from pulling pages from the same playbook. Across the country this year, targeted efforts to disenfranchise student voters have ramped up as election after election proved just how critical the bloc is to guarantee Democratic victories. With encouragement from influential GOP operatives, those efforts — which met with middling success in ‘23 — are poised to escalate in 2024. And they speak to a growing fear with which Republican officials and strategists regard young voters.

In Wisconsin, the GOP-controlled legislature has seized every opportunity to try and block students from voting. “We’ve seen really strong student engagement in our last couple of elections,” Morgan Hess, executive director of the Wisconsin Assembly Democrats, tells Rolling Stone. “And suddenly, we’re seeing new legislation that would prohibit student’s ability to vote.”

Hess points to GOP efforts over the past several years to make it harder to register, eliminate drop boxes, shorten early voting, increase residency requirements, and reduce polling locations — mostly in Madison and Milwaukee. “These are very targeted operations that serve to further entrench the power that they already have,” says Hess.

Months after their April routing, party functionaries at the Wisconsin GOP’s convention mulled a resolution demanding college students to vote absentee in their hometowns; one supporter of the resolution declared students had “hijacked” his city. The resolution failed to advance after another official raised the possibility that attacking students’ right to vote could backfire — an argument that seems prophetic in retrospect, as a growing number of polls show Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, outpolling Joe Biden with young voters.

Nevertheless, Republicans in state legislatures across the country this year have proposed laws targeting the student vote. In New Hampshire, House Republicans introduced a bill that would have prohibited any college students who pay out-of-state tuition from voting, and require the state’s colleges to provide the secretary of state with a list of eligible voters. Lawmakers “want the elections to be the reflection of those who reside in New Hampshire towns and who ultimately bear the consequences of the election results,” said Republican Rep. Sandra Panek, who introduced the measure in committee. (The bill was eventually killed.)

The same month, a GOP lawmaker in Texas introduced a bill that would ban polling places at colleges and universities. (That bill has not advanced out of committee.) In Virginia, there was a failed effort to repeal a law that allows anyone 16 or older to register to vote if they will be 18 by the next major election. And, according to the Voting Rights Lab, legislation seeking to change the rules around student IDs was introduced or enacted in at least 15 states this year.

It’s all part of a concerted strategy advanced by GOP operatives like Cleta Mitchell — one of the central figures behind Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. At a summit a few weeks after Wisconsin’s April special election, Mitchell told Republican donors that the party must do more to limit campus voting in swing states like Wisconsin “for any candidate other than a leftist to have a chance to WIN in 2024.”

Students and their advocates are pushing back against these efforts. In Wisconsin, leaflets distributed on campus ahead of April’s special election included information educating voters about the state’s ID requirements. In Idaho — the state that saw the largest increase in voter registrations from 18- and 19-year-olds ahead the 2022 midterms — a law set to go into effect Jan. 1, which bans the use of student IDs to register to vote or cast a ballot, is being challenged in lawsuits by the organization Babe Vote, the League of Women Voters and March for Our Lives Idaho. The groups claim that the law violates constitutional protections against age discrimination in voting.

“Young people are the reason why Biden won in 2020 and Democrats up and down the ballot won in 2022 and 2023,” says Abhi Rahman, national communications director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “If Gen Z continues to vote, we’re on the cusp of the most progressive era in our country’s history. Republicans know this as well, and that’s why they’re doing everything they can to stop young people from voting, including the fight for restrictions that we’re seeing play out in states like Wisconsin today.”

The Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority Wake up: Trump has fundamentally reshaped the electorate. This is good news for the fight against MAGA fascism.

Excellent analysis by Michael Podhorzer of an emerging anti-MAGA majority. This majority did not come into being because of 2016 voters switched sides in casting their votes in 2020. Instead, this was an artifact of a new, anti-MAGA majority who turned out to the polls—after not having voted in 2016. Podhorzer notes that

"Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory triggered the greatest increase in voting in midterms in American history and nearly the greatest increase for presidential elections. Turnout in the last three elections has literally been off the charts."

It's encouraging to see that young people—Gen Z and Millenials—are voting more as they age than prior generations. Also, those that didn't vote either for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in 2016 returned to the polls, including young white youth whose vote aligns less with their more pro-MAGA parents. Plus, these combinations of voters are more diverse than prior elections, giving these segments of the electorate an edge in 2020.

Podhorzer is correct in noting that we remain a divided nation—and how this is more the rule than the exception in our nation's history. I encourage you to also read Ronald Brownstein, who cites Podhorzer, in this June 24, 2022 article in The Atlantic titled, "America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good: The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly."

Podhorzer and Brownstein both point to the mid-twentieth century Great Society and civil rights reforms as the exception, rather than the rule. That is, the norm in U.S. history is division. I would like to push back on this and suggest that another interpretation, namely, that robust policy and political movements make a difference in people's lives, consciousness, and the well-being of our nation.

The good news is that we can relax a bit from all the doom and gloom reports that unlike Podhorzer, rely on polls instead of actual voting behavior, of voters leaning into fascist leaders. This means that Democrats' best route to victory—most particularly in purple states—is to focus on differentiating themselves from a party with, in his words, a "fascist movement’s agenda." 

In the meantime, as educators, we need to continue educating the next generation in the skills and habits of mind that promote a critical understanding of democracy and our nation's troubled history that respects and honors differences while simultaneously promoting unity consciousness, empathy, and solidarity with poor people's struggles.

As an electorate, we must of course continue supporting voting rights. Such an enlightening and worthwhile read. Thanks to Diane Ravitch for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority

Wake up: Trump has fundamentally reshaped the electorate. This is good news for the fight against MAGA fascism.

MICHAEL PODHORZER

JUN 8, 2023

In 2016, Trump shocked the world by tearing down the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Quickly, a new consensus congealed around the idea that despite having lost the national popular vote, and only barely having won the Electoral College, Trump had improved Republicans’ fortunes for the foreseeable future with his unique appeal to “uneducated” voters. Suddenly, white non-college voters became the “it” constituency. For the last seven years, even as their proportion of the population shrinks, the focus on them increases, most recently with assertions that Democrats have been continuously hemorrhaging working class voters. Despite everything we know about Trump, earlier this year there were a rash of stories about how Trump could win again in 2024 despite being the only president to ever incite a deadly attack on the Capitol to overturn an election he lost. In all those stories, “working class” voters were the basis for those predictions.

Yet, since 2016, Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five states everyone agrees Democratic hopes in the Electoral College and the Senate depend on. When Trump was sworn in, Republicans held four of those five states’ governorships, and six of the ten Senate seats. Moreover, Republicans defied history by losing nearly across the board in those states last year, the only time anything like that has happened to a Party running against such an unpopular president in a midterm.

How could all of this happen?

As the unique voter file analysis in this post confirms, it didn’t happen because very many of those who had voted for Trump in 2016 had buyers’ remorse. (Indeed, the number of 2016 voters switching sides has been historically low, and a wash as some have moved from Clinton to Trump.) Instead, Republicans have lost because of the emerging anti-MAGA majority consisting of those who did not vote in 2016. The literally unprecedented surge in new voters over the last three elections has two components: 1) young people are aging into the electorate, and are voting at a higher rate than previous generations at their age, and reject MAGA by 20-point margins, and 2) those who skipped 2016 (the so-called “Obama-none” voters) have returned. Those margins with young voters have two components – that young voters are much more diverse than the rest of the population, and young white people are far more anti-MAGA than their parents.

The Return of the Emerging Democratic Majority? by By Eric Levitz

Interesting—and indeed, hopeful—analysis of how the vote is trending across generations. Key quote:

 "If Republicans do not reconcile themselves to a more modern set of cultural values (and/or less plutocratic set of economic policies), generational churn will eventually make it very difficult for them to compete in national elections."

With the Texas Republican party in mind, the irony is that they see their cultural values and plutocratic economic policies as the very tools through which they can preserve their incumbencies, allowing them to use elective office for power hoarding and personal, as opposed to civic, gain.

In light of these trends, they would do well to re-think their strategy.

Angela Valenzuela

#GenZ #2024election

The Return of the Emerging Democratic Majority? 

by By Eric Levitz

Photo: SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett

The 2022 election was strange. Historically, the president’s party tends to suffer large losses in midterms, as its base grows complacent and swing voters indulge their fetish for divided government. And there was little reason to believe that last year would be an exception.

After all, last November, Joe Biden was a historically unpopular president presiding over exceptionally high inflation. Polls showed widespread disapproval of the Democratic administration in general and its economic management in particular. A “red wave” appeared to be cresting.

And yet that wave ebbed before it touched the nation’s most highly contested races: Even as Republicans won the two-party national vote for House control by a 51 to 49 percent margin in 2022, Democrats won 40 of the 64 races that were deemed very competitive by the Cook Political Report.

And in the closest Senate and gubernatorial races, the outcomes were even more odd. In the contests that Cook deemed either “toss-ups” or merely “leaning” toward one party, Democrats won 51 percent of the two-party vote — a higher share than they had secured in such races in 2020 — while claiming victories in 13 of 18 elections.

Altogether, this increased the Democratic Party’s power in the Senate and at the state level while leaving Republicans with a relatively meager nine-vote majority in the House. Had a few thousand more votes (in very specific places) shifted from Republicans to Democrats, Biden’s party would have retained full control of the federal government. As is, it still mounted one of the strongest midterm performances for an in-power party in modern American history.

By now, election analysts have produced plenty of compelling explanations for how this came to be. One is that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade scrambled conventional midterm dynamics. Major policy changes often spur short-term electoral backlashes. This is one reason why the president’s party has often struggled in midterm elections, which frequently follow ambitious legislative sessions. But in 2022, even though a Democrat was in the White House, Republicans delivered the year’s most disruptive policy change. Thus, in purple states where abortion policy was a live issue, swing voters in general (and women in particular) gave Democrats unusually strong support.

Another explanation for the red ripple was Donald Trump’s singularly bad taste in general-election candidates. In various competitive Senate and gubernatorial races, Republican primary voters nominated MAGA extremists at Trump’s request. This predictably rendered the party less competitive.

But a new analysis from the Democratic-data firm Catalist points to another critical factor: the political ascendance of millennials and zoomers.

America’s youngest adult generations had been integral to the 2018 blue wave. Millennials saw their turnout rate surge from 22 percent in the 2014 midterm to 42 percent four years later. In 2018, the oldest zoomers became eligible to vote in a midterm for the first time. And they cast ballots at a higher rate than millennials or Gen-Xers had in their respective first midterms. Critically, zoomers and millennials collectively cast more than 60 percent of their votes for Democrats, helping the party win the national House vote by a landslide margin.

This was an ominous development for the GOP. Still, Republican operatives could comfort themselves with a pair of thoughts. First, while America’s rising generations might turn out in historically high numbers to rebuke President Trump, their participation was bound to fall sharply once politics grew more banal. And second, though millennials and zoomers were currently the least Republican generations that America had produced since Lincoln’s time, they would surely age into a more ordinary partisan distribution.

The 2022 results were not kind to such wishful thinking. As Catalist’s analysis of voter-file data reveals, millennial and Gen-Z voters collectively comprised 26 percent of the 2022 electorate, up from 23 percent in 2018. This was partly a function of aging. More zoomers were eligible to vote last year than in 2018. But turnout among eligible voters was also a factor. Nationally, millennials and zoomers turned out at a rate comparable to their historically high 2018 mark, and in highly contested races, the two generations actually voted at a higher rate than they had in such races in 2018.

This is a big long-term problem for the Republican Party. With each passing election cycle, zoomers and millennials will become more likely to vote. As this chart from Catalist illustrates, generations tend to grow more and more electorally influential until they reach their mid-70s and then start aging out of the electorate owing to illness or death. Boomers have already passed their political peak. Millennials will be building toward theirs for a long time to come.

Graphic: Catalist

It is not surprising that millennials have retained their exceptionally strong Democratic lean even as they’ve exited their youth. Although cohorts do tend to grow a bit more conservative when (or if) they have children and buy a home, most voters’ political affiliations are cemented in adolescence and early adulthood, when myriad other aspects of their identities are forged. Millennials spent their formative years watching George W. Bush preside over catastrophic wars and an economic disaster while his party embraced soon-to-be-discredited social crusades (such as opposition to gay marriage). And millennials were also raised by parents who were markedly more socially liberal than the boomers’ forebears. It is therefore unsurprising that the generation has proven durably hostile to a Republican Party that refuses to abandon the cultural commitments of America’s white Evangelical minority.

The durability of birth cohorts’ political leanings means that generational churn by itself can remake our politics. There are many reasons why Barack Obama’s first midterm was a political disaster for the Democratic Party while Biden’s was a relative success. But one is that boomers constituted 69 percent of the electorate in 2010 but only 48 percent of it in 2022.

To this point, Republicans have managed to weather the rise of millennials and zoomers just fine. This is largely because America’s older generations have all shaded to the right since 2012. As a result, the political divide between millennials and zoomers on the one hand, and their elders on the other, has never been more stark:

Graphic: @williamjordann/Twitter

Further, the GOP’s historically high support from non-college-educated white voters — combined with the overrepresentation of those voters in the Senate and Electoral College battlegrounds — has enabled the party to win power in excess of its popular support.

Both of these factors are likely to attenuate the GOP’s millennial problem in the near term. For one thing, Generation X is a right-leaning cohort that came of age during the Reagan recovery and is about to enter its prime voting years.

But Gen X is also a small generation. And the boomers are growing smaller with each passing year. If Republicans do not reconcile themselves to a more modern set of cultural values (and/or less plutocratic set of economic policies), generational churn will eventually make it very difficult for them to compete in national elections.

Here, three other quick takeaways from the Catalist report:

Women were critical to Democratic success. Female voters backed Democrats nationally at levels comparable to 2020, and in highly competitive Senate and gubernatorial elections, Democrats actually won a slightly higher share of women’s ballots than they had in similar races two years earlier (winning 57 percent, up from 55 percent in 2020). Resiliently strong support among white college-educated women helped to compensate for a sharp drop in Democratic voting among white college-educated men, who gave Democrats 51 percent of their votes in 2020 but only 44 percent two years later.

In competitive races, education polarization eased. Beyond America’s generational cleavage, a growing “diploma divide” between college-educated and working-class voters has been one of the defining dynamics of U.S. politics in recent years. This gap remains vast, but in 2022 it declined a bit from its Trump-era peak, particularly in competitive races. In such contests, Democrats gained four points of support among non-college-educated white voters, relative to 2020, while losing two points of support among college-educated ones.

Democrats’ performance with non-white voters was suboptimal in 2022. In last year’s midterm, Democrats lost seven points of support among both college-educated and non-college-educated Asian American and Pacific Islander voters relative to 2020. Their performance with Hispanic voters was largely unchanged from the Biden-Trump race with the party winning 62 percent of that demographic. In 2016 and 2012, however, the party had won upwards of 70 percent of Hispanic voters.

Black voters, meanwhile, remained overwhelmingly Democratic. But both their turnout rate and support for Democrats declined slightly from previous midterms. In 2018, Black voters represented 12 percent of the electorate; in 2022, they comprised 10 percent. In 2020, Black voters delivered 91 percent of their votes to Democrats — two years later, they gave just 88 percent of them to Biden’s party.

Almost half of older millennials wish they’d chosen a different career path— what they’d do differently

Life is brief. It's important for us to follow our passions to the extent that we can, understanding that even our passions evolve. All of this speaks, among other things, to a robust education that gives our young people opportunities to experience numerous opportunities. Our legislature instead wants to narrow these by narrowing curricula through anti-CRT bills and high-stakes tests—and much to the detriment of our youth. This, atop the inadequate funding of our schools. It's no wonder our youth often find themselves adrift. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Almost half of older millennials wish 

they’d chosen a different career path—

what they’d do differently

by Jennifer Liu | Published Thu, Jun 17 20219:30 AM EDTUpdated Thu, Jun 17 20219:30 AM EDT

As millennials begin to turn 40 in 2021, CNBC Make It has launched Middle-Aged Millennials, a series exploring how the oldest members of this generation have grown into adulthood amidst the backdrop of the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, student loans, stagnant wages and rising costs of living.

At 35, Kristen Alfenito laments that she has yet to start her career.

That’s not to say she hasn’t worked. For the last 16 years, she has held a string of jobs, starting with two part-time gigs while attending college for musical theater. Then, she says, she was diagnosed with cancer, dropped out and became “resigned to working in food service or retail for the foreseeable future.” Today, Alfenito works as a cashier at a bakery in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Thinking back to her college days, “I wish someone had helped me figure out what jobs would be applicable for my interests and passions, and what kind of degree was actually required for that — if any,” Alfenito says.

Many older millennials who are now approaching middle age have significant career regrets. Nearly half, 47%, say they wish they had chosen a different career path when they started out, according to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults ages 33 to 40, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of CNBC Make It.

Alfenito believes millennials, who this year range in age from 25 to 40 and make up the largest age group in the workforce, were pressured to pursue four-year degrees, and the mountains of debt that can come with them, without always knowing if there was a viable career on the other side of graduation.

As older millennials approach two decades in the workforce, their current roles and responsibilities may not be what they envisioned out of high school or college. We talked with six people from a range of fields about what they would do differently if they could start over again.

A history degree and few job opportunities

For Lee Ruark, earning a history degree was all part of the plan to start a career — he just didn’t know what he wanted to use his degree for. He graduated from college in 2007 just as the economy began to nose-dive into the Great Recession, and many jobs he thought of trying out went away with it.

He spent the next three years figuring out his options, first thinking to join the military until his health prevented him from doing so, then taking the LSATs with the intention to go to law school. He almost became a police officer before he finally stumbled into substitute teaching. When he discovered a knack for it, he got certified to teach full time with a focus on high school science.

Ruark, now 35 and living in Jeffersonville, Vermont, remembers how stressful it felt to be directionless right after school.

“I had anxiety because my friends were finding jobs, and I perceived them as being wildly successful while I wasn’t,” Ruark says. “What’s interesting is, after talking about it with them, I realized all my friends had the same anxieties about perceiving others’ successes. We laugh about it now, but to think about it, [feeling anxious] was a waste of time and energy.”

If he could, Ruark says, he would go back to the time he was in third grade when his mom — also a schoolteacher — told him he had a gift for teaching and encouraged him to pursue it. If he had listened instead of being resistant to following in her footsteps, Ruark says he could have pursued education a lot earlier.

A $170K law degree that doesn’t pay off

Some millennials say financial realities, especially living with student loans, changed their chosen career path. As a college senior studying policy, Brad Walters wanted to be a legislative aide, but seeing the low $30,000 starting salary in comparison with his $60,000 student debt, he went into education instead. “It tells you something when education is the more lucrative option,” he jokes.

The Pivot of U.S. Politics: Racial Justice and Democracy by Calvin Cheung-Miaw

There are so many ways to think of the meaning of the past election. One of these is to consider the youth vote among young people, ages 18-29—in short, the "younger millennial" vote—if you will. To wit, this resulted in high voter turnout, particularly in 11 key battleground states. For example, read this pertinent piece titled, "Surge in youth voter turnout may have helped propel Biden to victory."

Good, but what does this mean? Calvin Cheung-Miaw frames this—and I think correctly—in light of all the social movements we've been witnessing. By this, I mean the Ethnic Studies, Black Lives Matters, Women's, and LGBTQ Movements that, as a whole show that young adults not only reject authoritarian, white supremacy and with that, a monocultural vision of the world, while opting instead for racial justice and with that, a multiracial vision of democracy.

I shared all of this with my students this week, referring to how these map on to the University of Texas students' "8 Demands" in the wake of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings.

Great read, particularly for the college classroom as our students are the constituency that helped us to move forward with this progressive vision for the future that they must continue to own as theirs given the polarization and unfortunate fragility of our current democracy.

Enjoy!

-Angela Valenzuela

#2020Election #BlackLivesMatter

The Pivot of U.S. Politics: Racial Justice and Democracy

By Calvin Cheung-Miaw | Nov. 20, 2020 | OrgUp

The contest between multiracial democracy and white authoritarianism was at the center of the 2020 election, and it will be a defining feature of U.S. politics for at least a generation, shaping the political terrain upon which all other struggles take place and necessitating an anti-right front.

The United States will be a multiracial democracy – a democracy in which people of color have full democratic rights — or it won’t be a democracy at all. This is the key lesson of the Trump era, and the necessary starting point for left strategy. It means that even with Trump out of office, racial justice will be the pivot around which U.S. politics turns. That includes class politics, and the question of whether or not a specifically working-class movement takes shape that is powerful and durable enough to grow in the decade ahead.

STARKLY DIFFERENT ALTERNATIVES

The Republicans have made it crystal clear that the alternative to multiracial democracy is not an imperfect democracy, one in which racist flaws can be gradually eroded, but white authoritarian rule. Indeed, this polarization has already remade U.S. politics in the past twelve years, by cohering social forces on the left and the right, generating entirely separate media and information bubbles, reframing how social groups understand their own interests, and pushing political leaders in the GOP to adopt positions they would have deemed beyond the pale just a few years ago.

The left faces a crucial and challenging set of tasks: expanding the broad anti-right front, keeping it together and focused on the danger of the right, while also finding a way to integrate economic struggles as well as issues of climate, gender, and peace more deeply into the politics of the forces committed to democracy. This will require a workers’ movement fully immersed in the struggle for racial justice, a task made more difficult but all the more urgent by the significant numbers of white workers won over by Trumpism. If we can make significant progress on this, if multi-racial working-class forces become key drivers of the broader democratic struggle, we have the best shot at remaking U.S. politics in a way that prioritizes the needs of working-class communities and communities of color.

DYNAMICS DRIVING POLITICAL POLARIZATION

The U.S. was born as a White Republic founded on settler colonialism and slavery. The White Republic survived the Civil War and Blacks did not secure government enforcement of the right to vote until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The very next year, James Meredith was shot while marching across the South for the right to vote without fear. Black voting rights have been under assault in the decades since, accelerating even further since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down a crucial portion of the Voting Rights Act. Our historic task is to defeat the far right’s attempt to create a new form of white authoritarianism and install a genuine multiracial democracy for the first time.

Struggles over racism and racial equality have often formed the pivot upon which U.S. politics turns. The present intensity of polarization, however, is first and foremost a result of the political strategies pursued by the Republican party and the rise of neoliberalism in the post-civil-rights era. Over the course of decades, Republican party leadership and right-wing grassroots activists have articulated the upward redistribution of wealth with a variety of other social issues – abortion, gun rights, law and order politics, opposition to welfare, busing, and affirmative action – to produce a political bloc with a social base that allowed it to compete in and win elections.

That social base was overwhelmingly dominated by a cross-class coalition of white voters. The political rhetoric that Republican leaders like Reagan deployed to cement its social base typically used dog-whistle racism, especially anti-Black racism. The party’s success on this front tended to push the Democratic party on the defensive, in some cases – as in the attack on welfare – moving it to accommodate rather than confront racism.

Some sections of the GOP, particularly the California Republican party, sought to stoke anti-immigrant (really anti-Latinx and anti-Mexican) sentiment. Through the early 2000s, however, such an approach was moderated by those who believed conservatism ought to appeal to Latinx and Asian American voters, and the party did earn substantial voters from those communities at the national level.

The election of Obama radically shifted the balance between the more racist and more multiculturalist wings of the Republican party. Obama, for all his shortcomings, symbolized the growing weight of voters of color in national elections and the progressive possibilities that power portended. The Republican party’s electoral strategy of pulling in a supermajority of white voters and a much smaller segment of voters of color seemed to be reaching the end of its shelf life.

We can understand the present-day Republican party in terms of the range of responses to this dilemma. Trump and those who are ideologically aligned with him have adopted the approach of repudiating wholesale the place of people of color within the U.S. polity, These figures tap into the racism that fueled birtherism and stoke it with chants of “Send them back,” directed against the women of color that form the Squad.

Many traditional leaders and strategists within the Republican party disdain the open racism of this approach. Their difference with Trumpism is, however, merely tactical and for the moment they have proven willing to accommodate Trumpism’s worst impulses, mounting only tepid and sporadic objections to Trump’s most embarrassing statements.

They are committed to gerrymandering, purging voter rolls, reducing opportunities for early voting, shutting down polling stations in working-class communities of color, restricting access to the vote through voter ID laws, rolling back the Voting Rights Act, challenging the legitimacy of the actual votes of voters of color and other tactics of suppression that are aimed squarely at voters of color. They supplement this core strategy with appeals to patriarchy and homophobia, promises of entrepreneurial success, and fear-mongering about socialism. They believe this package, combined with the anti-democratic nature of the Senate and Electoral College, will allow the GOP to remain competitive in elections, requiring only relatively minor gains among voters of color.

And they have good reason to be confident. In 2020, voters of color surged as a portion of the national electorate – growing from 29% to 35% of voters. This was enough to tip the balance to Biden in the presidential contest. But the Republicans gained seats in the House, increased their hold over state legislatures, will at worst suffer a 50-50 split in the Senate, and can look forward to control of the Supreme Court and decades of a federal judiciary packed with right-wing ideologues. All this from a white electorate that declined relative to the total electorate, and a couple percentage points of growth among voters of color.

A layer of the Republican party leadership genuinely believes that bourgeois democracy in a multiracial society is compatible with their conservative economic program. These individuals, grouped most prominently in the Lincoln Project, have mostly split openly with the Trumpists. But it is a thin layer, and one that is thoroughly isolated within the Republican party.

RACIAL JUSTICE AND DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS

Because the predominant GOP strategy – uniting both Trumpists and the tepid old guard conservatives of the party – is one of preserving its power through white minority rule, the struggle for racial justice is at the heart of the struggle for democracy. While those of us who were taught in the U.S. school system imbibed the idea that U.S. democracy was the foundation of aspirations for racial equality, we should reverse this relationship. Historically and today, it is struggles for racial equality that have eroded the White Republic and produced what democracy we have in the U.S.

There are specific demands where the struggles for racial justice and democratic rights are intertwined, such as campaigns against voter suppression. But those campaigns are inseparable from the broader struggles against racism – against police brutality, against the murders of transwomen of color, against the criminalization of immigrants, for decent public schools, etc. – that demand a recognition of the dignity of people of color within the U.S. polity.

The broader social transformation required to make gains in these struggles is what will also propel the struggle for democratic rights for people of color. As we’ve seen in the finger-pointing by centrist Democrats after the 2020 election, such racial justice struggles divide, to some extent, the anti-Trump front. Politics is an art, and it will require some finesse to keep an anti-right front together under a Biden administration, but backing away from racial justice struggles will only weaken our long-term capacity to fight the forces pushing white minority rule.

Campaigns to expand democratic rights and thus the electorate, on the other hand, have tended to benefit the progressive wing of the Democratic party. This is why groups like New Florida Majority campaigned for voting rights for all, regardless of prior criminal records, and why New Virginia Majority made a concerted effort to strengthen voting rights in its state. New Virginia Majority succeeded in transforming Virginia from one of the hardest states for people to vote in, to one of the easiest states, and it’s no coincidence that this transformation overlapped with its shift from red to blue.

The aftermath of the 2020 election makes clear the intertwining of antiracist and democratic struggles. Even after the 2016 election, Trump mounted a campaign to convince the people of the U.S. that he had won the popular vote, claiming that 3 million immigrants voted unlawfully. In 2020, as Trump pushes his theory of ‘illegal votes’ and his predominantly white supporters flood polling centers in Philadelphia or Arizona, who do we think his base pictures as illegal voters?

THE WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT IN THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY

Today, most of the left takes racial justice struggles seriously. We feel have a responsibility as leftists to dismantle all forms of oppression, and we aspire to remove racism as a form of division among workers, in order to produce a united working-class political subject.

Both of these motivations are important. But they miss the centrality of racial justice struggles to the struggle over democracy, and thus the overall terrain of politics in the U.S. Indeed, for those of us committed to building the power of the working class, an expanded democracy and the demolition of obstacles to political participation offers the best chance for the class to become the driving force within the anti-right front, and in the remaking of U.S. politics more generally.

Developing the multiracial working class into a key driver of the democratic struggle will position us to articulate – and win – a vision of democracy that includes rights to housing, education, health care, safe communities, and unionization. It should be a central component of left strategy, alongside the rebuilding of class power at the point of production. It is no accident that throughout U.S. history – from Reconstruction to the way the 1950s-60s Civil Rights Movement birthed the Poor People’s Campaign, spurred the development of second wave feminism and inspired the modern LGBTQ movement – so much of how we imagine a society where all working and oppressed people thrive was incubated in the creative furnace of the Black Freedom Movement.

Right-wing populism’s power is in its ability to convince individuals that their material suffering can be alleviated by attacking others who also suffer from capitalism. The Republican party’s open embrace of white supremacy, and its hold on a cross-class bloc of white voters, grew as class politics in the U.S. weakened as a force in shaping people’s lives and their understanding of politics.

One segment of the Democratic Party, ensconced in the Democratic Leadership Council, saw the future of the party in terms of growth among white suburban professionals who were wary of redistributionist politics. Clinton, who emerged from the DLC, embraced the politics of multicultural diversity within his cabinet while passing NAFTA (and welfare reform). The passage of NAFTA proved disastrous for the Democratic party’s base among white workers in manufacturing-based economies. While the trend since 2008 among Democratic presidential candidates has mainly been against the neoliberal orthodoxy promoted by the DLC, even candidates like Biden who on paper had a relatively progressive economic platform tended to downplay class politics as a campaign theme.

If struggles for racial justice and democracy are going to be successful, our side will have to weaken the cross-class front of white voters that forms most of the base of the Republican party, who are being pulled into support of white authoritarian rule. This is impossible without a massive struggle to improve the lives of workers and people of color, a class struggle in the broadest sense.

Right wing populism’s weakness is that it cannot deliver on its promise of improving people’s material conditions. One short video, by NowThis News, followed a set of Obama to Trump voters in Pennsylvania as they followed Trump’s actions during the first two years of his presidency.

While some voters were clearly committed to Trumpism at a deep ideological level, one voter reacted in dismay to Trump’s attack on Obamacare. This voter, a teacher in Luzerne County named Donna, had two parents with Huntington’s disease and lived in fear her entire adult life that an insurance company would find out and kick her off healthcare. Donna also understood how Trump’s cuts to the Shine program, which provides after school programs to under-resourced school districts, would affect her close friend’s own children. After all this, a friend asks her whether she would have voted for Trump knowing everything he would do. She hesitates for a moment, then answers, “yes.”

Donna belongs in the class struggle. It’s our job to organize her.

TOWARDS LIBERATION

A core set of social justice organizations, mostly rooted in communities of color and in unions with large numbers of members of color, have been leading the fight for multiracial democracy. This set of social forces has proven to be the most dynamic left political force in the fight against Trump. They were instrumental in the electoral defeat of Trump and in the tremendous boost in turnout of voters of color and young people in the election.

The uprising in defense of Black Lives thrust the issue of anti-Black racism into the center of national politics, and as it did so it cast a sharp spotlight on all kinds of structural inequities in U.S. society. The Frontline – initiated by the Working Families Party and the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project and drawing in partners like United We Dream Action and About Face – brought the energy of the uprising into the 2020 election; now it gearing up to press for deep change starting from day one of a new administration.

Our success as a left in moving a broader politics of liberation, encompassing a fundamental social transformation and the redistribution of power and resources, depends on how deeply we engage with these forces and the organizations that represent them, which are predominantly Black-led.

Take, for instance, the question of internationalism. It is currently an open question whether the Biden administration will slide into the mentality of a New Cold War with China, promoted by Trump to virulent effect in order to deflect from his failure to confront the coronavirus, but which has gained adherents in the upper echelons of both political parties. Those of us who believe that our ability to confront climate change depends upon some measure of cooperation with China can and should form our own organizations and campaigns. But we will only be able to move our politics if we are able to win over the racial justice and democratic forces that have been central to the anti-Trump fight. Based on a recent campaign along these lines, however, this is a political goal that is entirely realizable.

CONCLUSION

This article is an attempt at outlining a starting point for political strategy for the next period of struggle. Criticism and discussion is required to overcome its shortcomings, foremost among them the lack of an in-depth exploration of the relationship between the struggle for multiracial democracy and struggles against gender oppression, for queer liberation, disability rights, indigenous rights and decolonization, and for climate justice. Trumpism has intensified all these struggles as a result of its relentless assault on all those marginalized within U.S. society, and they will all play vital roles in reshaping the political terrain, so that another world is possible.

This article grew out of political discussions among Max Elbaum, Whitney Maxey, Melanie Barron, and the author. Thanks also to the Organizing Upgrade editorial collective and Bob Wing for feedback on an earlier draft.